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A New Way of Farming – Utilizing Symbiotic Relationships

Chris Kerston — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:37:51 -0700

For a while my wife and I were living on Table Mountain in Oroville. We were commuting to Chico State for school. After leaving my home base of Placer and Nevada County I was fascinated by Butte Counties “Big Agriculture.” It still had a small-town feel to it, as many of the large farms and ranches are still family operations but it was vastly different in comparison to the small 1-5 acre niche farms I was accustomed to in the foothills. I was looking for a place to work or volunteer that would expand my knowledge of community based food production. In my quest for sustainable agriculture I came across Chaffin Family Orchards. There is a little unassuming blue sign on hwy 70 at the base of Table Mountain as you are heading towards Quincy that caught my interest. I was intrigued by the ranch and I had seen their name and products around town but never really took the time to stop in.

I got to meet the owners of Chaffin Family Orchards at the opening of Chico State’s Organic Dairy. Kurt and Carol Albrecht had inherited the farm from Carol’s father. As I chatted with them I got a feeling that they were special, that they understand the soil, the land, the animals, and the plants, in almost a spiritual way. I came to find that these people understood symbiotic relationships in ways I couldn’t imagine. The farm/ranch is a couple of thousand acres. They raise olives for olive oil, stone fruits, citrus, grassfed beef, lamb, goat, chicken, and eggs. Everything for them is based on quality. They don’t use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. They hand pick the fruits for freshness. They slaughter animals once a year it at the peak of the feed season for each particular species. They don’t ever confine their livestock in small pens or feedlots, but rather let them go out and harvest the feed on their own.

This is all amazing but some of this thankfully is becoming a bit more common on farms around the country. The difference with Chaffin Family is the scale upon which they undertake these operations and their understanding of symbiosis on the farm. Waste is seen as a normal part of industrial agriculture. Not with the Albrechts. Rather every resource on the farm is viewed as an asset. They use the livestock to graze the orchards. In turn the livestock fertilize the orchards. The goats even help prune low or fallen branches. This eliminates their need rely on chemicals and minimizes their dependence on fossil fuels. When they do have to go in and prune mechanically, they take the waste branches and grind them up into a mulch applied right back to orchard floor, in contrast to conventional orchards who burn most of their prunings. On the parts of the ranch that aren’t suitable for farming they use their animals to forage in a constant rotational grazing system. Guard dogs are used to protect vulnerable livestock and no predators are ever killed. Once a group of livestock move out of an area the predators return to hunt their native prey. Each species of livestock prefers to consume different types of plants and in the same way each different class of livestock has different fertilizing properties in their manure. By utilizing all the species at different times they are able to maximize utilization of available feed while also maximizing available nutrients for the soil. After each piece of ground is grazed, sufficient biomass is left to provide habitat for native critters and to prevent erosion and other negative effects.

Managing this concert of movement to come to a beneficial outcome takes years of trial and error and someone with an innate understanding of nature’s cycles. The Albrecht’s have dedicated their lives to such an undertaking. They are committed to healthy local food that is both good for the people and good for the land. You can find Chaffin Family Orchards at various farmers markets around Butte County. They pride themselves on remaining affordable for families while still providing a quality product. They also believe in maintaining a feedback loop between the farmer and the consumer. I can’t say enough about Chaffin Family Orchards. It’s a really neat place and anyone who wants to visit is welcome to. Just go to the website and call them up for an appointment.

http://www.chaffinfamilyorchards.com/

Update on Williamson Act

Chris Kerston — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:41:52 -0700

I sent a letter to some friends at CCA and they sent me the letter that was drafted and sent to govenors office. Just look at the who's who of folks who signed it. Just from that alone you can see the change amidst the horizon in California. This is one of the first big issues that the Rangeland Resolution has decided to oppose in unison in this new era of collaboration between ranchers, environmentalists, and other various stakeholders.

