(warm music) - So my dad was an almond farmer, and at one point while I was still in graduate school I had this eye-opening experience where like, "I need to go back and farm."

- We started looking at moving our dairy farm.

It wasn't affordable in California anymore.

There was a water problem.

And we just felt like we couldn't do our jobs in California.

So in 2013, we found this beautiful walking horse farm located an hour south of Nashville, and we saw so much potential.

- When I was in high school, there just weren't a lot of women in ag then, and I don't think my dad ever thought that that was something that I would do.

Like, he thought my brother would be the one who would come up and do the farming.

I think that was always expected because he was a male.

And so I just went off, and I'm a very sciencey person, to go and get a degree in biology.

I had no idea what that was gonna lead to, but I did it, and I went off to UC Santa Cruz.

And then I got into working with the US Forest Service, and through that UC Davis, and then went off to get a master's in fisheries of all things.

(empowering music) - We didn't know how the cows would adapt, and luckily, you know, moving all of our cows from California, we only lost one.

So we were really successful with the move.

The reason for this is just to help them grow and keep them on the right track to get weaned off of milk.

Moving from California, Tennessee's got a lot of different weather.

- So the new buzzword right now is regenerative ag, and it's all about putting things back into the soil, keeping the soil really healthy.

Look at that.

Look how tall that is.

I'm gonna have to mow that.

- When we moved to Nashville, I started to get into music more.

And the funny thing is Charlie Daniels' godson was trimming hooves at the time at the dairy farm, so we exchanged numbers, started writing music, and kind of got into just spreading the news through my music and supporting agriculture.

♪ 'Cause it's the land that I was raised on ♪ ♪ It's mud between my boots ♪ - There was just something in me that says, "I am pretty good at growing things.

I'm meant to grow things."

As much as fisheries and food webs fascinate me, and the biology and science, I think my scientific mind is probably better applied to agriculture.

- Those first six to seven weeks, those are crucial for dairy calves to be successful in their career.

And eventually, you know, when they come into the milking herd it makes you feel good that you did the job right.

Be a good girl.

In the end, you kind of have to decide, do you wanna keep farming?

Do you wanna keep the legacy of, you know, being in agriculture?

Or are you gonna let the public education drive you out in California?

- You have the environmental end and then you have the agriculture end, and we've always been pitted against each other.

And it's really unfortunate because actually we probably have some of the same goals.

A true farmer would never want to degrade the land because that is their future.

(smooth introspective music) - [Announcer] Production funding for "American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag" provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates.

Insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By GAR Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts.

More yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

By Pickett Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co., providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic, M&A, and financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(warm inquisitive music) - Be a good girl.

- Hey, my name's Stephanie Nash.

I'm a fourth generation dairy farmer from Middle Tennessee, originally from the Central Valley in California.

My main job on the dairy farm is our calf and heifer management program.

I oversee all the newborns and two of our facilities offsite of all of our heifers that go away and get raised and then they come back pregnant and go into the milking string.

My everyday kind of routine is to get up real early, start the milk, feed the babies, make sure everybody has clean water and fresh grain, and then just to oversee the whole operation and family business here at Nash Family Farms.

Every morning we start the pasteurizer, we let it pasteurize to about 160 degrees, and then we'll cool it down.

Depending on the weather, if it gets cold, we'll cool it down about 116, start loading bottles, because we do have two barns.

We have calves outside and calves inside, so we wanna make sure that everybody's got the right temperature of milk.

Moving to Tennessee was, I guess we were stepping into territory we really haven't been.

We knew that it was a strong agriculture state.

We knew Farm Bureau and, you know, the State of Tennessee was really for new businesses coming in, specifically small business.

And so moving to Tennessee, we obviously had to kind of a adapt.

We didn't know what the weather would be like.

We didn't know how the cows would adapt.

And luckily, you know, moving all of our cows from California, we only lost one.

So we were really successful with the move.

