In addition, I had tremendous help and cooperation from Rex Laird, chief executive officer of the Farm Bureau of Ventura County, who answered questions, shared his perspective and helped me get in touch with many of my sources. Earl McPhail, the county agricultural commissioner, opened his office's archives to me, allowing me to gain a detailed appreciation of the changes in cropping patterns over the years. Tim Schiffer and Charles Johnson at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art let us dig around in their institution's priceless photo collection, and provided digital copies of evocative imagery from the county's agricultural past.

Edgar Terry provided countless helpful comments on the business of farming, and let me tromp around in his pepper and celery fields. Phil McGrath welcomed me into his organic farm and protected me from angry geese. Harold Edwards and Alex Teague at Limoneira shared their knowledge and let me roam around in the historical treasure that is their packinghouse.

Thanks also to the folks at Saticoy Lemon Association, Villa Park Orchards Association, Calavo, Seminis, Brokaw Nursery, Lassen Canyon Nursery and Associates Insectary for letting me inside their packinghouses, greenhouses and bughouses. Rick at Aspen Helicopters took me and photographer Karen Quincy Loberg flying, and Will Berg at the Port of Hueneme and Mike Karmelich of NYKLauritzenCool USA got us onto the shipping docks and into a Japan-bound freighter.

And finally, I want to thank those who enabled to gain some understanding of the workforce that makes farming possible. Henry Vega shared the labor contractor's perspective, and Lorenzo Vega told interesting stories about his experiences as a bracero. Barbara Macri-Ortiz shared insights from her years as a United Farm Workers attorney and farmworker advocate. Jaime Ceja, the manager at Villa Cesar Chavez apartments in Oxnard, helped locate a farmworker family there willing to open their home to us, and provided invaluable translation help. Santiago and Guadalupe Flores graciously allowed us to enter their home, ask them personal questions, and follow them to work so we could get an idea of what it's like to raise a family in Ventura County on a field worker's salary.

There were more, too many to list, and I apologize if anyone feels left out. Rest assured, your willingness to indulge a journalist's curiosity is deeply appreciated. You didn't have to take my phone calls, answer my e-mails or lead me around the county's fields and orchards, but you did.

Thanks are due to people inside the Ventura County Star, too. Karen worked with me all year on the series, and produced magnificent photos while dodging charging cattle and confronting other obstacles. Anthony Plascencia produced terrific videos for our Web site, aided by Bruce McLean, who managed to organize a ridiculous amount of multimedia material for the online presentation. Brian Snyder and Steve Greenberg produced great graphics and illustrations, and Amanda Reiter was responsible for the creative page designs that combined all the artwork and my really long stories into an effective presentation. And finally, thanks to projects editor Marty Bonvechio for playing ringmaster to this circus over the past year, editing the stories and coordinating the work of five departments.

Last but not least, I need to thank Larry Yee, county director of the UC Cooperative Extension, who first got me thinking about producing a comprehensive profile of Ventura County agriculture.

The answer is Yes. I've been working with the University of California Hansen Trust and the Ventura County Museum of History and Art to produce a coffee-table book about Ventura County agriculture. The text will be based on the stories in "Farming on the Edge" and the book will be lavishly illustrated with scores of terrific photographs shot over the past year in nearly every corner of the local farming landscape.

To learn more about that book, please visit the Web site I built for the project.

"Friday, March 1 (1861), we came on to San Buenaventura, on the seacoast. Soon after leaving Cayeguas (Ranch) we entered the plain, which there lies along the sea, and crossed it to the sea about twenty miles. It is a fine grassy plain, with here and there a gentle green knoll, with a few dry creeks or alkaline ponds, and one fine stream, the Santa Clara River, running through it. We stopped for an hour on its banks and rested our mules, lunched and refreshed ourselves in a grove of cottonwoods which came nearer to a forest than anything I have yet seen here. We forded the river and came on. At San Buenaventura the hills come up to the sea, the plain ceases, but a fine stream comes down from a pretty valley, green, grassy, and rich.

