PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to

Fight for Our Growers and Winemakers

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

Federal farm policy was built around a handful of row crops — corn, soybeans, wheat. Rice belongs on that list, and our rice growers earn every bit of the support they get. Rice is the backbone of the Sacramento Valley, it feeds the world from Colusa and Sutter and Yuba, and it comes with its own hard fight — water transfers, export markets, and a razor-thin margin in a dry year.

But look at everything else grown alongside it. Wine grapes, almonds, walnuts, peaches, olives, pears, prunes, tomatoes. Fruits, nuts, vegetables — filed by the federal government under the oddly dismissive heading of “specialty crops,” as though they were a hobby. And here is what that label costs us.

Specialty crops are 30 to 40% of the total value of American agriculture. They get less than 0.5% of the farm bill’s funding through the title that supports them. In the federal program meant to help farmers reach export markets, 70 to 75% goes to crops we don’t grow. California produces nearly half of this country’s fruits and vegetables and 90% of its nuts — and when our growers applied for specialty crop grants last year, the requests came to $65 million against about $24 million available.

So the people who put the actual food on America’s plate are an afterthought to the people writing the checks. That’s what happens when a region has nobody in the room.

And then there’s wine — the industry this district is known for around the world, and one where the deck is stacked in a way most people have never heard of.

The rigged middle of the wine business

After Prohibition, this country built what’s called the three-tier system: a winery sells to a distributor, the distributor sells to the store or restaurant, and the winery is mostly forbidden from selling to you. It was meant to prevent the abuses of the old days. What it created instead was a tollbooth — and over time, a few companies bought the tollbooth.

One distributor alone now moves roughly a third of all the wine and spirits in the United States. When a small family winery signs with a distributor, its label lands in a portfolio of thousands, competing against national brands that move a hundred times the volume. Get deprioritized, and your wine simply stops reaching shelves.

Here’s the part that should make you angry. In many states, franchise laws make it legally difficult or outright impossible for a producer to leave a distributor once the contract is signed. So a family winery can be buried by the company that’s supposed to sell its wine — and be legally stuck there. Imagine a law that lets your only salesman ignore you, and forbids you from hiring another one. That’s not a market. It’s a captive one, and it was built by lobbyists.

This isn’t a theory. In December 2024 the Federal Trade Commission sued that largest distributor, alleging pricing practices that disadvantage small independent retailers. The case is still live. The government’s own competition regulator looked at this business and saw a problem.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Write farm policy for the crops we actually grow. I’d bring specialty crop support into line with what specialty crops actually contribute — real parity in the farm bill for research, pest and disease response, market development, and block grants that are oversubscribed several times over. If we’re 30 to 40% of the value of American agriculture, we shouldn’t be a rounding error in the bill that governs it. And I’d push export and market-access dollars toward the crops this state actually sells to the world.

Fight for a real answer when a processor walks away — not a bandage. Ask a peach grower in Sutter County what happens when the cannery closes. When Del Monte went bankrupt and shut its Modesto plant, it canceled 20-year grower contracts worth more than $550 million and left roughly 74,000 tons of cling peaches with nowhere to go. The one remaining canner picked up 24,000 tons on one-year deals. That left about 50,000 tons stranded — fruit on the tree with no buyer.

Washington’s answer was $9 million in federal funding, and it doesn’t save a single orchard. It pays growers to bulldoze their trees — up to 420,000 of them, about 3,000 acres, cut down before harvest. Against $550 million in canceled contracts, that is roughly a penny and a half on the dollar, and what it buys is a chainsaw.

That request was bipartisan, and people from both parties signed it. Nobody asked for enough. I’d fight for what keeps the industry alive: transition and replant support, federal help standing up processing capacity here instead of watching the last plant close, and market development so a grower has somewhere to sell before the contract disappears — funded the way this whole platform is funded, by making the biggest corporations pay what they owe rather than adding to the debt. Paying a family to cut down a hundred-year-old orchard is a settlement, not a policy.

