Digging In With an Indigenous-Led Farm

Learning from Wukchumni Farms in California's Central Valley

Dear friend,

This is a low moment on the climate front. The “Big Beautiful Bill” promises to pull the rug out from under many of the Big, Impactful climate projects that are in the works here in the U.S. and nearly every day I find myself readjusting my expectations about what it means to fight for a livable planet.

And yet I still — against the odds — have hopeful moments. And they almost always take place when I get to talk with people who are in the trenches, keeping their sights on both a just world and a stable climate. Below are a mother-daughter pair I found particularly inspiring. It’s longer than my newsletter stories typically go, so the news roundup at the end is a little shorter. Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this work.

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I visited Wukchumni Farms — on the outskirts of Visalia, California — on a hot day last fall. Tomato season was coming to an end, and the soil had a dry, sun-baked feel to it that I’ve come to associate with the San Joaquin Valley in the warmer months.

Farm manager Yaynicut Franco made time to meet with me between tasks, and we moved from one patch of shade to another as she gave me a tour of the small farm, pointed out the native plants growing around the perimeter, and told me the story of the land on which we stood.

For Yaynicut and the rest of the Wukchumni Tribe, the plants, the land, and the tight-knit community they work hard to keep together are all part of the same story. The Wukchumni are one of many Yokuts communities in the center of the state, but they’re not federally recognized, which means they’re landless. And they don’t own the parcel we stood on that day. But their connection to the land goes back to a time before the Valley was cut up, doled out to a relatively small number of large-scale farms, and irrigated.

Yaynicut Franco in the hoop house nursery at Wukchumni Farms.

It’s the site of a Yokuts village and roundhouse that was burnt to the ground by the Spanish nearly two centuries ago. More recently, Yaynicut’s grandmother remembered walking through what is now the eastern edge of Visalia as a child, as her family would hunt, gathering foods like acorns and elderberries, and tend to the plants in the area. Just beyond the farm is one of the last remaining oak riparian forests in the Central Valley, the Kaweah Oaks Preserve.

“My great grandmother was a basket weaver, and this was one of the places where people could come to gather materials,” Yaynicut told me. “Because once fences started going up on private property, and more farmers used pesticides, people couldn't gather as freely as they had in the past.”

The land where Wukchumni Farms sits was for years used to grow Christmas trees, but its owners allowed the Franco family and others in the tribe to gather, practice traditional ceremonies, care for plants, and keep a sweat lodge on a far corner of the property. Then, when the owners retired, they left the land to the Quaker church and it became Quaker Oaks Farm, a teaching farm. However, the deed specified that the Wukchumni tribe could continue to access the land.

Fast forward to 2020, when the pandemic hit. “There was no food on the shelves, for a lot of our families — we have a lot of low-income tribal members and elders — and it was disastrous. My mom said, “We need to start growing our own food, and that’s what we did.”

Yaynicut’s mother Darlene Franco, who had been working part time building gardens for people in their community saw an opening, and they started partnering with a local food bank, got pandemic funding from a private foundation, and started growing food.

Five years later, the mother and daughter have worked alongside other immediate and extended family members to build out an educational farm that serves as a kind of hub for the Wukchumni tribe. They’re still providing food to those who need it — and their farm is often seen as a safe option for migrant farmworkers in the area who are in need of food but looking to keep a low profile. But now they’re receiving funding from foundations and universities that are allowing them to teach composting techniques, save seeds, raise chickens, do cultural burns, and propagate native plants in a nursery to give them away to other non-federally recognized tribes.

For Darlene and Yaynicut, who have both worked a series of other jobs — in offices and for a range of cultural and nonprofit organizations — the opportunity to steward land (they’re also on the board of Quaker Oaks Farm) and bring Wukchumni people together as their full-time jobs is both a gift and a serious responsibility.

Darlene Franco, Wukchumni Farms, native plants grow in the hoophouse

Before the pandemic, the mother-daughter team had been part of a group including the Central California Environmental Justice Network (CCEJN) and other small nonprofits in the region spearheaded by Isabel Arrollo-Toland (a fierce changemaker whose work I wrote about in 2019 and who passed away in 2020) that set out to create an agroecology farming training program at Quaker Oaks Farm. It didn’t ultimately come to pass, but Yaynicut and Darlene are hoping to pick up the charge with Wukchumni Farms.

“There are really no [sustainable] agriculture projects being led by tribal communities. So we said, ‘Well, let's do it,’" said Yaynicut.

And yet adjusting to farming rather than gathering food has been a big cultural shift—even within her own lifetime. And that’s largely because of the way water has been captured and diverted by farmers and water districts in the Valley. For example, Deep Creek, the creek that ran near the farm, used to create wetlands filled with tule. The oaks, mugwort, and elderberry bushes didn’t need to be irrigated.

“When I think back, we never had to tell our plants where to grow,” said Darlene. “We never had to farm and make rows and say, ‘you're gonna grow here,’ because the water flowed naturally. We went to where the plants were growing, where they were getting water, where they were getting the sun, and we helped them by clearing space or whatever we needed to do, and then we’d harvest. So the whole thought of agriculture is foreign to us. But we've learned to do it.”

Now, Darlene and Yaynicut are working to balance modern crop production with efforts to make it easier for more people to tend to and gather wild foods. At the height of the pandemic they received a grant that allowed them to pay traditional gatherers to collect foods like acorn mush and sour berries for their weekly food boxes.

And the landscape itself? Both Franco women say it has dried out a lot in the last decade. The tule that appeared briefly a few years back after they did a cultural burn on the land that was once a creek bed didn’t get enough water to last. And they’re worried about the longevity of the existing oaks around the farm, and the fact that young trees struggle to make it through the long, dry summers.

