(soft relaxing music) - [Algeo] Sonoma County, California has a long history as a vibrant agricultural community that has navigated a constantly changing world while still honoring its roots.

Three generations from this region come together for a conversation about where we come from, where we are now, and where we're headed, both as a community and as a nation.

- I love having that history, you know, to know and to be proud of it, you know, wherever we've come from, to be able to say, God darn it, you know, there's some generations before us that sacrificed quite a bit to let us sit here today.

- How do we honor the land?

How do we work in conjunction with the land?

How do we honor all of the other beings that we share the land with?

- How we take care of it and make sure that it is protected, healthy for the next generations that come after, for the people that come to it and eat off of it and experience it.

I think it's a very hard question to ask.

(soft relaxing music) (inspirational music) - [Voiceover] This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

- All right, come on girls, let's go.

Come on, cows, cows!

Come on, sweethearts.

(light music) William, throw some feed.

And yell cows, cows.

- Cows, cows!

- Good job.

- There we go.

Now they see it.

Good job William.

- Cows, cows!

Cows, cows!

- There we go.

There we go.

My name is Algeo Che Casul.

I am the seventh generation on our family ranch here out in Bodega.

We've run literally every kind of animal you can imagine on this place.

We've done dairy cattle, beef cattle, sheep, goats.

Generationally, it's been strong females all the way down.

I'm the first male born in seven generations, so, mom held onto the place.

My dad was a Puerto Rican radical raised in the Bronx.

And then I met my wife in Paris and she's this beautiful Australian that I convinced to come on over.

So, our son has a very interesting mix of all of those different cultures.

Good job, buddy.

Did you know that you're the best wrangler of cattle on this place?

Yeah?

I think it's pretty fun that we can have this deep rooted history, but we also have that mix of different groups, different cultures that have come in and give us, I think, a pretty unique perspective on what we're doing here and and how we're doing it.

My great great great great grandfather, he fought in the Mexican-American war and part of that treaty, or you could say taking of land after the war was California, and that's how we got this place.

But he really rode west with the idea of promise, of new land, of building a new life.

The history of Sonoma County is deeply tied to the history of California.

Indigenous people stewarded this region with fire and grazing for at least 12,000 years before the Spanish arrived.

Our ranch is in the present day community of Bodega, which was once coastal Miwok in Southern Pomo territory.

While the American Revolution was raging on the other side of the continent, Spanish colonization in California was well underway with missions and presidios being established all over the state.

Shortly after Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the last of the California missions was established right here in Sonoma County.

The early 1840s brought an influx of American settlers.

By the time my great great great great grandfather rode west settlers were revolting against the Mexican government and the city of Sonoma would become the site of the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, where California's iconic bear flag came into existence.

California was annexed with the end of the Mexican-American war just two years later in 1848.

Settlers to the region would find that the fertile soils and mild climate make the county prime for all kinds of agriculture.

From vineyards to eggs to cattle, and many farming families like my own, have been here for generations.

- So William, I want to show you some pictures.

I'm going to show you, look at this.

That's my mother.

So, that's your great-grandmother and that's your great-great-grandfather on the ranch all so many years ago.

So, here they are in front of your house.

- Well, it looks much cleaner.

- You mean now or then?

- Then.

(laughing) - And look, there's your room.

- See those windows right here buddy?

- Yeah?

- Those are the exact same windows.

- There were a lot of home repairs.

These houses all had knob and tube electricity.

The water system was pretty funky.

- I'm really enjoying all the different projects that need to be done and it can be overwhelming at times but it's fun learning new skills.

- Well, I'm glad you think it's fun.

- I was thinking we could wander over and take a look at the map and you can kind of tell us about what this place looked like when you took over.

- Okay.

So, this is the map, as you know the ranch.

When your dad and I moved here in 1981, none of the family had lived here since the late '50s.

As you know, when you watched us as you grew up, we worked on the infrastructure.

Joe then lived on the ranch next door to the east of us.

And your dad and I got to know him and he really helped us initially figure out a lot of the things that we didn't know about the ranch.

He's been a lifelong friend.

Very grateful to him.

- Joe Pozzi owned the ranch next to us.

I think they'd been there five generations at that point.

At eight years old, I started working with Joe just kind of getting taken under his wing and I'd follow him around in my little mud boots.

You know, he saw a young person that was interested in agriculture and he was willing to take the time and put the effort in, because I'm sure I was more of a pain in the butt than I was helpful most of the time, into teaching me about ag, into teaching me about the value of the food systems that we're creating, and more importantly, how to keep our landscapes and our ecology healthy.

