Land Prices, Development Threaten Last Few Farms

Not so long ago, the South Bay had more farms than it did shopping malls.

Luxuriating in the coast’s mild weather, farmers worked wonders in the sandy loam. Strawberries grew plump and red beside trailing vines of garbanzo beans. Swaying rows of corn and barley pushed their tassels toward the sky.

Soon after World War II, however, housing tracts and industrial parks began gobbling up the farms. Where tractors once moved from crop to crop, multilane highways appeared.

Today only about half a dozen farmers remain. They try to eke out an existence here by putting crops wherever they can find land--which can cost from $1,000 a year for 10 or 15 acres to $3,000 an acre each year--and trying not to think beyond the needs of this season’s plants.

Plagued by rocketing land costs and flanked on all sides by development, some farmers may be reaping their final harvests.

“We’ll make it one year more, at the most,” said Terry Figueroa, 59, who with his younger brother, Frank, has been farming various plots of leased land in Carson since 1960. “It’s rough as it is now. We barely make a living.”

At first, the Figueroas leased more than 100 acres to grow the collard greens, mustard, spinach, kale and carrots that have been their primary crops. Leased land was plentiful and cheap. That was fortunate: With seven children to raise, there was little money left over to buy permanent land for T & F Farming.

About 10 years ago, however, urban sprawl began to encroach on the Figueroas’ way of life.

The first hint of trouble came as it has come many times since--surveyors hired by landowners brought in their tripods and scopes and began driving stakes between the rows of red and green chard.

“We used to farm all that area where those buildings are,” Figueroa said, waving his hands in resignation at an industrial complex radiating out from the northeast corner of Carson Street and Wilmington Avenue.

Now the family farming enterprise has shrunk to two small patches of leased land: 11 acres on Dominguez Street between Alameda Street and Wilmington Avenue and 18 acres on the south side of Carson Street, just east of Wilmington.

Water restrictions brought on by the six-year drought forced them to cut their planting of the 18-acre site in half last year, he said. And surveyors have been spotted with their eyes on the family’s 11-acre site.

Figueroa, still recovering from a stroke he suffered a little more than a year ago, said he may soon have to give it all up.

Although he has tried several times to convince his brother that it’s time to give up and put the tractors and plows up for auction, it is not an easy thing for him to face.

“I was born and raised here, farming all my life, and the greens like this type of weather. So do I,” he said, shuffling his feet unhappily in the dust of his Carson Street farm. “I’ll enjoy it out here as long as I can, working in the breeze. After that? I don’t know.”

Problems also plague the South Bay’s only remaining family farming dynasty, the Ishibashis. Born and raised on a small farm at Portuguese Bend on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, three Ishibashi men have stayed in the South Bay and continue to practice the family’s farming traditions.

Hard times, age and rocketing land values may soon push two of the three out of business. But neither is willing to say exactly when he will gather his final harvest.

“If I call this the last year, there might be a next year,” said James Ishibashi, 73, who grows a variety of vegetables on his leased 8 1/2-acre Portuguese Bend farm.

“So long as I’m alive, I guess I’ll keep farming until I keel over,” he said, chuckling happily. “One day they’ll ask, ‘Where is he?’ and then they’ll find out he’s lying between the tomato rows.”

Late last year, however, James Ishibashi’s wife, Annie, died. For decades, she had operated the family vegetable stand on Palos Verdes Drive South, the only market that Ishibashi had ever used for his produce.

Although a daughter runs the stand now, James Ishibashi said he does not know how long she will be willing to do so.

“Every year, we work harder and make less,” he said. “So I don’t know what the answer is. Everybody tells me to retire, but I don’t want to retire. I notice when they retire, they kick the bucket. Not me.”

His cousin, Mas Ishibashi, 79, has seen somewhat more commercial success with his flower farm just south of the former Marineland property on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, but development plans for the site may well mean the end of his blooms.

If a long-planned luxury hotel is built on the property, Mas Ishibashi’s leased 12 acres are scheduled to become an 18-hole golf course.

Mas Ishibashi--whose father was one of the South Bay’s first farmers when he began planting crops in Portuguese Bend in 1907--once had a vegetable and barley farm spread over nearly 300 acres on the peninsula, but housing tracts, shopping malls, Marineland and other developments slowly gobbled it up.

Although he misses the farming community that used to exist in Palos Verdes, Mas Ishibashi remains stoic about the changes he has seen.

“It would be nice for things to never change, but a landowner wants to develop homes and get the money from his land,” he said. “I don’t blame him.”

His son and business partner, Tosh, 55, feels too young for retirement but is trying to face the possibility.

“Any day this year, next year, heck, next month, could be the end,” Tosh Ishibashi said. “We’re ready for it. We just figure we’ll keep going until we have to leave.”

The future of Torrance’s only farm is much more secure.

