With whirring blades, shearers recently clipped the thick wool from the 300 ewes at Jensen Ranch in Tomales. Skilled shearers are in high demand this time of year, as the days grow warm. The ranch hires professionals, who arrive in a mobile trailer, because “it’s incredibly labor intensive. It’s a trade, but also an art,” said Jim Jensen, a sixth-generation rancher. The fluffy wool is hard to handle, so it must be packed into dense bales using a hydraulic press. Then it’s shipped to Michigan, to be washed and turned into bedding. But Jensen Ranch’s most profitable product is lamb. Its young males—premium breeds of Dorset, Suffolk and Coopworth—are now being sent to market. This is also the time of year when the ranch evaluates the conformation, fleece quality and overall health of every young ewe, selecting which females will give birth to future generations.
June is silage season at Giacomini Dairy on the eastern shore of Tomales Bay. The ryegrass harvested now will be important supplemental feed for the dairy’s 450 Holsteins, which provide milk for Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company. “Ensiling” is a long, hard process. From the time the fog lifts until late afternoon, tractors cut long rows of grass. After resting in the sun for a few days, the cut grass is hauled to a long, narrow “silage pit,” where it is compacted by a tractor and covered with a large tarp. Old tires hold the tarp tightly in place, ensuring the low-oxygen environment needed for fermentation. So even when the hills turn golden brown, the cows are getting the nutritional benefit of green grass.
The green shoots of spring onions stand a foot tall in the cultivated fields of Allstar Organics, a small farm on Nicasio’s LaFranchi Ranch. Nearby, fava beans, with bushy stalks and blue-green oval leaves, are nearly hip high. Both species thrive in the valley’s cool nights and temperate days. The farm also includes a sunny one-acre field in Lagunitas, on the edge of a redwood forest, beside the home of its owners, Marty Jacobsen and Janet Brown. There, they dry, hand pack and seal the edible flowers and aromatic herbs used in spices, salts and sugars. Sharing the field are antique rosebushes, whose petals are used to make a delicately flavored rose sugar.