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.
Conley had started out in Washington, D.C., slinging burgers, and found her way to Berkeley, California—first to the kitchen of Fourth Street Grill, then to Bette’s Ocean View Diner. In 1989, she moved to Point Reyes, bringing with her an impressive amount of experience in restaurant operation and marketing.
Her life began to change when she read John Hart’s Farming on the Edge, which told the story of MALT. Like Ellen Straus, Conley is a natural activist, and she itched to join the movement. The goal was for farmers to become financially viable by adding value to their products: Instead of selling milk for 11cents a pound, they could make cheese and sell it for $20 a pound. She would not only encourage the farmers to make the new product, she would help them sell it. This was the inspiration behind her Cowgirl Creamery and Tomales Bay Foods.
Conley began to show farmers how to market their milk to restaurants and fancy foods stores. (Albert Straus was one of her first clients; Ellen Straus became a friend and a marketing tool.) And Cowgirl Creamery began to make cheese: crème fraîche, cottage cheese, and eventually aged cheeses, using milk from local farmers. But there were other local products worth showcasing—organic vegetables, olive oils, oysters, meats—which she did via Tomales Bay Foods, a fancy foods store and carryout. “All of these businesses are very small, so it is very important to work together,” she says. Along the way, Conley was named to the MALT board. As Ellen tells it, “Sue has taught everybody around here how to market their products. She made them profitable.”
While marin farms date back only to the 1850s, New York’s Hudson Valley is a living textbook of the nation’s early years: farm after farm is as old as the Constitution. But the sweep of the river, the majestic mountain ranges, and the breathtaking views—overlooked by some of the nation’s grandest estates—make this region very attractive as a second home for city dwellers and as fertile ground for developers.
The motivation to develop is intense, and the results are sadly visible. In Marin, farmland preservation took hold before developers could start carving chunks out of the scenery. New York completed its first agricultural trust purchase in 1977, but another 20 years slipped by before the state followed through with tax credits and grants to support more purchases. For some farmers, help arrived too late.
Adding insult to injury are the region’s unique agricultural issues: In Marin County, the dairy farmers struggle to find profitable markets; in the Hudson Valley, it is the apple growers who find themselves in desperate straits. Not only is New York’s growing season a mere 145 days—about 75 short of Marin County’s—but apples from China are flooding the market at prices New York farmers can’t match.
Rose Hill Farm, in Red Hook, had been in Dave Fraleigh’s family for 200 years when, in 1998, he was offered the adjoining farm and a purchase of development rights to make it affordable. The acquisition enabled him to expand his wholesale apple business and pay off most of his debt. But the next few years brought disastrous weather, increasing competition from Chinese growers, and chain markets too big to buy from family farms. Fraleigh adapted: He cut labor costs and trimmed production from 90 acres to 10. He added berries and soft fruits in order to lengthen his retail season. He commissioned neighbors to make jams and pies to draw customers to his farm stand. Farmers around here call such adaptations “entertainment farming.” As Fraleigh puts it, “Nobody comes all the way from New York City just to buy apples. They’re buying entertainment, and the twenty dollars’ worth of apples is the entrance fee for a pretty and quiet place.”
Despite financial struggles, Fraleigh is grateful: “With the pressure for housing developments, I’m glad there’s twelve hundred acres in Red Hook that aren’t going to be built on.” Land trusts, he says, “are not a panacea, they’re part of the puzzle in promoting farms and keeping them where they are.”
John Hardeman also grew up in Red Hook, on a farm his father managed. He took it over for a decade and then bought his own place in Columbia County. Eleven years later, in 1997, his childhood farm came on the market, but the price was too high. A local land trust agency, Scenic Hudson, came to Hardeman’s rescue with the money to purchase his development rights. Like Fraleigh, though, Hardeman found that the farming economy was changing for the worse. And, like the other farmers, he complains that “entertainment farming” takes time away from what farmers do best. He wonders whether he should be selling at a Greenmarket in the city rather than placing all his bets on a farm stand.
Ken Migliorelli, a vegetable farmer in Tivoli, has made the opposite choice. He loads his truck at 3 a.m. and sells his 40 types of vegetables, mostly cooking and salad greens, directly to consumers at New York City’s Greenmarkets. “When you put in a crop,” he says, “you’ve got to make sure you can market it.”
Even with successful direct marketing of his produce, Migliorelli found that encroaching development was creating economic pressures. He, too, was saved by Scenic Hudson, which paid him for his development rights. He also realized that “what really saves our farms is that more people want local food.” He plans to respond to that demand by growing fruit as well, and by opening a roadside stand. But the Greenmarkets are his mainstay. “If it weren’t for those farm markets in the city, I wouldn’t be farming right now.”
Hudson valley farmers are getting used to their new neighbors, the city folk whose numbers have been increasing since 9/11. “I’m surrounded by forty-seven landowners,” says Isabel Prescott, a community activist who runs Riverview Orchards, in Clifton Park. Few of her neighbors are farmers.
In her rustic country store festooned with American flags, Prescott sells homemade strudels, cider donuts, cookies, and pies that are worth a trip from Manhattan. In the fall, she gives tours to 6,000 schoolchildren, teaching them how fruits and vegetables are grown. She has, in fact, become a master of entertainment farming. She organizes two dozen kinds of parties, including a Victorian birthday where little girls bring their dolls and learn how to make apple pies. In December, she runs a holiday boutique with the Junior League of Schenectady. Riverview Orchards even has a Web site.
“We were forced to change, and change is good for us,” she says. But as Prescott gets more and more creative with her farm-sustaining tactics, she can’t help but give an embarrassed shrug and wonder, “What would my father think?” Hopefully, the previous generations would be proud their children are doing everything in their power to protect a fragile family heirloom.
HOW IT WORKS
Malt is a private nonprofit organization designed to counteract the economic pressures that tempt Marin County farmers to sell to developers. Created in 1980, MALT addresses the problem of farmers being land-rich but cash-poor by giving them a one-time payment to compensate for the difference between what their land is worth as a farm and what it would be worth on the open market to developers. The transaction is called a purchase of development rights (PDR) or a purchase of agricultural conservation easement (PACE) because it places a permanent limitation on the property, meaning that the land can neither be divided nor be used for any purpose other than farming. MALT doesn’t buy the land; it merely holds the easement and oversees it. Owners both present and future are limited in the number of houses that can be built on the property, and their right to subdivide or develop it is wiped out forever.
In return for giving up development rights, the farmer gets cash—from 40 to 50 percent of the appraised open-market value of the land—which is typically used for reducing debt, modernizing and marketing, expanding the farm, or providing a retirement nest egg.
Land trusts are a simple idea but a complicated process. They require cooperation between farmers and planners, private enterprise and government, and a citizenry that values open space and local food production enough to allocate funds for their protection.
Every state but Michigan has instituted differential assessments so that farms are taxed at a lower rate than developed land. Twenty-one states have enacted PACE or PDR programs, which are funded by everything from lottery proceeds to cellphone taxes. More than 1,200 private land trusts have been established around the country, and six million acres are currently under easement nationwide. Last year, though, applications for another $200 million worth of agricultural easements went unfunded. According to Ralph Grossi, president of the American Farmland Trust, in Washington, D.C., America still loses more than a million acres of farm and ranch land to development each year. —P.R.