This story is part of our September 2026 issue. To read the print version, click here.

At first the light flaring up outside Camelia Enriquez’s home in rural Newcastle seemed harmless — maybe headlights casting a glare in the window or someone goofing around. Then she saw the truth, burning clear and bright under the California sky: Her family farm’s packing shed, the heart of their operation, was going up in flames.

It was devastating — the loss of the facility where they packed peaches and other stone fruits, the financial hit, the generations of memories. It was also the start of a transformation.

“Innovation comes, sometimes, just out of desperation,” Enriquez, 48, says.

Since that 2020 fire, Twin Peaks Orchards, which has been around since 1912 and favored by farm-to-fork chefs across the region, has been the site of constant innovation, from installing a new irrigation system to changing how they pack their harvest. Whether born of desperation, aspiration or both, Sacramento’s Capital Region is emerging as an international zone for agricultural innovation.

The cutting-edge technological research, industry evolution and hardscrabble on-farm practices like those at Twin Peaks offer rare solutions for family farms in tough economic times and fuel Sacramento’s status as “America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital.” The question is just how many farms this innovation can save before it’s too late, with family farms and food systems in deep peril after decades of farm loss and modern crises like the war in Iran raising the stakes.

Making innovation — and its benefits — affordable

While long known for its farming roots, the Capital Region punches far above its weight on the innovation side of agriculture, according to farmers, industry leaders and researchers. There’s UC Davis, a hub for ag innovators from across the country, a burgeoning start-up culture and scores of farmers and researchers trying to tie past farm traditions to future food solutions.

Central to that success, some innovators say, will be how much of the technology can be “scale neutral” — meaning, technology that can work on small and mid-sized farms as well as large farms, to serve all levels of agriculture. For decades, agricultural technology in America has largely centered on helping farms reduce costs while getting bigger, according to leading agriculture researcher James MacDonald of the University of Maryland. That’s a goal that was necessary decades ago as farming lost workers to other industries at much higher levels, he says, but now leaves many farms behind by promoting technology they can’t afford or implement.

Technology that can save farms can also doom them if it’s not affordable for small and mid-sized farms, experts say. In that case, it’s just one more force driving farms to “get big or get out,” as they have for decades. The rising costs for farmers to produce a crop, while the prices they receive stay the same, has contributed to wiping out 70 percent of America’s farms in the past century, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Rising costs include land, equipment, labor, fuel, seeds, fertilizer and labor are the most immediate pressures farmers cite. But they are also facing the historical effects of economic catastrophes like the farm crisis of the 1980s and recessions of the 2000s, which economists say reshaped the industry in ways that disadvantage many family farms, including the role of government policy in agriculture. Other factors in farm loss include farmers retiring or consolidating their farms into larger farming operations.

Bart Peintner, CEO of Elemental Agronomy, was living out how to solve that dilemma in the region when he attended the FIRA USA conference hosted in Woodland in October 2025, part of an international network of events exploring robotics in agriculture. His Denver-based company has developed an award-winning device that can help make spraying fields far more precise and affordable for farms of all types and sizes.

“You better be removing costs overall, or your value proposition better be absolutely bulletproof,” Peintner says of the effort to make technology work for farms. “It matters who is in charge of that destiny.”

The sun is bright as Peintner and dozens of other innovators roam the FIRA demonstration site at the Yolo County Fairgrounds, with technological demonstrations going on over mock orchards, vineyards and more. At one point, a drone hoists weights over the mock orchard, its whirring weedwhacker noise surging as it strafes left and right to show how it can help family farms efficiently move equipment out to their fields.

Enriquez says for Twin Peaks, farm efficiency had to be improved so that they could survive. She and her husband poured their savings into transforming the farm as they recovered from the fire and bought it from her parents. They started packing their fruit right in the field rather than constructing a new packing shed, removing steps and cost. They also invested in a new irrigation system that was more efficient and environmentally friendly, and decided to shift their farm toward being organic — something they believed in, but also hoped would pay off with better profits.

