FRESNO, Calif. — 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?’”
Woolf was thinking about the agave plant: The large, fleshy, drought-resistant succulent is used to make tequila and mezcal in Mexico, where the plant is called maguey. He started with a 2.5-acre test plot of 12 different varieties of agave that he purchased in Ventura.
Today, Woolf has about 400,000 plants that he shipped in from Mexico — tequila’s Agave Tequilana and mezcal’s Agave Espadin — on about 340 acres, some of them visible from Interstate 5 on his Fresno County property.
“Maybe Fresno County and the Central Valley become kind of the Napa of California distilled spirits,” Woolf told The Fresno Bee on a spring visit to his farming operation. “I know, it’s a crazy kind of thing.”
But the idea that commercial agave farming and spirit distilling can take off in California is gaining traction. The California Agave Council, a statewide group of farmers and distillers, has been promoting the potential of agave as a crop for several years. Making way for the industry is a 2022 state law that requires alcohol sold here under the label of “California agave spirits” to be made completely with California-grown plants — and no additives. (Tequila and mezcal are names reserved for agave drinks produced in specific regions of Mexico.)
Mostly small farms, concentrated along the coast and around the Bay and Sacramento areas, are currently raising agave plants, with some distilleries setting up shop nearby. Woolf says he’s betting the same will happen in the Valley.
The cultivation of agave could mean a new opportunity for San Joaquin Valley growers to continue farming more of their land while using less water, and in an increasingly hotter, drier climate. Though billed as the perfect crop for a water-starved region in a climate crisis, some of the movement’s critics see the council’s investment in agave as wealthy interests extracting resources and culture from Indigenous Mexican communities that produce mezcal and don’t have enough influence to protect their exports.
The California Agave Council sees the industry it’s pushing to be complementary, not competitive, with Mexican products — though any competition would actually be with tequila, not mezcal, said council President Craig Reynolds.
“It’s its own California thing,” he said of the state’s agave movement.
The fledgling industry is in the learning stage as farmers and academics try to figure out what can grow in the state, and how.
Ron Runnebaum, a UC Davis professor of viticulture and enology, began directing research into agave two years ago, with the help of a $100,000 grant from the Woolf family. He said it is possible for agave to live without much water, or any at all, beyond what is provided by rainfall.
“That’s not necessarily the case with other crops,” he said.
Woolf told The Bee that almonds require about 4 acre-feet of water, compared to 3.5 acre-feet for pistachios and 2.5 acre-feet for some tomatoes and other row crops. “In our first year with the agave, we used two and three-quarter inches of water,” he said.
Runnebaum said that is the range that current growers have been following, but that there is not much historical data available.
He said his research intends to find the relationship between irrigation, growth rate and final yield: How much sugar do you get for the irrigation you are providing over a specific period of time? When is it most important to irrigate and when can growers hold back on irrigation? What happens in scenarios when growers cannot provide irrigation?
The research so far shows early promise for agave’s viability in California, but it’s ultimately a question of scale, Runnebaum said.
“Right now, there’s only been a few acres that have been harvested and that have successfully gone to several distillers,” he said, “but as we scale up, there’s going to be other challenges related to economics.”
Henry Tarmy, co-owner of Ventura Spirits Company, a medium-sized distiller in Ventura, said his operation has sold all the California agave spirits it has ever produced, but they have been small batches of about 1,000 bottles at a time. There just hasn’t been enough California-grown agave to take the distilling of its spirits to the next level of scale, he said.
“It’s been at such a small scale,” he said.
Tarmy said he can’t speak to whether agave spirit distilling will take off in Fresno County, but he said the farming of the plant could attract buyers from across the state who will use it to make drinks.
“We buy agave from all over the state: San Diego County and Ventura and Santa Barbara County, up to Yolo County and San Luis Obispo,” he said. “We’re not limited just to hyper-local growth, but we’re certainly committed when it comes to our agave work to only using California agave.”
In west Fresno County, the plants on Woolf’s farm that are intended for spirit production are about 15 months old — still about four years away from a harvest. Some of them took on a more purple hue in the past year, which he thinks might be because the winter temperatures are colder in the Central Valley than in Mexico. He’s been using bury drip irrigation on his plants during the growing season, giving them just enough water at their root system.
He is working with other farmers to create an agave nursery co-op “with the hopes of kind of being a market leader.” That would allow them to create their own standards for quality and create pricing terms and conditions as a group.
In Mexico, the plants he is growing would be ready for harvest at between 7-8 years, but Woolf is hoping his will be ready one or two years earlier growing in the San Joaquin Valley — and with a higher sugar content.
“We’ve had some larger distilling interest come to the farm,” Woolf said. “You know, I’m planting these crops at scale, betting that they will come. And if they don’t, I’m going to have to build my own distillery.”
