The Marin Agricultural Land Trust purchased the 864-acre Borello Ranch from a developer this week, under an agreement to lease the Marshall property to two local ranchers who will buy it from the nonprofit within four years.
MALT has rechristened the land Millerton Creek Ranch, named for the creek that runs through the pastures and empties into Tomales Bay.
The ranch, purchased by Bob Borello in the 1950s, has supported ranching, a quarry and sewer ponds over the years, though the ponds carry with them a history of environmental problems with the Regional Water Quality Control Board.
Mr. Borello died in a car accident in 1992, at which point his wife, Judy, took over. The ranch, legally three separate parcels, has been for sale since Ms. Borello, who owns the Old Western Saloon, sold it to Virtu Investments in early 2010 for somewhere around $4.5 million, according to a Marin Independent-Journal article at the time. (A recent listing had it priced at $6 million.)
The MALT purchase ensures that the ranch—where in recent years tenant farmers had cattle crowded in a small pasture while the land sat on the market—will remain in agriculture indefinitely.
“This is the first time since 1991 that MALT has purchased a ranch outright rather than protecting the land with an easement. MALT jumped at the opportunity to take this farmland out of the hands of a developer,” Jamison Watts, MALT’s executive director, said in a press statement.
Andrew Zlot, one of the ranchers who will lease the ranch, investigated the property after driving by the ranch innumerable times on his commute from his home in Point Reyes Station to his 30-acre rented pasture in Valley
Ford. There, he milks water buffalo and makes the gelato that he sells to restaurants and to customers at an outdoor cart in front of Toby’s Coffee Bar on weekends. (He also sells buffalo milk to cheesemakers.)
Mr. Zlot hadn’t intended to buy land when he first started his operation in 2012, but he needs more grass. “Everyone [in Marin] is on the constant search for pasture. Everyone is. Everyone is,” he said.
When he approached MALT about the property, they connected him with Mike Giammona, a rancher who runs beef cattle in the Point Reyes National Seashore and had tried to buy the Borello Ranch in 2009. Mr. Giammona had an environmental site assessment undertaken at the time, before the developer stepped in. “Those guys kind of scooped it from under us,” he said.
MALT recently received a loan from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation that allowed the nonprofit to buy the ranch itself, with an agreement that Mr. Giammona and Mr. Zlot will purchase it by 2018, at which point MALT can repay the loan. (In the meantime, MALT will raise money to secure an agricultural conservation easement.)
The Borellos faced a number of issues with the septic ponds at the ranch, where wastewater was trucked in from 1971 till 2009. In 1984, the Regional Water Quality Control Board temporarily ordered Mr. Borello to stop accepting Coast Guard sewage—which amounted to 10,000 gallons a day—because the ponds had filled beyond capacity. In 1997 the water board issued Ms. Borello a “cleanup and abatement order” because of fears that sewage could leak in rainy weather.
A 2009 environmental report, undertaken when Mr. Giammona first tried to purchase the property, suspected that the ponds were contaminating Millerton Gulch Creek and that non-authorized waste from outhouses and grease traps might have been dumped there, though that report wasn’t finalized before the previous sale.
Jeff Stump, the director of conservation at MALT, said that before it purchased the ranch it contracted out an “exhaustive environmental site assessment.” Samples from the bottom of the defunct ponds for a litany of contaminants like heavy metals, oil and gas came back clean. Though the ponds aren’t being used, the regional water board discharge permit is still active, and MALT is in the process of acquiring it.
Mr. Giammona, who in addition to ranching operates City Sewer Pumping, which cleans and services septic systems, envisions not only rehabilitating the sewer ponds but composting the solids and treating the wastewater for use on the ranch. (City Sewer disposed of its waste at the ponds when the Borellos ran them.)
He has talked with people at the Marin Carbon Project, which has three local farms demonstrating the ability of compost spread on land to trap carbon and combat climate change, and added that he might use compost to help combat distaff thistle, an invasive plant he said was prevalent on the ranch.
When MALT and the ranchers get the ponds going, the wastewater will come from City Sewer and potentially other businesses, though Mr. Giammona said they won’t accept wastewater from outside Marin and intend to limit it to near the Tomales Bay Watershed. (In the Borello’s time, he said, about half of the wastewater was coming from outside Marin.)
“With climate change and the Marin Carbon Project applying compost to rangelands, we really see this as an opportunity to transition [the ponds] to that kind of beneficial agricultural operation,” Mr. Stump said.
Mr. Giammona has other visions for the ranch, too: he wants to see endangered coho salmon swimming through the creek.
Mr. Stump said that while the creek isn’t generally in bad shape, at some point Mr. Borello dug a new channel in its upper reaches to divert water and create more space for his quarry. That channel drops off with a 10-foot waterfall.
“It’s lovely to look at but not good for fish migration,” Mr. Stump said. Restoring the upper creek, perhaps with the help of the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, could allow endangered coho salmon to use it. (“But it’s not gonna happen overnight,” he added.)
In addition to the environmental projects, the two ranchers say significant work needs to be done just to prepare the land for their herds, which they hope to bring to Millerton Creek Ranch this spring. There are few fences, the water lines and ranch roads need repair and overgrown trees need to be cut back near the roads. And Mr. Giammona said recent grazing had been concentrated in a 20-acre area where the grass had been “eaten down to the bone.” They plan to use rotational grazing to help the pastures recover.
Mr. Zlot won’t move his entire operation to Marshall, since his milking barns and the creamery are in Valley Ford. Instead he’ll graze young buffalo—who can’t be milked until they are at least two years old. Mr. Giammona will keep his herd in the seashore.
Though the new ranch will certainly let both grow their herds, Mr. Giammona and Mr. Zlot weren’t sure by what factor. “It’s difficult, because when you’re getting a piece of land… the animals have to learn the land, but you have to learn it too. It’s gonna be a learning process,” Mr. Giammona said.
The water buffalo and the beef cattle, they say, will graze side by side. “We’re one big happy family,” Mr. Giammona said.