(gears cranking) - [Charles] 600 years ago, a German metalsmith took a wine press, added movable type, and invented the printing press.

(printing press cranking) In a sense, Johannes Gutenberg built one form of information transfer out of another.

In the growing field of biosemiotics, scientists study how living beings respond to ecological signs, including the plants and animals our food comes from.

Smoke is a sign; it indicates fire.

The fruit's color indicates ripeness.

Our food carries these messages and memories about the organism it came from and the environment it grew in.

But, messages can become distorted en route.

So, how do we decode them?

(water sloshing) I'm Charles Loi.

I'm a filmmaker who began to see that the California we grew up in is disappearing.

Climate change demands new solutions and new stories.

My friends and I set out to find those narratives.

(compelling music) - [Announcer] "Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San-Francisco-based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation.

And by the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

(upbeat music) Additional support provided by donors to The Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

(upbeat music) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(enchanting music) (upbeat electronic music) - [Charles] California is huge in agriculture, the largest producer in the US and number five in the world, but agriculture is also our state's fifth largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

So we wanted to know: How does this industry giant reduce its climate impacts?

We took a trip to UC Davis where Ermias Kebreab is trying to tackle one slice of the emissions pie.

- [Ermias] Methane, although it's not as much as carbon dioxide in terms of the amount it's been emitted, is much more potent.

- Methane accounts for as much as 40% of global warming, and a lot of that comes from cows, who, contrary to popular belief, release it primarily through burps, not (bell clanking) the other way.

(cow mooing) Ermias and his team are trying to reduce that through cow feed.

Part of the inspiration?

Seaweed.

Studies have shown that seaweed disrupts the microbes inside cow's guts.

- The microbes are the ones that are producing the methane, so we provide different type of feed additives, some secondary compounds, like tannins, that would reduce emissions.

And then we have others that are inhibitors that inhibit the methanogenesis or the methane from being formed.

The third one that we are about to embark is microbial editing.

So, if we are able to kind of switch off the genes that are responsible for methane formation, then we may be able to come up with a microbiome where the microbes do not emit methane.

A lot of people are looking into California to see what works and what doesn't work.

Definitely, there is some overconsumption going on in high-income countries in particular, so we can afford to reduce that.

At the same time, we need to supply a large section of the population that demand those products.

Particularly in low-income countries, you have to make sure that it's safe for the animal, it's safe for the environment, it's safe for people.

We all know how dire the situation is, and we don't have a lot of time, and then we come here and we do this experiment, and then we see emission reduction going all the way up to 90, 95%.

That's very exciting.

- Innovative solutions like this one are incredibly important, but they're not the whole enchilada.

(jaunty music) The industrialization of our food system comes with a ton of other problems, like the question of animal welfare, or pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, or deforestation.

But, industrialization also feeds a lot of people.

So, how can we do that while still remembering that the garden you cultivate doesn't end at the fence?

More and more farmers are taking this question seriously, and one growing approach is regenerative agriculture.

So here in Wine Country, we met up with Ames Morison to learn more about how one vineyard is doing this.

(gentle upbeat music) - The sheep are a really integral part of our approach to regenerative farming.

The biggest challenge to farming organically is managing the weeds.

Sheep are really good at the beginning of the season.

Before the vines start growing, they go through and mow down pretty much all of the grass, all of the weeds.

When they're done, we want about 1/3 of the grass to be eaten, 1/3 of the grass to be trampled, and 1/3 of the grass to remain.

That allows still plenty of plant matter to continue photosynthesizing, but we're getting rid of a lot of the competition.

And as the sheep go through the vineyard, as they're eating the weeds, they're also digesting them and leaving their manure, and the growth is much lusher, much more verdant.

In addition to doing that, we have eliminated tillage.

You're allowing the organic matter to build up in the soil, and for every 1% organic matter, you allow the soil to hold an additional 25,000 gallons per acre.

And so that can go a really long way to eliminating the need for irrigation, and that's a huge advantage here in California where it doesn't rain in the summer.

I grew up on a farm.

Farming, it's a tough business, very low margins, and so people are willing to pay more for the chemicals they use to help minimize the risk, but I think they're not seeing the long-term risk of using those chemicals.

