North Coast KelpFest!
A Weekend of Events to Elevate, Educate, and Entertain
by Sarah Reith
KelpFest! is back, examing the story of kelp through the lens of art, science, food, film, and this year, even a parade. From October 3-6, anything that happens anywhere on the Mendocino Coast will be all about kelp.
Why October, when this annual algae is at the end of its life cycle? “Last year, we held KelpFest! in the spring, at a time of birth and renewal,” explains Tristin Anoush McHugh, Kelp Project Director at The Nature Conservancy. “This year, we wanted to celebrate the senescence of the forest.” That’s when the seaweed ends its annual life cycle and dies, then washes onto the shore and attracts insects, which provide a feast for migrating birds.
In the last ten years, bull kelp forests have been devastated due to warm water and the loss of predators that control the herbivorous purple urchin. An astounding 96% of the underwater canopy along 350 kilometers of California’s north coast has vanished.
But kelp is having a cultural resurgence. From Indigenous food sovereignty to academia to economic planning initiatives, a wide coalition is working to restore this keystone species. KelpFest! is a celebration of their efforts.
The festival kicks off on Friday, October 3. The first Friday of the month is always an opportunity to tour galleries, meet artists, and see what’s new in the art world. Local galleries have been gearing up for months to offer kelp and ocean-themed exhibits.
From 4:00-6:00pm on Friday, October 3 at the Fort Bragg Town Hall on the corner of Laurel and Main streets, the public will also have a chance to learn about the art and science of aquaculture.
“I’m excited about it,” says Jami Miller, who came to Fort Bragg in 2023 as the California Sea Grant fellow working with the City of Fort Bragg on the Blue Economy—a plan to use ocean resources for sustainable economic growth. Miller is part of a team that is working on an aquaculture feasibility study. The project includes raising three species of shellfish and installing water quality sensors in promising locations, as well as monitoring three baskets of red abalone, purple urchin, and Pacific oysters at the Noyo Center Marine Field Station on North Harbor Drive. Another basket of Pacific oysters is closer to the mouth of the river, near the wharf. The project also aims to plant bull kelp in the water.
This event will include presentations from everyone who has been involved in the plan. Exhibits offering more information will be at Town Hall all weekend, along with posters by high school students who took part in a Blue Economy youth leadership pilot program.
The fun continues on Saturday, October 4. You can never have too many people in a parade! Flockworks, an arts and cultural education program, is coordinating the procession. They have been organizing after-school workshops for kids to design costumes, as well as developing a kelp curriculum for Mendocino schools. Participants will gather at the entrance to Portuguese Beach at 11:30am, then march across town to the Mendocino Arts Center for further kelp-related arts and revelry. “It won’t just be kids dressed up as seaweed,” promises Josie Iselin, author of The Curious World of Seaweed and co-director of Above/Below, an organization working to promote ocean literacy.”
That evening, the Mendocino Arts Center will host a Senescence celebration where leaders involved in kelp restoration will speak about their work. This will also be the opening of Mómim Wené, an exhibition of Indigenous arts that honor the sea.
Sunday will be a big day for science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The second annual Indigenous Food Festival will be from 10:00am-4:00pm at Xa Kako Dile: in Caspar. Local and visiting tribal communities will offer samples of foods prepared according to ancient practices, collectively referred to as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). An Indigenous Market will feature an array of traditional arts, like beadwork, basketry, and jewelry.
One of the organizers is Monique Sonoquie (Tongva, Chumash), who has long been involved with local cultural and environmental education. She’s “a little concerned” about the kelp scarcity she’s noticed over the last two years. But she wants people to know that there are ways to take what you need from the sea without depleting it.
Sonoquie sees the Indigenous Food Festival as an opportunity to inform participants about the cultural protocols involved with providing sustainable food. “You gather as much as you need,” she explains, not as much as you can. “You make an offering and establish a relationship with the seaweed.” She hopes visitors will get a taste of what humans and nature can do when they work together, for mutual benefit.
Kelp research and recovery efforts are underway at multiple study sites in the Fort Bragg/Mendocino area, to protect and expand remnant forests. On Sunday morning, visitors to Big River can enjoy a demonstration of the high-tech drone mapping techniques that are being used to monitor the area. “We hope to see more kelp than we did last year,” says McHugh.
There will also be an open house at the Noyo Center Marine Field Station. Visitors can tour the urchin ranch, a 40-foot shipping container where overabundant yet starving purple urchins have been fed in a recirculating aquaculture system to prepare them for market. These resilient creatures are able to persist through years of starvation, but there is hope in Blue Economy circles that they can be harvested, raised to delectable plumpness, and sold commercially.
From 11:30am-12:45pm on Sunday, the Field Station will also host a presentation from Kelp Rises, a multi-institutional research program investigating both the human and natural drivers of kelp system resilience. Later that afternoon a panel discussion will dive deeper into the topic of regenerative aquaculture. A reception with kelp featured prominently among the selection of tasty hors d’oeuvres will follow.
The final event will be a wild urchin harvest by the light of the full moon, led by Nathan Maxwell Cann. Eating the urchin that are eating the kelp is “a great way to capstone the event ... a parting connection with the kelp forest,” he says.
Like the kelp ecosystem, KelpFest! is vast and complex. Iselin says that during the planning, “Every time an idea came up, someone said yes. It really was a lesson in the power of yes.”
Find a detailed schedule of events and more information at:
northcoastkelpfest.org
Photos by Underwater Pat.
Nuestra Alianza
Practical Support and Community Solidarity for Local Latinos
by Torrey Douglass
Sergio Perez came to the U.S. not long before his 13th birthday in 2003. He spoke no English, and the class at the public school designed to help him learn had only one teacher providing assistance for all the Latino students struggling academically. Only Sergio and one other new arrival spoke no English whatsoever, but with so many other students needing help in English, they didn’t get a lot of attention.
Fortunately, a new nonprofit in Willits called Nuestra Alianza de Willits—Our Alliance of Willits—was launching its first project, a free summer program for Spanish-speaking children ages 6 to 12. Plan Vacacional instructed children and their parents about Mexican language, culture, art, and sports. It was taught in Spanish, and provided 40 minutes a day of academic support from a credentialed teacher. With this help, in addition to the English as a Second Language (ESL) classes also offered by Nuestra Alianza, Sergio was able to learn English, make friends, and start to feel at home in the United States.
The concept for Nuestra Alianza de Willits (NAW) was born in 2000, when ESL instructor Dina Hutton was teaching a Mendocino College class at the Willits campus. The students, primarily Spanish-speaking immigrant adults, were conversing after class one night, discussing the services their kids needed, including a summer program and after-school help with homework. “Nobody is going to do that for you,” Dina observed. “You have to do that yourselves. I think we can do it with a nonprofit.”
Of the 16 people who started NAW, only one—Dina—spoke English, and none of them had experience with starting and managing a nonprofit. But they knew what they wanted to provide, and step-by-step figured out how to get it done. Three years later in the summer of 2003, the first program, Plan Vacacional, provided summer fun and instruction for 40 students and their parents. Twenty-two years later, the program continues, sometimes able to host a teacher from Mexico, and always ending with a ballet folklórico performance and celebration dinner for as many as 250 people.
Plan Vacacional is just one of the 14 programs NAW provides. They also offer free tax preparation during tax season, where volunteers help anyone who needs assistance to file their personal taxes. In 2024 they helped 450 people—60% were Latinos, 10% were Native Americans, and 30% were other locals. With this free service, clients can access their tax refund, providing much-needed additional income for them and their families.
The organization has also partnered with the Willits public school system, arranging for bilingual helpers to be in the classroom for homework support during Kids Club, the after school program. According to the former superintendent, it used to take six years for new English speakers to get up to grade level. With the bilingual aides NAW provided, it took just two. The program was dropped during the pandemic and has yet to be reactivated.
Helping immigrant workers—documented or not— understand their rights is another aspect of NAW’s work. They bring lawyers from around the region, including Sacramento, Santa Rosa, and San Francisco, to speak and answer questions. Sometimes NAW staff and volunteers go out into the fields to talk to workers, bringing food and potentially life-saving information, like how they are entitled to drink water and take breaks in the shade.
One of the most in-demand programs right now is the Emergency Food Bank, created during the COVID pandemic after the Willits Food Bank noticed Latinos were not accessing their services. NAW investigated, discovering that a combination of pride, shyness, and reluctance to complete the required paperwork discouraged local immigrants from showing up. So NAW started their emergency food bank, open Monday through Friday from 9:30am to 4:30pm, where anyone can stop by up to once a week to get food if they have an emergency. People are asked about their family size and income, but no paperwork is required. The bank helps 62 families every month, getting food donations from both the larger Willits Food Bank and the Redwood Empire Food Bank. Originally all food donations were free, but recently the unfunded Emergency Food Bank has been asked to pay for any donations of proteins like canned fish, meats, and eggs.
Twenty-four years after its inception, Nuestra Alianza is still going strong. Programs include free bilingual mental health services; classes and presentations around health and parenting, sometimes in collaboration with other organizations; immigration and translation support; referrals for social services; math tutoring in both English and Spanish; help accessing substance abuse counseling; and even just access to an internet-connected computer and copy machine for general use. Dina shares, “A lot of county workers have said to me, ‘We’re so glad you are working with the Latinos. We hope you can talk them into becoming citizens.’ So they see lack of citizenship as being willful, when in truth they would do anything to get it. It’s a very long, difficult, expensive process—and it is not open to everyone.” In the meantime, NAW provides a place where they can get questions answered and needs met, where they can learn information to help their health, their families, and their prospects.
Now grown, Sergio Perez became the first full time Executive Director at 32 years of age. Besides attending Plan Vacacional and ESL classes over the years, Sergio joined the organization as a volunteer when he was 17. Reflecting on the promotion, he self-effacingly claims, “The title does not mean anything. It’s a grassroots organization. There is just one other paid full-time staff member, and four part-time. We all do all of the same work.” The board is composed entirely of first generation immigrants. Dina acknowledges that they don’t have traditional board skills, but “they know what people need and how to present it. They are the community.”
Dina still teaches ESL twice a week at NAW, though she has retired from the college. Wednesday is for beginners and Thursday is for more advanced students. Sometimes she brings food, sometimes other people do, but there is always food, and often the first thing someone does when they walk in is look around and see what’s on offer to eat. When presentations are held in the evening—like a recent one that taught parents what drugs look like and that they might be among their kids’ belongings—people will sometimes stay to make and share dinner together. “They are good cooks,” Dina says. “They don’t measure anything. They like to cook, and they are very jolly when they are cooking—and even jollier when they are eating!”
When reflecting on her time with NAW, Dina shares, “I like hanging out with the employees and the board—I like being a member of it, one of the gang. They like teachers and they like old people, so it’s a good place for me to hang.” She smiles and continues, “And I love teaching. It’s a hilarious job. People feel free enough to make mistakes that turn out to be hilarious. They will go for it, head down laughing and slapping the table. At the beginning of the class they will talk about a few recent horrors, and then I say, ‘Okay, mijos, let’s get happy.’ And we change the scene.” Which is just what Nuestra Alianza did when it started—envisioned a different scene for its community and made it happen, embodying the resourcefulness, compassion, and grassroots grit this country has long purported to admire.
Nuestra Alianza de Willits
291 School St, Suite 1, Willits
(707) 456-9418 | nuestraalianzadewillits.org
Group photo by Michael Deer. All photos courtesy of Nuestra Alianza.
Ready for Disaster
The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership
By Lisa Ludwigsen
Picture this scenario: During an unexpectedly severe snowstorm in your remote community, 100 stranded motorists, including non-English speakers, families with young children, and even someone returning from a hospital stay, need food and shelter. A trailer from the County Office of Emergency Services, filled with cots, blankets, and other supplies, is parked next door, but you don’t have permission or the lock combination from local officials to open it. This was the scene in Laytonville during February of 2023.
By the time the official okay was given two days later (along with the correct lock combination), an intrepid group of volunteers led by Jayma Shields Spence, Director of the Laytonville Healthy Start Family Resource Center, had already pulled together sufficient supplies to keep everyone comfortable until the roads opened. “We proved that a little town with limited resources could host a group of stranded travelers and make a difference, and I think we saved some lives that first night,” Shields Spence shared. “I can’t imagine some of our guests in high-risk health situations being left in the cold. I wasn’t going to be the one to not open my doors to help those in need—I’d be ashamed of myself if I had the power to help a group of people and I didn’t because of a rulebook.”
This relatively brief and small-scale local emergency illustrates just how easily breakdowns can occur during disasters. All the good intentions, resources, and funding can’t help without clear communication. Federal, regional, and county groups can’t be effective if they don’t know what resources are available and how to connect with one another. Rural communities are often left under-served as more densely populated cities and towns get help first.
Snowstorms aren’t the only circumstances with the potential to interrupt the availability of food and other supplies. Pandemics, catastrophic wildfires, earthquakes, and floods all make the list of recent disruptions to local food systems on the north coast.
Would you know who to call or where to go if the food supply chain was suddenly disrupted during an emergency? What if the disruption extended for days, or weeks? For rural communities and at-risk populations such as children, older adults, and people with limited financial resources, the concerns are compounded.
As the North Bay Food Systems Advisor for U.C. Cooperative Extension, Julia Van Soelen Kim’s job includes supporting the development of regional farms, food hubs, and distribution channels. “Because of our region’s susceptibility to climate change-induced disasters, a lot of my work focuses on collaboration to support the resilience of our emergency food system to respond to and recover from disasters,” she shared. When a USDA funding opportunity designed to support partnerships that develop local and regional food systems crossed her desk, Julia and her colleagues and community partners seized the opportunity to bring together stakeholders to create a network of emergency food systems professionals across Northern California.
The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership is a four-year initiative bringing together food producers, local and tribal governments, food policy councils, the University of California, and community-based organizations that provide emergency food assistance. There are 275 participants from the six counties of Marin, Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte, representing roughly 1 million people spread over 11,500 square miles. The area encompasses isolated rural areas, densely populated urban places, and everything in between.
I was invited to join the partnership because of my work in natural foods, food policy, and small-scale farming in Mendocino and Sonoma counties. During the quarterly online and in-person meetings, representatives from a variety of agencies and community organizations have shared their experiences developing emergency preparedness strategies, as well as how they have problem-solved in moments of need.
