first showcased by the USDA. Which explains why Bonnie found himself being pulled by a tractor in Irvine. “Steve is obviously very creative,” says Bonnie, talking months after his visit to Irvine from his Washington, D.C., office. “But the connection he’s making between consumer interest and demand for climate-smart practices as a business concept is a remarkable insight. We really wanted the parts of the Climate-Smart partnership to be bigger than the whole, so projects can live beyond the life of the grant. Elevated Foods really ticked so many boxes. Steve has collected these people that care about food and food availability and people that care about climate. And Steve and Elevated Foods and
it was distributing fertilizer, and, like many in Brawley, he was a farmer. “He was just a really hard working guy and just kind of a cowboy,” says Brazeel. As a labor con- tractor, the elder Brazeel created a pickup truck
“My dad had no respect for the people that trad- ed and sold pro- duce,” Brazeel
really nothing incredibly exciting about it,” Brazeel says of SunTerra. “Just the day-to-day of business highs and lows, with some really good years, and some really bad. We stayed ahead of the game for 20 years, but SunTerra sort of just became a widget factory doing consistent volume.” SunTerra delivers 3,000-plus 18-wheelers’ worth of perishable produce every year and earns $70 million in annual revenue. And while the company may be miniscule compared to the likes of Archer Daniels Midland ($94 billion in revenue in 2023), or Conagra ($12.3 billion), building SunTerra led Brazeel to develop close personal and financial relationships with the farmers he worked with. “Our business marries buyers with
three-quarters of our product into the fields because we couldn’t sell it,” he recalls. “It was a scary time.” Salvation came in the unlikely form of Sonny Perdue. It was April of 2020 and Brazeel was sheltering in place in Palm Springs when the then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture appeared on CNN to announce a Farmers to Families Food Box grant program to purchase fresh produce, dairy, and meat products to help food distributors getting slammed by COVID’s closure of restaurants, hotels, and food- service companies. As Brazeel under- stood it, if he won a contract, SunTerra could package preapproved boxes of fresh produce and deliver them to food banks, community and faith-based organ- izations, and other nonprofits to help feed hungry Americans. Just as Brazeel
says. “But in my mind, I thought, that guy is win- ning. I’m standing in 120-degree heat covered in canta- loupe scum and he’s driving a red Porsche. That’s the life I wanted to have.” GROWING PAINS Brazeel attended Cal Poly Pomona for two years before transferring to the University of Arizona. When he graduated with a degree in agriculture in 1992, he sent out 100 resumes. The only response he got was from Sun World, a specialized distributor of exotic produce varieties like seedless watermelons and grapes and U.S.- grown mangoes. “They were among the first to focus on taste and develop unique varieties that nobody else had,” says Brazeel. “They knew if you control the market on a specific item, you dictate the price.” Brazeel’s experience at Sun World, compounded by the tech-obsessed climate of the first dot-com boom, led him to start SunTerra in 2000. SunTerra began as a one-man operation that built partnerships with small growers in Southern California, represented them, and sold their crops to retailers, food distributors, and, as Brazeel says, “anyone we could.” In the 20-odd years since, Brazeel has built SunTerra into a company with 50 employees, a massive refrigerated distribution facility in Imperial County, and customers like Trader Joe’s, Costco, Sprouts, Walmart, and Dole. “But there’s
A young Brazeel coaxing seeds out of the ground.
staffing agency of sorts, connecting mi- grant laborers to the many local farms that needed help harvesting crops. Ear- ly on, he’d wake Brazeel, his sister, and two brothers at dawn, drive them out to the farms, and introduce them to what a hard day’s work looked and felt like. “We learned how to pick fruit and vegetables alongside these workers,” says Brazeel. “They were some long days, but there was an odd joy and pride. It also instilled a sense of respect for the workers, the farmers, and the effort and care it takes to grow food.” Brazeel still recalls the desert heat, sticky dirt, flies, and the musty rancid smell that clinged to him from cleaning up piles of rotten melons. He also remembers being on break one day when a red Porsche 944 pulled into the field kicking up a cloud of dust. Leaning on his shovel, Brazeel recalls watching as a guy with a paunch and a big cigar emerged and walked out among the vines: “It was like that Porsche in ‘Sixteen Candles.’ He just nonchalantly picked up a cantaloupe, gave it a squeeze, and kicked a couple. Then he got back in his car and peeled off.” Brazeel says that when he asked his dad who the guy was, he told him: “That prima donna son of a bitch? He’s one of those guys that works three hours in the morning, drinks cocktails for lunch, plays golf all afternoon, and makes $100,000 a year.”
over extinction, chained their roads, and didn’t let anyone in or out. Riley knew that if anyone could help, it would be A.G. Kawamura, California’s former Secretary of Food and Agriculture. She then connected Studdert to Kawamura, who was working with Brazeel on the Food Box program. “Out of nowhere I get this blast call from Steve Studdert,” recalls Brazeel. “He says: ‘We need to get food to their reservation.’ I said whatever I can do to help. Then he asked me: ‘What do you need?’” Within 24 hours Brazeel had letters from representatives, senators, and governors granting SunTerra all the SunTerra delivered 1.5 million food boxes with the Farmers to Families Food Box program during the pandemic.
their project connect all of it.”
sellers and makes investments with farmers to both guarantee supply and have a stake in the crops,” he says. “In this industry
was putting the fi- nal touches on his initial Farmers to Families proposal, he got an urgent call from a man named Stephen
FIELDS OF DREAMS Brazeel is from the small town of Brawley in California’s Imperial Valley, a fertile crescent in the middle of the desert just south of Palm Springs and the Salton Sea, about 30 miles north of Mexicali. “There’s not much to do in Brawley besides agriculture,” says Brazeel. “It’s the traditional ‘Friday Night Lights’ kind of town where football and farming are the main activities.” Brazeel’s dad was a farm labor contractor, but had a number of side jobs. “He seemed to be reasonably successful in various different things, but it was never one thing,” says Brazeel. Sometimes
Steve and his brother Chris.
there’s considerable risk and you’re gambling on a lot when you put that seed in the ground. It’s less risky when it’s shared.” When Brazeel talks about “highs and lows” in SunTerra’s business, or about having “skin in the game” to reassure his partners, he’s talking about the day- to-day perils of the produce industry. But nothing prepared him for what would come in 2020. COVID-19 almost sideswiped everything Brazeel had been building for two decades. “It was like a light switch went off,” he says. Brazeel had thought SunTerra’s business was a 50/50 split between food service and retail. But it turned out, 70% of its customers sold to schools and hotels — which had effectively disappeared overnight. “We began plowing nearly
Studdert. Studdert is an international problem solver who has advised near- ly every president since Reagan; he had been tasked with solving an emerging food scarcity crisis among the Navajo Nation and called Dawn Riley, a for- mer USDA chief of staff who’d become an agency trans- lator. “I’m working with the Navajo Nation and these folks are starving,” Studdert told Riley. “I need some of that free food the USDA is giving away.” Even in the best of times, the Navajo Nation struggles with food shortages. When COVID hit, they chose hunger
permissions and access he needed. SunTerra would receive geoloca- tion coordinates to specific loca- tions in the middle of sacred Navajo grounds in Mon- ument Valley and direct its trucks
Brazeel and the Food Box program delivered 250,000 boxes to Navajo Nation.
into areas completely off-limits to any- one outside the tribal inner circle. Bra- zeel was blown away by Studdert and his organization. “Nothing would deter them,” he says.
Imperial Valley extends from the Salton Sea in California to the Mexican border.
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ISSUE 01
ELEVATED NATION
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