One of the biggest dilemmas farmers face in innovating is cost. New practices can mean meeting other goals — such as supplying local food or helping the environment — but they also have to make financial sense by driving better profit, cutting costs or otherwise “penciling out” when farm families do their math. Sometimes those transitions make economic or practical sense for one farm, but not for another.

“It’s not an easy environment to survive. So I think the farms that are around are more forward-looking.”

— Tim Nuss, vice president of operations, Nuss Farms,
a fifth-generation farm in Lodi

Nuss Farms in Lodi, a fifth-generation, 1,500-acre farm, is also evolving its irrigation techniques — the controversial issue of water is a ripe place to save money and promote conservation by using less, but the family, whose motto is “restoring our soil and our planet through regenerative agriculture,” is also experimenting in other places. They recently tested out an Ecorobotix “see and spray” implement, a sprayer they pulled behind their tractor that uses artificial intelligence to discern weeds from crops. The machine “spot sprays” those weeds, rather than spraying the entire field.

“It’s not an easy environment to survive,” says Tim Nuss, one of three brothers helping their dad run the farm. “So I think the farms that are around are more forward-looking.”

Innovators hope to give farms more ways to reduce costs and meet their goals. Danny Bernstein is CEO of Reservoir, a California company that operates an ag startup incubator in Salinas, where a barn serves as a robotics laboratory, and is developing additional locations in Santa Rosa and Merced. Bernstein says the Capital Region is near the top of places also ripe for a new incubator.

“We need more energy, more ideas,” Bernstein says.

Mixing the old with the new

The region’s innovations also go far beyond technology, extending to countless practices by farmers trying to find new paths forward. For Eric Walker, it means blending the old with the new.

He and his brother, Andrew, run Farmboy Organics in Winters, growing a wide range of fruits and vegetables. They’re constantly trying to figure out what other crops they can grow, making sure each is something they can make money on before moving forward. They recently connected with the University of California Extension for an on-site, computerized method of soil testing. But they also proudly use more primitive practices that also count as innovation these days — for example, using string to guide their tomato plants upward so they’re easier to harvest.

“You can’t just let an AI control your whole farm,” Eric says of mixing technology with his own judgment and hard work. “You need the farmer’s footsteps on there.”

There are many other ways to innovate, one of them being shifting from traditional chemicals to fertilize or protect crops to “biologicals” that draw on more natural materials. But here again, even farmers who want to make the change have real reason to worry it won’t work on their farm. The key is winning over farmers who already live with so much risk that they can’t afford a product failure, says John Finegan, founder of Beck Ag, a Sacramento-based company that helps ag companies commercialize new products by identifying and encouraging markets of farmers willing to adopt new practices. (He is also a member of Comstock’s Editorial Advisory Board.)

Beck Ag does this through peer review — working with farmers who test out a product and, if it works, vouch for it to their fellow farmers. This can help win the faith of farmers who can’t afford to have a crop fail. A biological spray that doesn’t work can mean a field that has low yields or is overrun by weeds or pests, leaving a farmer with all their costs for the year and none of their income. It puts another dimension on the cost savings aspect — for many farmers, the possibility of saving money can’t outweigh a risk that is too high.

“You can’t afford to take a big risk on a product failure when you’ve only got one shot in a full 12 months to make your profit for keeping your farm alive,” Finegan says.

Finegan thinks the time to innovate is now, with the war in Iran choking off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, sending fertilizer prices spiraling upward more than 30 percent as of August, according to the World Bank. It’s just another crisis for farmers, and it may mean there is a financial incentive to try new biologicals. Beck Ag has created a new Bio Efficiency Council to study that and seize the moment.

Enriquez at Twin Peaks agrees innovation takes many forms. Since the fire, the family has worked to recover emotionally and financially. They’ve weathered the dip in crop yields that can come with the switch to organic when conventional chemicals are no longer protecting against threats to crops — but then watched yields rise and profits improve as their soil got healthier. Thanks to new technologies, they feel they’ve got a brighter future for themselves and their kids.

“You have to have a five-year plan, a 10-year plan,” she says of making it through such transitions to put the farm in a better place for the future. “Our biggest goal, the thing that we’re aiming for, is sustainability.”

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