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03/10/06
Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --
The Chino Valley's wide flat landscape is ideal for farming, but now some people are eying it differently.
Nathan De Boom>> So we're going to see this huge transition from really cows to cars, pastures to pavement, and it's going to be -- I think we're kind of on the cusp of a really changing landscape here in southern California.
Val Zavala>> And then, they're the Energizer Bunnies of the space program. These two Mars Rovers just keep rolling along. What are they teaching us about the Red Planet?
These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.
Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> Today we take you to the Inland Empire where a twenty-first century land grab is happening. Dairy farmers are discovering that their milk cows can be cash cows. Is that good news? Not for everyone. Sam Louie takes us to the Chino Valley where dramatic changes are happening.
Sam Louie>> For the past fifteen years, Tom Alger has been running one of the Inland Empire's well-known dairies. His thousand cows are milked twice a day with the milk sold to milk producer, Altadena Dairy. The job of a dairyman is exhausting. Tom and his crew work every day from sunup to sundown.
Tom Alger>> We get up about 5:30. We start feeding cows at 5:30. We're done about 9 or 9:30 with the feeding chores. The milkers come in at 9:00. They milk until about 4:00 and then we start again at 3:30 and start feeding and doing the same process again in the afternoon.
Sam Louie>> The tradition started with his father.
Tom Alger>> My dad was a dairyman until I was about twelve and then he decided, for health reasons, to stop the dairy. It was always a dream of mine and, when I was about thirty-five, we started it and it's been great ever since.
Sam Louie>> Tom would also love to pass the dairy on to his sons, a third generation of Algers, but the only way he can do that is to say goodbye to southern California. Tom leases this one hundred acres of land and the property is now in escrow, soon to be sold to a developer.
Tom Alger>> Everybody is either selling or in the process of selling or has moved already, and it's time to leave.
Sam Louie>> The landowner has given Tom two years' notice. He's already bracing for the difficult transition, knowing he'll have to leave California which has gotten too expensive for dairy farming.
Tom Alger>> This is where I grew up. This is where my family is growing up, where my friends are. I'm fifty years old. It's kind of scary to start new in a whole different area of the country.
Sam Louie>> While dairy farmers like Tom move out of the area, dozens of developers are moving in. The Inland Empire cities of Chino, Ontario, Corona and beyond are seeing dramatic growth as single family homes sprout up and squeeze in right next to existing dairies.
As recently as five years ago, the dairy industry here in the Inland Empire was a billion dollar business. Nowadays that revenue has been cut in half and some experts predict that it could disappear altogether if development continues at its pace.
Nathan De Boom>> We've seen basically a gold rush when it's come to dairy development or land development here in the Chino basin. I think, if you're to go east of Los Angeles, this Chino Valley area is one of the last large tracts of really undeveloped flatland in southern California.
Sam Louie>> Nathan De Boom is head of the Milk Producers Council which represents the region's dairy farmers.
Nathan De Boom>> We're seeing a huge land rush and a lot of our dairy farmers are selling out. A lot of them are in escrow agreements. In fact, I think if we look at all the dairies here in Ontario and Chino, about seventy-five percent to eighty percent of them are in escrow right now and being scheduled to be developed.
Sam Louie>> De Boom says that, at its peak back in the early 1980s, Chino Valley's concentration of dairies made it the largest milk-producing region in the country with about four hundred fifty dairies. Today, there are less than two hundred.
Nathan De Boom>> What we're going to see in the next five to ten years is, in the same area where we have over a hundred thousand cows, we're going to have over a hundred thousand people. So we're going to see this huge transition from really cows to cars, pastures to pavement.
Sam Louie>> But the change can no longer be avoided. Syp Vander Dussen is a real estate broker. He works with the dairymen when they're ready to sell to the eager developers.
Syp Vander Dussen>> There's probably about half a dozen that are very aggressive and very interested in this area.
Sam Louie>> Vander Dussen says that he's a former dairyman himself. He's watched the Inland Empire transform itself from a rural landscape into what he considers an urban oasis.
Syp Vander Dussen>> It's just a wonderful area to live. Freeways all around, access to everything that a person could want. We're two hours from San Diego, an hour from Los Angeles. We're an hour from snow. We're an hour from the beach. The Inland Empire is exactly that. It's becoming an empire.
Sam Louie>> And milk producers are discovering that dairy cows can become cash cows. Over the past ten years, the price of an acre of good land has gone up tenfold.
Syp Vander Dussen>> That land sold for fifty to sixty thousand dollars an acre. Today, on a typical two to three year transaction, we're looking at a half million dollars per acre.
