Published on March 26, 2026 | Updated March 27, 2026
We first sat down with Steve Paul at our office—husband, father of four, rancher at heart, and a man whose life has been shaped as much by people as by land.
Steve Paul
What was clear is the love Paul has for the people who supported him during his upbringing and a deeply devoted love for his family. Paul talked about his wife, Sara. About how “she means everything,” he says. How she comes from one of Wasco’s early farming families. How she was a standout athlete, a singer then and now, a Point Loma graduate who once had very different plans for her life.
“She never planned on moving back to Wasco,” he says, smiling. “And she never planned on marrying a farmer… She did both.”
Where you think you’re going and where you end up is a common thread that runs quietly through everything that follows.
Because the next morning, we met Paul where it all still plays out.
Pampa Peak, California
Out on the ranch, with cattle moving through the corral and the smoke of the branding iron in the background, Paul’s story shifted from something told to something lived.
It’s one thing to hear about legacy across a desk. It’s another to watch it unfold in real time.
Standing there in the dust and rhythm of it, watching his daughter beside him, you start to understand that Steve Paul isn’t the beginning of this story, or the end. He’s the link between them—and beside him, the next link is already forming.
If Taylor Sheridan knew anything about the Pauls and their pioneering legacy, we’re calling it now: Season 1 shoots in Kern County.
Steve Paul’s daughter, Julia assisting in cattle branding.
Long before there was a Bakersfield, before the valley was mapped and named, Paul’s great-great-grandfather, James C. Crocker, was here driving cattle across this land. Crocker is counted among the original 100 Pioneers of Kern County—one of the first to claim land and help shape the agricultural backbone of the region.
More than 150 years later, Paul is still here, carrying that legacy and passing it on. Still working cattle. Still moving across the same county his family once helped build.
Paul pieced it all together through old documents, archives, and stories passed down over generations—shared at kitchen tables and campfires.
“I’ve never had anybody interview me about my history,” he says. “And I have history here that goes way, way back.”
WASCO, A FARM, AND TWO BOYS WHO WANTED TO BUILD SOMETHING
Paul was born in Guam as his father Ken was stationed there with the Navy. But the family returned to California when he was under two years old. Paul, his identical twin brother, and their sister grew up on a farm about two miles from the City of Wasco.
“Best place to live was the farm. And I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Photo Credit: Esin Deniz
That upbringing shaped everything that followed. Tractors and irrigation lines and long days of physical work. A place where you learned by doing, where responsibility came early, where the land was something you understood in your hands, not just in your head.
And the brothers drove before they could properly reach the pedals.
“We used to have a 1964 flatbed Dodge and we had to clutch it—we used to grind those gears because we could barely reach the clutch. But we were on the farm, so we could just drive everywhere.”
After football at Bakersfield College and then two small schools in Kansas—McPherson and Bethany—Paul and his brother came home with one clear intention: they were going to farm.
“We came back and wanted to be farmers. Didn’t realize how tough it was.”
The first year in business together, they lost roughly $300,000. The cotton crop failed.
“I think it took us ten years to pay that off. Everybody looks back at those days and thinks farming was lucrative—but a lot of it was not the case.”
No safety net. No shortcuts. Both brothers went back for their degrees—his brother earned a master’s, Paul finished in business management—and they began studying where the industry was actually heading.
They got into farm management, working with investment-backed operations entering California agriculture. They started small, did quality work, and grew steadily.
“We just did a good job.”
JAMES CROCKER AND THE LAND BEFORE THE NAME
To understand Paul’s connection to Kern County, you have to go back, and when we say back, we mean all the way back, through the lens of his mother, Sharon, who is a Crocker.
James C. Crocker was born in Oneida County, New York, in January of 1830. He learned the butchering trade in Oswego County before the California Gold Rush pulled him west. He left New York by steamer in June 1850, came by way of Panama, and didn’t reach San Francisco until August—nine months after he started.
He tried his hand at mining in El Dorado County, recognized quickly that a butcher was more needed than another miner, and worked his trade for several years before moving south to San Joaquin County, where he married Mary Smith in 1862.