Though I knew of the network of refrigerated nodes installed by the MendoLake Food Hub to provide central locations for farmers to deliver orders of fresh produce and other local food for distribution, I did not know about Del Norte County’s need to helicopter food to isolated residents when flooding washed out roads, or the emergency feeding plan developed by Marin County to get food to those who need it most in disasters, and which is now serving as a model for other counties. I’ve also come to understand how rural communities must be prepared to rely on each other during crises, as Jayma Shields Spence and the Laytonville folks did during the snowstorm. Jayma reports that since the snowstorm, “We have formed the North County Community Organizations Active in Disaster group, NCCOAD for short. The group meets four times a year to share resources and plan better for the next disaster/emergency and how we will handle things on our own if needed.” She adds, “In 2025, I will be pursuing funding to build a storage warehouse that would serve multiple purposes: Laytonville Food Bank storage, emergency food storage, emergency shelter supplies, and a commercial kitchen.”
Now in its second year, the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership is moving forward toward its three goals:
Working to create additional market opportunities for local producers within emergency food supply chains to mitigate risk and maintain income during disasters
Building collective capacity to improve emergency food systems by creating a strong network of partners, developing emergency feeding plans, and inventorying local emergency food supply chain infrastructure
Identifying barriers to their work and devising recommendations to establish effective local and regional emergency food supply chains
“Even though our regional project is still in its infancy, we’re already seen a lot of new relationships formed, increased awareness about innovative practices, and greater capacity of local food systems stakeholders to address climate change—fueled disasters. We hope to connect the dots across jurisdictional boundaries, local food and farming collaborators, and emergency managers,” said Van Soelen Kim.
Local farms are key to a healthy food system, one that is able to ease the challenges of widespread regional emergencies. Food produced nearby doesn’t need to travel long distances, and a diversified network of farms can be utilized in times of need. Ensuring that local farms remain sustainable becomes vital when considering all the ‘what-ifs’ during an emergency.
We can all contribute to our communities’ readiness for emergencies in a few easy ways. Stocking up on our own supplies and staying in touch with neighbors helps our immediate preparedness. Supporting local producers during the good times will help them be around for the challenges coming our way. Buy locally whenever possible and support the local grocers and markets that demonstrate a commitment to local agriculture.
As we improve our own preparedness, the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership is connecting the resources that will provide emergency relief during those inevitable challenging times. The collective effort is powerful and reassuring and will help us weather whatever lies ahead.
The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership can be found online at ucanr.edu/sites/NCEFSP.
Road photo by Torrey Douglass. Shelter photo by Jayma Spence Shields.
Local Fur-lanthropy
Humane Society’s Pet Food Banks Help Keep Pets in Homes
by Terry Ryder
In 2022, Mendocino County animal shelters found themselves inundated with 25% more intakes than in prior years. The shelter was filled with lost animals and, sadly, a growing number of voluntarily surrendered pets. The goal of every animal shelter is to move toward a world where every animal has a chance to be placed in a home where they are safe, healthy, and loved. The best chance of providing this life is by keeping the pet in its original home, with the people who know and love it. Owners part with their animals for many reasons, but one that comes up often is the cost associated with feeding their pet. If pet owners’ budgets are stretched to breaking in this world of ever increasing food prices, what can be done?
People involved in animal welfare services have studied this problem, and one solution has been applied with some degree of success. The Humane Society of Sonoma County, under CEO Lindsey McCall, began looking at ways to keep pets in their homes back in 2017. They managed to set aside some money to fund a Community Initiative Coordinator by following their motto, “Committed to Kindness.” Today, this position is managed as a partnership between two idealistic young men, Jorge Delgado and Celestino Jimenez. (Celestino was raised and educated in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley.) These men have been challenged to develop some practical and effective programs that will ultimately keep more pets in the homes of the owners who love them. They have named their program C.A.T.— Community Action Team.
The C.A.T. program focuses on food for animals. The team looked to pet food distributors, forming relationships with companies like PetCo and Costco in Sonoma County, as well as some smaller independent outlets like Cloverdog Pet Supply and Wash. When a bag of food is damaged through shipping or wear and tear, the outlet calls C.A.T., who then picks it up with their dedicated van. Once the food is collected, teams of volunteers pack and re-label it in three-gallon zip-lock freezer bags, at which point it is ready for distribution. Sometimes these businesses can also provide other items that pet owners need, like toys, beds, and grooming aids. Some of the food is given out directly from the Humane Societies, some travels to food banks to be passed out with the food for humans, and some goes to agencies that service the homeless population and their animals.
C.A.T. is a fledgling program with a hardworking skeleton staff of two, plus some volunteers. Though small, their fresh approach to keeping pets in their homes has been noted, and other shelters are trying to use similar programs to stem the tide of surrenders that are breaking hearts every day. This past July, Celestino was asked to attend an animal welfare conference in Orlando, Florida, where he shared the blueprint for the C.A.T. program. People were particularly interested in how such a program can be sustained. It is an exciting time to be involved, as many of the ideas being tested will lead to happy outcomes—more animals staying in their homes with their owners.
Jorge has mentored Celestino since he came on board. Celestino’s original job was to implement the programs that Jorge was creating. They now consider themselves partners. Both of them speak passionately about the work they are doing and the plans they have for the future. It is very inspiring to witness their idealism and commitment, and it is refreshing, too. Together they are visualizing new approaches, while also serving as the “boots on the ground” for the implementation of these ideas. Indeed, they are constantly making more work for themselves, but they don’t seem to mind.
Jorge and Celestino spend some of their time pursuing grants for the program. They recently applied to California for All Animals for funds specific to particular cities. With the aim of increased involvement in Mendocino County, they are hoping to hear soon about another grant specifically targeting our area. In the meantime, they have had a small presence in Mendocino County through the Redwood Empire Food Bank at the Fort Bragg Food Bank. They also distribute pet food through the Redwood Gospel Mission in both Santa Rosa and Ukiah, and they can often be found at the mission’s community events. Finding themselves with a surplus of donations during the holidays, they were able to share the bounty with the Humane Society of Inland Mendocino County in Redwood Valley, under Administrative Director Jenny Hanzlik. They are open to the idea of linking up directly with other local food banks that are interested in a partnership.
One or two people who care can really make a difference. One animal lover picks up food in Hopland to deliver to a non-profit called La Familia Sana in Cloverdale. Others who want to help can organize food drives and fundraising drives, or even their own similar program inspired by this one. Jorge and Celestino are excellent role models, and their example shows how creativity, ingenuity, and compassion can combine into rewarding work that can keep pets in their homes with the people who love them most.
If you are interested in volunteering for the existing program, email Jorge at jdelgado@humanesocietysoco.org or Celestino at cjimenez@humanesocietysoco.org.
Photos courtesy of Sonoma County Humane Society
Terry Ryder Sites lives in Yorkville with 4 cats and 1 husband. A graduate of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Clown College, and she writes a weekly column for the Anderson Valley Advertiser online edition.
Paying It Forward
High School Internships at Anderson Valley Restaurants
by Eden Kellner
In the heart of downtown Boonville is the Boonville Hotel & Restaurant. In business for thirty-five years, it is the legacy of the late Don and Sally Schmitt, founders of the French Laundry. The Schmitt family also owns The Apple Farm in Philo and are involved with Paysanne, Offspring restaurant, and the Farmhouse Mercantile. They are long-time local employers who have had generations of families work in their establishments.
How do businesses last through generations? They are rooted in the community. One of the tendrils of community is mentorship. Chef Perry Hoffman is a third-generation chef who has fond memories of being mentored in the kitchen by his grandmother, Sally Schmitt, whose recipes he still looks to for inspiration. Perry carries forward the practice of mentorship for the students at Anderson Valley High School by participating in an internship program through the Anderson Valley Education Foundation. Other young people find jobs there through the vast network of people who have been part of the Hotel family of employees.
Social anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wegner, founders of the Social Learning Lab, see internships as “legitimate peripheral participation … [which] provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice.” They stress the importance of immersion into a community where they learn, emulate, and mature within and into that group. Here, the community is the kitchen and the greater community of Anderson Valley. Anyone who has ever worked in a professional kitchen knows that it has its own culture with norms and practices that guide the relationships and the creation of the food. The chefs at Offspring and The Boonville Hotel cultivate a culture of exquisite delights while preparing the next generation to carry on the culinary traditions. This and other internships allow high school students to gain foundational knowledge that can open doors for future career opportunities.
Sammy Guerrero and Mariana Flores Almanza are two examples of students who flourished into integral employees of the kitchen culture at the Boonville Hotel and Offspring. After years of mentorship through high school, they are now employed as saucier and garde-manger, respectively. This means that Sammy is responsible for preparing the delectable tomato butter on the Gnocchi Alla Romana and the basil crema in the Confit Chicken Cannelloni, while Mariana proudly adds “dramatic touches” to the beet and pluot salad currently served at Offspring. These two budding chefs based their senior final projects on the lessons in the culinary arts that they learned at the Boonville Hotel.
Both Sammy and Mariana cite their moms as the first inspiration for their love of culinary arts. But both recently graduated seniors credit their internships as instrumental in shaping their future, developing their self-confidence and expanding their ideas of what is possible to achieve. Mariana says, “I used to be too shy to call back [a term used to repeat orders during service] or say much in general, but now I am able to call back with a full chest.” Sammy “could go on forever about how grateful” he is for everyone who shared their expertise in the kitchens.
Like Perry, these kids are a testament to mentoring relationships and the power of “absorbing a community’s modes of action and meaning as a part of the process of becoming a community member.” Mariana and Sammy both advise others to pursue internships and, as Sammy says, “listen and work hard.” Boonville is a small town, but the people who live here make a big impact on future generations.
Find out about internships and other student opportunities at andersonvalleyeducation.org.
References:
Klantzis, M., & Cope, B. (n.d.). Lave and Wenger on Situated Learning. New Learning Online. https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/supporting-material/lave-and-wenger-on-situated-learning
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 33, 29, 40.
Photos by Eden Kellner
Eden Kellner has worked in restaurants since she was 13 years old. She has worked at the Boonville Hotel and is currently embarking in a career as a first grade teacher at AV Elementary.
Bringing Back Beavers
A Potential Partner for Improving Water Quality and Preventing Wildfire
by Lisa Ludwigsen
A custom cowboy hat constructed of fine beaver fur will run you around $1,500 in downtown Santa Fe. To start the design process, the customer sits in a barber shop-like chair where a metal contraption is placed onto the head to calibrate each unique detail. (Despite appearances, I hear it only looks painful.) Though the beaver’s coarse outer fur is also used for hats, it is the soft underlayer of beaver fur that felts into a durable, waterproof, insulating material that also holds its shape. Most hats these days use rabbit, hare, or wool, so a beaver felt hat is a premium luxury.
It is precisely those superior qualities that led to the near extinction of beavers from North America and fundamentally changed the landscape across the continent, beginning over 500 years ago.
When Europeans arrived in North America in the 1500s, it is estimated that beavers could be found every two miles of a flowing waterway. According to the book Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, by Leila Philip, before the fur trade began, beavers were as common as squirrels.
It was easy pickings for fur traders. Great fortunes were made as pelts were sold and shipped throughout the growing American colonies and across Europe, especially since beavers had been hunted out in Europe as early as the 1300s. Beaver hats were ubiquitous. Take a look at an old black and white photo of men wearing tall top hats or bowlers and be assured that most of those hats were made from beaver.
While Native Americans managed beaver populations to ensure longevity, Europeans settlers shared no such concern. By the late 1800s, the American beaver population was decimated, ending the lucrative market and significantly altering the topography across the continent. The good news is that beavers are resilient, and successful reintroduction and conservation efforts, starting way back in the early 1900s, are restoring ecosystems and addressing impacts of droughts, fires, and even flooding, especially in the arid West.
Beavers’ ability to transform a running stream into a biologically diverse ecosystem is unmatched in nature. They alter the terrain by slowing the flow of water, spreading it out, and sinking it into the ground. While building strong, protective shelters, beavers transform streams into ponds, creating meadows, wetlands, and marshes that hold water on the surface and serve as important wildlife habitat. As the water slows and spreads, erosion is decreased, water tables rise, and aquifers are recharged. As a keystone species, their presence increases biodiversity, and they are necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy.
I recall hiking around a glacial lake in the Eastern Sierra wondering “who’s chopping down trees way back here?” I thought for a minute that I might find a cabin. Lifting my gaze a few degrees, I spotted the beaver lodge, which I had walked past and mistaken for a pile of debris washed from upstream. Yet another lesson for me in paying attention to my surroundings and looking a bit deeper!
Beavers are the largest North American rodent. They can hold their breath underwater for 15 minutes, are dexterous, and live in family units of parents and offspring up to a couple of years old. In times of scarcity, the offspring return to help with the work of the group. Beavers’ unique flat tails are used for balance and stability in and out of the water, to store fat, and to warn off unwelcome visitors with a loud thwap. They are called landscape architects for good reason. With long orange incisors, hefty rear feet measuring up to 7” long, and five-toed front feet, beavers can cut and drag trees up to 2’ in width and scoop volumes of mud to create impenetrable dams and lodges. They can cut down a 5” willow in three minutes. As vegetarians, they very efficiently eat the inner cambium layer of the tree and use the rest to build dams and lodges.
Though relatively plentiful again in parts of North America, the West still lacks healthy beaver populations. “We’ve worked hard to keep water from just passing through our rangeland,” said Loren Poncia, owner of Stemple Creek Ranch in west Marin County. As a producer of grass-fed, grass-finished beef, Poncia and his crew have planted over 10,000 trees along five miles of Stemple Creek. “We planted the trees, mostly willows, to build habitat and decrease erosion. It’s been a big success. The creek now runs year-round in some places.”
Taking restoration efforts a step further, Poncia is working with California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and Occidental Arts & Ecology Center (OAEC) WATER Institute to study the potential impacts of introducing beavers to the watershed. “As ranchers, we want to grow forage on our creek-adjacent land, so spreading out the water and slowing the water cycle is very desirable.” The team is installing beaver dam analogues, which are human-made beaver dams, along the creek as a step to determine long term effects. Poncia’s enthusiasm about restoring habitat and reintroducing beavers into the watershed is palpable. Though many people have considered beavers a nuisance and kill them without a second thought, he is part of a growing group of ranchers able to see beavers as integral to a sustainable food system.
It was once thought that beavers were native to only California’s Central Valley and northern mountain watersheds, but research by the OAEC WATER Institute shifted that assumption, which now includes watersheds with traditional coho salmon populations, including the upper reaches of the Eel River in Mendocino County. OAEC is an enthusiastic advocate of restoring beavers to California’s wild and rural spaces. Their efforts include their “Bring Back the Beaver” campaign, created “to improve water supply for humans and the environment and increase resilience to drought and climate change” by including the management of beavers into the state’s policies and regulation.
The Mendocino Conservation District has been monitoring a family of beavers outside of Willits since 2018 as it has grown and flourished. Year-round pools now exist in areas that were seasonal vernal ponds. Those local beavers may be descendants of a relocation program in 58 California counties— including Mendocino, Napa, and Marin—during the 1940s, which increased statewide populations from a miniscule 1,300 to more than 20,000 by 1950. In some cases, beavers were parachuted in from low-flying airplanes.
