Happy 150th birthday San Bernardo Rancho (my family’s ranch in south Monterey County)!
(Note: skipping my normal AgTech themes for this post to share a little bit of history — and to brag on my the great party we threw for the ranch and my mom’s 80th birthday, as well as the awesome video we put together with my mom celebrating the family ranch! Please take a look — there’s a link at the end of the post.)
San Bernardo Rancho just had a big birthday — it turned 150 years old. My great-great-grandfather Meyer Brandenstein purchased the ranch from the Mexican government via land grant in 1871. It has been in the family ever since that purchase. It has changed and changed hands a few times, but it is in many ways still the ranch that Meyer bought so many years ago. After the gold rush had come and gone and more than a few folks decided to stay, San Francisco became a player in the coffee imports and coffee roasting business and made really good coffee backed up with really good marketing. This included the new “ultra modern” coffee house at the Pan-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. San Francisco (and the world) were not quite ready for $5 coffee), but clearly MJB had a lot of innovation in product and marketing.
There was definitely an entrepreneurial streak in the family and one of the businesses they ran was a cattle and butcher business. As the story goes, the ranch was purchased as a place for Meyer to run his cattle. Apparently the good people of San Francisco were not too excited about Meyer’s cattle operation on what is now somewhere near Potrero Hill. So Meyer did some research, determined that the new Southern Pacific railroad tracks that headed south to Monterey County would provide him access to plenty of land for cattle grazing, and bought the ranch. He then began feeding cattle on the ranch and selling the meat in San Francisco. This turned out to be much better for neighbor relations and for business.
The cattle are still there — 300 head of beef cattle in a cow-calf operation — but not the butcher business. Energy was added in 1947 by my grandfather Walter Rosenberg (and neighbors) and the oilfield has been producing energy for over 75 years. Water has been a key part of the growth of the ranch business. The ranch borders the Salinas River on both sides and over the generations and there are both surface water (water that flows from rivers and reservoirs) and groundwater (the underground water sponge that services wells and has depleted over the decades with more irrigated acreage and California residents using it) rights that can be managed to add new agricultural production areas.
A partnership with Mondavi led to some significant water infrastructure and the wine grapes were planted in 1996. Since the 80s, the ranch has added irrigated acreage in multiple locations with investment in wells, levees, and river maintenance to keep the water in the river and out of the fields until it’s needed whenever possible. San Bernardo Rancho has some great growing partners — Rava Ranches, Braga Fresh Foods, and Christensen and Giannini are all multi-generational farming operations that grow product on our ranch. The irrigated acreage grows a mix of spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, and other crops and a mix of conventional and organic crops.
The ranch has provided a great base for the family for generations. My three sisters and I represent the fifth generation and all four of us grew up on the ranch. Together, we have 12 children (or more accurately, as my mom would say she has 12 grand-children) and they have grown up in different parts of California with the ranch being a regular gathering spot for holidays and summer activities. It is rare to get a family ranch to the 5th generation, rarer still to get to the 6th generation. We spend a lot of time trying to increase the chances that generation 6 (G6 for short) will be able to help manage and maintain the ranch as an operating ranch and family gathering spot. Most of them are still under 25 and we just had the first meeting with their generation (aka the G6 Summit — which I thought was clever …) to provide an overview of the ranch and what it means to the family and the businesses involved. It is fun to watch them get engaged and ask questions about how and why we do some of the things that we do.
Much of it is obvious and some of it is not, but all of it can be learned through time and conversation if you know who to ask. Part of our job is to make sure that G6 knows what and who to ask. Sometimes they want to know where to hunt (ask my sister), sometimes they want to know who the grower for a certain field is and whether they’re doing a good job (ask my other sister), sometimes they want to know what that new-fangled irrigation technology is and whether it works (that would be me), and sometimes they want to know why we had to split the ranch (the legal term would be “involuntary partition” and that would be an “ask my uncle” — few things more enjoyable than sitting in a deposition with your uncle’s attorney asking questions about the ranch for a few hours, but I digress — kids ask the darndest questions).
