Crop swap: Southern California's booming nursery business brings new life to citrus acreage

Issue Date: September 19, 2007

By Ching Lee
Assistant Editor

Briggs Tree Co. is one of several San Diego County nursery operators that are converting citrus acreage to nursery production. General manager Donnie Dabbs says the Bonsall site shown here was once a worn-out lemon grove.

California's second gold rush may have gotten its start in Southern California, where citrus once was king, but in San Diego County, where flower power currently reigns, many old citrus groves are being cleared to make way for the region's No. 1 agriculture sector--nurseries.

"As nursery growers are looking to expand in San Diego County, they are taking citrus acreage and converting it to nursery production," said Eric Larson, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau. "This is a great alternative to converting that acreage to development."

The change is indicative of a growing trend in Southern California, where increased urbanization pressures, high land values and water costs have pushed out much of the region's citrus sector while higher-value nursery crops continue to dominate the agricultural landscape.

Nursery and flower crops have been San Diego County's top commodities for more than two decades, with a value of $991.3 million in 2006, compared to $692.1 million in 1996, according to the county's Department of Agriculture, Weights and Measures. Acreage has increased from 8,116 in 1996 to 9,872 in 2006.

Citrus crops, on the other hand, brought in $34.5 million last year, down from $86.9 million in 1996, while acreage slipped from 17,116 in 1996 to 12,526 in 2006.

"It's simply a dollars and cents argument," said San Diego County Agricultural Commissioner Bob Atkins about the conversion of citrus farmland to nurseries. "People shift to things that obviously make more money."

Noting that on a dollar per acre basis, nursery crops are currently getting $100,411 per acre while citrus is getting $2,754 per acre, Atkins said, "that's kind of an indicator of why" people are replacing citrus with nurseries.

Briggs Tree Co., a wholesale nursery based in Vista, has been taking over some of the area's prime farmland where citrus trees once grew and replacing the ground with large containers of trees, shrubs and other ornamentals.

"This one happens to be an old, worn-out lemon grove that was planted in the 60s," said General Manager Donnie Dabbs of the company's 60-plus-acre farm in Bonsall. "Prime farmland is real hard to come by. This came up and we jumped on it."

Dabbs said the old grove was no longer productive, so the former owner decided to sell it rather than plant new trees. Nothing went to waste here, he said. After pulling out the trees, the nursery made mulch out of them and recycled everything into its soil mix. The farm has since been in full production for the last four years. The nursery farms more than 180 acres in San Diego County.

"Our other yard that we lease from a Japanese family was an old orange grove that we took out of production because it was just run down and the trees were worn out," said Dabbs. "So we extracted those trees about nine years ago."

Nursery producers prefer old citrus groves because they are on flatter ground, unlike avocado orchards that are typically on slopes, he said. The Bonsall property is ideal for growing ornamentals because it gets constant sunshine without the fog that blankets most coastal areas and temperatures are almost frost-free year-round, he added.

The old lemon grove also was attractive because it was already in agriculture, Dabbs said. State and federal laws that protect rare and endangered species restrict property owners from removing native vegetation, so many farmers looking to expand their operations opt for existing farmlands such as old citrus groves.

"We didn't have to obtain any special permits to come in here and take the trees out," he said. "We were able to just change from lemon farming to ornamental farming. A lot of growers that I'm aware of are starting to look for groves like that."

Atkins said the other advantage of old citrus groves is they already have the existing infrastructure needed to farm the land.

"If it's an old grove, there's already roads in there and water and power to supply the needs of the farm, so you don't have to do the grading and leveling because it's probably already been done for the grove," he said.

With the high cost of water--more than $600 per acre-foot--San Diego County citrus farmers are simply out-competed by other regions of the state and countries that have lower input costs, said Gary Bender, UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor.

"We are losing our Valencia orange acreage," he said. "They're just not making money anymore and having a difficult time competing with other navel oranges from Australia. We have navels in the stores year-round, so it kind of pushed our Valencias out."

And while citrus acreage in Southern California may be vanishing, other citrus-growing counties in the San Joaquin Valley are making up for the loss. Tulare County is now the No. 1 citrus-producing county in the state with 114,344 acres in 2006, followed by Kern, Fresno and Ventura counties.

Even Riverside County, home to the University of California, Riverside's Citrus Experiment Station, which helped propel the southern state as an emerging citrus belt in the early 1900s, has seen its citrus acreage shrink from 36,697 in 1990 to 20,675 in 2005, according to the latest figures available from the county.

Bob Blakely, director of grower services for the Tulare County-based California Citrus Mutual, which represents some 1,400 citrus growers in the state, said commercial-size citrus operations in southern counties such as San Diego, San Bernardino and Imperial are almost nonexistent due to urbanization in those regions.

"The citrus industry moved up here (to the San Joaquin Valley) from down there when it began to be pushed out of Southern California in the first half of the 1900s," Blakely said. "A lot of the farmers who are farming up here are transports whose fathers moved up here from Southern California, which is where they got their start."

But even citrus farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are now feeling the squeeze from the rapid urban growth that's been encroaching upon the state's most productive farmland, Blakely said.

"It's silly to think we here in the Central Valley are going to be immune to that," he said of urbanization. "I shudder to think what's going to happen to the prime ag land that we're farming here now and what our citrus industry is going to look like in 50 years."

Atkins said one of the advantages of growing nursery crops is that they allow producers to be more flexible. Unlike permanent crops such as citrus or avocados, San Diego County's top fruit crop, nursery stock can be changed according to the trends of the market, allowing growers to take advantage of their competitive niche if they're able to stay ahead of the curve.

But for farmers with citrus groves that are beyond their prime and who may be looking to retire from farming, they still have the option of selling their land to eager developers or nursery growers.

"Frankly, we like that they're selling to nursery growers," Atkins said.

(Ching Lee is a reporter for Ag Alert. She may be contacted at clee@cfbf.com.)

Permission for use is granted, however, credit must be made to the California Farm Bureau Federation when reprinting this item. Top