And that was the the big paradigm shift for me because I didn't realize how much work the landscape really needed in order to be healthy.

I was really lucky to have that mentor.

I don't think we'd be where we are without that.

- My name is Joe Pozzi.

I'm a fourth generation sheep and cattle rancher here in Valley Ford, California.

And I've been here my whole life raising sheep and cattle.

I oversee 1,300 acres, and probably, oh I don't know, you know, a thousand animals total.

It's not just those animals.

You've got to fix fences, you've got to make sure the water troughs are good, you've got to make sure that the cow that was calving had the calf.

You've got to be creative and you've got to make it work.

(upbeat country music) I'm fortunate that I grew up knowing what I wanted to do right from the beginning.

That makes it easy.

Makes it fun.

Are there challenges?

Yeah, there's a lot of challenges.

But tell me about any business that doesn't have a challenge?

To me, it's kind of a paradigm shift to say, all right, if we don't allow younger people to come in and to do things, you're going to lose interest.

I always feel it's up to us as older generations to bring that on.

Because it's easy to say, all right, I'm too busy, I've got to just go, go, go.

But when all of a sudden you have some young people involved, it is so nice.

We need younger people on the land.

- Joe taught me a love of of ranching and farming and the landscape and also what it meant to be a community member.

- That's how I met you.

- Exactly.

- I was in a place where I was like, I need to be more integrated into my community.

I don't know how to do that.

I'm just going to throw everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Anything you need help with, I'm just here learning, and you're spending so much time with me and teaching me so much.

- There was a chainsaw day where usually I can put everybody else into the ground, and Meilin was not done by I think it was the fourth round.

I'm like, I'm done Meilin.

Let's go sit on the porch and have a beer because I'm old.

- Yeah, you haven't seen old yet.

It's coming.

- Access to land for young people is really hard in this community and increasingly harder.

Learning from Joe Pozzi to when you meet young people that are interested and engaged, take them under your wing, and put the effort and the time in.

- There's sun golds, there's the red guys there, the clementines, and that's this entire row.

When I moved up to Sonoma County and starting to see and connecting to our local food system has been extremely powerful to me.

I was working at local farmer's markets, just trying to get more in involved in the community and working with the farmers directly and not just like, okay, here's my money, I'm going to buy some food, but creating that relationship.

My stronger memories from growing up, I feel like a lot of them lean into who I am now in many ways, like in kindergarten we did caterpillars and then they eventually turned into butterflies and we had our little garden beds per classroom in elementary school.

That's my mom, dad, and my brother there.

And this one particularly makes me laugh because it's supposed to be like a seeding picture and I'm supposed to be paying attention, but alas, I am distracted by plants in the background.

This again is just me distracted by plants, which I still say very frequently in the middle of conversations to this day.

And this one seems to be an Easter egg hunt, but me walking around barefoot on wood directly, on wood chips, is something again I still do very frequently.

So, I think going through these photos also just made me laugh a little bit of how similar I am even though it's been, I don't know, maybe at least 20 years since many of these were taken.

My dad's side came from China.

From during the revolution in Taiwan.

- And what years would that have been?

- That was my grandmother and my grandfather that was in the '50s.

They were both escaping because they were not part of the communist party.

And then my mom's side came from Germany and Ireland before then.

- Okay, and I think that's the part of America that's so cool is that we all have a story.

A lot of us don't take pride and understand what it took for our parents or grandparents to get to where we're pretty darn comfortable.

My family immigrated from Northern Italy and the County Wexford of Ireland, as with so many immigrants during the late 1800s, looking for a better opportunity.

There wasn't anything out here.

No electricity, the roads were all dirt, but they made a living, they paid their bills, they sold milk, they would take eggs to town once a month and sell them.

But it was very, very self-sufficient.

But they were able to save money and buy more land and build up their businesses.

How you doing?

How you doing, Daisy?

Hi, Jasper.

We sold one of our ranches and there's a lot of old equipment on it and I said, well, I'd like this old truck, and the story we behind this truck is a 1939 GMC.

Before World War II, everybody took cans of milk.

So, you would milk your cows and you'd put it in cans and then you'd load those cans on a truck and take them to a creamery.

So, this truck is what my dad and grandfather used every day to load the cans on.

I always say I'm going to restore it.

I'll probably run out of time before I restore it, but it's here.

Agriculture to me is the backbone of the country.

We all have to eat, you know, we all need clothing, we all need shelter.

Agriculture provides all of that.

So we're all dependent on a farmer and rancher to be able to be secure.

So, telephone has come, electricity has come, but from day one, agriculture was here.

We're doing the same thing today that they were doing 250 years ago just in a different way.

