Ranching Stays in the Family Thanks to Easement

by Elisabeth Ptak
Marin Agricultural Land Trust

The Zimmerman Family (Bill, Mary, Trish, Sharon and Merv). Photo by Dexter A. Roberts for Marin Agricultural Land Trust

As a founder of the Tomales History Center, Mary McCullough Zimmerman appreciates tradition. In fact, the house where she and her husband Merv live is the former Halleck School, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1862 on the ranch overlooking Tomales Bay. The building was modernized to suit their growing family over the years, but the original roof still rises to a peak above the front door. Windows on either side have the same thick wavy glass they had when young Gladys Jacobsen, who also
recently sold MALT a conservation easement, was the teacher from 1933-35, and the original cast-iron school bell is mounted in a place of honor near the front gate.

While it's tempting to look at agriculture through the lens of the past, many of today's West Marin ranchers are caught between history and a hard place. On the one hand, they may be part of a tradition that goes back five or six generations, as it does with Merv and Mary. Both are descendants of dairymen who settled in the area in the mid-19th century. Both spent their own childhoods pitching in with a capital "P"- before school, after school, and every single summer. The ranches they grew up on, and later their own operation, were self-sufficient enterprises that included chickens, pigs, beef and dairy cows, and a big vegetable garden. Hard work was taken for granted because, "You had freedom, you had friends around," Merv says, opening his arms to the rolling hills that surround his Marshall home on three sides.

On the other hand, ranchers struggling with commodity prices that haven't kept pace with the cost of living are increasingly forced to make choices that could end longstanding traditions. Three years ago, the Zimmermans closed the dairy Merv's father had started in 1941, replacing it with a herd of beef cattle and another of dairy heifers.

As Merv and Mary reached retirement age, their youngest son Bill wanted to continue the family business which he's helped operate for the past 20 years. He and his wife Sharon, the parents of four children, both have jobs off the ranch in addition to running the current livestock operation, but they didn't have the resources to buy out Bill's parents. Now their decision to sell an agricultural conservation easement to MALT will enable them to purchase the 308-acre Diamond Z Ranch from Merv and Mary. "Selling an easement is the only way we could afford to buy the ranch. We've saved it for another generation," Bill said. MALT paid the appraised price of $677,000 with funding from the California Coastal Conservancy and the California Department of Conservation's Farmland Conservancy Program.

An old milk can marked "710" sits in one corner of the schoolhouse kitchen. It's a reminder of the time not so many years ago when the number meant the Grade A milk inside came from the Diamond Z. A driver from the cooperative creamery in Petaluma picked up the milk each and every day without fail. "Our biggest treat," Mary remembers, "was to take a boat across the bay for a picnic." The boat may have been rickety and the water choppy, but the children played in the sand, and the day was fine. "Then we'd come home and milk the cows."

As it was more than the occasional picnic that kept families in agriculture then, so it will take a concerted effort to keep the tradition alive today. MALT's program is one option for West Marin farmers. "But agriculture in California, as well as in rest of the United States, has a great struggle to survive," Bill Zimmerman cautions. "It's not just out here in West Marin. It's nationwide."

(posted 12/18/03)