Fostering inclusive and sustainable agricultural innovation in California’s Central Valley

• For the Central Valley region, agriculture is both a lifeline and environmental risk. California’s Central Valley is a nationally significant agricultural region that supplies 25% of the United States’ fruits and nuts despite comprising only 1% of its farmland. Not surprisingly, agriculture is a key economic driver in the area, accounting for 14% of gross domestic product, 17% of jobs, and 19% of revenue in the San Joaquin Valley alone (the region’s southern half). However, growing water shortages, the quickening pace of climate risks and disasters, ongoing threats of farmworker displacement from technological innovation, and persistent patterns of racial and geographic inequity threaten the Central Valley’s position as a global leader in agricultural production.
• The Central Valley region’s core challenge—and opportunity—is building a resilient and inclusive agricultural technology cluster. By 2040, the region’s water supply could decline by 20% due to the combined impacts of climate change, threatening 900,000 acres of farmland and 50,000 jobs for the majority-Latino or Hispanic and low-income workforce. To maintain economic competitiveness and inclusive opportunity for all residents, the region must embrace agricultural technology for climate-adaptive and sustainable food production. Yet previous technological innovations in the region have cost tens of thousands of jobs, fueling tension and distrust between farmworkers and industry. Given these tensions, regional leaders recognized the need to endorse a BBBRC strategy that harnesses agricultural technology as a tool for inclusive prosperity and inclusion, rather than worker displacement and exploitation.
• The Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) is helping the region invest in a bold climate resilience and inclusion initiative. With the largest award out of all 21 BBBRC grantees—and one of the only BBBRC coalitions led by a community foundation—the Fresno-Merced Farms-Food-Future (F3) Coalition’s $65 million BBBRC strategy aims to align the often competing interests of farmworkers, environmentalists, industry, agriculture technology (ag-tech) practitioners, and different regional anchor institutions toward a bold vision to bolster the region’s resilience and competitiveness and promote a climate-adaptive food production ecosystem, all rooted in principles of equity, inclusion, and environmental sustainability.
• Advancing an inclusive cluster initiative requires intentional work to build trust and secure buy-in from workers, industry, and residents. This case study explores the design and implementation of the F3 Coalition’s ag-tech cluster strategy, including research and innovation through new university-industry-community partnerships, support for local farmers and food entrepreneurs, and the deployment of an industry-approved ag-tech certificate program across seven regional community colleges for upskilling incumbent farmworkers. It offers lessons on how economic and community development leaders can effectively build trust, overcome historical harms, and bolster inclusive and resilient economies, particularly in regions grappling with new technological innovations as well as longer-standing tensions between workers and industry.

The Central Valley lies at the intersection of several distinct economic, environmental, and public health contradictions. As the “agricultural heartland” of California, the region supplies 25% of the United States’ fruits and nuts despite comprising only 1% of its farmland. Even with these agricultural resources and productive output, Central Valley residents face stark socioeconomic inequities. For instance, 55% of Central Valley residents live in a state-identified “disadvantaged” census tract, the region’s unemployment is twice the national average, and it has consistently ranked low on indicators of racial and geographic inclusion.

The cascading effects of climate change have only worsened the region’s inequities and threatened its position as a global leader in agricultural production. All five Central Valley counties (Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced, and Tulare)—which are home to over 2 million people, 70% of whom are people of color—received failing grades from the American Lung Association for having high levels of ozone and short-term particle pollution (PM2.5). Moreover, nearly 80% of disadvantaged communities in the San Joaquin Valley are without potable water. By 2040, the average water supplies in the Central Valley could decline by 20%—threatening 900,000 acres of farmland and 50,000 jobs.

Many of the region’s socioeconomic inequities can be traced to a history of tensions between farmworkers, industry, and the United States government. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act excluded farmworkers and domestic workers from federal labor protections, essentially entrenching economic and physical exploitation as common practice among many agricultural industry employers for the next 30 years. In the early 1940s, the Bracero Program enabled millions of Mexican men to migrate legally to work on U.S. farms, but ultimately subjected many to wage theft, abuse, and poor working conditions prior to the program’s conclusion in 1964, after which many were left undocumented and unprotected.

Two farmworkers with a rich history of organizing in the Central Valley—Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta—were instrumental in rectifying some of these harms through successfully advocating for wage increases and the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975. But despite significant wins, the seeds of distrust between workers, industry, and government had been planted.

