Harvest Time: Tossing Work, Luck Into Salad : Agriculture: Gourmet greens are sent across country as a field near Camarillo produces its first profits.

From the freeway, the field now looks like a vast, just-vacuumed carpet, a uniform stretch of bright, bright green.

Up close, however, the beds more resemble a scruffy patchwork quilt.

Nurturing three types of lettuce plus radishes and turnips, the field bristles with contrasting shapes, sizes and colors. A broad oval here, a spiky nub there. A deep green, a silver sheen.

It’s been nearly a year since three ranchers bought the 60-acre patch just outside Camarillo for $420,000, taking out hefty bank loans and risking their other landholdings as collateral. They spent countless hours--and hundreds of thousands more dollars--preparing the long-abandoned acreage for planting.

Now, it’s payoff time.

After months of spending, the farmers are ready to earn. But first, they must harvest the blooming field and find markets for the gourmet greens.

Because rancher Jim Roberts planted the field in eight-acre strips, his workers have been picking the crop steadily throughout the winter. So far, they’ve harvested about half of the 60 acres dubbed Conejo Ranch.

As always, the laborers have encountered a few weeds and a few bugs as they trudge through the endless bend-and-pick rhythm of the harvest.

But overall, “the field’s done all right,” Roberts said. “We’ve sold most of the crop,” he added. “That’s what counts.”

Abandoned for more than a decade before Roberts and his partners reclaimed the swampy land for agriculture, Conejo Ranch has survived its first big test. But while the field has produced well, the partners at Underwood Ranches remain disappointed.

The culprit: this winter’s confoundedly perfect weather.

To Craig Underwood’s dismay, farmers across Southern and Central California have been enjoying remarkably mild temperatures this year. Unscathed by October’s wildfires, January’s earthquake and February’s mudslides, many ranches have produced bumper crops.

The crackling freezes that usually grip the Imperial Valley have skipped eastward. The cold, wet weather that usually dampens the Salinas harvest has given way to mild, spring-like temperatures.

And extended growing seasons in both regions have yielded more competition for Underwood Ranches.

“We try to anticipate Mother Nature. We plant in anticipation of other guys being out,” said sales director Minos Athanassiadis, a partner in the Conejo Ranch venture.

“Usually, winter means bad weather. Winter means frost. Winter means rain, disrupted planting seasons, lettuce crops freezing on the stalks,” Athanassiadis said. “Usually, winter tightens up the supply and lets us bring our prices above break-even.”

Usually. But not this year.

The average price farmers receive for their gourmet salad--a tumble of baby lettuce and exotic greens--has dropped to less than $9 for a three-pound box this year. Normally, that box would sell for about $12. Four years ago, when horrendous weather devastated the competition, even salad of mediocre quality fetched $14 a box.

That’s why the farmers at Underwood Ranches wouldn’t mind a freak freeze in Salinas.

Or some ravenous, lettuce-loving locusts in the Imperial Valley.

It sounds mean-spirited, but the partners don’t really wish their competition evil. A little run-of-the-mill bad luck would do just fine.

“You need something to happen somewhere, whether it be weather-related or a catastrophe,” said Alan Laird, deputy agricultural commissioner for Ventura County. “If everything goes along normally, and production is on schedule (everywhere), sometimes you have too much supply.”

Ironically, the bad weather elsewhere in the country is causing as much consternation as the unyielding warmth in California.

Slick roads and sinking temperatures back East have nibbled steadily away at the demand for fresh produce. Bundled in front of toasty fireplaces, even the hardiest consumers have cut back on trips to restaurants and supermarkets.

Despite the bulging supply and constricted demand, Underwood Ranches’ partners still earn 15% on their salad some months, when the capricious market breaks their way. But mostly, they’ve been watching glumly as net revenues dip further and further.

Still, harvest at Conejo Ranch continues.

Field hands, mostly Mexican immigrants, pack red crates with the gourmet greens each morning, picking just enough between 6 a.m. and noon to fill that day’s orders.

For now, they ignore the most recently planted rows, which nourish the smallest shoots. The baby plants, stripped across the eastern end of the field, remain smaller than clover, leaves no bigger than fingernails.

Marching in order of size like Russian nesting dolls, the greens gradually grow larger, peaking mid-field amid bushy heads of tatsoi and arugula.

Beyond the mature plants, in the westernmost block, lie the beds that have already been harvested. Churned-up dirt, sprinkled with a few stray leaves, creates a rough-textured contrast with the gleaming rows of green.

