Tony Chavez doesn’t look like a farmer. With his gold chain necklace and his brightly colored Hawaiian shirt, Chavez looks like he should be sipping Mai Tais on a tropical beach somewhere. Instead, he’s standing in a field in Nipomo talking to the Sun about blackberry production.
An experienced businessman, Chavez formerly owned a tortilla factory in San Francisco. He retired in the mid-2000s and bought the Nipomo property—located in the foothills on the eastern side of U.S. Highway 101—“because it was close to Pismo and I loved the weather.”
He decided to graze Angus cattle on the 150-acre ranch, but soon ran into some problems.
“Every time there was an accident on the 101, the fence would get knocked down and I’d have cattle running on the freeway,” Chavez said.
Once, while he was visiting family in Mexico, Chavez got a call from someone saying his 2,500-pound bull was loose and running amok on the highway.
He didn’t want to deal with the liability of someone getting hurt, so he sold his cattle and became a farmer.
“I wanted to plant grapes because I love wine, but it was too risky,” Chavez said.
Not sure about what to plant, he reached out to University of California Cooperative Extension scientists, who soon gave him an answer: berries.
Mark Gaskell, a farm adviser with the UC Cooperative Extension, said bush berry production—blueberries, specifically—has exploded in California over the last decade.
The strawberry has always been a heavy hitter in terms of sales, with towns like Santa Maria and Watsonville leading the charge in production. Other regions have followed suit; in San Luis Obispo County, that little, red berry went from a marginal crop to the No. 1 crop in just a handful of years.
But now that strawberry prices have leveled out, farmers are turning more of their attention to its lesser-known cousins: blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries.
Gaskell said berries used to be a marginal crop that was consumed on a relatively small scale because “they’re very perishable, meaning their shelf life isn’t very long because they’re so delicate.”
However, the increasing availability of improved berry varieties and more high-tech growing technology has created a berry renaissance, not just in California, but in other parts of the world as well.
Many farmers on the Central Coast have started using tunnels—long, tube-like structures made of plastic tarps and metal rods—to protect their precious crops from frost during the off season.
Chavez is using the tunnels to grow Primocane blackberries, which are specially bred to flower and produce fruit in their first year of planting. (He also grows smaller crops of blueberries and raspberries.) He said the tunnels’ greenhouse effect has caused the berries to grow faster, and it’s also enabled him to extend his picking season from two months to four months long. He’s still waiting to see what his returns will be, but he said this year’s harvest has been one of his best.
His organic blackberries are in particularly high demand; he sells 4 1/2-pound boxes in the Bay Area for $33 a pop.
Organic blueberries are a similarly lucrative crop for Lompoc farmer Sandra Newman. Since the early 2000s, she’s grown and cared for six acres of the sweet, juicy fruit on her farm, Forbidden Fruit Orchards, near the La Purisima Golf Course.
“It’s all about supply and demand in farming,” Newman said, adding that she only plants six acres of berries because “I can sell all of them and for a good price.”
She said growing certified organic blueberries is more expensive because “you have to weed all six acres by hand” and “the fertilizers are 10 times more expensive.” But the fruit her labor yields also goes for a premium price.
She described the perfect blueberry as “firm, picked at its ripest, and not sitting in coolers for a week.”
Unlike Chavez, Newman doesn’t use the tunnels at her farm because the strong Lompoc winds constantly blow them down. She relies on sprinklers to keep her plants healthy, and it seems to be working.
In addition to whole blueberries, Forbidden Fruit Orchards sells blueberry syrup, sorbet, and jam, and a blueberry dessert wine under the label Cebada. Other crops include Pakistani mulberries, kiwis, avocados, tea, and currants.
Newman’s agricultural repertoire is the perfect example of a growing trend among Central Coast farmers to grow an assortment of crops.
UC Cooperative Extension’s Gaskell said berry production is a testament to that trend.
“What you’re seeing is growers responding to an opportunity to diversify,” he said.
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 15-22, 2013.