Bill Van Leeuwen>> My barn used to be right there, our parlor, then we had cows in a circle around it.
Sam Louie>> Bill Van Leeuwen cashed out two years ago.
Bill Van Leeuwen>> I guess it's just a matter of time when everybody lets go of something, but it was very difficult.
Sam Louie>> The former dairy farmer near Corona sold forty acres to a developer for more than ten million dollars.
Bill Van Leeuwen>> The prices of land around here are just absolutely unbelievable. We certainly didn't get the top of the value, but we certainly did it at the time when it worked for us to make that move.
Sam Louie>> So the sixteen hundred acres that once grazed the open land in front of Bill's house have been replaced with this.
Bill Van Leeuwen>> They're building a hundred nineteen homes and they're all single family dwellings. Across the street there, they're building a high school that will house four thousand students. Next to that is a junior high school and beyond that is a new grade school, so that will serve all of these homes here. I think everybody likes to own a piece of America, so I think it's a very positive thing.
Sam Louie>> But not everyone is profiting. For some businesses, the disappearance of dairies spells doom.
Bernie Gabrieles>> Well, for a tank like this, it's a four thousand gallon tank, so this one's probably worth ten thousand dollars right here.
Sam Louie>> Bernie Gabrieles has been in the dairy equipment and service business for almost fifty years. This past December, he laid off almost all of his thirty employees. He's now busy selling his inventory.
Bernie Gabrieles>> The handwriting is on the wall, so it's something that we've had to make the adjustment. Like I say, I would like to keep doing it, but we just weren't able to keep going any more.
[Film Clip]
Bernie Gabrieles>> I like the way the water falls. It makes a lot of good noise.
Sam Louie>> But Bernie is making a transition, selling locally produced top-quality fountains.
Bernie Gabrieles>> I'd like to keep, you know, selling fountains. That's something we started in August or July of last year and something I very much enjoy, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make a living doing that. So that's something that remains to be seen.
Sam Louie>> And what remains to be seen for Tom Alger is what life will be like in Texas. That's where he has decided to move his family so the family tradition can live on.
Tom Alger>> If my sons weren't interested in the dairy business, I probably wouldn't do it. But they really like the dairy. They love working with me on the dairy. I love working with them, so we're willing to take our roots and move to another part of the country.
Sam Louie>> And as suburban development spreads across the Inland Empire, it's clear that dairies are a dying breed and the area's claim to fame as the nation's largest concentration of dairy farms will soon be another chapter in Chino Valley history. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times.
Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".
Val Zavala>> How often is it that a gadget that's supposed to last for three months lasts for two years? Well, thanks to the engineering geniuses at JPL, two Rovers on the surface of Mars are still going strong two years after they've landed. Jeffrey Kaye has the story about what they found and what it means.
Jeffrey Kaye>> For two years, a pair of NASA robots have been exploring the inhospitable surface of Mars, surviving sub-zero temperatures, punishing terrain and the vehicles' own expected demise. The Rovers, really mini science labs, arrived on the Red Planet in January of 2004. When they rolled onto the Martian surface, scientists and engineers had scheduled them for only a three-month mission. But the Rovers, one named Spirit and the other Opportunity, have left their predicted life spans in the dust and kept on rolling.
Jim Erickson>> The vehicles have really surprised everybody.
Jeffrey Kaye>> Jim Erickson is Project Manager for the nine hundred million dollar Mars Rover Expedition.
Jim Erickson>> They've been doing a great job. They've proven to be far more capable and more long-lasting than any of us ever dreamed of. I mean, I was one of the more optimistic ones that thought that, gee, we might get six months out of these things.
Jeffrey Kaye>> NASA engineers expected the Rovers, which rely on solar panels to generate onboard electricity, would eventually sputter to a stop and die as they received less sunlight during the short cold days of Martian winters. But back on earth, the Rovers' operators learned how to adapt and keep the power flowing, as Erickson explained to NewsHour producer, Saul Gonzalez.
Jim Erickson>> Once we lasted long enough to actually understand how these vehicles worked, we would find new ways of keeping them in the position of having more power. We would park the Rovers every day sort of on the most northerly tilt that we could find to face the solar panels closer to an upright position where they'd get the maximum efficiency from the sun that they could.
