Paul Kawamura, son of Orange County Produce LLC’s managing partner, Matt Kawamura, is now on the sales desk at Orange County Produce. He is the fourth-generation Kawamura in the family business.

“He has actually been working for the company for three or four years,” said Matt Kawamura in an interview with The Produce News March 5. “He was learning about the accounting side and a bunch of other things initially. Now we brought him over into the strawberry sales.”

Paul Kawamura is a graduate of New York University. He worked for a while “back East” outside of the produce business before deciding to return to California and join Orange County Produce.

According to the company’s website, the grandparents of Matt Kawamura and his brother A.G. Kawamura, who is also a partner in the company, came to California from Japan around the turn of the 20th century and became involved in agriculture, doing everything from picking and packing oranges to sharecropping before starting a small fertilizer and farm supply company. During World War II, their families were relocated to an internment camp in Arizona.”

“My grandfather and dad [Gengi Kawamura and Gene Kawamura] had a company” before the internment and “were fortunate that a good friend of ours looked after it till we were able to come out and still have a company,” said Matt Kawamura.

Shortly after the war, they formed Western Marketing Co., initially growing and shipping lettuce, cabbage, celery and cantaloupes. By the end of the 1950s, Western Marketing had operations in Glendale, AZ, Compton, CA, and San Diego.

In 1958, Gene Kawamura decided to consolidate the operation and relocate to Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, which was, at the time, a rural agricultural community specializing in horticultural products, including strawberries.

With urban development, agricultural land in the county has become scarce and many growers moved to other locations. Matt Kawamura said as recently as 15 years ago, Orange County strawberry growers held an annual Strawberry Field Day to mark the start of the season. At the time, there were a dozen or so strawberry growers in Orange County. “Now it is only us,” he said. “Ground is running out. Although it is wonderful farm ground, the real estate has gotten too expensive.”

The company changed its name to Orange County Produce in 1998 to reflect its local nature, and since then “we really found ourselves being one of the bigger choices” with the advocates of locally grown produce, “which we embrace. Locally grown has really taken off, and since …we are the last really commercial shipper left in Orange County, that has gone well for us with a lot of our customers.”

The company also grows in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles, which also resonates with the locavores.

Between the two districts, the company grows about 700 acres of conventional strawberries and about 90 acres of organic strawberries. In addition, it will have another 200 acres of summer plantings in Oxnard for fall harvest. That “allows us to have berries from October to May.”

The varieties are San Andreas on the conventional production, Camarosa on the organic and, for the summer plantings, Portola. The company also specializes in green beans, which it grows both in California and in Mexico.

In Orange County, the company farms about 350 acres of organic ground, on which it produces not only strawberries and green beans but “a mix of different vegetables,” partly on contract and partly for sale at farmer’s markets in the area. “We market our organic program locally,” Kawamura said.

“It is hard being a farmer,” especially in an urban environment such as Orange County, he said. “We’ve been doing it a long time, and we keep trying to hang in there. It is getting tough, between water, labor and all those different issues.”