"Here is the old Mission San Buenaventura, once rich, now poor. A little dirty village of a few inhabitants, mostly Indian, but with some Spanish-Mexican and American. The houses are of adobe, the roofs of red tiles, and all dirty enough. A fine old church stands, the extensive garden now in ruins, but with a few palm trees and many figs and olives -- the old padres' garden."
-- William H. Brewer, 1861
Up and Down California in 1860-1864: The Journal of William H. Brewer

"The garden of Buena Ventura far exceeded any thing of that description I had before met with in these regions, both in respect of the quality, quantity, and variety of its excellent productions, not only indigenous to the country, but appertaining to the temperate as well as torrid zone; not one species having yet been sown, or planted, that had not flourished, and yielded its fruit in abundance, and of excellent quality. These have principally consisted of apples, pears, plums, figs, oranges, grapes, peaches, and pomegranates, together with the plantain, banana, cocoa nut, sugar cane, indigo, and a great variety of the necessary and useful kitchen herbs, plants and roots. All these were flourishing in the greatest health and perfection, though separated from the sea-side only by two or three fields of corn, that were cultivated within a few yards of the surf."
-- George Vancouver, 1793
Vancouver in California, 1792-1794: The Original Account of George Vancouver

"It is not to be denied that this land exceeds all the preceding territory in fertility and abundance of things necessary for sustenance. All the seeds and fruits which these natives use, and which have been previously mentioned, grow here in native profusion."
-- Pedro Fages, 1775
A Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California by Pedro Fages, Soldier of Spain

"In a world without integrated corporate agriculture, without chemical poisons, and without enormous vertically integrated chains of supply and distribution, the produce section of the supermarket would not be open at midnight, and it would not have papayas, guava, bananas, and red grapes in February."
-- Victor Davis Hanson, 2000
The Land Was Everything: Letters From an American Farmer

"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth."
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1787
Notes on the State of Virginia

" 'All these trees do well, and are profitable,' said an orange cultivator to me, 'but they don't compare with the orange; when you have a bearing orange orchard, it is like finding money in the street."
-- Charles Nordhoff, 1873
California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence: A Book for Travellers and Settlers

"Farm labor is California's 'peculiar institution' in much the same sense that chattel slavery was the South's peculiar institution. Today, as yesterday, the farm labor problem is the cancer which lies beneath the beauty, richness, and fertility of the valleys of California."
-- Carey McWilliams, 1949
California: The Great Exception

"I like to think how nice it's gonna be, maybe, in California. Never cold, an' fruit ever'place, an' people just bein' in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees. I wonder -- that is, if we all get jobs an' all work -- maybe we can get one of them little white houses. An' the little fellas go out an' pick oranges right off the tree."
-- John Steinbeck, 1939
The Grapes of Wrath

But before long, the top crop in Ventura County won't be something you eat. It will be something you plant in your yard to look at.

Nursery stock has been slowly creeping up the list of the county's top crops. It ranked second last year, at $213.7 million, and Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail told me earlier this year that he expects it to overtake strawberries -- at $328.6 million, the top-valued crop in 2005 for the seventh consecutive year -- within the next three years or so. Nursery stock ranked fourth among county crops in 2000, with a value of $155.5 million. A decade ago, it ranked fifth and was worth $75.1 million.

Some of what's counted in that tally is young vegetable seedlings sold to farmers for transplant into their fields, so some nursery stock indirectly becomes something you eat. But a significant share of nursery-stock production is ornamental plants for sale to retail nurseries and commercial landscaping contractors. When you peruse the selection of rose bushes for sale at the local garden store, or marvel at the full-size trees that appear to have popped up overnight in a newly constructed subdivision, you are seeing the product of Ventura County's booming nursery industry.

They may not, strictly speaking, produce food. But the growers who run commercial nurseries are farmers just the same, subject to the same whims of weather and consumer preference, engaged in the same battle against pests and disease. Or so I discovered when I paid a visit to one of the county's big commercial nurseries, Otto & Sons Nursery outside of Fillmore.

I met Scott Klittich there on a foggy day in early autumn, and he drove me around in the chill, damp air for a look at the operation. As our electric cart bounced along the dirt roads, I soon found myself surrounded by 120,000 rose trees and bushes, their colorful blooms dripping with dew. Other ornamental plants stood in rows along the edges of the property, about 38 acres off Guiberson Road. The nursery covers 22 acres; the rest is occupied by an ancient orange orchard.

Klittich, the managing owner, said Otto & Sons specializes in roses, which account for 70 percent of the business. They carry as many as 900 varieties -- heaven for rose fanciers, some of whom border on the fanatical. The nursery buys its plants as seedlings from breeders, and then raises them until they're large enough for sale, mainly in 1-gallon, 5-gallon or 15-gallon pots. The plants spend no more than two years at the nursery. If he hasn't sold a rose by then, Klittich figures it's unlikely to ever sell, and the plants eventually become root-bound and start to decline.

