A child studies an array of bonsai trees while an elderly man tends to the display beside him. Around them, visitors weave through food stands as enthusiastic volunteers serve plates of tempura, while others fold origami envelopes. Nearby, the smell of grilled meat carries between booths as families gather around tables across the grounds of the Placer Buddhist Church’s 59th Annual Food Festival, held Sept. 26th in Penryn, California.

The festival, in many respects, serves as a microcosm of a community that materialized more than a century ago in the foothills surrounding Loomis. By the early 1900s, Japanese immigrants had become an integral part of Northern California’s fruit industry, working and eventually leasing or owning a substantial share of its farmland. Concurrent with the growth of those farms came Japanese-owned businesses and community institutions, including the former Japantown along Penryn Road and the Placer Buddhist Church.

By 1924, Loomis alone had five fruit packing houses, and during the 1930s and ’40s, seven operated there alongside another 15 throughout Placer County. A 1942 federal report on Japanese-operated farms in Placer County described most as relatively small operations of 20 to 50 acres, primarily concentrated around Loomis, Penryn and Newcastle. Yet they formed part of a formidable agricultural apparatus: By the 1940s, the Loomis fruit district was shipping roughly 4,500 train cars of plums each summer, according to the Loomis Basin Historical Society.

“All the farming families migrated here from Japan,” said an elderly church volunteer selling traditional shaved ice, called kakigōri, at the festival. “They started their farms, and the thing that brought them together was the church.”

A century of upheaval

After the outbreak of World War II, the incarceration of Japanese Americans across the country disrupted those agricultural beginnings. The following decades brought different strains: crop disease, the closure of local packing houses, consolidation among produce retailers and an ebb in the number of descendants willing to take over family farms.

The latter reflects a broader trend across American agriculture, which has long grappled with an aging population. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, the average American farmer was 58.1 years old, and those under 35 accounted for just 9 percent of the total number of farmers nationally.

“For a lot of the families, the kids went to college and then found professional jobs like engineers and doctors,” the church volunteer said. “They don’t have to work in the packing houses like we did.”

For Tosh Kuratomi, whose wife’s family owns Otow Orchard in Granite Bay, that generational deficit in workers hits close to home. His wife’s family has farmed the same Placer County property for more than a century, weathering crop disease and a rapidly changing agricultural economy. Her grandparents settled on the property around 1910, Kuratomi said, with the earliest deed bearing the family business name dating to 1911. What began with cash crops like strawberries eventually expanded to grapes and fruit trees, some of which have stood for more than 100 years.

During World War II, Kuratomi’s in-laws were incarcerated at Tule Lake while another family stayed on the property. Because the land was already held in the family’s name, Kuratomi said, they were able to retain it as long as its property taxes were paid.

Growing up, Kuratomi remembers relatives referring to the incarceration simply as “camp.” The word took on a meaning he did not fully understand until he encountered it in a very different context.

“When we were really little and we were going to go to Cub Scout camp, I didn’t really want to go,” Kuratomi said. “I didn’t realize it was a day camp and you did arts and crafts and stuff like that.”

After the war, Kuratomi’s father-in-law returned to a farm that had not weathered the years particularly well. He took a job repairing radios and televisions in Sacramento while rebuilding the orchard, eventually leaving that work once the farm could again support him full time.

Meanwhile, the orchard’s resurgence coincided with a gradual transformation of the industry around it. Pear blight prompted the family to move away from pears, while the farm cycled through plums, peaches, pluots and other fruit.

Kuratomi remembers hauling fruit to Loomis packing sheds and, in the 1970s, driving peaches into Sacramento for a wholesaler who distributed them to local grocery stores. At the time, customers could recognize not only the type of fruit they were buying, but the farm that produced it.

The packing houses once provided small growers with an economic infrastructure that extended well beyond their individual orchards. Farmers could harvest their fruit, deliver it to a local shed and rely on that network to move it into larger markets. Over time, however, Kuratomi watched that system lose ground to larger agricultural regions capable of producing at greater scale.

The retail side was changing, too. Even locally rooted grocers increasingly operated as chains, buying produce in the volume necessary to stock multiple stores rather than sourcing individual boxes from nearby farmers. For small Placer County orchards, the shift gradually diluted a market in which the identity of the grower had once mattered to consumers.

“People would wait for our peaches,” Kuratomi said. “They’d say, ‘When are your peaches coming?’”

That model began to disappear as grocery retailers consolidated and larger agricultural regions competed with Placer County growers on volume and price. When the market became oversaturated, growers sometimes received a biting instruction from the fruit shed: “Don’t harvest, just leave it on the tree,” Kuratomi recalled.

Additionally, Kuratomi acknowledges that selling the property could leave the family with a handsome sum (likely more than the roughly $1 million he once estimated) without the work required to keep an orchard operating. For now, though, the family has resisted that option, and one of Kuratomi’s children has expressed interest in eventually taking over the farm.

Rooted in tradition

Back at the Placer Buddhist Church, that same tension between change and continuity animates the festival.

Claudia Nakata joined the church around 1991. More than three decades later, she still considers herself relatively new to the community.

“I’ve been here, what, 30 years?” Nakata said. “And I’m still one of the new people.”

For legacy members, she said, membership can transcend four (or sometimes more) generations: great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and their children.

“It is kind of like one big family,” she said.

The agricultural origins of said “family” have not disappeared entirely. Many church members are farmers or former farmers, leaving the congregation with a unique skill set of practical knowledge.

“Everyone knows how to drive a tractor,” Nakata said.

That becomes useful when the church needs to level a parking lot or complete other work around the property. Where another organization may call a contractor, Nakata said, the sangha can often draw upon skills its members acquired through generations of agricultural work.

To add on, other traditions such as the church’s support for the Sierra Bonsai Club for decades, which provides space for meetings and demonstrations like the one displayed at the food festival, has stood the test of time. Club member Ray Williamson said this relationship traces back to church members who brought the practice with them from Japan.

“Bonsai was a tradition, so they continued it here,” Williamson said. “That’s why I think they support our club, because we’re part of their traditions.”

At Otow Orchard, Kuratomi describes a parallel communal relationship. Small farmers who still have a few productive acres sometimes bring him excess fruit, which he buys for the stand. Produce that cannot be sold can instead make its way to food banks and feeding programs.

Sacramento’s status as America’s self-designated “Farm-to-Fork Capital” has made the relationship between agriculture and food part of the region’s identity. Today, its dining scene includes a dozen Michelin-recognized restaurants, including two with Michelin stars. Seasonal tasting menus and the annual Tower Bridge Dinner may be the sexy face of the respective “Farm-to-Fork” and “Slow Food” movements, but the orchards, growers and agricultural communities that ultimately have made the movement possible often sit behind the branding used to promote them.

“To me, that’s really secondary,” Kuratomi said. “It’s that people just need to be connected to each other.”

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