- [Narrator] For February, Bay Area Bountiful celebrates Black History Month with local leaders who are making history.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - Working this land and working with one's body and tending the lands.

- Wool is magic.

As far as I'm concerned, wool gets more magic the more I learn about it.

- Eating good food, I learned early on, makes people happy.

I think I'm on a quest to make as many people happy as possible.

- Are you really caring about the climate crisis?

- California's are some of the most productive rain ecosystems on the planet.

- I want this to be what I leave behind.

I want this to be the mark that I make on the world.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Bay Area Bountiful is made possible, in part, by Rocky, the Free Range Chicken and Rosie, the Original Organic Chicken.

The Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District.

Made Local magazine and Sonoma County Go Local.

And through the generous support of Sonoma Water.

Cultivate.

Celebrate.

Connect.

(soft music) - Cascade Ranch is a 418 acre farm just North of the Pie Ranch, in the ancestral homeland of the Amah-Mutsun tribal band.

Under the leadership of Leonard Diggs, the Cascade Regenerator Program plans to create a regenerative landscape, where a multi-racial group of farmers, ranchers and land stewards will have access to the resources needed to help feed communities throughout the Bay Area.

- This is the home of the Almah-Mutsun tribe and they inhabited this zone from here all the way through up to Santa Cruz and they still have a strong relationship with the land here.

We also have a relationship with them.

As part of Pie Ranch, we've had a memorandum of understanding with them for a long time.

They've been working on projects at Home Pie.

And here, their main foods before first contact, were grasses.

All the trees and the coastal mountains zones that we have here were not as well established when they were here, before first contact.

And there was just the grass plains that went all the way down to the ocean.

So we're helping support them with that on this property.

So we have leased this property with the intention of starting a regenerator program.

And so we're trying to pull together a full offering of support for next gen farmers and ranchers and also to provide a more diverse group of people access to land.

So women, number one.

50% of the people we want on our program will be women.

And then people of color and indigenous people.

I already explained the relationship that we have with the local tribe that's here.

That's a really strong and important relationship that we'll maintain, but all people who have not had access to agricultural land for whatever reason, either because they were disenfranchised or because they just never had it as part of their current culture.

I think lots of us grew up in agricultural communities hundreds of years ago, but we've been all pulled apart from those a bit.

And for some people that still resonates and they want to go out and be a part of a food system and specifically grow food, raise animals.

And we wanna help support that group of people.

So it's not enough, as I said, to just provide them land and provide them equipment.

What, really, is needed is to help next gen farms take care of all of the things that they're gonna need to take care for their community.

So we know that climate instability is where we are right now and that having a system that's climate sensitive, climate friendly farming system, is really essential.

So many farmers have not established climate friendly farming practices.

They've established organic practices, regenerative practices, permacultural practices, and embedded in some of those, are practices that are positive for the climate, but not necessarily dead focused on that.

So, as part of our goals here, we wanna make sure that the farming practices get us towards carbon neutral or carbon negative practices.

And there are different tools, like minimum tillage tools, that are out there, that we can help introduce them to and we can also provide them access to.

So that's part of the package that we're putting together.

So we'd like to shift who has access, who has the ability, the privilege to be able to farm and shift the power dynamics so that there are people who are in leadership roles and are initiating systems and food systems that are relevant to them in our farming communities.

And not have it be as it has been for the last 200 years, where we haven't had a diverse group of people being able to have leadership over the agricultural system and access to the agricultural system.

And who are able to profit from it.

Be able to grow a business from it and grow a lifestyle from it.

The tricky part for me though, in that, is I started out by centering on the fact that we've got to farm differently, we've got to farm in a way that's more environmentally sensitive.

We've really got to stay focused on the issues around biological diversity.

I don't think that unless that is connected, simultaneously, with the diverse group of people, getting involved in that type of a farming system, so that the diversity of the people involved and the sustainability of the system go hand in hand.

If we have a diverse group of people farming conventionally, in the way that we've been farming our lands here for the last hundred years, it's not gonna be sufficient.

So we've got to be able to create an incentive for this new group of people to farm differently, to take responsibility for some of the environmental issues that have been ignored for the last generation of farming.

(soft music) - [Narrator] We meet Mac McDonald in his family garden in Windsor.

The son of a moonshiner, Mac was first introduced to wine at the age of 12.

