When Edwin Camp learned he had been selected as Western Growers’ 2026 Award of Honor recipient, the news came from a familiar voice.
Rob Yraceburu, a longtime friend and Western Growers Board Chair, called to deliver the good word. Camp explained that in typical Yraceburu fashion, he joked that it had taken about 12 votes to finally get him selected.
“I’m surprised it didn’t take more,” Camp shot back.
Although he had no particular desire to make a fuss about himself, Camp understood the significance of the honor. “I was honored but flabbergasted,” he said.
It is a fitting reaction for a man who has spent much of his career doing the work rather than seeking recognition for it.
For more than five decades, Camp has been part of California agriculture as a farmer, CEO, businessman, water leader and industry advocate. He served 30 years on the Western Growers Board, including as Chair, and spent decades working on some of the most complicated water issues facing farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
But when asked about the accomplishment that means the most to him, Camp doesn’t start with a board position, a business milestone or a policy victory. He talks about people.
“The most meaningful would be just the honor of working with all of the people I’ve been able to work with,” he said.
That answer says a lot about Camp and the way he views agriculture. The issues may be water, labor, regulation, food safety or costs, but the work is ultimately about people and what happens to them when those issues are left unresolved.
Choosing the Farm
Camp’s path into agriculture wasn’t necessarily where he thought he was headed. He grew up in a farming family in the Shafter area and had worked in the family business from a young age.
But as a young adult, he wanted to do something different. He enrolled at the University of Southern California as a pre-med student, thinking he might become a doctor. Then came a summer when he changed his mind and decided to get back into farming, so he enrolled at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he studied crop science.
The decision to return to the family business was made easier by something his father told him and his brothers while they were in college.
Their father was, in his own words, a demanding taskmaster. But he also gave Camp and his brothers something Camp considers particularly important: a choice. If they wanted to return to farming, that was fine. If they wanted to do something else, that was fine, too.
“I had a lot of friends who were forced, or they were expected to come back to the farm,” Camp said. “But when you make your own decision, that’s completely different.”
Camp chose farming. He officially began working full-time at D.M. Camp & Sons in 1979 after college, although his wife, Kaye, would argue that his career began much earlier.
Today, D.M. Camp & Sons is celebrating its 90th year. Almonds are the mainstay of the family’s farming operation, while the business also includes four John Deere dealerships in Kern and Los Angeles counties and a John Deere engine distributorship covering five Western states.
The Water Job
For a Kern County farmer, water is impossible to separate from agriculture, Camp explained.
“I always said I had two jobs,” he said. “I had my farming job, and I had my water job.”
Camp’s farming operation was exposed to several different sources of water—state, federal and Kern River water—giving him an early education in the complicated systems, contracts and politics that determine where water goes and who gets it.
He became involved in water district leadership, including at the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, and eventually served on the Friant Water Authority Board.
He recently retired after 38 years as President of the Arvin- Edison Water Storage District Board and 13 years on the Friant Water Authority Board. He remains involved in water policy as a delegate to the Great Valley Farm Water Partnership.
Camp was initially drawn to the complexity of water.
“It was fascinating to me,” he said. “The water world is endless.”
But fascination alone doesn’t explain why he stayed with it for so long. Camp understood that serving on a water board meant representing farmers and landowners whose businesses and livelihoods could be directly affected by decisions made around a table.
At Arvin-Edison, the mantra was simple: “Connections, connections, connections,” he said.
The district worked to establish connections between water systems, including the California Aqueduct, Cross Valley Canal, Friant-Kern Canal and Kern River.
“Those connections created options. Water could be moved. It could be stored. Partnerships could be developed,” Camp said.
And he believes California still suffers from not having enough of those connections.
“We’re missing connections,” he said. “We never completed the connections we should have had to be able to move things around to their most needed or proper places.”
Some of the most consequential decisions he was involved in grew out of that philosophy.
One example was Arvin-Edison’s agreement with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to store Metropolitan’s water in the district. The arrangement drew criticism at the time, and Camp remembers opponents saying the district was effectively “dealing with the devil.”
But Camp saw it differently. Metropolitan would pay for facilities as well as the storage and pumping of its water. The infrastructure would also provide benefits to Arvin-Edison.
The important part, Camp explained, was making sure the contracts were structured so everyone understood the rules and there was no opportunity for anyone to play games later. The controversial arrangement went on to become a long-term success.
“It was another example of why water leadership requires more than knowing the rules. Sometimes, it requires being willing to take criticism and pursue an idea that isn’t popular,” Camp said.
Three Decades with Western Growers
Camp’s relationship with Western Growers stretches back more than three decades. He joined the organization’s Board of Directors in 1994 and served as Chair in 2003. His family business has been a Western Growers member for more than five decades.
What kept him involved for so long was Western Growers’ ability to take on difficult issues and “actually do something” about them.
“Western Growers was an organization that could take on the hard things and affect them,” he said.
He remembers traveling to Washington, D.C., during Tom Nassif ’s early years as President and watching Western Growers work to raise the profile of specialty crops in federal policy. That work was important to Camp because California’s agricultural landscape doesn’t fit neatly into the traditional federal focus on commodities, such as corn, soybeans and wheat.
“The West has a different mix of crops, climates, soils and challenges. Water, labor, regulation and production costs can look very different for a specialty crop grower,” he said.
Camp appreciated that Western Growers was willing to put people and resources behind those issues, even when doing so was difficult.
“When Western Growers came to town for a meeting, training or other event, it wasn’t simply another meeting on the calendar,” Camp said. “It was for a purpose. That was always Western Growers. It was always meaningful and helpful.”
What Agriculture Gave Him
Despite all the challenges, Camp doesn’t sound like a man who regrets choosing agriculture.
His father taught him early that farming is a business and that a farmer shouldn’t become so attached to a piece of property that he is unwilling to change. Camp also learned that agriculture can be a lifestyle. And for him, it was a good one.
He raised his family on the farm. Kaye, whom he describes as a “city girl,” came to love farm life, too. Now, their grandchildren get that same exposure when they visit.
“There is also something satisfying about producing something tangible,” Camp said. “Most of the world is service oriented. We’re still creating food, making food.”
And of course, there are the people.
As a high school student, Camp helped manage the graders in the family’s potato shed. He joked that the workers knew far more about the job than he did and probably laughed among themselves while he tried to manage them.
Those workers were largely families who had come to California from Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas, many of them Dust Bowl families who arrived with very little.
Later, the family’s workforce became largely Hispanic. Camp saw the same qualities he had admired in those earlier generations: hard work, loyalty and a desire to provide better opportunities for their families.
He watched the children of workers grow up and pursue careers of their own. Some became attorneys. Others entered professional fields. One became Camp’s dentist.
Those relationships have stayed with him and remain a part of what agriculture makes possible—not only food, but opportunity.
Still Showing Up
Camp has spent a lifetime working in an industry that rarely offers easy answers, and yet he remains engaged.
Western Growers President and CEO Dave Puglia described Camp as “the man in the arena,” pointing to his deep understanding of California’s complicated water systems and his ability to build trust among people with competing interests. That trust has been built over decades.
Camp’s own measure of success is a little less grand. It is whether the people working together managed, every once in a while, to move the needle.
He didn’t set out to become a prominent figure in California agriculture. As a young man, in fact, he seemed set on becoming a doctor.
Instead, his path took him somewhere else. And then, over the decades, he kept choosing to stay the course.
Perhaps that is the best way to understand Camp’s legacy. He has spent a lifetime showing up for his family, his business, his community, his fellow farmers and an industry that, in his own words, still “makes something.”
For a farmer, perhaps there is no better legacy than that.