The 150th anniversary of the ranch was a great cause for celebration, and we got a 2-for-1 out of it. The party was on Labor Day weekend and it was a celebration of both the ranch and my mom’s 80th birthday party. Mom wasn’t sure she was up for a birthday party (the 75th had been at the ranch — of course — at my sister’s and after much drink and some dance there was an incident involving an allegedly non-standard dance surface disguised as a lawn and a slight fall caused not by the drink but a poor dance partner, but mom picked herself up and soldiered on and as usual was the last one to go home), but in a rare show of force we blew right past her request not to have one and she started to like the idea as the planning took place and the event came together. By now you should be thinking “wow, a 150 year old ranch party” — what does that actually look like? Great question, and you’re in luck, I’ve got a few photos. It will feel like you were able to join us!
Here is the main entrance to my mom’s house — this is where the party started with snacks and drinks on the lawn. Note the new feature we added — the SBR logo on the left, the SBR cattle brand at the top, and est. 1871 on the right just to let people know we’ve been here for a while. Note the simplicity of the brand — the plain square is one of the most simple brands you can use for cattle, and it is ours because we’ve been raising cattle a long time and when we registered the brand we got one of the early ones and kept it simple so that it was clearly marked on cattle to stop any bad behavior by cattle rustlers or help recover lost cattle. Modern cattle operations often use more complex brands because they can (branding equipment has improved) and because many of the simple ones have been taken.
It’s worth noting that my family started the town that sits on what was the ranch and originally called it San Bernardo. However, it was later renamed to San Ardo because of confusion the US Postal Service had with getting mail correctly to San Bernardo and San Bernadino. Apparently enough mail was going to the wrong location that the name change was needed to stop the confusion. The family was happy to help. Clearly this confusion pre-dated the standardized use of ZIP codes, which did not happen nationally until July 1, 1963.
Here’s a picture of some historic items related to the ranch — a ranch saddle, pictures of my relatives, and the big photo in the center is an aerial photo of the ranch from a few decades ago. There were a few additional photos by the time the party started.
Here’s a picture of some of the great crops that our growers contributed for both appetizers and dinner on the big day, and of course they make an appropriate and great decoration as well. All of the food was tremendous (I may be a little biased) and the steak (very biased) was a perfect complement for the great vegetables that were definitely “locally grown.” Note that large fan on the left — it was a balmy 104 in San Ardo that weekend so the fans were very helpful in trying to keep everyone cool.
Here’s my dinner plate. The green beans, beans, and bread were excellent, and the highlight was the steak with the SBR brand on it. Yes, they took the time to brand each steak before serving it — well done BBQ crew!
Here is a picture at dinner. It was so great to see everyone — friends and family got to reconnect as part of a great celebration. A lot of people made a big effort to get there, and we appreciated all the effort.
As part of the event, we gathered up a lot of the original and somewhat used equipment from the ranch and put them on display. In this case, the power wagon on the left was great for removing trees and had enough power to operate as a tow truck decades back. I played in a golf tournament in Los Gatos a few months after the event and I showed this to a friend’s dad and asked if he recognized the equipment. He worked on the ranch growing up and said “remember it, I’m pretty sure I drove that power wagon a few times.” The red truck was used for a lot of activities over the years. As you can guess, the equipment is in various states of road-readiness. They pre-date any concerns over “right to repair” and got repaired plenty — and again always local repairs.
It is always hard to capture the full effect of a historic celebration like the 150th anniversary of the ranch. If you weren’t there and the people aren’t familiar, I’m sure a lot of it doesn’t translate as well as it could. Plus it’s 2023 and all the cool kids like video, so just in case text and photos weren’t enough we had a local videographer work with my mom over a few hours to produce this video. It’s a bit under 7 minutes and I love how it turned out. My mom enjoys the history of the ranch and she really likes sharing some of the stories from the town, the ranch, and the people.
Other than about 12 years in El Centro, she spent her entire life in that town, and now lives in the house she grew up in. It is a perfect fit for her, and she is a perfect fit for it. San Ardo has been very good to my mom, and my mom has been very good to San Ardo. People made such an effort to come to help us celebrate the ranch and mom.
This video captures some of her stories and her words on a live (still being) well lived in a little town on her family’s ranch. I think what the ranch means to her and what the people of San Ardo mean to her are both captured so well. I don’t know if we can make her Tik Tok famous but if you want to hear the story of how one rural community grew up and became San Ardo, here’s the whole story in 6:51 — enjoy!
Here’s the video