As a result, they’re working with a program of the state’s Department of Conservation designed to help preserve and recharge groundwater. There’s a groundwater basin across the freeway and in wet years they flood the farmland there as a way of preventing the nearby city of Farmersville from flooding. Recently, Wukchumni Farms applied to get water pumped onto their side of the freeway too. “It's obviously not going to help all the oaks repopulate overnight, but it might help the groundwater in the region get replenished,” said Yaynicut.

In addition to working to repair the landscape and help it adapt to climate change, the team behind Wukchumni Farms is also dedicated to helping the youth in their tribe build long standing relationships with the land, and their plant and animal relatives. One strategy involves encouraging each young person to choose their favorite plant — and care for it and harvest from it over time.

“A lot of our kids, they don't go to church. They go to the land. That's where their ceremony is, that's where their connection is,” says Darlene.

She is keenly aware of how challenging it is for Wukchumni youth to stay connected to tribal traditions while navigating social media, consumerism, and all the other trappings of modern life.

“It's different than when I was growing up and my mom and grandma were teaching me about our culture,” said Darlene.“They know who they are when they're with us, but when they're in schools, there's so much pressure to mold into what other people strive to be, people who have more money, more material possessions.”

Darlene envisions expanding the farm or finding other land where Wukchumni families can live together in a multi-generational community, and youth can learn from and serve their elders as an ordinary part of the experience of growing up. But that may still be a few years off.

All the work and planning she and Yaynicut do is an extension of their drive to keep Wukchumni culture and language — and a reciprocal relationship with the natural world — alive.

“We’re always asking, ‘how can we be of service in these modern times? Because that's something that people sometimes forget,” said Yaynicut. “We're supposed to be taking care of each other, and we're supposed to be of service to one another, especially the ones who are most in need.”

The pushback

19-year-old Eva Lighthiser is one of the 16 young people who sued the state Montana over its promotion of fossil fuel (Held v. Montana) and won last December. And although Montana's majority-GOP legislature has since passed multiple bills that have weakened the state supreme court's decision, Lighthiser and the other youth are clearly playing the long game.

Now, she’s the lead plaintiff in a new lawsuit that takes on Donald Trump’s recent efforts to “unleash” fossil fuels while undermining renewable energy and denying and defunding climate science. The case alleges that the administration’s actions violate young Americans’ Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty under the U.S. Constitution.

On the brighter side

1. I wrote about a plan to "prune" or decommission whole sections of old gas lines in California and electrify all the homes on the block. The first neighborhood-scale decarbonization project is taking place in Albany, CA, just north of Berkeley, and a series of pilot programs will roll out in other cities — with an emphasis on low-income neighborhoods — within the next few years. The most amazing thing? PG&E is on board. And it might even spend some of the money it saves on maintaining the gas lines toward the cost of electrifying the neighborhoods’ homes.

2. Zohran Mamdani’s primary win may not have been directly related to climate change for most voters, but this Jacobin piece does a good job of connecting the dots between cost of living and the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

   It reads:

   New national polling from Data for Progress shows that two in five voters rank kitchen-table costs like utilities and housing as the most important reasons to address energy and environmental issues. And the scale of transformation required to maintain a livable planet requires building a united working-class base that sees its demands reflected in visions for a greener world. … The Mamdani campaign’s focus on lowering the cost of living should serve as a blueprint for progressives across the country seeking to embed climate action in real improvements for working peoples’ lives.

3. Britt Wray’s newsletter Unthinkable features a useful interview with environmental psychologist Dr Renée Lertzman about how to use a “psychologically informed strategy” to talk about climate change with those who haven’t felt welcome in the conversation. Here’s a snippet:

   It started out with what we appreciate about being American and about wide-open spaces and clean air and water. And then we got into ‘you must be feeling really angry that people are being hypocrites by telling you not to do things while they're flying around the globe. And you might feel really resentful, and you might feel really left out of these key conversations.’
   

   By the end of the two-minute script … they were resonating with a pro-climate message, but it was a message on their own terms.

4. Earlier this month, an all-electric aircraft landed at New York’s JFK airport. Electric planes will likely never work for long-haul flights, but they might one day become a workable solution for short trips. And they’re a more promising solution than ethanol-based jet fuel, which is a nice sounding story until you do the emissions math.
   

5. Native pond turtles are making a comeback in Yosemite National Park after the removal of invasive bullfrogs.
   

6. Colorado, inspired by the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, is going to begin managing bison as wildlife rather than livestock. This should allow more people in the state to graze the animals in ways that repair public lands and add more carbon to the soil.
   

7. Every year or two someone publishes a story about the green housing wonder that is Vienna, Germany. Last week it was NPR, and I have to say, it was well done. Now let’s hope more U.S. urban planners and local government folks visit the city — with its small-but-affordable, uber-climate friendly apartment buildings and shared green spaces — for inspiration.
   

8. The dedicated folks at the LA Zoo have ushered not one, not two, but 10 baby condors into the world. All are candidates for release in the wild.

   

   A baby condor. Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Zoo.

9. Lawmakers passed a bill in Oregon that will ban beaver hunting and trapping along impaired waterways on public lands. As a great deal of research shows, allowing more beavers to exist in the landscape will lead to more natural wetlands, which filter and clean water and help restore ecosystems — and protect land from wildfires.
   

10. Northern California’s Yurok Tribe is celebrating the return of 73 square miles of forested land along the Klamath River in the state’s largest land-back deal so far.

Take care out there,

Twilight