Yael Bernier
President

Raised in San Francisco, Yael migrated North to Marin County, went to college at Sonoma State University while living with her daughters and beginning her farming career in Penngrove. As a young child, she realized that she would eventually farm. Yael began with the purchase of a milk goat. Soula, the nanny goat, provided milk for the family for a couple of years and her off spring, Sassy Lassie, continued to nourish the family upon her mama goat retirement. While living in Penngrove, an 80 year old Italian neighbor gave Yael 10 heads of garlic that her neighbor’s husband grew from garlic that was grown by his family in Northern Italy. By the time Yael met Paul Bernier, she had increased her garlic crop 10 fold. About 100 heads. Today in Dry Creek Valley and Alexander Valley, Yael, her husband Paul and son Zureal, grow two tons of garlic each year. They grow 14 different varieties of garlic, and other row crops which the family sells at the Santa Rosa and Healdsburg Farmers Markets and to various restaurants in Northern Sonoma County.Yael and Paul met while taking a class in Balkan Folkdancing in the mid 1970’s. Yael moved North once again, to marry Paul, and together with Yael’s daughters, Mahlah and Briana they farmed prunes and other fruit trees, grapes, garden vegetables, chickens and goats. Within a few years Sam and Zureal were born and the family transitioned away from growing prunes and peaches to sharecropping old vine zinfandel, dry farmed and grown on the steep red hillside soils of Dry Creek Valley.

Yael has been involved with the Dry Creek Valley Association since 1980. She has always had a strong attachment to the Valley and has worked several terms to help with issues that confront it. Yael feels that the preservation of agriculture, the Valley’s history of shakers and movers that fought to get the gravel companies out of Dry Creek to keep the soils from going downstream, and the history of the Native Pomos should be kept as legacy for generations to come.