But guessing what varieties are going to be hot a year or so in the future is an uncertain business. Like any other growers, nursery owners have to predict where the whims of consumer preferences will take the market, and try to ensure that the crop they plant today is one the public will want to buy when harvest time rolls around.

"Every year, I learn that what I think doesn't matter," Klittich said.

And like food producers, who have learned that consumers prize appearance over practically any other attribute of a fruit or vegetable (with the possible exception of price), nursery owners live in dread of plant maladies or unkind weather that can compromise physical perfection: brown leaf tips, scarring, ragged holes chewed in foliage.

"It's cosmetic, but our business is all cosmetic," Klittich said.

This year I finally had an excuse. I poked around and learned that the place is one of the county's few remaining processing plants for local farm products. Saticoy Foods Corp. has been in that spot since 1967, packing peppers and pimientos in a wide range of containers for an equally wide range of customers. I called Jerry Hensley, the president, and he invited me to tour the plant.

It's a noisy, messy place. And it features one of the scariest pieces of industrial machinery I've ever seen. But it was interesting, too.

The plant handles thousands of tons of peppers each season. It has contracts with about 10 growers, who send 20 to 30 truckloads of bright red bell peppers -- the color they acquire when mature -- to the facility each day during the fall harvest season. At 22 to 24 tons per load, that's a lot of peppers.

Peppers have become an important crop in Ventura County, worth more than $23 million a year and ranking 10th in the Agricultural Commissioner's annual list of top county crops.

"It's one of the best places in the world for growing peppers," Hensley said.

Pimientos look kind of like bell peppers, but are more heart-shaped and have a pointed end rather than a lobed one. You can stand a bell pepper upright on a table, but a pimiento will topple.

When the trucks arrive, the big metal bins they carry are hooked to hydraulic lifts, which dump each load into a hopper. A conveyor system feeds the peppers into the plant, where they're washed and sorted, the seed pods are removed, and the remaining flesh is chopped into various sizes depending on intended use. The process involves high-pressure streams of water, and the interior of the plant is a frothy red mess of scattered seeds and bits of skin. The plant is crowded with employees sorting through sodden pepper parts as they speed past on the conveyors, picking out those that were not properly seeded or are not fit for consumption. About 350 people work at the plant at the height of the season, Hensley said.

Some peppers face a different fate, at least initially. Across a yard from the packing plant, there's a separate system of hoppers and conveyors that carries peppers high into the air and dumps them into the end of what look like giant cannon barrels angled toward the sky. They're hollow metal tubes a couple feet in diameter, with thick walls, and they slowly spin in place.

At the lower end of each tube is a big gas pipe, shooting a huge jet of fire into the rotating barrel and heating the entire thing to such a high temperature that you can barely stand to approach within 50 feet. There’s a bank of several of these glowing, fire-spitting dragons, which have tendrils of smoke curling out of one end and charred peppers dropping like fleshy briquettes from the other. The whole assemblage could play a terrifying role in a horror movie.

The cleaned, sorted, diced pepper and pimiento bits are sent through an acidified bath and then placed in bottles, jars, cans or drums. Saticoy Foods sells everything from 2-ounce jars of pimiento pieces -- you may well have one in your refrigerator -- to 55-gallon drums of pepper parts.

The big drums clearly are not intended for home use; they're packed for commercial food producers. When you buy a bucket of pre-mixed macaroni or potato salad at the grocery store, or find a scoop of it on your plate at a restaurant or deli, the colorful and crunchy bits of pepper in it likely were packed at that noisy, steamy, fiery packing plant alongside the freeway outside Santa Paula.

For the September package of stories about farm labor, I spent a lot of time digging into the historical record, believing I could better explore the issue in the context of 21st century agriculture if I understood how things had changed -- or not -- over time. As part of that research, I compiled the following a timeline of key events over the past 200-plus years that helped me visualize broad trends and served as useful background for the video I produced. I had intended the timeline to be published as part of the story package, but we ran out of space.

Immigrant Farm Labor in California
Historical Timeline

1769 Franciscan priests and Spanish soldiers recruit Indian converts living near missions on the Baja peninsula and bring them north from Mexico to work in California. The recruits help build missions at San Diego and Monterey, and labor in the settlement fields and orchards.

