Long, Hard Days and No Margin for Error : Agriculture: Timing is everything in deciding when to plant. A little organic magic doesn’t hurt, either.

Natividad Zavala waited impatiently for months as his bosses prepped the 60-acre field, a one-time swamp that stretches alongside jagged hills just north of the Ventura Freeway in Camarillo.

Come October, the field looked ready and Zavala itched to get down to the grubby job of planting Conejo Ranch. But partners Craig Underwood, Jim Roberts and Minos Athanassiadis held off.

As always in the agonizingly uncertain world of agriculture, the ranchers strained to predict just the right moment to drop 100 million seeds into the waiting furrows.

Rain on the way? Can’t send tractors over sodden soil. Perfect weather? Good news, but the planting machine’s tied up in another field. Right equipment, right forecast? Still no go--the sales gurus predict poor prices in three months, just when seeds planted now would be ready for harvest.

The timing was complex, the stakes high.

If the farmers misjudged the planting season, they faced the sickening prospect of plowing under tons of vegetables months down the road. If they missed the market’s crest, prices could fall so low that it wouldn’t be worth hiring crews to pick their gourmet greens.

A bad stretch of weather or some particularly nasty pests could be equally devastating, saddling the ranchers with blemished, withered, unappetizing produce.

To juggle the ever-shifting variables, Roberts had designed a high-tech crystal ball: a computer program that spits out the number of acres he should plant of each crop on each field, each week.

For Conejo Ranch, the green light finally flashed a few days before Thanksgiving.

The field was ready for its first seeds in 15 years. Zavala was ready too.

“We’ll be successful,” he said confidently. “When you’re standing in front of something positive, you can feel it.”

As planting foreman for Underwood Ranches, Zavala supervises the seeding of nearly two dozen fields.

He has worked the land for 28 years, ever since he crossed the Mexican border with his father, a field hand legally trekking to California for seasonal labor. Though he has seen the cycle countless times, Zavala still marvels at the miracle that turns hard, brown pellets into tender, green leaves within weeks.

Round-faced and ever-smiling, a man who keeps photographs of his eight children in his pickup truck at work, Zavala has never tired of watching things grow.

“I give life to the earth and the vegetables, and they give life back to me,” he said, shyly testing his sturdy English before diving with relief into Spanish.

“When you work with your heart, you get good returns.”

*

Soon, Zavala will get to test his philosophy.

The first Conejo Ranch crop is already peeping out of the tidy furrows, and should be ready for harvest within the next two months.

A sprinkling of exotic greens--Japanese mizuna, Chinese tatsoi and Italian arugula--will get tossed into the partners’ Sweet Petite bagged salads. The baby bok choy and turnips will end up in Southern California restaurants. And the four fancifully named radish varieties--Easter Egg, French Breakfast, White Icicle and Long Red Italian--will be sold at Underwood Ranches’ produce stand in Somis.

Although originally the farmers had planned to plant Conejo Ranch entirely with gourmet greens, they decided to add other vegetables to boost their restaurant supply business and add stock for the produce stand.

Radishes and turnips are compatible with greens in their irrigation and pesticide needs, so they seemed the logical choice. They also fit the Underwood Ranches credo: grow niche crops rather than mass-produced vegetables.

“We’re trying to stay out of the path of agribusiness giants” who grow huge quantities of iceberg lettuce or tomatoes, Athanassiadis said. “We don’t think we could win a fight against a Dole or a Del Monte.”

To ensure a continual harvest of their specialty crops through the winter, the partners decided to plant Conejo Ranch in eight-acre strips, seeding a new patch every week or so with greens, bok choy, turnips and radishes.

Up to 2 million plants can squeeze into a single acre.

“The way I see it, the sun’s our energy, and the more we can cover a field with leaves, the more we can take advantage of the sun,” Roberts explained.

That approach would not work with standard-size vegetables, which need considerable breathing room. But the baby crops that Underwood Ranches specializes in are harvested young, while they’re small.

Hooked to a tractor, the planting machine rumbled slowly down the field one recent afternoon, scattering seeds from its 13 plastic storage bins. After each drop, a metal roller punched the seed a few centimeters into the dirt and two rectangular plates patted the soil into thin ridges.