We're always trying to do things better.

We're trying to get more efficient and then we have fun doing it and we try to make a living at it.

So, what we're going to do down here is just go through some sheep and sort them, trim a few feet, you know, put a paint brand on them to identify them.

And these are going to be mature ewes that are going to be ready to lamb in December.

I've always said there's a lot of opportunities here, but you've got to chase them.

You've got to be creative.

Theoretically, you get paid once a year for your product, and so how do you budget your whole year out for that one check that you get that you have no idea what it's going to be?

We're now an international marketplace, a worldwide marketplace.

So we're not just competing with a neighbor down the road or somebody in Kansas.

You know, we're competing with somebody in Italy or Brazil or Australia on our market share and sometimes their cost of doing business is a lot less than ours.

You just have to have the attitude of saying, we'll make it work, we can figure it out.

Diversity in agriculture has created some great opportunities for me.

Wool off of a sheep's called a fleece.

So, you shear the sheep, takes a good sheep shearer about two minutes to shear a sheep.

Well, this wool right now is worth about 12 cents a pound.

So, say you get 10 pounds off a sheep, you're getting a $1.20 for the wool, and then you're getting $6 to pay the guy to shear.

So, you're losing money every time you shear a sheep.

So, we diversified into a wool company.

So, we make all kinds of household and bedding products and then we market it and tell our story about our ranch and how we raise the animals, how we take care of the land.

And then we go ahead and then we have the products here.

- I think often people think about farmers and ranchers as folks that don't care about the landscape.

When it comes to small family farms, especially generational farms, that is furthest thing that could be from the truth.

Because you look at your children and you realize that what you're handing to them needs to be a healthy landscape.

- Being in agriculture, you're a scientist, not just with the animal husbandry and learning about animal health, but soil health.

Conservation practices have really changed in the last 40 or 50 years.

There's so much more science and technology and recognition of the importance of taking care of the land.

- The other piece that that you taught me, that it's not just taking care of the animals, it's also taking care of the land.

Well, and you've always been a champion of that.

I mean, I remember even as a kid, there was some dairy down in Marin, I believe called you a hippie when I was about 9 or 10 because you were like, no, you should go organic.

- When you're doing things differently, you're going to get challenged and you're going to get sometimes run out of the county or run out of the room.

So, you've got to have thick skin.

- A bit of that was your education, going to Chico.

And one thing that I really appreciated of my young life is, you know, even when I was like, I'm just going to be at ranch, you always encouraged me, like, no, you should go to school.

- I was that way.

I didn't take a college prep class.

I thought when I walked out of high school I was done.

But god bless my mother who's passed on many years ago said, you know, you need to go at least take some classes.

And it's not just the bookwork, it's the networking, it's the people.

It's learning how to converse.

- Unlearning is also learning more.

I had this concept of ranching.

I had this concept of animal production, just like these giant properties that don't do anything and they just foster cattle.

These people are kind of all potentially really far-right conservative Republicans and they don't want to talk about the climate or the environment at all.

The stereotypes are built on those who are the loudest, and those who are the loudest are commonly the minority.

You don't think about that if you're not in tune with the people and you haven't seen or visited those properties, you haven't listened to their perspective.

- Meilin has been really a joy to get to know and I hope it's all right if I say mentor a little bit.

Working with the animals the way that we do I think was a paradigm shift for her.

To work with a young person that also has the self, self-reflection to be like, maybe I'm wrong, which is super rare in young people, because we all think we know everything when we're young, right?

The sky's the limit for a young person like that that is willing to put the work in.

- Che's a kick.

Oh my gosh.

The first time we met we kind of just hit it off.

I think if you ask him, his proudest accomplishment is that he's reintroduced me into the meat world.

I've been really understanding more the place of animals in our ecosystems and in our food system.

(soft relaxing music) Coming from a background of someone for a very long time who wasn't eating meat, I didn't understand the entire system of how important it is to work with different animals.

- Way back with the mammoths and the elk and the pronghorns, they were grazing this whole country.

And so when we fence it off, or when we say no grazing, it does it a disservice.

- And I think that's the preservation versus conservation mindset.

Preservation is somewhat of the older generation's ideology of no touch.

And we're quickly realizing for the last 10 to 15,000 years we've been burning it and we've been grazing it.

I would argue that our form of agriculture is the only form of agriculture that requires biodiversity to be successful.

- People are in this mindset of like, re-wilding the land, and it's like, no, we've actually done so much harm that we need to rebuild these ecosystems.

- We need to mimic them because we're not going to be able to bring 10,000 bison through here.

These animals are here for a purpose.

We're breeding them for a purpose.