“Slow it, sink it, spread it, store it, share it,” was coined by Brock Dolman, cofounder of the WATER Institute, to explain how we should consider our relationship with water in the West. Wet and moist places don’t readily burn, and beavercreated wetlands actually hold excess water underneath the surface during flooding events.
Beavers are captivating creatures, perhaps because of their unique appearance or their tenacious work ethic and impressive results. Understanding their beneficial impacts on our water quantity and quality, as well as our resilience to wildfire, can transform public opinion of them from a destructive nuisance to a productive partner in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
Learn more:
• Beaver Land, How One Weird Rodent Made America by Leila Philip
• Beavers: A Rodent Success Story, CBS Sunday Morning
• Bring Back the Beaver Campaign, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
www.oaec.org/projects/bring-back-the-beaver-campaign/
Cover photo by Scott Younkin courtesy of Pexels
Photo top left by Lisa Ludwigsen. Photo top right from game camera operated by Mendocino County Resource Conservation District: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR5K0y15f8w
MendoSeed & Xa Kako Dile:
The Urgent Work of Reclaiming Our Seeds
by Julia Dakin
Two years ago, I co-founded the organization Going to Seed, which supports food growers by helping them learn how to adapt crops to their local conditions. We received a grant from the Clif Family Foundation to support farmers, and though it’s an international organization, there are three Mendocino County farms in our grant program: Nye Ranch, which focuses on adapting sweet corn to cool coastal summers; Earthlings Veganics, which will grow melons, hull-less squash and flour corn; and Open Circle Seeds, which is adapting dry-farm watermelons in Potter Valley.
One of Going to Seed’s initiatives supports adaptation projects in local communities, including right here on the coast. At a presentation last year, about 40 people got inspired and committed to growing and adapting three heat-loving species to this cold coastal environment: sweet corn, melons, and butternut squash. But in spite of the enthusiasm, we did not receive enough seed returns to sustain the project. Participants wanted more education and support. It became clear that a culture shift was needed, with more people and resources to make it work.
A revised vision of education in addition to seed sharing evolved, and we named it MendoSeed: a mobile community seed-cleaning resource that would also function as a collection and distribution system for local seeds. We even got a physical home when the Caspar Community Center gave us half a garage to use for storage, which has become crucial.
I see adaptive crop production as a matter of life and death. The state of agriculture and the quality and quantity of non-patented, organically grown seeds is an emergency, especially in areas that face climate or pest challenges. In addition, corporate control of genetics is an existential threat to long term food security. A seed’s genes control its nutrient density, which has declined over the years in produce grown with mass market seeds. Genetics also determine the ability to grow in varied and challenging environments.
Genetics is a challenging concept for a lot of gardeners, yet drought (or fog) tolerance, disease resistance, and nutrient density are mostly genetic. In spite of this, many food growers spend much of their time and energy talking about soil health and management practices. These are also important, but I believe regenerative agriculture is missing a giant piece of the puzzle, and until we realize that our food system is under threat, we will continue to fertilize, spray, coddle, and worry about crops that are not adapted for the precise growing conditions at hand. Shifting agriculture must start with local models like this.
And it isn’t just the lack of locally adapted seeds that is an emergency. The bigger emergency is how overpowered food growers have become. We completely depend on those seed catalogs and websites. “Local food” almost entirely depends on patented hybrids from very far away. Can that really be considered local? We’re going to need to work hard to empower ourselves to become active participants in the crops we depend on.
As an under-resourced community seed project, it’s going to take us a while to get people even thinking about these issues, let alone feeling confident enough to grow, collect, and share their seeds back with us. During this time of education, expansion, workshops, and seed sharing, we need more financial support to keep going. We have applied for several grants to support building a template and supportive resources for local projects, but funding remains scarce.
While I was struggling with the challenges of sustaining this fledgling seed effort, a serendipitous series of events led to a conversation that gave me hope. I was supposed to go to Tennessee to a seed conference as part of Going to Seed. But in the end, I couldn’t get on a plane because a raccoon had snatched my purse with my ID (and lunch) off my doorstep while packing my car for the airport at 4am. I had to stay home, and gifted with a few unscheduled days, I was able to spend a full day accompanying U’ilani (U’i) Wesley of Xa Kako Dile: on a trip to speak with Sherwood Valley tribal women. On the long drive there and back, we talked a lot about seeds.
U’i had had a journey of her own while traveling around Northern California during the previous weeks. It felt like that raccoon snatching my purse was a push in a direction that might make things possible, and I’d finally found somebody that shared my sense of urgency and could be a partner in the next phase of growing a movement that could shift agriculture.
As a result of our talks, MendoSeed is integrating with Xa Kako Dile, an indigenous women-led and -directed non-profit doing work in the space of indigenous knowledge and land stewardship. Their location in Caspar will be incorporating a lot more seed work, including gatherings, concerts, volunteers, and growing for seeds as well as food. We are going to work together to secure a fuel-efficient vehicle that can be the SeedMobile and travel around Northern California with a focus on Tribal communities. Our growing seed collection can be housed at Xa Kako Dile. I am assisting with grant writing and fundraising for Xa Kako Dile:, while U’i is a charismatic and visionary voice for the project.
Stay tuned to learn and participate in local seed exchanges and ventures. Our group feels strongly that there is not a moment to waste. We will literally be growing our future.
Reflections from U’ilani Wesley
In my work with Xa Kako Dile:, I work with tribes around Mendocino County. There is a lot of diabetes because of the food that is most accessible to a lot of tribal elders—the USDA food program providing tribes with “commodity foods” is literally killing people. People need vegetables to be healthy, but they don’t have access to them. So, for the last year we’ve been growing food and sharing it with elders from tribes around the county: Sherwood, Big Valley, Coyote Valley, Pinoleville, Round Valley, and Redwood Valley.
The food people eat is either medicine or it’s poison. Through centuries of colonialism, a lot of people have lost their connection with Mother Earth, and with traditional culture. Eating plants and good food can help to both bring it back and restore health.
I was hearing from my mentors and Indigenous leaders that we need to focus on the seeds as well as food. We’ve lost much of our cultural connection to seeds, and people don’t have access to good, local seeds that can grow good, nutritious food. The most accessible seeds are purchased from places like the Dollar Store or Walmart. For many generations, seeds have been grown by corporations that use a lot of fertilizers and chemicals, or the harvest they produce isn’t very nutritious. And then we keep buying them every year, because it’s not in our culture anymore to think of seeds as tied to a place, tied to us. So, we need to make healing produce available to people, but we also need to make sure they have a connection with the seeds, and with each other, and the earth. We need to re-connect with the mentality that seeds are our relatives, as Native peoples have thought of them for the past thousands of years. This will require changing the culture. Singing together, working together.
Learn more at goingtoseed.org/pages/community-seed-projects.
Julia Dakin grows food and seeds in Caspar, where she has been adapting some warm-season crops to coastal summers, and sells seeds locally through Quail Seeds. A couple of years ago she co-founded a non-profit called Going to Seed.
Photos by Yvonne Boyd
California Scheming
The Tangled Landscape of California Cannabis Regulations
by Jim Roberts
As the long shadows of fall arrive, farmers throughout the North Coast prepare for another harvest full of anticipation, excitement, and the usual anxiety of bringing in the bounty. Our small farm sits on a ridge with a vine-covered stone house that has sweeping views of the fertile Anderson Valley, encompassing old growth redwood forests and rolling hills patch-worked with vineyards. Nothing could feel more idyllic, as our postage-stamp plot of 160 cannabis plants ripens in the honey-hued golden hour of autumn. Nothing could also feel so precarious, as we help launch new political campaigns that advocate for a fair playing field, resources for equity operators, access to banking and capital, and sensible policy, not to mention respect from our neighbors as well as our community and state leaders.
As part of the LGBTQ community, I know the fight all too well. The marginalized and the stigmatized are the scapegoat for all of society’s ills. I watched a whole community die without resources, support, or compassion during the AIDS crisis. Then there were those years of CAMP raids—“Campaign Against Marijuana Planting”—that terrorized communities, putting them under military-style assault by our government’s war on drugs. Decades later, it can only be expected that a trauma response would be triggered as I watch the systematic culling of small family farms, which were promised a leg up with the passing of Proposition 64. You dare not ask what can happen next after your insurance company drops you, your bank threatens to call the loans of your other business, and legislation moves past state lawmakers to the Governor’s desk that could completely shut you down. All for a plant that has been cultivated for thousands of years for medicinal, spiritual, and recreational use.
Seven years after the end of cannabis prohibition, the environment could not be more challenging, especially for our small cannabis farms in our legacy growing region. Proposition 64 laid a roadmap to bring into the fold hundreds of small heritage farms, which were then operating under Proposition 215, better known as the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, a California law permitting the use of medical cannabis. This is what 57% of our state residents voted for, with the intention to create a five-year grace period that would allow only farms that were one acre or under to be licensed by the state.
The five-year head start for small farmers was a concession specifically designed to win support from—or at least quell some of the opposition by—growers in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle, who worried that well-funded corporate cannabis interests would crush them right out of the gate. The delay mechanism in Prop 64 would give them time to get licensed under the new state regulatory regime and carve a toehold in the new legal marketplace for recreational pot.
Unfortunately, at the 11th hour, lobbyists for the most well-resourced cannabis start-ups like Steven DeAngelo’s FLRish, Inc and Grupo Flor, based in Salinas, were pushing on lawmakers. They are thought to be some of the force that influenced the change of rules put out by the California Food and Agriculture Department—rules that would open the playing field immediately for large scale industrial grows of cannabis. Looking back through articles and interviews at that time, all the predicted fears came true years later, when an over-production of flower by a multimillion dollar investment machine forced a collapse in the emerging market. That collapse ruined the future of families in our communities, forced farmers to sell their property, and created an oligopoly where the most powerful and well resourced could push the market into any direction they willed, driving out competition and crushing the little guy.
At the same time, local politics and lobbying here in Mendocino County were stacking up with a drama of their own, slowly building up to another extinction event for small legacy farmers—who were jumping through all the hoops to conform to the new regulations set forth in Prop 64. With large-scale production underway in counties such as Monterey and Santa Barbara, a few home-grown local cannabis brands such as Flow Canna and Henry’s, now backed with rounds of outside investment funding, wanted an on-ramp to compete with some of the biggest players in the state. Carrying the weight of the Mendocino region branding with them, the stakes were high. Historic growing regions in the Emerald Triangle garner international recognition, not to mention historical significance in California’s cannabis culture.
Lobbyists for these companies now had the ear of key local government leaders, convincing them that the only tenable format was large-scale cultivation. To further exacerbate the situation, those forces had an ally running the local cannabis department, who also was a strong proponent of industrial cannabis agriculture. With these power plays in motion, the applications and paperwork of hundreds of small family farms were all but ignored, let alone processed for permits. Our file—even after rounds of submitting duplicate paperwork and constant follow up—sat untouched for almost seven years. Fewer than six sun-grown cultivation applicants/ permits out of 1300+ in our county had made their way to an annual license, the lowest success rate in the state.
With a tenfold growth expansion in play by local government leadership, communities finally started to rally, with a gathering of signatures and a punitive referendum in the making to shut those expansion plans down. Little did we know that shortly afterwards, the California market would completely collapse, taking out over 54% of the market value of the largest players in Salinas alone. Unfortunately, valuable time has been wasted, pushing out local farmers, complicating an already difficult process, and creating unprecedented stresses on the greater local economy. It’s hard to find a restaurant, grocery store, or shop owner that isn’t wringing their hands as local dollars have completely vanished. Some may try to box the troubles within the cannabis community alone, but in reality the grave economic fallout cannot be contained.
Whether we like it or not, our communities have been sustained for decades by the money generated from the weed industry, traditional and legal. Michael Katz, Director of the non-profit Mendocino Cannabis Alliance, states, “County sales taxes are down over 5% throughout the county, most markedly in the Ag and Gardening sectors where the most recent year-to-year decrease was over 42%. When our local cannabis community is thriving, the dollars they generate stay within the community and contribute significantly to our local economy, both through purchases at local businesses and by infusing the county coffers with significant tax and fee revenues.” He adds, “Since the inception of the program, local cannabis taxes have generated over $20 million for the county, nearly $8 million more than projected. The harder it gets to operate a small cannabis business in this environment, the more of these businesses we will lose, all to the detriment of the entire community.”
As we examine the series of events that has brought us to this place, it is equally important to take stock of where we are now and the possibilities of what lies ahead. Thanks to an intervention from the state and a new commitment from local leadership, the Mendocino County Cannabis Program is finally operating in a positive and productive manner. State financial assistance has allowed for additional resources, as well as consultants, to work through the backlog of cultivation sites which already have provisional state licensing. For those local small farms and brands that are still in business, the future remains precarious, but our infrastructure, talent, and idyllic growing region can carry us through to a new chapter in what is projected to be a $5.4 billion annual sales market by 2030 in California alone.
It is now becoming obvious that a true craft model of small production is not only viable, but will be in demand for the years ahead. We have noticed this with our Bohemian Chemist brand over the past few years, as we market to and develop relationships with retail partners across the state. The industry has become far more educated about sungrown cannabis—with its minimal carbon footprint—as well as the quality of flower that comes from a farm with sustainable growing practices.
Cannabis enthusiasts are also very interested in the history of California consumption culture. The state has even awarded a large grant to study the North Coast growing regions, and specifically the legacy story. The grant is tied to Cal Poly Humboldt’s Cannabis Studies Program, with the goal of preserving the history, value, and diversity of California’s rural legacy cannabis genetics and the communities that steward them.
A primary lead in this work is Genine Coleman of the non-profit Origins Council, who represents over 800 family farms across Northern California, most of which are cultivating 1/2 acre or less of cannabis. “For me, this study is about cultural preservation, and healing our communities from the impacts of the War on Drugs through quantifying and honoring the tremendous agricultural contributions California legacy cannabis has offered, and will continue to offer the world,” says Coleman.
In addition to her work in preserving and protecting legacy culture and communities, Genine is one of the main architects of California’s Senate Bill 67, which ratified appellations of origin for cannabis cultivation in the state. This is the first program of its type, and cannabis is the only crop outside of grapes to have a program that is based on terroir. The program has gone through several rounds of development and is scheduled to start accepting petitions in early 2024. In essence, once a petition for an appellation is submitted and accepted, only cannabis within that region which adheres to the specific guidelines set forth in that petition will be able to use the appellation name with its branding and labeling. This was another strong motivation of well-resourced outside corporate interests to gain a foothold in established international growing regions such as Mendocino and Humboldt counties. Thankfully, with the halting of large-scale expansion in Mendocino County, this control remains in the hands of our local family cultivators and the communities they live in.
Coleman states, “The existing legacy farms that have entered legalization, working towards compliance and business viability against all odds, deserve everyone’s deepest respect. To do anything but support these families—and the vast majority of legacy cannabis are family-owned and -operated businesses—is unethical and foolish.”
Coleman continues, “California is home to a wealth of incredible talent, genetics, and innovation when it comes to craft cannabis. Immediate direct-to-consumer marketing and sales opportunities are urgently needed if we are to preserve our existing craft producers, genetics, and products, much less grow the sector.”
Following a similar trajectory that the budding California wine industry tracked five decades ago, there is a host of auxiliary support industries that come along with the emerging craft category. Cannabis tourism is only just beginning to take shape, as enthusiasts want to plan their travel holidays with weed in mind. Our Madrones and Brambles properties in Anderson Valley have joined outfits like the Plant Shop in Ukiah and Sol de Mendocino in Mendocino Village to cater to cannabis tourism by featuring local products, producing events, educational workshops, farmers markets, and more to increase local visitors.
This year, Visit Mendocino County (VMC), the county’s local tourism arm, fully embraced this new travel sector, and their commitment supports local, Mendocino-grown brands. VMC has set out to make our region the leader in the state when it comes to cannabis tourism, and in so doing, has enlisted the services of Brian Applegarth, who runs a travel consulting firm and was the founder of the Cannabis Travel Association International. Applegarth compiles available data, metrics, and studies, and he likes to point out that 37% of active leisure travelers want to participate in at least one cannabis-related activity while on vacation. Keeping in mind that this segment of travelers also enjoys wine, hiking and the outdoors, and memorable dining experiences, it is easy to imagine how the whole ecosystem of the local economy could benefit.
So as the long harvest continues and we bring in this year’s flower, I feel hopeful despite the precarious road ahead. As a family, we have to take stock and find gratitude. We can continue to grow the same crop that my mom did well into her 80s. The farm continues to evolve, as we are now working with scientists and MDs to study our breeding work, seeking cultivars that possess rare and complex cannabinoid profiles that can offer therapeutic benefits. We are also doing preservation work to keep heirloom and landrace genetics available in a fickle market where they are quickly being lost.
In this daily work of ours, the outside pressures can seem insurmountable. But to weather the difficult times, we have decided to latch on to something that fosters excitement and meaning, whether it is developing a new cultivar, supporting local farmers, or finding ways to connect and lift up the greater community we all live in.
Jim Roberts is a second generation legacy cannabis farmer in Mendocino County. He is an owner of The Bohemian Chemist brand as well as The Madrones and The Brambles in Anderson Valley. Roberts is on the Board of Directors of West Business Development Center and one of CalOSBA’s 34 Entrepreneur and Economic Mobility Task Force members.
Plowshares Meals-On-Wheels
Nourishing Elders & Community for Over 25 Years
by Torrey Douglass
Volunteers gather in the Plowshares 2000+ square foot dining room in south Ukiah, a cavernous, echoing space with industrial kitchen equipment along the back wall and doors to offices along the side. People cluster in small groups, packing food into bags crowded on top of the folding tables, chatting over pastries, counting quarts of milk in their blue plastic crates, and setting up steam tables for a hot food assembly line. There is an unembellished practicality about everything, and the volunteers seem to inhabit that sweet spot where busy and relaxed overlap. This is the center of operations for the Ukiah area Meals-On-Wheels program, and like the room it inhabits, there is more going on than first meets the eye.
Meals-On-Wheels has been operating for 26 years in Ukiah, originally managed by the Senior Center. Today, Meals-On-Wheels is part of Plowshares, a community dining center started in 1983 to provide free meals to hungry community members. The program was initially handed off to Plowshares for a short period in 1997, then permanently in 2002. Program Manager Rhonda De Los Santos came on board at roughly the same time as Meals-On-Wheels, and she now oversees all of the Plowshares programs. Rhonda shares, “I just love feeding our seniors. And I get to meet so many wonderful people.” When remembering the early days of the Meals-On-Wheels program, she reflects, “When I got hired, we had three routes with 15 to 16 people each. The need has grown.”
It definitely has. In May of this year, with the help of a committed group of Redwood Valley volunteers, Meals-On-Wheels added its ninth route. In 2022, the program fed 156 seniors seven meals a week, for a total of over 56,000 meals delivered over the course of the year. This year, they are serving nearly 200 Meals-On-Wheels participants and are on track to provide almost 70,000 meals. Originally the program dropped off a hot meal five days a week, but after acquiring a reach-in freezer in 2018, they began to drop off extra frozen meals on Thursdays and Fridays to see participants through the weekend.
Not surprisingly, the COVID pandemic forced the team to adopt a new approach, one they continue today. Volunteers drive the nine routes twice a week, delivering three meals on Mondays and four on Thursdays for each participant. A driver stays behind the wheel and a runner walks the food up to the front door. Volunteer Coordinator Makayah Tollow quickly learned to refrain from reassigning volunteers to different routes. When he tried shifting volunteers from one route to another, several protested, emphasizing that they’ve been serving the same participants week after week for ten years or more. CEO Michelle Shaw elaborates, “Sometimes we’re the only person our recipients see during the week,” and out of that regular contact, year after year, lasting relationships evolve.
Some of the 100 volunteers who regularly help the program have been coming for decades. They serve as cooks, packers, drivers, and runners. Volunteer Lloyd moved to Ukiah in 2002 when his wife was ill, and he found himself looking for a meaningful way to spend his time after she passed. “It’s a godsend for me. It gets me out of bed in the morning,” Lloyd shares. He’s been volunteering for 20 years, and says after every route he always feels like “I don’t have a problem in the world.”
Margaret, who volunteers as a driver and assembly line worker, has been helping Plowshares for an impressive 35 years. She quips, “We’re like Santa Claus—everybody’s glad to see us!” And it’s easy to understand why. The gifts they bring include bread, green salads, fresh fruit, dessert, and a weekly quart of milk. Frozen meals can feature ground beef and macaroni with a side of garden squash, chicken with mashed potatoes and broccoli, or pork chops with herb roasted potatoes and grilled zucchini. Vegetarian options are available and always include a source of protein. Michelle says they do their best to introduce new recipes into the mix to avoid repetition, but they are limited by the food that is donated.
Those donations primarily come from Ukiah supermarkets like Raley’s, FoodMaxx, Lucky, Costco, Safeway, Walmart, and Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op. The program also partners with Redwood Empire and Fort Bragg food banks, so when a large volume of food is donated—like a pallet of rice, pasta, or canned foods—multiple organizations can take advantage of it while it is still usable. Some ingredients do have to be purchased, but those can be bought through the Redwood Empire Food Bank, which lowers the cost.
Born and raised in Ukiah, Michelle Shaw was hired as the Meals-On-Wheels CEO in 2018. When asked about her least favorite aspect of the role, she admits that she is not fond of the stress that comes from relying on uncertain funding. But for her, the flip side of that coin is also the best part of the job: “Making it all work, regardless.”
86% of the funding comes from private donations, 11% from grants, and the remaining 3% from other sources. They usually do not qualify for federal funding because they are a “no questions asked” program. Besides their annual holiday season appeal, Plowshares hosts two major fundraisers a year—an Empty Bowls event in October and BBQ-On-Wheels in May. For the Empty Bowls event, ticket holders receive a hand-crafted ceramic bowl, made by either local ceramicist Jan Hoyman or the Mendocino College Ceramics Club, along with their dinner of homemade soup and tri-tip dinner for two, with an abundance of sides. The BBQ-On- Wheels offers a choice of tri-tip, chicken, or both, plus potato salad, fresh green salad, bread, and dessert for four people. If you’re still hungry, you can add a family serving of mac and cheese, and, as always, a vegetarian option is available.
Jim and his wife Patty have both volunteered for over 10 years. When asked to explain the longevity of service from so many volunteers, Jim says it is the relationships with the people. He glances down at his phone to check the date before confirming that one of his participants should be getting knee replacement surgery that same morning, and he’ll be visiting him in the hospital later. He even goes so far to say, “It’s not the food they care about, it’s the contact. It’s what makes us human.” In light of the Surgeon General’s statement earlier this year asserting that loneliness is a serious health risk for Americans, Jim concludes, “We are the solution to that.”
When discussing the people they serve, Jim comments that, “Nearly all of them are in difficult situations.” He says healthy boundaries are a must, and volunteers who get easily overwhelmed emotionally don’t last very long. That said, within those healthy boundaries, volunteers can often be found going above and beyond, like the time Craig returned to a participant’s home to fix their table after his shift ended. Volunteers will investigate if a typically responsive participant is not answering their door. More than once they’ve discovered someone stranded from a fall and in need of help. And if they notice anything amiss—things like slurred speech or symptoms of poor treatment—they can reach out to the participant’s emergency contact or refer the situation to staff who can find the resources to help.
Patty worked as a public health nurse for 40 years before she retired. She talks about the difficulties she experienced when trying to deliver to one participant, in particular, a reclusive gentleman who would not open the door to accept food deliveries. Instead he had her come to the kitchen window so he could scrutinize her before cautiously opening it. The gap in the window was narrow, and she wanted to prolong the conversation, so she took one food item out at a time and talked about it before passing it through. During one delivery she pulled out an entire box of Girl Scout cookies and the shy man’s face blossomed into a huge smile. She hears from his neighbors that he has become less isolated and standoffish since joining the program.
Patty leans in like she’s sharing a secret, confiding with a mischievous smile, “The main reason I’m here doesn’t have anything to do with the participants. An older person feels isolated, and here I meet new people, find friends—it’s a huge boost for mental health.” Then she and Jim head back to the steam tables to help finish dishing out the hot meals before they are added to the bags, at which point drivers and runners will leave for their routes. In less than two hours they will be finished, having distributed their bounty for another day.
Patty might downplay the altruistic aspect of her participation with Plowshares, but Makayah holds no illusions about how essential his volunteers are to the program. “What surprised me most when I started working here is how everything is pretty much run by volunteers. We have a small staff, so everything we do would not be possible without them. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it—spending so many hours of their time here when they could be doing anything else.”
It’s a straightforward process—make some meals, then deliver them to low income seniors who need them. Yet the benefits are much more profound than simply filling some bellies. What Meals-On-Wheels provides is nothing less than community resilience, built on a virtuous circle—the volunteers find joy in giving, and that joy inspires more generosity. Through a multitude of friendly interactions and good deeds large and small, the program weaves a safety net for people who would otherwise face increased stress and struggles in their lives. And in the end, everyone involved comes away nourished, in more ways than one.
Plowshares Peace & Justice Center / Meals-On-Wheels
1346 S State St, Ukiah
(707) 462-8582 | PlowsharesFeeds.org
Free hot lunch served Mon - Fri, 11:30am - noon
Saturday & Sunday 3:00pm
Cover photo by Michelle Shaw. Additional photos were provided by Torrey Douglass.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
The Challenges and Struggles of Farming
by Holly Madrigal
Some hold a romantic ideal of agricultural life—the pace of your day responding to the season, the pride and accomplishment of growing your food, of feeding your community. They imagine the satisfaction of a day well worked, rising with the sun, and living authentically. What may not be so obvious is the financial stress, the envy of things like a paid vacation, letting go of simple ideas like retirement or even home-ownership.
The average age of farmers in the United States remains stubbornly high, 60 years old, according to the USDA. Over the last five years, Mendocino County has lost numerous small farmers. Some have relocated to other states where land is cheaper, and others have left the agricultural field altogether. Farmers, eaters, and those who believe in the importance of a local food system are seeking solutions to keep farmers here and thriving.
What follows are some thoughts from local farmers—not necessarily answers to these problems, but areas of concern that would be helpful to address if we want to retain our farmers.
SUCCESSION
Dan Todd, Todd Organics
My parents and grandparents were farming in Southern California for many years until freeways and housing developments took over their orange groves. In the late 1950s, they bought adjoining cattle ranches in Potter Valley and planted pear trees, prune trees, and walnuts, in addition to raising cows. That’s where I grew up, on the farm helping out.
In 1977, the bank and I bought some of my dad’s pear orchards, and I began farming on my own. It’s very different when you are making all the farming decisions yourself instead of just doing what you are told needs to be done. In 1987, after a lot of research and talking to old timers who had farmed prior to our modern-day chemicals, I switched over some of our orchards to organic. I was very much an early adopter of organic farming.
I managed to make it work, and by 1992 we had transitioned all 70 acres of pears to certified organic, which possibly made us the largest organic pear grower in the United States. Our best pears went to the fresh market under our Todd Ranch label, and our processing pears went to baby food and juice. Earth’s Best was one of our main buyers.
My wife and I raised our three children on the farm. The saying was, every successful farmer in Potter Valley had a wife that worked in town, and we were no exception, as my wife was a nurse. And we had a good life. Much of our success was hard work, educated guesses, and some good fortune.
The Todd Family with Dan and Alice on the left, Andy and Sarah on the right, and (grand) kids in the middle
Rachel Britton
Our kids went off to college and started their careers. And I wanted that, I wanted them to make their own decisions about their lives. About 10 years ago, my eldest son Andy reached out. He and his wife and their twin boys had decided that they wanted to come home and farm with us. He wanted to raise his boys the way he was raised, with ponds, hills, and the freedom to roam. His wife Sarah was interested but uncertain about leaving Santa Rosa. They decided that it needed to work for everyone. The farm was successful enough to support one family, but the question was could it support two? Through a combination of a few good pear years, and after developing some good contracts for wine grapes, they were able to make it work. They sat down with the bank and, after reviewing the equity and other factors, they decided to do it.
Now we’ve been farming 160 acres together for a bit more than ten years. The farm has grown, and my grandkids can run between the houses. The challenge, of course, is that I have multiple children, and it is important that, when I think about the future, I think about how to pass on the farm to the next generation. What I learned through a succession planning seminar with American Ag Credit was that “fair is not equal, and equal is not fair.”
For estate planning purposes, the farming operation and the land both have value. What we now have is a result of the hard work we have both put in over the last ten years. Andy has a lot of “sweat equity” in the farm and will inherit the farming operation. The land will be equally divided between him and his siblings. I believe they all feel good about this direction. When people ask me how I’m doing, I tell them that I am working harder than I have ever worked, but I am enjoying it more than I ever have.
CAPITAL
Rachel Britton, Mendocino Grain Project
I acquired the Mendocino Grain Project in 2020. It is both a farm—we grow grain, quinoa, and other staple crops—and also a grain-processing business for us and other regional farmers. We work with farmers in Humboldt, Lake, and other small producers in Mendocino County. Our vision is to make dry goods available locally. I sometimes call dry goods the last frontier of the local food system.
I bought this business, which was started by Doug Mosel in 2009. Back then, the Anderson Valley Foodshed, the Willits Grange, and Willits Economic LocaLization group (WELL) had done a local food assessment and identified that one farm product we did not have any of in the county was dry goods. No one was growing oats, beans, quinoa, or wheat on a larger scale. So Doug embarked on this journey of rebuilding the infrastructure to make this happen. [Learn more about the Mendocino Grain Project in our Fall 2022 Word of Mouth article.]
Around 2020, I had been working with John Jeavons’ Ecology Action nonprofit for six years and was looking around for my next step. At that same time, Doug was looking for someone to take on the Grain Project. Well, what are the limitations there? For one, there is a huge financial limitation. What young farmer has $200,000 sitting around and thinks, “Yes, I would like to purchase all of this old farm equipment you have carefully restored.” I am in a unique situation where I lost both of my parents fairly young, and so I did have an inheritance to invest. It was a total hustle, but I was able to make it work.
But this is a huge issue for our farming community. There is a massive disconnect between the young people who have the energy and capacity to do the work, because most people do not have that level of capital. You can lease land to grow grain, but the equipment is expensive, as well as the additional processing required, like threshing and cleaning. Quinoa comes out of the field very bitter and needs to be washed. A critical mass of farmers who are growing dry goods are required to make this pencil out. We reach out and collaborate with as many people as we can to make it work.
The other key component is eaters. We need people who care enough about flavor and the importance of our local food system that they are willing to make those decisions in the marketplace. We have a CSA for our grains, which helps us because the payments are made upfront in the spring and help us through the fluctuations of cash flow throughout the year. And it’s flexible because we have learned that our customers are highly personal: some people eat oats every morning, some are gluten-free, and some never eat beans, so we have now made our subscription customizable.
One of the reasons I am so passionate about this work is that dry goods are calorie dense and storable; they don’t require refrigeration. I signed on the dotted line for this business in February of 2020. It was a wild time. And if you remember, people began baking en masse. And I was so green, I had just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Our sales from April to May grew 60-fold, which some might put in the category of “unsustainable growth.”
I grew up in a small community in Iowa, and I like to question my belief systems. And 2020 was such an educational year because I got to really think: Is local food actually more sustainable and more resilient? This experience was affirming because, for a time we were the only flour available on the Ukiah Coop shelves. We are hyper-localized. Even a small producer like Bob’s Red Mill serves a larger population and had to be rationed between stores. Our focus was getting local food on local shelves. And we are nimble in that we work with an educational nonprofit that works in Marin. I am only able to physically mill 100 pounds per day, but this nonprofit had the exact kind of mill that we used, so they were able to loan it to us so that we could double our production. So this collaboration saved us.
LAND
derived from multiple sources
A friend shared that often when farmers are just starting out, they are on a shoestring budget. That was true in his case. He and his partner were able to lease land quite affordably when they started just out of college. The challenge with that model is that, like with any rental, all the blood, sweat, and tears invested could be lost if the property gets sold or if you have to vacate. Renters do not get to keep the equity if the owners decide to move on. This can add to the already stressful lifestyle of a farmer.
According to my friend, there are ways to mitigate the risks. Finding an aging rancher or farmer who may be considering retirement, and who will let you learn on the land without the risks of ownership, is one strategy. This will allow the tenant farmers to glean valuable information that will be useful for when they are able to buy their own property. Without the burden of paying a mortgage, a farmer might be able to invest in the development of mobile infrastructure, which could go with them if they have to move.
Another couple that left when farming became unsustainable for them commented that Mendocino County is located just outside of the sweet spot: ideally within a one-hour drive of a city of more than 100,000, as suggested by farming leaders like Joel Salitin. Santa Rosa qualifies, but it is hard for Mendocino County farmers to compete with the climate and access to flat fertile land that Sonoma County farms have. Local farms here typically do not grow on a larger scale to sell to restaurants and grocery stores. Though the farmers markets can provide a decent income, they represent a fairly small portion of the eaters in Mendocino County. Groups like the MendoLake Food Hub have been seeking to bridge this gap by consolidating the production and distribution power of small farms.
Our planning bureaucracy is also a barrier to small producers. It’s not a simple thing to build a roadside farmstand or hoop house that could improve a farm’s economic outlook. The permitting process can stymie the most diligent citizen. Drought has brought several local farms to their knees, and the investment required to address that issue is significant.
The challenges facing those who grow food are serious. And we as a culture need to prioritize lowering those barriers if we want local food security. Groups do exist: The Greenhorns provide a professional resource to young farmers seeking to make a go of it, and FarmLink connects retiring farmers with young people looking for land. We need to demand that our local elected officials enact policies to reduce barriers to making small farm improvements. And finally, as those who eat food and support local agriculture, we need to use our buying power to support our neighborhood farmers. The saying goes, use it or lose it. I think, in this case, it is support it or it may soon be gone. I extend a deep appreciation and thank you to those who remain.
An Ounce of Prevention
Measure P Empowers the Fire Safe Council To Do More, Better
by Torrey Douglass
When Measure P passed in Mendocino County last November with 55.8% of voters in favor, supporters understood it as a long-needed, stable funding source for local fire departments. And it certainly is that. The majority of our fire departments are staffed by volunteers, so if you live in Mendocino County, it’s likely that you know someone who volunteers for a fire department, or even volunteer yourself. To survive, these departments are active in the community, fundraising and educating residents about the value of their services, visible at local events like the county fair and organizing events like toy drives and July 4th picnics. The departments are high visibility organizations with lots of community support.
But there’s another aspect to Measure P that is equally important, even if it is less well known. This is the prevention portion of the measure which funds the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC). Since 2003, MCFSC has been working to educate Mendocino County residents and provide programs to help them make their homes and property more resilient to wildfires. They’ve subsisted on grants for years, but thanks to Measure P, funding will be both consistent and predictable, allowing programs to escape the boom/bust cycle of grant funding and instead have ongoing support to expand their benefits to a much wider group of recipients.
Executive Director Scott Cratty has been working with MCFSC since January 2020. When asked about the activity of the council, he took a moment before admitting, “We do so many damn things it’s hard to cover it all.” The variety and scope of the many projects are all based on an understanding that wildfire is a reality for people living in California, and the steps we’ve taken for our homes and on our land will make the biggest difference in saving lives and property.
Scott explains, “Decades ago, it became clear that earthquakes were a part of nature in California, and we began the process of adapting how we build. It is equally clear that wildfire is also a basic part of nature here and is possibly an even larger threat to our communities. But we are just at the start of working to take the steps we need to adapt to it.”
The council’s website is packed full of helpful information about changes you can apply to your home and property so they will be more resilient when wildfires arrive. Maintaining defensible space 100 feet out from your home is an essential step. Ideally there should be nothing flammable in the 5 feet immediately surrounding the home, only thin and low vegetation from 5-30 feet, and low grass, cleared brush, limbed-up trees, and well-spaced vegetation from 30-100 feet—all healthy and well maintained with dead material removed.
Maintaining that space can take a lot of work, but fortunately there is a program to support low income, elderly, and/or disabled residents. It’s called the Defensible Space Assistance for Income-Eligible program, and interested property owners can sign up on the website (firesafemendocino.org). Accepted applicants will be assigned a team to do things like clear vegetation, clean roofs and gutters, and chip the removed vegetation.
The council is also currently offering free home assessments. These provide non-judgmental, non-binding analyses and recommendations, scheduling an assessor to come to your property and give advice on which fire safety measures should be the highest priority for you. The assessor can answer any of your questions and identify where your home is most vulnerable to wildfire. You can even organize a group of neighbors to schedule assessments together, walk through homes and properties as a group, and leave with an even better understanding of the issues and solutions.
Once your land and property have been “hardened,” the next step is to make sure the roads to and from your property are in the right shape for residents to leave and fire safety personnel to arrive. This involves clearing roadside brush, limbing-up trees so tall engines can pass through, and maintaining open flat spaces next to the road where multiple large fire trucks can park, turn around, and otherwise maneuver during a fire event.
Making the roads in your neighborhood safer for evacuating people and incoming fire fighters is a project that can be tackled cooperatively by forming a Neighborhood Fire Safe Council. There are already around 50 in the county, so check the MCFSC website to see if there’s one in your area already. If not, the site also provides guidance for starting your own. Working together allows local councils to participate in free community chipper days, attend leadership meetings, get help organizing projects, and get deals on equipment needed to get the job done.
Scott reflects on the necessity of working both individually and together to increase wildfire resilience for Mendocino County homes and properties. “It is essential for our long-term survival. The last decade has shown that the effort to suppress nature, which includes wildfire, by stomping out every fire, fails in the long run. It ultimately results in bigger, hotter, more dangerous fires. The good news is that, with education, work, and the proper support, we can reduce our risks tremendously. A recent study found that good home hardening and defensible space can reduce a home’s risk up to 75%. Getting to that point will involve a lot of steps from education about how to think about the dangers, to training and assistance with defensible space and home retrofitting, to regular systems for road clearing. We need to start on that journey now, which Measure P will enable.”
The funds provided by Measure P will not be available until 2024. For now, the council is working on specific grant-based projects, including $3.5M in CalFire funding, mostly for environmental assessments and specific fuel reduction projects. Among other projects, those grant dollars have paid for roadside fuel reduction along a substantial stretch of Orr Springs Road to allow safer passage for responders. A similar project in Willits’ Brooktrails area has also been completed.
The MCFSC is committed to applying the most recent and trusted science in the area of wildfire resilience and passing along that knowledge in ways that will provide the highest impact. With that in mind, they organized a course in March for contractors and hardware store workers throughout the county to share insights. That plastic skylight might be much cheaper than the glass version, but it will also melt quicker in the event of a wildfire, allowing dangerous embers into the home. In a similar vein, fences constructed with non-flammable materials in the zone six feet or closer to the home won’t carry fire to the structure. Educating the people who interact with home owners as they make decisions about home and land improvements will have a ripple effect and collectively make our county safer from wildfires.
Once Measure P funds do become available, they can be leveraged to attract federal dollars. Grants of that size and scope require well defined projects that have been identified, researched, and planned. That’s where Emily Tecchio comes in, whose role as the MCFSC County Coordinator includes finding and organizing those projects-in-waiting around the county, so that a plan is in place which can qualify for future federal grants when they become available. Emily shares, “It’s a big job, and with all the individuals, organizations, agencies, and governments involved with making our county more resilient to wildfire, I’ve only just begun making a dent this first year.”
Emily continues, “Measure P is the first substantial and reliable investment in fire mitigation for our county. There is so much that needs to be done! We need to clear roads for ingress/egress, create fuel breaks where firefighters can have a chance of stopping wildfires, enhance firefighting resources like water storage, but we also need to adapt the way that we as individuals and communities live.”
Scott figures there is easily $1B worth of wildfire hardening projects in the county. The Measure P funds put MCFSC on solid ground, providing a reliable foundation from which the organization can scale up. Over the next decades, the council hopes to serve as a critical resource for retrofitting our homes and neighborhoods so they can better withstand the inevitable wildfires that California endures.
All of these efforts—upgrading homes, reducing fuel loads in neighborhoods, and including everyone regardless of income—will require a lot of resources. Over the next decade, explains Emily, “MCFSC will use Measure P funds as leverage to access more state and federal dollars and continue to build out programs and services that bring our whole county closer to wildfire and climate resilience.“ Pulling together—to pass the measure and optimize the funds it provides, while also organizing our communities and hardening our properties—will move us toward a more fire safe future where we can endure the reality of California wildfire with greater grace and resilience.
Do you want to learn what fire safe upgrades you can make in a weekend? Check out the Home Hardening video series and more at FireSafeMendocino.org. Do you have an ingress/egress project in mind for your neighborhood? Send Emily an email: emily@firesafemendocino.org. Let’s get to work!
Photo by Ross Stone and courtesy of Unsplash
The K-8 School Food Pantry
MUSD Addresses Food Insecurity
by Holly Madrigal
Cecilia Jimenez
The village of Mendocino might bring to mind million-dollar cottages where Murder She Wrote was filmed (rest in peace Angela Lansbury), but behind the quaint picturesque location is a living, breathing, deep-rooted community with enough property taxes and talented teachers to make a top-notch school district. In addition to achievements in academics, there is a much-needed focus on mental health. Mendocino Unified has a robust counseling staff that works closely with students to deal with challenges.
A little-recognized aspect of mental health is food insecurity. An alarmingly high percentage of students in Mendocino County qualify for free and reduced lunch. Sadly, school is often the one place where some kids can get a reliable meal. This was thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, when school districts across the county became food delivery organizations. Ukiah Unified School District alone distributed thousands of meals to students and their families in need.
Cecilia Jimenez, LCSW, is part of the team at Mendocino Unified School District. In 2018, the K-8 school decided to establish a food pantry, using Cecilia’s office as a distribution point. “The idea came from a conversation with a parent,” says Cecilia. They used to hand out snack packs every week because some kids were experiencing homelessness. “After winter break, I checked in with a parent to see how things were going, and they let me know how expensive things get in the winter, not just from the holidays but with the increase of heating costs,“ she remembers. “The parent thanked me for the snack pack because it helped them get through the two weeks away from school. So for me, that really highlighted the need that a lot of our families had.”
Cecilia explains that, for some families, the cost of gas to come to town and access the food bank in Fort Bragg was unaffordable. “So that is when we began working with the Food Bank and the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund. We’ve prepared as little as five boxes a week to 22 boxes a week during a Covid year,” Cecilia adds.
At the school, the staff let students know that they are always welcome to pick up a snack. During the holidays or over long breaks, counseling staff pack up boxes of canned goods, cereals, and other non-perishable items that students can take home. The school also installed a washer and dryer some years ago, so that students who may not have access at home have a way to get their clothes clean. At our school Diane and the kitchen staff went above and beyond to feed our students. I know the other schools did as well. Our school district and admin staff have been so supportive every step of the way.
During the season of giving, many worthy nonprofits may be seeking your donation dollars. The Fort Bragg Food Bank and all of the food-providing organizations in Mendocino County would be excellent places to contribute. These hard-working groups experienced an increased demand during the pandemic, and the current sharp increase in food costs has severely impacted their bottom lines. Please consider pitching in, so that no student in Mendocino County will go without.
Fort Bragg Food Bank — Mendocino Food & Nutrition Program
910 N Franklin St. Fort Bragg, CA
(707) 964-9404 | FortBraggFoodBank.org
Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund
PO Box 1616 Mendocino, CA 95460
(707) 937-6111 | MCCF.info
Exciting Times at Noyo Harbor
A New Harbormaster and Monthly Fish Market Bring Fresh Energy to the Docks
by Holly Madrigal
Fishing has been in Anna Neumann’s life for a long time. As the new Harbormaster in Noyo Harbor, she may seem young at 32, but her experience belies that. “I was happy being a fishmonger before I was recruited for this job,” says Neumann, who was part of the Princess Seafood Fishing Crew, which has successfully expanded local access to fresh-caught seafood through their market and restaurant. The all-female fishing crew caught rockfish, crab, and salmon all up and down the Mendocino Coast. The new job as Harbormaster keeps Neumann closer to home, and the relationships she made in Noyo Harbor have served her well.
The Harbormaster is “. . . responsible for all the mud within the harbor district,” says Neuman. That means maintaining and managing all the slip fees, supporting the commercial fishing industry centered in Fort Bragg, and facilitating infrastructure projects within the Noyo Harbor District, a special district that is responsible for the Noyo Harbor and the Noyo Mooring Basin. Noyo Harbor is one of the few remaining working harbors between San Francisco Bay and Eureka, and a five-member board meets monthly to guide its long-term planning and operation. Anna Neumann is serving her first year as Harbormaster, and she has hit the ground running. The new Noyo Fish Market is just one of the initiatives she has underway.
The meadow on the South Harbor is the traditional site of the World’s Largest Salmon BBQ on the 4th of July, and it has typically remained quiet most of the rest of the year. But on this bright sunny morning, it’s bustling with the Fish Market, a kind of farmers market for the harbor’s fish catchers. According to Neumann, the idea came out of a brainstorming session to develop more markets for local fishermen, which is one of the Community Sustainability Plan targets. “I’m not sure how I can entice large businesses to come in to buy our fish, but I know that our community buys a lot of local seafood. I know this from working at Princess Seafood Market, where Heather got her start selling her fish off her boat in the harbor. Noyo Harbor has minimal dockside sales, which could be increased. I thought that if we could make an event of it, if you could grab everything you need for dinner right here, it makes it easy,” she adds.
Neumann had heard murmurings in the community that there was a certain shyness and uncertainty about how to access this fresh catch. “Can you just walk up to a boat?” and “Where is F dock?” were common refrains. The idea behind the market is to support the fisherfolk in developing relationships and a customer base. The customer will learn that if A dock is here, then F dock is four docks down, and they’ll find friendly faces. So when there is a fish special, signs can go up around town, and folks will know where to go to get fresh fish.
Local farmers have been encouraged to bring their produce to the market, and craft vendors are selling everything from custom cutting boards to wave-themed art. Live music entertains as a guitarist strums a tune. The aroma of fresh pupusas from a pop-up vendor fills the air. One attendee makes a beeline for a lunch of Fry Bread Tacos before starting to shop. Thanksgiving Coffee, whose roastery headquarters are on the South Harbor, has a table offering samples of the local brew.
Walking the plank to A dock, the boats are lined up, coolers overflowing with the day’s catch. James “Red Beard” Karlonas is filleting a fish for a young family waiting boat-side. The family’s three-year-old watches, fascinated, as James skillfully slices and chops the gleaming scales from a Canary rockfish. “I just went out this morning to catch some fish so that I could make an appearance today,” he says. “Most of the fish I sell are for wholesale. It’s like running a whole other business to sell directly to the consumer.”
James typically sells to fish buyers in the Bay Area, and he also crabs out of Bodega Bay when the season is right. “Dandy Fish Company usually buys all my crab. Up here I catch mostly sablefish, also known as black cod, and those go to San Francisco.” An older gentleman grabs a 20-pound lingcod out of the cooler. He used to captain his own fishing boats off the coast of Fort Bragg, running the Miss Kelley and the Verna Jean for himself, so he doesn’t need it to be fileted for him. He takes the whole fish, packed with ice, even though it doesn’t quite fit in his bag. Red Beard’s ling cod is going for $5/lb today, a deal as far as the old-timer is concerned, since he didn’t have to catch it himself.
One berth down, the Viking is doing a swift business. “This is usually a charter boat,” says Kirk, who runs Noyo Fish Charters as captain of the Viking, “but we haven’t been too busy recently. Maybe it’s the price of gas. Hopefully, recre-ational fishing tours will pick up soon.” They were offering China rockfish and Petrale sole, and Kirk explains, “The sole you have to cook hot, otherwise it will get mushy. The rockfish you can cook in a pan, barbeque, fry it, whatever style you like. These would be better for fish tacos, if that is what you are aiming for.” Lauren, Kirk’s girlfriend, says baking the rock cod is her favorite method.
The Harbor District has 256 slips. Roughly 200 of them are “full-time slips” and 50 are “transient short-terms,” running the gamut from 7-month short stays for the fishing season to ships coming in out of the weather when they need a night. “I try to make sure that every boat that needs a safe harbor gets one. But it is a shuffle,” explains Neumann. There are several key infrastructure improvements needed in the district, such as a fuel dock, which would make boats traveling up and down the coast more likely to stop. Improving the Noyo Ice House business would allow for more rapid chilling of catch and more access for commercial fishermen.
Automobile access to the harbor is an additional challenge. The North Harbor has become a thriving restaurant scene, and the Noyo Center for Marine Science has purchased the old Carine’s Fish Grotto space, with plans to turn it into an educational space, offices, and coffee shop. But the narrow road in and out of the North Harbor causes traffic jams, and it would be easily overwhelmed in the event of an emergency. Geography limits expansion, however, with steep hills to the east and tribal land to the west, so creative solutions will need to be found to move forward with any project to change the status quo.
The Fish Market is a new venture and will take time to develop a following. If the crab season is a good one, then they hope to keep the market going through the winter. A thriving harbor is a key economic driver in this fishing town. Fishing, like any resource-based industry, is at the mercy of environmental and regulatory changes and market fluctuations. Future sustainability will require flexibility and nimble leadership. The new Harbormaster, by supporting projects like the Fish Market, is creating new opportunities for those whose livelihoods depend on the sea.
“If this works, we can expand,” says Neumann. “If it doesn’t, then we will learn from it and move on.” For now, Neumann has her sights set on a new fuel dock and is working with the Harbor District Board to make it a reality. But that is all behind the scenes. For now, you can venture down to A dock on the second Saturday of the month and grab a fresh catch right off the boat.
Noyo Harbor District
South Harbor Drive, Fort Bragg
(707) 964-4719 | NoyoHarborDistrict.org
Photo of Anna Neuman by Mary Benjamin.
All other photos by Holly Madrigal.
Holly Madrigal is a Mendocino County maven who loves to share the delights of our region. She’s fortunate to enjoy her meaningful work as the Director of the Leadership Mendocino program and takes great joy in publishing this magazine.
Thinking Like a Watershed
Anderson Valley Resilient Lands Symposium
by Barbara Goodell
Anderson Valley and the Navarro River Watershed are an ecological microcosm endowed with resplendent redwood forests, undulant hills with grassy oak woodlands, and the largest coastal river basin with a residual salmon habitat in Mendocino County. Last year, Anderson Valley Land Trust (AVLT) celebrated 30 years of work protecting 2,700 acres in 29 perpetual conservation easements. With an active, engaged community, AVLT has continued to expand their conservation efforts during the pandemic by Zoom and by golly.
Given this momentous anniversary year, they paused. The board wanted to determine what their conservation role would be over the next 30 years. AVLT Board President Yoriko Kishimoto asked, “How can Anderson Valley bolster the resiliency of the land with its basic elements: earth, air, water, and fire?” With the challenges of serious drought, wildfire susceptibility, food security, a growing population, and widespread climate change, they floated a question: How can land and resource conservation in Anderson Valley expand to address those challenges while still providing for other community needs, including housing and job opportunities? What emerged was the idea of gathering Anderson Valley landowners, residents, businesses, and non-profits together to explore and address these concerns.
Thus, the idea of the Resilient Land Symposium was born. The goal of the gathering is to encourage identification of Anderson Valley’s needs, and to inspire the successful creation and implementation of potential solutions—regenerative agriculture, sustainable logging, local food production, fish-friendly farming, dry farming, a thriving watershed, a healthy fishery, and winter water storage. The symposium will also address California’s 30 x 30 legislation, enacted to protect 30% of California’s wildlands, coastal and inland waters, and open spaces in order to build climate resilience, biodiversity, and outdoor access for all by 2030.
AVLT, with co-sponsors the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association’s Environmental Committee and the Mendocino County Resource Conservation District’s Navarro River Resource Center, as well as a long list of supporting partner organizations, will offer an overview of Anderson Valley and its watershed, looking at its history, its present, and potential future.
For inspiration, Obi Kaufman will be one of the featured speakers. Some of you may have met him when he came to Boonville to share his California Field Atlas. He is a gifted illustrator and author and has dedicated his life to studying California’s natural world. He has also published The State of Water, as well as Forests of California, and Coasts of California. Obi blends science and art to enhance our understanding and appreciation of the web of life. Other speakers will offer their expertise, and panel discussions will follow, annotated with resource materials to help participants understand the overlapping issues and, ideally, plan next steps. Afterward, Q&A conversations will continue to explore topics in greater depth, and there will also be time to mingle for more cross-pollination of ideas.
By sharing information and best practices, and learning from leaders and peers, the symposium will identify top initiatives and locate the gaps, opportunities, and challenges Anderson Valley faces in addressing and redressing them. What is Anderson Valley not doing today that it should? Is a periodically dry Navarro River the new normal? How are cumulative effects making an impact on quality of life, natural resources, and long term economic viability? What further collaborative opportunities can be formed beyond the community’s individual efforts and boundaries to advance land and resource resiliency in Anderson Valley?
By bringing together people from different sectors of the Anderson Valley community, each possessing their own issues and priorities, the symposium hopes to begin crafting a shared vision for how we can move forward together into a future that will demand creative thinking, deep understanding, and ongoing resilience. While AVLT values environmental protection and land conservation, they by no means bring preconceived notions for the specific form that vision should take. That is for the participants to discuss in order to collectively respond to the issues which threaten the health and wellness of Anderson Valley’s land, natural resources, and people.
Two Events this October: The Symposium and a Tour of Filigreen Farm
The Resilient Land Symposium will take place at the Philo Grange on October 15, 2022 from 9:00am - 3:30pm. A farm-to-table lunch will be offered. The symposium will also be recorded/live streamed as much as possible.
A special AVLT tour of Filigreen Farm, the regenerative, conserved, biodynamic property farmed by Chris and Stephanie Tebbutt, is scheduled for October 16, 2022.
Separate pre-registration is necessary for these events before September 10, 2022, and both will have registration limits. Call (707) 895-3150, email avlt@mcn.org, or go to AndersonValleyLandTrust.org for more current information about the symposium speakers and panels or to register or ask questions about symposium or the Filigreen Farm tour.
Anderson Valley Land Trust is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to the preservation and restoration of Anderson Valley’s unique rural landscape, protecting forests (including working forests), agricultural land, oak woodlands, water courses, and open space. AVLT hosts educational events including outdoor interpretive events—visit the website for details.
Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association (AVWA) was established in 2005 to promote and protect the unique grape growing region of Anderson Valley. They have recently formed an Environmental Committee to encourage regenerative soil and water best practices for their membership. Go to AVWines.com for more information.
Navarro River Resource Center is a part of the Mendocino County Resource Conservation District and is a non-regulatory, public agency providing conservation leadership for voluntary stewardship of natural resources on public and private lands. Their mission is to conserve, protect, and restore wild and working landscapes to enhance the health of the water, soil, and forests in Mendocino County. Learn more at MCRCD.org.
Barbara Goodell is a retired teacher and curriculum writer who moved to Anderson Valley in 1978 with her family to establish a permaculture homestead. She is on the AV Foodshed committee, AV Adult School Steering Committee, and is an AV Land Trust Board Member.
The Blue Zones Project
Creating the Conditions for Health and Vitality
by Holly Madrigal
What are the ingredients for a well-rounded life, for a life of fulfillment, health, energy, and meaning? Dan Buettner, a National Geographic photographer and traveler of the world, wondered what aspects made the people of Okinawa, Japan regularly stay active well into their 90s, and why the people of Sardinia, Italy had so many elders living vivaciously into their twilight years. Buettner spent many years studying and researching, eventually collating the data and mapping a number of areas across the globe that possessed these traits. He was able to identify nine shared conditions— natural movement, life purpose, stress reduction, moderate calorie intake, plant-based diet, limited alcohol intake, engagement in spirituality or religion, connection in family life, and strong friendships—and coined the phrase “Power 9 Principles” to describe them.
Of course, knowing the ingredients of any recipe is only part of the picture. How do we take those items and combine them to best effect? The Blue Zones Project of Mendocino County, generously sponsored by Adventist Health, works to improve the health and wellbeing of all the residents of our county. This group, led by longtime community health worker, Tina Tyler O’Shea, is gearing up to walk the walk here at home. “We are seeking to make the healthy choice the easy choice,” said Tina. “We are taking the blueprint of Blue Zones and making it work here for us, utilizing the resources and research of this huge effort and sharing it within Mendocino County to make a difference.”
The work has already been underway here for years. In Tina’s previous role with the county’s Department of Public Health, she worked regularly with students on learning to make healthy choices and exercise more, engaging the youth to empower themselves and become their own advocates. “Many leaders in the community, like North Coast Opportunities, have pioneered the growth of healthy food systems in Mendocino County with the Food Hub, Gardens Project, and the Caring Kitchen, just to name a few. What we’re doing at Blue Zones is supporting these efforts and helping move the needle towards community health in these key ways,” she explained.
A five-member local team is in the foundational discovery phase. Beginning last spring, they facilitated multiple listening sessions and focus groups to develop a clear understanding of the work already underway in Mendocino County. Tina elaborated, “All the information has been distilled into reports that will guide the work and priorities of the team. Beyond personal health changes, there are real improvements that can be achieved in our community. We are not coming in with a prescriptive plan, but are learning how we can be a resource. We have determined a level of community readiness in Mendocino County with the incredible work that has already happened. We are one of seventy communities in the United States that is undertaking this health initiative. Our focus is on People, Place, and Policy changes that can have real positive impacts.”
The focus on People will take the form of partnering with existing nonprofit and faith groups to encourage volunteerism. Studies show that the bond formed when giving generously of one’s time benefits the volunteer as much as the recipient. The project will also be hosting workshops to help people explore their purpose in life, encouraging folks to think about why they get up in the morning, what brings them joy. Physical health also falls under this category. “I’m excited about starting Moai groups. This is an Okinawan term which means to gather with a common purpose,” added Tina, “so we can have walking meetings instead of all sitting around a conference table. It both gets you outside into the fresh air and gets creative thoughts flowing.”
The focus on Place refers to the physical conditions in our community. Do neighborhoods have access to fresh food? Are there safe trails and spaces to be outside together? Calling back to those key ingredients for a long healthy life, socializing and natural movement were key factors. If we highlight Place-making in our towns, if parks and community spaces are encouraged, then socializing becomes much easier. The Blue Zones team is partnering with the staff of Caltrans District 1, which encompasses Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte Counties, to discuss how transportation projects can support community health needs. “We’re also recognizing the truly excellent grocery stores in our county and celebrating the work that they have been doing to support local food providers, as well as the community support they give. This work will be ongoing, but so many of the relationships are already connected here,” Tina explained.
The focus on Policy can be both challenging and extremely rewarding. It is an area that Tina knows well from her time on the Anti-Tobacco Task Force with the county. “There has been a real cultural shift over the past thirty years when it comes to smoking. We’ve had significant declines over the years, but unfortunately what we are now seeing is an epidemic increase in vaping, especially in our young people,” Tina noted. “We are committed to education and policy initiatives that will move the needle on this,” she added. The Blue Zones project plans to work with the Food Policy Council to engage with local employers and schools to incorporate wellness, increase access to fresh food, and foster connection. “So much work in this area has already been done,” commented Tina, “but we plan to work with Adventist Health to pull down resources from the national Blue Zones Program to benefit our community. We are hosting a kick off March 19th in Ukiah at our offices in the Alex Rohrbach Center to celebrate and share our plans for the future.”
The recipe for a long-lasting and fulfilling life can seem simple at first: make friends, eat plants, move your body. But we all know that new habits can be difficult to sustain. Thankfully, there are a wealth of projects and initiatives that can support these individual acts. The Mendocino Blue Zones Project is engaging the grassroots organizers of this county to make these steps available and accessible for all. Now is the time to start our own Moai group to map out our healthy, long-lived future.
Find out more at MEC.BlueZonesProject.com.
Holly Madrigal is a Mendocino County maven who loves to share the delights of our region. She’s fortunate to enjoy her meaningful work as the director of the Leadership Mendocino program and takes great joy in publishing this magazine.
Juice Me
Ultra-Fresh, Revitalizing, and Delivered
by Holly Madrigal
The tang of fresh carrot dances across my tongue. Hints of tart apple with a slight kick of turmeric taste so alive that it feels like I’m mainlining nutrients. A cheerful colorful heart adorns each recycled glass bottle of Juice Me. The ingredient list is simplicity itself: turmeric, carrot, lemon, apple, cayenne, love.
Daphne Allen, creator and owner of Juice Me, has been into juicing her whole life. A Mendocino native, her parents lived off the land. Her rustic roots led to a lot of juicing in her early years, and she has fond memories of the juice bar (now the herb and tea room) that used to be upstairs at Corners of the Mouth. In her memories, they only had carrot juice, but it was a treat.
This ethos of conscious living permeates her other work as well. In 2018, she was doing some research through a program called Food Matters, based in Australia. She learned that her body was craving nourishment, so she started doing intermittent juice fasts and enjoyed how she felt. Then, because of some minor health issues, she began to wonder what it would be like to include regular juicing in her lifestyle. She included 64 oz of juiced mixed vegetables each day, adding a small amount of apple for just a hint of sweetness. Daphne explains, “The juice is a combination of cold pressed juice and blended whole vegetables which makes it unique because it includes fiber and enzymes. When I first started juicing this way for myself my health improved greatly.”
The change was noticeable. “I gained energy and felt so much better. I started drinking this large amount of juice each day and pretty much ate what I wanted to eat other than that. I found that once I began receiving these bioavailable nutrients and fiber, I didn’t crave much junk food or breads or sweets,” she explained.
Nutritional deficiencies can cause cravings for less-healthy foods, and unfortunately, many Americans are in this state regularly. Our industrial food processing has stripped many foods of the vitamins that they began with. Fresh juices retain many of the nutrients that the plants started out with and make the vitamins, enzymes, and fiber easier for bodies to absorb.
Some friends and neighbors noticed the changes in Daphne and asked her to juice for them. “It took off from there,” Daphne laughed. “At some point, I called the health department to make sure I was doing it all correctly and safely. Pretty soon I just had to start the business to meet the demand.” And Juice Me was born, and it has grown and flourished.
The business has expanded greatly from its humble beginnings in her home kitchen. The format is an exercise in simplicity. Each bottle is labeled with the five or so ingredients and dated so that consumers know how fresh it is. Daphne and her husband built a commercial kitchen at the inn they run. “We have this dedicated team, and we could not do it without them. The team juices, packages, and delivers each day. And the community here has been so supportive, with businesses like Harvest Market taking a chance on us.” Daphne noted, “We credit the stores for what doesn’t sell, so there is no risk to them. Juice loses its nutritional content over time, so we ensure that what people are drinking is the freshest and healthiest available.”
The couple both spent large parts of their lives down in the East Bay, so as the juice business succeeded in Mendocino County, even in the midst of a global pandemic, they decided to open a satellite kitchen in Contra Costa County. “We were essential juicers,” laughed Daphne. “We say that we deliver each morning … like the milkman, but freshly made, healthy juice.” The rainbow of glass jars on the porch would bring a smile to anyone’s face.
Deliveries can now be received on the Mendocino Coast, Willits, Redwood Valley, and Boonville, as well as Contra Costa County and some locations in Oakland. Additionally, you can pick up one of these colorful gems at A Frame Expresso and Harvest Market in Fort Bragg, GoodLife Cafe & Bakery, The Waiting Room in Mendocino, and at many other locations. Juice Me purchases their produce through Veritable Vegetable, which sources their organic produce from family farms throughout California. This leads to a price point that is not inexpensive (though certainly healthier than a latte habit like my own).
Reflecting on her personal journey, Daphne added, “Once my body knew it could count on these nutrients, those 64 oz a day, it stopped asking me for those breads and sweets. It changed my cravings over time. In my experience, 8 oz a day would not show significant health changes, but 32 oz or 64 oz daily certainly does. I don’t recommend taking away anything in your diet, but if you add our Green Juice or one of our other flavors, it may change you. Personally, I don’t think that you need to restrict but can shift to more intuitive eating.”
I’m not sure there has ever been a better time to focus on health, and that community desire is clearly fueling the success of this small business. Their expansion demonstrates that there is a craving for these unprocessed, healthier beverages. It’s the start of spring, when people begin to seek out fresher, healthier foods. Even if a juicing revolution is not in your plans, you may want to give these a try. Sipping the last bits of my carrot juice, I can feel the vitamins pouring into my body, and what’s that last ingredient? Oh yeah, I can taste the love.
Juice Me juices can be purchased at both Harvest Market locations, GoodLife Cafe and The Waiting Room in Mendocino, A Frame Expresso Drive Thru in Fort Bragg and by delivery at JuiceMePlus.com.
Undersea Activism
Restoring the Kelp Forests of Northern California
by Lisa Ludwigsen
From shore they glisten as massively dense, slowly undulating, impenetrable masses of shiny ocean plants. Below the surface, kelp forests host complex ecosystems of plant life, marine mammals, fish, birds, and invertebrates. These vast underwater forests have existed for thousands of years, providing healthy sources of food, shelter, materials, and cultural practices. But it is safe to say that we don’t yet fully understand all the ways they contribute to the planet’s wellbeing.
What we do understand is that over 95% of the bull kelp forests along Northern California’s coast have disappeared since 2014, when a sudden marine water heat wave caused upheaval in the entire ecosystem of the coastal Pacific Ocean. The warm water coincided with a mysterious sea star wasting syndrome, killing the sea stars and allowing their main food source, purple sea urchins, to explode in population. Those urchins, in turn, voraciously fed on the kelp, eradicating most of the kelp forests in an astoundingly short time. As the kelp forests disappeared, so did the plant and animal life dependent on that habitat. The scenario is alarming, yes, but organized restoration efforts are showing real promise.
Bull kelp is a type of seaweed which requires the typical cold water of the Pacific coast, thriving from Alaska to California. With an annual growing cycle and impressive growth rates of up to a foot per day, the kelp anchors via bulbous holdfasts in relatively shallow, rocky areas with moderate wave action. If you live near or visit the coasts of Northern California, you have likely seen them. Stalks of bull kelp—the stipe—can grow up to 65 feet in length and are held up by the spherical float, an air-filled buoyant ball supporting many flat blades that create a layer on or near the surface. These plants really do create underwater forests, providing food and shelter for a wide variety of animals. At year’s end, the kelp dies, and new plants are produced for the following year. The dead kelp masses continue to provide nourishment as they float on the surface.
The Surfrider Foundation is an international nonprofit environmental organization with over 100 chapters. The Mendocino County chapter has provided volunteers since 2002 to help keep beaches and water clean and accessible. Increasingly, Mendocino County Surfrider Foundation has been working to protect our coast from offshore oil and gas drilling, and to curtail the expansion of underwater sonar and weapons testing by the U.S. Navy. Surfrider is also assisting with kelp restoration through a broader based collective called KELPRR (Kelp Ecosystem Landscape Partnership for Research on Resilience), a coalition of marine scientists, divers, tribes, nonprofits, fish catchers, and others.
One crucial step to stop further decimation of kelp is the removal of purple sea urchins from the ocean floor. “We are seeing positive outcomes from urchin management efforts on our coast,” says Nicole Paisley Martensen, chairperson of the Surfrider Foundation, Mendocino County Chapter. “Over the past two years, the Noyo Center for Marine Science coordinated urchin removal efforts with commercial divers under guidance from California Department of Fish and Wildlife, removing over two million urchins from kelp ‘oasis’ zones at Noyo Bay, Caspar Cove, and Albion Cove,” she explains. The efforts in these survey zones have been surprisingly effective and have brought additional attention from policy makers and others.
In July, 2021, Congressman Jared Huffman introduced the KELP Act—Keeping Ecosystems Living and Productive Act, HR4458. Funded by NOAA, it proposes to provide $50 million annually from 2022 through 2026 for the conservation, restoration, and/or management of natural kelp forest ecosystems. “Working with Congressman Huffman and his team on writing this proposed legislation was such an honor,” says Nicole. “It felt like this is the leap that needs to be taken to jump from grassroots triage to federally-funded crisis prevention.” As of this printing, Congress has not yet voted to enact the KELP Act.
Alarmed by the state of the kelp forests, a group of concerned Northern California-based artists and activists have engaged with scientists working directly on kelp recovery to create the project titled Above/Below. The artists come from Santa Cruz to Mendocino and work in a range of media including film, multi-media, watercolor, large silk cyanotypes, and kelp itself. The science component includes representatives from The Nature Conservancy, the Estuary & Ocean Science Center at San Francisco State, U.C. Berkeley Herbarium, Noyo Center for Marine Science, and the Kelp Recovery Program at the Greater Farallones Association.
To launch the three-year awareness building campaign, Above/Below held a gathering of approximately 100 stakeholders in Sausalito in October 2021, with presentations by the science community and exhibits of work from the involved artists. Nibbles were sourced from fish that interact with kelp forests, including rockfish, salmon roe, anchovies, and, of course, Uni Onigiri—sea urchins. Oysters were provided by Hog Island, located on Tomales Bay in Marshall, California.
The event was organized in part by Marianna Leuschel, a Sausalito woman who became curious about the role of kelp while walking the beaches around Point Arena. It wasn’t long before she learned about the dire situation the kelp forests face, and she felt compelled to help others understand as well. With a background in communications and a network of inspired and creative friends, Marianna spearheaded Above/Below to use food, art, and science to “tell a compelling story of the kelp forests on the North Coast, and inspire people to get involved in supporting the protection and restoration of these endangered forests of the ocean.” Appealing to the public on multiple levels is essential since, as Marianna points out, it’s “an issue that is challenging for many of us to experience—because kelp forests live in a realm not visible to most—but one that touches all of our lives through our local foods, ecology, culture, and climate.”
A particularly illuminating speaker at the event was Rietta Hohman, coordinator for the Kelp Recovery Program at the Greater Farallones Association. The association is addressing the kelp crisis with a three-pronged approach: restoration, research, and partnerships. The restoration involves urchin removal in the zones near the shore where kelp usually thrives, as well as growing kelp in labs and then planting them out in the ocean once they are hardy enough to survive. Research includes monitoring the kelp zones off the coast of Sonoma and Mendocino to keep an eye on which areas need the most attention. And partnerships are enhanced through KELPRR, which brings together concerned stakeholders and is open to anyone who wants to participate.
It’s encouraging to hear about Hohman’s work, and indeed about the efforts of all the people and organizations who care about the kelp forests: policymakers, researchers, surfers, scientists, artists, and just concerned citizens like Marianna who want to make a difference. If 95% of the dry land forests in Northern California had disappeared, there would understandably be an urgent outcry for immediate and intense corrective action. With our underwater kelp forests in equal peril, it’s imperative that we pursue all options available for ceasing and reversing their devestation. Fortunately, the abundance of skills, knowledge, concern, and creativity the different participants bring to this issue have put us on a path where that just might be possible.
How can you help?
Know where your food comes from—eat seafood from regenerative sources. Oyster, clams, mussels, and seaweed improve waterways.
Ask your representatives to support the KELP Act.
Join the KELPRR email list at
farallones.org.
Visit the Noyo Center for Marine Science in Fort Bragg.
Join Surfriders at
mendocino.surfrider.org.
Visit the ocean! Take your children and experience the wonder of the ocean and tide pools.
Find out more about Mendocino County’s collaborative efforts to eradicate purple seas urchins via eco-culinary activism in the Word of Mouth Summer 2020 issue.
Photos: Van Damme State Beach by Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Art event photos by Torrey Douglass. Bull kelp photo by Keith Johnson.
Lisa Ludwigsen is a writer and marketer working with food, farms, and family small businesses throughout Northern California. She has worked in organic agriculture, natural foods, and environmental education for over 20 years.
Gardening & Growth in the Mendocino County Jail
story & photos by Zohar Zaied
On a spring morning inside the perimeter of the Mendocino County Jail, a group of inmates joined members of a volunteer group for a check-in before they started their day. Each member of the circle had the option to share what s/he would personally offer to the group on this day. After check-in, the crew got to work in the 1/8th acre vegetable garden, which provides food, flowers, and some experience to cultivate a better future for the participants. The garden project is one of many programs offered by the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, which provides targeted resources to assist inmates to interrupt the incarceration cycle.
Though a garden has existed in various forms at the jail, gardening as a component of rehabilitation started informally at the Mendocino County Jail in 2012. Lifetime gardener John Holt, with the help of a crew of inmates, transformed land within the facility’s perimeter into a working vegetable garden.
