Ventura County agriculture generated $2.4 billion in gross production value in 2025, a 4% increase over 2024, according to the 2025 Crop and Livestock Report presented to the Board of Supervisors on June 23 by the Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. The report, titled Making Cents of Agricultural Production, breaks farm expenses into six categories — labor, land, inputs, plant care, services and regulatory compliance — and reports that rising costs are outpacing revenues across nearly every commodity. Labor was the largest expense for all major crops.
Strawberries remained the county’s top crop at nearly $808 million, up 14% from 2024. Agricultural Commissioner Korinne Bell said the higher production value did not translate into stronger profits and that growers effectively saw no net gain after costs. Lemons rose 54% in value to nearly $182 million on a strong harvest, but the report found growers lost about 12 cents on every dollar after expenses. Avocados held second place at $241 million in an off-production year, returning roughly 5 cents per dollar. Nursery stock rose 21% to $225 million and raspberries 36% to $220 million. Vegetable crops declined, which Bell attributed to pest pressure, higher shipping costs and rising inputs.
Irrigated farmland fell only slightly, from 98,732 acres in 2024 to 98,470 in 2025, but Bell said idle ground is the more telling number. “I’ve never seen so much fallow land out there,” she said. “There are empty fields everywhere.” She said the cause is economic rather than neglect, and that several agricultural companies have recently closed.
Bell also reported that Huanglongbing, the fatal citrus disease spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, has been found in additional residential citrus trees in Santa Paula, with cases moving slowly east. The county’s quarantine zone has not expanded and commercial groves have not been affected. Some growers are replacing lemon orchards with avocados. Supervisor Matt LeVere said the headline figure obscures conditions on the ground: “People see that $2.4 billion number, and that ignores the financial reality our farmers are facing.”
The gap between what food sells for and what it costs to grow is the subject of our explainer on how money broke food. Producers and markets in the county are listed on the Ventura County page.
Why this matters for SoCal: Ventura is the closest large-scale growing county to Los Angeles, and its own agricultural commissioner is now on the record saying the fields going empty are going empty because the math stopped working.
Update, Sept. 22, 2026: Ventura growers head into winter under a statewide El Niño emergency declared Sept. 21, with state forecasters putting the odds of a very strong event above 90%.
The next county to report told a different version of the same story: Kern County’s 2025 crop value rose 12% to $8.93 billion on about 4% fewer harvested acres. The labor line in both counties moves again in January, when the $19.75 farmworker wage floor signed on Sept. 30 takes effect.
Update, Oct. 20, 2026: The Farm Bureau of Ventura County has since published its own cost-of-production study, which puts hard dollar figures on the margins described above: strawberries cost $815.1 million to grow against $807 million in revenue, and lemons $203.5 million against $181.7 million.
Source: County’s farm production hits $2.4 billion as growers face rising costs — Thousand Oaks Acorn, July 10, 2026