Welcome to the companion blog to "Farming on the Edge," a series about Ventura County agriculture that will be published each month through the rest of the year. We'll be posting a lot of related material on our Web site, and I'll be updating this blog regularly to share with you behind-the-scenes details and other stray bits of information I collect while I'm working on the project.

First, a disclosure. I have something of a bias when it comes to farming. Or perhaps not a bias, exactly, but a definite point of view.

In a sense, "Farming on the Edge" began more than 40 years ago, when my folks moved from San Francisco to a piece of rural property in the Sonoma County wine country. I was about 5 at the time, and so I grew up amid 23 acres of orchards and vineyards. As a kid, and later as a teen-ager and young adult, I spent summers and weekends doing the kind of manual labor that it has apparently become very difficult to hire non-immigrants to do.

I picked fruit, chopped weeds, pruned trees and vines, stacked boxes, loaded trucks, dug ditches and moved irrigation pipe. On hot August days I crawled around in the dirt picking prunes; on foggy autumn mornings I risked my fingers using a sharp hook-bladed knife to cut bunches of grapes from vines buzzing with bees. I picked apples and drove tractors. I sucked dust, developed blisters and then calluses, fell off ladders and got sunburned.

And while I cannot say I loved every minute of it, I certainly enjoyed living on that ranch. It taught me about nature, and about hard work, and about the limitations placed by weather and other unpredictable forces on each year's crops. It granted me experiences that my friends from town did not share.

I also watched as what was originally a small town to the east of us grew steadily larger year by year, its expanding suburbs gradually swallowing acre after acre of land that I had known when it was covered with neat rows of grapevines, shaded by the stately canopies of fruit trees, or just green and flat and dotted by oak trees and cows. Even as a child, that bothered me, and as the city's edge drew ever nearer our land, I felt a strange sense of impending doom.

So, as an adult four decades later, I continue to empathize with people who work on the land, and who battle weather and other powerful forces to grow crops. I do not like seeing tremendously fertile ground covered with pavement. I do not feel at home in concrete landscapes. I know something about what it takes to put food on the table, and I am always amazed at how little we pay for it.

And I carry that perspective into this project. I know too well that farming is not romantic; it's hard, dirty work. I know also that it's a business, often an uncertain one. But I know also that it has its own rewards, and that magic can sometimes be found in the fields. And I would prefer that this county, the adopted home that reminds me so much of the landscape of my childhood, continues to be a place where farming thrives and is valued.

In these stories, I am not going to gloss over the problems associated with modern agriculture, which employs some of the most poorly paid labor in California, uses a gargantuan share of the state's water supply -- sometimes very unwisely -- and puts a lot of unpleasant chemicals into the environment. But I want to understand more about why farmers make the choices they do, and about the challenges they face that most of us know nothing about. When I'm done with this project, perhaps we'll all have a more realistic perception of the industry that has shaped this county and continues to dominate its landscape.

We're calling this series "Farming on the Edge." That sounds a bit gloomy at first, but I think it's appropriate because of all that the phrase encompasses -- farming on the edge of suburbia, farming pushed to the economic edge by rising costs, foreign competition and other factors, and farming on the cutting edge of technology, cultural practices and marketing strategies. These are all characteristics of Ventura County agriculture in the 21st century.