Roots and Resilience: Celebrating the “Year of the Woman” Farmer at SF Climate Week

May 6, 2026

Designed as an opportunity not only to celebrate, but also to address the vexing challenges facing farmers, ranchers, and agricultural communities, the panel HARVEST California hosted at this year’s SF Climate Week brought together a group of forward-thinking leaders committed to creating a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous future of agriculture:

• Allison Jordan, executive director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance;
• Dr. Evelyn Young Spath, founder and executive director of the Kern County Black Farmers Association;
• Jenny Lester Moffitt, vice president of farmland protection and strategic priorities, at American Farmland Trust;
• Kat Taylor, co-founder of Beneficial State Bank and TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation;
• Viginia Jameson, deputy secretary of climate and working lands at the California Department of Food & Agriculture; and
• Kathryn Beros, executive director of HARVEST California, who moderated the discussion.

“Women have always played an important role in agriculture – often behind-the-scenes. The United Nations designating 2026 the ‘International Year of the Woman Farmer’ is about recognizing that and bringing the role of women in agriculture to the forefront.”
-Jenny Lester Moffitt, vice president of farmland protection and strategic priorities at the American Farmland Trust

Jenny, who played an important role in achieving this designation during her time with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Biden administration, set this context for the conversation and shared personal memories of farming alongside her dad on their family’s fifth-generation California walnut farm.

BOLD IDEAS. PRAGMATIC SOLUTIONS. REAL TALK.

Five important themes stand out from the insights the panelists shared. Throughout the conversation, their commitment to truth-telling and problem-solving was central to the panelists’ remarks, providing the audience with not only a lot to think about but also specific actions to take.

Theme 1: Farming can be a dignified pathway to prosperity

Evelyn’s work leading the Kern County Black Farmers Association centers on reframing, renaming, and reclaiming Black farming as a sacred heritage and dignified pathway to prosperity.

“I stand here as my ancestors’ wildest dream come true. Farming is sacred. The soil is sacred. Farming is a way to feed our families, to feed our communities. And it can be a way for Black families to develop generational wealth.”
-Dr. Evelyn Young Spath, founder and executive director of the Kern County Black Farmers Association

A self-described ‘micro-farmer’ in Bakersfield, Evelyn is empowering small producers to work together, creating a 14-farm cooperative that shares infrastructure for aggregation, processing, and distribution. While it’s difficult for any one of them to operate at meaningful scale, together they are successfully writing grants, accessing equipment, and creating real market leverage.

We at HARVEST California are excited about the benefits of agrivoltaics for small producers, including the potential to increase yields and extend growing seasons, with some trials reporting up to 3x higher yields for certain crops. Additionally, generating on-site electricity can reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which still supply about 80% of direct on-farm energy use.

Theme 2: Getting water right in California is a top priority

Water supply in California is expected to decline 10% by 2050. This is due to reduced snowpack, increased salinity in the Delta, and an atmosphere that increasingly holds more heat and less moisture. The implications for the state’s agriculture industry, which generates more than $60 billion in annual sales, are significant.

“Funding programs that support healthy soils practices and water-use efficiency efforts via the state’s Cap and Invest Program is one of the smartest climate-smart strategies I’ve seen. Just the idea of reducing emissions from industry and then re-investing those proceeds into agriculture is amazing.”
-Virginia Jameson, deputy secretary of climate and working lands at the California Department of Food and Agriculture

An entire chapter of the CDFA’s newly published Climate Resilience Strategy for California Agriculture is dedicated to ensuring a water system for agricultural resilience in a hotter, drier climate and addresses both state-level and farm-level initiatives that support this goal.

Virginia shared the multi-dimensional approach the state is taking to deal with our hotter, drier future, including:

• Bringing aquifers into balance;
• Building more water storage capacity;
• Restoring watersheds and freshwater ecosystems; and
• Continuing the State Water Efficiency Enhancement Program (SWEEP).

As background, for nearly 10 years SWEEP has helped farmers adopt technologies such as drip irrigation and switch from diesel-powered to renewables-powered water pumping systems. More than 1,300 farms statewide have participated, generating a collective 1.6 million acre feet of water savings – equivalent to 800,000 Olympic swimming pools.

We loved hearing Virginia give an on-stage shout-out to agrivoltaics as a valuable part of the solution to helping farmers embrace more renewables-powered systems as they pursue electrification opportunities. And, of course, HARVEST is focused on helping California growers realize the potential water savings associated with agrivoltaics. The partial shading from solar panels helps crops stay cooler, which reduces water use up to 30% in some cases.

Theme 3: Sustainability is an adaptive management strategy

In this context of accelerating change and uncertainty, Allison pointed out how important it is for growers and vintners to understand their whole operation and the many systems within it, the business and environmental context in which they’re operating, and what their stakeholders think.

