Ripe for Change

Making Space for Food in Wine Country

Photos by Paige Green

There’s a new crop popping up across Sonoma County. You’ve probably seen them while driving by rolling hills or along rural roads. Emerging from soil once dominated by grapes, this new crop is sturdy, oddly rectangular, and complicates the future of local agriculture: “For Sale” signs.

For half a century, ever since local wine began competing with European imports, the proliferation of vineyards here has felt unstoppable, almost inevitable. While apple, hop, prune, and even dairy production shrank, vineyards grew from just 12,000 acres in 1970 to over 60,000 in more recent years, so ubiquitous they’ve become synonymous with the region. 

Then came 2025, a disruptive year for nearly everything in this country. Wine was no exception. 

First up: the kids just aren’t drinking like they used to. In fact, the kids aren’t alone. The percentage of U.S. adults who consume alcohol has fallen to the lowest point since Gallup started tracking these trends 90 years ago. 

Then came our aggressive “America First” policy. While supposedly meant to protect domestic industries, local growers instead began to face an international consumer backlash. Wine exports dropped by 30% last year. So too did tourism, a pillar of the industry, as visitors from Canada—who once flocked to our warmer climes for wine tasting—fell by 28%.

Lastly, labor, the backbone of the wine industry, has endured the threat of ICE raids, border patrol, and state-sanctioned vitriol, not only preventing immigration but sending away workers, disrupting agricultural communities, and driving up labor costs for growers. 

Add to all this the overly optimistic plantings of the past decade and here we are: grapes left unharvested on the vine, enormous vats of unsellable juice, a 13.5% drop in Sonoma County grapes crushed, and over 2,700 acres of vines pulled up in 2025 alone.

Some believe these trends represent a harsh but necessary corrective to an oversaturated market, one that will eventually settle. Others in our community, however, are asking whether these changes could be a corrective of another sort, one in which a single overwhelming monocrop might make space for the rest of agriculture, which has struggled for decades to regain a foothold.

Back in 2020, Sammy Tookey was one such farmer seeking to carve out his own plot of diverse crops among an endless sea of vines. After working on organic farms for several years, he struck out on his own but quickly found that land in wine country, even just a few acres to lease, proved hard to come by. So, he went old school: printing out fliers and posting them around the county, like at the feed store where Paul Bernier took notice. In Sammy’s words: “I just got really lucky.”

Paul and his wife, Yael, have been farming locally since the ’70s. Even back then they stood out: while most people were going all in on the wine rush, they diversified, growing both grapes as well as garlic, peaches, and vegetables, even helping to found the Healdsburg Farmers Market. Most of their land, however, was sharecropped, that is, the Berniers managed other people’s vines and took as payment a percentage of the crop. As Yael recalls, “Lots of city folks were buying up vineyards without knowing much about farming. Whereas Paul and I knew how to farm, but we didn’t have the land.”

This arrangement, together with hard work and horticultural savvy, functioned for several decades. Agricultural land prices in Sonoma County skyrocketed but so too did the value of wine. By the time Sammy started putting up those posters, the industry still felt optimistic and the Berniers, now together with their son Zureal, were still managing multiple properties. It was on one of these properties that they offered a few acres as a sublet for Sammy to get started. 

There he began growing tomatoes, melons, lettuce, and sweet corn, selling his produce through three farmers markets as well as the farmer-owned food hub FEED Cooperative. But while his small business was growing, the wine industry around him began to falter. The Berniers began to let go of several of their contracts while many landowners held back on planting. Such was the case on a parcel west of town where, after digging up old vines, the new owners decided against replacing them. Seeing an opportunity, in 2024 Sammy contacted them and arranged an additional lease: seven acres where today he’s growing thousands of pounds of food.

Does Tookey’s story represent the future of a new agricultural landscape for Sonoma County? Will those 2,700 acres of uprooted vines—and more to come in the years ahead if industry predictions hold true—be replaced by rolling hills of cabbage, plums, and turnips? 

This is the vision that Yael Bernier longs for: a Sonoma County flush with food, thriving family farms, and as much pride in every crop that the region currently reserves for its world-famous wines. Tookey agrees, echoing the words of Luther Burbank, renowned horticulturist who, 150 years ago, chose, of all places, Sonoma County to put down roots. “In terms of climate and soil,” says Tookey, “this is as good as it gets. This land should grow food.”

But achieving this will be an uphill battle. As they both point out, the math on cabbage, plums, and turnips simply can’t compete with those of cabernet, chardonnay, and pinot noir. At least not at the same scale. Even now, those who purchased land during the seemingly ever-upward wine boom are sitting on properties with inflated values. Some, says Yael, plan to simply weather the storm. Others have decided to throw in the towel, hence those proliferating real estate signs. Yet the price per acre, despite all these downward statistics, remains stubbornly high, well beyond what most farmers like Sammy could ever afford with his profits growing food.

But there is another option that is as lucrative as grapes once were, no, not cannabis—another boom era industry whose prices plummeted following legalization—but rather, development.

The specter of development has long haunted the region, as strip malls and culs de sac paved over countless farms. Which is why Sonoma County voters, in 1990, passed a sales tax creating the Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District to purchase development rights to prevent such conversions. 

But until recently, according to the district’s director, Misti Arias, vineyard land rarely required such protection. Unlike dairies or apple orchards, grapes were so profitable that the difference between planting vines and building houses was negligible enough to make their work unnecessary. Even now, she says, land values are so inflated that this remains the case. But that could change as she’s beginning to receive calls from property owners seeking help.

So, will taxpayer funds go towards saving struggling vineyards? 

For those envisioning an agrarian future flush with locally grown food, this might not sit well. But Arias points out that when the district purchases rights, they don’t typically limit the type of agriculture. More recently, however, they have been experimenting with more creative arrangements, such as a mandatory agricultural provision that can require crop diversity as well as a program that purchases a property, strips its development rights, then sells it to a new farmer at a lower cost.

Arias shares that this might help assist food producers as well as even opening up arrangements like Tookey’s, where grape growers lease portions of their property to those growing other crops. This will require building awareness and a proactive effort to make connections between landowners and tenant farmers.

It’s unlikely grapes will disappear from Sonoma County any time soon. Nor does Tookey want them to. “But perhaps,” he says, “just a few of those 60,000 acres might open up to other crops, giving farmers like me a chance.”

For Yael Bernier, preserving the agricultural roots of this county—especially in light of so much change—will require organizing and policy reform. She encourages everyone who cares about food and agriculture to get involved with the update of the county’s General Plan which will reshape land-use decisions for a generation. Public meetings are ongoing. 

But, she says, it also requires a cultural shift. “How do we brand Sonoma County food the same way we do wine?” she asks. “Why can’t we be a food-centric county too? We have all these talented farmers with no land. We need to make food production just as romantic as owning a vineyard, even if that’s owning land you lease out to a young person to grow that food.”

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For info about the Sonoma County General Plan: 
permitsonoma.org/generalplan