Marin county stretches north from San Francisco, the poster child for urban sprawl as Sausalito, Corte Madera, and San Rafael ram into each other along Route 101.
Head west, however, and you can drive for miles through soft green hills and never see two houses at one time. West Marin, where the cows and sheep outnumber the people, forms a quiet buffer between the frantically reproductive eastern suburbs and the federally protected Pacific shoreline—nothing but farmland, some of the most beautiful anywhere.
That might not be true if Ellen Prins hadn’t married Bill Straus and moved to his California dairy ranch. When she arrived in 1950, Ellen was an unlikely political leader for the community of Swiss-Italians and Portuguese who had been farming there for a century. She was a college-educated city girl, a Dutch Jew who had fled the Nazis to settle in New York. She was also idealistic and persistent. The county that was to become her home was on the threshold of enormous growth. Marin had more than 150 dairy farmers when Ellen arrived, but they were failing fast.
“I thought we had a paradise here and I didn’t want to move,” says Ellen—now in her seventies—pouring water from a cow teakettle while serving lunch.
Along with Bill, who had emigrated from Germany by way of Palestine, Ellen devoted herself to improving their dairy ranch, raising four children, and being active in the community. She campaigned to have Point Reyes designated a national seashore, and she also fought for the passage of A-60 zoning, which meant that West Marin farms could only have one residence per 60 acres. She proved to fellow ranchers that there were common interests between conservationists and agriculturists.
Finally, in the late 1970s, Ellen discovered a tool to save the struggling farmers: agricultural land trusts. Thus was born the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT; see “How It Works,” opposite).
Land trusts were not a new idea, but previously they had only been used to protect parks and other public lands. Nobody had established a land trust exclusively for farms. It took years to gain the support—not to mention the state and private funds—MALT needed. The first easement wasn’t signed until 1983 (though 46 have followed since then, accounting for a total of 31,965 acres). MALT was a revolutionary idea, and it needed endorsement from the old-guard farmers who dominated the community. Luckily, Ellen had an ally among them—a young idealist named Ralph Grossi.
Grossi was just a year old when Ellen Straus arrived in Marin County, but his grandfather Domingo had emigrated 58 years earlier from the Italian-Swiss canton of Ticino and settled down to raise 11 children.
Today, the Grossi family numbers 200 and owns 15 farms in Marin and Sonoma counties. Still, by the time Grossi was in school, Marin County’s farms had become so vulnerable to development that he expected to have to farm elsewhere. But he returned from college to find that agricultural policies and attitudes about land use were changing. He settled into the family farm, began raising Holsteins, and joined the Farm Bureau to help solidify those changes. Grossi became the first chairman of the bureau’s new Land Use Committee, and by 1979 this young, educated activist, an innovative farmer and polished speaker, was named president of the bureau. When MALT was conceived, he was a natural to join Ellen Straus and other conservation-minded farmers as a founding director. “When farmers and environmentalists join together, they are a powerful force,” he reminisces.
In 1985, Grossi was invited to be president of the American Farmland Trust, established in 1980 to stop the loss of farmland and to promote environmentally sound farming through lobbying, education, technical assistance, and demonstration projects.
From those humble beginnings, the progress of farm preservation can be measured in dollars: The 1996 federal farm bill allocated a timid $35 million “starter kit” for farmland protection. The 2002 bill, passed in May, increased the kitty to nearly $600 million for the next six years, though proponents consider even this amount insufficient. And it comes with strings attached: The federal allocation requires matching grants, so local and state governments and nonprofits will be challenged to raise their part.
“If a farmer has a feeling of permanence, he’s willing to take some risks,” Ellen believes. As an example, she can point just down the road to her son’s farm, where a MALT easement financed its transformation into the first organic dairy west of the Mississippi. “He had to learn everything himself,” Ellen boasted. “Albert wrote the book on organic dairies.”
The driving force behind dairy farmers’ innovations in Marin County is their determination to get around the federal price-control system. Within it, few have been able to break even. But price controls don’t apply to organic and other value-added products. It took three years for Albert Straus to put together his organic dairy; the catalyst was the money that came from selling his farm’s development rights to MALT. “I thought, if we make a quality product and don’t put in additives and don’t overprocess it, customers will support it—and they did,” Albert explains. He sells his products to Chez Panisse, The French Laundry, and Greens in California, as well as to several East Coast markets. He produces a European-style high-fat butter, unhomogenized milk, and fruit yogurt drinks and chocolate milk he hopes to package for school vending machines.
“MALT helped us defer some of our debt and take some risks to go organic,” he says. “MALT helped us make the leap, and organics made us profitable.”
Seed money isn’t all that family farms need to survive, however. They need to learn how to sell their products in a changed world. That’s why Sue Conley was another vital catalyst in the revitalization of Marin’s dairy farms.
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