“Sustainability is an adaptive management strategy that enables you to embrace change, reduce risk, and drive innovation. At the core of sustainability is a commitment to continuous improvement.”
-Allison Jordan, executive director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance

Today, 90% of California wine is made in a certified-sustainable winery, which has a meaningful impact since the state is the 4^th-largest wine-producing region in the world. Continuous improvement is a requirement for certification, and producers prioritize actions that make sense for their region and property – including installing solar panels, converting to dry farming, implementing healthy soils practices, and many more.

As California winegrape growers continue building on their sustainability efforts, agrivoltaics holds promising potential, with a growing body of research indicating that grape production and solar energy production pair well together, including an ongoing study at Colorado State University. 

Theme 4: Agriculture’s financial crisis is solvable

Banking can be considered the largest, longest-standing, and most powerful form of crowdfunding. Traditional lending practices in the agriculture industry have left many farmers trapped in a debt-servicing cycle that leaves little to no resources available for investment, innovation, or restoration. Kat calls for change, at both the individual and institutional levels, centered on creating more equitable lending practices and aligning payback periods with agriculture-friendly timelines.

“Where your money sleeps at night matters because deposits fund a lending practice, and those deposits can either fuel regenerative systems that restore our communities and ecosystems or accelerate extractive ones that deplete them. We’re working to reawaken a sense of agency and accountability among borrowers, as your money is always at work.”
-Kat Taylor, co-founder of Beneficial State Bank and TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation 

Important money levers, in addition to re-setting the unit-economics in finance, that can help revitalize the nation’s farming system include:

• Programs such as California’s 30×30 initiative to conserve land and its Cap and Invest program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which can provide important start-up capital for transformation;
• USDA-backed funding programs such as the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Regenerative Pilot Program introduced in December 2025 that encourages bundling healthy water and soil practices in a whole-farm approach; and
• Emerging insurance opportunities that can help re-shape risk management in agriculture, such as crop insurance products that are not tied to applying conventional recommendations for chemical fertilizers but instead aligned with regenerative practices and insurance premium discounts for agricultural practices such as managed grazing that reduce fire risk.

In our conversations with California growers, operational economics is always an important consideration when evaluating the agrivoltaics opportunity. Integrating solar production with crop production can help offset electricity costs, with on-farm solar often cutting electricity bills by 60-90%, or provide a predictable income stream that can fund an innovation budget for new approaches previously out of reach.

Theme 5: Think big, stay nimble, create multiple pathways to success

Drawing on her extensive professional and personal experience across the agriculture sector, Jenny shared an ambitious vision for the next 45 years: bringing on 500,000 new farmers to the agriculture industry across the country, which would reverse a decades-long trend.

Achieving this goal will require embracing new ways of doing things that ensure farmers see multiple pathways to business success – from cultivating new market development opportunities to creating additional value streams such as agrivoltaics, from expanding farm-to-school programs to developing aggregated infrastructure that makes delivering on those programs possible. The food supply chain disruptions we saw during the pandemic underscored the importance of considering the whole system and investing in the programs and processes that make the system not only efficient but also flexible and resilient. 

“When we strengthen local and regional food system infrastructure and markets, that supports new and diverse revenue streams for farmers which helps strengthen viable and vibrant farming enterprise. When farms are financially viable, they are able to stay on the land. They think about succession planning. They invest in sound farming practices. They invest in their communities. We can do this!”
-Jenny Lester Moffitt, vice president of farmland protection and strategic priorities at the American Farmland Trust

We at HARVEST believe integrating agricultural production and solar energy production is an important part of the strategy to conserve farmland in California. In fact, one of our 2030 Impact goals is to conserve 1,500-4,000 acres of productive farmland through agrivoltaics – especially in water-stressed areas that may otherwise find it difficult to continue growing food.

ACTION-READY INSPIRATION

The morning’s high-energy conversation grounded in a get-better-every-day ethos points to the potential for transformative change. As Kat put it, “Regenerative agriculture is the biggest delta that we have for climate change solutions. Regenerative practices have the potential to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 30–40% and sequester up to 200 gigatons of carbon over time. But more than that, they restore soil health, biodiversity, and water cycles while building more resilient food systems and communities.”

So to close the morning’s event, Kathryn invited each panelist to quickly answer one question: What is one thing everyone can do to support the vision for a more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous future of agriculture?

The answers provide action-ready inspiration:

Allison:  Vote with your dollars and support the issues you care about when shopping. Choose California wine. Agritourism is a great way to learn about climate-smart agriculture.

Evelyn: Tell a different story. Have a conversation in which you name a Black farmer, a woman farmer, an immigrant farmer – not as someone on the periphery but as someone who’s central to the agricultural work that we do.

Jenny: Reach out and talk to people that you don’t normally talk to. We need to build a bigger tent and hear people’s perspectives – particularly when it comes to agriculture, our food system, climate change, and resilience.

Kat: By eating well, spending well, banking well, and investing well, we can recapture our food sovereignty, which is democracy and national security and a lot of other things wrapped up into one.

Virginia: Spend some time thinking about where your food comes from. Go to your local farmers’ market and talk to the farmers. Ask your restaurateurs where they’re getting their product. (And PSA: take those stickers off your produce before putting the peels into the compost!)