By 1868, Crocker was watching the Central Valley transform around him—farms pushing out across the west side, settlers to the east filing claims and fencing crops, cattle operations squeezed from every direction. He made one more move, this time to Kern County, arriving at a pivotal moment in the region’s history.
County records of the era mark 1868 as the year large capital began shaping Kern County’s destiny. Crocker was at the center of it.
He established his base at the Temblor Ranch, adjoining Buena Vista Slough, and began piecing together the land and cattle that would form the nucleus of one of the most significant agricultural holdings in California history.
The surrounding landscape was still largely swampland—tule-covered bog stretching between Tulare and Buena Vista Lakes—and the methods of claiming it were unlike anything that came after.
“He went around with a horse and wagon with a boat on it. As long as you had a boat, you could claim it—because it used to be a swamp,” Paul says.
The stroke of vision that defined his legacy was convincing cattle baron Henry Miller to look south. Miller and his partner Charles Lux had built the largest cattle operation in America—eventually owning or leasing more than 15 million acres across three states—but it was Crocker who persuaded them that this waterlogged valley floor could be drained and reclaimed into some of the richest farmland in the state.
The plan required engineering a 40-mile canal to carry Kern River runoff northward into Tulare Lake, skirting the marshland along the western foothills until the tule beds could be cleared and leveled into farmable ground.
It worked. By the early 1870s, Crocker was the chief agent for Miller and Lux in Kern County, and together the three men held a vast tract of land south of Tulare Lake. Their combined Kern County holdings would eventually surpass 120,000 acres.
County histories of the era describe Crocker as a man of indomitable persistence, with a clear head for business and a reputation for being true to his friends and just to all men.
By the time those accounts were written, he had 1,760 acres under fence—1,350 of them planted in alfalfa, some 1,250 head of cattle, 155 horses, 800 hogs, and 600 sheep. Kern County’s early chroniclers called him a model citizen. The land records agree.
Paul has gathered the documents, the old county books, the legal filings. He shares them with the care of someone who has spent years being the custodian of a history that some people in his own community don’t know exists.
“Most people don’t know that. You hear all the stories about Miller and Lux— but he’s [Crocker] the one who brought them here.”
Crocker worked what was known as the Temblor Ranch. He drove cattle through corridors that helped define the county’s geography. And along one of those routes—through Colonel Baker’s field, at the watering hole — history, almost casually, named a city.
“Colonel Baker had a field. There was a watering hole in Colonel Baker’s field. And so they used to drive their cattle through Baker’s field,” Paul says.
Paul shares this with the genuine pleasure of someone still amazed by it. His family was there before the name existed. They were part of why the name stuck.
WATER, BANDITS, AND A FAMILY AT THE CENTER OF IT ALL
The Crocker family’s place in Kern County history goes beyond land and cattle. It runs straight through the water wars that shaped California agriculture for the next century.
The drought of the late 1870s was devastating. Miller, Lux, and Crocker lost thousands of cattle when a competing water interest—the Kern River Land and Canal Company, controlled by James Haggin—diverted the flow away from Buena Vista Slough. The three men went to court.
The case, Miller, Lux, and Crocker v. Haggin, wound through the California Supreme Court and produced a landmark ruling in Western water law in 1886, one still referenced in legal scholarship today. James C. Crocker was a named plaintiff alongside Miller and Lux in one of California’s foundational legal battles.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in their favor on the question of riparian rights — but the practical outcome was murkier. The legal chaos the ruling created led to years of further conflict, finally resolved through a negotiated settlement in 1888.
“The family that won that case — their descendants still own a lot of those water rights today,” Paul says. “It all traces back to that.”
The case nonetheless reshaped how water rights would be contested across the American West for generations to come. (Internet Archive)
But the legal record is only part of the story. Mary Crocker, Paul’s great-great-grandmother, ran the household along routes traveled by some of the most notorious figures of the era.
Among the men who reportedly stopped at her door asking for a meal were Tiburcio Vásquez and his chief lieutenant Clodoveo Chávez—at that time the most wanted outlaws in California. Vásquez was a Californio bandido who robbed stagecoaches and raided towns across Central and Southern California throughout the 1860s and early 1870s, framing his crimes as resistance against the American displacement of native Californios.
