The drought took a predictably harsh toll on farming and ranching in Marin last year.
The gross value of agriculture dropped by 5 percent in 2021, the county’s annual crop and livestock report showed. Grass stayed short, wells ran dry and ponds receded, undoing the modest gains reported the previous year. Nearly every crop and product in Marin, from fruit to cattle, saw precipitous profit declines, and the overall value of the county’s agriculture sank from nearly $102 million to about $96.6 million, lower than it has been since 2018.
“Between the pandemic and the third year of drought, our agricultural producers have become very weary and a bit disheartened,” agricultural commissioner Stefan Parnay said at a presentation to the Board of Supervisors last week.
The previous crop report was deceptively promising. The beginning of the pandemic saw surges in value for many ranchers and dry conditions hadn’t yet caught up to the overall trend toward growth. But the agriculture community knew the numbers would soon see a downturn. The 2021 report, released last week, bore out those predictions.
The drought’s hardships were widespread but uneven. Cattle and organic milk, which together account for almost half of Marin’s agricultural production, both saw serious declines in value. As ranchers and dairy farmers sold off cows from their herds last summer to avoid overgrazing meager pastures, cattle prices plunged by 13 percent to just $1,000 per head. Organic milk, the county’s most important agricultural product, saw an 8 percent value decline for similar reasons. But plants are the first to suffer from drought, and the most dizzying drop came for growers: Fruit and vegetable production lost more than a third of its value, from more than $4 million in 2020 to just $2.6 million last year.
Anticipating a dry summer, beef ranchers sold calves before they were “finished,” not having reached the weight at which they’d normally be sold. Unloading small calves in a crowded market, they made little profit. But for most, it was the wisest financial decision. “You can’t buy your way out of a drought,” said rancher Mike Gale, who runs Chileno Valley Ranch with his wife, Sally. “You can’t just keep buying water and feed.”
The Gales sold 79 animals last year, more than half their herd, for about 25 cents per pound—less than a quarter of what they could have fetched in 2019. “The prices were not good, but the idea of keeping them was a worse option,” Mr. Gale said.
Kevin Lunny, who grazes beef cattle at G Ranch in the Point Reyes National Seashore, made the same calculation last June. At the tail end of the rainy season, grass on his ranch should be up to a person’s waist, and it was barely knee-level. Mr. Lunny recognized something was wrong and sold 30 percent of his mother cows. Soon after, the park service sent a letter to its tenant ranchers instructing them to sell cows or risk failing to meet the agency’s thresholds for residual dry matter, the plant matter left on the ground just before the first rains, when the herd has grazed the land to its breaking point.
“Overgrazing serves no purpose to anybody,” Mr. Lunny said. The park service wants to protect against denuded, barren soil that heightens erosion and kills native plants, and ranchers want productive rangeland that is easily rejuvenated by winter rains. Well-timed late-season rains this year gave pastures a helpful boost, and now that most herds are smaller, ranchers will likely have an easier summer this summer.
Yet destocking, as livestock producers call it, is a painful choice, and its consequences take years to reverse. Ranchers spend years cultivating favorable genes in their herds and come to depend on productive cows and lineages.
“I had to sell cows off that I had been with for eight years,” said Guido Frosini, who runs True Grass Farms in Tomales. “You sell off the ones that are older or don’t perform as much. It’s still sad.”
Beef ranchers are relatively lucky in that their water needs are limited. Dairy farmers need much more water for processing and washing, and most had to resort to trucking in water. The Lafranchi Ranch in Nicasio is home to an active spring that normally provides much of the dairy’s water, but last year, the dependable spring ran dry.
“At one point in early fall, we were hauling all our water,” said Rick Lafranchi, who manages sales and marketing for the Nicasio Valley Cheese Company, the family’s creamery. “Whatever we needed, we had to haul.” Dairy farmers with no value-added products like cheese had an even harder time staying afloat. And the closure of the McClure Dairy in the seashore last spring contributed to the overall drop in organic milk value.