1833 Mexican republic orders mission lands in California to be sold or handed over to private owners.

1848 California becomes part of the United States, following the end of war with Mexico. Gold is discovered on the American River. In less than two years, California’s non-Indian population more than quadruples. Farming begins rapid expansion as population growth increases demand for food.

1852 State Sen. George Tingley of Santa Clara introduces bill to import Chinese agricultural workers, who would work under contract and be prohibited from obtaining citizenship. Bill fails, but Chinese immigrants begin arriving by the
thousands.

1870 Chinese immigrants account for about 15 percent of California's farm labor force. In Sacramento, San Mateo and Alameda counties, they account for between a quarter and half of all farm workers.

1877 Anti-Chinese protests and attacks on workers spread up and down California.

1882 Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, ending Chinese immigration for the next 70 years.

1891 Japanese immigrants arrive on the U.S. mainland for work primarily as agricultural laborers.

1894 A U.S. district court rules that Japanese immigrants cannot become citizens because they are not "a free white person" as the Naturalization Act of 1790 requires.

1903 Immigrant sugar beet workers in Oxnard form the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association and strike over low wages, the state's first organized farm labor action. Growers negotiate a settlement, raising wages for field work.

1905 The Asiatic Exclusion League is formed in San Francisco.

1907 Sikh laborers from northern India begin working on California farms.

1908 Japan and the United States agree to halt the immigration of Japanese laborers.

1909 About 30,000 Japanese work on California farms, 42 percent of the labor force.

1913 California passes first of several Alien Land Acts, prohibiting noncitizens from owning land.

1939 Factories in the Field by Carey McWilliams and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck are published, focusing national attention on the conditions of migrant farm workers.

1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, precipitating U.S. entry into World War II.

1942 President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 authorizing military authorities to exclude civilians from any area without trial or hearing. More than 110,000 West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry are forced into internment camps.
United States and Mexico authorize bracero program, which allows importation
of temporary contract workers for agriculture, to alleviate wartime labor shortage.

1943 Congress repeals Chinese Exclusion Act.

1948 U.S. Supreme Court rules California's Alien Land Act is unconstitutional.

1962 National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), organized by Cesar Chavez, holds its first convention.

1964 Bracero program ends, having brought 4.5 million Mexicans into the United States to work on farms.

1965 Mostly Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) strike against Central Valley grape growers, soon joined by largely Mexican members of NFWA. Unions call for consumer boycott of table grapes.

1966 United Farm Workers established by merger of AWOC and NFWA.

1970 Central Valley grape growers sign UFW contracts, ending strike and boycott.

1975 California passes the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law recognizing the rights of farmworkers to organize and bargain collectively.

1986 Congress passes Immigration Reform and Control Act, which grants amnesty to illegal immigrants who have resided in the United States since 1982, and imposes sanctions on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

1994 California voters pass Proposition 187, denying undocumented immigrants access to public schools, medical care, and other social services, and requiring public employees and law enforcement officials to report suspected undocumented immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Federal courts later strike down nearly all its provisions.

Sources: Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 by Richard Steven Street; Harvest Empire: A History of California Agriculture by Lawrence J. Jelinek; "The California Farm Labor Force: Overview and Trends from the National Agricultural Workers Survey" by Aquirre Intertnational; Library of Congress; Migration Policy Institute; United Farm Workers

Ventura County growers apply about 7 million pounds of chemicals to their crops each year. That works out to an average of about 70 pounds per acre of harvested cropland. That's more than twice the per-acre volume of chemicals used by farmers in Fresno County, the state's biggest agricultural county in both acreage and crop value. But at $9.87 in annual crop value per acre of harvested land, Ventura County growers are four times as economically productive as their counterparts in Fresno County, where growers manage to generate only $2.56 for each of the 1.1 million acres of cropland.

Ventura County farmers are facing new restrictions on runoff from their fields and orchards adopted to protect local waterways. Stretches of Calleguas Creek, the Santa Clara River and the Ventura River have been identified by state water-quality regulators as impaired by a variety of contaminants, many of them linked to agriculture.

Some of those substances -- the pesticides DDT, toxaphene, chlordane, dieldrin, -- have been banned or discontinued and are a legacy of long-ago farming practices. Others, however, are still used today. These include nitrogen from fertilizer (which also runs off suburban lawns and flower beds), and such pesticides as endosulfan and chlorpyrifos. The latter is a member of one of the most dangerous classes of pesticides, the organophosphates, which are chemically related to military nerve gas.