At that young age, he had a vision of becoming a winemaker and has helped a new generation of African-American winemakers to envision their own futures in the industry - I was sitting there one day and I came home and I said to Miss Lil, I said, you know what, honey?

I haven't ever seen any black peoples in my wine dinners.

And I said that kind of bothered me a little bit.

She goes, think about it, where have you been all this time, she says.

I said I guess I never thought about it in that sense, but some reason it is.

So I thought, you know what, there's a few folks that I know that's in the wine business.

Maybe we ought to get together and share our experience.

Cause I had been in it longer than them.

These are the two guys and I could talk to them about some of the things that I was successful at and some that I wasn't.

And I could share that with them and make them more profitable because I take that it's hard for African-Americans to get into a lot of business because of the word that's used capital, I don't use that word.

I call it money because if I got money, I can buy stuff, you know what I mean?

And so, if I could get us together and talk about that, then we all could do a lot better.

And that was a basic, a foreman of the association.

Take a look at triple AVs, three A's vintners, V-I-N-T-N-E-R-S dot org.

And you can see all the members, you can see how to apply for a scholarship through the association.

Well, you know, they partnered with Napa Valley College and Nick Negro College Fund.

And then there's another scholarship that's being set up.

So it's three different ways that you can get into that, if I'm keeping up with it all right.

They may have changed some of it, but there's three different ways to do that.

Just go to that website, give them a call or a email.

And if you're interested in doing something like that, they'll tell you how to do it.

I love gardening.

Gardening is something, by the way, that I use as a tool because I was trying to get more peoples who look like me to understand growing their own food and growing grapes in the wine business.

And so, a lot of the folks that I ran across in the inner cities, they didn't want their kids to be learning about wine at an early age.

So I thought, you know what, what can I do then?

So I came up with this wheelbarrow concept.

I tried it on our granddaughters first and they'd come over and I'd have them to paint the wheelbarrow different colors and stuff like that.

But I give them all a paintbrush and then we would put dirt in it and plant certain type of vegetables.

And the reason I like that wheelbarrow concept is because you can go to the dump, or wherever they call them nowadays, and you can pick up an old wheelbarrow for three or four bucks.

And get some soil and put in it.

You can grow a lot of stuff in a wheelbarrow.

You can rotate and grow a lot of stuff.

And then I can go to inner cities and have inner city kids to grow a lot of food right on that, in the backyard or whatever they have one, they don't need to take that much space.

Rotate your crops because you do that a lot in farming.

You have to rotate your crop.

You just put it in there, like I have a row of radishes out here and it's just amazing how many those things grow out of a package.

You can't keep up with them.

Or I have white turnips out there.

And it's just amazing how many you get out of a $2 package of those white turnips.

So as far as the mentoring of the folks in the wine business yes, there's been a lot of folks call me and talk to me.

High profile, some of them didn't know nothing about wine, didn't know anything about what grapes.

And I'd be on the phone with them, still on the phone with people for hours, trying to explain to them what they need to do to get started and I'll look at it.

Some have kind of lessened.

Theopolis, Theodore Lee, she's an attorney, she's doing really, really well.

She's doing really, really well with her wine.

- Mac is one of my mentors in this business.

So Mac has been a long time mentor.

In fact, I got involved with the Association of African-American Vintners because of Mac McDonald and worked with him and helped brainstorm of what the organization could be.

He is an incredible winemaker and an incredible person.

He and Miss Lil, I've had dinner at their house, they've come to my parties.

I have a Harvest and Bottle Release Party every year, except for 2020, we did not have it.

But the first year, Mac poured wine at my Harvest and Bottle Release Party right next to me.

So he and Tom, who were my winemakers at the time, we had over 200 people.

It was fantastic.

So we're hoping that in 2021, we can return to our Harvest and Bottle Release Party that we hold in September, during harvest.

I grew up in Dallas, my parents were educators.

My father was a male chauvinist pig, but he had one daughter, one child, and that was me.

And so I wanted to ride horses back in the 70's, little girls didn't throw their legs up on top of a horse and ride.

So when I would go to my grandparents' house, they would let the boy cousins ride and my father said, one day I will buy you your own horse and you don't have to cry.

And so, about the age of six or seven, he bought his first 10 acres of land outside of Dallas.

