The California Centennial Farm: Hall Ranch, Ojai

Laura Avery
Mirror contributing writer
  
   As the premier agricultural production state in the nation, California has a long and rich farming heritage. Many of the stories from small family farmers have undoubtedly been lost to time’s passing, but, at local farmers’ markets, farmers and their customers can still share stories of family farms, some of which are one hundred years old. In many states of the union farms which have been continuously occupied and farmed earn a designation of a “heritage” or “centennial” farm. Such a designation is not purely nostalgic. It signifies a great achievement and is a testament to the hard work and belief in the value of a farming life that allow these farms to endure, even as their owners are forced to become increasingly creative in the ways they finance their farms’ operation.
   The Hall Ranch in upper Ojai has been farmed since the 1880s when its primary crop was olives. Today the Hall Ranch is well-known for its singular crop of Blenheim apricots — those tasty gems of pure flavor that appear for a pitifully short season beginning sometime during the month of June. K.B. “Pete” Hall was a petroleum geologist for the Richfield company who moved to lower Ojai in 1946 with his wife and his young family that would eventually number seven - all boys. K.B.’s wife Emily was the daughter of the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles, and her youngest son Tom remembers visiting the large family home in Pasadena with the organ on the first floor landing. The Hall boys had an adventurous, rustic life in lower Ojai, and their mother learned how to kill and pluck chickens for the family table.
   In 1955 K.B. bought an apricot orchard in upper Ojai that belonged to a German immigrant named Henry Hess, who had been farming the land since 1906. Hess was the cousin of a well known Ojai farmer named Hofmeister who owned the largest ranch in the upper Ojai valley, raising apricots and alfalfa. Hess and his wife Emma harvested apricots, dried them with sulphur and shipped them to Germany. Emma kept detailed notes about how to raise, harvest and process the apricots, almonds and prunes she and her husband grew, and K.B. used this carefully handwritten information to become an apricot farmer himself. The Hall family raised and sold dried apricots at local farmers’ markets and kept some of the fresh fruit for their roadside stand, but farms were numerous in Ojai in the sixties and the fruit sold better in the distant urban markets of Santa Barbara and Santa Monica.
   Farming — even a single dry-farmed crop of organic apricots — is a challenge, as the youngest Hall, Tom, who still actively farms the orchard, learns every year. His 100-year-old apricot trees are beginning to finally show their age, and he has undertaken a program of grafting old wood on to new root stock to preserve the trees’ lineage. So far he has been gathering up “volunteer” trees for root stock. The trees he started from apricot pits are now three years old and have failed to produce any fruit at all. Taking a bud graft from a tree that has produced fruit consistently for over 100 years will ensure that the fruit will continue to grow. Tom has also grafted some buds from a neighbor’s 100-year old Fuji trees onto his ten Fujis. The Hall Ranch’s efforts at propagating Ojai’s centennial trees is a gift we can all be thankful for, especially as California continues to lose old farmland and orchards every day.
   The Halls discontinued the use of sulphur dioxide on their dried apricots in 1984. Since their fruit is all dry-farmed, it develops an intense, concentrated flavor that the Halls’ many loyal customers clamor for each year. Tom doesn’t use any pesticides or fertilizer on his trees. He has devised an ant bait consisting of boric acid mixed with apple mint jelly that the worker ants find irresistible, and he catches earwigs in a can of oil and water. Dry-farmed trees have been known to fail to produce a sellable crop some years, but this one looks like a good one, according to Tom, who plans to bring fresh Blenheim apricots to the Santa Monica Wednesday market for about three weeks, beginning today, June 9th. Most of the Hall sons have moved away, and K.B. now lives in Santa Paula, but the family has put the farm in a trust to ensure its longevity. Tom is interested in putting some historic houses on the property, and has gone as far as buying and dismantling them for a future move to the farm. He and his wife Laura are both active in the performing arts and cinema, and would like to move their family to Los Angeles soon to pursue acting and producing careers.
   This year’s apricot harvest is looking especially propitious, and the Hall Ranch’s 100-year old trees will bring forth another good year’s fruit for the delectation of dedicated consumers (and caretakers) who know a good thing when they taste it.