As this series closes, I'd like to publicly thank everyone who helped make it possible. The farmers and ranchers I profiled and followed over the past year agreed to subject themselves to a constant barrage of intrusive questions about their lives, their businesses, their success and their failures. They were unfailingly polite, indulgent, understanding and candid, and I simply could not have done any of this without their cooperation.

So, to Richard Atmore, Lisa Brenneis, Jim Churchill, Link Leavens, Leslie Leavens-Crowe, Cecil Martinez and David Schwabauer, my heartiest thanks.

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.

As this series has progressed, many readers have asked whether the stories were going to be assembled and reprinted in book form, as I eventually did with the series I wrote five years ago on the Lewis and Clark expedition. (Shameless plug: Click here to order a copy of Voyage of Rediscovery: Exploring the New West in the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark.)

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.

In the course of research on this project, I did a lot of reading, and every so often I would come across a quote I found particularly interesting or insightful. I collected a few of my favorites but never found much use for most of them in the stories. I thought I'd share some of them here. Food for thought ...

"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

When you think of farming, you probably think of food. That is, after all, the fundamental magic of agriculture: that it takes sunlight, soil, air and water, and transforms them into a source of sensory pleasure and sustenance.

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.

If you drive along the Santa Paula freeway in autumn, generally between September and November, you may notice the unmistakable odor of roasting peppers as you pass a steam-belching industrial plant on the south side of the highway. It's just west of Santa Paula, right at the Todd Road overpass near the county jail. I've caught whiffs of that powerful, smoky scent periodically over the years, and always found myself wondering what was going on inside that nondescript building. And I always vowed to find out someday.

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.

Immigration may be a subject of bitter political debate and public polarization today, but there's certainly nothing new about that. California has always had a paradoxical attitude toward the men and women, many of them from other countries, whose physical labor plays such an important role in the state's prosperity.

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

When criticized for the amount of chemicals they use, growers often point to the benefit those chemicals provide in the form of increased yield, which means more food can be produced cheaply. There are many ways to measure productivity, but by at least one yardstick, the claim seems to have merit. Economic data show a correlation between the high rate of chemical use in Ventura County and the value of farm production.

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.

Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail released the 2005 Ventura County crop report on Thursday, an annual tradition that dates back to 1896. That first crop report more than a century ago was submitted to the state by the County Board of Horticultural Commissioners, and was a mere three paragraphs long. It discussed mostly pests, such as black scale and codlin moths, and described some of the efforts undertaken to combat them -- notably the release of ladybird beetles, indicating that reliance on beneficial insects rather than chemicals has a long history here.

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.

This has been a banner year for avocados in Ventura County, with the tonnage likely to set a local record. Other avocado growing regions in California are also producing well, thanks to good weather last year when the trees were flowering and setting this year's fruit.

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.

One of the elements of the June 11-12 installment of this series is a slide show featuring vintage Ventura County fruit crate labels. If you want to see more such labels, and learn a bit more about their history, there's a nice public display at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles. Titled "Artistry of the Orange," the exhibit will remain on public view through Jan. 7, and features 45 framed labels from the library's collection. A few represent Ventura County brands and packinghouses, but most are from other parts of Southern California.

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.