*

On days following a storm, new colors and textures join the montage of dirt and plants on Conejo Ranch. Shiny rivulets of water snake up the furrows and shimmering puddles pool in a trough toward the field’s southern edge.

On one such sodden morning in mid-February, Agustin Garcia drove a tractor through the muck to collect lettuce-laden crates and place empties in position for the next day’s harvest.

The tractor’s massive wheels wobbled drunkenly in the thick, grasping mud.

“It’s hard, huh?” Garcia said, grinning. “But I have to work. You get to be a big mess, but you don’t have a choice.”

Picking the baby greens is considered skilled work among field hands, who earn $6.92 an hour plus benefits. Each day they must assess the quality of the mature plants, and decide which leaves to cut with their stainless-steel knives. Because the lettuce bruises easily, they must handle the plants tenderly.

Carrots, in contrast, require only entry-level skills.

Harvesters simply pluck the baby carrots from the ground, check that the shoots are finger-sized and the tops a healthy shade of green, and chuck the vegetables into a crate. After seven years as Underwood Ranches’ harvest supervisor, Jesus Valladolid--known as Diablo--can estimate fairly well how many boxes of greens his crews will need to fill each morning. If the company gets a surprise order, he receives the news through his ever-crackling walkie-talkie and passes it on to his field foremen.

The walkie-talkie system makes communication easy--Jim Roberts carries his in a back pocket and flips it out like Clint Eastwood drawing a gun. Just a few years ago, however, Roberts and Diablo had no walkie-talkies.

Their salad crops, still experimental, were spread out among dozens of fields, squeezed between cauliflower and broccoli. To coordinate the harvest, they first had to find each other. And often, Roberts said, they would end up circling endlessly between Camarillo and Oxnard, driving 150 miles each in a single day.

As Underwood Ranches lurched toward large-scale production of baby lettuce and gourmet greens in the late 1980s, the partners lacked critical technology, from walkie-talkies on up.

And they came up with some pretty wacky substitutes.

An old Speed Queen laundry machine hooked up to a lawn-mower engine, for instance, served as an industrial-sized salad spinner.

Later, the farmers got electricity, abandoned the lawn-mower engine, and plugged in six new washers. But they never got around to disconnecting the coin boxes. So they kept a supply of quarters on hand, plunking them into the Laundromat machines each time they had to spin a batch of dripping salad.

Despite their decidedly unconventional techniques, Underwood Ranches began getting an increasing number of orders for the salad mix. To fill them, Roberts and his employees would often spend all evening packing crates. They would pull the refrigerated trucks in a tight circle, turn on the headlights and work in the resulting glare.

“It was an amazing period,” Roberts said, chuckling at the memory.

Now, of course, the salad preparation technology has become more sophisticated.

Salad ingredients come straight from the field to the packinghouse in Camarillo, the hub of the Underwood Ranches’ operation. Because the leaves lose a day of shelf life for each hour they sit in the sun, workers must cool the harvest immediately.

“It’s a race to get it cold as fast as you can,” Roberts said. “The worst thing you can do to a plant is cut it, because it’s dying after you pick it.”

Cooling preserves the lettuce for weeks. Some greens get an icy 20-minute shower under a waterfall (known officially as a hydrocooler). Others are draped with tarps and placed in front of a giant suction machine that whips cold air through the leaves.

Once cooled, the greens are dumped into a trough of water set at a specific temperature, with exact levels of chlorine and a precise acidity. Workers swirl the lettuce in first one basin, then another.

Finally, the salad is dried in a high-tech version of the laundry machines and packed into plastic-lined boxes.

A few orders are shipped Federal Express to finicky chefs who demand fresh-from-the-field produce daily. Other boxes are loaded onto trucks ferrying cargo to local supermarket chains, including Lucky, Ralphs, Hughes and Vons.

By avoiding both middlemen and shipping costs, area supermarkets can sell Underwood salad by the pound for several dollars less than retailers elsewhere in the country.

But the bulk of the salad is rushed each evening to the Los Angeles Produce Market, which shakes awake just after midnight.

From there, the Camarillo-bred greens embark on a convoluted--yet weirdly efficient--journey to supermarkets, restaurants and specialty groceries across the United States and as far away as Canada and Hong Kong.

*

In an East Los Angeles warehouse, Jim Ptaszenski adds the third of six price markups to a passel of gourmet greens from Conejo Ranch.

The salad has traveled just 55 miles from the emerald field at the base of the Conejo Grade. But already the price has jumped more than 110% above the cost of producing the ready-to-eat mix.

