Coming Sunday in The Star is the kickoff of an exciting, year-long project we are doing on farming in Ventura County.

Star senior writer John Krist is going to write about 1-2 stories a month over the rest of this year about the state of farming in our county. We'll talk about the weather. We'll talk about the crops. We'll talk about jobs ... and immigration. We'll talk about markets, old and new. We'll talk about impacts of technology. And we'll talk a lot about the creep of urbanism on the farms in the county.

He's going to do it through the eyes of four farm operations.

It's a project that we first intended to present to you two weeks ago. In fact, we had done some promotion (placing what we call rack cards, which are promotions in the boxes where we sell the paper) to announce its arrival on Sunday.

But, days before publication, we had to hold it. There was nothing wrong with John's work. But there were two key factors that made it not ready: One of the farmers who had agreed to work with us all year decided not to do that and so we needed to find a replacement; and the weather was preventing us from obtaining the quality video we wanted to present the online multimedia portion of the story.

That's a critical factor in how we are looking at telling news stories. You'll hear me talk more and more about this subject this year. In addition to reporting and writing and photography, we will tell stories in other medium (video, audio, online graphics, blogs, etc.). Whatever we think is the best way to get that message to you.

Take a look Sunday and let us know what you think. Read the story and then check out the online additions. We'd love to hear your views.