Voices of Sustainable Farmers

Chris Kerston — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:12:50 -0700

I found this great link to a site showcasing farmers and ranchers around the country who are dedicated to sustainable ag. It remeinded me a lot of the storybooth project that I worked on with STS. Featured among the farmers is California's own organic guru Paul Muller from Full Belly Farms. His daughter goes to Chico State with me and they seem like a really neat family. http://www.fullbellyfarm.com/

Here is the link to the folks they interviewed from around the country:

http://www.sare.org/publications/naf2/voices.htm

My Life and Why I Farm

Chris Kerston — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:31:11 -0700

My Life and Why I FarmBy Chris Kerston
June 1, 2007

Agriculture is a trade that most modern folks have lost touch with. Big business and modern science have so drastically changed food production that someone born as few as 150 years ago would not recognize most of the items in our grocery stores, and they certainly would not recognize our intensive confined food production systems. It is my belief that many of society’s problems can be stemmed to a loss of connection with nature. Health, social, and environmental problems all have some connection with food, and how it’s produced. Humans are herd animals and from the dawn of time have relished in breaking bread as a community. When agriculture emerged, humans gathered to grow food as a community as well. Today it’s possible for a child to grow up without ever touching soil outside of maybe a municipal park or a sand box. That makes my heart break. In many ways I grew up that way, and it was not until I first met my wife and fell in love with her family’s ranch that my whole perspective changed. Getting back to nature, learning to live within the seasons, working my hands through the soil, sweating under a hot sun, shivering in a freezing rain, taking the time to enjoy a sunset, creeping up on a coyote and simply staring in awe at his cunning behavior, listening to the birds sing, and staring at a clear moonlit night sky are all activities that I attest to giving me my life. That might sound really foreign or even cheesy to some, but I have found that more physical work and less stress can be the answer to a whole world of happiness that would be completely unknown and missed by someone who resides outside of the realm of sustainable food production.

The life that my wife and I have chosen to live is not always an easy one. We have given up many creature comforts that so many folks would cringe at the thought of losing. I don’t miss those comfort items; it’s amazing how simple it is to forget how easy life can be. When I worry, I don’t worry about things like how can I get cable tv, high speed internet, garbage service, air conditioning, central heat, or a dishwasher. When I am in the mood to worry, I worry about if my animals are healthy, are they getting enough food, are they happy, is my life richer from the activities I am taking part in, are the things I am doing things my family can be proud of, and my ultimate fear would be to lose this lifestyle that I have chosen. If our society is going to save itself people need to become less material and follow their passions. I have more than an inkling that many folks would be passionate about raising their own food if they simply were exposed to it. My suggestion is, find a farmer/rancher who grows locally and start buying the bulk of your food from them. Educate yourself on how to grow food sustainably (there are many great books available on this). Then offer to volunteer with that rancher/farmer and start working with the soil, sweating under the sun, and soaking up life. Give it some time, go through a whole season. Learn about planting, growing and harvesting. You will be amazed at how much clearer and simpler life will seem. You might just realize how small humans are in this whole system, and realize that being small isn’t such a bad thing. The experience is nothing short of spiritual and it can fill holes in your life you didn’t even know you had. You just might reveal a whole new understanding and appreciation for life. Once you have grown your own food you can take pride in knowing that you are saving the planet and enhancing people’s lives one bite at a time.

The following is an article that was posted in the Feb/Mar issue of Mother Earth News. I have never read any other article that better summed up how I feel about growing animals for meat. It was like I was reading my own thoughts. This article has been surrounded by controversy among sustainable growers. Vegans and vegetarians came out of the wood work to point at that there are other options than killing animals. Read this article and share your thoughts.

Why I FarmFebruary/March 2007 Issue #220
By Bryan Welch

Twenty-five years ago I was an enthusiastic hiker and backpacker. A skier and a climber. I probably spent 45 days a year in the outdoors and slept outside five or six nights a year. I lived in a city, and I tried to get into the nearby mountains every chance I had, but it wasn’t much.

These days, I watch the sun come up several times a week. I know what’s blooming and which birds are coming through. I know how it feels to be outside on the worst night of the year watching coyotes try to open the door of the henhouse. Now that I am a farmer, I see much more of nature than I did when I was outdoors purely for recreation. For me, the difference between hiking and farming is the difference between listening to music and playing music. As a hiker, I enjoy the dramatic rhythms and splashy vistas of the mountains. As a farmer, I am part of the dense, varied, vigorous symphony of the prairie.

Raising our Own Meat
I write this during the most bittersweet of our seasons: late fall or early winter, depending on the day and the weather. It’s the time of year when we kill the animals — the cattle, sheep and goats — that we raise for meat for ourselves and our friends.