It's our responsibility to take good care of them and make sure that they are provided for until they provide back to us.

Come on, girls!

Come on!

Come on!

Once a few start, you need to have them all come so they all get to eat at the same time.

- If you are going to eat meat, you should understand what it means to take a life.

- And respect that.

- And respect that life.

And understand also that it's kind of creating the circle of life.

- Well, it is, it is a circle of life.

And it's important to try to keep that as local as possible.

Nobody stops and thinks, where did that food come from?

How many people handled it?

Is that farmer or rancher getting a fair price to make sure he's going to stay in business for next year?

- You know, I think young people like Meilin are inspiring to me because she volunteers at all these different ranches and farms, and the vast majority of what you consume comes from this county.

And that's a very rare thing I think in most people and especially most young people.

- Having young people support and recognize food security, like Che just mentioned, is so important.

Land is a pass-through.

Yes, when we're here, we own it, and we're working hard on it, we're going to make an imprint, but when you're done, somebody else is going to take care of it, you know?

And then hopefully they'll take care of it and follow by some of your rules or some of your examples.

- In a perfect world, I'd love to own and manage land.

My generation, it's like we are in this concept now of what gives us the right to "own property" or land that never belonged to the person we are purchasing it from in the first place.

Part of honoring land and how we are working with the land now is thinking about the people who were stewarding it before us.

In many ways, all of those who are not Indigenous to this land are colonizers.

We learn our histories through a very American perspective, and there are so many other histories that are erased through that, but how can we create these root systems and integrate all of these different perspectives and peoples and species that have lived here and create more of a holistic system?

I think it's really hard right now, especially in our polarized times.

How can we use our power and our histories in Sonoma County and our voices to bond over what we share rather than our differences?

And that is very American at its core.

- We've all come from the same place in the sense of how we started out in this country and then here we are, you know?

How do we hang onto it?

That's the challenge.

We have the ability, we have the land.

We need to make sure we have people out there.

This kind of lifestyle, you have to love it.

You have to have passion, you have to have a drive to want to do this kind of work.

And it takes a lot.

Takes a toll physically.

Takes a toll emotionally, mentally.

It's not a profession that young people are getting into real fast.

- I don't know anybody that is in my generation that just farms or ranches anymore.

Everybody has a job.

This landscape is very expensive to maintain.

It's mostly a labor of love.

My wife and I joke that we want to make enough money and save enough money that one day we can afford to work on the ranch.

What was the kind of oil I was supposed to use?

- That stuff in the corner.

- There's a reason that food is such a universal language of appreciation and affirmation in our communities because everybody's got to eat.

I look at this place as not just a way to feed my family.

This is a place where people can go to engage, to learn, to be part of what is a beautiful process.

My great great great great grandfather when he settled here, the first thing he did after he built a house for the family was to build a school for the community, which is the Watson School at the end of our road.

And then every generation has been in some kind of service ever since.

It's something that I think has been part of the ideology of our family is trying to change their paradigms, giving the experience of seeing a different space and a touchstone that they never really would've had in the urban environment that most of us live in.

(soft relaxing music) The history of this school, to me, represents how we can give back to the community, and if he was doing this 175 years ago, I better step it up.

- I'm sure he was thinking about his kids, saying, you know, my kids need to be educated, we need to have a school.

But it also brought in all the other people that we're still able to sit here today.

So I think it's pretty cool that we're reminiscing a little bit about the area with three different generations in a sense of agriculturists.

- Well, thank you all for taking the time.

And thanks for all the education over the years.

- I'm still kicking, so we'll get together, and when we do calves in a few weeks, I'll call you.

- Sounds good.

We'll get it done.

- And you'll come, too.

- I'll come, too.

- We'll make sure you're there.

- Yeah, yeah.

- That'll be fun.

(soft hopeful music) - My grandmother used to say that the ranch is both a blessing and a curse because it does a lot of good things, but it requires a lot as well.

I look at my son and fully realize that he's going to make his own decisions.

My hope is that if he doesn't succeed and take over the place after me that he holds onto it like my grandmother did for my mother.

After 175 years of holding onto the landscape, it would break my heart to lose this place.

I just hope that people hold on to these properties because I want to see people that know the landscape, that love the landscape, and are willing to put their blood, sweat, and tears into making it healthier and better.

My wife moved to this country, which was not easy, because she looked at this place and what we could build in a country that has the ability to change things.

I definitely have a lot of hope.

(inspirational soft music) (inspirational soft music continues) - [Voiceover] You can visit our website for more information and additional resources.

It's all at generations250.org.

- [Voiceover] This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

(prestigious jingle) (exciting jingle)