Cut the energy bill that runs the pump. For a lot of operations here the single biggest controllable cost is electricity to move water — set by the same monopoly utility everyone else is stuck with, in proceedings a family farm has no realistic way to fight. Every rate hike is a direct tax on growing food. I’d fight for agricultural rate relief on the federal levers available and back on-farm generation and storage, so an operation can make its own power instead of renting it.

Break the chokehold in the middle of the wine business. The consolidation of alcohol distribution into a handful of national companies is exactly the kind of monopoly problem I’ve spent this whole platform talking about, and it deserves the same treatment. I’d back aggressive federal antitrust enforcement against distributor consolidation, support the FTC’s action rather than letting it quietly settle into nothing, and scrutinize further mergers in a business already far too concentrated. A grower with a great product should be able to find a buyer. Right now they have to find a gatekeeper.

Free producers from the franchise-law trap. No small business should be legally bound forever to a distributor that isn’t selling its product. I’d fight for a federal floor of protections — a right to exit a distribution agreement for cause, plain and enforceable — so a family winery that’s being ignored can take its wine somewhere else. The right to fire someone who isn’t doing the job is the most basic thing in business. Our winemakers don’t have it.

Let winemakers sell directly to the people who want to buy. Direct-to-consumer shipping is the most important channel a small winery has, and it’s governed by a 50-state patchwork a small producer needs a compliance department to survive. Two states still ban it outright. I’d push for a clear national standard for direct-to-consumer shipping so a family winery in Napa can sell to a customer in any state without hiring a law firm. The tasting room shouldn’t stop at the state line.

Back a public option in distribution — and be honest that this one starts in Sacramento. 17 states already run their own alcohol wholesaling rather than leaving it to private distributors. California could do the same, and it should look hard at it — a state option small producers can choose, priced to serve them rather than extract from them, would put real competitive pressure on companies that face almost none. That’s a decision California makes. It’s not one for Congress. But I’ll champion it loudly, and make sure federal law and antitrust clear the path rather than block it.

Make crop insurance work for the crops we grow. Federal crop insurance was built around row crops, and it fits a vineyard or an orchard badly. A grower who loses a season to smoke exposure, a late frost, or drought often finds the coverage doesn’t match the loss — and unlike a corn farmer, they can’t replant next spring, because a vine or a tree takes years to come back. I’d fight to build specialty-crop realities into federal crop insurance, including the losses our growers keep absorbing alone.

What this means for Our District

This is the district’s signature industry and its daily work. Napa and Sonoma wine. Sacramento Valley rice. The peaches, prunes, and walnuts of Sutter and Yuba. The orchards and row crops of Colusa and Yolo. Tens of thousands of jobs — in the vineyards and fields, but also the tasting rooms, the restaurants, the hotels, the equipment dealers, the truckers, the packing houses.

And for decades we’ve sent representatives to Washington who let this region be treated as a rounding error in federal farm policy while the distribution middle consolidated into a handful of companies. The biggest players in both cases have lobbyists. Our growers have a season and a prayer.

I take no corporate PAC money, no special interest money, and no foreign money — nothing from agribusiness, nothing from the distribution giants. So I can go after the tollbooth and demand a fair share of the farm bill without a phone call from anybody I owe. These are our neighbors. This is what we make. It’s long past time somebody in Washington fought for it.

The bottom line

The people here grow food and make wine the whole world wants, on land their families have worked for generations. They have never asked for a handout. What they want is a farm bill that counts them, a market they can actually reach, and the freedom to fire a distributor who won’t sell their wine. Get federal policy to treat this district’s agriculture as seriously as it treats a cornfield in Iowa, and our growers will do the rest — because they always have. Let’s go get them a fair shot.

All Policies
Next Policy
Return to Top

SOURCES

Join the Fight
Contribute