Earlier this week, Season Community Development Corporation, operator of the Yolo Food Hub Network, announced the appointment of Ave Lambert as its new executive director, marking a new chapter for the organization.

An eighth-generation farmer and rancher with deep roots in Yolo and Ventura Counties, as well as the Bay Area, Lambert brings a lifelong passion for food and agriculture to this pivotal role. According to a local press release, their multidisciplinary background spans the culinary arts, regenerative farming, workforce development, and food policy advocacy, making them a dynamic and visionary leader for the region’s local food movement.

“We are incredibly excited to welcome Ave back to the valley,” stated New Season Community Development Corporation Board President Jim Durst, a nonprofit responsible for two decades of revitalizing rural northwest Yolo County. “Their commitment to community-driven food systems, paired with a proven track record of innovative leadership, makes them the ideal person to lead this next chapter.”

After two decades creating models for local food systems, community flourishing, and economic development in food-insecure, impoverished areas, Lambert is now returning to Yolo County. Lambert brings this rich experience home to lead the Yolo Food Hub Network and its anchor project at the Historic Oakdale Ranch.

The newly acquired five-acre site between Esparto and Madison features a 22,000-square-foot barn—already a vibrant community space since its 2022 barn warming—that will soon be transformed into the central site of a larger regional food hub network including Spork Food Hub and Capay Valley Farm Shop, offering aggregation, processing, storage, and distribution services to support small farms and ranches.

This project has been a community-driven collaboration, engaging hundreds of local residents, organizations, and representatives from every level of government. The food hub emerges as a long-anticipated solution to a collapsing centralized and globalized food system. By re-regionalizing centers of food production and distribution in a rural agricultural region, the Yolo Food Hub Network builds lasting economic resilience for everyday people, not corporations.

“Don’t take your food supply for granted,” Durst, also of Durst Organic Growers, said recently to the Davis Vanguard. “It’s better to build resilience now than wait for the next crisis. The Yolo Food Hub is about proactive solutions—not charity, but systems change.”

With an ever-increasing climate and funding crisis, small-scale farms and ranches are on the front lines of that ecosystem and economic fragility, while growing our food and stewarding our ecosystems. Keeping the value and nutritional density of our food investments rooted in local land and labor, and developing models for the nation in how to do that, is more important than ever and allows farmers and eaters to divest from national systems that have long failed to serve the public interest.

This shift strengthens community health and well-being, empowers local decision-making, and reinvests in intergenerational equity — putting the power BACK in the hands of the people.

“We’re building infrastructure that not only supports our local agricultural economy but strengthens community health and relationships at every step of the supply chain,” said Ave Lambert. “I’m honored to be standing on the shoulders of each community member who has invested their lives in this work, the incredible all-volunteer New Season Board, and to be part of this transformative work.”