Betting the Farm on an Abandoned Field : Agriculture: Partners reclaim overgrown parcel and gamble on niche crops.

Just off the Ventura Freeway, a row of eucalyptus trees, as unevenly spaced as a gaptoothed smile, stands guard over a patch of bare earth that is Craig Underwood’s big gamble.

Over the years, this field has nurtured white-faced cattle, a mountain lion family and an architect’s blueprint for hundreds of trim suburban homes. But mostly it has been neglected, allowed to grow thick with brush and willows.

Now, Underwood and two partners want to defy the times and turn this 60-acre piece of Ventura County dirt into a farm.

They plan to cover the long-abandoned rectangle with exotic salad greens, tender baby carrots and sweet summer corn--crops chosen to carve a niche in the California vegetable market, which is dominated by huge commercial growers.

Risking their other land holdings as collateral, the farmers took out a hefty bank loan last spring and bought the overgrown, marshy field for $420,000. They worked to get the soil in shape for the fall planting, a six-month struggle that set them back another $154,000.

They hope to plant the first seeds--Japanese mizuna, Chinese tatsoi, Italian arugula--this month and hope to reap three crops from the untested parcel they have dubbed Conejo Ranch. In doing so, they will be ignoring the national trend.

A national farmland conservation group recently named California’s coast, including Ventura County, as the third-most threatened agricultural region in the United States. All around their knobby, sun-bleached field, the ranchers can see signs of urban encroachment.

Across the Ventura Freeway, a big chunk of agricultural land is up for sale. Another nearby patch, long since sold, will soon sprout a dry cleaner, a beauty parlor, maybe a gas station.

Similar “Coming Soon” and “For Sale” signs are cropping up on farmland across the nation, as more and more farmers auction their fields to deep-pocketed developers. Up to 2 million acres of farmland vanish in the United States each year as strip malls replace strawberry patches and condominiums bloom in carrot fields.

Told of the Conjeo Ranch venture, a conservation expert said he was “very encouraged--and frankly, quite surprised.” Erik Vink of American Farmland Trust said it was “very unusual that land which has been in limbo for years is going back into agricultural production.”

Those who know Underwood and respect him as an innovator in Ventura County agriculture think he will be able to reclaim the field for farming.

“If anyone can pull it off, Craig will,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “He’s always willing to throw the dice.”

Nonetheless, Underwood rejects the mantle of farming superhero bravely battling urban sprawl.

Down-to-earth and plain-spoken, he insists he’s no martyr out to sacrifice himself for a piece of dirt. As the yellowed copy of the Wall Street Journal on his pickup truck floor attests, Underwood considers himself a businessman. And a gambler.

On the farm, nature can drown a year’s profits in sudden, drenching rain. The price of avocados can plunge so abruptly that it’s not worth picking them. Voracious snails can gobble up an entire grove of lemons.

Although Underwood’s family has farmed in Ventura County for more than a century--starting with a great-grandfather who grew black-eyed beans and walnuts--he knows not everyone can stand the uncertainties of living off the land.

His brother-in-law, for example, worked the family ranch for 14 years but finally quit to become a high school teacher. “He found it stressful, this business of making $100,000 one year and losing $150,000 the next,” said Alice Underwood, Craig’s mother and a third-generation farmer.

In fact, Underwood--a graduate of Cornell’s agriculture school--had doubts about entering the farming life. But he eventually agreed to help his father out in the Underwood family’s lemon groves. He was hooked. Now, he said, “it’s in my blood.”

The other partners also describe agriculture as an irresistible tug on their psyches.

“I didn’t choose farming--it chose me,” Jim Roberts said. “I wouldn’t do anything else.”

Although he still can’t plow a straight furrow, Minos Athanassiadis agrees. A business school graduate and onetime philosophy student, he is in charge of marketing and sales for Underwood Ranches, the family operation that includes a packing house and produce stand.

His partners tease him about his decidedly ungreen thumb because he spends most of his time working the phones in his office. But Athanassiadis considers himself a farmer at heart.

“From a karma point of view, it seemed to be better to work in agriculture and feed people than to shuffle assets around on Wall Street,” he said.

Though the field now sits bare, prepped to receive its first seeds, Conejo Ranch didn’t look like much when the partners began. Abandoned for 15 years, the field had sprouted willow trees, mesquite brush and countless scrubby plants. Stagnant pools, choked with vegetation and silt, acted like quicksand--once sucking in a bulldozer and swamping it clear to its grimy roof.

Quail scurried through the brambles and mountain lion cubs prowled through the muck. Wedged between lemon groves and tomato fields, the property had become a swamp. “You could fish crawdads there,” Underwood said.

Still, something about the land attracted them.

