Green Dreams : How You Gonna Keep Them Down in L.A. After They’ve Been on the Farm?

The contentious English gamecock is giving Ronna Jurow a problem. Actually, it would like to take her eyes out, which it almost did once.

“Oh, come here now,” coos Jurow, her hands and forearms covered in protective leather, reeling in the leashed dervish as it splays and flaps and screeches and kicks up dust clouds with its scratching spinning feet.

“There.” She snatches him up from the ground. He sinks his beak into her left arm, then takes a pass at her face, missing her chin by about an inch.

“Hey, you stop that,” says Jurow, a gynecologist who practices in Ventura. “It’s your mom here. Hey ! I’m your mom .”

Inexplicably, the thing calms down.

Jurow looks up, cradling the gamecock as if he were a precious newborn infant, and greets a visitor: “Really beautiful, isn’t he?” asks Jurow.

Twelve miles to the north, Peter Strauss has another kind of problem.

“I have alien pests,” he says, furrowing his brow. “The Argentinean ant. European brown snails. I have the ash whitefly, whose only natural predator is in Greece. It’s the Jet Age. The Jet Age has produced a nightmare of pests.”

A machine drones nearby, and Strauss spies his spray tractor in the orange grove below his house.

He smiles broadly--the smile that makes him the familiar television and movie actor--and waves its driver to a stop. There’s a holding tank and inside is a nasty roiling brew of opaque liquid formulated by Strauss to keep each of his 2,908 citrus trees hearty.

“The Magic Cocktail,” he says, beaming with pride. “Magnesium. Nitrogen. Other stuff. Today we apply the Magic Cocktail.”

Farther east in the county is Don Marquis. Marquis has no gamecocks, no pests, no cocktails. Instead he has a water problem.

Dressed in a shirt and tie for the next software deal, he lurches up gullied roads in his air-conditioned Toyota 4-Runner, pointing out this avocado grove and that lemon tract.

“Over here,” he says, pointing into trees, “that’s where I’d love to put my house. But who knows when I can do that? My current house is worth squat--no equity. And business now?” His voice trails off.

He stops, hops out. Shielding his eyes with one hand and gesturing to the surrounding hills with the other, a smile transforms him:

“It’s neat. It really is,” he says. “It’s beautiful through here.”

A physician, an actor, a salesman. They couldn’t be more different. Yet each has the bug. Each is ineluctably drawn to another life--a life that is often more difficult and always more random and expensive than anything each has known: to be a farmer.

It has nothing to do with gynecology, surely, although Jurow does run from delivering babies at hospitals in Ventura to overseeing in her fowl hatchery, 50 feet from her modern house in unincorporated Ventura County, near Santa Paula.

It has no connection to making money by being somebody else, as actors do. So for Peter Strauss, farming at his home in Ojai represents a stretch.

And the relationship between citrus irrigation and electrical engineering software is, well, strained at best: Don Marquis of Woodland Hills simply dreams of building the house in Moorpark that will complete his migration to the farm life.

But two key things tie these country pilgrims together: successful professional careers from which they take money to create the misery and joy that defines “connection to the land” and the fact that none, despite theft, seasonal humiliations and sometimes impossible wars against viruses and fungi, would turn back on that choice.

They have company, too. Pro-Ag, a leading farm management company in Moorpark, notes that since the division of Ventura County’s vast ranches in the mid-1970s, white-collar professionals have increasingly purchased 10 or 20 or even 40 acres of lemon and avocado groves and then set about farming them.

Jurow came from anything but overalls. Forget gynecology--that came after her life as a successful opera singer.

While a Berkeley undergraduate, she won a Merola Foundation Award from the San Francisco Opera. It marked the start of a career, in 1969, as a coloratura soprano with the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Opera, the Salzburg Opera, the Klagenfurt Opera and the Linz Opera, with appearances at Wolf Trap and Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Summer Festival.

But the itinerant single life had desolation made worse by what she saw in her future: “Those high notes leave you as you approach menopause,” Jurow says, “and in my late 20s, I knew I didn’t want to be a fat old singing teacher.”

She quit and flew home to San Mateo, to the Bay Area house where she had grown up. She had had an interest in medicine: It was a family legacy. But her father, a physician, and two brothers, both physicians, had dissuaded her. Not this time: Jurow finally went to medical school, at UC San Francisco, then quickly established herself in Los Angeles, with a fellowship and faculty appointment at the USC Medical Center.

She married a doctor, John Stevenson. Then, the fluke event: Stevenson was shot while walking through Burbank Airport, the victim of a bullet that misfired from a traveler’s hunting rifle.

“He recovered,” Jurow says, “and just said: ‘We’re getting out of here.’ ”

They moved to Ventura and rented a house near Wells Road. Jurow worked with a group, then opened her own practice on North Brent Street. With two children, they wanted to own a home. And Stevenson, the son of a Phoenix water engineer, was not completely alien to agriculture: His grandfather ran a ranch in Arizona.

In the rented house, Ronna Jurow started her farm reading.

“It was my escape literature,” she says.

They bought their Santa Paula ranch without so much as a second thought. The house is surrounded by nearly seven acres of abundant Haas avocado trees.

The trees are farmed, producing 30,000 pounds of fruit in a single crop. It’s expensive because much of the work--pruning, irrigating, picking--is contracted out to crews. But in most instances it produces enough income to outstrip the costs.

