KEEPING OPEN SPACE

PROBLEMS OF SUSTAINABLE RANCHING

Most people take for granted that there will be sheep or cows on these hills. Economics suggest otherwise. Ranchers Donna Furlong and Joe Pozzi think the agricultural future is "scary."
Joe's family has farmed around here for over a century; he is a fourth generation rancher. He runs 600 sheep and 100 cows spread over several ranches. Donna, who grew up in Santa Rosa, married into a farming family. She runs about 200 sheep and 30 cows on her Freestone ranch and more elsewhere. Both families used to run dairy cows as well as sheep; when they gave up dairying they took on beef cattle. Donna's husband Tom used to work at the Creamery in Bodega making butter, then worked as foreman there until the Creamery closed in the 1950s.
These long histories seem typical. There are few newcomers in ranching around here; I have been working with the Bodega Pastures flock for seventeen years and I often feel like a beginner. It is hard to start up in ranching now when land is so expensive and profits so low.
The family ranchers love their calling. "It's a good life. Out in the hills. You're your own boss; you make your own decisions," said Joe. Donna feels that most people in agriculture love the land and the livestock. Then there is the family aspect: she mentioned how her kids liked to help on the ranch as children and still do, and Joe remembers how as kids, he and his brothers and sisters were all involved in the work of the ranch. "Can't teach it. You learn it hands on," he says.
For myself I like the way that raising sheep ties us closely to nature. The annual cycle of the sheep is based on the cycle of the plants which is based on the weather. With the autumn rains the grass starts to grow. Lambs are timed to be born at the turning of the year - new life at the dark of the year - so that they are old enough to graze when the grass becomes less watery and thus more nutritious. Lambs grow well throughout the spring when the grass is good, and are usually sold in June, once the rains have stopped, the grass is drying out and its protein level is falling. The ewes are bred again in July or August and can get by, through most of pregnancy, on the less nutritious feed. As lambing approaches and through lambing and early nursing, they are given extra feed; on some ranches this includes the hay which is harvested from their own fields in May, when plant growth is outstripping grazing. This surplus feed sits in the barn until it is most needed.
What I am describing, so familiar and obvious to ranchers, is in fact an example of sustainable agriculture. It is a system that uses few outside resources and could go on and on - if we take care to prevent soil erosion.
The pasture around Bodega is good: cool weather and fog give a longer green grass season than inland. And pasture is a good land use for these hills. With heavy winter rainfall (Joe measured 81 inches in 1994 - '95 and 74 inches in 1995 - '96), soil erosion is a big problem if you plow. Sheep are easier than cows on the steepest land with regards to erosion. Grazing animals turn plants that we cannot eat, mostly grasses, into food that we can eat and fiber that we can use. They also help maintain the health of the grasslands which evolved along with grazing animals, (but that is another article).
Ranchers have good reason to look after their land: they depend on it for their living. Joe and Donna both said that ranchers know and understand their land better than anyone else and generally do a good job looking after it. On the other hand the market does not reward sustainable practices; when ranchers are paid by the pound (of lamb and of wool) there is an incentive to raise more animals on the same amount of land, increasing the risk of overgrazing and ultimately soil erosion. Overgrazing is not simply a matter of number of animals per acre -- management has a lot to do with it -- but there is more risk of overgrazing with more animals, especially if they are not moved frequently from pasture to pasture. Separate pastures mean fence, and fence is expensive.
Since ranchers like to ranch and sheep ranching is a good use of the land around here, what is the problem? Sheep ranching is no longer economically viable - that is the problem. Sheep numbers in Sonoma County have declined in thirty years from 130,000 to 16,000. Even locally, where it is too foggy for grapes to oust sheep from the land, as they have elsewhere, numbers have fallen.
Joe attributes the demise of the sheep industry to three factors: predators, poor markets and development. He considers predators the most serious. "Coyotes have put so many people out of business." Donna found she had only a 20% lamb crop on one of her ranches, that is, from 100 ewes only 20 lambs survived till summer, though over 100 were born. "You have to face facts," Donna said, and regretfully replaced the sheep with cattle.
The second factor is markets. When it comes to selling the lambs that survive, large numbers of growers face only two buyers (in California often only one). Two buyers process 90% of the lambs in the country and of course dictate prices. This year prices were good, probably because lambs are getting scarcer, but were still only 90 - 95 cents per lb. In most recent years prices have been at 1970's levels, while all the things a rancher needs to buy (fencing, medical supplies, etc.) have gotten more expensive.
Wool prices are largely determined by the world market: when China cancelled a wool deal with Australia last year, wool prices in California plummeted. This year a fleece sold to California Wool Marketing Association would fetch around $2, which is less than the cost of shearing it off the sheep. At the same time the U.S. Department of Agriculture has ended its wool incentive payments to growers - another blow to sheep ranching. Financed from import duties on foreign wool (from countries whose governments subsidize sheep farming) these payments boosted US ranchers' wool income - often to the point where the value of the wool exceeded the cost of shearing it!
With these poor prices, ranching is, as Joe puts it, "financially frustrating". Most ranchers have second jobs to keep them going and much of the animal work is done in the evenings and on weekends (with relatives coming over to help on the 'big days').
