- [Mark] Yeah, one of the misnomers about Gilroy and being labeled as the garlic capital of the world is that very little garlic is actually grown in that area.

- They hear Gilroy, they hear garlic, they think it's all grown there.

Fresno County is the garlic capital of the United States.

- We have some shrimp, we have some cherry tomato, of course we have the garlic.

Cooking with garlic is almost like a heritage, it's centuries and centuries of culinary tradition.

- So a garlic crop really easily can, when you figure out your ground prep, timing prior to planting and after harvest, it's easy for garlic to take over a year's worth of production.

- Garlic has got something special.

The aroma, the history, the flavor, the multicultural uses of garlic.

- So my family, the Christopher family, has been farming since the 1800s.

Even though there's a lot of garlic available from around the world, the best garlic as measured by quality and flavor, is coming from right here in California.

- Once in a while, you know, China will decide that it wants to export and dump a bunch of product into the United States.

- And it's just like any other produce, if you trust the quality of something coming from China, then knock yourself out and go buy it.

- [Peter] I'm a huge fan of the Gilroy garlic festival.

And I've been so many times and I've got my marketing hat on and I'm looking around and I've got my foodie hat on, and I'm thinking, man, we could maybe do that different.

We could do that better.

- I think it brings to the plate a kind of history.

Okay because it's very important to have this history of Central Valley.

- [Peter] People love it and it's addictive.

And there are far more people that crave garlic than would rather not.

- [Didier] But you close your eyes, you have this piece of steak, you have this piece of garlic, and then you know who you are.

You are here in Central Valley.

- But when you get out the west side, typically everything is a half mile by a half mile, 160 acre blocks.

Having those large blocks out on the west side is tremendously important.

And I often tell people who don't understand the scale of farming in California, and particularly on the west side, on my farm I grow about one third of a pound of garlic for every man, woman, and child in America.

- [Didier] You eat garlic, you use no butter, but only olive oil.

So garlic, olive oil, and fish, a glass of wine, and then you'll live forever.

- [Peter] This festival comes at a time when we need to embrace something positive and something special.

This is not a one off event.

This is something that's gonna happen for many, many years.

We should recognize the growers.

We should recognize the processors.

This is ours, and we've allowed other people to do great things with it for a long time.

But now it's time for us to get involved and do something really great.

(instrumental outro music) - [Man] Production funding for American Grown, My job depends on AG, provided by James G Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts.

More yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

By Pickett Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co, providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic, M&A, and financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(instrumental outro music) (country intro music) ♪ Ready to sail into the wind ♪ ♪ Heading west to find my reason ♪ ♪ Longing for something greater than this ♪ ♪ And I'm ripe with anticipation ♪ - When people talk about the central San Joaquin Valley and being the food source for not only California and the US, but also the world, it's a recognition of how significant and on what scale our production is because we are blessed with soils and climate and expertise, and in most years, irrigation.

- I'm Ken Christopher, executive vice president Christopher Ranch, the nation's largest garlic grower.

So my family, the Christopher family, has been farming since the 1800s, and they got their start in prunes up in San Jose, California.

And when my grandfather came of age, about 21 years old, he decided he had quite enough of being in the prune business and wanted to try something different.

And he had heard about the Mediterranean climate, right here in Gilroy, California, that was ideal for growing garlic.

So he came down here with a loan from his dad and started on just 10 acres.

And every year since then he grew little by little to where today we're growing 6,000 acres of garlic, or 100 million pounds.

And we're growing all of our garlic up and down the state of California.

So whereas all the garlic comes home to Gilroy, the truth is garlic is actually grown in Fresno, in Southern California, Northern California, and right here in the central coast.

- [Mark] You know, you can't turn on any of these cooking shows on TV, that somewhere along the line, unless they're making pastry, they always add some garlic of some sort.

Because of ethnic foods and the need for really robust flavor in foods, it's really become kind of an essential ingredient.

