Growing Pains : Agriculture: Corn crop went bust, the EPA is probing possible destruction of wetlands and neighbors threaten legal action over smelly compost.

Craig Underwood’s brand of hope was always cautious, always tempered--expressed in a half-sprung smile as close to optimism as a farmer can come. But even that most tentative brand now looks reckless.

For this summer has been utterly woeful.

Underwood and his partners--grower Jim Roberts and sales manager Minos Athanassiadis--are reeling. Their 60-acre Ventura County investment, a rich field outside Camarillo, has crumbled into calamity.

After a hardscrabble fall, a break-even winter and a promising spring, it’s been a disastrous summer. The corn crop lost money, and neighbors threatened to sue over a smelly compost heap.

And in perhaps the most crushing blow, federal investigators have stepped up a probe that could cost the partners their farm.

“I think I’m going to crawl into a hole,” Underwood said bleakly. “I want to disappear.”

Born to farming families, all three partners recognized the risks when they mortgaged other landholdings in the spring of 1993 to buy a tumble-down plot of Ventura County land dubbed Conejo Ranch for $420,000.

Their venture seemed stubborn, naive--they were launching a farm while all around them, growers sought to sell land to wealthy developers.

Nationwide, about 2 million acres of farmland vanish each year. Once-rural Ventura County, too, has lost ground, as outlet malls, movie theaters and plaintive “For Sale” signs have sprouted on the fertile Oxnard Plain.

The Conejo Ranch partners expected challenges. They even expected setbacks. But they never expected a federal investigation.

Investigators from the Environmental Protection Agency suspect the partners may have destroyed a wetland when they bulldozed a thicket of wild plants in the summer of 1993 as they prepared to transform the ranch from a scraggly swamp into a tidy farm.

“This particular site concerns us, because it was a fairly good area for various kinds of wildlife,” EPA attorney Jessica Kao said.

Indeed, when the partners bought the field, they found quail scurrying among the brush. They heard talk of a mountain lion in the area. And their mascot mutt, Lucy, emerged from an exploratory romp crawling with ticks.

Scattered about the field, several low-lying pockets sagged into pools of silty muck.

Some of the moisture could be attributed to simple geography--Conejo Ranch sits in a flood plain, and collects runoff from surrounding hills. The field also boasts an unusually high water table, Underwood said.

But Underwood thought most of the puddles had dribbled onto the field from a broken pipe.

In the late 1980s, he said, the culvert draining water from a nearby lemon grove had ruptured, diverting the flow toward Conejo Ranch. As the field had been abandoned nearly a decade earlier, no one bothered to repair the culvert or clear away the sprouting vegetation. So, he reasoned, Conejo Ranch, soggy and untended, evolved into a swamp.

The land had been devoted to agriculture for more than a century: first as a cattle pasture, and later as a vegetable farm. Conejo Ranch was meant to be cultivated, the partners reasoned--even if they had to install an underground drainage system to suck moisture from the gooey soil.

The owners said no one imagined that the fertile 60-acre swath might be considered a wetland.

Whether fed by an underground spring or a leaky air conditioner, any moist patch of ground can be classified as a wetland--as long as its plants, hydrology and soil meet certain scientific criteria, federal officials said.

Because the partners razed the vegetation and churned the soil on Conejo Ranch last summer, EPA investigators have had trouble determining whether the field meets those standards. Conejo Ranch could have been a teeming riparian habitat before the farmers moved in to tame it. Or it could have been simply a waterlogged lot.

EPA biologist Aaron Setran will have to make the call. Setran rooted through Conejo Ranch in late July to dig up spoonfuls of soil and shreds of roots.

Setran will scrutinize the dirt for classic signs of wetlands: clay particles, orange streaks of oxidized iron, root specks from riparian plants. He plans to announce his conclusions by the end of September.

The EPA could file a complaint accusing the partners of knowingly destroying a wetland, a violation of the federal Clean Water Act. If the partners resist the EPA, the agency could levy an administrative penalty of up to $125,000, plus criminal penalties and civil fines totaling $75,000 a day.

No investigator expects such severe punishment. But the next level of penalties would hit the farmers nearly as hard: The government could force them to pull out the Conejo Ranch crops and restore the field to its natural state.

