Words from The WELL

Response #650 (mtrbike) Monday, May 7, 2001

 Pretty much everyone knows that Silicon Valley used to be called the Valley
 of Heart's Delight, used to be full of orchards, and that the farmers all
 slowly vanished once the computers came in.  There are still vestiges of
 the old Valley left, though.  There are still a few old family farms left
 here and there in amongst the office buildings the billboards and the
 freeways.  It hasn't all dissappeared.

 I used to buy strawberries and cherries from an orchard in Saratoga.
 Actually, it wasn't really an orchard, it was an older gentleman with a few
 acres of cherries who, as I understood it, used to have a much larger farm
 but sold off most of the land over the years as land values went up and
 farming became less profitable.  He kept the acre or two around his house
 because he just really liked being a farmer.  In May he would sell
 strawberries from Gilroy, and in June he sold cherries from his own trees,
 all from a little roadside stand.  I would drive by, park along the little
 white fence alongside his property, chat for a while and buy a quart or two
 of berries for eating or for jam, or cherries for snacking.  The prices
 were good, and the fruit was incredibly fresh and flavorful (far more than
 it ever got at the grocery store).

 I read in the paper late last year that my friend the old farmer had died,
 and his family was trying to decide what to do with the orchard.  I hoped
 they would find a way to keep it open, but I knew that with housing prices
 what they were in the Valley, and especially in Saratoga, that the little
 cherry orchard would be sold.  And sure enough, we drove by there just a
 little while ago, and there was a FOR SALE sign up on the little white fence
 next to the roadside stand where I used to park my car.

 I was very quiet for the next mile down the road.

 Saratoga is a very rich neighborhood, a town of sweeping driveways paved in
 brick leading up to enormous faux-Tudor and faux-Tuscan mansions.  You
 could fit at least three or four of those houses on a sad little worn out
 cherry orchard once you scraped all the trees off of it, sell those houses
 for a couple mil apiece, make quite a profit on your investment.  And
 that's what the Valley is all about, right?  Return on Investment?

 I was thinking of my friend and his little cherry orchard when I read in
 the paper a week or so ago that Mariani, the last dried fruit packer in
 Santa Clara County, is shutting down.  Last year Del Monte closed its
 last fruit cannery here.  A couple of years back Olson Cherries, who had
 huge orchards out in Sunnyvale and a big roadside stand on El Camino Real,
 sold most of its land to a developer.  There are apartments there now.
 They're called the Cherry Orchard Apartments.  Ha ha ha.

 All we've got left now as far as actual commercial fruit production is a
 tomato packer owned by a company in New York, and a small maraschino cherry
 manufacturer.  Both are planning to leave the Valley in the next few years.
 Soon all the fruit will be gone.

 Does it really matter?  Computers are more profitable.  The economy in the
 area is certainly better with high tech that it would be in farming.  The
 jump in land values is great if you own land.  And you could argue that a
 lot of these farmers have been here for long enough that they can sell out
 for a lot of money, retire altogether or just buy more land in a cheaper
 area and keep farming.  They don't have to farm in this particular
 neighborhood.  We don't need farming here.

 But I don't know.  In San Francisco they complain that when the
 dotcommers came in they drove out all the artists and the musicians
 and the people who make San Francisco interesting -- that all that
 high tech money turned the city into a town of loft condos and cell
 phones and SUVs.  In the Valley we've been over-teched for a long time
 and the change been much more gradual, much less dramatic.  But the
 problem is the same: its good to have diversity.  Its good to have
 industry in an area that is not all chips and networks and software.
 Its good to be able to talk to people who have different interests,
 different backgrounds, different ways of looking at the very
 neighborhood you live in and the streets you walk and drive every day.
 When an industry dies, particularly an industry that was once so
 important to this area, you lose all of that.  I think its hard to
 understand how much that will be missed until its gone...and until it
 is far too late to get it back.  But then, for the Valley of Heart's
 Delight, it probably already is.