Al Poncia, a free spirit who fought to preserve family farms and promote sustainable agriculture, died on Aug. 28 at his ranch in Tomales, surrounded by the family he loved and the land he cherished. He was 83.
A third-generation farmer, Mr. Poncia was one of the first to join the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, whose pioneering use of property easements helped preserve open space at a time when West Marin faced the prospect of unchecked suburban sprawl. With his knack for forging friendships, he found common ground between environmentalists and farmers whose interests often clashed, and he helped establish a culture of land conservation.
“He was not afraid to challenge the status quo,” said Ralph Grossi, the first chairman of MALT’s board. “He was always willing to listen to new ideas and new approaches. He had real impact.”
A man of contradictions, Mr. Poncia was a traditionalist with a ponytail and a conservative patriot open to progressive ideas. He flew the American flag and drove a Harley, but he also promoted carbon-neutral farming, believed in spirits and went with his son to Burning Man.
Just 5-foot, 3-inches tall, Mr. Poncia was a small man with a big presence. His legacy will be long-lasting, said Lily Verdone, MALT’s executive director.
“Marin County wouldn’t be the same without his early influence and steadfast belief in local farming, ranching and conservation,” she said.
His lifelong engagement with the agricultural community won him awards and honors, including a Steward of the Land Award from the Marin Conservation League and an Excellence in Conservation Award from the United States Department of Agriculture. It also won him many friends.
“He was just so welcoming and accepting of people,” said Nancy Scolari, executive director of the Marin Resource Conservation District. “He always had a smile and lifted other people up. You couldn’t help but want to be around him.”
Alfred Loren Poncia was born in Santa Rosa on Feb. 2, 1940, and grew up on a dairy farm on Stemple Creek, in a hamlet called Fallon at the northern edge of Tomales. He started milking cows at around the same time he was learning the three Rs.
His roots in Marin were deep. His grandfather, Angelo, came to West Marin in 1897 from an Italian village on Lake Como, in the foothills of the Alps. His wife, Rachele Pozzi Poncia, immigrated a few years later from the Swiss side of the border. They co-owned and operated the Fallon Creamery, and Mr. Poncia’s parents started operating their own dairy in 1933 on a nearby ranch.
Mr. Poncia served as student body president at Tomales High, where he was known for his spiffy clothes and white buck shoes—cousins of the blue suede shoes made famous by Elvis. After graduating, he joined the Army National Guard and later received an associate degree at Santa Rosa Junior College, where he met his wife, Cathie Brandeburg, whom he married in 1964. They loved to dance—country swing and the twist—and cruise through Sonoma and Marin in his midnight blue Chevy Impala.
As the Poncias settled at the ranch and started a family, Mr. Poncia threw himself into civic affairs. He served on the Marin County Farm Bureau board for 18 years, including three as president, and later served for 17 years on the board of the Shoreline Unified School District.
An avid reader of history, Mr. Poncia engaged in local and state politics. He made a memorable appearance at a legislative hearing on milk pricing to speak on behalf of the Marin County Committee on Small Family Farms. He jumped on a chair and delivered a passionate speech that apparently stirred the assembled representatives, who promptly endorsed the measure he was promoting.
His days were long, and keeping the dairy afloat was a never-ending challenge. He milked cows seven days a week at 2:30 a.m. and again at 2:30 p.m., a schedule that left evenings open for civic work—and more importantly, meals with Cathie and their children, Jennifer, Melissa, Jessica and Loren.
Every evening before sitting down to supper, he’d give the kids a hug and ask how their day had gone. Their dinner table conversations were lively, and every now and then, Mr. Poncia, an opera aficionado, would stand up and belt out an aria. Sometimes, however, the farm work had so exhausted him that he’d nod off. He once fell asleep face-first in a plate of spaghetti.
Try as he might to keep the dairy running, in 1989 he shut it down and switched to cattle ranching, a decision that didn’t come easily. Mr. Poncia, who had always walked the straight and narrow, went through something of a midlife crisis. He grew his ponytail, bought a Harley and started taking road trips, decked out in his star-spangled cowboy boots. He loved cruising Route 66 on the bike, which he named after Mae West, whose husky contralto enchanted him.
Although he took many of these journeys alone, Cathie joined him on one to the Canadian Rockies. They were both scarcely over 5 feet tall and found it challenging to keep the hefty machine upright at stop signs. They eventually converted it to a three-wheeler.
Back on the ranch, Mr. Poncia turned his attention to managing the land, which he hoped to see his children and grandchildren continue farming. He was one of the first West Marin ranchers to restore degraded creek habitat and protect sensitive wildlife species. He planted hundreds of trees along Stemple Creek to halt erosion, which ate away the creek bed and sullied the water.
When Laurette Rogers, a San Anselmo teacher, asked to bring her fourth-grade class to the ranch for an ecology field trip 30 years ago, Mr. Poncia enthusiastically welcomed them. The class was working on a project about California freshwater shrimp, an endangered species that survives in just a handful of creeks in Marin, Sonoma and Napa Counties, including Stemple Creek.
The students planted willows along the water’s edge on Mr. Poncia’s property. The trees’ roots gave the shrimp something to cling to when waters ran high and threatened to carry them toward the ocean, where they would not survive.
“He came into our classrooms and talked to students about the restoration work,” Ms. Rogers said. “He was an incredible teacher.”
The fledgling program—known as STRAW, or Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed—has since spread to 15 counties. “The children started this project, but it was ranchers like Al who pushed it to scale,” Ms. Rogers said.
Mr. Poncia’s connection to the land was spiritual, and it extended beyond the borders of his ranch. An avid hiker, he scaled Mount Whitney, Mount Shasta and the Half Dome at Yosemite. But more than trees, it was rocks that captivated him. His fascination with southwestern geology drew him repeatedly to Death Valley, whose landscapes spoke to him.
“You know why I love stones?” he asked in a tribute video created by MALT. “They’ve seen the past, they see the present, and they’ll see the future. They’ll be here when we’re gone.”
A master with a tractor, Mr. Poncia moved stones and boulders around his property and arranged them in patterns, labyrinths and designs. Each one had meaning, none more so than the boulder in a potato field above his house—a memorial he made years ago to honor Denise, his daughter Jessica’s 4-H cow.
Like her father, Jessica died earlier this year of pancreatic cancer. The family spread some of her ashes by Denise’s rock and will spread some of Mr. Poncia’s there, too.
“What could be better than to be plowed into the earth and be born again with every season’s new grass?” Mr. Poncia once asked in a profile included in “Farming on the Edge,” a book about family farms in Marin.
A year ago, after he began chemotherapy treatments, Mr. Poncia made a trip to Nevada for Burning Man with his son, Loren, who is carrying on the family farming tradition as the co-founder of Stemple Creek Ranch, which supplies grass-fed, grass-finished beef to some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. They engaged in a Burning Man ritual: lying in the sand and spreading their arms and legs to leave an imprint akin to a snow angel.
One year later, Loren held his father’s hand when he took his last breath.
“My dad was super honest, super hardworking, and he loved people,” Loren said. “He loved his community, he loved his family and he was my biggest cheerleader. He had your back.”
A celebration of life will be held on Saturday, Oct. 7, at Stemple Creek Ranch. It will begin at 11:30 a.m. and last until the cows come home.