At $18 a pound, with 20 pounds strewn across each acre, gourmet mizuna, tatsoi and arugula seeds cost about $360 per acre, considered relatively cheap. At least compared with baby carrots, which run about $500 an acre. Or radicchio, at $460 an acre.

But whatever the variety, the seeds are a minimal expense next to the gamble of preparing Conejo Ranch for planting, an eight-month effort that hit the partners’ pockets hard and devoured their waking hours.

“I hate daylight-saving time because it means more hours of farming,” sighed Sara Jane Underwood, whose husband, Craig, wakes up at 4:30 a.m. daily to hit the fields.

Rocking her 2-year-old daughter on her lap, Karen Roberts ruefully agreed: “If it’s light out there, they’ll be working.”

Because the field had lain fallow for so long, Underwood and his partners had to spend almost two months fine-tuning their preparations before they could drop even one seed into the sandy topsoil.

To coax nascent weeds out quickly, before the first planting, Roberts decided to irrigate early. He laid sprinkler pipes across the entire field, the size of 47 football fields, and gave the earth a good soaking.

As soon as the weeds poked up, shadowing the field like 5 o’clock stubble, Roberts sent out a machine to rip them up. Then, he ordered another round of leveling.

Wearing red ear mufflers over a faded blue baseball cap, a white surgeon’s mask over his nose and mouth, Matias Pena drove the dusty yellow leveler in neat rows across the field one late October afternoon.

Dragging behind the tractor, a grading machine that looks like a splayed-out metal insect swept the field, smoothing the topsoil to an even plane.

“It’s not difficult with a little practice and some brains,” Pena said.

Meanwhile, another crew drove a rake across the field to cull out rocks and other debris. Later, they would till the topsoil by pummeling it with tiny, rotating hammers to break up clods of dirt and mince any weeds still clinging to the earth.

The final step: digging furrows by dragging a rake behind a green-and-yellow tractor. “Many people wouldn’t like to work in the dirt all day,” planting supervisor Zavala said. “But I think there’s no such thing as ugly work if a man wants to do it.”

*

While Zavala struggles to explain the link between life and the land, his fellow farm workers tend to keep their minds on their paychecks.

In a factory, they might earn minimum wage for a standard 40-hour workweek. At Underwood Ranches, most field hands start at $5.25 an hour for the first three months, moving up to $6.25 an hour for the next three.

After six months with the company, most laborers earn $6.92 an hour, with overtime for Saturdays and night shifts.

“We don’t come here to be a burden on the government or to be maintained by the government,” worker Francisco Ambriz said, standing tall in his stained shirt, brown pants and a rakish cowboy hat. “We came here to work, all of us.”

One notch above the laborers, crew supervisors and construction workers earn $7.64 to $8.84 an hour. The planting and irrigation foremen earn a few dollars more. Everyone gets two weeks’ paid vacation, another two weeks of unpaid leave, and health insurance.

Mostly Mexican immigrants who have obtained legal residency or work permits, the field hands start out on the night shift--spraying chemicals when the winds are low--and graduate to daytime planting, picking or tractor driving.

“Jeez, it’s a long day,” Agustin Garcia, 32, said, wiping his brow in mock exhaustion. Often, he toils from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week to support his wife and three daughters.

Since he got assigned to driving a tractor--after a year on construction and maintenance--Garcia has noticed one drawback with modern, mechanized field work: his steadily expanding waistline.

Wearing a Chicago Bulls sweat shirt, though he favors the Phoenix Suns, Garcia patted his paunch and admitted to gaining 25 pounds.

Fortunately, his wife doesn’t mind, Garcia said. “As long as I get a check, no problem.”

Rafael Lopez cares about his paycheck, too. But when he arrived in California nearly 30 years ago, he turned down a higher-paying job to work in agriculture.

A Santa Monica restaurant was offering $1.25 an hour back then to “wash plates and scrape off people’s leftover food,” Lopez recounted, screwing up his face in disgust. He tried it, but lasted only three days in the smelly, noisy kitchen.

“It makes me more healthy and happy to be out in the fields,” he said. “I wanted to know the land.”

While Lopez claims he can tell how much to irrigate simply by feeling the soil, he does employ a general formula.