And that’s just the beginning.

In all, the price of a salad may jump nearly 220% above Underwood Ranches’ production cost by the time it arrives at a far-flung dinner table. To get there, it has to go through a bewildering number of middlemen.

The industry jargon sounds like so much gobbledygook. A box of Conejo Ranch greens hits a terminal marketer, a produce consolidator, a regional distributor, a wholesale jobber and a local retailer before reaching a consumer.

Or, in plain English:

To get their salad to a grocery store in Des Moines, Iowa, the Underwood partners start by shipping it to the Los Angeles Produce Market, where they sell it to a terminal marketer, such as Alan Pollack.

Pollack’s company, Coosemans, specializes in off-beat vegetables. He buys the specialty items from local and foreign growers, bundles them together in variety packs, and then trucks them down the street to another middleman, known as a consolidator.

The consolidator packs the gourmet items from Coosemans along with produce department standards, such as iceberg lettuce and yellow cooking onions. He’ll then ship the whole carton by air to a regional distributor in Chicago.

In Chicago, the distributor will sort and repack the California produce, perhaps adding tomatoes from Florida or potatoes from Idaho. Yet another truck will take the newly configured load to a “jobber” in Des Moines--basically, a wholesaler with a large warehouse.

Retailers will then buy directly from the jobbers, adding the sixth and final markup before passing the veggies to consumers.

All that for a bowl of salad.

Ironically, cutting middlemen would cripple the distribution system’s efficiency.

If a consolidator firm in Los Angeles tried to supply the Des Moines store directly, it would have to send half-empty trucks--a waste of time, fuel and labor. By shipping to a big-city wholesaler instead, the company ensures full cargo loads.

The round-about system suits grocery managers as well.

“Each grocery store carries 350 to 400 items of produce, and each grower will traditionally grow no more than 10,” Athanassiadis explained. “It’s not economically feasible for a small Des Moines store to send trucks each week to 35 different growers in California and Florida.”

Hence the need for Jim Ptaszenski’s brick-walled warehouse in East Los Angeles. Ptaszenski receives truckloads of fruits and vegetables each morning from the L.A. Produce Market and packs them to ship to wholesalers across the country.

One recent early morning, as smears of pale blue spread across the star-flecked sky, Ptaszenski took off his telephone headset and bounded down a rickety staircase to his loading room.

Boxes of Underwood Ranches carrots mingled with other fresh produce on the clean-swept floor, the pile dwindling rapidly as a worker packed the vegetables into an airplane shipping crate.

One full crate costs roughly $500 to send across the country--except during the Christmas season, when airlines carry so many cards for the Postal Service that they have little room for produce cargo. Squeezing a 3,000-pound crate of carrots and salad onto a commercial carrier during the Christmas rush can cost up to $1,000, Ptaszenski said.

*

To keep orders flowing and shippers hustling, the partners at Underwood Ranches have to keep pushing for new customers. Mainly, that’s Athanassiadis’ job. Once in a while, however, the others have to lend a hand.

And when he gets the call, Craig Underwood invariably gets grumpy.

A man who wears suits only to church, and even then reluctantly, Underwood must haul out his navy blazer and tie for national produce conventions twice a year.

Even dressed in his Sunday best, Underwood stays out of the spotlight, hovering at the fringe of his booth’s Burgundy carpet (a color chosen to reflect the rich reddish tones of the radicchio captured in a close-up photo of the salad mix).

Uncomfortable with the schmoozing and socializing considered vital in the tight-knit produce industry, Underwood keeps a profile so low he seems to vanish in the hullabaloo of produce conventions.

Take the recent hubbub at the San Diego Convention Center, for instance, during the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Assn’s. 90th annual expo.

Industry insiders strolled among 600 growers’ booths wearing suspenders brightened with chili pepper motifs, ties strewn with feathery-topped carrots, sweaters decorated with knit eggplants and onions.

At the Sunkist display, convention-goers putted golf balls through a spinning orange-shaped gate, while an electronic clock ticked off how many pieces of citrus have been sold this fiscal year (20,300,000 and counting).

At the Dole counter, people waiting for free salad grinned at a dancing banana in red running shoes. Elsewhere, they tapped their feet to live mariachi music, grabbed handfuls of free refrigerator magnets, and stormed past the display of extra-strong rubber bands.

Meanwhile, Underwood stood in the corner and smiled weakly.

