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June 12, 2006

Label mania

One of the elements of the June 11-12 installment of this series is a slide show featuring vintage Ventura County fruit crate labels. If you want to see more such labels, and learn a bit more about their history, there's a nice public display at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles. Titled "Artistry of the Orange," the exhibit will remain on public view through Jan. 7, and features 45 framed labels from the library's collection. A few represent Ventura County brands and packinghouses, but most are from other parts of Southern California.

The library is at 630 W. 5th St., and is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 to 6 on Friday and Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday.

Posted by jkrist at 09:52 AM

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June 11, 2006

Seedy story

Valencia oranges used to be a hugely important crop in Ventura County. In terms of acreage, it was No. 2 in the 1970s, behind only lemons, peaking at nearly 19,000 acres. That's nearly a fifth of all the irrigated cropland in the county. But the orchards started dwindling in 1975, beginning a long slide that dropped the total to less than 16,000 acres by 1980. By 1995, it had fallen to 11,409 acres, and by 2000 it was down to 9,360. Today, the total is down to about 5,400 acres.

There are two reasons for the wholesale removal of Valencia orange trees in Ventura County. First, growers in the San Joaquin Valley planted thousand of acres of Valencias, producing the fruit at lower cost because Central Valley land is relatively cheap. Growers here could not compete on price, which dropped as production rose.

But changing consumer preferences also played a part. Valencias have seeds, and navels typically do not, or have very few. And American consumers have proved themselves willing to trade flavor, juiciness and just about every other aesthetic quality in a piece of fruit for convenience and low price.

That helps explain the explosive success of seedless mandarin orange varieties such a Clementines and our very own pixie tangerines, grown mainly in the Ojai Valley. Seedless, sweet, easy-to-peel citrus varieties are a natural snack food, and sales have been skyrocketing. Growers have responded by planting thousands of acres of new orchards in California, mostly in the Central Valley and mainly in two varieties of what are technically known as mandarins, the Clementine and a new strain called the W. Murcot Afourer.

Recently, this touched off an interesting battle between big farming companies and their neighbors. Only this time, it isn't the typical kind of food fight, one pitting growers against urban residents. This is farmer vs. farmer. And, in a nicely ironic twist, farmer against beekeeper.

The reason for the fight is that W. Murcotts and Clementines are seedless only if grown far away from other citrus varieties with viable pollen. If a bee lands in a Valencia tree, picks up some pollen, and then flies next door to alight on the flower of a Clementine tree, the Clementines produced on that tree are likely to have seeds. This makes them virtually worthless in the marketplace. And bees are pretty intrepid travelers, flying a mile or more from the hive in search of flowers.

One of California's biggest citrus growers, Paramount Citrus, has planted thousands of acres of Clementines in the San Joaquin Valley in the past few years. And much of that acreage is adjacent or very near to existing orchards, or to other crops that require bees for pollination. The predictable outcome -- predictable, apparently, to everyone except the management at Paramount -- is likely to be that all those trees will soon be producing thousand of tons of nearly worthless fruit each year.

So Paramount has threatened to sue its neighbors if they don't move their bees at least two miles from Paramount's new orchards. According to accounts of the dispute in the Fresno Bee and Ag Alert, the weekly publication of the California Farm Bureau Federation, the letter to growers and beekeepers from Paramount's lawyers warns that "trespass" is one of the claims that would be cited in the litigation.

You heard right -- trespassing bees.

Sun Pacific, another citrus giant, has also planted thousands of acres of mandarins in the Central Valley, and has also asked neighbors to move their beehives. So far, however, it hasn't threatened to sue them.

The other farmers and beekeepers were there first, which puts Paramount in the decidedly weird position of arguing that its new activity should take priority over pre-existing uses. Usually, farmers make the opposite argument -- that their traditional activities trump the concerns of new suburban neighbors when development creeps to the edge of agricultural land.

The irony doesn't stop there. Paramount Farms, a sister company of Paramount Citrus, is the world's largest supplier of almonds and pistachios. Without bees to pollinate the trees, Paramount's Central Valley almond orchards wouldn't produce any nuts. And guess where Paramount gets those bees?

You guessed it -- from the same beekeeping industry its corporate sibling is now threatening to sue.

Posted by jkrist at 04:22 PM

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