Meet Your Neighbors Who Are Leading the
Golden State’s Expanding Agave Industry
California’s agave industry is exploding right now, expanding from just a couple dozen acres a few years ago to more than 1,000 acres today, with much more on the way. Though there are some larger farms, like the one that hugs Interstate 5 just west of Fresno, the vast majority of the plants — most famously turned into tequila and mezcal in Mexico, yet also valued for food, fiber, fuel, and more — are dispersed across more than 300 smaller properties statewide. Agave intended for commercial usage now grows in at least 32 of the state’s 58 counties.
Santa Barbara County lit an early spark under this trend, as I first discovered in my January 2019 cover story “The Great Agave Experiment” about the first agave harvests at Rancho La Paloma on the Gaviota Coast. Earlier this year, while reporting a story on the industry’s growth — and its growing pains — I was reminded that Santa Barbara remains a critical force behind the Golden State’s agave movement. In fact, the California Agave Symposium, which has been held in Davis since it started in 2022, will come here next spring.
Over the past couple of months, photographer Macduff Everton and I visited numerous farms growing agave across the South Coast alone, from the craggy mountains over Carpinteria to the canyons above San Roque to the valleys behind Goleta. Our search was far from comprehensive — we didn’t even hit the Santa Ynez Valley, where at least a half dozen plantings are underway. (I did, however, talk to Cuyama’s first grower.)…