Just a few months ago they were the spirits of spring, filling the pastures with the joyful, bouncing exuberance of new life. In a few weeks their meat will be in my freezers, and my friends’, on our tables and in our bodies.

People often ask, “How can you eat your own animals?” Sometimes it’s a sincere question, meant to explore the emotions associated with raising your own meat. But often it’s more of an accusation, as in: “How can you be so callous?” So in response I might ask, “How can you be so cruel as to eat animals without knowing them? Without knowing how they lived? Without making sure they were treated kindly and with respect?”

My father, both my grandfathers and all my great-grandparents were grass farmers. It’s quite likely that every generation of my family since prehistoric times has followed a herd of grazing animals — either wild or domesticated — through its lifetime and down its nomadic path across the ages. We have always lived in direct contact and in a kind of kinship with the animals that provide our food. I believe it’s a “natural” relationship in the deepest and most profound sense of that word.

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should raise their own meat. But it’s perverse, isn’t it, that many people in our society seem to consider it more civilized to eat animals they don’t know? Meanwhile, industrial agriculture treats meat animals as nothing more than cogs in the machine, without regard for their happiness or basic well-being.

From the time I could walk, I was invited to help my relatives care for their livestock. I was about 10 when a neighbor hired me to milk his goats and feed his rabbits. I took to it. I enjoyed the animals and I enjoyed the people. I found that people who shared their lives with livestock were, on the whole, caring but not sentimental.

There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the lives of the animals, and that we should provide as much simple comfort and dignity to our fellow creatures as we can. After all, aren’t simple comfort and dignity among the most important things we wish for ourselves and our children?

So we’re careful, on our little farm, to let the animals live in ways that seem natural to them. None of our creatures lives alone. For any social animal, to be alone is the worst thing. All of them have access, every day of the year, to natural food and clean water. They reproduce just as they were created to reproduce. They live their lives on healthy, familiar pastures where they feel secure. When we handle them, we handle them as gently as possible. When we can’t be gentle, we try to be quick.

Even though I’m proud of the happy, healthy lives we give our animals, I feel a profound twinge of sadness as I watch them grazing in the colorful autumn grass. But it’s a feeling I want to embrace, rather than avoid. It’s the sadness associated with life’s astonishing richness and vitality. It’s the sadness associated with mortality. It’s the sadness we feel as we consider our own impermanence and the impermanence of everything on this planet, everything mortal we hold dear, the sadness that makes life poignant and sweet.

It’s sad when animals I know well and care for reach the end of their lives. But it would be far worse if I didn’t feel this profound connection, this profound gratitude, this profound mortality.

Life in the Pasture
A few years ago I was working on a fence far out in a new pasture, and I kept smelling food. I checked my pockets for old sandwich wrappers. I checked the toolbox for snacks. I smelled the cuffs of my work shirt. Then I realized I had been sitting in wild onions, the wild onions that stay green all the way through the Kansas winter. They smelled like hamburgers.

I’ve noticed lately how the sheep and goats sometimes dine on the green onion shoots. If I sit still, they’ll come over to visit, and I can smell onions on their breath. I like to watch goats eating the seed-heads off sunflowers, and I puzzle over the way sheep like to trim the grass down to a slick butch, like the manicured greens on a golf course.

At the end of a day of farm work I smell like the animals — I reek of them. I also never come in at the end of the day without a new story, some new bit of amusement provided by one of our animals, each of them whimsical, imaginative and utterly unique. I’m outside every night, checking on the livestock and closing the chicken house. I watch the night sky and see the ice crystals when they form a halo around the moon.

I get a lot of blood, dirt and manure on my hands and clothes these days. I get calluses and scars. I get a lot of laughs watching my animals figure out their lives and I get pretty sad when it’s time to kill them. I have a lot more death in my life than I did before. And, ironically, that’s part of the reason why I feel like I have a lot more life in my life. That’s why I farm.

— Bryan Welch is the publisher and editorial director of Mother Earth News. He and his wife, Carolyn, raise grass-fed cattle, sheep and goats on a small farm near Lawrence, Kan. For more stories about the farm, visitwww.MotherEarthNews.com/blogs/bwelch/.