- [Charles] Risks like insect die offs that are driven in part by pesticides, or the emission of nitrous oxide, the third largest driver of global warming.

But honestly, we've been so disconnected from food it's hard to notice.

Food used to give us direct information about the ecology, who was flourishing, what to eat, what not.

That knowledge shaped our relationships.

But industrialization by prioritizing profit over nutrition, quantity over quality, broke this circle, stretching the distance between every step and inserting corporate players in between.

Food messages were distorted by processing and branding.

Consumers and farmers lost connection with the local ecosystem and workers lost their connection to the people they feed.

It got harder to feel the effects of poisoned soil or the struggles of farmers and laborers, but with Ames, we began to see it's not just about how agriculture exacerbates or is affected by climate change.

It's about how agriculture can be a tool to build climate resilience.

- 2019, the Kincade Fire swept through here the end of October, and if you look around and see pretty much, everything you can see that's green now was charred black.

We lost about 20% of our vines, thousands of trees.

It was a wake-up call to reexamine everything we were doing.

We've been farming organically for 25 years, but I started to wonder if that was enough.

I just kept hearing this word pop up continuously: regenerative.

People that farm regeneratively, they have to be very, very observant of the vine so the vines will live longer as a result.

And so that extra layer of attention allows us to make better wine.

(uplifting music) - Food connects us to our changing environment, to our context.

Literally, in its chemistry, its flavor, its form.

There's this concept that scientists like Jill Johnstone call ecological memory, the idea that past events or disturbances in an ecosystem leave behind legacies.

These legacies guide how the ecosystem responds to similar disturbances in the future, like certain trees responding to recurring wildfires with cones that only open when exposed to heat, releasing seeds that repopulate the species.

(upbeat music) Nature learns, but can it learn fast enough?

- We have had so many extreme years, 2010 and '11 were some of the coldest years we've ever experienced.

2022, we had a week where the temperature got above 110 every day, and it's very stressful for the vines to handle that weather.

25 years ago, we're in a different climate.

We've gotten more than our average rainfall, but one of the challenges is that it used to come sort of spread over the whole winter.

Now, we're getting very intense events.

If you don't have a lot of organic matter in your soil, you can't hold onto all that water.

So, a lot of it runs off, and as it runs off, it's also creating erosion.

Pinot noir, which is grown not that far from here, is much more heat-sensitive, and I think it's going to be harder to grow that variety in the future.

Grapes get riper during the harvest season and it used to be that the amount of sugar is roughly equivalent to the physiological ripeness or when all the other flavors that make the wine taste good are present.

And so that was a very easy tool to measure the sugar in a grape, but as temperatures increase, that relationship between sugar ripeness and physiological ripeness is getting less and less linked.

In order to get the flavors we want, we have to harvest at a higher sugar than we want, causing wines to have more alcohol than they used to, and that's a problem as well.

Every year is so different because of the weather, and so that has the biggest influence on the flavor of wine from year to year.

- Wine is like tasting a memory.

- Yeah, each bottle captures almost like a photograph.

All the things that happened in that year just in one sip.

There's a whole ecosystem that revolves just around the roots of plants.

Fungi burrow into the roots of plants and send out these tubes that help find nutrients and minerals that the plant needs.

- [Charles] Fungi are a kingdom of life that breaks down old structures and weaves together new relationships.

This is Taye Bright, a PhD student at UC Davis and fungi enthusiast.

- We know how important trees are for climate modulation and ecosystem health, and so, so many functions and services to the world and the humans, but oftentimes, you know, we don't give a lot of credit to the fungi that make the lives of the trees possible.

So just because we can't see the mushroom, which is kind of the above-ground reproductive structure of the fungus, it's important to remember that fungi are still everywhere.

They're inside of the leaves of all these plants.

Their mycelium is in the earth, in the soil.

They invite us to get really close to the forest floor.

So this is most likely a saprotroph that's breaking down the really, really hard structure of wood, and basically turning it into these little wood particles that will then be eaten further by the life in the soil and reassimilated back into the forest.

- [Charles] Many plants rely on fungi to gather enough water and nutrients to grow.

Those nutrients themselves come from saprotrophic fungi.

Fungi are kind of the foundations for plant communities and ecosystems that we depend on.

They're not just "fun guys."

