Farmers Are Divided Over California Forever's Plan in Solano County

Will Brazelton holds many jobs: He runs a company that fixes farm fences, operates heavy machinery on construction sites, manages wildlife and pests on nearby farms, and even occasionally manages fruit stands.

He does it all to keep running Brazelton Ranch, a generations-old stone fruit and citrus orchard.

“Farming’s in my blood, I can’t really turn away from it,” he said.

Just a few miles north from Brazelton’s 80-acre orchard, Rob Nickelson runs KMS Farm, named after his three daughters: Keeley, Molly and Samantha. His farm is not as old as Brazelton’s, but he loves his job. He started growing walnuts there in the late 1990s and hopes to expand his offerings to other types of nuts someday.

“You have to have farms,” he said. “It’s the basics of our society.”

The two farmers share many of the same priorities for their businesses, but they’re split on how they see a billionaire-backed company’s proposal to build a city from scratch and what it means for the future of farming in their county.

Nickelson is optimistic the plan will add desperately-needed housing to the area and bring a more diverse array of jobs. But Brazelton and many other skeptics worry a new city would impact his farm, along with many others.

“Our community is actually a pretty small one, believe it or not, and many of the families that have been here a long time have been friends with each other for generations,” he said, adding that the company behind the plan, California Forever, didn’t make a great first impression. “They don’t actually care about the community that they’re essentially pushing out.”

California Forever’s ambitious development promises to house up to 400,000 people once it’s fully built, effectively doubling the county’s population. Earlier this year, the company announced the project would also add an estimated 15,000 jobs, some of which will come from 15 companies and start-ups that recently pledged to open offices there.

According to a recent study from business advocacy organization Bay Area Council, Solano County has the lowest ratio of jobs per resident out of the region’s nine counties. Nickelson hopes California Forever’s plan could change those statistics. He is so supportive of the company’s ballot measure, called the East Solano Plan, that he volunteered to appear in a campaign ad.

“I’m not for growth for growth’s sake — I’m an environmentalist — but sometimes you gotta build,” he said. “I’ve never seen any developer put that much on the table.”

To Brazelton, it all sounds too good to be true. He has concerns about how the new city will get its water, whether the new housing will truly be affordable and whether the endangered species in the Jepson Prairie and vernal pools will be protected.

It hasn’t helped, either, that California Forever’s lengthy legal fight against a group of farmers who currently own some of the land it sought to purchase in 2017 has left a bitter taste in the mouth of Brazelton and many others, who have watched the families struggle financially through the expensive case. It’s what drove Brazelton’s organization, the Solano Farm Bureau, to officially oppose the plan.

Alexis Koefoed felt the same way and joined Solano Together, the most prominent organization campaigning against the plan. She owns Soul Food Farm, where she grows olives and nursery plants like chamomile, sunflowers and poppies, just a few miles away from Brazelton Ranch.

“It’s a much bigger loss than just the loss of land,” Koefoed said in reference to the more than 60,000 acres California Forever has accumulated since it started buying land secretly in 2017. “It’s that the whole system of food security and food availability is now diminished.”

According to the state’s Department of Conservation, farm and grazing lands across California have decreased by about 4% between 1984 and 2018, in large part due to urbanization. And thanks to new groundwater regulations, another 500,000 to 1 million acres are projected to go out of production by 2040. Solano County’s agricultural production makes up a little less than 1% of the state’s $59 billion industry.

But Daniel Sumner, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at UC Davis, said Koefoed’s fears aren’t borne out in the data. Most of the land California Forever purchased is located in the Montezuma Hills and used primarily as pasture land for grazing sheep or to grow alfalfa and wheat, mostly to feed livestock.

According to the county’s 2022 crop and livestock report, processed tomatoes and nursery products — grown in other parts of the county — brought in the most money. Moreover, demand for wool and sheep meat has declined because it’s become cheaper to import those products.

“We’ve paved over some of the richest, most productive farmland in the world to make Silicon Valley, which used to be considered the ‘fruit valley’ not too long ago,” he said. “But there’s no question that [the land California Forever bought] is the least agriculturally productive flat land.”

Still, the loss of agricultural land in Solano County has been much more severe over the past decade than across the state as a whole. Between 2012 (PDF) and 2022 (PDF), the county lost about 20% of its farmland. If voters in November approve the East Solano Plan, Koefoed worries other farmland in Solano, including hers, could be next.

“We have a lot of good work we need to do, which is to support all the other small farmers in this community and build better protections so this doesn’t happen again with another developer and they start looking at other land in Solano,” she said.

Sumner, who was born and raised on a farm in Solano County, said the arguments against California Forever are perhaps rooted in a desire to uphold the county’s cultural values.

“It’s an emotional question for people who like the way they live. I understand that, we all understand that,” he said. “Now, do you let those people block development for everybody else? Because people are going to live somewhere.”