From the Fields: Rod Chamberlain, Riverside County mango and vegetable farmer

August 5, 2026

Photo/Melissa Jewell

By Rod Chamberlain
Riverside County mango and vegetable farmer

We’re wrapping up harvest of our third mango variety. It’s been a very early season for us. Once mango harvest is finished, we’ll begin cleanup and field preparation before starting to seed our vegetable crops in early September.

The early season has worked in our favor. Our mango orchards follow our vegetable season, allowing us to keep our employees working year-round. Because the two crops don’t overlap very much, we can transition directly from vegetables into mangoes without needing to hire a large seasonal workforce. We’re a small operation, so we keep only a handful of permanent, year-round employees. Many of our employees have been with us for decades—some for more than 40 years. When we need additional seasonal help, our employees typically bring in family members and friends to fill those positions.

We’ll have some whitefly issues in the early fall plantings, but compared to most other areas, we’re on the fortunate side. The mangoes also seem to be very pest-free. They have a latex sap, so I think they’re not as susceptible to a lot of the sucking pests that affect other crops. We use only organic pesticides, even though we’re not a registered organic operation. We like to stay within that framework. As for the mangoes, we’ve never sprayed them with anything. In the 35 years we’ve been growing mangoes, we’ve never applied any pesticide sprays.

We market almost all our products through farmers markets in the Los Angeles area. Santa Monica and Hollywood are our two largest markets, and then we have a couple of smaller markets. We also ship some product to the Bay Area. Everything goes through the farmers markets. We also do some wholesale sales through those markets. We’re fully integrated. We do everything from growing our own seedlings all the way to harvest and sales. That allows us to keep the margins that would normally go to someone else, and that helps our bottom line significantly.

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Reprint with credit to California Farm Bureau. For image use, email agalert@cfbf.com