(That’s if everything goes as expected. A few years back, Jurow and her family left the ranch for a few days to attend a funeral. They returned to find a huge hole cut in their chain-link fence and the entire avocado crop, 15 tons, stripped from the trees.)

The trees, however, are only a backdrop to Jurow’s main love: the chickens and the birds. Hundreds of chickens, among them fancy miniature bantams and the swaggering English gamecock. China geese. Miniature call ducks. Twenty peacocks.

Farming has changed the beat of her life.

Ronna Jurow no longer goes to the opera. And her social life has shrunk to the limits of her farm. She throws and attends few dinner parties, for example. “I don’t like to dress up,” she says. “We work very hard. Any free time we have is spent here, at home, with the kids.”

The word, finally, comes up: roots .

It’s farming’s biggest payoff, she says. “That’s what it all represents to me. The roots are here: in the agriculture, in the new arrivals in the hatchery, in the people here and in the farming community.

“I want my children to have this, to know this.”

The fireplace mantel in Peter Strauss’ home study holds two things side-by-side: a shiny trophy, his 1979 Emmy for best leading actor in “The Jericho Mile,” and a bland little framed certificate marking his successful completion of Palm Tree Management, offered by the agricultural extension service of the University of California.

“That was a great course,” he says. “I’m very proud of that.”

Strauss grew up in New York, the son of a wine importer father and dog-breeder mother. He and his wife, Nicole, were not even in the market to buy a farm when they purchased their home in Ojai five years ago and moved with their two children. But 30 badly maintained acres of citrus trees came along with the deal.

Strauss, however, had always had an interest in garden design and botany. This enabled him to redesign the citrus orchard’s decrepit, inefficient irrigation systems “just based on what I knew about gardens,” he says. Soon after moving in, he also moved about town, seeking counsel from the more experienced orange growers.

“Within months,” he says, “I knew how to run an orchard.”

It’s worked. His average crop of 22 acres in Valencia oranges and eight acres in navel oranges produces 440 tons of fruit, occasionally some of it so out-sized and precious as to command $5-per-piece prices in Japan.

Save the picking and some of the spraying, Strauss does it himself. Prunes the trees. Runs the irrigation. Applies the chemicals to the trees. Fixes things “when squirrels eat through them.” He allows himself “two L.A. days” a week--he does, after all, earn a living as an actor.

But it’s clear he’s hooked.

“You know, I’ve probably hurt my own career by being too diversified,” he says. “When I don’t go to a meeting (in L.A.) because it’s a critical time to fertilize, I screw up. But I want to apply the nitrogen. I love to do that. You can call people in and pay them $5 an hour or $15 an hour to do it. But I won’t. It’s important that I do that.

“It’s hard to convey the thrill of growing something. In April, when all the trees come into bloom, their fragrance wafts through the house--it’s a mind-boggling saccharin nausea--and you realize you are sustaining life, a life force. And so it becomes somewhat a spiritual issue.”

He pauses a moment.

“The fact is, I don’t find the happiness in Nielsen numbers that I do in fruit yields.”

Despite his successes, Strauss would be the first to concede that small farming is to some extent a luxury. He pulls an accounting sheet from last year. After expenses, his citrus income barely cracked $13,000.

“That’s farming,” he says. “It’s expensive, it’s frustrating. And I would say if I were strictly a farmer, I don’t think I could make it.”

But the word, with Strauss as with Jurow, finally pops up: roots .

“I look around and I see a lot of loneliness,” Strauss says. “I see families broken up and people disconnected from things. I walk the orchard with my children, and sometimes they help me, and it’s another way we grow together as a family.”

Waiting for his burrito at the Taco Bell in Moorpark, Don Marquis considers why he bought his 21.6-acre Moorpark ranch in the first place.

“Because I had a good year,” he says flatly. “I had only a few choices: give it to the government or invest in something that I could get some benefit from.”

But Marquis quickly found that farm ownership had peculiar and immediate demands.

“I realized: I’m facing all these dying trees,” he recalls. “Now I’m not one of these bleeding sorts, where you can’t touch this leaf with that. But I did feel some responsibility to these 300 or so trees that were dying. And so I acted to get them the right treatment. And it’s been working out.”

Marquis’ dream, however, was less to adopt the farming lifestyle than to build a large house--”4,700 square feet in a Mediterranean style”--on the property and call it home. The economy, his business and water and building costs conspire to push any groundbreaking well into the future. So the Marquis ranch stands as an active orchard with absentee owner, its complete management contracted out to Pro-Ag, to which Marquis pays more than $25,000 annually.

Marquis declines to call himself a farmer, although technically anyone whose property produces crops is a farmer.

And yet, he is still drawn to the place, prideful in the abundance of its trees and in some of the experiments on the property, like a newly planted acre of oro blanco grapefruit.

He’s not sure of how his four children feel about the Moorpark farm. “They probably see this as their legacy,” he says. “But right now they have heart rates of 300--you know, they need a toy to make this thing entertaining, a bike to ride or something. For them, looking at trees gets old fast.”

So in the meantime, Marquis keeps up the near-weekly solo commute from home in Woodland Hills to the farm in Moorpark, only to bounce up the gullied roads and think of the house, its view and the tranquil farm life.

“Hey, I move out here, there’s only so much I will do,” he says. “Hack away at dead branches on avocado trees. Turn the pump on and off for the irrigation. Walk around a lot. Do in a day what a young guy would do in a half hour.”

As if he senses what Jurow and Strauss already know, he adds: “But it sure would be nice.”