FRESNO — There was a time when Fong Tching's four children worked the fields and accompanied him to the market to help sell their strawberries, eggplants, sugar cane and 60 other crop varieties.
But one by one, the kids are leaving the family business, going to college to pursue more lucrative professions in pharmaceuticals and engineering.
"It's just me and my wife working 30 acres by ourselves," said Tching as he surveyed a field of ripened berries.
Tching, 45, is an ethnic Hmong, a tribe from the hills of Southeast Asia with a long history in agriculture. His children are among the first generation of Hmong in the U.S. that are not farming.
Although no one is tallying how many younger ethnic Hmong are abandoning tradition, leaders in the immigrant community and agriculture industry observers say the trend is striking.
It is a familiar pattern among immigrant farmers: The number of Japanese American farm laborers who first came to the state in the early 1900s dwindled after World War II.
"They grew up and saw the toughness of farming, their parents working year-round, and they saw that hard labor doesn't necessarily pay off," said Manuel Cunha, president of Nisei Farmers League of Fresno. His group was founded in 1971 by second-generation Japanese American farmers, but most of its 1,000 current members have no Japanese ancestry, Cunha said.
For the Hmong, the same kind of shift means a loss of tradition that dates back centuries. The ethnic group subsisted on farming across generations of migration, until many of the men were recruited by the U.S. to fight communists during the war in Vietnam.
After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, about 44,000 Laotians, mostly Hmong, fled to camps in Thailand, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.
Many Hmong in Southeast Asia continue farming. Those who came to the United States have settled primarily in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The 2000 census counted 102,773 Hmong in the U.S., with about 30,000 of them in the Fresno area.
Tching said he immediately rented farmland when he came to Fresno in 1988. The work allows freedom -- "You're your own boss" -- but requires long hours.
On Fridays, he and his wife often work into the night packing vegetables, sleep for three hours, then make a three-hour drive to a farmers' market in the San Francisco Bay Area.