State and federal regulators are also moving slowly, prodded in some cases by litigation and court orders, to ban or force the reformulation of a broad array of pesticides because they worsen air pollution, emitting volatile organic compounds that contribute to formation of ground-level ozone.

The California Department of Pesticide Regulation has launched a broad effort to crack down on polluting emissions from pesticide use, facing a federal court ruling in April that found the department in violation of the Clean Air Act for failing to do so. The judge ordered DPR to adopt regulations that will reduce pesticide-related VOC emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels in five air basins -- the San Joaquin Valley, Ventura County, the Sacramento and Los Angeles areas, and the Southeast Desert -- by 2008.

The ruling came in response to a suit filed by a coalition of environmental groups and anti-pesticide activists, among them several in Ventura County -- Wishtoyo Foundation, Ventura Coastkeeper and Community and Children's Advocates Against Pesticide Poisoning.

The immediate effect will likely be further reduction in availability of soil fumigants, which account for four of the five most heavily used agricultural chemicals in Ventura county. And that will increase pressure on local growers to seek alternatives.

The modern crop report is a much more elaborate affair -- though today's version is not as elaborate as those in the 1950s and 1960s, which provided extravagant detail on the yearlong activities of the ag commissioner office staff, including more than most people could possibly want to know about seed certification and pest inspections -- and it provides an intriguing statistical snapshot of the county's agricultural industry.

One of the great weaknesses of traditional reporting on the annual crop report is a failure to look beyond the limited set of numbers each summary provides. Comparing this year's numbers to those from last year is not particularly instructive, given that natural events can cause big year-to-year differences. But by comparing those for several years, it's possible to identify broad trends and gain added insight into the forces affecting the county's signature industry.

This year's report notes that overall farm revenues fell 12 percent from 2004 to 2005, a drop of $164.3 million. McPhail blamed much of the drop on last year's heavy rains, which made a mess of strawberry and vegetable fields.

Nearly half the decrease, however, can be accounted for by a precipitous drop in revenue for avocados, which earned local growers roughly $70 million less in 2005 than in 2004. The main reason for this is no mystery, but it has nothing to do with rain. It has to do with several days of unseasonably hot weather in 2004 during the brief window of time when avocado trees were blooming and preparing to set the fruit that would become the 2005 crop. Scorching heat and wind simply crisped most of the flowers before they could be pollinated, growers recall.

The results are visible in one of the other numbers included in the crop report. In 2004, avocado growers produced an average of 3.28 tons of fruit per acre. In 2005, they produced less than half as much, 1.54 tons per acre. Instead of 63,095 tons of the pebbly green fruit, for which they were paid $1,976 a ton in 2004, county growers harvested only 29,592 tons, for which they were paid an average of $1,852 a ton.

Here's the bright side of the poor 2005 crop: Last year's paltry production allowed the trees to conserve much of the energy they would otherwise have expended developing fruit. So when perfect conditions accompanied the 2005 bloom, the trees went crazy, producing the staggering amount of fruit avocado growers have been harvesting this year.

It's also worth looking more closely and thoughtfully at the figure representing the total value of the local crop, which the 2005 ag commissioner's report lists as $1.2 billion -- and which the Star's front-page story said represents "the seventh consecutive year" that local farmers earned more than $1 billion.

To perform meaningful comparisons from year to year, it's necessary to adjust the figures for inflation and express them in constant dollars. When you do that with local crop revenues, the otherwise optimistic progression of ever-higher numbers that forms a centerpiece of most reporting on the data evaporates. What's revealed is an industry whose revenues have been at the billion-dollar-a-year level for much longer than seven years, but which have been stagnant since at least 1979.

Using an inflation calculator available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, I plugged in the numbers for the past 27 years (thoughtfully provided by the latest Ventura County crop report) and translated them into constant 2000 dollars.

That calculation reveals the 1979 crop value to have been $1.1 billion. In the same inflation-adjusted dollars, this year's value is -- you may have guessed it -- $1.1 billion. Between 1979 and 2005 the annual value fluctuated modestly, from a low of $823 million to a high of $1.3 billion, but has mostly hovered right around the $1 billion mark. The inflation-adjusted 27-year average, in fact, is $1.03 billion.

Here are a couple of graphs I created (using my computer's Excel software) that illustrate the data. The first (View image) has just the adjusted figures.