He bought himself a thoroughbred and me a quarter horse who's named Ginger.

I learned to ride a horse.

In the process of farming, I learned to drive on a tractor at the age of eight.

So farming was in my blood.

My grandfather was a sharecropper.

My father was a weekend farmer.

And when I moved to San Francisco to practice law, I had the opportunity to have a mentor who actually owned a vineyard up in Hillsburgh.

Barbara and Pierre Diadonni.

They're still my mentors.

And I would drive briefs to their weekend home.

And I said, wow, I can really be a grape farmer.

Little did I know how expensive land was in California.

So that dream was built back in the 80's, but it wasn't until 2001 that I was able to buy 20 acres of land in the Yorkville Highlands, Anderson Valley, Mendocino County.

(tractor rattling) I know what I don't know, but I know good wine when I taste it.

And so I have to trust my winemakers or my consulting winemakers because I'm involved in every aspect.

I am involved in barrel selection.

And, as I've said, great wine starts right here in the vineyard.

You cannot have great wine without great grapes.

You can't take a bad grape and make a great wine.

You have to actually farm to make quality fruit in order to make quality wine.

And I'm all about quality (soft music) - [Narrator] In 2020, Brianna Nobel founded Humble, an Oakland base equine program, dedicated to positively impacting youth from disenfranchised communities.

Through enriching learning experiences, Humble uses horses as a medium to inspire bright futures.

- I've always worked with children, probably since I was about 14 years old.

So I'd always work in Ryde and any opportunity I got to work with other organizations, as I was younger, cause there's definitely been, throughout the years, a few organizations that have popped up to try to help the inner city kids around here and get them introduced with horses.

They generally don't stand around too long, but I've had my foot into a lot of them that have come up through the Bay Area.

And I've always really deeply enjoyed the work that I did with them.

I worked for the city of Oakland and I taught for their Horsemanship Day Camp that they had in Oakland years ago.

Just any opportunity I could work with kids, but the problem-- Hi, Amir.

The problem sort of became, as these organizations would rise and fall, that the need is still there.

I still wanna do the work, but the organizations would disappear.

So I just started to do it on my own from there.

And that's really how Humble began, is, technically, I really just got, on paper, established last year, but Humble has been something that I've worked on for probably the past five years.

So it really began as something where I would teach for-profit summer camps for the kids.

And then just out of my own pocket, at the end of the summer, I would bring in an organization from the Bay Area.

Just like hey, let's get a group of 10 kids out and they can come for free and experience what the other kids get to experience.

And so, I would just do that as I can.

And I'm so happy that it's become more than that now.

There are horsemen all over the country.

And I'm not a really well-traveled equestrian at this point.

So I wanna make it clear that I'm just speaking to my little area here in Northern California that I've experienced, but there are not very many people that look like me, at all.

I think all of us know each other.

There's very few of us here.

So a lot of times I like to tell people, it feels like being a white rose in a field of yellow daisies.

And sometimes the attention that you get is simply because I'm a white rose, I stand out.

I look a little bit different than everyone else and it's not necessarily a negative thing, but sometimes, a lot of times, it is a very negative thing.

So it can be hard, just always looking different and then it can be hard to face some of the blatant racism that you do because a lot of it can be blatant.

Or even just like, we're facing hardships here on this property, where we're really looking for a place to call home.

This is people that are white and that do have money don't necessarily like to see us and these families around.

They feel threatened by us.

So I've had an instance around here, at this facility, where we had a complaint to management because a family, a father, a mother and four kids and a dog, parked in front of a barn that we had permission to.

And one of the owners of a horse in that barn felt threatened.

And the excuse that I got when we were told that oh, yes, this person feels threatened is because, well, they've had things stolen before.

So seeing the brown family parked around their stuff, even though we have a children's riding program that serves predominantly people of color and youth of that matter, still they felt threatened enough to call management on us and complain.

It will feel really good to have a space of our own where we aren't bothering people simply because of the color of our skin.

(soft music) Having a home for us is gonna allow us to dig those roots down in the ground and make sure that this is a program that is here for the next 50 years.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Food insecurity impacts many local families, a crisis that has only gotten worse during the pandemic.

The Sonoma County Black Forum has pivoted to address this pressing issue, partnering with other nonprofit organizations, small businesses and individual volunteers in our community.

- Today, we are out here gleaning in the Healdsburg Plaza.