The EPA would order the farmers off the field, however, only if scientists could be sure the land would bloom into a viable wetland. As an alternative, the EPA might order them to enhance a wetlands elsewhere in Ventura County.

“We need to determine what’s good for the environment and what’s equitable under the circumstances,” Kao said.

The farmers’ battle with the EPA echoes a increasingly common conflict: Agriculture versus the Environment. Their second agony of the summer could be summed up with equally stark polarity: Agriculture versus the Suburbs.

The problem flared in early August, when residents of eastern Camarillo caught a gut-churning whiff of the decaying compost heap stashed at the far end of Conejo Ranch.

A cornucopia of half-rotted vegetables piled high along 300-foot-long rows, the compost heap resembled a macabre banquet. And more to the point, it stunk.

Even from a mile away, residents could smell the fumes. Some said the stench could wake them from a dead slumber. Others blamed it for scratchy throats or stuffed-up noses.

“You have to take a bath when you get home, that’s for sure,” field worker Agustin Garcia said with a wry grin.

To create the compost heap, Underwood Ranches hauls lemon peels and avocado pits from local packing houses to the field. The partners add their own processing plant’s waste--limp carrots, brittle corn husks, wilted radishes. Finally, they toss purple, green and white scraps of paper on the weirdly vibrant piles.

This summer, the biochemical stew turned rancid. Oxygen pockets in the compost heap collapsed. The only bacteria that can live in that environment emit foul smells as they gnaw away at the waste.

Underwood had hoped to leave the pile on Conejo Ranch through Thanksgiving, until the waste decomposed enough to be spread as fertilizer. But he could not stomach the complaints. At a cost of $7,000, he hauled the pile to another of his fields--one far from suburbanites.

Gloomily, he announced: “We raised the white flag.”

To make moods even worse, the corn crop lost money all summer long.

“This has been the worst year in 20 or more,” Underwood said. “Most people cannot remember such a depressed market lasting so long. It started in November and it’s still going.”

The farmers at Underwood Ranches had hoped to command a sizable share of the corn market this year. They didn’t come close. The first hint of trouble cropped up in mid-June, when the corn began to “silk,” sending out its sticky, slender, yellow-brown hairs.

From afar, the field seemed a flawless golden carpet, framed by a snaggletooth row of eucalyptus trees, a shrub-blotted mountain and a distant glint of cars. Up close, the rows of furry tassels beckoned alluringly, proud pennants of a ripening crop.

Majestic. But misleading.

Underwood knew, just from looking, that the corn wouldn’t ripen in time for the critical opening-season week leading up to the Fourth of July. Sure enough, the stubborn plants--retarded by a spell of cloudy weather--matured after the holiday. By then, the market had gone bust.

With no buyers in sight, the partners didn’t even bother sending their harvester to that plot of corn. They left nearly three acres at the field’s northwest corner for the birds, the white and yellow kernels swelling inside snug green husks.

“It’s tough on us to have to leave super-sweet corn for ducks,” Athanassiadis said.

Disappointment turned to dejection when the produce buyer for a major supermarket decided not to stock the partners’ corn, although he had once discussed purchasing $3,000 worth of corn a day. Another deal also fell through, costing them about $4,500 a day.

Stuck with more corn than they could sell, the farmers donated bushels to a local food bank. They tossed juicy ears on their ill-fated compost heap. And they left another patch of bursting-ripe corn to wither in the field. All told, they wrote off more than $12,000 worth of harvested corn. They didn’t even bother to tally the value of the stalks abandoned to the birds.

Because they grow sweet corn through Christmas--long after other farmers have switched to vegetables--the partners have a shot at recouping some of their losses with strong end of season sales.

But with all that’s gone wrong, they’re not willing to bet on it.

About This Series

“60 Acres of Hope,” a seasonal series that began last October, traces the first year of a Southern California farm. Previous articles have explained the planting, harvesting and marketing of the first crop: salad greens. Today’s article focuses on a federal probe investigating whether the farmers destroyed a wetland when they began working on Conejo Ranch. If convicted, the growers could lose their field. The series’ final article, to appear later this fall, will review the farm’s first year.