As dawn breaks, Bill Ito is often out the door to inspect his strawberries. That's what his father did. That's what his grandfather did too, after emigrating from Japan in 1918 to establish a family farming enterprise that would eventually become one of the biggest strawberry growers in Southern California.
But whether the Ito family will farm strawberry fields forever is anyone's guess. Although farmers of Japanese descent virtually developed the state's $1.3-billion strawberry industry, they themselves are becoming scarce.
In Orange County, for instance, where more than two dozen Japanese American farming families will be honored Sunday for their contributions, only six of them are still growing strawberries.
Some sold their land during booms in property values. Others found that their college-educated children preferred white-collar professional careers instead, said Diana Ono, who helped organize the Sunday event for Project Kokoro at Orange County Buddhist Church in Anaheim.
The trend is not something that's confined to the Japanese American community, said Tom Am Rhein, who is of German descent.
"Farming is an honorable profession, but you get out of it as quickly as you can," said Am Rhein, director of research and grower support for Naturipe Berry Growers, a Salinas-based growers' cooperative. "You get your education and move on."
In a timeless cycle of ethnic assimilation and advancement, Latinos have replaced Japanese Americans as the industry's dominant players. Just as Japanese immigrants climbed the ladder of agricultural success, moving up from pickers to sharecroppers to independent growers, Latinos who came as immigrant laborers are making a similar leap. They now make up more than 56% of the state's 518 strawberry growers, compared with 14% for Japanese Americans, according to the California Strawberry Commission.
Ito, 55, bucked that trend. As a youth growing up in Westminster, the soft-spoken farmer says, he never thought he would take over the business despite the weight of family tradition. His grandfather, Gonsaku, began farming celery and other vegetables in Venice before the family turned to strawberries after World War II.
Other Japanese farmers had already come to dominate strawberry farming since the early 1900s along the entire West Coast, according to Lane Hirabayashi, an Asian American studies professor at UC Riverside. They turned to strawberries because they were lucrative and required only a few acres, Hirabayashi said.