♪ I'm on the move ♪ ♪ Out into the great wide open ♪ ♪ Look out world, here I come ♪ ♪ Hoist up my sails and ride the wind ♪ ♪ Look out world, here I come ♪ ♪ Hoist up my sails and ride the wind ♪ - What we gonna do is a perfect surf and turf.

We have a New York, look at this marbling, very nice, it's a prime New York.

We have some shrimp, we have some cherry tomato, of course we have the garlic, butter, a little bit of vodka because I like to flame, a little bit of Harris Ranch Chardonnay, and there we go.

We start with the garlic.

I like to make it like this so you can have it the whole clove.

But of course garlic is the holy trinity of mediterranean cuisine.

You have garlic, you have olive oil, basil, tomato, you can have some variation but garlic is the base of our diet in the Mediterranean Sea.

Hey, go gentle.

Don't push, push, push.

You see it coming naturally, don't go over the top.

A little pressure and it's enough.

Three garlic for one serving should be good.

The garlic in itself, it's a mix of different character.

It's a little bit of the angry guy.

It's a little bit of the sweet guy, the cool guy.

Garlic is very important because garlic is the balance.

You're not gonna find the same thing with onion.

You know, onion can be sweet, onion can be acidic, but you don't have this fragrance that is gonna make you go high in the flavor profile.

- Fresno County is the garlic capital of the United States.

Most people don't realize that.

They hear Gilroy, they hear garlic, they think it's all grown there, we have nothing to do with it.

But actually we grow 80% of the garlic in the United States and we send it to Gilroy for processing.

And what they've done with the Gilroy Garlic Festival was genius for 42 years, volunteer based, turned something smelly in the air into something that people loved and craved.

- Garlic is a crop that can't be grown just anywhere.

You're not gonna find it in the Northeast, the Northwest, the South.

It can only be grown right here in California.

And that's because we're gonna have nice cold winters, and then we're also gonna have super hot dry summers, just like they do in the Mediterranean region of Europe.

And that guarantees the best garlic in the world.

- Tomatoes, here the secret, a little bit of chicken stock.

Just for the flavor.

Forget about it, you let produce, you go back to the steak, okay cause we have the good color, up, down.

How do you like your steak, Jeff?

Medium!

Medium it is.

So since it's like history, the garlic at Harris Ranch, we serve all our steaks with a whole garlic.

We do a lot of dishes that goes with garlic.

It's because it's traditional.

I think it brings to the plate a kind of history.

Okay because it's very important to have this history of Central Valley.

For me, the importance in cooking is when you close your eyes, you know where you are.

You close your eyes, you have a steak in front of you, a piece of garlic, and sometimes you have veggies from the farm, but you close your eyes, you have this piece of steak, you have this piece of garlic, and then you know who you are.

You are here in Central Valley.

You are in Coalinga.

(gentle music) - Gilroy used to be the garlic capital, garlic production capital, but over the years that's changed and transitioned into the San Joaquin Valley as time moved on.

Garlic from the time you plant it to harvest it is a very, very long crop.

It's basically a nine month crop, it's one of the oldest crop, not oldest, one of the longest crops out there.

So if we plant it in the middle of October, we won't harvest it till mid June or July.

- [Mark] So again, I grow fresh market, but I also grow dehy.

The dehy product is one that you see, McCormick is a big one, but Sensient, who we grow for, they make powder, flakes, salt, you know, and those dehy products are shelf stable.

You can put in your cabinet and you know, a year later still be using them, so that's important.

But the fresh market side is one that really demands, you know, a very skilled production in the field if you're gonna get the cosmetically appealing bulb of garlic.

- When my grandfather first got started in garlic, he was really focused on just fresh garlic, those big white bulbs that you see at the grocery store nationwide.

Well, ever since then, we decided to diversify and to try a few new things.

So from fresh garlic, we now have our crack garlic, our peeled garlic, our chopped garlic, our pickled garlic, our crushed garlic, our organic garlic.

You name it, we have over 300 different ways of offering garlic to our customers.

So the thing about garlic is it's unlike a lot of other vegetables in that, on the growing side, it requires the human hand and the human eye.