Chávez was his constant companion on raids that swept through the same Kern County territory where the Crockers were building their ranching empire. The two men used a rocky outcropping near Inyokern—still known today as Robbers Roost—as a hideout, and they were known to seek shelter and meals at ranch houses along their routes.
That Mary Crocker’s home lay along those roads is entirely in keeping with the historical record. Joaquin Murrieta, the outlaw whose name had become legend across California, was also said to have stopped at her door more than once asking for a meal.
Mary Crocker’s response to whoever came to the door was consistent.
“She would make them leave their rough talk and their guns at the door—with the homemade soap and the tin wash basins—before she’d let them come in to eat.”
By 1887, the Crocker family had moved north to Big Pine, leaving behind two small graves in Kern County—children lost along the way, as so many families lost children in those years. There is still a cabin up in the mountains, built in 1908, with the family name carved into its wall. And there is still a spring in the hills that bears their name. Crocker Spring.
THE CATTLE, THE DOGS, AND THE LIFE HE’D CHOOSE EVERY TIME
For all the decades of business evolution—management companies, investment groups, real estate development across the Midwest—what lights Paul up is something simpler and older.
“I love cattle. I love horses. I love dogs. If I can ranch every day, I would. But that unfortunately didn’t pay the bills, so I just do it for a hobby.”
Watch Steve Paul’s border collies in action.
That passion was built through curiosity, proximity, and time spent learning from people who genuinely knew what they were doing. When Paul was in his early 20s, he spent stretches of time working cattle at local Wasco farmer and cattleman Sterling Grant’s ranch up in the hills.
“It was just something that was fun, enjoyable. He was cooking for us all the time. We’d go out and do the work and come back and he’d have all the meals prepared for us. It was kind of like the old days.”
They’d ride out on horseback at first light and stay for four or five days at a stretch—branding calves, shipping cattle. The kind of experience that doesn’t translate to a resume but fundamentally changes how you see the world.
The same philosophy carries into his work with border collies, which he trains with an instinct that looks, from the outside, like something he was born with.
“I went to different clinics and learned from different people and saw what they did. There’s certain cowboys that had dogs that were really good and you just pick their brain. Everybody’s a little different. I just kind of stole a little bit from everybody and what fit in my program.”
Now, watching him work dogs and cattle together, it looks seamless. It wasn’t. It was built. And it remains where he feels most like himself.
“If I could be up in the mountains every day with my dogs and gathering cattle—that would be a dream.”
His cattle summer above Glennville, near a peak locals call Fulton Peak, halfway between the valley floor and the old Sierra. He describes the terrain with the precision of someone who has read it for decades: golden eagles overhead, burrowing owls in the fields, coyotes and kit foxes and roadrunners moving through the brush.
“Riding along with the cattle, the dogs and everything else … you’re just in it.”
THE HARDEST WORD IN AGRICULTURE: CHANGE
Water allocations. Shifting regulations. The economics of competing with operations in South America and Mexico where costs are a fraction of what they are here. Around 1998, he and his brother made a decision.
“The biggest thing we had to do was change.”
His father had always believed the Central Valley’s farmers would be protected. That the political establishment would come through, because people need to eat.
“He said, ‘They will never not give us water because they know they need us. We will always get water.’ And then one year—zero allocation. And I said, Dad, I thought you said they always needed us. And then the next year they gave us zero again.”
The Paul brothers adapted their model, diversified into management and real estate, and kept going. He’s careful to acknowledge the complexity—he calls himself a conservationist, and he means it.
“I can understand part of it. Because I’m a conservationist—I don’t want to destroy everything. But we also have 40 million people that live in California that need to eat. And that’s part of the environmental problem. They don’t see that.”
The loss isn’t only financial. It’s communal, and it runs deep.
“You had a lot of little farmers and they invested in the community. Tractor salesmen, fuel sales, fertilizer salesmen—everybody that serviced farmers. As farmers were selling and couldn’t make it anymore, investment groups came in. What happens is all those farmers that used to buy from the tractor salesman — they’re gone. And then the biggest thing is you don’t have those people on your boards. Your school boards, your community boards. Who’s coaching Little League? Who’s coaching soccer?”