Vegetable growers, the farmers with the least room for water troubles, are barely hanging on in Marin—or worse. When water is scarce, their row crops are the first to be afflicted, and many had to let much of their acreage lie fallow last year.
At its peak, Marin Roots Farm cultivated about 40 acres of leased land in Hicks Valley, using a goat farmer’s pond to water lettuces, root vegetables and herbs. But last year, the landowner needed every drop of pond water for the goats, so farmers Moira and Jesse Kuhn had to fend for themselves. They couldn’t afford to truck in water without raising costs to exorbitant levels—“Do you want to pay $20 per lettuce head?” Ms. Kuhn asked—so they fashioned a makeshift tanker truck by placing water totes on an equipment trailer. Through a county program, they had permission to draw water from a North Marin Water District hydrant on San Antonio Road. They used about 1,250 gallons per day.
In the end, they cultivated just an eighth of an acre and decided to permanently let go of about three quarters of the land they once farmed. With too little water, carrots taste more like bitter parsnips, so the Kuhns focused on a lettuce mix they could sell at the farmers’ market.
Ms. Kuhn said the situation is especially precarious for renters like them, and they’ve grown accustomed to debt. “The rent bills keep coming in even if you can’t produce anything,” she said. Some fellow vegetable farmers have left Marin altogether.
Fallow fields around the American West have an indirect effect on livestock production, too. Alfalfa prices shot up last year as farmers from the Sacramento Valley to Idaho didn’t have enough water to irrigate their fields and competition for existing feed became fierce. Rising fuel prices have only worsened Marin ranchers’ bills for shipping feed.
Some agricultural products were fortunate outliers. Though the market for wool collapsed, the price per head of sheep actually went up by about 10 percent. Sheep need less water and feed than cattle, so ranchers could wait until their lambs were the right size before selling them for slaughter at full price. Reliable demand for local lamb from restaurants helped some producers along. “It’s very much a niche market for a small producer like me,” Marshall sheep rancher Marcia Barinaga said. “I’m trying not to grow my flock too much but I’m not cutting back either.”
West Marin’s oyster industry was another bright spot. Mariculture more than doubled in value during 2021, as businesses like Hog Island Oyster Company and Tomales Bay Oyster Company recovered quickly from the plummeting sales they suffered during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. In 2020, local shellfish farms lost more than $3 million in value, but as restaurants—their key clients—reopened, they surged back to life.
Marin agriculturalists are far from helpless. They can tap into a wide array of federal, state and county drought assistance funds that have expanded since the county declared a drought emergency last May. And last week, supervisors approved $100,000 in relief for farmers from a drought mitigation fund to help offset the millions ranchers already spent on trucking water last year. The county also paid for Marin Water and N.M.W.D. to supply more than two dozen ranchers with water from hydrants last summer.
“We are fortunate to live in a county where the board does keep agriculture in mind,” assistant agricultural commissioner Scott Wise said. He said the county doesn’t anticipate any need for water hauling this summer, though ranchers will still likely have to fight to afford feed costs.
Most producers are doing better this June than they were a year ago. Marin Roots Farm has enough water to grow a wider variety of greens, Mr. Lunny’s grass has reached a much more respectable height, and the heavy, isolated rains recharged wells and ponds throughout the county. But some cautioned their fellow agriculturalists against placing all their hopes on one season of replenishing rain.
“I feel that people in our community seem to have a short-term memory about droughts, treating water as a week-to-week and summer-to-summer challenge,” Ms. Kuhn said. “We really need to take a decade-long approach to things.”
Mr. Frosini said ranchers need to be more nimble and ecologically aware. Some might require technical assistance to adopt carbon farming techniques or to diversify their pastures with hedgerows and trees, but doing so will be necessary to keep producing food, he said.
“This is not just ‘poor ag.’ Ranchers need to shape up to adapt for the ecosystem and their own business,” he said. “It’s really hard as a reality, but I think it’s an incentive for the farming community.”