Price of Water Dries Up Avocado Farms : Agriculture: Some growers in the county are cutting down their groves, saying water costs have put them out of business.

The chain saws started buzzing an hour past dawn, and the avocado trees began falling. Jack Denten fidgeted nearby, a piece of his dream dying with each crashing branch.

Denten, a silver-haired, cigarette-puffing former caterer, says he no longer can afford the water to keep his Ramona avocado ranch in business. He plans to cut about 500 trees before the end of next week, and then the saws will move to neighboring groves.

Across the street, 700 trees await doom. Down the road, more than 7,000. White-painted stumps already cover the hillside behind Denten’s 11-acre spread.

He and others note with irony that their tropical avocado trees are falling even as U.S. officials travel to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero to preserve Brazilian rain forests.

“We’re saving the world, but we can’t even save ourselves,” said Dave Owen, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

Denten’s story, he added, is a harbinger of trouble for many area farmers: Water prices are starting to “drive agriculture out of business.”

Denten, 58, ends his 21-year farming venture with bittersweet memories.

“I can’t help but get emotional,” he said Friday morning, eyes moistening while he pondered the fate of what was once a plot of boulders and scrub along a then-unpaved Highland Valley Road. As he spoke, Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” played over an outdoor sound system.

Denten came to Ramona in 1970 from Palos Verdes, where he had owned a coffee shop, bakery and catering business. He wanted an active retirement, and agriculture experts at the time were predicting that avocados would earn a net profit of $2,000 an acre.

He planted the next year, built two houses on the property--one for his parents, who died shortly after construction ended--and picked his first avocado in February, 1974. He still has the debut fruit--bronzed as if it were a baby shoe.

Farming absorbed him. “It doesn’t leave your mind--water rates, freezes, too hot, too cold, blossom time, picking time. . . . The winds come and you hear an avocado fall and you think, ‘Oh my God, there goes another 50 cents.’ ”

The worries of farming were offset by the pleasures of working the land, the serenity of rural living and the spectacular setting of the ranch.

Denten’s house sits atop a hill at the end of a twisting, flower-lined driveway. A massive boulder looms beside a swimming pool and fish pond outside the front door. Dogs named Igor and Bear roam the grounds, and, out back, a wooden deck overlooks the Laguna mountain range.

But the picture began darkening two years ago, he said. Denten had to take a job at an Escondido bakery to make up for dwindling avocado income.

And this year, grove manager Steve White announced that water rates had priced the farm out of business.

The cutting began a few days ago. About half of Denten’s 1,000 trees will come down now; the rest next year after harvest. (Avocado trees produce fruit in alternating years, so the non-producing plants will go first.)

The stumps will be left intact, covered with a protective white coating. If the avocado market changes or water prices fall, the trees could be back in production in three years, White said.

But Denten plans to sell his ranch no matter what happens. “I wouldn’t ever consider farming again,” he said.

His major gripe is the Ramona Municipal Water District.

Farmers in the district pay $650 an acre-foot for untreated water, the highest rate for agricultural water in the county, according to farm bureau and water officials.

White, Denten and other growers have asked the district to lower its agricultural rate to $500 per acre-foot. They say the shortfall could be recovered by charging residential customers an extra $7 a month.

If avocado groves go under--and the farm bureau says Denten and his neighbors are just “the tip of the iceberg”--the water district will lose its biggest customers and residents will still have to make up for the plunge in income, White said.

About a half dozen farmer have already taken down their trees, according to the farm bureau.

Harry Ehrlich, acting general manager for the Ramona Municipal Water District, said he sympathizes with the farmers’ plight, but lowering rates “is not something you can do arbitrarily or quickly, especially since water prices and costs (paid by the district) have been going up.”

Even if growers folded operations and water sales fell 25%, he said, it’s still cheaper than subsidizing agricultural rates. That doesn’t mean the district doesn’t care if farmers go out of business, he added.

“We’re trying to hold costs down . . . and we’re looking for things we can do, but it’s not something that’s easily solved.”

Farmers say one solution is to stop using money from water sales to subsidize Ramona’s fire, sewer and paramedic services. But Ehrlich said water income doesn’t support any other services.

White, meanwhile, said much more is at stake than farmers. “There’s a ripple effect,” he said.

If farms go under, it hurts fertilizer dealers, farm laborers, entomologists, consultants, the companies that make boxes for the fruit and the truckers who deliver them, he said.

It’s an argument that’s likely to be heard again and again in coming months and years, said the farm bureau’s Owen: “We see water prices as the next major battle.”

Farmers can look for other crops, he said, but “they’ll have to find one that doesn’t take water.”