The second (View image) includes a linear trend line helpfully generated by Excel.

As the trend line illustrates, inflation-adjusted crop revenues have increased a tiny amount since 1979, from just under $1 billion a year to around $1.1 billion. But when you think about how much labor, water and land costs have risen in real dollars during that same time, the reason for the common economic anxiety of local growers becomes clear.

Next time you buy an avocado, take a moment to heft that fruit in your hand and wonder how on earth something so strange could evolve in nature.

There are three families of avocados -- one originating in Mexico, another in the West Indies and the third in Guatemala -- and without some means of seed dispersal, they all would have a heck of a time reproducing. In the wild, avocado trees grow scattered throughout dense tropical forests, and a thick layer of dead leaves accumulates beneath their branches. Fruit that simply drops to the ground beneath a wild tree has little chance of germinating because of the deep shade and inaccessible soil. So what accounts for the avocados' wide dispersal and reproductive success?

Trickery, according to ecologists.

Botanically, avocados are berries. Plants produce berries as a reproductive strategy, surrounding their seeds with a fleshy, nutritious pulp that entices more mobile life forms to gobble the entire package and wander off before excreting the durable germ of the next generation. It's a strategy plants have evolved to ensure their offspring won't compete with them for light, water and nutrients.

It's easy to imagine how this works for blackberries, blueberries and other fruits small enough to be ingested whole by birds, bats, bears and other familiar creatures. But heft an avocado, and try to imagine what would swallow such a thing in its entirety. Bear in mind that the half-pound Hass avocados commonly sold in supermarkets are rather small by global avocado standards; many of the nearly 1,000 named varieties produce fruit that typically is three times as large.

In 1982, university professors Daniel Jantzen and Paul Martin published an intriguing article in the journal Science hypothesizing that several groups of Mesoamerican trees and shrubs with giant fruits are what they termed "neotropical anachronisms" -- plants that evolved in concert with jumbo herbivores, which have since vanished.

The prehistoric megafauna of Mesoamerica included horses, giant ground sloths and lumbering creatures known as gomphotheres (View image), which were related and similar in appearance to mastodons, mammoths and modern elephants. All were big enough to swallow and disperse the seeds of avocados, forest palms and other trees with huge fruit.

Those big critters all disappeared about 10,000 years ago, but ecologists believe that some of the plants that evolved to take advantage of the animals' gargantuan guts persist today, their oversize fruit a sort of ghostly evolutionary leftover.

So, eat an avocado and imagine an elephant. Or something like it.

The library is at 630 W. 5th St., and is open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 to 6 on Friday and Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday.

There are two reasons for the wholesale removal of Valencia orange trees in Ventura County. First, growers in the San Joaquin Valley planted thousand of acres of Valencias, producing the fruit at lower cost because Central Valley land is relatively cheap. Growers here could not compete on price, which dropped as production rose.

But changing consumer preferences also played a part. Valencias have seeds, and navels typically do not, or have very few. And American consumers have proved themselves willing to trade flavor, juiciness and just about every other aesthetic quality in a piece of fruit for convenience and low price.

That helps explain the explosive success of seedless mandarin orange varieties such a Clementines and our very own pixie tangerines, grown mainly in the Ojai Valley. Seedless, sweet, easy-to-peel citrus varieties are a natural snack food, and sales have been skyrocketing. Growers have responded by planting thousands of acres of new orchards in California, mostly in the Central Valley and mainly in two varieties of what are technically known as mandarins, the Clementine and a new strain called the W. Murcot Afourer.

Recently, this touched off an interesting battle between big farming companies and their neighbors. Only this time, it isn't the typical kind of food fight, one pitting growers against urban residents. This is farmer vs. farmer. And, in a nicely ironic twist, farmer against beekeeper.

The reason for the fight is that W. Murcotts and Clementines are seedless only if grown far away from other citrus varieties with viable pollen. If a bee lands in a Valencia tree, picks up some pollen, and then flies next door to alight on the flower of a Clementine tree, the Clementines produced on that tree are likely to have seeds. This makes them virtually worthless in the marketplace. And bees are pretty intrepid travelers, flying a mile or more from the hive in search of flowers.

One of California's biggest citrus growers, Paramount Citrus, has planted thousands of acres of Clementines in the San Joaquin Valley in the past few years. And much of that acreage is adjacent or very near to existing orchards, or to other crops that require bees for pollination. The predictable outcome -- predictable, apparently, to everyone except the management at Paramount -- is likely to be that all those trees will soon be producing thousand of tons of nearly worthless fruit each year.

