Oil in the family

A Desert Center couple hopes to strike it rich as organic jojoba farmers

01:34 AM PDT on Thursday, June 17, 2004

By BARBARA E. HERNANDEZ / The Press-Enterprise

DESERT CENTER - The LaRonna Jojoba Company has a work force of two. Laurence and Donna Charpied do everything on their 10-acre experimental organic jojoba farm located in this isolated desert community about 75 miles east of Palm Springs. They shake the four-foot-high bushes, gather the coffee bean-sized seeds, hull them and press them into yellow jojoba oil, which can be used for moisturizing skin or as an additive to shampoo.

The LaRonna Jojoba Company sells its jojoba oil in three different sizes. The company's owners say their product, when applied consistently, will make calluses slough off and turn dry areas soft and supple.

"What we found out is about one plant in 10,000 is a great one," Laurence Charpied said. "It's like with people, some are Olympic athletes and the rest of us aren't." The Charpieds found that they could make cuttings of these superplants and create jojoba that produced more seeds and more often. "The average yield was about 50 percent oil content and we're at 62 percent," he said. The Charpieds are some of the handful of jojoba farmers in Riverside County and are among the few farmers who say they can make a profit. Jojoba oil is a substitute for sperm whale oil used mostly in cosmetics and shampoo. It's also used as an industrial lubricant and recent studies have suggested it could be a potential fuel source. The couple sells jojoba oil at farmers markets in Santa Barbara County, where organic jojoba oil has a more lucrative market than in the desert town of 125. Laurence Charpied previously worked with the developmentally disabled and Donna Charpied was a psychiatric nurse before starting the business. LaRonna Jojoba Company sells its oil from $250 to $640 a gallon, Laurence Charpied said. He said the business sold about $26,000 worth of oil last year with their profits in the "tens of thousands." But the real money is coming later, when their superplants have filled in all of their 10 acres, Donna Charpied, 48, said. "That's the only reason we're where we are, we're the future of the jojoba industry," Laurence Charpied said. "We'll be the nursery that supplies the world with jojoba. We just need to make millions of plants." Jojoba is a shrub native to the Southwest and Mexico, although it's now grown as far away as Israel and Africa.
The seeds, which taste like hazelnuts, can be eaten, but are valued most for their oil. In 1982, New Internationalist magazine wrote that jojoba - a plant that grows in poor soil in dry conditions - produced oil that sold for more than crude oil. The jojoba boom began in the 1970s when people from all walks of life began growing the plant. Some of the farmers were urban hucksters interested mainly in the generous federal aid given to farmers, Laurence Charpied, 51, said. "The farmers with seeded fields couldn't compete with the higher-producing varieties," said Michael Rethwisch, UC Cooperative Extension farm adviser who oversees the Palo Verde Valley. "And with the higher-producing varieties, the price of jojoba dropped." Rethwisch said that new farmers seeded fields that had an equal number of male and female plants, when only female plants produced seeds. "And when the tax breaks weren't there, investors dropped out," Rethwisch said. Only farms able to produce large amounts of jojoba seeds would make money in the lower-priced jojoba market, he said. LaRonna Jojoba Company sits in the middle of hundreds of acres of dead jojoba plants that were abandoned when many jojoba dreams didn't prove hardy. Jose Victoria, farm manager for Jojoba Farms of California in Desert Center, runs the 320-acre jojoba and catfish farm for an absentee landlord from Germany. Water from catfish ponds, full of fish manure, doubles as both irrigation and fertilizer for the jojoba plants. "We utilize water best when we can use it twice," said Victoria, 45. Jerold Segall, 76, left the jojoba farming four months ago, preferring a role as a jojoba oil distributor rather than the hard physical labor of farming. "One time my grandson came to help and he told me, 'You're insane,' " Segall said. "He never came back." Segall started farming in Thousand Palms in 1978, in the peak of the jojoba boom. He wasn't a farmer, like most of the new jojoba farmers, he said. He owned an auto repair shop in Palm Desert. "I went to a lot of classes on jojoba farming at UC Riverside," he said. He said they didn't help much, since the classes gave poor advice. "I never made a profit, ever," he said. "The market kept going down. It went from $20 a pound when I started to about $3 a pound." Now Segall buys oil from a grower, bottles the oil and sells it. He said he makes about $85 for a gallon of jojoba oil. "I'd say there's a lot worse things you can do and it's a very honorable way to make a living," he said of farming. "But nobody who went into jojoba farming were farmers. They all were lawyers, doctors, dentists and didn't know what they were getting into."
Reach Barbara E. Hernandez at (760) 837-4416 or bhernandez@pe.com