LEGEND. Icon. Renegade. Pioneer.
The sobriquets Willie Benedetti collected during his lifetime are as numerous as they are grand.
As the spark that ignited Willie Bird, the famous free-range turkey enterprise of more than 40 years, they were also deserved.
To his sons, Arthur and Arron, however, Willie was simply “Pops”—an affectionate nickname that perfectly fits the tight family ties that sustained them in a showdown with government regulators.
The legal battle outlived Willie, but thanks to his sons, it is settled—for now. Yet the Benedettis’ saga to defend the family’s land from bureaucratic control is a reminder that individual liberty requires eternal, relentless vigilance.
“Here comes the Willie Bird!”
THE BENEDETTI NAME became intertwined with poultry in 1902, when Willie’s grandparents emigrated from Switzerland to Petaluma, California, and started a chicken ranch.
The family lost the chicken ranch, along with everything else, in the stock market crash of 1929. The children, Alvin and Walter, revived the Sonoma County bird business after World War II, selling fertile turkey eggs to hatcheries around the country.
The pivot from eggs intended for breeding to turkeys meant for meals began in 1963 as a Future Farmers of America project of Walter’s son, Willie. The 14-year-old Sonoma Valley High School freshman hatched, raised, and processed close to 500 turkeys for sale as holiday dinners.
Thus, a legend also was hatched; its lore, well-documented. While small details may differ in each retelling, two elements of Willie Bird’s origins remain consistent and undisputed: Willie’s dad wasn’t enthusiastic about the project because of the extra work, so his mom, Aloha, helped their son buy the eggs and keep them hidden until they hatched; and, when Willie brought turkeys into John Kings Beauty Salon, the Petaluma beauty shop where his mom worked, the beauticians would sing in chorus, “Here comes the Willie Bird!” (Or “Willie Bird, spread the word!”—depending on the storyteller.)
The name stuck, and with help from his brother, Riley Benedetti, and their cousin, Rocky Koch, Willie began raising Willie Bird turkeys for holiday dinner tables across the nation.
Willie’s larger-than-life presence and likeability were natural fits for the budding poultry entrepreneur. So was loyalty. In 2009, Willie went on an Alaskan boat adventure with some longtime college friends, one of whom kept an online journal and wrote:
The guys met at Cal Poly and have kept in touch over the last 42 years. In college, we all wanted to be Willie’s roommates because his family had a turkey ranch and we knew we would eat well. And we did, especially if you liked Thanksgiving dinner every day! During Thanksgiving and Christmas, we all would travel to Petaluma, CA and help Willie butcher fresh turkeys which folks would drive miles to buy.
In its prime, Benedetti’s operation raised 85,000 turkeys a year and became famous as well for smoked products. Their huge barbecued turkey legs were legendary at street markets and county fairs.
Dubbed the “king of a turkey ranch-to-table empire,” long before the birth of the farm-to-table movement, Willie’s 1990s expansion into Williams Sonoma mail-order turkeys was considered cutting edge. From a 1997 Thanksgiving feature in the LA Times:
Indeed, Willie this year has produced the Tiffany of turkeys—the world’s first $100 hen. At least, that’s what a select cadre of Williams Sonoma catalog customers paid for the privilege of having one of these 16-pound to 18-pound gilded gobblers delivered to their doorstep Tuesday, in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. Mind you, this is just the freshly slaughtered beast for the feast—unadorned, uncooked and unaccompanied by trimmings.
The gourmet turkeys have been dished up near and far, from the popular Willie Bird’s Restaurant in Santa Rosa, California—a Guy Fieri favorite—to the nation’s upscale hotels and restaurants, as well as the White House. Even the Queen of England has dined on a Willie Benedetti smoked duck.
“He loved his business,” said his son, Arthur, who lives in Petaluma.
Willie also loved his family and he loved living in his log cabin on the beautiful Marin County ranch he bought in 1972. “God’s country,” he called it. The property’s 267 acres provided plenty of room to build another home for succeeding generations of Benedettis.
After all, thought Willie, he wasn’t going to farm forever. He looked forward to retiring one day, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. For Willie, there was no better place for that to happen than on his own land.
Marin County had other plans.
“What kind of law forces a man to keep farming?”
LOCATED WITHIN CALIFORNIA’S Coastal Zone, Marin County is among more than 90 local governments subject to California Coastal Act land use regulations and their enforcers, the California Coastal Commission (CCC).
