At Mother Nature’s Mercy

Kevin Kester’s family has been farming in the U.S. for generations. And it’s not just a couple of generations they’ve been farming; more like generations upon generations, way back to the 1600s, specifically in California since the 1860s. Today, Kester owns a 22,000-acre beef cattle ranch in California’s Monterey and Fresno counties, near Paso Robles. In the middle of the state, it’s at the “bull’s eye,” he says, of the worst drought that he—and several generations before him