This fruit that we're picking today will be going to the Sonoma County Black Forum.

They're a nonprofit in the County that feeds families.

Farm to Pantry was founded in 2008 and I joined the board in 2015.

I was originally born in Mexico, I came over to the States when I was seven years old.

My family has been in Sonoma County for 30 plus years.

My uncles, my grandfather, my dad, they're all local farm workers.

So, in that way, I've always seen organizations as the receiver.

And now that I'm on the other side, where I can actually help provide these services to people in my community, people who look like me, it's very humbling just because I can see my family in every single recipient.

- We could not do our food distribution or our Youth Summit without the support of Farm to Pantry, without the support of community foundations, Sonoma County, Sonoma County Vintner, Bud's Custom Meat, Napa Sonoma League, Oliver's.

I also want to recognize the small donors that we have, from the community, anywhere from $5 to $25.

So we receive support from our sponsors, but also from the community, which we are so grateful for.

- Traditionally, what we do is we have a Youth Summit every year and we have other community engagement events.

And so what we did was shift this year.

We wanted to continue to support our community.

And so, we put out a survey to ask the community, what do you need right now?

And two of the largest responses was money for rent and food and the third one was mental health support.

So what we're trying to do is, again, connect our community members with information about various therapists who are there to support them.

We offer that at our meetings, we have a list of therapists of color.

We also, again, the food drive is there to meet that need for food, the food insecurity that's going on right now because of COVID.

We are not able to address the monetary aspect, but what we decided we could do was the food.

And being in Sonoma County, we are in an agricultural County.

We thought we'd be able to reach out to community members and they did respond and they are giving us the donations we need to provide healthy, organic, enriched foods to our members.

- In addition to our food distribution, we're going to have an urban gardening series.

It's going to be spearheaded by another board member, Claudia de la Pena.

And she's going to try to instruct the community, those who have very little experience with growing their own food because we feel that this is the time that we have to be independent, in terms of where our food comes from and showing people how to do just that.

- The first class will be container gardening.

So we're gonna talk about growing some food in containers and what that looks like and what that will take.

We'll talk about soil, we'll talking about watering, what you can successfully grow in containers.

And you can grow most anything and almost anything, but the idea is just to get people interested in growing their own food.

When we saw the amount of people that were showing up at the food distributions, we kind of thought maybe these are some of the people that we could speak to and teach them how to grow some of their own food.

If you can grow your own salad, then you're doing a lot.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Petaluma Blacks for Community Development share black history and culture within our community through various programs and events throughout the year.

This month, their Celebrating Family exhibit can be experienced all over downtown Petaluma.

- Our main goal is to share black history and culture with the community.

So this year, because of the pandemic that is happening now, we knew that we were not going to be able to go into the museum to do our exhibit.

Plus, we had a lot of killings that were caught on video and thus, a lot of protest afterwards.

And so we felt that it was really important for us to include the community in our exhibit for 2021.

The theme is the family, we decided to make ours celebrating family and letting it be about celebrating family completely in Petaluma.

And so, I was talking to another lady, Paige Green, who happens to be a photographer.

And Paige said that she would love to take the pictures.

And she was thinking, at first, just black families.

And I said, no, it would need to be the community.

This is a way we can help to bring our community together.

We decided that 2021 and 2020 was not gonna break us.

We were gonna continue to do what we normally do.

So our storefront exhibit and now our black history program, which will be on the 27th, at 6:30.

It is virtual, but you do have to register in order to participate.

So you will need to go onto our website.

(soft music) - I got contacted by a young lady who said that they were doing family photos and would I like to be part of it?

And so I said, yeah, sure, why not?

Let's take the picture, let's do it and she said, yeah, you can have your family.

And my wife and son were there and we did that.

And that was that.

And last week, when the picture went up, I had no idea where the picture was.

And then I get a text message from a friend, Alithia, who works at Della and said, hey, check this out.

And then she took a snap and I was like, oh, that's our picture, I was like where's this?

And she's like it's at Della.

So you don't have no idea how it warmed my heart.

And so, again, goes all back to why I love Petaluma.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Black History Month is a relatively new construct in America.

But as we have witnessed, it is a reminder that there is work required of all of us to recognize that Black history is American history.

This truth should be honored every month, as we explore our shared American history together.

(soft music)