Industry-led agricultural technological innovation, in particular, has remained a lingering source of tension in the region. For example, the mechanical tomato harvester created by University of California, Davis in the mid-1950s led to the displacement of 82% of tomato growers and a loss of 32,000 farmworker jobs in just five years. Fears of similar displacement and loss have rendered many farmworkers and community-based organizations skeptical of agricultural technology, and committed to improving the livelihood of Central Valley residents first before enhancing global production through innovation.

Even with these tensions, farming and farming-related industries remain the primary lifeline of the Central Valley economy, and its leaders are coalescing around a path forward that they believe can embrace agricultural technology while improving the economic and public health outcomes of existing Central Valley residents, farmers, farmworkers, and food entrepreneurs. This vision seeks to leverage the region’s distinct environmental, human capital, and civic assets (Figure 2) to ensure that agricultural technology can be a tool of inclusion and prosperity rather than one of worker displacement and/or exploitation. It builds on momentum from anchor institutions such as University of California, Merced; California State University, Fresno; University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources; and several regional community colleges that had previously been investing in agrifood tech research, facilities, and equipment in the years prior, and combines this groundwork with direct engagement with thousands of farmworkers and other food entrepreneurs in the Valley. 

To achieve this vision—and help restore a region divided by economic, environmental, and health inequities—public, private, and civic sector leaders in the Central Valley formed the Farms-Food-Future (F3) Coalition, which aims to leverage agricultural technology to achieve three objectives: 1) develop and commercialize solutions for climate-adaptive food production; 2) create quality jobs across all skills levels for Central Valley residents; and 3) engage underserved small farmers and food entrepreneurs in technology development and adoption as well as new market access (Figure 3). Taken together, the coalition’s efforts seek to transform the Central Valley region into a sustainable global hub for climate-adaptive agricultural production, while growing and sustaining quality jobs for residents across all skill levels. 

The origins of the coalition

The F3 Coalition is unique not only for receiving the largest BBBRC award out of the 21 grantees, but also for being led by a community foundation with the convening power to align the often disparate interests of farmworkers, environmentalists, industry, and anchor institutions into a bold ag-tech vision rooted in principles of equity, inclusion, and environmental sustainability.

F3 stakeholders attribute the success of their BBBRC application to three primary factors: 1) the Central Valley Community Foundation’s (CVCF) change in leadership and strategic direction over the last decade; 2) the groundwork laid by previous cross-sectoral economic development initiatives in the region, such as Fresno DRIVE; and 3) preexisting social justice and multidisciplinary movements that heavily influenced the BBBRC application to embrace farmworker and environmentalist priorities.

First, over the last decade, CVCF transitioned from a more traditional community foundation model reliant on its endowment into an organization with diversified funding sources focused on enhancing the region’s economic prosperity. Much of this change can be attributed to its most recent president and CEO, Ashley Swearengin, who joined CVCF in 2017 after serving as the mayor of Fresno from 2009 to 2016. Based on her experience working both in the public and private sectors in the region, Swearengin advocated for CVCF to adjust its funding model to secure additional resources that could help match the scale of the challenges Central Valley residents experience.

By 2019, the CVCF board agreed that the foundation should pursue diversified sources of funding and focus on enhancing inclusive economic mobility in the Central Valley region. This helped lay the groundwork for CVCF leadership in other cross-sectoral initiatives such as Fresno DRIVE and, eventually, its successful application for the BBBRC award.

Building on the new CVCF leadership and previous research conducted by Fresno’s Regional Jobs Initiative (which identified manufacturing and food as two major clusters to expand export-oriented industries in the region), the region adopted Fresno DRIVE (Developing the Region’s Inclusive and Vibrant Economy) in 2020. DRIVE is a 10-year, $4 billion strategy anchored by 14 initiatives across economic development, human capital, and neighborhood development. Developed in conjunction with a 300-person steering committee and led by a 38-member executive committee, DRIVE was among the initiatives that inspired the state of California to create the statewide $600 million Community Economic Resilience Fund (recently renamed California Jobs First) to support regional economic development plans like DRIVE. It also directly laid the foundation for the state’s initial $32 million investment in seed funding for the F3 BBBRC application in 2021 ($14.25 million of which was provided as a direct match to the BBBRC proposals), as well as its subsequent $20 million investment in non-EDA-funded F3 priorities in 2022.

Finally, the F3 Coalition was invariably shaped by power-building movements from communities of color and environmentalist advocates in the region. These major lanes of community organizing predated both the DRIVE and F3 initiatives, leveraging their significant grassroots backing to shape the priorities included in both and ensure that the needs of workers and environmentalists were as front and center as the needs of industry and anchor institution partners.  