Development throughout the Coastal Zone is governed by local governments, albeit under the heavy hand of the CCC. Cities and counties are required to come up with their own land use plans (LUPs), which become enforceable only after CCC certification.
The CCC certified Marin County’s first LUP in 1982. Nearly three decades later, the county decided it was time for a major overhaul.
That was 2008. In May of 2017, after years of negotiations with the CCC—and finally, the agency’s blessing—the county finalized a new LUP.
That same year, as the ink dried on the revamped plan, Willie Benedetti was approaching his 68th birthday with an eye toward retirement and a home for his son, Arthur.
Willie was already prepared for government red tape. Building a second home on one’s property in Marin County falls under CCC purview, which means landowners must meet conditions dictated by the county’s LUP. And for more than 35 years, the plan allowed one additional home per 60 acres of agriculturally zoned property—like Willie’s.
The only catch is the landowners must get a government permit, which Arthur admits is no easy task in California.
“You have to spend $60,000 and two years of your life just to get the permit,” he says.
The reward of having his family close vastly outweighed the cost, so Willie applied for a permit, only to learn it came with a far greater price tag: his rights.
The county’s new LUP included a “forced farming” mandate for building permits. That is, permit approval requires that current landowners—and all subsequent landowners—must remain “actively and directly engaged” in agriculture in perpetuity.
“I don’t see why the county thinks they can tell me I have to keep working just because I want to do something that farming families have done for as long as there has been farming: build a home for the next generation,” Willie said at the time.
Marin County reasoned that forcing farmers to farm forever would keep the scenic, rolling hills and fields from becoming a boutique getaway for the Hollywood crowd.
With his characteristic bluntness, Willie called it as he saw it.
“What kind of law forces a man to keep farming? There are understandable regulations and then there is BS,” he told a reporter.
He was absolutely correct. Willie’s property had been a family farming operation for 45 years prior, and existing zoning laws were more than adequate in preventing the very development feared by county bureaucrats—only a dozen houses were built in the area in the past 50 years, and Willie’s nearest neighbor was five miles away.
Instead, the regulation weaponizes building permits to force the landowners into one career from which they can never retire.
Arthur echoes his dad when he insists the forced farming mandate has nothing to do with the environment or farming, and everything to do with restricting liberty and property rights.
“All these government actors want is control,” he says. “They wanted to control everything that Pops did.”
Willie wasn’t about to let government control his right to choose when and how to work. And he had U.S. Supreme Court precedent on his side.
Pacific Legal Foundation’s 1987 Supreme Court victory in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission made it clear that government cannot use land development permits to coerce applicants into making large and unrelated property rights concessions without compensation.
In July 2017, and represented by PLF free of charge, Willie sued Marin County and the CCC in state court to invalidate the LUP forced farming provision as an unconstitutional condition on his right to use his property as he wishes.
Willie died the following year. His sons inherited the property, but both Benedettis are plumbers. While Arthur had been actively involved in the family’s companies, Arron had no desire to do the same. Either way, the sons faced the same forced farming mandate if they wanted to build homes.
For Arthur, taking up his dad’s fight wasn’t just principle. It was personal.
If not for the unconstitutional land use provision, he’d have been living right next to his dad when stomach cancer struck.
“I’d have been out on the ranch up until he died,” Arthur says. “I live in Petaluma. He lived 45 minutes to an hour away in Valley Ford. I’d have been there to care for him all the time.”
In February 2020, the county and CCC backed down from enforcing the rule—a legal victory with an asterisk. Marin County Superior Court finalized a stipulated dismissal in which the county agreed it will not apply the mandate to anyone unless further action on the plan takes place.
“It’s what we wanted and Pops would be happy to know that it’s finally over, but it would have been nicer if he was there to enjoy it with us,” says Arthur. “He’d have a big grin on his face, a stogie in his mouth, and a vodka and cranberry in his hand, and he’d have laid back and laughed and said, ‘Aha! I knew it would take a long time but we got ’em!’”
The Willie Bird legacy may now be in the rearview mirror, but as long as forced farming is a threat, Arthur and his brother stand ready for battle.
“Why buy a piece of property and own it if you can’t do anything with it or if you’re constantly being hounded on what you can and can’t do with it?” he asks.
It soon became time to move on. Arthur sold the family’s restaurant in 2019, and in 2020, he closed the Willie Bird processing plant and Benedetti Farms. He also sold the Willie Bird brand to the Diestel Family Ranch, another fourth-generation family farm and friends of the Benedettis who promise to keep Willie’s legacy alive.