Organic – Here To Stay A While

Chris Kerston — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:38:35 -0700

Chico State’s new dairy will open have its grand opening and dedication on Thursday April 26th, 2007. The breaking of the milk bottle will commence around 10:40 am but there will be presentations all morning, including a visit A.G. Kawamura California Dept. of Food and Ag Secretary of Agriculture. I have mentioned in a previous blog that I have met the Secretary, and I must say it’s an opportunity that should not be passed up. The program starts at 9:30 and will wrap up before noon. Tours of the dairy will be given as well as presentations from local organic dairy operators and a discussion with Jerry Brunetti an agri-dynamics dairy nutritionist. The full value of Chico State’s new enterprise has yet to be completely realized, but one thing is for sure, teaching students alternative agriculture methods and pointing them towards new opportunities will have lasting impacts on this state and should be supported.

Download a pdf flyer if you want to attend.

Come Home to Eat

Chris Kerston — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 13:16:26 -0700

I am very excited to be attending the second annual Come Home to Eat dinner tonight. Here is the pdf flyer put out by the Nevada County Land Trust for more information http://www.nevadacountylandtrust.org/pdfs/March%2031%20Come%20Home%20To%20Eat%20press%20release.pdf

I had some correspondence with the event coordinator Rita de Quercus and her responses got me really excited about this event. I asked her why this event was important and what message is it trying to send. Rita responded “issues and concerns of local agriculture are not just for farmers and ranchers to deal with--they are community concerns. Food is one of the 3-4 basic survival needs. Humans have been feeding themselves locally and seasonally for thousands of years. Relying on a profit-driven global system to feed us is.....well, crazy.” She states that this event is “the community coming together to recognize and honor the contributions of those who work and preserve the land that feeds us. It's also an opportunity for this community to ‘see’ itself, celebrate itself, have fun together (essential glue).”

Last year was the first annual Come Home to Eat and it started out as a group of concerned consumers who wanted to know more about how their food was made, they wanted to meet the ranchers and farmers growing it, and they wanted to better understand the obstacles that growers face. Out of that first meeting came the Local Food Coalition which Rita states “is not an organization per se--it is a network, and it is still building. At this point this network includes folks involved in nearly all the county ag organizations and functions, many non-profits that have missions that overlap with local food concerns, and many individual farms and farmers.” As for the future of the LFC and the Come Home to Eat event she says “We are in an organic evolving process, just taking it one step at a time, figuring it out as we go. What we are offering to the larger community is the opportunity to become engaged in a real way in the real aspects of their lives.”

Check out the Local Food Coalition website for more information

www.localfoodcoalition.org

Saving the land---With Cows???

Chris Kerston — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:17:56 -0700

Dan Dagget recently visited Grass Valley and Chico. I went to both events and had a phenomenal time! Dan is a great guy to get to know, and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations on his recent trip. Dan's most recent book Gardeners of Eden Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature, challenges the common leave-it-alone philosophy of land preserves. He argues that humans play a healthy role in many eco-systems and our management practices and connection to the land is vital to keeping lands healthy. Dan talks about groups that have been involved with creating nature since the dawn of time, including Native Americans as well as the tribal groups who created the Amazon.

Dan draws a connection between the ancient cultures and the modern groups of folks who have a similar connection to the land to be ranchers. Dan started out as an Earth Firster as well as active recruiter for the Sierra Club. In his many journeys he began to find that many ranchers had much healthier lands than neighboring preserves, and he wondered why. He began to study the use of grazing as a management tool and the relationship that most ranchers have with the land. He cites cases of overgrazing, but shows that most ranches that used to fall into those categories of management style are changing. Dagget also speaks of the Tipton family in Nevada who ride a around in a bus called the Pink Panther, which a picture of the cartoon character mooning any unsuspecting passengers behind it. The Tiptons have dedicated themselves to land restoration through grazing. They have restored many lands thought to be irreversible waste lands. Many of their projects have included mine tailings in which they use the cows to build up a layer of top-soil. The successes have been absolutely amazing!

Dan Dagget states that one way to protect nature is to appropriately use it. Grassland no matter how it is use it always healthier and better for the environment than pavement. Ranchers and environmentalists have a common enemy…encroachment and urban sprawl. Dan also points out that an acre of grassland utilized more carbon dioxide than an acre or rainforest, which makes grasslands irreplaceable in the face of global warming.

