(upbeat music) - We're here to take care of the land.

If we take care of our land, it was told to us that it would take care of us, from our elders, and so we take that to heart.

- [Narrator] James Kinter is the Senior Advisor of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation.

It's a tribe that has lived for 10,000 years in what is now Northern California.

Today they're centered in Capay Valley where they own one of the most diverse farming operations in Yolo County.

They produce olive oil and other products under the Seka Hills name.

- "Seka" is "blue" in the Patwin language.

And we have these beautiful, blue mountains that are out here in the valley.

And we wanted to honor the land and we wanted to honor those mountains.

(farmers chatting) - [Narrator] Kinter says the tribe is intentional about the crops they farm.

Some crops like the elderberry that goes into their balsamic vinegar honors the tribe's use of elderberry over thousands of years.

Others, like olives, were selected, because they are drought resistant and naturally suited to California's Mediterranean climate.

- When I started with the tribe in 2003, they only owned about 1,000 acres of land.

Today we farm and ranch just over 25,000 acres.

We grow a dozen different crops.

We run about 800 head of Angus cross cattle.

- [Narrator] Jim Etters is the director of land management for the tribe.

- We grow two varieties of olives here on this ranch.

We grow arbequina and arbesana.

Arbequina tends to be a mild to medium bodied oil that's very versatile in the kitchen.

It can be used for everything from frying to finishing.

Arbesana tends to be a little more buttery, and so it's really an oil that the chefs that we sell oil to prefer.

(upbeat music) So, this style of planting is called super high density.

It's where the trees are planted very close together, 13 feet by five feet apart, and are on a trellis similar to the way you would grow grapes.

This style of growing has really allowed olives to become a viable crop again in California, because of the mechanized harvest and the mechanized pruning.

So, we use a large, over the row harvester that basically the whole tree passes through, removes the olives, and places them into a gondola pulled behind a tractor.

- We're the grower.

We grow the olives, but we also truck the olives down to our mill.

We mill them ourselves.

We separate the oil from all the different pumice and stuff ourselves, and do the whole production here on site.

And we also bottle and do everything here as well.

And we do our own marketing.

In the olive oil industry, the longer it takes for you to get the olives from the tree into the mill, and into the bottle, you lose quality.

And so, for us to be so close to our mill is one of the reasons why it's such a good product.

- From the time the fruit arrives at the mill to the time oil starts coming out the spout is about 45 minutes to an hour.

So, it's a very quick process and much more efficient than olives have been processed historically.

- [Narrator] Yocha Dehe opened a tasting room for Seka Hills in 2014.

It's a way to share their products and their story.

- Once we start talking about, you know, what the word "seka" means, people are gonna ask, "What does that mean?"

And that opens the door for conversations for us to elaborate on our culture with them and why we're doing this.

- [Narrator] It's a story that tells how their once large tribe of 25,000 people nearly disappeared.

- We flourished in this area.

We had thriving economies and we had a lot of different things here pre-contact.

And we've had a lot of struggles.

And over the time of California, and the gold rush, and different invasions that came through over those time periods, we were whittled down to under 25 people within our tribe.

We have now rebounded back to around 100 and we're continuing to grow and flourish.

- [Narrator] Flourishing also means creating new opportunities in agriculture and farming for young tribal members, opportunities that didn't exist for prior generations.

- We didn't really grow up in farming.

What we grew up in was in poverty.

The future of hope for us is that our youth would get involved in agriculture, that they'd be interested in understanding the process of food manufacturing and those type of things.

And so, for us it means a little bit more than just farming it.

We're really trying to take care of it for future generations.

So, instead of taking from the land and never giving back, we try to find crops and other items that are gonna be more sustainable.

And we want folks to know that, you know, we're here to take care of the land.