Green Acres : Three professionals have ‘real’ jobs that let them afford their real love: the orchards and the chickens and putting down roots on small family farms.

The contentious English gamecock is giving Ronna Jurow a problem. Actually, it would like to take her eyes out, which it almost did once.

“Oh, come here now,” coos Jurow, her hands and forearms covered in protective leather, reeling in the leashed dervish as it splays and flaps and screeches and kicks up dust clouds from its scratching spinning feet.

“There.” She snatches him up from the ground. He sinks his beak into her left arm, then takes a pass at her face, missing her chin by about an inch.

“Hey, you stop that,” she says.

“It’s your mom here. Hey ! I’m your mom .”

Inexplicably, the thing calms down.

Jurow, a gynecologist practicing in Ventura, looks up, cradling the cock as if he were a precious newborn infant, and greets a visitor:

“Really beautiful, isn’t he?”

Twelve miles to the north, Peter Strauss has another kind of problem.

“I have alien pests,” he says, furrowing his brow. “The Argentinian ant. European brown snails. I have the ash white fly, whose only natural predator is in Greece. It’s the Jet Age. The Jet Age has produced a nightmare of pests.”

He takes a cheerless sip of coffee.

“Then, there is Tristezia. The virus. I fear this virus. It is the AIDS of citrus.”

A machine drones nearby, and Strauss spies his spray tractor in the orange grove below his house.

He smiles broadly--the smile that makes him the familiar television and movie actor--and waves its driver to a stop, inviting a visitor to clamber up the side and look beneath the hatch and into its holding tank. Inside is a nasty roiling brew of opaque liquid formulated by Strauss to keep each of his 2,908 citrus trees hearty.

“The Magic Cocktail,” he says, beaming with pride. “Magnesium. Nitrogen. Other stuff. Today we apply the Magic Cocktail.”

Farther east in the county is Don Marquis. Marquis has no gamecocks, no pests, no cocktails. Instead he has a water problem.

Dressed in a shirt and tie for the next software deal, he lurches up gullied roads in his air-conditioned Toyota 4-Runner, pointing out this avocado grove and that lemon tract, all the while talking about water.

“How do you figure? The water under my land is not mine,” he says. “That’s not the case with mineral rights unless you sign them away. But nobody ‘owns’ an aquifer.”

He pulls to a stop near a pump house that will, after a half-mile of connecting pipe is installed, serve him and several neighbors. “Take a look,” he says. “My share in this thing is going to be about $75,000, and it’s broke. Nobody’s fault, but it’s broke. And it’s gonna cost to fix it.”

He’s back in the truck, bouncing to still higher ground, at times up hills so steep that only blue sky is seen over the hood.

“Over here,” he says, pointing into trees, “that’s where I’d love to put my house. But who knows when I can do that? My current house is worth squat--no equity. And business now?” His voice trails off.

He stops again, hops out. Shielding his eyes with one hand and gesturing to the surrounding hills with the other, a smile transforms him:

“It’s neat, it really is,” he says. “It’s beautiful through here.”

A Double Life

A physician, an actor, a salesman.

They couldn’t be more different. Yet each has the bug. Each is ineluctably drawn to another life--a life that is often more difficult and always more random and expensive than anything each has known: To be a farmer.

To grow things. To breed animals. To see death. To work and sweat in the slop and muck and stench and hope that God--for nonbelievers, Nature--will allow, by stroke of weather and perhaps beneficence, some measure of success for the effort.

It’s got nothing to do with gynecology, surely, though Jurow does run from delivering baby humans at hospitals in Ventura to those in her fowl hatchery, 50 feet from her modern house in unincorporated Ventura County, near Santa Paula.

It’s got no connection to making money by being somebody else, as actors do. So for Peter Strauss, farming at his home in Ojai represents a stretch.

And the relationship between citrus irrigation and electrical engineering software is, well, strained at best: Don Marquis of Woodland Hills simply dreams of building the house in Moorpark that will complete his migration to the farm life.

But two key things tie these country pilgrims together: successful professional careers from which they take money to create the misery and joy that defines “connection to the land,” and the fact that none, despite theft, seasonal humiliations, and sometimes impossible wars against viruses and fungi, would turn back on that choice.

The Doctor

They have company, too. Pro-Ag, a leading farm management company in Moorpark, notes that since the division of Ventura County’s vast ranches in the mid-1970s, white-collar professionals-- doctors and airline pilots are well-represented--have increasingly purchased 10 or 20 or even 40 acres of lemon and avocado groves and then set about farming them.

None of the subjects in this article had dreamed about farming. None had planned life and career to incorporate farming.