And now being here, you know, we've established a community, we've built a local creamery, and really proud of what we, you know, have accomplished and what we can bring to the community and educate about the dairy farm.

We had a lot last week, so.

But this one's my favorite.

She's so cute.

So when it comes to California versus Tennessee, I think the biggest thing is the public.

We have had such a great community here supporting agriculture, and even though Nashville is growing, people honestly wanna get out of the city to learn about agriculture.

When you're in California, you kind of have that Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego concept of, you know, bigger living, and the Central Valley gets missed a lot of times.

I feel like, you know, with California, they don't get the credit they deserve.

I mean, it's the largest agriculture county in the United States, and we're still dealing, you know, with big regulations and no water availability.

And so coming to Tennessee, we really didn't have to deal with that.

The state was very open to us building the dairy farm and being part of the community.

Here, I'll take some small ones.

I'll take some small bottles.

- One?

- No, gimme a couple.

One more.

- Two more.

(both laughing) (gentle upbeat music) - This is one of our ranches that I live on.

It's the Faith Home Ranch.

We have been here for, let's see, 1998, so 25 years we've been here.

We meaning my brother and I bought this place in '98 and we both lived here for a while, and then I got married and had kids and he went and got a house.

And then of course I raised my family here.

Farming with my brother is probably the one of the easiest things I've ever done.

We've always been really tight.

He's six years younger than me, and when we were kids, because we had sort of a small house, and my sister, she was more difficult to share a room with, my brother and I shared a room until I was about 16.

So we always got along really well, and we have two distinctly different skillsets and they're just a great balance.

We literally, I know this sounds odd for people who are in families and have siblings, but we literally never fight and we have a ton of respect for each other and really have figured out a good balance of work here on the farm with our different skillsets.

My dad immigrated from Switzerland in the early 1960s and came out here to meet his brother, and they started an almond and egg operation, so I grew up around almonds and chickens.

So the new buzzword right now is regenerative ag, and it's all about putting things back into the soil, keeping the soil really healthy, about all the microbial organisms in the soil and how that benefits what you're growing there.

And so what you see here, this is actually part of that.

One of the big things is cover cropping.

When I originally put it in, I specifically put it in to actually benefit my beekeeper and his bees, 'cause if his bees were strong then they were gonna pollinate a good crop for me, and then he would always wanna bring his bees back to my property.

I mean, it really was kind of a selfish motive but it ended up having all these other benefits to it.

I mean, first of all, the bees did love it.

They did do great.

I mean, I had great pollination this year, no competition.

I'm making the assumption.

I don't have the data to back it up.

I am making the assumption that what I have in here is actually controlling any pests that I might have.

I mean, it's really obvious at certain times in the spring when you go through here, there's a ton of lacewings and ladybugs, and those are definitely great beneficial insects you wanna have.

The other great thing is I noticed that it actually started out-competing a lot of the weeds that are problematic for me, especially during the summer.

And some of those weeds are herbicide-resistant.

And so by increasing the seed bank of this sort of crop here, I'm actually out-competing the other plants and then they don't go to seed.

So year after year, the population of those herbicide-resistant species is going down, so I don't have to use as much herbicide anymore.

- Ever since I was a little girl, like I would point out things, especially with the calves, like if they got sick or just their personality traits.

And so I was really the only one that could take on the pressures of raising a dairy calf.

It's not an easy task, but I love it.

But, you know, some people can see cattle differently.

My dad's that way.

(warm music) - You know, we've been in California our whole life, and third generation farming in California, farming and dairying.

And it just, as I continued to watch the bills coming out of the legislature that became laws and all the licenses and fees that changed when they couldn't add any new taxes, it just became obvious that it was gonna be very difficult for my kids to make a living in the dairy business in California.

- I mean, it was a big change, because growing up, you know, I showed cattle at the Fresno Fair, and I was a part of everything agriculture, and I really loved just the richness of the Valley.

But when it came to, you know, regulations and final decisions, it was really hard for us to validate staying in the Central Valley if we were just gonna have to sell off in a couple of years because prices weren't right and people didn't know us and they didn't understand our industry.

