Local to till new soil

Alicia Robinson

After returning to his farming roots, the state secretary of food and

agriculture is seeing the fruits of his labor in Gov. Arnold

Schwarzenegger’s administration.

A.G. Kawamura grew up in Newport Beach and graduated from Newport

Harbor High School in 1974. He and his family live in Newport Beach,

but since his appointment to the agriculture post in November, he has

spent much of his time in Sacramento.

Before heading the agriculture department, Kawamura worked for his

family’s business, Irvine-based Orange County Produce, and has served

on the State Board of Food and Agriculture and a U.S. Department of

Agriculture technical advisory committee.

“Part of the reason that I felt it was important to come to

Sacramento was to address the lack of viability for California

farmers in the face of competition, over-regulation and soaring

production costs including worker’s compensation,” Kawamura said.

He saw these problems first-hand in the family business, which

Kawamura’s grandfather started in 1946. It has been a grower and

shipper of various fresh produce crops and now grows mainly

strawberries and green beans, Kawamura said.

A far cry from farming, Kawamura earned his bachelor’s degree from

UC Berkeley in comparative literature in English and Spanish, but he

already was planning to head back to the farm.

“In my last two years of college I took a lot of Third World

development courses and resource conservation ... and realized that I

was very interested in the problems of underdevelopment, hunger,

[and] nutrition, and thought that being involved in agriculture would

be the natural way to work in that area in the future,” he said.

Locally, Kawamura has worked on many agriculture issues, even to

the point of getting his hands dirty, Orange County Fair Manager

Becky Bailey-Findley said.

“[Kawamura] was the farmer who literally helped build Centennial

Farm at the fairgrounds,” she said. “He was there in the dirt helping

us do that.”

Centennial Farm is a 4-acre working farm at the county fairgrounds

in Costa Mesa that hosts educational programming, including field

trips for about 7,000 students a year, Bailey-Findley said.

The agriculture secretary is a past president of the Orange County

Farm Bureau, a former county fair board member and a founding trustee

of Sage Hill School in Newport Beach.

He also has focused on the role of agriculture in feeding the

hungry through his work with Second Harvest Food Bank in Orange,

Bailey-Findley said.

As a farmer, Kawamura understands the issues facing the farming

industry as well as the problems Orange County farmers encounter in

their increasingly urban environment, Bailey-Findley said.

For Kawamura, educating the public about the importance of

agriculture is a top priority.

“If we don’t find good public support for domestic agriculture, we

may find ourselves with an imported food supply similar to our supply

of petroleum,” he said.

For now, he’s learning his new role and trying to protect his

department’s programs in the state budget crisis, but the new job has

gone well so far, he said.

“Six months ago I had no idea that I’d be in this position, but

I’m elated,” he said. “I’m very proud to be here.”