Yet all somehow drifted into it, by peculiar circumstance, and it took deep root in them. They are, for better and worse, a trio of Ventura County’s accidental farmers, well-heeled and well-educated people without a farming legacy for whom productive land exerts an ineffable sense of connection.

Ronna Jurow came from anything but overalls. Forget gynecology--that came after her life as a successful opera singer.

While a Berkeley undergraduate, she won the prestigious Merola Foundation Award from the San Francisco Opera. It marked the start of a career, in 1969, as a lead coloratura soprano with the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Opera, the Salzburg Opera, the Klagenfurt Opera and the Linz Opera, with appearances at Wolf Trap and Vienna’s Schoenbrunn Summer Festival. In 1970 and 1971, she represented the State Department in concert tours in Munich, Hamburg and Lubeck.

But the itinerant, single life had desolations made worse by a looming biologic fact: “Those high notes leave you as you approach menopause,” Jurow says, “and in my late 20s, I knew I didn’t want to be a fat old singing teacher.”

Something clicked, finally, when she tripped--onstage.

“I was in Europe, going back for a curtain call, and fell down before the curtain opened. I got up and took the call. I walked offstage and said to myself: ‘What a stupid life.’ ”

She flew home to San Mateo, to the Bay Area house where she had grown up. She had had an interest in medicine--it was a family legacy. But her father, a physician, and two brothers, both physicians, had dissuaded her--this despite the fact that her parents considered opera mere “show business,” down there with lowly bar singing. Jurow finally went to medical school, at UC San Francisco.

She quickly established herself in Los Angeles, with a fellowship and faculty appointment at the University of Southern California Medical Center. She would conduct research on the role of anti-prostaglandins on women with bladder instability and, in 1984, publish, in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, an article titled “Cesarean Delivery for Fetal Distress Without Maternal Consent.”

She married a doctor, John Stevenson. Then, the fluke event: Stevenson got shot while walking through Burbank Airport, the victim of a bullet that misfired from a traveler’s hunting rifle. For Stevenson, something clicked.

“He recovered,” Jurow says, “and just said: ‘We’re getting out of here.’ ”

They moved to Ventura and rented a house near Wells Road. Jurow worked with a group, then opened her own practice on North Brent Street. With two children, they wanted to own a home. And Stevenson, though the son of a Phoenix water engineer, was not completely alien to agriculture: His grandfather ran a ranch in Arizona.

In the rented house, Ronna Jurow started her farm reading.

“It was my escape literature,” she says. “Much of the 1960s hippie homesteading books, but I liked it. Then I noticed there were some really good magazines, like Small Farm Journal, out of Oregon. I read it all. I found, also, through my M.D. training, that I could get deeply into the veterinary literature, which is where I got all my chicken stuff.”

They bought their Santa Paula ranch without so much as a second thought. The house is surrounded by nearly seven acres of abundant Haas avocado trees. The trees are farmed, producing 30,000 pounds of fruit in a single crop. It’s expensive because much of the work--pruning, irrigating, picking--is contracted out to crews. But in most instances it produces enough income to outstrip the costs. (That’s if everything goes as expected. A few years back, Jurow and her family left the ranch for a few days to attend a funeral. They returned to find a huge hole cut in their chain link fence and the entire avocado crop, 15 tons worth, stripped from the trees.)

But the trees are only a backdrop to Jurow’s main love: the chickens and the birds. Hundreds of chickens, among them fancy miniature bantams and the swaggering English gamecock. China geese. Miniature call ducks. Twenty peacocks.

Jurow enters the hatchery, just off her driveway. The temperature is in the 90s, with heat lamps everywhere working on the 1,000 or so eggs that are “cooking” at any given moment. The air is heavy with the scent of birthing and defecation, stoked further by the heat.

“A lot of people don’t really get it,” she says. “The hatchery stinks. But I love the smell.”

She cites as her biggest farm accomplishment, a moment in which she felt a sense of victory: The day a neighbor farmer accepted gift of two hatchery-bred geese, not unlike the 19th-Century English practice of giving the gift of chickens. “The fact that he took those geese home for his mother, and that they’re good enough to run around in her back yard--that’s a sense of real accomplishment.”

She is quick to dispute any notion that it’s all a bit decorative, a rustic conceit.

“I’m extremely passionate about this,” she says. “If you’re going to work all day and come home from delivering a baby only to go rushing around the hatchery with 27-gauge needles inoculating a bunch of chickens at midnight, which is how it works out, you just really have to love it. The chickens are excruciatingly interesting to me.” (They are also expensive, as the birds, unlike the profitable avocados, “cost 17 times more than they bring in.” Jurow shows or sells the best of them, trades others with fellow breeders “interested in keeping the genetic strains going,”’ and donates hundreds of leftovers to 4-H clubs and similar organizations.)

