Local Grow­ers

Booth Ranches, LLC is a fam­ily owned, fully inte­grated grower, packer and ship­per of pre­mium fresh cit­rus. They have been grow­ing cit­rus for more than 50 years in the San Joaquin val­ley, and pack­ing at two pack­ing­houses near the head­quar­ters in Orange Cove, California.

The late Otis Booth was a busi­ness exec­u­tive when he inher­ited a 40-​acre cit­rus grove in 1950. Accord­ing to Loren Booth, Otis Booth’s daugh­ter and cur­rent owner of the cit­rus com­pany, that orig­i­nal grove is known sim­ply as Ranch 40. Today, Ranch 40 is a small slice of the 8,500 acres of Booth Ranch navels, valen­cias and spe­cialty cit­rus in the San Joaquin Val­ley from Fresno County south into Kern County.

As his invest­ments sky­rock­eted Otis Booth’s wealth into the Forbes 400, oranges became a pas­sion. “Land and a grow­ing busi­ness and farm­ing on the land is some­thing rather more tan­gi­ble than a secu­ri­ties port­fo­lio,” Booth told Forbes mag­a­zine in 2005.

As some grow­ers switched to other com­modi­ties, Booth remained com­mit­ted to cit­rus, though he did add a cat­tle ranch in 1971. Adding acreage and mar­ket­ing fruit grown only by the com­pany helped make it a truly inde­pen­dent grower-​shipper.

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