“I’m a terrible salesperson,” he said, looking slightly dazed as crowds pressed around his booth. “I just hide and let my wife do all the work.”

That’s fine with Sara Jane Underwood, a registered nurse who has worked for the family business the past 36 years as a bookkeeper, saleswoman, farmer’s market representative and more.

Her specialty: lurking in supermarkets back home in Ventura County and pouncing on shoppers in the produce sections who load their carts with the “wrong” brand of salad or carrots.

The San Diego produce expo offered few opportunities for guerrilla tactics. But there was plenty of time for what marketing manager Dana Abercrombie called “the Sherlock Holmes bit”--sleuthing out the competition.

As she strolled through the crowded convention center, Abercrombie scanned each booth for new marketing ideas. Usually, she found more to criticize than to emulate.

“Their boxes don’t match their company colors,” she carped. “Their booth doesn’t look pulled together. They gotta think about the carpet.”

While Abercrombie evaluated the aesthetics, Athanassiadis scrutinized the vegetables.

As usual. “Minos is obsessed with produce,” said his wife, Tracey Athanassiadis, who works for a Santa Monica advertising agency. “If I send him into the supermarket for a carton of milk, he stays for half an hour. He always has to check out the competition.”

Sometimes, ironically, that competition is actually another Underwood Ranches’ product.

To satisfy some big-ticket wholesalers, who like to claim exclusive distribution rights to select products, the Underwood partners now market their carrots under several labels.

The ready-to-eat baby carrots, for instance, are sold through one wholesaler as Sweet Petite and through another as Melissa’s. Un-peeled carrots with fluffy green tops also come in two varieties identical but for the name: Underwood Ranches and Las Posas Valley.

Sometimes side-by-side on a single supermarket’s shelf, sometimes cross-town rivals, the dueling labels compete with each other, and could confuse customers.

But the complications are outweighed, Athanassiadis said, by the benefits: Packaging the produce differently satisfies large wholesalers, who account for nearly half of Underwood Ranches’ sales.

*

At the San Diego produce convention, the Underwood Ranches’ sales pros were seeking to boost the retail side of the business, trolling for big-ticket customers. They found a potential boon in Lynn Stogsdill, the tall and burly chief buyer for Walt Disney World.

Swinging by the Underwood Ranches’ booth, Stogsdill plucked a scrawny Sweet Petite carrot from a woven basket of freebies. He nibbled.

“Looks like an interesting product,” he said, still chewing as he walked off.

Not exactly a bells-and-whistles endorsement. But a prize nonetheless.

Just having Stogsdill’s card in hand was enough to encourage Abercrombie. Mind racing, she pictured a health-food stand at Walt Disney World. A pushcart vendor hawking snack-packs of Sweet Petites. A restaurant salad bar crammed with baby carrots.

Already, Stogsdill buys some Underwood Ranches’ salad for Walt Disney World in Florida, tossing the gourmet mix onto a few restaurant menus. If he could get excited about the carrots . . .

“He (Stogsdill) could really put us on the map,” said Steve Schiedermayer, the advertising executive in charge of marketing Sweet Petites.

But sales manager Athanassiadis remains wary.

“We don’t want to go crazy, to get drunk with the name of (potential customers) or the potential volume,” Athanassiadis said. “We don’t want to lose credibility by not being able to fill an order.”

Already, though, some competitors suspect he’ll be unable to resist the challenge.

And indeed, back home in Ventura County after three days at the produce convention, Athanassiadis sounded enthusiastic about his conversations with Disney and another potentially big customer, an upscale New Jersey supermarket.

Within a few weeks, he’ll design prototype carrot snack packs for the Disney buyer and seek new, customer-friendly ways to package beets and turnips for the New Jersey grocers.

All in all, Athanassiadis said, he’s reasonably satisfied with the produce convention. But partner Underwood was less enthusiastic.

“We probably won’t do that show next year, because we ended up talking more to our competition and our booth neighbors than to potential customers,” Underwood said.

The three-day produce convention cost the business roughly $4,000, between hotel rooms, meals and other expenses. On top of that, the booth itself--a stand-alone counter and a backdrop plastered with a close-up photo of Underwood produce--cost a hefty $7,000.

“If we just confirm a couple of customers, that’ll make up for the price,” Underwood said. “But it’s kind of questionable if it’s worth the money.”

Still a small business, with just three full-time sales and marketing staff members, Underwood Ranches spends only $40,000 a year on promotion. That tab includes two produce conventions, scattered advertising in trade magazines, supermarket demonstrations and visits to potential customers.