Jeffrey Kaye>> Spirit, the first of the two vehicles to arrive on the Red Planet, has journeyed more than three miles from its landing site in the Gusev Crater. Opportunity, which landed in a vast flatlands area called Meridiani planum, has racked up over four miles on its trip. Together, the Rovers' cameras have sent back nearly a hundred forty thousand pictures. Working on opposite sides of Mars, the twin robots' instruments have probed and analyzed rocks and soil all with one primary mission: to look for signs that water, an essential building block of life, once existed on the planet's surface.
Matt Golombek>> We found compelling evidence that Mars was warm and wet at a time when life started here on earth.
Jeffrey Kaye>> Matt Golombek heads the Rover Project's science operation team. He says his claim of a once warm and wet Mars is based on the geology the Rovers have encountered, particularly Opportunity.
Matt Golombek>> The evidence from Opportunity is unambiguous, I would argue (laughter). It shows rocks that are evaporites. Effectively, they form when sea water evaporates away typically in hot and dry climates and leaves behind the minerals that are in solution in the water, and the rocks that we found at Meridiani are tell-tale signs that liquid water pooled and sat at the surface for significant periods of time at about three and a half billion years ago.
Jeffrey Kaye>> Scientists are uncertain about how much water Mars had in its past and where it was.
Matt Golombek>> One possibility is that you had groundwater table that fluctuated locally and that created the environment in which the materials were deposited. There was no ocean elsewhere and it may have been intermittently wet and dry. Another interpretation that's possible is that you actually filled up the northern plains and you had an ocean that was kilometers deep (laughter) on Mars at that time.
Jeffrey Kaye>> Many scientists believe Mars still holds much water in the form of ice below the surface. Beyond the hunt for clues to water, the Rovers are also sending back valuable information about present-day Martian weather patterns and the planet's more recent geological history. As Opportunity and Spirit continue their journeys, Mission personnel are increasingly adventurous about where they send the Rovers.
Jim Erickson>> We've expanded the envelope of what we would consider to have the Rovers actually even do. Instead of the nice flat gentle perch with some rocks on a terrain, we now fully expect these things to do up-slopes, into sand dunes, you name it.
Jeffrey Kaye>> But the robotic explorers are starting to show their age and ailments, from a bad wheel on Opportunity to a worn-out rock-cutting tool aboard Spirit.
Jim Erickson>> So it's sort of like we're into middle age, we're looking forward to old age and we're trying to make it a nice graceful old age. But at the same time, we really want to wear these things out. Our whole goal is to get as much bang for the buck as we can.
Jeffrey Kaye>> Erickson acknowledges the Rovers could go dead at any moment, but he believes they still have many more Martian miles to travel.
Jim Erickson>> In the end of their days years from now, they'll be creaking down to try and get that one last glimpse into a new crater, and that's the right way for them to go.
Saul Gonzalez>> Years from now?
Jim Erickson>> Well, we'll see what happens. We've gone two years. You always say that the best prediction of the future is the past, so I wouldn't be surprised to see these things a year or two from now still moving around.
Jeffrey Kaye>> In the days ahead, Spirit's on its way to investigate a geological feature dubbed "Home Plate". Opportunity, meanwhile, is steering a course to the edge of a large crater named "Victoria". I'm Jeffrey Kaye for Life and Times.
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Val Zavala>> It's a part of our Spanish past, but it's nearly hidden, surrounded by industry and factories. It's a one hundred eighty year old adobe and you'll see in a moment why volunteers have spent years restoring it. Vicki Curry takes us inside the Dominguez Rancho Adobe in Carson.
Tom Huston>> This is the birthplace of the South Bay.
Vicki Curry>> And the former home of one of Southern California's oldest families. Tom Huston is a descendant of Juan Jose Dominguez, the original owner of this land, now known as the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum. The family recently restored the adobe and the surrounding grounds.
Tom Huston>> Two of the families still have land. There's probably around twenty-three to twenty-four hundred acres still remaining of the original land grant. That's remarkable that they still believe in their forefathers' thought and that is to keep the land.
Vicki Curry>> It all began when Juan Jose Dominguez came to California in 1769. He escorted Father Juniperro Serra on the Portola Expedition to set up Spanish missions throughout the state.
Tom Huston>> Juan Jose Dominguez was a soldier in a king's army and his job was to protect the exploration. Upon his retirement, the King of Spain granted him the first Spanish land grant in California which was called Rancho San Pedro. That incorporated seventy-five or seventy-six thousand acres.
Vicki Curry>> The 1784 land grant encompassed most of the South Bay including parts of eleven present-day cities, but Juan Jose never spent much time at the isolated rancho and built only a small adobe there. When he died, the land passed to his nephew, Cristobal, and then to Cristobal's son, Manuel Dominguez.