So in the end, you kind of have to decide do you wanna keep farming?

Do you wanna keep a legacy of, you know, being in agriculture?

Or are you gonna let the public education drive you out in California?

- Well, I could just say that one of the things that moving to Tennessee, it allowed us to do was to vertically integrate our operation more, something I'd wanted to do for years but because of all the research and permits and things that you need in California, I could never afford to do it.

Here, we were able to come to an agriculture county, put up a creamery, start making our own ice cream, and now put up a cheese plant and start making cheese and selling cheese and try to... That's the thing that I think is gonna be our future.

For our operation, we're never gonna milk 5,000 cows.

In fact, if the creamery and the cheese continues to do better, I'd probably wanna milk less cows and do it more for the operation.

But that probably will not be in my lifetime.

That will probably be something that she'll make the call on someday.

- So this is the first year we have started farmer's markets here in Tennessee, and we also do farm tours and we do creamery events.

And we also, you know, just do a lot of advocacy work across the state, so I decided to reach out and try to get some interns.

And this year we have three, so we'll all be going around to different events, helping out with the tours.

And so it's all three young women, they're all in college, and so they will come onto my dairy farm, they will learn everything that I do, my advocacy, selling cheese at the farmer's markets, events at the creamery, and at the end of their internship, I will write a letter to the job or the college of their choice in furthering their education in agriculture.

- If you wanna know what keeps me up at night, climate change keeps me up at night.

It scares the crap out of me, actually.

I am very aware of all the changes, even in my short time, which 25 years to be farming is actually a short amount of time, really, in the scheme of things.

I mean, if you talk to my dad, he's like, "Oh, it's so much different now," you know?

And we have this like feast or famine cycle.

And I think going forward, good policy is gonna make or break us.

But the question is what's good policy, and who is it good policy to you?

Again, you know, you're talking about people in metropolitan areas, you're talking environmentalists, you're talking about ag.

We're all on different pages, and at some point we kind of need to get united and figure this thing out together.

And unfortunately, we're all gonna have to give, right?

And at this point, nobody wants to give.

My question in California, with climate change and with water, and asking Californians, what is a good use of water?

I would like to ask that to every Californian.

What do you think a good use of water is?

Because coming from a farmer, I feel like a good use of water is actually growing food so that when you open your fridge, there's something there.

Everything takes water to grow, and it all takes different amounts of water.

Unless maybe you're growing nopales.

You know, it's a cactus.

I don't see us all switching to a cactus diet anytime soon.

So what I say to people about almonds, you know, you really have to start looking at not what people are growing, but how they're growing.

What exactly is that crop giving other than just the crop?

But when I look at almond farming and how it's done, I feel like they are actually so progressive and giving so much back.

Think about it: in the Valley, if we did not all have all these trees, what would our air quality look like?

They literally scrub carbon out of the air and they sequester it in the soil.

And here's one of the awesome things about almond farming now: the newest regenerative trend now is to actually do whole orchard cycling.

So after 25 years, sometimes 30 if your orchard lives that long, you take that whole orchard, you grind it up, and you take all that carbon, that 30 years of collected carbon, and you put it back in the soil and you sequester it.

And there is nothing that sequesters that much carbon on that scale in agriculture.

And yet here we are doing it in almond farming.

It's not that I want all of California covered in almond trees, but the trees that are here are doing something good.

(warm music) ♪ It's driving through this little town ♪ ♪ Like I never left ♪ - You know, I grew up in church and I sang in church, and then I went off to college and I kind of had like a bigger agriculture experience.

That's when I learned, you know, the advocacy side and just learning about different industries.

But when we moved to Nashville, I started to get into music more.

And the funny thing is Charlie Daniels' godson was trimming hooves at the time at the dairy farm, so we exchanged numbers, started writing music, and I just fell in love with the Nashville scene, the songwriter scene, and kind of got into just spreading the news through my music and supporting agriculture.