When I asked Dan what a small rancher could do to get involved he told me to invite an enviro as he calls them, or environmental group to my property. It could be perceived as a huge risk to ranchers to have such an open door policy with their perceived adversaries, however taking such risks is the key to trust and open communication. The reality seems to be that regardless of differences, ranchers and environmentalists are going to have to band together if they want to see healthy open spaces remain.

If you want more information I highly recommend both of Dan’s books

www.ecoresults.org

This is the article that appeared in the March 22, 2007 issue of Chico News and Review

http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Content?oid=300689

Saving the land --with cows?

By Robert Speer
roberts@newsreview.com
more stories by this author

www.ecoresults.org
The title of Dan Dagget's latest book is Gardeners of Eden, but the subtitle does a better job of saying what it's about: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature.
Our importance to nature? Isn't the best thing we can do for nature to leave it alone?

Well, no, Dagget argues, and he's got the environmental creds to make the case: For years he was a leader in Earth First!--that monkey-wrenching gang of eco-radicals that was the bane of loggers and developers in the West--and later he worked for the Sierra Club.

At one point Dagget found himself working on environmental projects with Arizona cattle ranchers, and he learned that some were such excellent stewards that they actually improved their land over time. From that experience and others, he came to believe that environmental groups of the "leave-it-alone" school had it all wrong.

Human beings belong in nature and are a part of it, he realized, and until recently have always had a positive impact on the natural environment. It's wrong to think that early tribal peoples didn't manipulate the land. In California, for example, the native Indians regularly used fire as a way to clear out underbrush and create more grassland for deer and antelope.

It's only lately, actually, that we have become "aliens," as he puts it, whose idea of authentic nature is of big parks--called wilderness areas--with no people in them other than our fellow urbanized aliens who've come to visit.

Dan Dagget

Last Thursday (March 15) Dagget, a stocky man with gray hair and goatee who lives in Santa Barbara, was at Chico State University spreading the word. His talk in Holt Hall was the final presentation in Chico Performances' delightfully provocative On the Creek lecture series on sustainability and ecology.

Using a series of the excellent photos (by Tom Bean) from his book, he presented examples of ranchers and others who have had far more success at restoring abused land than could be obtained by leaving it alone. At the U Bar Ranch, in New Mexico, the ranch manager created an environment in which the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher thrived, while on a nearby preserve they numbered zero. The birds and the cows, it turned out, had a mutual relationship that worked for both.

He mentioned a couple, Tony and Jerrie Tipton, who live in a purple bus in central Nevada. Working with little support and less money, they have developed a revolutionary way of restoring blasted land. In one case, done as a trial, they tackled a former heap leach pad, the relic of a gold-mining operation, a 300-foot-high pile of crushed rock leached with cyanide and encrusted with salt.

Their method? They put down a layer of straw and native plant seeds, covered it with hay and straw, and set loose a herd of cows on the site for several days. As Dagget describes it in his book, "The cows ate most of the hay and a little of the straw, and what they didn't eat they trampled into the rocks along with the seeds and the microbe-rich organic fertilizer they provided from their guts."

Six months later, a community of native plants had grown there. Three years later, it had become home to a diverse community of wildlife, and birds' nests, rodent burrows and lizards, along with coyote and deer scat, were present.

Should anyone doubt the importance of having healthy rangeland, Dagget pointed out that an acre of good grassland eats up more carbon dioxide than an acre of rainforest.

It's OK to use the land, he said in Holt Hall: "Nature can be protected by using it." Besides, he added, "the use relationship is at the heart of nature"--in the food chain, in the process of decay, everywhere one looks, in fact. Human beings are part of that process and always have been.

He's talking of course about positive engagement with nature. Most of our use of nature these days is exploitive and done by big corporations with negative consequences, he said. That must change. The more we engage positively with nature, understanding that the relationship must be mutually beneficial, Dagget said, the more we will understand our importance to nature.

"We've got to face it, guys," he told the Holt audience. "We're natives. We've got to start acting that way."

Support Nevada County Free Range Beef!!!

