If you want to make Jarrid Bordessa unhappy, put him behind a desk. That’s where Jarrid found himself one day during college. He had landed a summer internship and it was going well, but for whatever reason, Jarrid couldn’t stand the work. “The weather was beautiful, and I was sitting in an office staring at a computer screen,” he recalls. “I felt like I was trapped in a prison cell.”

The Bordessa family has farmed the hills of California’s Sonoma County for generations, and Jarrid realized that office work wasn’t in his genes. His family’s legacy lay in these fields, and so did his own mental well-being: “Sitting in that office, I knew I needed the farm for me, too—for my sanity.”

When Jarrid finished earning his degree, opportunity knocked. Just a mile down the road from his father’s farm, the neighbors were selling land they had owned for more than 100 years. “It’s not like land comes up for sale every couple of years here, and that you’re in a position to buy it,” Jarrid recalls. With the support of his father, his brother, and his wife, Jarrid took a leap and started his own organic dairy farm.