Just west of Fillmore, citrus rancher Keith Barnard is bracing for a legal battle that he thinks is necessary to preserve the rural lifestyle that he has enjoyed since boyhood.

Barnard grows oranges and avocados on the same land he did when he and his wife, Ruth, were married 40 years ago. But now he feels threatened by a proposal to dig a gravel mining pit in a nearby orange orchard.

He and 13 other area growers have set up a legal fund to fight the proposal, and he expects the battle to be a tough one.

"We're playing hardball here, just as the mining people are," he said.

To the south, Moorpark residents Pat and Tom Schleve complain that the morning air already reeks of diesel exhaust from the trucks that come and go at the Blue Star Ready Mix rock quarry, north of town.

The Schleves live in a house trailer, but they are building a new home just down the street from the quarry. They are frightened by a proposal to more than double the quarry's size by adding 284 acres over the next 50 years.

"You take a big breath of air at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. and it's all diesel fumes," Pat Schleve said. "It's just disgusting."

Elsewhere in the county, there are other concerns about mines and gravel pits, either operating or proposed. In the small community of El Rio, north of Oxnard, one of the issues is whether mining operations may further contaminate ground water that is now unfit for drinking.

Gene and Evelyn Miller are longtime El Rio residents who have joined a local citizens group to fight the proposals to expand two companies' mining operations by a total of 280 acres in and along the Santa Clara River.

But Evelyn Miller is pessimistic about their chances.

"You can't fight big business," she said. "We've tried before."

Those conflicts are part of a larger battle being waged by residents throughout Ventura County as the result of an unprecedented number of proposals to dot the county's landscape with either new or larger quarries and mines. Nineteen gravel mines and rock quarries already operate in the county. But county officials are faced with a record number of 10 proposals to create new mines and two more to expand quarries already in operation.

Together, the requests represent proposals to mine more material from Ventura County riverbeds, mountainsides and rocky flats than has ever been mined before. The new proposals alone call for removing more than 6 million tons of rock, sand and gravel a year.