Stewarding the soil that makes the difference
The Burroughs family started farming with one goal: to grow food they would be glad to feed their own children. Five generations on, that is still the whole of it.
It began with a young man from Illinois
In 1894 Benjamin Rendall Burroughs came west from Springfield, Illinois. He was nineteen. He and two of his brothers, Ernest and Willis, kept cows in the Oakland hills, bottled their own milk and sold it to families across the Bay.
Four generations later the cows are gone and the orchards are here, but the arrangement has not really changed: the family that grows it is the family that sells it to you.
Today Ward and Rosie Burroughs farm alongside their grown children in the northern San Joaquin Valley. Their daughter Benina runs the almond and olive side with her husband Heriberto, and their four children are on the farm daily.
What has not changed are the methods: the ones that honor the ecosystem, build healthy land and healthy food, and leave the soil better than they found it. The hope is that their grandchildren farm it the same way.
A hundred and thirty years, in short
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1894
Benjamin comes west
Benjamin Rendall Burroughs leaves Springfield, Illinois at nineteen for the Oakland and Berkeley hills. With his brothers Ernest and Willis he keeps cows, bottles the milk himself and sells it to customers around the Bay.
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1906
The dairy moves to Knightsen
He buys a farm in the Delta. Much of it sits below sea level with a high water table, which is exactly why the grass grows the way it does. He marries Edna Belle Nelson soon after, and they raise five children there.
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1922
Ernest is born
The youngest of the five. He grows up on the Burroughs Brothers dairy and goes on to Cal Berkeley to read history.
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1942
Ernest comes home
Benjamin passes. Ernest leaves college mid-war to work the farm and never does finish the degree, though the love of history stays with him for life.
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1947
Ernest marries MaryLoo Saunders
He runs the dairy in partnership with his brother Oscar as Burroughs Brothers, later Cloverleaf Farms Dairy and Creamery.
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1952
Ward is born
Second of five, raised on the Knightsen dairy among cows, horses and pigs, and with what he still calls a tremendous love of the family farm.
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1970s
Ernest finds this farm
He comes across the ground the family still farms today, in the northern San Joaquin Valley.
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1974
Ward and Rosie marry
They met at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. They have run the farm together ever since.
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1978
The dairy moves here
Vista Livestock Co. and Burroughs Family Farms bring the herd to the valley. Ward farms it conventionally for the next twenty-five years, in partnership with his father and his brother Bruce.
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1988
The first almond orchards
The trees go in. It is the beginning of the crop the farm is now known for.
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2002
Benina starts farming almonds
Home from Cal Poly, a couple of years with the cattle first, and then across to the trees.
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2003
The farm starts going organic
Ward's own account of it: I did not know what I did not know. The dairy and the orchards begin working with Mother Nature rather than against her, and soil health becomes the thing every other decision answers to.
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2006
The almond transition begins
The first blocks come out of conventional. Three years before any of it can be called organic, and no premium in the meantime.
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2008
Olives planted
The grove goes in. Olives take a few years to come into fruit, and the family has pressed oil from its own trees every year since 2012.
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2010
Poultry taken on
Workers for the land. Hens whose scratching and manure build better soil than anything that comes out of a bag.
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2015
Every acre certified organic
Nine years on from that first block.
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2020
Walnuts
Added into the mix to bring different nutrients and different building blocks into the ecosystem, rotating out of some of the almond ground.
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2022
Regenerative Organic Certified®
A standard that looks at soil, animals and the people who work here alike. The first almond farm in the world to hold it.
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2024
Regenified, and the eggs
A second audit, measuring outcomes in the soil rather than practices on paper. The egg operation was certified the same year.
The family behind it
Four adults and four children, all of them living on the land they farm.
Ward & Rosie Burroughs
They built up the dairy and the grass-based livestock side, and they are still farming today.
Benina Burroughs Montes
She took on 650 acres in her twenties and farms 1,200 today, and she carried the farm through both certifications.
Heriberto Montes
Benina met him on the farm. They married and have farmed it together since.
Four children
Here every day, learning the farm the way their mother did, by working it alongside her.
Everything here comes off this farm
The family grows it, harvests it and packs it, and it all comes off their own orchards.
How we farm is the heart of it
Cover crops, sheep, hens, hedgerows and owl boxes, each doing work that would otherwise have to come out of a bag.
