CENTRAL VALLEY SPRAWL FUELS ALARM : WORLD'S RICHEST FARMLAND PRODUCING MORE AND MORE HOUSING DEVELOPMENTS.

Byline: Carey Goldberg The New York Times

Born and reared in the most fruitful farm county in America, David Mas Masumoto sighed as his van passed the pastel swaths of suburbia that have displaced many of the vivid orchards, vineyards and strawberry fields of his childhood.

As if mocking the vanished bounty, the clusters of ranch houses, lawns and new blacktop in Fresno County bear faux-farm names like Vineyard Glen and Harvest Park. The names brought a sad smile from Masumoto, a peach grower.

``Ironically, it's only a harvest of houses,'' he said. ``Meanwhile, in the last hour, one acre of farmland has been yanked out somewhere in the Central Valley.''

The lament over uncontrolled suburban growth is virtually California's state anthem. The signature method of planning - or failing to plan - development has always been simple sprawl.

But now that breakneck suburbanization has come to the sunny Central Valley, the incomparable cornucopia of 250 crops that fill produce departments of supermarkets from New York City to Anchorage, Alaska, it is prompting renewed alarm. The concern is reaching as far as Congress and as near as farms of individuals like Masumoto.

``If growth patterns don't change, the Central Valley will become another Los Angeles,'' said Ralph Grossi, president of the American Farmland Trust, a national nonprofit group seeking to protect farmland. ``In our view, it's a national treasure, a strategic resource that needs to be protected.''

The Central Valley, the 50-mile-wide basin between the Pacific coastal mountains and the Sierra Nevada, starts north of Sacramento and stretches south below Bakersfield. Agriculture experts say there is no richer farm ground in the United States or the rest of the world than the land in the 300-miles-long valley.

A recent study by the American Farmland Trust, based on the California Department of Finance's projections of current growth rates, found that the valley's population is likely to triple to 12 million by the year 2040 and housing probably will eat up more than 1 million of the 6.7 million acres of irrigated valley farmland.

Rudy Platzek, an urban planner, predicts that by 2080 - only about one lifetime from now - the valley will not even be able to feed itself, let alone help feed the rest of the nation. Platzek's work is the cover story for California Farmer magazine this month under the apocalyptic headline, ``An Urban Central Valley?''

Such projections have mobilized many to start agitating for better protection of the farmland that now produces $13 billion in crops each year. New groups getting involved range from the first Farmland Protection Caucus, formed in Congress this year, to prospective members of the proposed Fresno County Growth Alternatives Task Force.

Last fall, the California Legislature passed a statewide crop land protection program to help compensate farmers who prohibit development on their land, and the new national Farm Bill provides the first-ever federal matching funds for states with such programs. Congress passed the bill in March and President Clinton signed it.

The Central Valley is not the only place losing farmland. In South Florida, suburbia is expanding rapidly into rich fields. Nationwide, 1 million acres of productive farmland give way to development each year.

The change is most dramatic in places like Fresno, where signs - promising inexpensive houses, ``from the $90,000s,'' or dangling the prospect of ``$760 a month and you're home'' - draw escapees from prices around San Francisco and Los Angeles that are nearly as high as in Manhattan.