Chris Kerston — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:04:51 -0700

The Beef is Here

written by Anna Reynolds
reprinted by permission from BriarPatch Co-op News & Review, October/November 2006 issue

Local rancher Jim Gates is preparing to provide the new BriarPatch store with fresh cuts of his free-range beef. Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it? But you wouldn't believe the amount of effort and tenacity required just to get this far. To provide beef at a resale outlet, two crucial and difficult tasks must be accomplished: raising a quality product, and getting USDA certification to be allowed to sell that product. Jim Gates, owner of Nevada County Free Range Beef, has been slogging at both tasks for years while holding a second full-time, off-ranch job. He's had a lot of help, but it's been tough.

First, the beef. Calling upon a lifetime of ranching experience and generations of his relatives before him, Jim has developed a herd of 125 mother cows. A cow raises one calf yearly. Ideally it will be born small for ease of calving, grow fast on mother's milk and later free-range forage, and reach an appropriate slaughter weight and condition in ten to twelve months. Other than vaccines required for protection against endemic diseases, animals receive no injections. If one gets sick and needs antibiotics for recovery, it's out of the program. Because the herd roams over more than 1,000 acres, crowding and the associated disease and need for antibiotics do not exist. No hormones are given, ever. There's no need for such stuff when animals are allowed to grow on their natural food, grass.

This all seems pretty simple, but it requires profound knowledge of genetics, obstetrics, native forage management, coping with annual weather and feed conditions, and gentle animal-handling techniques. it also requires large amounts of land, water, fencing, insurance, safe transport ... and patience.

This last quality has been much called upon as Jim struggled through seemingly interminable amounts of regulation, paperwork, and waiting - two and a half years! - to get a USDA label. There are still obstacles to surmount, such as the only certified slaughter facility being 120 miles away, but Jim's objective is to be able to offer the full range of beef cuts at the new store. Imagine being able to purchase succulent steaks, robust roasts, ribs, and stewmeat in addition to the scrumptious hamburger you already love. And all this righteous red meat comes to you from a local rancher supported by local landowners working very hard to keep our precious rural land functioning to feed local folks like you. Salute!

Anna Reynolds and Bill Trabucco lease range land off Bitney Springs Road to Nevada County Free Range Beef. They are active with the Nevada County Land Trust and Nevada County Local Food Coalition.

This article was copied from http://www.localfoodcoalition.org/biographies.htm on March 14, 2007

Stackable Enterprises and Deep Animal Husbandry

Chris Kerston — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:52:36 -0700

Allen Edwards is not your typical economist. He has substantial training in forestry and he also operates a 520 acre ranch in Colfax where he is better utilizing his land by utilizing natural cycles and exploring symbiotic relationships. Allen worries about the viability of a rurual land based economy losing all its ground to real estate development. If you ever get the opportunity to meet or visit Allen's place I highly recommend it. He is really making a difference in the way foothill lifestyle will be viewed for generations to come.http://www.uli.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=73399&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm
'Ranchette' Buyers Take a Slice of Rural West; 'Very Low Density' Housing is Gaining Ground, and Grief

USA Today
October 6, 2006
John Ritter

COLFAX, Calif. -- Allen Edwards grows trees and salad greens and raises sheep and goats on 520 acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of greater Sacramento's relentless sprawl. The land has been in his family 60 years, but never under pressure like it is today.

Edwards says residential developments, including upscale trophy homes known as "ranchettes" -- rural dwellings on several acres -- are making it harder for farmers like him to operate.

Ranchette neighbors tried to block renewal of his permit to harvest timber over worries that logging trucks would obstruct their access road. When he cuts trees, they complain that it degrades their views. All around him, developers have pushed land prices beyond what farmers and ranchers can afford.

Edwards and his wife, Nancy, are becoming an anachronism in the foothills: farmers who still make a living off their land.

"Even among our friends the norm is you're always looking for some way to divide your land and sell it off," says Edwards, 59. "It's probably the biggest business in this area."

And not just here. In California's Central Valley, the nation's most productive farm region, on the slopes of the Colorado Rockies, in western Montana's big-sky country and in other popular Western locales, ranchettes are fragmenting the countryside at an alarming rate, environmentalists and land-use experts say.

"Ranchettes are a way to eat up the landscape very fast," says Ed McMahon, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C. "Essentially it's the suburbanization of the American West."

