Lake County pear growers reaping rewards

Scully Packing Co. in Finley was a whirl of activity early this week as more than 200 workers sorted, packed and loaded a bounty of Lake County pears headed for markets across the country and beyond.

The bustle represents the final sprint of activity in the earliest pear harvest on record in Lake County, a product of mild winter, spring and summer weather conditions that have triggered early harvests for wine grapes and other crops statewide. Only a smattering of Bartlett pears and some later varieties, including Bosc and Comice, were left to be picked in Lake County this week.

“This was our earliest harvest ever,” said Lake County Agricultural Commissioner Steve Hajik. The pear harvest began July 22 in some areas of the county, two or three days earlier than previously recorded and nearly two weeks earlier than normal, he said.

“Everything’s early,” said UC Davis farm adviser Rachel Elkins. “We didn’t have anything to slow the progress” of fruit crops, she said, noting the weather was neither too hot nor too cold.

The early crop did face some labor- and fire-related challenges, but emerged unscathed and is expected to bring financial rewards for Lake County growers, who produce almost a fifth of California’s pears, said Toni Scully, a pear grower and an owner of Scully Packing, which has facilities in Scotts Valley as well as Finley. They’re the only commercial packing facilities left operating this year in Lake or Mendocino counties, following years of decline in the pear industry, agricultural officials said.

“All indications are for a good crop and a good return” this year, Scully said.

“They’re remarkable pears,” said Diane Henderson, a fifth-generation farmer who grows the fruit on 63 acres near Kelseyville. The Henderson orchard is among about 30 locally owned Lake County family farms that send pears to Scully facilities for processing. It also processes pears from Mendocino County and the Sacramento River growing district.

Scully estimated this year’s crop at about 35,000 tons, compared to 32,000 last year, which was a lower than average production year but yielded near-record prices. Last year’s numbers, which haven’t been totaled yet, were expected to exceed the $21.8 million in gross revenue generated by the 39,076 tons produced in 2013.

While the figures are good, pears in Lake County place a distant second to wine grapes, the top crop. In 2013, Lake County farmers produced 43,620 tons of wine grapes with a gross value of $61.3 million.

Statewide, the 2015 pear crop is expected to be about 170,000 tons, said Chris Zanobini, executive director of the California Pear Advisory Board. In 2013, farmers statewide produced 220,000 tons of pears worth $86 million.

Mendocino County produced 27,663 tons of pears with a gross value of $12.9 million in 2013, according to that year’s crop report, the latest one available. That compares with 77,920 tons of grapes valued at just over $113 million. Sonoma County’s wine grape growers in 2013 produced 270,000 tons valued at $605 million. That county’s pear crop is too small to warrant its own category in crop reports.

Mendocino County is expected to produce 24,500 tons of pears this year, Zanobini said. Fresh pear prices for this year have not yet been determined, but they’re expected to be good and the canning prices are excellent, ranging from $220 per ton for hail-damaged fruit to $460 per ton for the best quality pears, according to the California Pear Growers. About 20 percent of Lake County’s fresh-packed pears are shipped outside California, including to Mexico and Canada, Scully said.

“People don’t know how well-known our product is,” she said. The quality is high; the sugar content is high, contributing to a higher shelf life. The fruit has a beautiful shape, Scully said.

Pear growers don’t take their recent good fortune for granted. They’ve had several good years in a row, but bad luck has visited them in the past and threatened them again this year.

Because the harvest was so early, it overlapped with harvests in the Sacramento region and Mendocino County, spreading the labor force thin.

“There were people who couldn’t get started” with their harvests when their pears first began ripening, Henderson said. Luckily, there is some flexibility in picking ripening pears and farmers were able to find enough laborers to get them off the trees before it was too late.

The labor shortage is a chronic problem that hasn’t improved much since 2006, when an estimated 10,000 tons of Lake County pears valued at more than $2.5 million rotted because there weren’t enough migrant laborers to pick them all, said Scully, who that year became the face of what is a nationwide problem.

“We haven’t made much progress” since then, she said.

“It’s getting worse. The workers we have now are an aging population,” Henderson said.

The ongoing problem has pushed more farmers toward mechanization, when possible. But there’s not yet a good mechanical harvester for pears, Elkins said.

“We’re working on it,” she said.

Farmers meanwhile still are waiting and hoping for legislative changes that would allow foreign laborers to work here during harvests.

The Lake County pear crop this year also faced transportation problems when Highway 20, the main route to Central Valley canneries and distributors, was shut down for several days by the massive Rocky fire.

The drought has not negatively affected pear production in Lake County, Hajik said. Those farmers have wells that, so far, have held up under dry conditions, he said.

There are fewer pear trees to water now than in previous years but their fruit is climbing in value.

Pear acreage has decreased from 17,300 acres statewide in 2003 to 11,600 in 2013, according to the latest available crop report issued by the state agriculture department. In Lake County, there were 2,093 acres that produced a gross income of $21.8 million in 2013, compared with 2,764 acres in production in 2003, a year in which the crop grossed $16.4 million. In Mendocino County, the acreage declined from 2,316 acres that produced pears worth $14.6 million in 2003 to 1,339 acres in 2013 that produced a crop worth $12.9 million.

But the decline in pear production began many years earlier. At its peak in the mid-1970s, there were 8,240 acres of pears that in 1977 generated a gross annual revenue of $9.7 million, in Lake County, according to Hajik. Many of those acres have been replaced by more profitable wine grapes, which now take up four times as much land - 8,253 acres in 2013 - as pears.

Hajik doesn’t expect the acreage to drop below 2,000 as long as prices hold, the apparent product of the rules of supply and demand shifting in favor of farmers.

“I think the market has stabilized,” Scully said. “The size of the crop has come more in line with demand.”

The pear farmers who held onto their pear trees through the bad times, rather than converting all of their land to wine grapes finally are benefiting, she said.

“Those growers who were able to stick it out are seeing the fruits of their labor,” she said.

Henderson said she maintained her pear orchards - which includes trees that are 124 years old - through bad times both because they are her heritage and in the belief that market equilibrium would again be reached.

“Growing pears will always be difficult, but it is now a very rewarding business,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or glenda.anderson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@MendoReporter.