Bob Kuang pulls weeds while taking care of business on his cell phone. Photo by Andria Lo, New America Media
By LI LOVETT, Hyphen
Bob and Judy Kuang’s farm begins
where a cul-de-sac ends in the tiny town of San Martin, Calif. It’s about 30
miles south of San Jose and home to some of the country’s most expensive real
estate. At first glance, it might not even be recognizable as a working farm.
The vegetables grown there ― Chinese
celery (gao choy or chives), gau gei (leaves of Chinese wolfberry) and gai lan,
which looks and tastes nothing like Western broccoli despite its common
nickname (“Chinese broccoli”) ― are hidden from sight in a greenhouse. The only
thing that catches the eye is a cottage with corrugated tin panels. That’s
where the field hand lives.
Judy rises before 3:30 a.m. on
delivery days, driving a truck loaded with more than 300 boxes of vegetables to
the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Oakland. While products like ginger, taro
root and lychee can come from as far away as Japan and China, the fresh produce
from these markets comes from Asian farmers in California, an employee at an
Oakland wholesale produce market says.
Farming is in Judy’s blood. Her
relatives were farmers in the fertile Pearl River Delta region of China, and
almost all the Chinese growers in Silicon Valley’s farming belt can trace their
roots to this region near Hong Kong. Coincidentally, this region has become
central to China’s explosive economic growth in recent decades due to its
booming manufacturing industry.
Back in San Martin, the Kuangs
continue to live the farming life of their ancestors. But this way of life is
increasingly under threat ― not from the manufacture of watches, toys and
clothes, but from Internet company headquarters and the surrounding
neighborhoods where its employees live. Since buying 12.9 acres here in 1998,
the Kuangs have watched the pricetag of surrounding land increase from $30,000
an acre to as much as $70,000 in recent years. According to the 2007 Census of
Agriculture, more than half of the Asian American farmers in Santa Clara County
operate on fewer than 10 acres of land. Unlike their white and Latino
counterparts, the number of Asians operating farms larger than 180 acres can be
counted on one hand.
Of the roughly 130 Asian growers
documented in this county, the majority are Chinese, and most of the Chinese
growers here own land in or on the fringes of urban zones. In areas zoned for
agriculture, land can be purchased at $100,000 an acre, according to Aziz
Baameur, a University of California farm adviser based in Santa Clara County.
However, land in the bedroom communities of Silicon Valley, such as Gilroy and
Morgan Hill, easily could fetch between $300,000 and $500,000 per acre. New
farmers have few prospects of buying land “unless it’s someone from Silicon
Valley who is cottage farming on the weekends,” Baameur says.
Domestic
development vs. international relations
While the Silicon Valley of Apple
and Facebook is no longer a land of blossoms and orchards, Chinese farmers like
the Kuangs continue to wage a battle for farmland preservation in Santa Clara
County.
Bob Kuang was 21 years old when he
immigrated to the United States from Guangdong, China, in the mid-1980s. In
1989, he leased land with his older brother Peter in Morgan Hill, 15 miles
south of San Jose. In those days, the vast majority of Chinese growers in the
area grew flowers, particularly chrysanthemums. The brothers farmed 10 acres of
the cash crop, earning enough money for Bob to buy his own land in nearby San
Martin less than a decade later.
Bob takes me on a tour of the
greenhouse, where he grows 20 varieties of produce for sale. The greenhouse
offers the vegetables protection from inclement weather, but that’s not why the
Chinese and Japanese farmers in the mid-peninsula south of San Francisco
initially built them over 100 years ago. In those days, the greenhouses
contained flower-growing enterprises, and by the mid-1960s, chrysanthemums were
a multimillion-dollar crop here.
Wing
Mok is a third-generation farmer in the San Francisco Bay Area and one of the
last remaining flower growers among the local Chinese. The Mok family’s
migration down the peninsula over the course of the last century traces the
path of development in what is today’s Silicon Valley. Mok’s grandfather
started in Belmont, relocated to Stanford and then moved further south to
Redwood City.
Today, Mok owns 12.5 acres in Morgan
Hill. In the wake of recession, a nice single-family home in Morgan Hill can be
listed for at least $700,000 to upward of $1 million. Urbanites have been lured
to these picturesque bedroom communities by the prospect of a short commute to
Silicon Valley. It’s an uneasy coexistence that may lead to farmers being
priced off the land, as has been the result in other parts of the country.
Land prices aren’t the only threats
to small-business farmers. When Mok took over the family farm in 1980, the
chrysanthemum market still was thriving because most people still bought American-grown
flowers. That decade, however, marked the beginning of increased competition
from South American imports. Baameur says that U.S. aid to Colombia has been a
significant force in edging out domestic growers from the market for cut
flowers.
