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The People’s Garden: Farmworker families grow food for themselves & those in need
Pants freshly stained with grape juice after a long night harvesting a nearby vineyard, a worker arrives to a farm just outside Healdsburg. After an exhausting shift, he should be heading straight for a shaded hammock for some much-deserved rest. Instead, he walks between towering banana plants and a greenhouse…
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The Best of Both Worlds: An Immigrant Legacy of Entrepreneurship
Surrounded by succulents, snake plants, and philodendrons in her downtown Santa Rosa shop, Ana Prado describes herself as “Con el nopal en la frente,” which translates to “with a cactus on the forehead.” For the founder of a new plant boutique on Courthouse Square, this might seem an apt if…
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Is This Frequency Busy?
She’d first seen the flier for the local ham radio club while out on a walk in her new neighborhood. Though whether that hillside could be considered a neighborhood, Sadie wasn’t sure. In her mind, a neighborhood, like where they’d lived before, had sidewalks and cafés and a name. This…
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What Does “Local Food” Really Mean?
In 2007, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” its Word of the Year. Farmers’ markets were proliferating nationwide, tripling in just 15 years. Restaurants began emulating farm-to-table trailblazers like Chez Panisse. Then came surprise bestselling books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and films like Food, Inc. as millions reconsidered dinner’s…
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Finding Unity Through Food: A Global Table at Sonoma Family Meal
“I come from a country where hunger dominated our population,” explains Jules Sinai, who arrived in Sonoma County last year from Haiti, “so, I know the importance of feeding people and am passionate about food and the happiness it can make in people’s lives.” Despite recent false claims from fear-mongering…
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Grazing for Good: Mimicking Ancient Migrations for a Healthier Future
With a knife sheathed in her belt on one side and a bright orange mallet on the other, Paigelynn Trotter traverses a steep hillside with a baby strapped to her back, and a livestock guardian dog at her side. She’s studying how 140 goats just grazed down the spring forage…
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After a Century in Sonoma County, Manzana Apple Cannery Moves to Washington. What Does it Mean for Local Apple Farmers?
It was a bittersweet milestone for Manzana. Just two years after reaching its centennial, the North Bay’s last remaining apple cannery announced they’re relocating to Washington. It’s said that the only constant is change. And that old facility along Atascadero Creek, with its big metal tanks, loading docks, and piles…
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Can We Make Farmland Conservation Work When Farmers Don’t Own The Land?
Twenty years ago Wayne James harvested garlic with a pickaxe. Today, on the exact same plot of land, all that’s required is a light tug and those bulbs slide right out from soft, dark earth. That’s because Wayne, together with his sister Lee, have spent the past two decades rotating…
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Can Sonoma County Even the Playing Field of Agricultural Equity?
Small-scale farmers are inherently resourceful. They have to be. Often operating on a shoestring budget, they make the most of what they have: stacking functions, repurposing materials, taking a tool designed for one task and, after a bit of welding and duct tape, jury-rigging it until it can accomplish a…
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How schools are seeking to replace prepackaged vended food with farm-grown produce
You are what you eat. And for the 30 million children in the US who rely on a school lunch program, that’s even more true. What these growing kids eat not only impacts their health but also has been proven to impact their grades and long-term well-being too.
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Is Dry Farming Making a Comeback?
Rewards taste sweeter when you have to work for them. And for thousands of years, deep underground, that’s how vines have brought us grapes. From the prehistoric Levant to the Spanish missionaries who bottled the first Sonoma vintage, these plants can thrive without a single drop of irrigation. As Tony…
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Will Sonoma County ease restrictions on urban agriculture?
We’ve all seen the painting. It hangs in local galleries and on restaurant walls. You’ll find it on business cards for real estate companies or framed in homes. It’ll even appear when you google “Sonoma County painting.” And while it may come in many colors and styles, crafted by a…
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Farmers reap the benefits of cannabis cultivation
Of the many cannabis stereotypes that Aaron Keefer fights against, a predilection for cookie dough, Funyuns and Nutella-spooned-straight-from-the-jar may be the most stubborn. With prohibition over, Keefer and his partners are betting their business on a new appreciation for marijuana’s farm-to-table potential. If they succeed, it could help shape Sonoma…
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Pandora Thomas and the Promise of Earthseed
Riding on a wicker throne, Frances Louise Thomas, 81 years of age, is carried out from beneath an unseasonably hot sun by four young men to the shade of a mother willow tree. A dog and cat kick up dirt at their feet while a hawk circles above. Only a…
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Sustainable Slaughter
Until last year, Sarah Silva prided herself on raising animals who lived a good life, from start to finish. At Green Star Farm just outside of Sebastopol, her pigs, chickens and lambs grazed happily under an open sky on lush grasses until the day they took a quick jaunt to…
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Seed to Sauce: Deb Rock’s Fiery Enterprise
Deb Rock likes it hot. But in October of 2017, with hundreds of pounds of freshly harvested chili peppers piled up in the back of her Volvo, a 10-gallon pot of pozole sloshing around in her passenger seat, and wildfires consuming the hills just above her farm, for once, the…
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Dwindling Dairies
Nestled in a valley where vineyards and redwoods give way to green rolling hills is the tiny town of Freestone. While the world may know Sonoma County as “wine country,” out here, grass reigns supreme. Most mornings, a thick fog descends, replaced in the afternoon by a wind that trains…
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The Hands that Feed Us
Things were finally back to normal for Jennifer Reichardt and her ducks. Last October’s Kincade fire, which scorched nearly 80,000 acres, thankfully never reached her family’s Petaluma farm. But the resulting blackouts did. Reichardt, together with her Sonoma County Poultry team, scrambled in vain to find enough generators to keep…
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EVAN WIIG 