What happens when a high school business plan assignment turns into reality? For a team from Sacramento Charter High School, it’s just the beginning of a budding hot sauce business.

While California boasts some of the highest numbers of female farmers in the U.S., at 33 percent of the state’s total farmers, that’s still only one in seven farmers. Yet, the women who have chosen this profession don’t see themselves as statistics. They see themselves as hard workers feeding their communities.

Comstock’s recently spoke with three women about the joys and challenges of running small farms.

Here in America’s farm-to-fork capital, consumers tend to understand this connection through our region’s rich agricultural heritage and California’s role as the nation’s largest agricultural producer. Local chefs like Brad Cecchi showcase seasonal produce and proteins from local farmers and ranchers who respect the land they farm and animals they raise, through practices intended to keep the land productive for generations to come.

As Sacramento’s craft beer scene exploded, breweries opened on the outskirts, but now breweries and beer bars are migrating to the grid.

In the wine industry, families must often handle the unique dynamics of their arrangement while running several operations at once — growing grapes, producing wine, and marketing and selling the final product. It’s not always easy. But these four wine-industry families wouldn’t have it any other way.

Why is Auburn beer blowing up? Besides the amenable climate, perhaps the appeal lies in the area’s clean and balanced water that originates as the Sierra snowpack.

In a historic brick building on Lincoln Street in Old Roseville, FourScore Coffee House is open for business after a two-year hiatus. Now expanded and remodeled, the family-run coffee shop features a funky portrait of President Abraham Lincoln in sunglasses, reclaimed wood tables built by a local craftsman and brick pulled from the K Street demolition in Sacramento that made room for the Golden 1 Center.

As Sacramento undergoes a culinary renaissance, family-owned restaurants like South have become foundational to the city’s rejuvenated character. For the restaurant’s owners, however, running a business with family can be both a great blessing and a major headache.

The historic D.O. Mills Bank building, owned by the Cameron Family since 1922, is in the midst of massive transformation. The bank, slated to open this year, will be a three level 30,000 square-foot culinary destination. 

After staging a cattle drive across the Tower Bridge and a tractor parade down Capitol Mall, Mike Testa and his Visit Sacramento staff faced a huge challenge: How could they broaden the impact of Sacramento’s Farm-to-Fork Month kickoff?