He’ll douse the field for eight to 12 hours after a planting. To make sure the soil is moist enough for seedlings to poke through, he’ll turn on the sprinklers again four days and eight days later, for about four hours each time.

“The first eight days after planting can determine if you’ll make money or lose money,” rancher Roberts said. “You have to keep the top layer of soil from getting crusty, because if the seeds can’t break through, they die. The worst thing we can do is irrigate improperly.”

For now, Lopez irrigates Conejo Ranch with free water, pumped from the rock-lined Conejo Creek that runs along the field’s western border.

But soon, farmers throughout the Santa Rosa Valley, including Underwood and his partners, will have to pay up to $800 an acre for a year’s worth of water.

Much of Conejo Creek’s slow-eddying flow comes from the Thousand Oaks waste-water treatment plant, tucked in the craggy cliffs of Hill Canyon north of Conejo Ranch. Instead of watching the water flow unused to the ocean, Thousand Oaks city leaders are determined to sell the waste-water plant’s discharge, which is clean enough for agricultural irrigation.

Farmers in the Santa Rosa Valley tied up the city’s plans in court several years ago by challenging an environmental impact report on the proposed sale. Recently, however, the city reached an agreement to sell its treated discharge to the Calleguas Municipal Water District.

Calleguas, in turn, will sell the water to the Camrosa and Pleasant Valley water districts, which will then peddle it to farmers. So instead of dipping into the creek for free, Underwood and his partners will have to pay for water through at least two middlemen.

Still, they’re philosophical about the expense.

“Of course we like it the way it is now, because we can just pull water out of the creek,” Underwood said. “But as long as they charge reasonable rates, we can pay them.”

*

The water the ranchers use for irrigating Conejo Ranch may be treated waste water, but it looks a whole lot cleaner than the “compost tea” they recently developed to battle bugs.

After dissolving a homemade compost in water to create a muddy, sludgy “tea,” the farmers stir in specific insecticides and spray it on pest-infested crops. In theory, the mix should combine beneficial fungi from the compost with bug-zapping chemicals from the insecticides.

The compost tea is just one example of the partners’ efforts “to manipulate nature a bit without spending too much money or harming the environment,” Roberts said.

They start by analyzing the soil on each field--digging 20 or so holes and sending samples to a laboratory for a nutrient check. If nitrogen, potassium, sulfur or some other key element is lacking, they tailor their fertilization program to bring the dirt into healthy balance.

It’s science--with a strong dose of magic.

“When you’re dealing with soil in a lab, it’s pretty easy to quantify,” Roberts said. “But in a field, everything’s a whole lot bigger than we can really understand. No one knows why a lot of this stuff works.”

Perhaps the most amazing process is composting, when the farmers turn bits of paper and the discarded fruit from avocado and lemon packing houses into nutrient-rich fertilizer. Bacteria gnaw busily away at the odd mixture, breaking it down into organic matter and generating enough energy to heat a compost heap to 150 degrees.

Normally, Underwood and Roberts pile five tons of compost onto every acre they plant. The added nutrients help bind the soil particles together, making the earth softer, so plants can stretch their roots and shoots. Left unfertilized, the soil tends to form a hard crust, which seedlings have trouble penetrating.

On Conejo Ranch, the partners decided to skip the composting this year. They had already plowed enough organic matter into the soil, they reasoned, when they cut the trees and shrubs that had grown up during the field’s long fallow period.

Instead of compost, the ranchers spread ammonium sulfate, a dry fertilizer composed mainly of nitrogen and sulfur, with the consistency of coarse salt. Spewing the granules through a big yellow funnel, a slow-moving tractor fertilized three beds at once.

The nitrogen provides enriching nutrients, while the sulfur combines with calcium in the soil to leach out salts that might choke the plants’ tender roots.

Total cost for Conejo Ranch: just $1,800.

But while the ranchers tout their commercial fertilizer as an effective, cheap way to feed the soil, the state’s organic certifying board regards ammonium sulfate as taboo.

The nitrogen can leach into the ground water, contaminating aquifers. And overuse of fertilizer can kill beneficial organisms, such as earthworms, by changing the soil’s acidity, said Brian Baker, a technical coordinator with the nonprofit group California Certified Organic Farmers.

