By Henry Dubroff Sunday, October 18th, 2026

Ventura County farmers have been through a lot in the 150-plus years since they broke away from Santa Barbara County to plow their own future.

But many ag leaders alive today tell me they can’t remember times as difficult as these. Widen the lens a bit, and prospects are not much better for Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo County wine growers and producers of other crops.

“It seems like we’ve been on a slow decline for several years,” Ventura County Supervisor Matt LaVere told me in an Oct. 14 phone chat. “If we don’t start taking this seriously, I’m afraid we’re going from slow to bankrupt.”

Producers who’d like to raise prices are constrained by brutal global competition, including lemons from Brazil and berries from Latin America. For winemakers, demand has slumped badly, especially from Gen Z and Millennials.

But the real pressures are on the cost side; labor is expensive and in short supply thanks to ICE raids, most recently in Santa Maria. Water is increasingly scarce, and fuel costs are at record highs, along with raw materials and fertilizer.Tariffs on components have made farm equipment expensive.

“It’s a tough, tough time,” said Harold Edwards, CEO of Limoneira, one of the nation’s biggest producers of lemons and a major avocado grower. “We haven’t been able to make money in lemons since 2018,” he said, adding that owning and operating its historic packing house allows Limoneira to reduce transportation and processing costs.

In an Oct. 1 report from the Ventura County Farm Bureau, CEO Louise Lampara analyzed the lemon industry’s problems. “It is costing growers $203.5 million to receive $181.7 million in gross revenue,” she wrote.

She added that Ventura County may look attractive and the $2.4 billion in crop value sounds impressive, but “the landscape is hiding what’s happening underneath it.”

One bright spot in agribusiness is avocados, which are profitable for many farmers and remain in strong demand.  Limoneira has been replacing lemons with avocados for that reason.

But LaVere said seven out of the county’s top 10 crops “are not winning,” adding that strawberries, typically a top revenue producer, are a break-even proposition. Meanwhile, around 1,000 agricultural acres were fallow last year, an ominous sign.  

Lemons are a symbolically important crop for Ventura County and the region. Founded in 1893, Limoneira’s founder pioneered the California citrus industry, inventing the grading system used today to assess the quality of individual fruit.

At the Museum of Ventura County, CEO Elena Brokaw has been watching the current woes in the farming industry as part of a cycle that repeats from generation to generation, from cattle hides to lima beans to sugar beets on down through the decades.

“The history of agriculture is one of times of great success followed by overproduction or a change in weather or taste” that leads to periods of turbulence, she said. “It’s the history of grit and creativity.”

She added that in the 21^st century, the challenges facing farmers are a unique mix of regulation, climate, water and global competition. “The number of pressures or obstacles we are facing is almost existential. It’s really difficult.”

But she said it’s too early to count the sector out. “Our history shows there is hope,” she said, adding that time after time it’s taken “courage and risk on the part of farmers to keep agriculture alive.”

LaVere and Supervisor Jeff Gorell are working on ways to streamline permitting for small farming operations as a way to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.

He said he’s hoping to spend the last two years of his term working on reforms to the county’s SOAR initiative, which severely limits activities other than agriculture on farmland. “SOAR was meant to restrict residential growth but it’s having serious consequences for farmers,” he said.

One concept is reforming SOAR to provide for more food processing, which would make local farmers more competitive on transportation costs. Today, many farmers ship products to LA for processing, turning a potentially break-even harvest into a loss-making one.

LaVere and others think that action at the regional and state level will be required to ease some regulations that are adding costs and making farming unsustainable.

“If we are going to figure this out, it’s going to take a lot of interests working together,” agreed Brokaw. “If we are a community that values having farmland here, there are ways to make that feasible.”

• Henry Dubroff is the founder, owner and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times. He can be reached at [email protected].