By WADE DANIELS
Staff Reporter
The plight of Midwestern farm families has been well documented for years. But a more local drama of a farming family struggling to stay afloat is unfolding on 40 acres right off the San Diego (405) Freeway in Carson.
The Takahashi family has been farming the same plot of Carson soil since 1960, but now the family’s Top Veg Farms is on a month-to-month lease as the property’s owner prepares to develop commercial buildings on the site.
“We knew from the beginning that they were going to build on the land one day,” Top Veg owner Frank Takahashi said of property owner Watson Land Co., a Carson-based developer that owns the farmland and an adjacent industrial park. “They could tell us any day that we have to leave, but they would give us enough time to finish our last crop.”
For much of the decade, Watson Land made little effort to market the land because of the weak economy, said Audra Nelsus, Watson Land’s vice president of asset management. However, with the economy in an upswing, the developer has decided it’s time to put the land to more profitable use.
“That is land being readied for development,” Nelsus said of the Top Veg fields. “They will actually be vacating that property shortly.”
The pending disappearance of Top Veg’s 40-acre operation is just the latest in the continued loss of L.A.’s agricultural base. The majority of the county’s farming takes place in northern fringe areas such as the Antelope Valley, said Sherlin Neblett-Bernhard, supervising agricultural inspector for the L.A. County Agricultural Commission.
Meanwhile, the few farms remaining in the L.A. basin, such as Top Veg, are becoming fewer and farther between as appreciating land is converted to more profitable uses.
“A lot of farmers use land under power lines, and they are (even) losing those plots,” Neblett-Bernhard said. “With deregulation of the energy industry, Edison (the local electricity supplier) is trying to lease its land to businesses like storage companies, where they can get more money.”
In 1996 there were 4,994 acres of vegetable crops grown in L.A. County, down from 6,922 acres in 1985 and 12,380 acres in 1965.
While there are two smaller plots of farmland in the Carson area (about 10 acres each), there are none as large as Top Veg. The farm’s original 200 acres have been whittled down to make way for the freeway and the industrial buildings adjacent to its remaining fields.
Even with the drone of freeway traffic whizzing nearby, the farm retains its heartland aura. Its rows of table greens (lettuce and spinach), root crops (carrots and beets) and other vegetables are quietly minded by the company’s 15 or so farm hands. The goods are washed, trimmed and readied for market by hand at an outdoor concrete platform at the end of a dirt road that leads off of 220th Street.
Alongside the platform is Takahashi’s office a ramshackle, tarped and taped-together structure cluttered with boxes of yellowing files and dusty office supplies and trinkets. Cats use some of Takahashi’s file-stuffed boxes as beds.
Frank’s wife, Mary Takahashi, said hers was one of many farm families in the area when they first leased the land in 1960. But as Los Angeles turned more urban, the other farm families lost their land, one by one, and moved away to farm such places as the Imperial Valley.
Frank Takahashi would not discuss Top Veg’s finances, or whether it is profitable, other than to say it always has been a “good business.”
Most of Top Veg’s crops are sold at weekly farmers markets throughout Los Angeles, where Frank and Mary (both of whom are well past retirement age) personally sell from a booth, along with their grown daughter Gloria and granddaughter Naomi. Some of Top Veg’s farm laborers also help out.
Takahashi said selling vegetables for retail prices at farmers markets is more profitable than selling at wholesale prices to supermarket chains.
But such issues will soon be of no relevance to the Takahashis, once they receive their eviction notice from Watson Land.
The Carson fields are the only ones the Takahashis have ever tilled; when asked if they would find another farm to tend, Mary merely shrugged.
“Our daughter and granddaughter mostly run the farm now,” she said. “I think they’ll want to do something else if we close.”