Used correctly, however, ammonium sulfate does not wreck the earth, according to Ben Faber, a soil expert at the University of California Cooperative Extension in Ventura. In fact, by stimulating plant growth, the fertilizer actually increases the concentration of roots in the soil and feeds earthworms, he said.

But the key is moderation.

If piled on, ammonium sulfate can destroy soil structure. “And there are always some guys who say, ‘Hey, 100 pounds works so well, I’m going to go for 200 pounds,’ ” Faber acknowledged.

*

Roberts understands the pro-organic arguments. Although he uses half a dozen synthetic chemicals, he tries to keep the amounts to a minimum. And he always looks for products that will leave the beneficial insects in the soil unscathed.

“We as farmers have tended to back the chemical industry too much,” Roberts said, “and argue that losing this chemical or that chemical would change agriculture as we know it. But in the last five years, we’ve lost 50% of our chemicals and we seem to be doing well enough.”

Nonetheless, Roberts can’t see how he could wean his fields from the artificial stuff entirely and still turn a profit.

When he refrains from spraying herbicide on lettuce and beet crops, Roberts has to send in teams to hand-pick the weeds--at a cost of about $500 an acre, 10 times the price of a chemical application. If he skips commercial fertilizer, his plants may turn yellow in the summer, making them unfit for use in the ranch’s gourmet salad mix.

Only about 500 farmers statewide are certified organic, representing just 1% of California’s total irrigated agricultural acreage.

And of those ranchers, more than one-quarter also maintain some fields for conventional, chemically aided farming.

“In some ways, the organic farmers are sticking their heads in the sand,” Roberts said. “You can’t say everything made by man is bad.”

As an example, he pointed to the herbicide and insecticide he used on Conejo Ranch just after planting. Both, he said, have been proved safe over decades of use.

To apply the chemicals, workers don rubber boots, gloves, goggles, masks and waterproof suits.

From a tractor one November night, they sprayed the weed-killer Dacthal and the pest-attacking Lorsban. Spreading four pounds per acre--less than one-third the legal limit--costs about $2,000 for the entire field.

Dacthal is “as close to a nontoxic pesticide as you can find,” said Veda Federighi, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Pesticide Regulation. The chemical is so benign, she said, that scientists testing its potency by feeding it to rats found it nearly impossible to kill the lab animals, no matter how much Dacthal they fed them.

As for Lorsban, it’s commonly used in home gardens, and is so safe and effective against fleas that some pet owners rub it on their dogs, Federighi said.

Because sunlight breaks down the chemicals and renders them ineffectual, the ranchers must irrigate immediately after spraying to allow the herbicide and insecticide to set.

In theory, the chemicals break down completely within weeks, so no residue lingers on the mature plants.

A state report last year found that less than 1% of California’s raw produce contains illegal levels of pesticide residue.

“I think the chemical companies are mostly telling the truth when they write their labels,” Roberts said. “From a liability standpoint, they have to.”

*

A moderate approach to pesticide use was part of the lesson Roberts attempted to teach to 60 second-graders from Webster Elementary School in Malibu who recently toured Underwood Ranches.

But the screaming, skipping youngsters were more interested in filling their silver garbage bags with farm-fresh produce.

As they tore through tomato, carrot and corn fields, stuffing their bags with newly picked booty, the children whooped a steady chant: “Car-rots, car-rots, car-rots.”

“I like the sound of that,” Roberts said, grinning and tossing his dog, Roy, an ear of raw corn. “That’s our future generation of customers.”

The tour so impressed one student, 7-year-old Blake Mills, that he decided on the spot to go into agriculture. But rather than bear the full responsibility of ranching, he thought he’d rather be a laborer--”because I like carrying stuff that’s real heavy,” he said.

The field hand’s life might have seemed romantic to Blake and his second-grade buddies. But as much as Zavala loves the land, he recognizes that his labor has become a lifelong trap.

When he came to America at age 15, tagging along with his father, Zavala escaped a life of harsh poverty in Mexico. His family had always barely scraped by. Growing up, Zavala shared a one-room, dirt-floor hut with three siblings and his parents.

But once in California, he dreamed of returning to Mexico. “We all had many illusions about life in America,” Zavala said. “We thought we would earn a lot of money and return to Mexico. Yet very few of us can do that.”

