Longtime prune farmer Joe Forestieri lamented the sight of
hundreds of fruit trees covered with white flowers, freshly pulled
out of the dusty ground at the orchard he and his brother managed
for 15 years on Fisher Avenue.
Morgan Hill
Longtime prune farmer Joe Forestieri lamented the sight of hundreds of fruit trees covered with white flowers, freshly pulled out of the dusty ground at the orchard he and his brother managed for 15 years on Fisher Avenue. Tuesday, he watched as a backhoe slowly moved down the rows, digging each tree out of the ground one at a time, and setting it down behind the machine before inching to the next.
But according to Forestieri and other local agriculture professionals, it’s a sign of the times in Santa Clara County’s evolving farming industry. Joe and Duke Forestieri began growing prune trees with their families in 1940, when more than 56,000 acres of the fruit were growing throughout the valley, far more than any other crop.
With the removal of about 20 more acres of prune trees this week, the total prune acreage in the county is about 60, based on information from the Department of Agriculture.
“It’s a shame to see all these trees laying down in perfect bloom,” Joe Forestieri said at his home, which is on his remaining 25-acre orchard. “This whole area was prunes, walnuts, cherries, vineyards.”
Now 80 years old and still doing all the tractor work on his farm, Forestieri said his age and his brother’s health prevent them from being as productive as they used to be. With the removal of the prunes across the street, which the Forestieris operated but did not own, they have now cut back to the farm they started with.
The new tenant on the 40-acre orchard plot, formerly Atkins Orchard, is George Chiala Farms of Morgan Hill. Tim Chiala said he called in the heavy equipment to remove the trees so he could plant “more profitable” crops, continuing the industry trend that began decades ago.
“The prune industry has been getting pulled out for the last 40 years,” Chiala said. “It’s the end of an era. Nobody wants to take care of prunes (anymore).”
Specifically, Chiala will grow jalapeno peppers, now one of the county’s top five money-making crops. He said the switch makes sense, especially for his company which has a jalapeno processing facility just a couple of miles away on Hill Road, and peppers are one of Chiala’s top crops in the fields he runs throughout Santa Clara and San Benito counties.
Chiala, whose company started as a family business in the 1970s, also explained that agriculture goes through cycles. The area where the Forestieris’ orchard is, now known as the city’s “southeast quadrant,” has been used for hay fields, grapes, and fruit and nut trees, Chiala said.
It’s simply supply and demand, he said.
“When the market changes the grower has to change. The demand for peppers exceeds the demand for prunes,” Chiala explained, though he noted that locally grown fruit is still of a high quality.
Now virtually nonexistent, the prune industry was once one of Santa Clara Valley’s most productive. As prunes, which actually grow as plums, are typically sold to the consumer as dried fruit, large-scale dehydrating facilities used to be scattered all over Santa Clara County, according to Kevin O’Day, the county’s deputy agricultural commissioner. One of those facilities used to be in downtown Morgan Hill, at the Sunsweet building on Third Street, which closed about 50 years ago.
Now most of those facilities are gone, and the prune industry has largely moved north to the Sacramento Valley, O’Day said.
There are now only three prune farmers in all of Santa Clara County, and the Forestieris run the largest prune orchard. O’Day said the flight of prunes, and fruit and nut orchards as a whole, from Santa Clara County is “one of the most surprising examples” of the changing market.
Since 1995, the total acreage of all varieties of fruit and nut orchards has dropped from more than 5,000 to about 3,300. Apricots alone in 1943 covered about 18,700 acres.
O’Day said in recent years the county’s highest-grossing agricultural products have become nursery crops, followed by mushrooms.
A chief reason, coupled with the disappearance of local infrastructure such as dehydrators, is a higher value of these crops can be produced on less acreage than fruit trees.
“Land is very expensive, and you need to have high-value intensive crops in order to have it pencil out,” O’Day said. “That’s why low value crops are on the decline.”
If it soothes any passersby who fear the freshly bloomed trees abutting the eastern side of U.S. 101 will become a cluster of buildings and parking lots, Chiala said he plans only to use the property to grow crops, at least for the upcoming three years he holds the lease.
However, the city of Morgan Hill has long-term plans to expand its nearby Outdoor Sports Complex. City Manager Ed Tewes said the Parks and Recreation Commission has included the addition of baseball fields, “somewhere in the vicinity” of the OSC, in its master plan.
He said the city will begin working on property acquisition for the fields in the next five years, though it does not yet have the money to develop new fields.
In the last 60 years, Forestieri has watched thousands of acres of orchards transform not only into vineyards or row crops, but also into subdivisions and strip malls.
“This used to be beautiful out here. There were fruit trees everywhere,” Forestieri said.
