Jobs Crop Up as Harvest Gets Into Full Swing : Agriculture: Spring, the peak season for county farmers, is also a bountiful time for many workers and their families.

Just two months ago, farm worker Gerardo Villa was lucky to pick 30 boxes of ripe strawberries after 12 hours of toiling at a field just south of Ventura.

Now he’s pushing 90 boxes a day. At $1.50 a box, he is earning up to $135 a day.

“Now I can take the family out for a ride to a nice place, maybe save up for a trip to Mexico,” he said. “When there’s no work there’s no food, now we can buy tasty things to put on the table.”

Villa is one of thousands of farm workers and hundreds of growers in the county who have been busier than usual in recent weeks.

While the harvest season comes in autumn in most of the nation, the spring harvest is the biggest of the year in Ventura County. And it is now in full swing.

“The whole city is more animated,” Oxnard resident Humberto Garcia said as he bagged celery in a field by Victoria Avenue. “There are more people in the streets, more families in the park, more cars on the road, and the cantinas are livelier.

“Everybody’s happier.”

In Ojai, the Santa Clara River Valley and on the Oxnard Plain, workers are picking lemons and sending them by the truckload to the county’s packinghouses. They’ve also begun the annual pick of Valencia oranges in the warmer northeast end of the county.

Across the Oxnard Plain, flats of strawberries soon will be picked and packed at the rate of more than 100,000 trays a day. And vegetable farmers who work the coastal plain have their workers uprooting heads of red lettuce and romaine, cutting bunches of broccoli and cauliflower and lopping off stalks of celery.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of seasonal workers have poured in from across the Mexican border to join in the harvest.

“Now’s the time to make money,” said Rosendo Gonzalez as he ripped strawberries off a plant in an Oxnard field. A week ago, he arrived from Guanajuato in southern Mexico. He expects to be able to send $300 back home by the end of the month.

Vegetable growers will plant and harvest crops one or two more times this year. Crops could be ready for picking again this summer and once more in the fall, the more traditional harvest time.

But the spring harvest will remain by far the most productive for Ventura County, where the seasons nearly blend together in a moderate Mediterranean climate.

“Turkeys aren’t on sale and there’s no harvest moon, but this is our busiest time of the year,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “We’re six months out of step with tradition.”

Spring contributes the largest share of the year’s total production, which reached a record-breaking $877 million in 1990.

In most years, farmers and labor contractors employ more people during April than they do at any other time of the year. Officials estimate that 17,000 people have been called to work so far this year.

Employment is down by about 4,000 workers from previous Aprils because the December freeze ruined up to a quarter of the county’s tree crops, said Avelina Villalobos, supervisor at the California Employment Development Department in Oxnard.

“Employers are not calling us,” Villalobos said. “Normally, we would get calls now for workers for lemons and avocados as well as vegetables and strawberries.”

Some of those people may yet return to work because the freeze delayed the harvest by a few weeks for lemons, avocados and strawberries, said Ventura County Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail. Last January, he estimated the damage to county crops at $128 million.

“As long as we have a normal rain year and there are no disastrous freezes, we’ll be back in full swing next year,” McPhail said.

John Newman, who grows lemons on 840 acres at the Newman Ranch in Oxnard, said the harvest at his ranch has reached its peak. He estimated that about 40% of this year’s lemon production will be harvested between now and June. But he will pick three more times during the year, he said.

“Trees bloom all year here on the coast,” said Newman, who boasts 50 years in the business. “The central California lemons are all picked in the winter. That’s why most of the lemons in the market now are from Ventura County.”

Lemons--the largest agricultural crop in the county, worth $175 million in 1990--begin their cycle in summer when the first of the trees are in bloom. Six months later, the trees produce fruit. Early picking begins in January most years, although the freeze set the growers back this year.

The picking escalates to March, April and May. In June, picking declines and by July and August, not much remains on the trees. By September and August, a crop of fall lemons is ready to be picked.

For strawberries, a crop valued at $126 million in 1990, the harvest’s peak will hit in two weeks, said Joe Dowd, field manager at the Bob Jones Ranch in El Rio.

At that time, about 800 people will work the 500 acres to produce about 35,000 flats a day, he said.

Strawberry farmers begin their cycle in fall when they prepare the soil and put the plants into the ground. In January, farmers begin picking the early berries. Mid-April is usually the peak, but picking continues through May and tails off in June. In July, the smaller fruit is sent for freezing.

Vegetable growers have a quicker turnaround. Their crops are 90 days from planting to harvest.

“Since consumers would like a steady supply of lettuce, the farmers try to schedule their planting so they have an even amount of produce at the market,” said Robert Brindler, adviser at the University of California agriculture extension office in Ventura.

The largest harvest of the year is in April. But growers also plant in summer during years when water is plentiful, and again in the fall for a winter harvest, Brindler said.

Flowers are planted and harvested according to the holidays, said Fred Van Winderden, an Oxnard grower. Spring is still the most productive harvest, due to the warm weather and the upcoming holidays.

“We never get too warm in the summer or too cool in the winter,” he said. “It’s much the same reason that people want to retire here.”

But for hundreds of farm workers who go on welfare during the winter, the arrival of spring comes not a second too soon.

“When there’s no work we barely get by,” said Villa. “We sleep a lot, maybe find some day work here and there, but never enough to fill the refrigerator. Now is the time to do it.”