With eight children to support, Zavala cannot see leaving his $10.40-an-hour job as planting foreman. And he cannot imagine ever saving enough money to pursue his fantasy--owning a ranch in his native land.

Zavala also stays with Underwood Ranches because he--like many of the other field hands--respects his patrones .

“This is a unique place, because the bosses give you respect and have confidence in you,” he said. “They treat you like a human being.”

About This Series

“60 Acres of Hope,” a seasonal series that began in October, will trace the first year of a Southern California farm field. Today’s article focuses on the first planting--the work needed to drop 100 million seeds into the soil, and the fertilizers and pesticides used to boost crop yield. It also looks at the laborers, mainly Mexican immigrants, who spend long hours working the land. Future stories will explain the harvest and marketing efforts and will also follow the farmers’ struggle against pests and bad weather. Finally, the series will explore the perilous economics of farming.

THE FIRST PLANTING

After months of preparation, this 60-acre field was finally ready for planting in mid-November. The partners had already cleared the land, chopping and shredding the overgrown brush, and had installed underground pipes to drain excess water. They then waited anxiously until the weather looked good, the market seemed right, and their equipment and crews were free. The week before Thanksgiving, Craig Underwood and his partners seeded the first eight-acre strip. Here are the seven steps of the process that will result in Conejo Ranch’s first crop in 15 years. It will be ready for harvest at the end of February.

Irrigation

Proper irrigation is critical to the early life of a seedling. Too little water will cause the surface to dry up, preventing the seedlings from breaking through. Once the young plants have broken the surface, they must be kept moist enough to grow at a healthy rate.

The field is irrigated in several stages: before planting to help germinate any weeds in the soil, immediately after insecticides and herbicides are applied, and again every couple of days, for four hours at a time. Once seedlings have emerged, irrigating is done less frequently.

1) Preparing the Soil: Discs, rakes, “chisels” (shown above) and planes were used to break up clumps of earth and level the soil for planting.

2) Making the Beds: Rakes were towed behind the tractor to create the beds.

3) Pre-Irrigating the Soil: The field is watered to germinate the weeds, which are then raked from the soil.

4) Final Soil Preparations: A power mulcher towed behind the tractor further refined the soil. Fertilizers were then applied.

5) Planting: Towed behind a tractor, the planter dropped evenly spaced seeds just below the soil’s surface.

6) Application of Herbicides and Insecticides: Chemicals were sprayed over the field to fight weeds and crop-destroying insects.

7) Irrigating the Crop: To prevent the breakdown of the herbicides, the field was watered immediately after spraying.

How much water is used?

* Up to 1,200 gallons of water, pumped from Conejo Creek, are used every minute.

* The 36 sprinklers spray a total of 60,000 gallons of water per hour.

* More than 1 1/2 miles of pipes are used to irrigate an eight-acre crop.

One hour or irrigation consumes about the same amount of water as a typical residential block of single-family homes uses in six days.

The Planter

A customized planter, capable of planting 13 rows was built to accommodate the wider beds. At right is look at an individual planting unit.

(To maximize yield per acre, seeds were planted in 80-inch beds, twice the standard width.)

1. The hopper is filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny seeds.

2. The seeds fall into the seed compartment where they are picked up one at a time by the rotating seed cups.

3. As the cups reach the top of their rotation, they twist, dropping the seed through the seed chute and into the small furrow created by the shoe.

4. A steel wheel then rolls over the furrow, burying the seeds just below the surface.

Sowing the Seeds

* To maintain a continual harvest, planting is done in eight-acre strips, with a new patch seeded about every week.

* Each acre holds up to 2 million seeds of the baby vegetables.

* Seeds cost about $18 per pound or about $2,900 for the eight acres.

About the Crop

Conejo Ranch’s first crop will be ready for harvest about three months after planting. The three types of exotic greens, shown at left, will be tossed into packaged gourmet salads, for sale in supermarkets and at farmers’ markets. The baby bok choy and turnips will be shipped to Southern California restaurants, and the radishes will end up at Underwood Ranches’ produce stand in Somis.

Sources: Craig Underwood and Jim Roberts, Underwood Ranches, White Seed Co., Department of Water and Power, city Planning Department

Research by JULIE SHEER, STEPHANIE SIMON and TREVOR JOHNSTON / Los Angeles Times