When the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the BBBRC was first released in August 2021, leaders at CVCF brought the application to the Fresno DRIVE Steering Committee. Having already established a regional coalition with DRIVE and engaged in the community work needed to garner public sector and grassroots support for its priorities, CVCF was able to adapt the Steering Committee developed for DRIVE to form the basis for the F3 Coalition. It expanded the coalition to encompass the broader five-county region, including seven community colleges that serve as crucial workforce development providers in more remote and rural areas, as well as to further cement the representation of community voice and farmworkers with organizations such as the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (which previously launched legal battles against the use of the mechanical tomato harvester), California Farmworker Foundation, Cultiva La Salud, and Fresno Metro Ministry. 

Project identification and selection

Based on the groundwork Fresno DRIVE laid, input from the expanded regional coalition, and early seed funding from the state of California, the F3 Coalition ultimately coalesced around a vision for climate-smart agrifood technology rooted in three interlocking “gears.” This “three-gear” portfolio took significant negotiation among partners and weeks of iteration on the strategies, but amounted to an initial request to the EDA for $100 million. The coalition ultimately received $65.1 million for five of the eight component projects.

The following eight component projects, organized by “gear,” were included in the F3 Coalition’s BBBRC application (five of which were funded by the EDA):

Research and Innovation Gear

1. F3 Innovate (funded by the BBBRC at $20 million) aims to become the nation’s hub for climate-smart agrifood technology and engineering, anchored in a historic and long-neglected building in downtown Fresno. As a new nonprofit entity comprised of F3 Coalition partners, F3 Innovate will seek to achieve the following goals: 1) promote the Central Valley region as a globally recognized leader in climate-smart ag-tech through industry association, publications, conferences, and international trade; 2) drive university-industry-community partnerships to foster an innovation ecosystem and generate startups and business expansion; and 3) coordinate talent pipeline pathways by bringing industry to the table with study development programs.

Local Farm and Food Innovation Gear

2. Local Farm and Food Innovation (funded by the BBBRC at $16 million) aims to stimulate inclusive economic prosperity and wealth-building for the Central Valley region’s small farmers and food entrepreneurs by offering capacity-building support, technical guidance, market access, and access to capital for underserved farmers and food entrepreneurs. More specifically, it will support the development of the San Joaquin Valley Agroecology Hub (an alliance of small farmers and BIPOC agrifood business owners who will adopt new sustainable technologies) and developing the Del Valle food hub (a physical space in Fresno for small-scale and underserved producers to sell their products and grow their businesses).

3. SIEMBRA Food Fund (not funded by BBBRC) proposed establishing a revolving loan fund through the Fresno Area Hispanic Foundation to provide affordable and accessible financing to BIPOC-led small businesses across the Central Valley food system.

AgTEC Workforce Gear

4. AgTEC Workforce Initiative (funded by the BBBRC at $15 million) seeks to develop a skilled, next-generation workforce in advanced, sustainable food production and manufacturing by aligning seven community colleges across the region (initially eight in the application prior to one’s withdrawal) to adopt an industry-approved curriculum and certificate program in Ag-tech and Competency-Based Education. Importantly, the AgTEC Workforce Initiative will prioritize upskilling incumbent farmworkers and will be rooted firmly in community engagement with farmworkers and industry partners.

5. Reedley College AgTEC Innovation Center (not funded by the BBBRC) was proposed to be a 20-acre hub on Reedley College’s farm housing ag-tech startups and providing Reedley students with work experience in agricultural technology through internships, job shadowing, and part-time employment.
6. Merced Ag Innovation Center (funded by the BBBRC at $12 million) will be a 14,880 square feet food processing facility that provides interdisciplinary training for Merced College students in advanced, sustainable food production and food manufacturing, while fostering collaboration between university researchers, food processers, and manufacturing and logistics industries.
7. Opportunity Walkway (not funded by BBBRC) was proposed to physically connect disadvantaged and disconnected communities in Southwest Fresno to economic opportunity by building a pedestrian trail and bicycle facility that connects these neighborhoods to the projected high-speed rail station, Downtown Fresno, and the proposed F3 Innovate building.
8. Partner Integration (funded by the BBBRC at $2 million) funds CVCF to manage the governance and partner facilitation component of F3 to ensure investments across the portfolio are integrated, measured, and grounded in ongoing community engagement and usable data (Figure 7). Essentially, it establishes the civic infrastructure needed to “ensure that F3’s portfolio results are greater than the sum of their parts.”

