For three years, Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens drove up California's coast for 14 hours every month for a routine task: milling his grain into flour. "I was literally not able to find a flour mill at my scale, and we're not tiny," he said. "We've got 150 acres of grain." He found this disconcerting, not only for himself but the future of small-scale grain farming in California, once known for its golden hills of grain.

As California has lost much of its grain to higher value crops, small flour mills and grain cleaning businesses have disappeared, too. It's a symptom of what Gonzales-Siemens sees as a larger problem facing many farmers, awash in a marketplace dominated by highly concentrated operations as regional farm infrastructure atrophies.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Today, Environment California Research and Policy Center announced petitions at an event on the UCSB campus, calling for the expansion and strengthening of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). The proposals called for in the petitions align with Governor Newsom’s 30×30 goal, to protect 30% of lands and coastal waters by 2030.

On Saturday, December 9, California State Senator MONIQUE LIMÓN and Assemblymember STEVE BENNETT presented a check for $1.5 million to Rubicon Theatre Company, Ventura's not-for-profit professional theatre company in Ventura, California.

The funds were announced to cheers from Rubicon's opening night audience for The World Goes ‘Round, a revue of the music of Kander & Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman, New York, New York, etc.).

Cooperative Development and Equipment Sharing Is an Equitable Solution that California's Family Farmers Need to Succeed

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Nate Gonzalez-Siemens of Fat Uncle Farms and Melissa Sorongon of Piedrasassi are exceptional in the south SanJoaquin Valley and the Central Coast: They are both small-scale farmers who grow grain as part of their diversifiedoperations. Consequently, small-scale and biologically diverse farming operations like Nate's and Melissa's require agreater variety of costly equipment, some of which is only used a few times a year.

Today, the realities of climate change, the structure of the supply chain, and food system inequities disproportionatelynegatively impact California's local food producers. The high costs of land, equipment, infrastructure, and water havemade it nearly impossible for young, beginning, and small farmers such as Nate and Melissa to access thesebaseline needs. And the farmers who are able to overcome these barriers and establish small businesses stillstruggle to access these resources. Roughly three-fourths of farmers in California operate on less than $100,000 inannual sales, making the purchase of any new equipment, which can average between $5,000 to $30,000 or more, achallenge. Some types of equipment, such as harvesting equipment, electric tractors, or refrigeration units can costover $100,000.