Water, Food & The Future of Ojai With Larry Yee

Lawrence Yee has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of agriculture, water, and the complex systems that sustain both. His résumé runs deep —U niversity of California Cooperative Extension, founder of the Hansen Agricultural Research and Education Center, advisor on national food initiatives, and a decade shaping water policy at the regional level in California.But if you want to understand his work, you don’t start in a boardroom. You start on a Sunday morning in Ojai.Because that’s where the theory meets the table.In this episode of Ojai Talk of the Town, Yee joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on what we misunderstand about our food system, why “local” is more than a lifestyle choice, and how water — California’s most contested resource—is managed in ways that rarely make headlines but shape everything downstream.We talk about the promise (and limits) of sustainable agriculture, the hard tradeoffs between environmental priorities and working farms, and the deeper question beneath it all: can we design systems that actually work — for farmers, for communities, and for the land itself?Along the way, Yee reflects on lessons from his work with visionary organizational thinker Dee Hock, his experience helping rebuild agricultural systems in Colombia as a Fulbright Specialist, and the long arc of Ventura County agriculture — what it’s gotten right, and what may be at risk.It’s a conversation that moves easily between the global and the local, the abstract and the tangible. And it lands, fittingly, right back where it started: at the farmers market, where all the big ideas have to prove themselves in the simplest way possible.Can you grow it?Can you sell it?Can people eat it — and thrive?(Note: We did not talk about Amur tigers, echolocation or billionaire bunkers.)