It all started when Grandpa Sebastian Cipponeri hopped on a boat and left Sicily, looking for a better life in the United States.   He left his wife and children to look after his store and plot of land.  Eventually they were able to join him and they worked as a family unit as farm laborers for the Sciabica family and others.  Once they got on their feet they purchased property in Modesto, CA and planted fruit trees, nuts, watermelons and one giant fig tree. His son Pete learned the farming business and eventually married Beatrice.

Beatrice grew up in Modesto, CA on a fruit farm where her father had a dry yard. She and her siblings spent the hot summers picking, cutting and drying peaches, nectarines and apricots.

Pete and Bea married and soon after purchased their own 105 acre plot of land in the rich soil of Hughson, CA, a small farming community where it was normal to see tractors driving down the road.  At the time it was peach territory, even Del Monte was only a mile from the ranch.   There Pete and Bea farmed peaches and watermelons which they sold locally to the grocery stores and canneries.  In 1969 they established Cipponeri Family Farms and began to grow there business by driving their produce to the Alemany Farmers Market, the first farmers market in California, which the family still attends.

In 1983 tragedy struck and Pete was killed in an automobile accident.  Bea and the 4 kids along with help from the family continued to farm the land and take their produce to the farmers markets.  Sebastian, Josephine, Nick and Angelo learned at a young age how to drive the tractors through the fields, hauling out bins full of ripe peaches.  Their playground was the farmers market.  When they weren’t busy building forts out of empty boxes they helped their mom sell there produce.

Cipponeri Farms is now in its fourth generation of passionate and experienced farmers.  We believe that if we take care of our land, our land will take care of us.