(jaunty music) This is sorrel?

- Yeah.

Have you ever nibbled on a piece of redwood sorrel before?

- No.

(Taye laughing) It's nice and sour.

- [Taye] Mm-hmm.

- Almost like a blueberry.

- Yeah.

I kind of like to call them nature's Sour Patch Kids.

They're fun to just be in that deeper relationship with the forest.

Come right through here.

They're just right here.

(pensive music) So these are Ganoderma brownii, one of our local native reishi species.

So this looks like a Melanoleuca species.

Very, very gently, I'm going to unearth the mushroom.

You can see that it has a lot of really beautiful, fuzzy white stuff at the base, and that's their mycelium.

This is really the true body of the fungus that's growing in the duff and in the soil, and this is what the mushroom that we're holding here comes from.

I feel like in a lot of our discussions about climate change, fungi are virtually absent from that conversation.

(mellow music) About 3/4 of all terrestrial carbon is stored in the soil.

These fungi are a huge player in that stored carbon.

I work for the Fungal Diversity Survey, so we're kind of the appendages of researchers that are out in the field making the collection.

Fungi require us to slow down and really pay attention to our surroundings, putting our mushroom goggles on, and it kind of forces us to pick up these nuanced patterns in the landscape.

- [Charles] Patterns that industrialization obscures, a closer relationship to the land and our food allows us to remember that everything lives in relation with others.

Paying attention, paying care to those relationships, is what Cafe Ohlone is all about.

The Ohlone people were here in the Bay Area before colonization.

And through their cuisine, chefs Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino are making sure we all remember that.

They showed us how even the process of making food is itself a way of making meaning of the world.

- So these acorns, they have to cure for six months.

They're black oak acorns, which we use for acorn soup.

These are rare to find because partially of climate change, but we know spaces in our home here to gather them.

You're just going to tap.

(pensive music) (rock clicking) If there's any of the red that's there, the most bitter parts, it's a sign that the acorn isn't the way that the Elders would like it to be done.

- [Charles] It means you were a little bit sloppy.

- Yeah.

(Louis laughing) - [Charles] This is very calming.

- Oh, yeah, we have a very peaceful culture.

You know, imagine people doing this every single day by the creek, you know, just surrounded by their family, living in a world where everybody trusts each other and works together for common goals, a world of abundance.

We believe that the plants, and then later the animals, they were in the world first.

They have their own personhood.

When we're gathering our plants, we always want to say, "Thank you."

- How do you square the methods and the ways that you guys make your food with the necessities of modernization?

- People aren't eating seasonally, but we also know that there's another way that's there.

What's growing at the farmers' markets, for an example, that's seasonal food.

Foods that are being grown in a sustainable way in springtime.

Now, all of these greens are coming up right here.

The Rooreh, the Indian lettuce, the watercress, fiddlehead ferns.

When we transition into summer, we're out more and we're more active.

Foods that are higher in sugars help us stay energized.

Native strawberries that are growing and the juicy blackberries and the hazelnuts that come in, you know, the land is providing for us exactly what we need in the moment.

The earth has a way of always taking care of us.

- All this talk about food got us hungry, so Vince and Louis invited us to lunch with their family.

(upbeat music) - I thought it was fitting that we meet with you while we're eating because food is our love language with our family, certainly.

- The colors and the textures of the food reflect the land that we come from right here.

- Pretty.

- [Family Member] It's just so beautiful to look at.

- [Vincent] Yeah, we're from paradise, you know?

- [Charles] You guys know Vince when he was younger.

What was he like?

- [Dottie] He was a brat.

(family laughing) - [Family Member] Very particular, very fussy.

(Vincent laughing) It's a compliment.

- We are so lucky that we have the family that we have because we love each other, but we like each other.

We hang out together.

- Yes, this is very common.

Sitting around the table, and you never know who's going to walk through the door on any given day.

- Where we live and where we're driving around, it's where we belong, it's where we came from.

There was never a break in our connections.

Yeah, it's like, it's heartwarming.

- Yeah.

How do you say delicious?

- Say (Vincent speaking in foreign language).

It's good that we eat.

Carson right here and he's learning some Chochenyo language.

- Do you remember the word for Salmon?