It’s changed the beat of her life.

Ronna Jurow no longer goes to the opera. And her social life has shrunk to the limits of her farm. She throws and attends few dinner parties, for example. “I don’t like to dress up,” she says. “We work very hard. Any free time we have is spent here, at home, with the kids.”

The word, finally, comes up: roots .

It’s farming’s biggest payoff, she says. “That’s what it all represents to me. The roots are here: in the agriculture, in the new arrivals in the hatchery, in the people here and in the farming community.

“I want my children to have this, to know this.”

Jurow would not dispute her peculiar circumstance: that her and her husband’s lives as physicians furnish the means for such a sense of connection.

“The fact is, to be successful (in agriculture) you have to be big. Obviously, we’re not. The so-called days of returning to your roots--well, I don’t know if it’s viable.”

This lends small-time farming a house-of-cards quality, a fear not lost on Jurow.

“Development is making things impossible,” she says. “Development and agriculture are not compatible. This is my home. But what am I going to do if housing tracts should come to my door? I have wind machines to fight frost, and they’re loud. Then, the birds. I have hundreds of birds.”

Not exactly what people want to live next to.

“There is so much loneliness and dislocation out there,” she says. “Why is America bent on self-destruction? We’ve got it all, and yet we squander it. . . . Development is killing us because it’s a one-shot deal: You sell the land, get the money, and then it’s all gone. You have nothing to pass on to your family.”

So Jurow works on a legacy. It’s blurred her life somewhat between obstetrics and the treatment, say, of herpes in chickens. But it’s a blur that’s necessary for that sense of “roots.”

“I used to go to work in hose and heels and a nice dress,” she says. “But the minute I’d be home I’d get covered in dirt and, finally, I said: ‘That’s it.’ I got a pair of boots. And so, on with it. The boots go with me.”

The Actor

The fireplace mantle in Peter Strauss’ home study holds two things side-by-side: a shiny trophy, his 1979 Emmy for best leading actor in “The Jericho Mile,’ and a bland little framed certificate marking his successful completion of “Palm Tree Management,” offered by the agricultural extension service of the University of California.

“That was a great course,” he says. “I’m very proud of that.”

Strauss grew up in New York, the son of a wine importer father and dog-breeder mother. He and his wife, Nicole, were not even in the market to buy a farm when they purchased their home in Ojai five years ago and moved with their two children. But 30 badly maintained acres of citrus trees came along with the deal.

Strauss, however, had always had an interest in garden design and botany, showing a bookish proclivity in the study of cacti and succulents. This enabled him to redesign the citrus orchard’s decrepit, inefficient irrigation systems “just based on what I knew about gardens,” he says. Soon after moving in, he also moved about town, seeking counsel from the more experienced orange growers.

“Within months,” he says, “I knew how to run an orchard.”

It’s worked. His average crop of 22 acres in Valencia and eight acres in navel oranges produces 440 tons of fruit, occasionally a portion of it so outsized and precious as to command $5-per-piece prices in Japan.

Save the picking and some of the spraying, Strauss does it himself. Prunes the trees. Runs the irrigation. Applies the chemicals to the trees. Fixes things “when squirrels eat through them.” He allows himself “two L.A. days” a week--he does, after all, earn a living as an actor.

But it’s clear he’s hooked.

Over coffee at his kitchen table he is talking ETO’s, or evapo-transpiration rates, which he calls”a hot topic in Ventura County.” (An ETO is a specific metering of a leaf’s water absorption.) But he notes that he prefers to use his “finger (in the dirt) and nose (in the air)” as the tools with which he most accurately assesses the thirst of his trees.

“You know, I’ve probably hurt my own career by being too diversified,” he says. “When I don’t go to a meeting (in L.A.) because it’s a critical time to fertilize, I screw up. But I want to apply the nitrogen. I love to do that. You can call people in and pay them $5 an hour or $15 and hour to do it. But I won’t. It’s important that I do that.”

Strauss’ devotion to detail is Teutonic. He produces MacIntosh printouts of his orchard. A visitor discovers that the trees of Block 4, Rows 6 and 7 are highlighted in yellow.

“That’s a very cold pocket,” Strauss broods. “I’m watching those trees. They’ll require extra nitrogen.”

Then his most recent trophy is culled from the files: a letter from Dole, which buys much of his fruit, commending him for the “second-highest packout per box” in the 1990 orange crop.