With this proposed project portfolio, F3 was selected as one of the BBBRC’s 60 Phase 2 finalists (out of 529 coalitions competing for this designation in Phase 1). Since Phase 2 funding requests exceeded the BBBRC’s available resources, the EDA gave all Phase 2 finalists, including F3, the opportunity to reduce their budgets. The group submitted a revised proposal for all eight projects, and the Investment Review Committee selected five for implementation awards. Ultimately, the SIEMBRA Food Fund and Opportunity Walkway were cut from the BBBRC portfolio. While coalition members were disappointed, they described recognizing that the two unfunded projects had promising avenues to receive funding from other sources, and therefore felt like the core of the project portfolio remained intact.

With five projects ultimately selected for federal funding, the F3 Coalition has spent the last year implementing each to set its “three gears” up for success (Figure 5).

Embedding equity into the strategy

One of the EDA’s top priorities for allocating BBBRC funds was equity, which the Biden administration defines as “investments that directly benefit 1) one or more traditionally underserved populations, including but not limited to women, Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders or 2) underserved communities within geographies that have been systemically and/or systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic prosperity such as Tribal Lands, Persistent Poverty Counties, and rural areas with demonstrated, historical underservice.”

F3 prioritized equity in its coalition strategy and project portfolio through three primary means. First, F3 built on months of community engagement conducted during the Fresno DRIVE process and expanded its coalition to be inclusive of the region writ large, fully engaging community-centered organizations and outer-region community colleges in the process. For example, to ensure the representation of farmworkers who may not be able to participate in a formal coalition structure, they conducted several engagement activities, including surveys, six outreach convenings, and numerous informal conversations with workers to ensure meaningful farmworker engagement as an integral foundation of the coalition itself.

Second, F3 designed two of its three gears to be firmly grounded in principles of equity and inclusion. The Local Farm and Food Innovation gear, for example, is meant to be the portfolio’s “equity anchor” in its mission to directly grow and support small-scale BIPOC farmers and food entrepreneurs in the region. Additionally, its AgTEC Workforce gear is designed to be directly informed by incumbent farmworkers’ needs in order to create more inclusive pathways for upskilling workers—building in two rounds of surveys with thousands of farmworkers to ensure that the ag-tech curriculum is shaped by their desires and identifies barriers to opportunity to enhance their pathways to opportunity.  

Finally, the vision of F3 itself—to secure a just transition for a persistently poor, environmentally harmed, and food-insecure region that supplies the bulk of the nation’s produce—is one that cannot be separated from principles of equity and inclusion. 

Early implementation: Successes and obstacles

Of the implementation activities underway across F3’s funded projects, the coalition has garnered early successes in three key priorities while overcoming significant barriers that often make this work difficult in distressed regions. These early successes are:

1. Fostering regional and state support for inclusive, climate-smart agricultural innovation. In a region highly divided by extractive agricultural production, devastating levels of food and environmental insecurity among workers and residents, and deeply rooted tensions between industry, farmworkers, and environmentalists, one of the strongest early wins for the F3 Coalition was its ability to align often adversarial actors around a shared regional vision for embracing agricultural technology that both improves economic outcomes for residents and solidifies the Central Valley region as an agricultural hub of climate-smart production.

Moreover, this equity-focused vision inspired unprecedented state recognition of the Central Valley region’s statewide and global economic importance alongside other major California economic anchors like the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles—with the state of California being an earlier investor of $32 million to help seed F3-related projects.

2. Establishing a regional workforce ecosystem rooted in farmworker and community voice. F3’s project portfolio hinges upon building and sustaining an inclusive local workforce skilled in advanced food production and manufacturing to support the region in becoming a global leader in climate-adaptive food production. The primary strategy through which the coalition seeks to accomplish this goal is through its AgTEC Workforce Initiative—a competency-based educational curriculum designed to upskill incumbent farmworkers, co-developed and co-implemented across seven of the region’s community colleges.

In the first year of implementation, the AgTEC Workforce Initiative secured significant early wins, but was not without its challenges. For instance, a key early win was its ability to engage over 12,000 farmworkers and directly base the curriculum on this feedback and the often ignored realities of farmworkers. During the same period, they were also able to align and coordinate seven community colleges to co-create and co-endorse a standard ag-tech competency-based education (CBE) curriculum, to be implemented in classrooms in fall 2024—outpacing the California Community Colleges’ Vision 2030 plan for incorporating CBE in the community college curriculum. In doing so, coalition partners were able to identify the challenges that farmworkers face in acquiring and sustaining agricultural jobs, and were subsequently asked to be a demonstration project in the Vision 2030 plan.

