2 Growers to Tour Former Soviet Union With Group : Agriculture: A 21-member delegation plans to visit four cities, spreading goodwill and farming information.

Two Ventura County growers will travel to the former Soviet Union later this month with a mission to spread goodwill and farming know-how to the area’s beleaguered agriculture community.

Carolyn Leavens and Dorcas Thille, both citrus and avocado growers, will embark on a four-city tour Sept. 21 as part of a 21-member California delegation. The group will travel under the auspices of the American People Ambassador Program, which organizes delegations of professionals to meet with workers in similar fields worldwide.

“The idea is to create strong ties with our counterparts around the world,” said Leavens, a political activist whose family farms in Ventura.

The delegation, organized in part by the California Farm Bureau, will meet with farmers across the Commonwealth of Independent States, with stops in Moscow, Kiev, Belarus and St. Petersburg. Leavens said they expect to see farming communities ravaged by political and economic upheaval.

“Farming conditions are in shambles over there,” she said. “Some of these impoverished farmers don’t have the technology or the availability for such things as cold storage. They want to learn how it all works for us.”

Leavens and Thille are among a couple of dozen Ventura County growers who have already traveled abroad in past years on similar excursions to Eastern Block countries, China, South America and elsewhere.

“We visited farming areas from East Berlin to Poland and their biggest problem was the communist system,” said Thille, who farms in the Santa Clara Valley. “We found that in China, too. It destroyed the opportunity for technology to succeed in agriculture.”

The groups saw mom and pop farm operations resorting to antiquated, back-breaking methods to work the earth.

“Mom was hitched to the plow and Dad was pushing,” Leavens said.

More often than not, she said, a rusting modern day tractor sat idle and broken nearby, with no spare parts available to fix it.

Also on the trip agenda are exchanges with the agriculture ministry and other government officials as well as heads of universities.

While the Commonwealth’s travel bureau will coordinate all lodging, touring and interpreter services, the participants will pay all of their own expenses.

The American People Ambassador Program is an offspring of People to People, International, a program created in 1957 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“It’s all about helping people, help themselves,” Leavens said.