The concern isn’t anti-investment. Paul has worked with investment groups for years and understands their role. The concern is more fundamental: when a community loses the people who were rooted to its land, it loses something money alone can’t replace.
“The way I grew up no longer exists. My kids don’t get that. The way I was able to just go out there and play in the dirt…”
“THEY INVESTED IN ME”
There is one more thread to Steve Paul’s story, and it may be the most important one.
He coaches wrestling at Bakersfield Christian High School. He sits on the school board. He’s been involved in community organizations, scholarship funds, church work, and agricultural youth programs. The Paul brothers give back to FFA, to 4H, to Christian college scholarship programs in Kansas where they’ve built their real estate operations.
“All those people gave to me. They invested in me. Sterling Grant invested in me. Those people took the time. I learned sitting around the campfire, doing the work. They gave me things I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.”
Courtesy of Kathy Grant Wentz: Sterling Grant
He talks about Sterling Grant not just as a ranching mentor but as a man who fed him, trusted him with horses and cattle, and modeled a way of living on the land that Paul has spent his life honoring.
“There’s just a list of people that I’m not where I am today without. They helped and molded me and taught me things.”
Courtesy of Steve Paul: Left to Right Steve Richardson, Benny McLeod, Steve Paul, David Towse, Dan Garcia, Ryan Thompson
He talks about men who paid struggling kids a dollar per gopher tail just to give their families a little extra income. He talks about a man named Benny McLeod, whom Paul would call up and bring along to brandings and cattle work even when McLeod was in his late 80s and couldn’t drive anymore.
“I’d call him and say, ‘You want to go with me?’ And we’d go. He did it until he was 89 years old.”
McLeod worked until he was 89. He died at 90.
Courtesy of Steve Paul: Left to Right Steve Paul, Benny McLeod and Steve Richardson
Ask Paul about the wrestling kids at Bakersfield Christian and he talks about them the same way others once talked about him.
“I do that because it’s a ministry. I can get some of those kids into wrestling and I can minister to them. Because when I go up there and watch them—like all those people gave to me… they invested in me. And you want to give it back because you realize: my parents weren’t just farmers. They were people that helped people and really cared about them.”
Courtesy of Steve Paul: Benny McLeod with Paul’s son Brady
This is the part of Steve Paul’s story that ties everything together. The pioneer heritage. The farming roots. The decades of adaptation. The cattle and dogs and mountain work. The coaching and board service and the giving back. It is all, at its core, the same impulse: to honor the people and the land that shaped you, and to pass something real forward to the people coming after.
Steve Paul with his daughter Julia
Legacy, in Kern County, is a watering hole on a cattle route. It’s a name carved into a cabin wall. It’s a spring still bearing your family’s name 150 years after they first stopped there. It’s a city that owes its name, in part, to the men and cattle that once passed through a particular field on a particular piece of open ground.
It’s a family still writing that legacy—one daughter, one lesson at a time.
Steve Paul’s daughter, Julia
It’s a grandmother who made outlaws wash their hands before she fed them.
In Kern County, where history runs deep and the future still depends on people willing to work for it, that might matter more than anything.
Paul’s daughter, Julia, singing at Monache Meadows, California
Kern Magazine’s Signature Questions
Steve Paul in Wasco, California
What do you love about your community?
You know people. You’re not just a number. There’s connections. Like inside of Bakersfield, and when I grew up in Wasco, you know all the families, you know all the people. You can go to the store, go up to Luigi’s or Wool Growers or anywhere and you’re always running into people. It’s very well connected.
When you eat local, where do you go?
I love Luigi’s, I love Wool Growers Restaurant. I go to Benji’s. And then I live in Rosedale, so I go to Bootleggers a lot. But the old standbys are Luigi’s and Wool Growers.
When you want to get out of town, where do you go?
I like to go up to Glennville. It’s a small little community and I have a ranch up there. I’m probably going to be spending a lot more time there now that my kids are older—my last one’s a senior.