So Paramount has threatened to sue its neighbors if they don't move their bees at least two miles from Paramount's new orchards. According to accounts of the dispute in the Fresno Bee and Ag Alert, the weekly publication of the California Farm Bureau Federation, the letter to growers and beekeepers from Paramount's lawyers warns that "trespass" is one of the claims that would be cited in the litigation.

You heard right -- trespassing bees.

Sun Pacific, another citrus giant, has also planted thousands of acres of mandarins in the Central Valley, and has also asked neighbors to move their beehives. So far, however, it hasn't threatened to sue them.

The other farmers and beekeepers were there first, which puts Paramount in the decidedly weird position of arguing that its new activity should take priority over pre-existing uses. Usually, farmers make the opposite argument -- that their traditional activities trump the concerns of new suburban neighbors when development creeps to the edge of agricultural land.

The irony doesn't stop there. Paramount Farms, a sister company of Paramount Citrus, is the world's largest supplier of almonds and pistachios. Without bees to pollinate the trees, Paramount's Central Valley almond orchards wouldn't produce any nuts. And guess where Paramount gets those bees?

You guessed it -- from the same beekeeping industry its corporate sibling is now threatening to sue.

Here's how the original passage read:

More Ventura County acres are planted in lemons -- 22,520 in 2004, according to the Agricultural Commissioner's Office -- than any other crop. Forty to 50 percent of each year's lemon production is thrown away. Thirty to 35 percent ends up as juice. Perhaps 15 percent makes it to the fresh market.

Here's how it should have read:

More Ventura County acres are planted in lemons -- 22,520 in 2004, according to the Agricultural Commissioner's Office -- than any other crop. Forty to 50 percent of each year's lemon production is sold for juice, concentrate and other products, at a price that doesn't cover the cost of producing and processing the fruit. About half is sold on the fresh market and earns growers a profit. Perhaps 15 percent of the total crop is top grade and brings the highest price.

The lesson I learned from this is not to conduct important interviews in a packinghouse roaring away at full tilt. Tip for other journalists: When the workers all around you are wearing ear protection, maybe it's a good idea to put the notebook away and save the questions for later.

In case you were wondering, scooping your way through a big bowl of mashed avocados and salsa does have the potential to significantly boost your daily caloric intake. But it probably doesn't do as much damage to your diet as you might think.

No doubt about it, avocados are loaded with fat and calories. Like many other fruits. avocados are mostly made up of water, about 72 percent by weight. Still, an average California avocado stripped of skin and seed weighs around 6 ounces and packs about 300 calories, 90 percent of which are derived from fat.

The good news, however, is that more than 80 percent of that fat is monounsaturated, a type that's been found to lower blood levels of the "bad" cholesterol linked to heart disease. The only other commonly consumed food product with a similar fat profile is olive oil, the darling of health-food advocates. Avocados are also loaded with potassium, a nutrient also linked to good coronary health.

Avocados are the fourth-most valuable crop grown in Ventura County, worth $125 million in 2004, according to the Agricultural Commissioner's Office. By acreage, they rank No. 2, with 19,234 harvested acreage (only lemons cover more of the county's cropland).

If eaten in moderation, there'' no reason to avoid avocados and a few good reasons to include them in your diet. That, of course, is a message the California Avocado Commission and other industry groups spend lots of time and money trying to deliver. Americans consume about 2.9 pounds of avocados per person each year, and U.S. growers -- worried about the depressing effects of over-production on price -- have a hopeful eye on Mexico as a model. The average resident of that country consumes nearly 20 pounds per year.

There are some shared characteristics. In both methods, the pickers crouch in knee-deep furrows that separate each bed of plants from the next. Each bed has four parallel rows of plants, each plant bearing fruit at various stages of maturity, from just-fertilized flowers to bright red berries. Each picker pushes a small wire cart supporting a cardboard carton filled with clear plastic clamshell containers.

Typically wearing thin gloves, the pickers run their hands through the plants, brushing back the leaves to uncover the fruit. All the ripe berries must be picked, even those that are too small, weirdly shaped or otherwise defective; left on the plant they eventually will decay and spread rot to other berries. Pickers toss unwanted fruit into the furrow and place those berries they judge acceptable directly into the plastic containers. What this means is that the pickers are not just evaluating and picking fruit; they also are packing and preparing the berries for display on supermarket shelves.

