Through her forthcoming cookbook, the seventh-generation rancher invites readers (and eaters) to share year-round celebrations, harvests, and meals at Rancho San Julian.
In spite of persistent drought conditions in California, a soft rain is falling on Rancho San Julian when we visit in early June. The creeks splash audibly through the patchwork orchards, and when Elizabeth Poett’s truck rolls up the gravel driveway, the dust clings low against a backdrop of verdant hillside shrouded in fog.
“We’re blessed to have all this rain,” Poett says. As a cattle rancher and a farmer in the Santa Ynez Valley, she acknowledges “so much of my business plan is looking up at the sky and going ‘please rain.’” Those pleas to the sky are just one reality of ranch life that Poett — who is also a devoted home cook — hopes to share with the world through her culinary events, her cooking show “Ranch to Table,” and her forthcoming cookbook “The Ranch Table.”
That “table” is not just conceptual. It refers to Rancho San Julian’s rustic picnic-style benches, which are situated under a wooden pergola positively dripping with climbing vines. Here, ranchers have gathered to share meals for more than seven generations.
Rancho San Julian was granted to Jose de la Guerra, comandante of the Santa Barbara Presidio (and Poett’s great-great-great-great-grandfather), in 1837. The Casa, as the family calls the ranch headquarters, was a stopping point on the old stagecoach road from Santa Barbara to Lompoc. Travelers and ranch hands would stop into the “Cowboy’s dining room” for meals at 6 am, 12 pm, and 6 pm. “We’ve been feeding a million people for a long time,” Poett says. “It’s something that’s very much integrated into our family.”
Though Poett was raised on the ranch, her prodigal journey took her from Kenyon College (where she studied Spanish history) to a series of waitressing and bartending gigs in New York City before she returned home. “I really wanted to figure out where I fit in on the ranch, how I was going to make it my own,” Poett says. Her father, who had been one of the first organic beef providers in California in the late 1980s, had recently stopped selling meat. So with the help of her husband and two sons, Poett jumped head first into the world of Southern California farmers markets, re-introducing the ranch’s grass-fed organic beef.
“Especially in California, farmers-market-goers are so knowledgeable and interested,” Poett says. “That really inspired me to be cooking more food, different food.” That, in turn, inspired the Ranch Table culinary events. “People were asking for tours of the ranch, I wanted to do something that felt a little more integrated,” Poett says.
Before long, Poett was approached by Magnolia Network for a television series. “I wanted to show what ranch life was really about and make it authentic,” Poett says. “Not, you know, a Hollywood take on ranching.”
When it comes to managing a 14,000-acre ranch, there are plenty of authentic ups and downs — and the downs are only exacerbated by the climate crisis. During summers, a family member must be ever-present on the property, watchful for signs of wildfire. The recent years’ drought forced the ranchers to perform a “devastating” cull of the herd in order to preserve resources for the mother cows of their cow-calf operation.
But in some sense, climate protections are built right into the management of the ranch. “The only way to run cattle here every single year is to take care of the land and to watch the grasses,” Poett says. The ranchers depend on rotational grazing to rest and replenish the pastures, and Poett started her own mobile harvest unit so her animals could be slaughtered with dignity on site.
“I think sometimes beef can get a bad rap,” Poett says. “But I do feel like what we’re doing here could not be better for the environment. We’re not tilling these hillsides, we’re not spraying these hillsides, this is really land that is being taken care of for generation after generation. And cattle are helping us do that.”
Rancho San Julian has also partnered with government agencies, implementing tools like fish ladders for steelhead trout to help restore their watersheds.
“Sustainability is a very hot word,” Poett says. “We couldn’t do what we have been doing for the last 200 years if it was not sustainable. In all forms — not just sustainability for the land, but also sustainability for the animals, for the creeks, and to be able to keep this ranch in our family. Everything is very interrelated here.”
Poett wants that relationship to the land, that holistic picture of life on a ranch, to shine through in her first cookbook, The Ranch Table. Poett’s book tells the story of a year on the ranch — showcasing menus of seasonal recipes alongside the celebrations and hard work that take place surrounding each harvest. In the early summer, Poett’s go-to ingredients are strawberries, artichokes, and tri-tip beef prepared on the ranch’s vintage Santa Maria grill.
With the cookbook in the production stage and the fourth season of “From Ranch to Table” wrapped, Poett plans to take a breather, reconnecting with her family and day-to-day life on the ranch. Spring will shift to summer, the hills will fade from green to gold, and the challenges of another dry season will await. But for now, Poett looks to the sky and beams: “Our pond is full, the aquifers are filling — these are all things that just make me giddy.”
Poett’s smile bears the brand of a true California rancher: her disposition is never sunnier than when it’s raining outside.
Thank you for this inspiring article about an enterprising and adventurous young woman and her passionate quest to save the land and traditions of her ancestors!