Lives in Blossom : Addicts Toil on Unusual Ranch in Santa Paula to Regain Control

A few hours of sweaty fieldwork--dragging a rake across a newly plowed furrow--gave Jonathan Wood a feeling he had never before experienced.

He hadn’t felt it when he was studying for his business degree at Cal Lutheran University.

Or when he was arrested for selling methamphetamines.

Or when he was serving any one of his half a dozen prison stints for possessing, using or pushing drugs.

But at Victory Outreach’s organic ranch, toiling under a brilliant Santa Paula sky, Wood suddenly felt like laughing and crying--and changing.

“I started thinking about life--all the bad choices I had made, all the wrong decisions,” said Wood, a thin 27-year-old. “A force out of nowhere just hit me. It was wild.”

Wild, perhaps, for Wood--but nothing unusual for Victory Outreach.

Through a regimen of Bible study, prayer and hard work, the nonprofit ministry aims to help “the hurting people, the drug addicts, the down-and-outers,” in the words of Pastor Bob Herrera, who started the program.

Victory Outreach works best for men and women with religious backgrounds who are willing to turn to the Bible for comfort as they struggle to shake their addictions.

“It’s a fairly severe indoctrination, especially when you’re first trying to kick the habit; you’re basically kept incommunicado,” said Jean Farley, an assistant public defender who has referred many clients to Victory Outreach.

“I would not recommend it for anyone who tells me they do not believe in God or do not want to believe in God,” she added. “But that almost never happens. People get pretty desperate when they’re strung out on drugs.”

Since Herrera started the Ventura County branch of Victory Outreach in his garage nine years ago, the program has won accolades from local politicians, police officers and even former President George Bush.

Now, Victory Outreach has also earned the support of a Ventura businessman and a Camarillo farmer, who together have helped Herrera achieve his vision of merging drug rehabilitation and organic farming on a 34-acre ranch off South Mountain Road.

“Drug addiction is a selfish habit, and the men begin to lose that trait when they get on the ranch,” Herrera said. “They become responsible. They begin to worry about how many weeds are out there, how come this end of the field isn’t growing like that end. Their minds get healthy.”

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Investor Mel Cummings sold Victory Outreach the ranch for $500,000 last year--then agreed to carry the mortgage for the ministry, which would be hard-pressed to secure a bank loan. “I’ve seen a lot of miracles happen with Victory Outreach,” said Cummings, himself a recovering alcoholic. “Any way I can help them, I will.”

The same conviction motivated farmer Jim Roberts of Underwood Ranches to donate fruit and vegetable seeds, used equipment and hours of his time.

A Camarillo company, Corona Seeds, also pitched in with several hundred dollars worth of vegetable seeds. Owner Michael Newman said he believes in the concept of rehabilitation through ranching because working the land can be “very therapeutic and very productive, not like pounding bricks or making license plates in jail.”

Aside from its therapeutic value, the ranch helps keep Victory Outreach solvent.

By selling the organic produce at local farmers markets, the ministry clears up to $2,000 a month. Plus, the bountiful crops help cut down on supermarket bills. Victory Outreach also relies on donations from its 350 congregation members to support the drug rehabilitation program.

Many ministry members give of their time as well as their money.

As an example, Herrera points to Daniel Lopez, his “minister of farming.”

A heroin addict for 34 years, Lopez wandered into a Victory Outreach church on Christmas Day six years ago--and has been clean ever since.

He now works on the ranch, overseeing the clients and doing a fair share of grubby labor himself. Lopez has turned down plastering jobs paying up to $28 an hour, sticking instead with Victory Outreach and its token $50 weekly stipend.

It’s his way of paying back a program that rescued him, he says, from the “pit of hell.”

“I believed I would die a drug addict,” Lopez said. “I counted 12 times that I overdosed and woke up in the emergency room. Then one day I was 47 years old, and I looked around and realized I had nothing. Even the shirt on my back was borrowed.”

When he first encountered Victory Outreach’s philosophy of spirituality and hard work, Lopez hesitated. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, what did I get myself into?’ ” he recalled. “But I was at the point where, if I had to stand on my head for a week to turn my life around, I would have done it.”

Drawing on his own experience with drug addiction, prison time and street life, Lopez can empathize with the young men who come to Victory Outreach. Some wander in on their own, after hearing of the ministry through friends. Others are under court order to work through the rehabilitation program, which runs for nine months to a year, depending on individual progress.

On a recent Thursday, Lopez stopped his shiny orange tractor in the field to counsel Wood, a new arrival from Ojai.

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They talked aphids and ants, discussed when to pick watermelons and inspected a cardboard box full of the summer’s last yellow squash. Then Lopez told Wood his favorite story--how he realized, in a flash of insight just a few weeks ago, that his infant son Gabriel was the only one of his six children he had ever cradled, ever rocked, ever played with.

The point of the story: Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone should get a second chance to do things right.

“We’re here to see you guys make it,” Lopez said, “every one of you.”

To that end, Lopez directs his clients in six-hour workdays, which start shortly after a 6 a.m. prayer.

Hands scarred from years on the streets learn to root out weeds and wield hoes. Men who have spent decades strung out on drugs learn to grow and cook organic food. City kids who have never seen a zucchini learn to tell the difference between romaine and butter lettuce.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Aw, I don’t want to work on the ranch today. I could be out there on the streets,’ ” said Robert Soto, 35, who started using heroin at age 11 and has been in and out of prison ever since. “But working out here gives you time to think about what you really want out of life.”

County officials last year put some heat on the Victory Outreach ranch because of health and safety violations, including an inadequate waste-disposal system and the illegal conversion of a barn into a dormitory. Herrera also ran into a problem because the farm sits within an open-space zone that does not allow for residential drug rehabilitation programs.

But in the past year, Victory Outreach organizers have corrected most of the violations, said Todd Collart of the county’s planning department.

The 27 men now going through the program have moved out of the barn. Instead, they live off the ranch in Oxnard’s Crystal Lodge. Victory Outreach leaders recently took over management of the hotel from Cummings, the same investor who sold them the ranch.

In addition to Crystal Lodge, Victory Outreach runs a group home in Santa Paula for seven women recovering from drug addiction. Although they do not work on the farm, the women help out by selling produce at farmers markets and holding car washes to raise money for the church. Several also work at Gospel Light, a Christian publishing company based in Ventura.

The neighborhood around Crystal Lodge on South Oxnard Boulevard has a reputation for being one of the city’s most crime-ridden, drug-infested areas, Cummings said. He’s hoping that Victory Outreach will turn it around.

“I’d like to see recovery become more addictive than drugs and alcohol,” he said. “I think it can be contagious.”