Tom Huston>> And Manuel came up here and took a look at the land and said this is fantastic, I love it, and that was the beginning of really the Dominguez influence in the area. That's when Manuel and his brothers and his sisters and mother all moved up this way and they started the building of the adobe.
Vicki Curry>> The family finished this adobe in 1826 and, one hundred eighty years later, it's still standing. Donna Harris is the museum manager.
Donna Harris>> This site and this family have been instrumental in every era of development of Southern California in rancho life, in agriculture, in the oil era, real estate and transportation. Here in the map room, we have many of the artifacts from Manuel's political and business career.
Unlike many of the other rancheros, he was bilingual, he was well educated, and this resulted in him serving in political office under both the Mexican and the American governments. He was the Mayor of Los Angeles, elected three times over. He was on the County Board of Supervisors. He was a judge. He was one of only seven delegates from southern California to serve on the initial California Constitutional Convention where they wrote the first Constitution for the state.
Vicki Curry>> Despite his prominence, Manuel Dominguez had to withstand regular challenges to his ownership of the rancho.
Tom Huston>> Because Juan Jose had not taken too heavy of a vested interest in the property, over the years there were people that came in and laid claim to it. So Manuel was busy through most of his life defending the land. There was a case where the Sepulvedas were ranching for the Dominguez family. They raised some cattle and some crops up on what is now Palos Verdes. They had laid claim for it and Manuel would go up and defend his rights in court.
Vicki Curry>> Manuel successfully defended his rights on seven occasions. However, during the eighth challenge, Jose Delores Sepulveda was killed in an Indian uprising leaving his wife and children alone in Palos Verdes.
Tom Huston>> At that time, Manuel had said forget it. Give them the property. Their home had been established up there and he felt sad. That chunk, which was about thirty thousand acres, went to the Sepulvedas.
Vicki Curry>> When California became a state, Manuel had to prove his ownership again. Then finally in 1858, President James Buchanan officially recognized the Dominguez land grant.
Donna Harris>> You notice that he is holding a document there which is the notification from the United States government that the rancho is the first to receive a clear patent of ownership in recognition under the United States government.
Vicki Curry>> When Manuel Dominguez died in 1882, he was survived by six daughters. Three of them married men who would play important roles in the South Bay.
Donna Harris>> And Susana married Dr. Gregorio Del Amo, as in the Del Amo Mall, Del Amo Boulevard. Victoria married Carson, as in the city of Carson. Delores Dominguez married a man named James Alexander Watson.
Tom Huston>> And Jack Watson is my side of the family. Manuel devised a plan to get one of his six daughters married to a lawyer who could defend their land grant and the lawyer was Jack Watson.
Vicki Curry>> The six Dominguez daughters and their husbands split the property between them and maintained the rancho and adobe.
Tom Huston>> With the eve of the 1900's came the dirty words, property taxes, and with the droughts and the floods, it wasn't a consistent income coming in, so the family was forced to sell some of their land.
Vicki Curry>> Two of the sales resulted in the cities of Redondo Beach and Torrance.
Tom Huston>> Manuel had also given the right-of-way to the railroads to service the land south of here. Without the granting of that easement, I don't know if we'd have those ports today.
Vicki Curry>> The families formed corporations for the land they continued to own, two of which still exist today. The Carson Companies and the Watson Land Company operate several industrial parks throughout the area. But because there were no male heirs to carry on the Dominguez name, the daughters decided to give their home and the surrounding seventeen acres to an order of Catholic priests.
Tom Huston>> The Claretian Fathers then were going to set up a seminary and they were going to call it the Dominguez Seminary.
Vicki Curry>> Dwindling enrollment caused the seminary to close in 1974. That's when Father Pat McPolin decided to turn the adobe into a museum to preserve the history of the Dominguez family.
Tom Huston>> Manuel understood what he had and wanted to make sure that he protected it and passed it on to generations and generations.
Vicki Curry>> And the museum staff is making sure the legacy of the Dominguez family lives on. I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times.
Val Zavala>> For more information on the Dominguez Rancho Adobe and Museum, you can go to their website (dominguezrancho.com) or give them a call. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.
Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.
And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.
Val Zavala>> Next time on Life and Times --
More casinos mean more gamblers and, for one group, it means more problems.
>> I would easily go crazy. I'm so mad with my wife, with my kids. I would be yelling and sometimes throwing things. In the meantime, I cannot stop thinking always about gambling fantasy.
Val Zavala>> That's next time on Life and Times.
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