♪ 'Cause it's the land that I was raised on ♪ ♪ It's mud between my boots ♪ ♪ It's the church that I grew up in ♪ ♪ That planted me these roots ♪ So "Time Changes" was my first single that I recorded about agriculture, and I actually recorded it because of, you know, the bullet train going through California.

I saw a lot of farmers weren't getting paid for the land that was being taken up, and it kind of connected with me because we had to retreat from California.

♪ The time changes ♪ ♪ That simple way of life has come and gone ♪ ♪ But I'm still holding on ♪ ♪ To the faith, to the truth ♪ ♪ That's kept me strong when I believe ♪ And so I wanted people to know that even though times are changing and housing developments are coming up and regulations are going against us, that family farmers and ranchers are still here.

They're still providing for the world, and we need to recognize them and what they do for the country.

- She always had the ability to sing to communicate.

And so it's a lot more natural for her.

For her to get up on a stage and sing for 30 minutes to an hour is something I would never do.

I've never even done karaoke.

So that's not something that I would wanna do.

But for her, I've never seen her nervous, really.

♪ There ain't no promises ♪ ♪ Just take and never give ♪ ♪ Now there's empty farms and broken hearts ♪ ♪ Trying to forgive ♪ ♪ That time changes ♪ - If I had a choice between the dairy farm and country music, I mean, that's a really hard question because I have a love differently for both.

You know, when it comes to probably what was in my heart since I was little, it'd be really hard to leave the farm.

I think it's important to keep educating people about agriculture.

There's platforms like this that show the real, true life of the American family farmer and rancher.

And the more we start to realize the importance of our food security and the future of our food, we will start to see that farmers are passionate and they love their jobs and they sacrifice and we continue to fight for the American people on agriculture.

So don't stop supporting your local communities.

Always ask questions to family farmers.

And let's continue to support our agriculture communities.

♪ Time changes ♪ ♪ Yeah, times are changing ♪ - The head of the Water Board of California was speaking to us, and the whole time he's speaking to us, you know, he's coming from a very, I feel a very metropolitan standpoint.

I'm like, "Oh, wow.

Like, you're just not really understanding this relationship.

Like, we need to be working together, you know?

We can make huge change."

And I was like, "Yeah, if we could only, you know, bridge this gap between environmentalism and agriculture."

And I was like, "Oh, agrimentalism.

Yeah, wouldn't that be great?"

And so I came up with this idea.

The whole idea is working together or allowing each other to coexist.

And you know those old stickers that spell out coexist in all the religious symbols?

I was like, "Oh, I can write coexist in agricultural and environmental symbols."

I drew out the C, which stood for crop, and all the little crops were drawn in the C. And the O was a globe, which is everybody, the Earth.

E, actually, I fashioned out of a smelt and a salmon.

X was a duck flying on its side.

I was actually a female farmer with the sun over her head for the the dot.

The S was a river and the T was a tree.

And I felt like it brought everything together.

We can have ag, we can have environmentalism.

We can do this together.

We just have to want to, right?

We have to listen to each other and we have to be able to give, right?

As much as we wanna take, we need to be able to give.

Both sides, let me reiterate, both sides.

And so that is how agrimentalism came to be.

When you have that moment where you've done, you've worked so hard, and then something like a monarch butterfly comes flying through your property, you're like, "I'm doing something right because I have figured out the balance."

Or, "You know what?

I'm not gonna say I have figured it out.

I will always be figuring it out, but I am moving in that direction of figuring out the balance where agriculture and environmentalism can actually meet each other and have a positive impact."

Mic drop.

♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh ♪ ♪ It's driving through this little town ♪ ♪ Like I never left ♪ ♪ I tried the big city living dream ♪ ♪ And came right back ♪ (smooth introspective music) - [Announcer] Production funding for "American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag" provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates.

Insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By GAR Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts.

More yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

By Pickett Solar, helping farmers and ranchers save money by becoming energy independent.

By Harrison Co., providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic, M&A, and financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.