There simply is no mechanization or automation that can get our garlic out of the ground.

And even once we get it out of the ground, to get that garlic into a box and to your local market, it's also gonna require human eyes and human hands to actually go through and sort through every single bulb of garlic that we harvest.

So at the end of the day, over 1 billion bulbs of garlic are gonna be run through our facility and selected by the human hand.

- [Interviewer] Is it as lucrative as a crop as pistachios or almonds?

I mean, is it a pretty good crop for market?

- I will tell you that back when I started growing it, we would scratch at the window screens of the processors and the handlers to give us a hundred dollars a ton.

Not long ago, we were growing it for $160 a ton, and this year we're growing it and the contracts are $500 a ton.

And, you know, supply and demand because of the drought and because of the fallowed acres that we now see out there, if you run a processing operation for the dehydrators, or if you run a fresh market operation, consistency of supply is critical.

You have a fixed cost, you probably have forward contracts for your product, and you cannot afford to not have the raw product come in the front door of your facility.

- I think food festivals are a good venue.

I think it's a great opportunity to educate the American consumer, the American culinary people, about the value and the integrity of American produced agricultural products and what they do, not only as being healthy and nutritious foods, but also what do they bring to the economy?

If we're farming locally, you know, we're paying somebody to work on the farm.

They're buying gas at the local gas station.

They're shopping at the local hardware.

They're shopping at the local grocery store.

This money stays here and it builds our economy and it builds our neighborhoods and it builds our infrastructure rather than buy an offshore product and where does that money go?

That money goes somewhere else and it doesn't do any good for American jobs, American security, as far as food security.

It's just, it's a drain.

(light country music) - You know, there's so many things that we grow here in the valley that are wildly popular.

I mean, garlic is I think number six or seven on our list of number ones that we grow in the United States, but garlic has got something special.

The aroma, the history, the flavor, the multicultural uses of garlic.

A lot of people when they hear garlic, if they're not thinking Gilroy, and they're thinking areas they think Italian food, they think Chinese food, but it's used an awful lot in so many different cultures and people love it.

And it's addictive.

And there are far more people that crave garlic than would rather not.

The bad breath is almost a trophy to the consumption of garlic.

So we're embracing that and I think it's important to have fun with it.

And it comes at a time, this festival comes at a time, when we need to embrace something positive and something special.

And, you know, this is not a one off event.

This is something that's gonna happen for many, many years, God willing.

- I think people who probably don't have any interest in agriculture, but, you know, go to their local restaurant and smell garlic or at home they're using it, will have an interest and they'll come.

And they're gonna get exposed to not only the products, but they're getting exposed to the people who grow it, plant it, sell it, process it, demonstrate it.

And there will be good dialogue that goes on that's open and it's not one sided.

And I think the benefits of that are that those people will then talk to others.

And if this is the first year of that event, I only see it expanding because the vibe will be not only good food.

I attended a garlic festival up in Empire, Nevada, maybe 10 years ago and I still recall garlic beer and garlic ice cream, neither of which I would ever, ever eat again, but it sticks in my mind.

But just down the way, there was some really, really good food and it was a fun event.

And I think that, you know, this one in Fresno is likewise gonna be outstanding.

- [Interviewer] I think it's important for people to understand, you were gonna start this whether the garlic festival in Gilroy continued or not, correct?

- Absolutely.

The whole idea and the whole concept of doing the garlic festival here, the national garlic festival came probably 10 years ago.

I'm in the ag commodity business and I was in Japan actually.

And one of my coworkers told me, you know Fresno County grows more garlic than anywhere else in the United States?

And I said, no, that can't be true.

I would've heard about it.

There's no way that that's true.

So I check my sources, we don't grow a little bit, we grow 80% of the garlic grown in the United States.

That's huge, and we're doing nothing with it, and that's just not right.

And so I said to myself, you know, come when the timing is right, we're gonna try this and we're gonna do this.

(instrumental country music) - So here in Fresno County, what's amazing is that garlic has actually been one of our top 10 crops for years.

