Is agave the Central Valley’s future cash crop?
Fifty years ago, when Jack Woolf and his family founded Woolf Farming, he became one of the first in the western San Joaquin Valley to grow new crops including pistachios and almonds. Today, Stuart Woolf is following in his father’s innovative footsteps. But he’s doing so at a time when the Valley’s groundwater crisis is taking countless acres out of agricultural production. Woolf Farming is planning to manage its 20,000 acres near the Fresno County town of Huron so that crops are produced on about 60% of the land. One day, deep in thought as he sipped mezcal, it came to Woolf that there might also be another answer. And it was right there in his glass. “After about the third mezcal, I realized, and said to myself, ‘What? Why aren’t you growing this crop out here? Could this be the right crop at the right time?’”
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