The AgTEC workforce strategy is still experiencing challenges, including overcoming broadband access and documentation barriers for farmworker trainees, obtaining buy-in from California community colleges to embrace CBE, and cementing industry partnerships in an often adversarial environment for both workers and industry. Still, stakeholders described achieving early alignment across all involved sectors to help ensure the groundwork of trust is laid for the workforce strategy to succeed in its mission of meeting both workers’ and industry needs. 

3. Forming a new governance entity for long-term sustainability of F3’s goals. Finally, the F3 Coalition stands out among BBBRC awardees for successfully establishing a new and long-term governance entity designed to ensure sustainability and accountability for coalition-wide priorities, while also enabling other lead implementors to complete their coalition project priorities without the burden of taking on uncompensated management and governance duties. In the first year of implementation, the coalition formally established a new 501(c)(3) entity, F3 Innovate, —sponsored by the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development; California Department of Food and Agriculture, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources; University of California, Merced; California State University, Fresno; and the Central Valley Community Foundation—with the stated goals of promoting the Central Valley as a globally recognized leader in climate-smart ag-tech, facilitating university-industry-community partnerships, and coordinating talent pipeline pathways to foster an innovation ecosystem.

Already, F3 Innovate has identified and convened a board to guide the direction of the new entity. Next steps include hiring a permanent CEO and finalizing agreements for revitalizing a historic downtown Fresno building into the organization’s new headquarters. This long-term governance mission demonstrates the unique role that community foundations can play as long-term stewards for inclusive growth strategies.

Organizing coalition-wide to deliver equity

The BBBRC award strengthened and solidified the partnerships formed during previous regional initiatives, including Fresno DRIVE, to fund a bold and cohesive roadmap for transitioning the region’s agricultural economy into one rooted in inclusive workforce development, environmental sustainability, and long-term sustainability.

F3’s coalition governance structure builds upon DRIVE’s steering committee, which encompassed hundreds of civic, business, and community organizations across the region. But it also relies on the regional leadership of CVCF to create a long-term governance entity, F3 Innovate, as the region’s sustainable hub for achieving, tracking, and scaling the impacts of the coalition writ large. The coalition’s distributive governance mechanism—meaning that it relies on both inclusive engagement practices (such as farmworker surveys and industry input) and formal decisionmaking bodies (such as the DRIVE steering committee)—ensures a structured and inclusive process that builds on the unique role that community foundations can play in seeding regional cluster initiatives without insisting upon long-term control.

While there are still multiple years left in the BBBRC, F3’s progress so far provides critical insights for economic and community leaders—particularly those in economically distressed regions threatened by the disproportionate impacts of climate change.

First, the F3 Coalition demonstrates the critical role that community foundations and other nonprofit intermediaries can play in convening and sustaining transformative regional economic development initiatives. Central Valley stakeholders consistently reiterated that the F3 coalition—which represents a historic collaboration among often adversarial institutions such as farmworkers, industry, environmentalists, ag-tech practitioners, and competing anchor institutions—could not have been possible without a neutral convener and mediator like a community foundation. Stakeholders emphasized the crucial role that CVCF played in ensuring that the perspectives of small BIPOC farmers and farmworkers were fundamentally valued as much, if not more, than industry partners—which inspired a wider set of champions to support and facilitate a vision that would have otherwise been seen as politically unachievable in the region.

Second, the F3 case study reiterates the importance of building on previous initiatives to grow and scale a transformative economic and environmental justice vision. For instance, much of the groundwork for F3’s success was rooted in the trust, engagement, and coalition-building achieved during the Fresno DRIVE initiative. The region’s ability to swiftly adapt its DRIVE coalition to “think bigger” about one of its 14 pillars—F3—and win an award like the BBBRC is emblematic of that success.

Finally, the F3 Coalition demonstrates that catalytic role that state funding can have on the success of regional cluster initiatives. Notably, the state of California provided an early commitment of $32 million in seed funding for F3-related projects (and $14.25 million as a direct match for BBBRC projects), while supplementing an additional $20 million match to the coalition in its next phase.”

F3 leadership considers California’s commitments to the coalition as a demonstration of the state becoming a critical champion for inclusive economic development and climate-smart technology in the Central Valley.

Though the full impact of the F3 Coalition’s BBBRC strategy will likely not be known for many years, its impact on the Central Valley region so far has been extremely promising. While the coalition will need to identify new funding resources to sustain its successes once the BBBRC is over, its work to date is a model for justly transitioning from an economy dominated by poor pay and inadequate workers’ rights to a region with sustainable pathways for shared prosperity and inclusive community well-being.