(Carson speaking in Chochenyo) (family member speaking in Chochenyo) - Makes you think you're sitting back in time.

- Mm-hmm.

- With the Elders.

(Dottie laughing) During the Depression, we didn't have much, you know, because we never thought about that because there was plenty of food, deer, you name it.

- Everything you need to live a a good life right there.

- [Dottie] Right.

- [Charles] Speaking of the good life, we wanted to know: What do the people who harvest our food need for a good life?

(Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (activist speaking in foreign language) - Right across the street, there's a party going on, and people are spending thousands of dollars to be there from all over the world.

They're drinking wines that have been made off of the back of farm workers.

And so we are calling on the consumers to support and to back up workers.

(activists cheering) (activist speaking in foreign language) - Often, we know people who oppose us.

They're still tapping their toes, they still want to dance with us, even if they don't agree with what we're doing.

(festive music) (activists speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia laughing) (festive music) (Cecilia yelling) (festive music) (Aura speaking in Spanish) (Charles speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia laughing) (Aura speaking in Spanish) (Charles speaking in Spanish) - She started the dance line.

(Aura speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia and Aura laughing) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) - [Aura] Yeah.

(Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (Charles speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish continues) (Aura laughing) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) - I think that we can't have like climate justice without thinking about the workers.

That's how this fight started to begin with.

It started during the fires, as all of us were going back into our houses and, like, not being allowed into evacuation zones.

Workers were going into evacuation zones.

Cecilia has talked about like leaving her kids behind during the fires to harvest a luxury crop.

(Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (Aura speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia laughing) - When we decided to follow this regenerative journey, a really big element of it is paying a living wage, which sounds like the lowest bar possible.

How could you not pay someone a living wage?

They know the vineyard better than I do.

They know every little nook and cranny.

We have this saying that great wine is made in the vineyard.

If we really believe that, then we need to treat our vineyard workers with the same respect that we treat our wine makers because they are the wine makers.

- One more question.

What's it really like working with Aura?

(Aura laughing) (Aura speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (Cecilia and Aura laughing) (Cecilia speaking in Spanish) - [Aura] I've just learned a lot about how she, like, builds trust with people and how she, like, builds relationships and want to follow her.

(Cecilia speaking in Spanish) (festive music) (activists cheering and applauding) (activists speaking in Spanish) - Through food, you experience the embodied record of this place, of its inhabitants, Indigenous, immigrants, in between.

(mellow music) - This is a black walnut candy cap mushroom olive oil cake, and it comes from a love story of my great-great-great-grandparents.

He was a cabin boy originally from Sicily.

Him and my great-great-great-grandmother fell in love.

Through love and through family, they would exchange culture.

The original recipe comes from Sicily as the olive oil cake, but then our family, Ohlone-ized it, right, brought in Ohlone flavors, black walnuts native here to California, candy cap mushrooms, these fragrant aromatic sweet mushrooms, and it's delicious, but it's coming from a love story, specific people from right here where we're sitting from a time before.

We think about their love and who allows us to be here in the world today.

- Aunt Dottie, how do you feel about what Louis and Vince have created?

- They have done so much work in our culture, bringing it back to life.

Oh, God, I'm so proud of them.

- Nature's always written to us, whether it's encapsulated in a bottle or a bite.

What might we remember if we paid attention?

What might those messages tell us?

You are not a machine.

You are not a number.

You are alive, and so are we.

Every cut of meat, every drink of milk, every seed and leaf is a transfer of power.

Remember, when you receive our life, you are making our potential yours.

(uplifting music) Reciprocity means returning a fair share of it back to the harvesters of light and land.

Our world and yours is changing.

We are giving you life.

What will you do with it?

(uplifting music) - [Announcer] You can visit our website for more information, related educational materials, and additional resources.

(pensive music) It's all at climatecalifornia.org.

"Climate California" is brought to you in part by Crankstart, a San-Francisco-based family foundation that works with others on critical issues concerning economic mobility, education, democracy, housing security, the environment, and medical science and innovation.

And by the Community Foundation of Sonoma County.

(upbeat music) Additional support provided by donors to The Center for Environmental Reporting at NorCal Public Media.

A complete list is available.

And by the following.

(upbeat music) "Climate California" is made possible by contributions to your public television station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music)