Agriculture Orange County

Past Disneyland, past the long stretch of resort hotels on Harbor Boulevard, past the new Anaheim--the Anaheim of tomorrow--sits the last agricultural vestige of the original Anaheim colony: an orange grove. This two-acre stretch of green in downtown Anaheim is the last working orange grove in a city where once there were acres upon acres of orchards. It is not for sale, at least for now. But many Anaheim residents are lobbying city officials to help them preserve the grove.

Orange County strawberry growers got clobbered by the recent rains, and nature shows no signs of letting up. "It's been horrible," said A.G. Kawamura, an Irvine grower. Given the El Nino threat, growers had been preparing fields for weeks and therefore suffered less damage than they might have. But little, Kawamura said, can be done to stave off the effects of 9 1/2 inches of rain in two days, the amount Irvine recorded two weekends ago.

Just call it Lemon County. Production of the once-mighty orange, Orange County's top citrus crop for a century, declined by 70% last year and was finally surpassed by lemons. "It really puts in perspective how few oranges groves we have left," said Gordon McClelland, who worked in local packinghouses as a teenager and later wrote a book about citrus box labels. "It makes you wonder what will happen next year."

At the Singing Hen Egg Ranch, a barn-red shack and a few cages of egg-laying chickens on a side street in Cypress, it's egg-buying the way it used to be: 15 cents each, cackling hens laying them before your eyes. But nothing else about the 42-year-old business is the way it once was.

Orange County ranks No. 1 statewide in the number of people residing close to areas where pesticides are heavily used, concludes a new report that calls for more intense state regulation. Nearly 4 million Californians in all live within half a mile of land treated with known or suspected air contaminant pesticides, stirring concerns about human exposure to potentially dangerous airborne chemicals, says the report from the California Public Interest Group Charitable Trust.

State agricultural officials said Friday that a second wild Mediterranean fruit fly was discovered in Mission Viejo half a mile away from where the first bug was found a week earlier. The two new sightings bring to seven the number of medflies found in the general area. In July, five were found in adjacent Lake Forest. "At this point, any fruit fly we find is a concern," said Oscar Hidalgo, spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture.