VAIL RANCHES Advancing a 100-Year Legacy By Taylor Lauson, Communications Manager
Kate Elmore McCutcheon, Chief Financial Officer at Vail Ranches, in one of their lettuce fields.
As a fifth-generation farmer in California’s Imperial Valley, Kate Elmore McCutcheon has never been far from agriculture. But her journey into the family business wasn’t immediate. What began as a more distant relationship with farming has since evolved into a central role within her family’s company, Vail Ranches, where she serves as Chief Financial Officer, working alongside her father Howard Elmore, her uncle Richard Elmore, her cousins and her husband Caleb McCutcheon. Their work carries forward a legacy that began more than a century ago, when Elmore McCutcheon’s great- great-grandfather settled in the region in the early 1900s. He arrived in 1908 with his family, traveling from Missouri by boxcar with only a few belongings: a wagon, seed, building materials and a mule. The journey west was grueling, driven by the promise of opportunity in the Imperial Valley. Federal reclamation projects were bringing irrigation water to the desert for the first time, while policies such as the Desert Land Act and Homestead Act encouraged families to settle. Canals and infrastructure tied to the Colorado River began transforming arid land into productive farmland, opening the door for farming families like the Elmores. As the family settled down and established itself, the years following World War I marked a turning point, as the next generation looked beyond survival and toward innovation and growth. In 1920, Elmore McCutcheon’s great-grandfather, John Junior Elmore, married his sweetheart, Hetty Joy Jameson, who also came from a farming family that owned citrus orchards and property in Corona, Calif.
The couple went on to purchase what would become the family’s first large farming operation, the Elmore Desert Ranch. “It’s a very productive ranch that we still farm a portion of today,” Elmore McCutcheon said. The early efforts of a family farm continued throughout the generations, with her grandfather, John Jameson Elmore, branching out to form his own farming operation. This included turning raw desert into farming land along the Colorado River and Mexicali Valley. “It was during that time we started Sahara Packing Company, which was our produce label for a long time. We sold and shipped produce all over the world.” This passion for agriculture would go on to be inherited by the next generation, with her dad and uncle establishing Vail Ranches in 1997. Today, they’re a diversified farming operation in Brawley, Calif., growing lettuce, carrots, celery, corn, alfalfa, Sudan and Bermuda grass. They also have a more vertically integrated
Elmore McCutcheon at her office in Brawley, Calif.
40 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com January – March 2026
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