From Farm to Table, the Family Farmers Inviting Visitors to See Where Our Food Comes From

Aug 21, 2024

By Caroline Feraday

Over 15 farms welcome visitors for the annual Santa Barbara County Farm Day.

Megan Raff is feeding zucchini to Rocco the goat. Rocco is one of the animals at this small family-owned farm near Lompoc. And Raff? Well, she didn’t start out intending to be a farmer.

"I'd never really done any farm work or had experience with agricultural labor," said Raff.

Dare 2 Dream is the name of the farm, and that – says Raff – is what she and her family did as they grew the farm from starting out raising chickens to now pasturing goats and cows.

"We had started raising chickens. We were selling free range eggs to New Frontiers in Solvang and San Luis Obispo. People were starting to freak out about having agency over their food source. And so we started getting a lot of calls of, 'hey, do you sell chickens, too?' We're thinking, 'well, we don't, but we can'. So we did!" she said.

And we would deliver chickens all the way to L.A. in [my husband] Jeremy's white Toyota 4runner 2003," she remembers.

"I came from doing marketing at Live eyewear, and then the crash of 2008 happened, and they put me in several different departments. So thankfully, I had experience with administration and accounting and marketing, and I had been the executive assistant - so it was super helpful when I came to start my own business with Jeremy, in understanding what was necessary and what kind of things needed to be involved in our business plan," she said.

It’s the first time this farm has participated in Santa Barbara County Farm Day and are one of over 15 local farms and agricultural organizations, from Walnut Groves to blueberry farms, who are opening their doors on Farm Day offering free tours, tastings, giveaways and kid-friendly activities.

For visitors – like these who caught the train to Lompoc from Los Angeles, it’s a rare chance to see our food being grown.

"Because usually if you just go to the store, you just pick it up. But seeing where it actually grows and it's just really interesting to see," said one.

Another said, "Oh, I love it. I love animals, so I would take them home if I could. If I could live here, I would."

"It's really nice," said another. "Because in LA there's so much and like just here it's open and all the animals are in the mountains. And then the ocean is so beautiful," she said.

And – says Raff – she’s aware that while her own children have all this as their own backyard, that’s not true for most.

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Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”