Why We Will Not Quit Growing Avocados
A comment came in suggesting we should stop growing food and simply retire. The argument was essentially that we live in a plastic economy now, that small farms are a sentimental hobby, and that the sensible move is to cash out.
It is worth answering properly, because the assumption underneath it is one a lot of people hold without examining. The short answer: someone has to grow the food, a small family grove can do things a large operation cannot, and this ground has been in our family for over a century.
Someone Has to Actually Grow It
Every meal begins on a piece of ground that somebody tends. That does not stop being true because the supply chain between the field and the plate got long enough to hide it.
When American farms go out of production, the food does not vanish. It gets grown somewhere else, under someone else’s rules, and shipped further to reach you. The question is never whether food gets grown. It is who grows it and what standards they answer to.
Ten Acres Is Not Nothing
Ours is a small operation by commercial standards. Ten acres in North San Diego County does not move national supply.
But a small farm is not a scaled-down version of a large one. It is a different thing. We know individual trees. We pick to order rather than to a warehouse schedule. Nothing sits in cold storage for weeks waiting on a distribution plan. That is only possible at this size, and it is the entire reason our fruit tastes like it does.
Small Growers Built This Industry
It helps to remember where California avocados came from. The Hass itself was a single chance seedling in Rudolph Hass’s grove in La Habra Heights. He planted seedlings bought from a Whittier nursery in 1926, tried three times to graft one of them over to Fuerte, and when the grafts would not take he let it grow. He patented it in 1935 and, by the time the patent expired in 1952, had earned only about $4,800 from it. Here is the full story of Hass patent 139.
Fuerte, the variety the industry was built on before Hass, arrived as budwood from a backyard tree in Atlixco, Mexico, and its first orchard was planted by a single grower near Yorba Linda. The growers organized themselves, too. The California Avocado Association formed in 1915 and had 74 members by the end of that year, and in 1924 growers incorporated the cooperative exchange that became Calavo. We told that story in the rise and fall of the avocado co-op. Every name on today’s shelf traces back to people working modest pieces of ground, and we would rather stay part of that line than read about it.
A Hundred Years on the Same Ground
Our family has been on this land for over a century. That history is not decoration on a label; it is the reason the decisions get made the way they do.
We are raising our boys in the grove. They see what hard work actually looks like and what it means to build something meant to outlast you. That is worth more to us than the interest on a sale, and it is not available at any price once the land is gone.
Why So Many California Groves Have Disappeared
The comment was not wrong that plenty of growers have quit, and the reasons are worth naming. California’s industry boomed in the late 1970s, expanding to about 80,000 acres and more than 8,000 growers before that “gold rush” ended in a glut. In San Diego County, water has been the grinding pressure. In 2007, drought forced growers on the interruptible agricultural water program to cut back by 30 percent, and when the drought was declared over in 2010 the rates did not come back down. The University of California grower handbook describes what followed as a downward spiral of groves going out of business in San Diego County. By 2012, district water cost about $1,100 an acre-foot in Fallbrook and $1,300 to $1,400 in Valley Center.
Meanwhile the fruit kept coming from elsewhere. Mexico has long been the world’s largest avocado producer, and Chilean shipments in the winter of 2002–03 alone came to more than a third of California’s annual Hass crop. None of that means small groves are finished. It means the ones still standing have to be run on purpose, by people who want to be there. We wrote more about the water crisis behind disappearing groves and why so few commercial farms remain.
People Want to Skip the Middleman
The encouraging part is that the market is moving toward us, not away. There is a real and growing group of people, young families especially, who want to know exactly where their food came from and would rather buy from the grower than from three intermediaries.
That is the grove-to-table shift, and it is what makes a farm our size viable again. Direct sales mean the value of the fruit stays with the people who grew it instead of being distributed across a chain. We have laid out our own figures in the economics of our avocado farm.
Where We Are Headed
We are continuing to move toward organic practices and whole-food growing, because that is the way we want to farm and the way we want to feed our own family.
The promise is simple. Fruit picked from our trees, shipped the same week, never warehoused and never waxed. That is what we are protecting, and it is why retiring is not on the table.