“It is a sort of schizophrenia in my life: acting and farming,” Strauss says. “But it’s an old ethic about America, to grow things. It’s a proud ethic that what we produce goes on our dinner tables. I find that very powerful.

“It’s hard to convey the thrill of growing something. In April, when all the trees come into bloom, their fragrance wafts through the house--it’s a mind-boggling saccharin nausea--and you realize you are sustaining life, a life force. And so it becomes somewhat a spiritual issue.

He pauses a moment.

“The fact is, I don’t find the happiness in Nielsen numbers that I do in fruit yields.”

Despite his successes, Strauss would be the first to concede that small farming is to some extent a luxury. He pulls an accounting sheet from last year. After expenses, his citrus income barely cracked $13,000.

“That’s farming,” he says. “It’s expensive, it’s frustrating. And I would say if I were strictly a farmer, I don’t think I could make it.”

What happened a few years back probably would have put him under completely were it not for other income. He spent all of one Christmas Eve darting around his orchards fighting 19-degree temperatures. He was “smudging”--firing up oil heaters placed throughout the orchards--and very nearly calling in expensive helicopters to blow the heat downward when he realized it was too late.

“Gone. Four hundred and forty tons of fruit. Not even for juice,” he says. “I went back into the house, covered in grime and diesel oil. I was in tears.”

It is clear that Strauss values this story less for its tragedy than its lesson: Farming, no matter how good you get at it, is beyond anyone’s control and so humbles in a way that neither a dicey film or unpopular TV feature can.

The word, with Strauss as with Jurow, finally pops up: roots .

“I look around and I see a lot of loneliness,” Strauss says. “I see families broken up and people disconnected from things. I walk the orchard with my children, and sometimes they help me, and it’s another way we grow together as a family.

“It’s filled an awful lot of empty spaces.”

Strauss recalls being in his mother’s back yard garden at age 8. “She put my hands in the soil,” he says. “She was showing me things and suddenly remembered that we had tickets to go to the Met that night. We had one hour to get there. We were racing to make it. In the car on the way to the opera, she peeled off one of her white gloves, laughed, and showed me: clear rings of dirt under her fingernails.

“Maybe that’s where it all comes from.”

The Salesman

Waiting for his burrito at the Taco Bell in Moorpark, Don Marquis considers why he bought his 21.6-acre Moorpark ranch in the first place.

“Because I had a good year,” he says flatly. “I had only a few choices: give it to the government, or invest in something that I could get some benefit from.”

He didn’t look, for example, to more dramatically remote places such as the Sierras, as wilderness is just pretty and has nothing upon it that can produce income. Nor did he look at a beach house. “Too expensive,” he says.

But Marquis would quickly find that farm ownership had peculiar and immediate demands.

“I realized: I’m facing all these dying trees,” he recalls. “Now I’m not one of these bleeding sorts, where you can’t touch this leaf with that. But I did feel some responsibility to these 300 or so trees that were dying. And so I acted to get them the right treatment. And it’s been working out.”

Marquis’ dream, however, was less to adopt the farming lifestyle than to build a large house--”4,700 square feet in a Mediterranean style”--on the property and call it home. The economy, his business, and water and building costs currently conspire to push any groundbreaking well into the future. So the Marquis ranch stands as an active orchard with absentee owner, its complete management contracted out to Pro-Ag, to which Marquis pays more than $25,000 annually.

Through it all, Marquis declines to call himself a farmer, though technically anyone whose property produces crops is a farmer.

And yet, he is still drawn to the place, prideful in the abundance of its trees and in some of the experiments on the property, such as a newly planted acre of oro blanco grapefruit. He likes to visit and inspect, walk the orchards and dream about the right site for the house.

The land looks familiar to him, like what he saw from the car when he was 8 years old driving with his parents from their home in Glendale through the massive ranches of Fillmore.

He’s not sure of how his four children feel about the Moorpark farm. “They probably see this as their legacy,” he says. “But right now they have heart rates of 300--you know, they need a toy to make this thing entertaining, a bike to ride or something. For them, looking at trees gets old fast.”

So in the meantime, Marquis keeps up the near-weekly solo commute from home in Woodland Hills to the farm in Moorpark, only to bounce up the gullied roads and think of the house, its view and the tranquil farm life.

“Hey, I move out here, there’s only so much I will do,” he says. “Hack away at dead branches on avocado trees. Turn the pump on an off for the irrigation. Walk around a lot. Do in a day what a young guy would do in a half-hour.”

As if he senses what Jurow and Strauss already know, he adds: “But it sure would be nice.”