Tom Ishibashi, brother of James and cousin of Mas, started farming 260 acres in and around the Torrance Municipal Airport in 1960.

From February to around Halloween each year, his wife, cousins, a son, two daughters and other relatives have operated the family produce stand on Crenshaw Boulevard, watching Torrance develop and grow around them over the years.

As time passed, Tom Ishibashi’s strawberry fields, cornrows and tomato plants gave way to industrial buildings and the Torrance Memorial Medical Center. Now down to farming 75 acres, he believes that the city’s need for an open buffer around the airport will prevent reducing his leasehold much more.

Working with seven year-round field hands, he shares his farm with the constant drone of Cessnas and at least two dozen sweet corn-loving red foxes.

“They know exactly when the corn is ready to harvest and they go after it,” he said, pointing out the tawny animals hiding between freshly plowed furrows. “But other than that, I have no problems. This is a fenced-in area and they’ve got 24-hour security for the airport, so it’s a benefit for me too.”

As spring turns into summer, the produce stand is stocked with vine-ripened strawberries as large as chicken’s eggs and a succession of fresh beets, turnips, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, string beans and lima beans.

It was the last thing Tom Ishibashi expected to spend his life doing.

“I hated farming,” he said. “My dad and my brother couldn’t believe it when I started farming. I didn’t even want to drive a tractor when I was a kid, and they thought all boys wanted to at least do that.”

Over the years of helping his parents on their farm, however, he changed his mind.

“I can think outside,” he said. “I like to see things grow. It’s like trying to raise a little child. They’re hungry and you’ve got to feed them. They’re growing and you have to water them. . . . People say I’m nuts, but I talk to my plants. They need it.”

His vision is shared by the South Bay’s newest farmer.

Five years ago, Jerry Jung, 51, gave up his welding job and poured $70,000 into a seven-acre weed patch under high-voltage power lines in Carson. Now the land he calls Eden Farm is emerald green with a dozen different types of Korean vegetables.

Jung and his wife, Chae, had considered several different ways to go into business for themselves. But the possibilities of crime and violence in a small liquor store or market frightened Chae Jung, who wanted to try to continue her Korean family’s farming tradition.

For the first two years, the Jungs worked side by side as cars roared past on Wilmington Avenue, pulling weeds, plowing new rows, harvesting crops and packing produce for shipment to the downtown vegetable market.

Then Chae was injured when a large gate fell on her leg in the produce loading area. As she slowly heals, her husband struggles happily to keep produce moving to market.

Like other urban farmers, Jung has few battles with wildlife hungry for his produce. Instead, he must stave off human predators.

Vandals driving a large truck once plowed through a gate and tore through the Korean cabbage, causing more than $2,000 in damage. On several other occasions, thieves have walked off with expensive irrigation pipes and hoses.

It could be worse, Jung said. He could be forced to work indoors.

“I like what I do now. (When I was) welding, the air was no good,” Jung said. “Now, I have open air. It is so much better.”

A few miles away, Frank Takahashi, 72, is slowly phasing out one of the South Bay’s most visible farms, a 20-acre spread tucked between 220th Street and the San Diego Freeway, just east of Wilmington Avenue.

As he worked to sort freshly harvested carrots and turnips at his packing station off Perry Street, Takahashi said he could continue to earn his keep as a farmer.

But the combined woes of development pressing inexorably in on him, drought fines pushing up the cost of water, retailers demanding more expensive packing and his own advancing age make it all just a little too much.

“I’m going to have to quit gradually,” he said. “There’s no future in this.”

Takahashi is more fortunate than other South Bay farmers, however, because he owns some of his land.

When the economy improves, he said, he will seek permits to build houses on the five acres he bought for $100,000 in 1960. He suspects that the land is worth more than $3.5 million now.

“Farming used to be good here, but not anymore,” he said. “I like farming. That’s all I’ve done, farm, all my life . . . but maybe it’s time for something else.”

For James Hatano, 65, there is nothing else.

“I just love this, out in the open,” he said, gazing past his delphinium and baby’s breath crops to the ocean north of Long Point in Rancho Palos Verdes. “The city keeps me here as weed abatement, mostly, but that doesn’t matter to me. I get to do what I love.”

Since 1953, Hatano has leased a 14-acre plot on a hillside above Palos Verdes Drive South. Alert to changing markets, he has farmed many different types of flowers and a few vegetable crops, he said.

Several years ago, he began growing a few cactus rows, which produce tender young shoots that are sliced into strips and marketed as a salad ingredient called nopales at Latino swap meets.

This year, or maybe next year, he said, he’ll try his hand at growing garbanzo beans.

“Those are really popular right now, you know,” he said.

But with the seven-day-a-week demands of a farm, won’t he be wanting to retire soon?

“Hasn’t even crossed my mind,” he said. “I’m doing what I love. What’s there to retire from?”