The U.S.-funded “war on drugs” has
shifted agricultural production in Colombia from coca and poppies to legal
crops, especially flowers. And the weather is on the side of the South American
growers. “No lights or plastic tarps are needed [there],” Baameur says. “The
temperature is perfect.” The Toronto Star reported that 450 million flowers
were imported from Colombia this past Valentine’s Day.
That wasn’t the only challenge for
flower growers. Bob Kuang remembers when a serious viral disease called
“chrysanthemum white rust” first infected his nursery. Following strict USD A
guidelines, all infected plants and others in the vicinity had to be destroyed.
“Our entire year’s salary was gone,” he says. Between crop diseases and foreign
competition, about 90 percent of local Chinese American farmers have converted
from flower to vegetable cultivation in the past two decades.
Then in 1995, the North American
Free Trade Agreement liberalized trade between Canada, the United States and
Mexico in order to stimulate economic growth for all three countries. What it
ended up doing was sparking a race to the bottom in agricultural products,
sending much of the income of small American farms into a free fall, according
to a report by the nonprofit Public Citizen.
Nearly 33,000 growers who earned
less than $100,000 per year went out of business between 1993 and 2000. Imports
of agricultural goods including beef, grain, fruits, vegetables and flowers
soared; even Chinese vegetables grown in Mexico have begun to flood the U.S. market,
according to Bob Kuang.
In the face of these challenges, the
Kuangs and Moks have exuded a tough spirit reminiscent of that of American
pioneers who crossed deserts and mountains to settle the West nearly a century
and a half ago.
“Farmers are the most stubborn
people that you could work with,” says Baameur, who has worked with Asian
growers since 1985 and in Santa Clara County for the past decade. “That’s a
compliment.” Perhaps these farmers haven’t quit farming because of this
characteristic stubbornness.
Another likely explanation is that
it’s hard to give up after all they have done to put down stakes; the majority
of Chinese farmers here own their land. “You can easily put half a million
dollars into the ground” as a land-owning farmer, Baameur says, not to mention
the sweat put into the land by generations of family members.
Because the Chinese have been in
California for a long time (they first began immigrating in significant numbers
in the 1850s), “They have more resources. They brought their nephews. It’s a
stable community,” Baameur says.
Contingent
legacies
Chinese growers established their
roots in the region during a golden era of the 20th century, despite earlier
laws against Chinese immigration and alien land ownership. Retired grower Frank
Leung bought his farm in 1972. For $95,000, he obtained five and a half acres
along with a house and a well. Mok visited Bank of America to get a $250 loan
for a PG&E meter that same year.
“The manager was happy to help,” Mok
says. “Kam Lau, the former president of the Bay Area Chrysanthemum Growers
Association, also remembers the good old days: “We are lucky we bought our
place in this valley when the land was cheap. Then the electronic industry
moved in and the [value of the] ground went up.”
Val Dolcini, California state
executive director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, points to urban growth
and suburbanization in this region as barriers to land ownership for farmers
over the past half century, especially those who want to buy significant
acreage. In fact, the cost of land is an issue throughout the state ― even in
Fresno County, where agriculture is still king.
Small farmers like the Moks have
lived under the shadow of encroaching development as growing towns such as Gilroy
and Morgan Hill have attempted to annex nearby open space. In 2002, Gilroy’s
city council voted to earmark 664 acres of the county’s agricultural preserve
for industrial development, which has yet to materialize due to the
sluggishness of the economy.
In
the meantime, Greenbelt Alliance has played a role in designing San Jose’s
general plan update, approved last November, which would safeguard urban
reserves in southern San Jose as wildlife corridors and ranching and
agricultural lands through the year 2040. “There’s so much land within cities
and towns that can be redeveloped,” says Michele Beasley, senior field
representative at Greenbelt Alliance. “It doesn’t make sense to sprawl.”
Owning land has bestowed a certain
amount of security for these small farmers. Yet ownership ties the older
generation of Chinese growers to the land in a way that it may not for their
children in years to come.
Although both grassroots groups and
the USDA have stepped up their efforts to reach young and new farmers, some
Chinese growers don’t envision their children taking over the land when they
retire. “My own kids don’t eat Chinese vegetables,” Judy Kuang says.
Kam Lau agrees that domestic Chinese
crop farming is in its twilight.
But Wing Mok, whose business has
survived recessions, chrysanthemum viruses and foreign competitors, is more
optimistic: “When we retire, someone else will come. The sky never falls.”