The boom is hard to gauge. A few studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that it's spreading unchecked, McMahon says. Few local governments muster political will to keep ranchettes off farmland and forests. Zoning usually permits landowners to easily subdivide property.

Some counties try to curb rural housing by requiring large lots, figuring fewer people will pay for acreage they don't need for a home. "But that just accelerates the process," McMahon says, because people today are willing to pay a premium to live next to "green space."

Counties, state forestry agencies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have data on development outside urban areas. But that information is broad and relies on zoning and land-use plans, not what's actually built.

"No agency keeps a close track of ranchette expansion," says Matt Samelson, a consultant for the Sierra Business Council in Placer County, which includes Colfax. "There's no ability to track it well." Business leaders in the Sierra worry that the forests and open space that drew people in the first place are being carved up.

"Maintaining working landscapes and the natural environment is good for business, good for tourism," Samelson says.

Speckling the map

Last year, California's Conservation Department mapped five counties from aerial photography, color-coded the maps -- red for ranchettes, green for farmland, tan for rangeland -- and posted them on a website. It's a stark picture: Red ranchette plots, for example, make Fresno County look like it has a bad case of measles.

The mapping was a $105,000 trial program that ended when funding ran out, well short of statewide coverage -- or the quiet woods Ginger and Rex Johnson call home.

The couple fled Southern California traffic and eventually built a 4,200-square-foot house on 3acres in Eden Valley View Estates, 21 lots a few miles from Allen Edwards' farm. With stunning sunset views of coastal mountains and lots of wildlife, the property is worth about $1 million today, Ginger Johnson estimates.

"I don't care what people say about how much land we have, we don't have the rat race here," she says. "We're just 3acres out in the middle of a forest. We didn't take a place that had artifacts or anything like that."

Up Placer Hills Road are Bill Briasco, his wife, five teenage children and their 4,000-square-foot house on 5 acres. Briasco, a plumbing contractor who grew up in Los Angeles, says suburban developers chewing up farmland in the fertile Sacramento Valley is a bigger problem than housing in the foothills.

"Leave the flatland alone -- that's where all the harvesting is - - and build up here," Briasco, 52, says.

A March report by Environment Colorado, a non-profit advocacy group, found that ranchettes are the leading cause of farmland loss. The report relied on 2000 Census data and "bits and pieces of studies," says author Pam Kiely. It estimated that large-lot rural development had consumed more than 2million acres statewide.

'Gentleman's ranch'

California appraisers say 20 acres has become a new standard lot size in the countryside. Migrants from pricey real-estate markets in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas -- retirees, second- home builders, even commuters -- can buy 5 acres, build a house, maybe keep a horse or two, for less than a tract house back home.

"Realtors are pushing these rural home sites," says Allan Barros, a rural appraiser who works in six Central Valley counties. "This is your ranchette, your gentleman's ranch out in the country."

After the 2000 Census, Mike McCoy, a University of California, Davis researcher, noticed population spikes on land that historically had been zoned for agriculture. "We thought it odd. We knew farmers weren't having bigger families," McCoy says.

He started driving rural roads. "Sure enough, here were these beautiful white fences out front with arched entries and palm trees," he says. "And a quarter-mile up the property was a grand home, and a half-mile down the road was another one."

At the current rate, two-thirds of land developed by 2050 in the Central Valley's eight top farm counties will be ranchettes or other "very low density" housing, McCoy estimates. The loss of farmland and related business would cost Fresno, the nation's top agriculture county, $345 million a year, he says.

The valley is vast and even if acreage lost to housing more than doubles by 2050, urban uses would consume just 5% of the total area. Where does it stop? The state estimates California's population of 35 million will grow by 20 million by 2050. Preservation advocates see a tipping point somewhere.

"It's like the bow wave of a ship," says Ed Thompson, American Farmland Trust's California director. "Long before the ship hits, long before ranchettes have a physical impact on agriculture, the bow wave is causing enormous disturbance in the market."

Educational Opportunity

Chris Kerston — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:08:13 -0800

Talk about free and convient education; the following link has all sorts of learning modules available to anyone who registers with the site. The modules are designed to teach anyone interested how to be proficient at a particular task by teaching them online at the users own learning rate. I found this tonight and just thought it was such a cool tool!

http://www.forestandrange.org/default.aspx