Two more West Marin ranches, including one of the largest in the county, will soon be added to the portfolio of farmland protected from development by the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.
Last week, the Board of Supervisors approved $3.3 million in farmland preservation grants to help MALT purchase easements that will keep the Bivista Ridge Ranch and Spring Valley Ranch in agricultural production forever. Funding for the county grants, which protect farmlands of ecological importance, comes from Measure A, which voters first approved in 2012 and renewed last year.
The 1,179-acre Spring Valley Ranch, one of the largest in Marin, is located a few miles west of Hicks Valley. Most of the property has been identified as a critical habitat for the California red-legged frog, a threatened species.
The 592-acre Bivista Ranch is close to Marshall on the eastern shore of Tomales Bay. It includes a 4-acre wetland and a 1.6-mile stream that empties into the bay. According to a county staff report, the waterway has the potential to support steelhead trout, another threatened species.
“These two easements not only add to Marin’s mosaic of protected agricultural land, but they also bolster community efforts to protect biodiversity and build climate resilience,” said Lily Verdone, MALT’s executive director. “With each new easement, another piece of the puzzle is put into place.”
The new conservation easements will bring the total investment in farmland preservation by MALT and its partners to just over $100 million since the land trust was founded in 1980.
The Spring Valley easement cost $3.5 million, and the Bivista easement $3.9 million. A certified private appraiser specializing in conservation easements established the value of the land. The county and MALT donors split the cost of the Spring Valley easement roughly in half. The Bivista easement was purchased entirely with public funds, with the county contributing 35 percent and the California Department of Conservation pitching in 65 percent.
Spring Valley Ranch has been in the Respini and Dolcini families for more than a century. Bivista Ridge Ranch, owned by the Taylor family since 1976, is part of Bivalve Dairy, located 5 miles south on Highway 1.
Easements provide farm owners with an alternative to selling to private developers. They require landowners to keep the property in agricultural production themselves or sell or lease it to someone else to farm it. Landowners can replace existing agricultural structures or add more but only with approval from MALT. No additional residential units can be built, with the exception of housing for agricultural workers.
Under current county agricultural zoning regulations, the property owners could have carved their ranches into 60-acre parcels with a single home located on each one. The easements will keep the properties at their current size even if the county adopts more permissive development rules in the future.
MALT was eager to protect the Bivista ranch because it is close to commercial and residential areas of Marshall that have been subdivided into lots of less than an acre, making nearby properties a ripe target for future development, said Zach Mendes, MALT’s director of land protection.
“Marshall has a lot of parcels that are chopped up into small lots zoned for mixed commercial and residential uses,” he said. “Proximity to parcels that have much smaller zoning puts a larger parcel at higher risk than ones that are farther away.”
The Spring Valley Ranch is bordered to the north by the Soulajule Reservoir and to the east and south by other MALT-protected properties. It will join a 13,895-acre, contiguous block of protected agricultural land, one of the largest areas of conserved land in the Bay Area, according to MALT.
“It’s difficult to comprehend the size of Spring Valley Ranch,” MALT states on its website. “Standing at its center, south of the Soulajule Reservoir, the entire viewshed comprises the ranch’s verdant grasslands, Douglas fir forests, and seasonal creeks. You can walk in any direction for hours without meeting a fence line, and even that is only a boundary to more expansive rangelands.”
MALT possesses easements for just over 55,000 acres of agricultural land—slightly more than half the farmland in the county—most of it in West Marin. But the organization says it is now as focused on land management as land acquisition.
Land trust staff monitor the ranches in their portfolio at least once a year to ensure that property owners or lessees are managing them in accordance with the requirements of each easement. MALT also provides small grants available to all Marin farmers to promote water quality, soil health, climate resilience and biodiversity.