Raymond Ferreira, a second-generation dairy farmer now in retirement, was watching television one November Sunday in 1999 when the propane tank deliveryman stopped to tell him that his old homestead, a few miles away, was on fire.

Ferreira rushed over and turned a garden hose on the blaze until the chemical-laced smoke choked the air from his lungs. Unable to breathe, he ran to the road and waited for firefighters.

Bob Pennal, supervisor of the newest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area in the United States, was driving up Highway 99 in his black Gran Prix, one of the perks of a 14-year career spent chasing down the country’s largest meth super labs. The Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force had been busy that day. It had already busted three meth labs when the radio squawked that there was an explosion on a secluded road. Pennal had a gut feeling. He turned west, toward the cornfields and dairy farms.

Milkers hired by the farmer who had rented Ferreira’s family homestead were doing a “pill wash” during the meth cooking process when the propane flame ignited with the fumes and blew off the back wall.

The lab count was up to four.

“I was born two and a half miles down that road. We moved here in 1947,” Ferreira says, pointing to the house where his dad and mom first lived. After high school, he started a dairy farm on other acreage but moved back when he married in 1955 and built a house next door to his parents. In the late 1960s, his father had bought the house from the Oakland Naval Base and shipped it to Stockton on a barge.

“That’s redwood,” says Ferreira proudly as he knocked on the old naval house.

But the homestead, Christmas lights still hanging on the side, is now a scorched shell with broken windows, a roof open to the sky and no back wall.

Industrial-size meth manufacturing has brought toxic explosions to California’s breadbasket and chemicals used to make the drug are dumped into rivers, irrigation canals and on the nation’s richest farmland.

When farmers in the Livingston-Delhi area of Merced County meet for coffee at a local restaurant, Ferreira says, they often talk about meth labs, not dairy prices

Yet despite all the talk, Ferreira was shocked to find a lab on his property. The milkers paid their rent in cash and on time. He often drove by at night on his way home and never saw anything suspicious.

It’s exactly the scenario meth cookers depend on: the smell of manure hides the smell of chemicals. While farmers sleep, the cooks cook. In the back bedroom facing the cows and the chicken coop, they had used a propane cooker that ignited with airborne chemicals. The cookers were armed with four guns, three of them loaded. They fled after the explosion, but Pennal’s men arrested them the next day and found another lab they were operating in a farmhouse hidden in cornfields a few miles away.

“I’ve seen things there I’ve never seen in my life. I could not believe it,” Ferreira says. And his late father? “He’d go out of his mind.”

Ferreira, who is 66 and still mows his grass with a push mower, is trying to clean up the mess. To date, he’s spent only $1,100 for chemical testing on the house, but the bids to rebuild it are about $60,000. He hopes his insurance will pay. He’s frustrated with how long it’s taking to get repair work under way.

While he waits, the house sits empty, an invitation to scavengers.

-- By Nancy Teichert