It's been high as number three or four.

It typically is somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, the five to eight most valuable crop here in Fresno County.

It's grown on about 25,000 acres as well as produces somewhere in the neighborhood of about 220,000 to 250,000 tons every single year.

And so this is not, we're talking about the flavors, the taste, and the importance to the region, but it's economic activity, it's jobs.

This is something that this region is really, you know, importantly known for.

When we talk about garlic, you know, Gilroy is obviously, from a marketing perspective, processing perspective, been known as the garlic capital, but I think this is also an opportunity to educate folks about the importance of all the other commodities that we have here.

Georgia is not the peach capital of the nation.

In fact I think they're actually number three on the list.

When you look at the peach capital of the nation, it's right here in Fresno County.

I mean we are talking that a major portion of the nation's peaches are grown here, somewhere in the neighborhood of California has more than like the next 40 states combined.

When you talk about citrus, a lot of people, it has it on their license plates, Florida.

Citrus is still an important crop there, yet California is the number one citrus state.

California is the number one dairy state, it's not Wisconsin.

California is the number one cheese state, it's not Wisconsin.

You go on and on about all these different facts, some of these facts we know, but a lot of people just don't know about it, it's marketing.

And so we all in the ag community, as well as just a community at large, need to do a better job branding the importance of this region.

- [Doug] I think it's great that they're having this festival and that they're starting this off.

I think it's a shame that the Gilroy garlic festival is being discontinued because it's, I mean, it's had a long legacy over there and it's got a great following and, you know, if we can get something into San Joaquin Valley similar, I think that'd be awesome.

- I've been in California for the last 21 years.

I work in the south, I work in the north, but here I am in the Central Valley.

I choose Harris Ranch just because they have everything that you can imagine in term of cooking, bakery, challenges, banquets, wedding.

We do a breakfast lunch, dinner, brunch.

I think that here it's the complete package.

I learn a lot of thing here.

I dunno, it makes me maybe a better chef, but also a better person.

The motto I think is take less and give more.

Here we are givers.

- For me as a representative of the agricultural community, events that celebrate anything and everything agriculture are so important.

It's just here we are the, you know, fruit and vegetable basket of the nation and arguably, depending on the crop, of the world, and yet we don't do enough to celebrate what we're doing here in our backyard.

And so for me, anytime you have that opportunity to take something and make something of it, let both locals know, as well as just on the national scale, know more about this region, I think that's important.

I want to see Fresno County, California be the absolutely synonymous name when it comes to food.

You know, when you think Detroit, you think the auto makers, when you think Washington DC, you think politics, when you think, Florida, you think sunshine and beaches, but I want people when they take a bite multiple times per day to be thinking Fresno County, the San Joaquin Valley, because it is so important to the overall role of what food supply is here in this nation.

- [Interviewer] What kind of a turnout are you expecting?

- That's a great question.

Our goals and expectations are to surpass the world record that was set in Gilroy I believe in 2007, where they hit 108,000 people.

We'd like to see 110,000 people, and that's only gonna happen if everybody that's watching this tells a friend and asks them to tell a friend.

We deserve it.

We should be the world record holder for the largest number of people at a garlic festival.

And if we don't hit it this year, we're gonna try again next year and we're gonna put Fresno County on the map.

Agritourism is very important to ag commodities, and we've done a really poor job at agritourism when we have these gold nuggets in a bag that we could be talking about, we feed the world and we don't tell people about it.

We don't talk about it.

We don't promote it.

And that needs to change.

And it will change as people begin to take note of what we're doing.

And the most important thing is COVID is over, let's celebrate and let's thank the people that got us through it.

So yeah, if we don't hit the world record this year, okay, we're gonna do it next year.

(soft instrumental music) (train horn blares) - Every time.

- [Crew member] No noise back here, don't worry about it.

- Thank you.

(soft instrumental music) - [Man] Production funding for American Grown, My job depends on AG, provided by James G Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts.

More yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

By Pickett Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co, providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic, M&A, and financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(instrumental outro music)