Donna points out that agriculture is one industry where producers have no control over prices and prices have no connection with costs. She instanced this year's beef prices which scarcely cover the cost of transporting the animals to market, let alone the cost of maintaining a herd and raising young animals. In reply to my question, "How can ranchers survive in these market conditions?" she said, "Many of them won't survive, if prices don't improve. They may get through one year perhaps, but not more."
She sees the rancher subsidizing the consumer through cheap food. Food in the U.S. is unusually inexpensive, compared with, say, Europe and Japan. She wishes that in return consumers would support government subsidies to farmers. "Most people, including government representatives, are too far away from farming to understand. This used not to be so." Far too many people, when asked where food comes from, reply "Safeway".
Farmers of course would be better off if they had some control over their markets and if they could stimulate demand for their products. Two encouraging things have happened locally. First, we have created a local wool market, selling wool to the Natural Bedroom in Sebastopol to be made into comforters, pillows and futons. The volume of wool sold has risen from an experimental 1,000 lb. batch from our barn in 1992 to 45,000 lbs. in 1996. Now about 50 growers sell to the Natural Bedroom, meeting Pure-Grow standards on the raising and handling of the wool. The growing standards are close to organic and the wool handling does take more work than is required by other buyers. The reward is a higher price. It is rewarding too to see those scrumptious comforters in the store, made from our wool.
The other innovation is Healdsburg rancher Bruce Campbell's business of selling premium lean lamb to restaurants and supermarkets. Besides offering a little competition to the big buyers, Bruce's CK Lamb has put Sonoma County lamb on the menu as something special. Bruce has the problem of maintaining a constant supply of lambs throughout the year, though most lambs are ready in summer. He also has to spend more time transporting lambs and talking to buyers than working on his ranch. So what he does is not for everyone. "We¼re lucky to have Bruce", said Joe.
Ranchers have discussed collaborating to arrange processing and selling direct to stores and institutions. So far they have been stymied by the problems just mentioned plus the difficulty of selling only a few lambs at a time (and more the next week and the next) when sheep are often scattered over hundreds of acres and take hours to bring in to the barn.
Both these innovations, plus sheep cheese from Bellwether Farms in Valley Ford, are described as niche marketing in an article in the San Francisco Examiner on "Flocking to Sheep Chic". Our local U.C. Farm Advisor, Stephanie Larson thinks that niche marketing is a way to reach a different section of the public and thus to make more people aware of lamb and wool.
The danger with talk of "sheep chic" is that many people may think that lamb and wool are too chic (and expensive) for them. Several local ranchers will gladly sell lambs or wool directly to individuals. Possibly customers committed to buying vegetables direct from growers through Community Shared Agriculture groups would like to add meat and eggs to their commitment. Although most ranchers are probably not used to thinking of marketing locally, they might become interested if this seemed worthwhile.
The third factor threatening the sheep industry is development. "Development takes a lot of good land," Joe pointed out. Living in Bodega for close to twenty years I have seen a substantial amount of development. The open space around Bodega is open largely because it is farm land. It may only remain as open space if agriculture is viable.
How could we ensure that open space around Bodega stays in agriculture? And thus stays open space? Markets are a large part of it. Are we buying what ranchers are growing? If you wish there were something you could do to keep sheep farming here, then follow CK Lamb's slogan: "Eat lamb, wear wool" - and don't just wear it, sleep on it and under it, walk on it, insulate your house with it. We do not have to destroy the rainforest in order to grow beef for America. We could, if we want to eat meat, eat the animals raised right here, on land too steep to be used for crops. You will not find purer meat, as it is totally devoid of growth hormones or antibiotics. We do not have to make our clothing, bedding and carpets from synthetics, derived from fossil fuel. We could use wool - beautiful, sustainable, renewable; by the time this year's wool is processed, the sheep have half grown another crop of it.
Beyond buying locally, are we supporting ranchers in their efforts to restore some government price support or to combat packer monopoly? Write your representatives now!
Open space could also be protected through purchasing conservation easements from willing sellers. These individually written easements allow pieces of land to remain free from development; the development rights are handed to a land trust, to the Open Space District, or, in the case of the proposed National Seashore extension, to the Federal Government.
Easements have a number of advantages to ranchers. The land they love will never be developed. The money from selling an easement may enable a rancher to enhance or expand a ranch, or to pay inheritance taxes. Joe has watched Marin Agricultural Land Trust and feels that it has worked well. His family has an easement with M.A.L.T. Joe would like to see the Open Space District more active in our part of the county. It was originally concerned mostly with protecting green belts around cities. "This money would protect a lot more land out here."
Donna has a ranch in the National Seashore extension, making easements an issue for her. "An easement is a thing one has to study on for a while." Her reservation about them is that "If you can no longer make a living farming, should you tie up the land in an easement?" She would ask the government: "If you want to save agriculture, are you helping ranchers with the predator control and with markets?"
Since saving agriculture entails saving so much of our open space around Bodega, Donna's question to the government touches us all. It is not just sheep ranchers who are affected by the future of sheep ranching. Ranchers want to continue ranching. Donna emphasised, "I'd like to keep lands in agriculture as long as I can afford it". Joe said, "Before I go broke in this business, I¼m going to do everything I can to make a living at it...[In all the time my family has been farming]... some of the biggest challenges are now."