“It was beautiful--once you waded in,” said Roberts, 34, a tanned, blue-eyed Camarillo resident who is in charge of Underwood Ranches’ vegetable crops. He took heart in the healthy willow trees, which had grown three stories high in a little more than a dozen years. “Good brush, good crops,” he reasoned.

Gut feeling aside, Underwood knew this particular patch of Southern California dirt had easy access to a rancher’s most critical resource: water. The concrete-edged creek running along the field carries discharge from Thousand Oaks’ water treatment plant, and farmers throughout the Santa Rosa Valley dip into the channel for irrigation.

So the partners spent the summer clear-cutting the land with bulldozers and brush shredders, then burning the debris in bonfires. Once the land was bare, except for a sprinkling of leftover wood chips, the partners dug up the topsoil to install an underground drainage system.

To make the land even for plowing, they shelled out $24,000 for a high-tech leveling job.

A computer-controlled laser surveyed the field to map its hills and swales. Mounted on a pole, the laser directed a bucket-wielding tractor to grade the entire lot, scooping out here and filling in there. Finally, the land lay flat--and ready to receive the first seeds.

As planting gets under way this month, the three partners will enter a new phase of intense labor. Although they will not be dropping the seeds into the furrows themselves, they will be supervising every painstaking step.

“With vegetables, if you’re not out there 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week, things slip by,” Underwood said.

But the 125-year Underwood family legacy serves as a strong reminder that things do go right.

“There’s something very therapeutic in watching things grow,” said Alice Underwood, who remains passionate about farming at the age of 76. “If there’s a good crop, the boys are satisfied even if they don’t make any money.”

But by and large they have made money. By focusing on their narrow market niche of baby vegetables and gourmet greens, the family has been able to turn a decent profit most years and steadily expand its operations.

“Most farmers complain about weather and prices--it’s kind of a habit,” Craig Underwood said. “But if you’re lucky and you work hard and you make more right decisions than wrong ones, you’ll survive. You’ll do OK.”

But not everyone considers Conjeo Ranch a worthwhile endeavor.

Ecologists at the state Department of Fish and Game would have been happier if Underwood and his partners had left the field as an overgrown marsh.

Because the land was not classified as a stream bed or lake, the department had no jurisdiction over its use, plant ecologist Mary Meyer said. And because the new owners did not request a land-use change--the parcel has always been zoned agricultural--clear-cutting more than a dozen years of brush growth did not trigger an environmental review.

“It falls into a gray area,” Meyer said. “It’s a good example of all the wetlands we’ve lost in this state.”

In response, Underwood points out that his farm will pick up a thread of agricultural use that stretches back at least three-quarters of a century.

The field’s agricultural history began in the 1920s, when Adolfo Camarillo let his white-faced cattle graze there. After Camarillo’s death in 1958, his estate manager had to sell the parcel to pay inheritance taxes. The Marlborough development company snapped it up.

Ambitious plans to build 240 single-family homes on the field crumbled when the Camarillo City Council rejected Marlborough’s bid for development in the mid-1970s. So the company began leasing its parcel to local ranchers, who grew vegetables there until a 1979 flood wiped them out.

Even if Conejo Ranch does well, Underwood said, the partners will need about 25 years to pay back the bank loan. In the meantime, they will face some big challenges.

Leveling the field and driving heavy machinery over it has thrown the natural balance of the soil slightly out of whack. Air pockets and water crevices have shifted, and plants may have a hard time at first drawing out vital nutrients.

“The soil is alive--if you do something traumatic to it, it will react like any living organism,” Roberts said. “You have to let it recover before it will really perform.”

The field is strewn with fist-size rocks, which hinder cultivation, and covered with six distinct kinds of soil--from a fine sand-like dirt to gummy clay. Each type requires different irrigation and fertilization, but Underwood is philosophical: “The bank loan’s on the whole property, not just the good parts.”

The three exotic greens that will cover the ground this fall are known as aggressive plants, quick to take root and defend their soil from encroaching weeds, Athanassiadis said.

The first growing season stretches from early November through the end of January. The partners plan to plant several acres of greens each week so they can harvest continuously during the winter. As each strip of exotic lettuce ripens, crews will harvest it and prepare the earth for the spring crop--most likely baby carrots.

Planted in January and February, these vegetables will be ready for harvest in May. And then, to complete their yearly cycle, the partners plan a summer crop of either corn or jalapeno peppers, to be planted in late May or early June and harvested in August.

To get a feel for his new land, Underwood took on a task he usually delegates to one of his 140 employees--driving the plow. He was only making a preliminary furrow, but he had the satisfaction of watching the earth--his earth--churn behind him.

Underwood liked how the dirt turned under his plow. But he’s still not positive he will turn a profit.

“It’s all a gamble,” he said. “We felt we could put this land back into shape, but there’s definitely an element of uncertainty.”