Abercrombie, the marketing manager, jumps at any chance to gain additional exposure. In San Diego, she happily doled out free carrots and salad to anyone who wandered by the booth, from grandmothers to toddlers.

“I like to have our products circulating in the industry, with our bag, our name, and our address on them,” she said. “It shows we’re a player.”

THE FIRST HARVEST

Conejo Ranch farmers began harvesting their gourmet greens in January. The lettuce is tossed into a gourmet salad mix that is distributed to customers in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong. While some salad gets shipped overnight express to restaurants, most is sent on a convoluted route that begins at the Los Angeles Produce Market.

Produce Market Route

Bagged salad stays fresh only 10 days, so quick distribution is essential. Still, the produce goes through six middlemen before reaching the consumer.

1) Lettuce is transported by refrigerated trucks to Los Angeles Produce Market, usually arriving by midnight in time for the market’s opening at 1 a.m.

Underwood sells box for: $9.35

2) Lettuce is sold to a warehouse distributor known as the terminal market wholesaler.

Wholesaler sells box for: $11.25

3) Lettuce is bundled with produce from other growers and trucked to a nearby consolidator.

Consolidator sells box for: $16.00

4) Consolidator packs gourmet items along with standard produce such as iceberg lettuce and ships carton by air to a regional distributor in Chicago.

Distributor sells box for: $17.00

5) Distributor in Chicago repacks produce. The new package is trucked to a “jobber”--a warehouse wholesaler.

Wholesaler sells box for: $18.00

6) Retailer or restaurant buys produce directly from jobber and sells to consumer.

Market sells 1 pound of greens for: $8.00

Restaurant sells 4-ounce salad for: $5.00

A Day (and a Half) in the Life of a Salad: How a Box of Greens Gets from Field to Table

By shipping Federal Express, Underwood Ranches can supply fresh greens to restaurants across the country in less than 30 hours from picking. This timeline and map follow the trail of salad greens from Conejo Ranch, on the outskirts of Camarillo, to a restaurant table in Pittsburgh:

6 a.m. Picking: Crews begin cutting lettuce. They use stainless steel knives, assessing quality of plants and carefully handling the easily bruised leaves. Lettuce is put into basket after being cut.

7 a.m. Cooling: The baskets are emptied into large bins and taken to the nearby packing facility. To extend the life of the greens, they are showered for 20 minutes in 38- to 40-degree water, or moved into a refrigerated building where they are placed in front of a machine that sucks cold air from the room through the leaves.

9 a.m. Washing: Greens are dumped into large tanks of chlorinated water where they receive two thorough washings. To ensure cleanliness, workers wear long sanitary gloves, boots and bonnets. Masks with charcoal filters protect against chlorine fumes.

10 a.m. Drying: The lettuce is dried in an electric machine, similar to a kitchen salad spinner, that spins the greens, throwing excess water off the leaves.

11 a.m. Packing: Lettuce is then dumped into a large plastic crate and packed into plastic-lined boxes.

2 p.m. Shipping: The boxes are loaded into refrigerated Federal Express trucks for delivery to LAX, then flown to Pittsburgh via Memphis.

The following day . . . Lettuce arrives at the Pittsburgh restaurant by 10:30 a.m. and is served that evening.

The Product

Conejo Ranch grows these three types of gourmet greens, which are mixed with nine other ingredients to form Underwood Ranches’ Sweet Petite salads.

Arugula: Its peppery taste gives a salad a kick.

Mizuna: Its crunchy leaves add texture.

Tatsol: Its nutty flavor gives a salad body.

Route of the Greens

This map shows some of the locations of the more than 50 Underwood Ranches’ customers, who receive the greens by truck or air. Terminal markets Los Angeles San Francisco Chicago New York Boston *Supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, convention centers. Los Angeles San Francisco Phoenix Denver Albuquerque Dallas St. Louis Minneapolis New Orleans Atlanta Miami Orlando (Disney World) Pittsburgh White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia Washington, D.C. Philadelphia Atlantic City New York Sources: Minos Athanassiadis and Jim Roberts, Underwood Ranches

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

ABOUT THIS SERIES

“60 Acres of Hope,” a series that began in October, traces the first year of a Southern California farm field. The first two articles detailed the field’s history and first planting, and looked at the ranchers and laborers who spend long hours on the land. This story focuses on the first harvest, the packing, distribution and marketing strategy. Future articles will explore the economics of farming and the ranchers’ attempts to find a niche in the crowded produce industry.