After all the plastic boxes in the carton are filled, the two harvesting methods diverge considerably.

In the older method, still in wide use, the pickers must carry each filled carton to a waiting trailer on a road at the end of the field, which can be a distance of 150 or more feet. They generally run, balancing the cartons on their shoulders. Then, having deposited the full cartons, they run to a second location to pick up empty ones. and then run back to the row to resume picking. A picker might run 2 miles a day this way, researchers have calculated.

All that motion means a chance for twisted ankles, back sprains or worse, which can translate into lost earnings for the picker and higher insurance costs for the grower. It also means the picker is spending a third of the work day running instead of picking. During the peak of the season, when they're mainly getting paid by the piece, that's time when they aren't making any money.

The newer harvest method, pioneered in Ventura County and slowly spreading throughout the state, is intended to eliminate much of that inefficiency. It involves the use of a machine that rolls through the field just ahead of the pickers. In the center is a covered platform holding the driver of the rig, two box handlers, a supply of empty cartons, and pallets on which to stack the full ones. A long boom sticks out to each side, supporting conveyor belts that move full cartons back to the center. Pickers need move only a few feet to deliver a filled carton to the conveyor and pick up an empty one.

The machines can boost the productivity of a picking crew by 25 to 30 percent, enabling the grower to hire fewer workers.

Pickers on a machine crew can earn more if they're being paid by the tray, as is common during the peak season. But they're generally paid an hourly wage early or late in the season, when there's not as much ripe fruit. Under those conditions, the machines greatly reduce the grower's hourly labor costs. But they also can mean pickers work harder and faster for the same wages.

The machines cost around $125,000 each. But with labor accounting for about 40 percent of the nearly $30,000 it costs per acre to produce and harvest strawberries in Ventura County, they soon pay for themselves.

So far, no one has developed an effective method to fully mechanize harvesting berries for the fresh market -- a reflection of the amount of skill and good judgment pickers must possess.

But if you think it's painful to fill the 20-gallon tank on your gas-guzzling SUV, imagine the shock that's greeting farmers who rely on powerful tractors to work their fields.

I spent some time this week driving around with Edgar Terry, who grows celery, peppers, cilantro and strawberries on about 1,200 acres of mostly leased land scattered from the Oxnard Plain to Piru. His situation is fairly typical of vegetable growers in this area, who produce multiple crops each year from the same patch of ground and are in a nearly constant state of field preparation.

We drove into a field between Oxnard and Camarillo to watch it being readied to plant peppers. The seedling plants are set out in raised beds, which are created using an ingenious rig outfitted with angled blades, rollers and scrapers. The rig is big and heavy, and the blades move a lot of dirt. The rig is pulled by a powerful Challenger tractor with a 500-horsepower diesel engine.

It's an impressive piece of equipment, rumbling along on huge steel-reinforced rubber treads. The cab is tall and glass-walled, outfitted with a dust-filtering air conditioner. It has computerized controls tied into a GPS positioning system that can automatically steer the entire rig using satellite data, keeping it traveling on perfectly parallel rows across the field.

It costs about $300,000 new, although Edgar, like many farmers, leases his under a contract that also covers maintenance and repairs. Caterpillar used to make and sell the Challenger, one of the most powerful farm tractors on the market, but an outfit called AGCO bought the line. Caterpillar provides most of the components, though, and the machine is painted the trademark Caterpillar yellow.

Those components include a 16-cylinder engine that displaces 964 cubic inches. The tractor has a top speed of nearly 25 mph. It also comes equipped with a fuel thank that holds more than 300 gallons. Which is a good thing, because it burns 12 gallons an hour, according to Edgar.

At the current price for diesel fuel of roughly $3 a gallon -- and rising as fast as the price of gasoline -- that's $36 an hour, nearly three times the average pay of a tractor driver. It also means spending nearly a thousand bucks on a fill-up.

Unlike motorists, farmers operating tractors can't reduce their fuel bills by carpooling, switching to buses and trains, trading in their fuel-slurping machines for subcompact hybrids, or eliminating nonessential trips. Nor can they pass the extra cost on to consumers, since growers don't set crop prices; they take the price the retailers and wholesalers offer them.

So, when the price of diesel boosts their operating costs by several thousand dollars a month, it just comes out of their pockets.