When he agreed to take on the jail’s garden project, Holt found the grounds were overgrown with weeds, the compacted garden beds were full of rocks, and he recalls that the garden was dubbed “the Stony Jail Garden” by the first group of inmates he trained. The garden has been transformed. Today, the rocks sifted from the garden beds can be found in the borders of some of the flowerbeds which line most of the jail’s secured walkways.
Holt maintained a hand-written record of the fruits and vegetables his crews have harvested over the years. In 2017, the garden crew brought in over five tons of produce, used by the kitchen to prepare meals for the inmate population at the jail and youth at Juvenile Hall. Unconditional Freedom Project volunteer, Marla Moffet, estimates that, under its current configuration, the garden stands to produce approximately 11,000 pounds of produce per year, saving potentially up to $18,000 in food cost.
A more significant savings to the taxpayers, however, comes from the potential to reduce recidivism at the local incarceration level, an effort that lines up with the Sheriff’s Office mission at the jail. In 2018, the weighted average cost to house an inmate at a county jail amounted to just under $160 per day in California, according to a Board of State Community Corrections report. That adds up to over $58,000 per year.
In February of 2021, members of the Unconditional Freedom Project (UFP) teamed up with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office to formalize rehabilitation efforts for some of the jail’s inmates by way of the garden. “Any gardener can manage the soil, plant starts, and harvest in the fall. The real job [in an incarceration setting] is offering guidance,” said Holt, who was on hand in early 2021 to help transition the garden to UFP volunteers. UFP brings a program to Mendocino County that has already seen success in California’s state prison system through the “Art of Soul Making Program,” a correspondence course which “seeks to repurpose the experience of incarceration from mere punishment to something truly restorative.”
“It’s one of the more positive aspects of being incarcerated,” program participant Aaron Beardslee says. He often sees produce he has planted and grown end up in the jail’s kitchen. “Even though we’re behind a fence, we’re in a garden. You can put your hands on the results.”
“The whole idea is getting people connected to the earth,” Moffet says. “Just like the earth is an ecosystem, we are an ecosystem.” UFP introduces program participants to these concepts through gardening. To further the restorative efforts of their program, UFP has enrolled 27 incarcerated men and 35 women in the Art of Soul Making correspondence course.
Collaborating with UFP is part of an effort by Mendocino County Sheriff, Matt Kendall, to provide rehabilitation opportunities for county jail inmates. Today, inmates at the 305-bed facility access educational opportunities, job training, and other restorative programs during incarceration. The mission is to heal trauma and return incarcerated residents to the community in better shape than they were in when they entered the jail.
California’s oldest operating state prison, San Quentin, was the first in the state to develop a vegetable garden within its walls. According to Planting Justice, the state inmates involved in San Quentin’s garden program have a 10% recidivism rate, thanks to program follow-up and meaningful employment opportunities for inmates upon their release from prison. That number is significantly lower than the national average. A recent Pew Charitable Trusts study showed over 40 percent of inmates nationally return to state prison within three years of their release.
Beyond the benefits to incarcerated individuals at the county jail, an on-site garden represents a piece of relaxation to staff. Every time Mendocino County Corrections Lieutenant Joyce Spears walks from her office in the Sheriff’s Office administration building to the county’s jail, she passes by the landscaping inside the facility’s perimeter. “The flowers are my favorite,” Spears says. Deputies walk through the gardens every time they check the security of the perimeter, often stopping to pick a strawberry or tomato when in season. The garden provides a soft visual contrast to the institutional setting of the correctional facility. The Lieutenant and veteran corrections staffer has watched the garden develop over the past few decades into its current incarnation.
According to Moffet, the current garden crew has already planted over 1,500 starts to populate the project’s summer garden, with more plants coming for a winter garden in the coming months. UFP staff spoke with jail kitchen supervisor, Peggy Luna, to find out specifically which vegetables would most benefit the kitchen. Luna requested tomatoes, squash, leafy greens, eggplants, and cucumbers. Harvests of early season leafy greens have already made their way from the garden to the jail’s kitchen, and from there on to the plates of the inmates who helped to grow them. Hopefully, the experience will provide more options for them when they are outside once again.
Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office
951 Low Gap Road, Ukiah | MendocinoSheriff.com
Unconditional Freedom Project
1275 4th St. #3220, Santa Rosa, CA 95404
UnconditionalFreedom.org
Zohar Zaied grew up in Mendocino County and has been employed with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office since 2002. He is a regular contributor for Corrections1.com
Mendocino County Prescribed Burn Association
Harnessing Fire to Manage California’s Forests
by Michael Jones, PhD
On a warm sunny day in February of last year, I joined a small group of property owners and community members that had gathered to help a landowner manage a thicket of Himalayan blackberry. The thorny branches were choking out native oaks and riparian vegetation along a small drainage. We set fire to the thicket using a drip torch and watched as 15-foot flames shot out, listening to the hiss and crackle as the fire spread through the thick vegetation. This was the first prescribed burn of the Mendocino County Prescribed Burn Association (PBA).
Fire is an important natural disturbance that has shaped the flora and fauna of California. Periodic fires—naturally ignited or intentionally burned by Native Americans—helped maintain the structure, composition, and health of many of California’s ecosystems for thousands of years. But with European settlement, traditional use of prescribed fire ceased and, with the advent of the fire suppression era, there was even an attempt to control naturally ignited wildfires. But 100 years of fire suppression has increased a build-up of vegetation and reduced the health of our ecosystems.
With seemingly more destructive wildfires occurring in recent years, what fire ecologists and Native Americans had been saying all along was finally recognized: fire is an inevitable and important part of the California ecosystem. And prescribed fire is an incredibly powerful tool that can help us sustainably manage our forests and natural resources and prepare for future wildfires.
Prescribed fire is the use of fire under predetermined conditions to achieve specific objectives. It can be integrated with other management activities to help reduce wildfire hazards around communities, manage fuels, restore ecosystem health after a century of fire suppression, decrease vegetation, enhance wildlife habitat, improve rangeland, and manage forests.
In the 1980s, Cal Fire initiated the Vegetation Management Program, an attempt by the agency to expand the use of prescribed burns on private lands. The program was initially very successful, with thousands of acres burned every year, but changes in funding caused the program to wane. While the program has since been re-worked, there was still a need for other options that could help private landowners and managers use prescribed fire.
In 2018, my colleagues from U.C. Cooperative Extension Humboldt—Lenya Quinn-Davidson, Fire Advisor, and Jeff Stackhouse, Livestock and Natural Resource Advisor—introduced the concept of the Prescribed Burn Association to California, with the formation of the Humboldt County PBA, the first PBA in the west.
A PBA is a loosely organized group of community members working together to pool resources, knowledge, and experience to safely use prescribed fire as a management tool. This model had been successfully used in other parts of the country for many years, but under the West’s culture of fire suppression, it was assumed that only fire professionals should use fire as a tool. The introduction of this collaborative model has started to change that perception and is empowering California landowners and managers to bring fire back to the land.
By 2019, the success of our neighbors in Humboldt was well known in Mendocino County, and the local community was enthusiastic about developing a PBA. Our diverse habitats, ranging from coastal prairie/scrub, bishop pine forests, redwood and Douglas-fir forests, oak woodlands, to chaparral, are all fire adapted. It only seemed appropriate that we should build capacity for using prescribed fire to help manage them. So, following in my colleagues’ footsteps (and essentially copying everything they did), I pulled a group of active and engaged community members together, formed a steering committee, and initiated the Mendocino County PBA.
We have grown to over 100 members including property owners, land managers, Native American communities, ranchers, foresters, non-profit organizations, volunteer and professional fire fighters, retired fire fighters, county government, and other community members. We conducted several burns, including a 100-acre cooperative burn in chaparral and oak woodlands with the Sonoma County PBA, Good Fire Alliance. We also hosted a virtual Prescribed Burning 101 workshop that was attended by more than 100 people from throughout California.
As a new group, we are still growing and finding our footing (the COVID-19 pandemic certainly has not helped in that process). Our goal is to continue expanding our capacity to provide training, equipment, and labor, and to share experiences and knowledge that help the community safely use fire.
The amazing thing about being a part of the PBA community is the opportunity to gain hands-on experience and training with fire. For some in the community, their only prior experience with fire is the images they see of catastrophic wildfire and the sensational stories they hear about fires that destroyed forests, burned down homes, or, in the worst-case scenario, resulted in lives lost. So it is rather awesome to put a drip torch in somebody’s hand for the first time and have them put fire on the ground and realize that it’s different than the fire they have seen in the news. They see how prescribed fire can be used in a way that is safe and, perhaps, even fun.
There are no requirements to join the Mendocino County PBA. We welcome anyone from the community who is interested in using prescribed fire as a management tool or helping others implement prescribed fire. We do not require members to have any prior experience with prescribed fire, nor do we require members to own specialized fire equipment. Most of the time, the minimum required personal protective equipment is good boots, natural fiber long-sleeves and pants or Nomex, leather gloves, eye protection, and headwear. Most importantly, we conclude every burn with food and drink—enjoying the community we work so hard to protect.
To join or learn more about the Mendocino County PBA, e-mail mendopba@gmail.com. To learn more about prescribed burning in Mendocino County check out http://cemendocino.ucanr.edu/FireResources/PrescribedFire. To learn more about PBAs in California and the prescribed fire process, check out www.calpba.org.
Michael Jones is the U.C. Cooperative Extension Forest Advisor for Mendocino, Lake, and Sonoma counties. He is an entomologist by training and specializes in integrated management of forest pests. He also chairs the Mendocino County PBA.
To join or learn more about the Mendocino County PBA, e-mail mendopba@gmail.com. To learn more about prescribed burning in Mendocino County check out http://cemendocino.ucanr.edu/FireResources/PrescribedFire. To learn more about PBAs in California and the prescribed fire process, check out www.calpba.org.
Michael Jones is the U.C. Cooperative Extension Forest Advisor for Mendocino, Lake, and Sonoma counties. He is an entomologist by training and specializes in integrated management of forest pests. He also chairs the Mendocino County PBA.
Great Plates
Delivering Restaurant Meals to the High-Risk and Home-Bound
by Holly Madrigal
At 85, Gail has a heart condition that could likely be fatal if she were to contract the coronavirus, so she took the shelter-in-place order very seriously. Her previously full life soon had shrunk to her small two-bedroom in the hills above Mendocino. But a knock on her door lets her know that a hot meal awaits her on the porch. The Great Plates Delivered program has become a friendly, nourishing lifeline for Gail and her peers who are medically vulnerable, providing three meals a day, and prepared by local restaurants at no cost to the recipient.
This same time last year, the pandemic shut-down had begun in earnest, and we were all sheltering in place, quite unsure of how the virus was spread, how we could continue to work, or how long it would last. “I found myself honestly not knowing how the restaurant would survive,” says Meredith Smith, owner of both Mendocino Café and Flow Restaurant. “I’m usually an optimistic person, and I’m used to the balancing act required by being a restaurant owner. You make your money in the summer season to carry you through the lean months of winter. But I honestly could see no options.”
Alfonso at Eggheads prepares and packs meals.
The shelter-in-place order came in March, when travel was already significantly down after a summer plagued by smoky skies from inland wildfires, and following the PSPS electrical shut down the prior fall, which had cost local restaurants thousands of dollars in losses. The pandemic spring of 2020 simply seemed like one challenge too many. “I became obsessed with watching the news and following the political process of the pandemic relief,” says Meredith. “When the PPP loans were announced, I jumped on that before the deadlines were even finalized.” But that government assistance was a double-edged sword. The money initially had to be spent within 60 days and only on certain categories such as payroll, but many employees were receiving more money to stay home (to keep the pandemic from spreading) through enhanced unemployment. “We made it work somehow. We were seriously in debt by that point. I had maxed out all my credit cards to keep the business afloat, vendors were losing patience, and I was at the end of my rope.” This experience was not unique to Mendocino Café, as most local businesses struggled to adjust to the crisis.
“When I heard that FEMA had funded the Great Plates Delivered program, we worked with Supervisor Ted Williams to get the program started here. It saved us,” says Meredith. Using the spacious kitchen at Flow Restaurant, also owned by Meredith, they were able to continue to employ eight people who otherwise would have been laid off. Flow has outdoor seating, but the layout requires guests to pass through the restaurant to reach the open space. “It just didn’t seem safe with the current restrictions, so we’re doing the Great Plates out of this space and it works really well,” says Lilah Nelson, Meredith’s daughter, who coordinates the program for 60-70 clients. The staff and chefs craft three quality meals a day, which are then delivered to the clients who are sheltering in place. For many, they not only receive nourishing healthy meals, but they also welcome the minimal human connection.
Many of the elderly clients have dietary restrictions such as gluten-free (GF), no grapefruit (interferes with blood pressure medication), vegetarian, and vegan. Flow’s kitchen has a gluten-free fryer, which is a huge asset. This means that they can make French fries, sweet potato fries, chicken tenders, and more that can be eaten by those with a gluten allergy.
During prep time at Flow one recent morning, Chef Jack was preparing GF mushroom gravy for roast chicken breast, vegetables, and mashed potatoes for dinner, quesadillas with fresh salsa for lunch, and fresh fruit, yogurt, and granola for breakfast. “I’ve been enjoying stretching my vegan dishes. We can use the Beyond Burger, which is quite good because I can crumble it up with my own spices. We have a vegan chicken breast we can use as well, and occasionally we use jackfruit. I like the challenge. There is a cool aspect to it where I can create something delicious that meets the needs of these clients,” says Jack. Lilah impressively tracks the daily changes to the client roster. “We’ve been doing this for seven months now, and it’s been great. It changes every day, so we work it like a puzzle. And it helps that we have so many dishes on our menu already here at Flow, so the cooks have a lot to work with. And we’re still doing take out for the public,” adds Lilah.
Anyone who has squeezed into one of the five booths at Eggheads Restaurant in Fort Bragg knows that they are pros at getting a lot out of a small space. The Wizard of Oz-themed breakfast and lunch spot regularly has a forty-minute wait for a table all summer long, but this year changed all that. Becky and Marvin Parrish, owners of this favorite local spot, saw all possibility of income drain away as indoor dining was prohibited. “We can do take out, but even when some places were able to partially open indoors, that was just not an option for us—25% would be only 10 people,” says Becky. “I was watching the Governor’s daily briefings, and he announced the Great Plates Delivered program. It came in the nick of time, as I had just spent the last dime of the PPP loan. I reached out to the County Adult and Aging Services, and they signed us up. Cucina Verona in Fort Bragg was already on board, and we were able to take on another 30-35 local clients.” The program not only allowed the staff of ten people to stay employed, but they were eager for a challenge.
Previous to this program, Eggheads had served only breakfast and lunch, but now dinner was on the table. “The kitchen staff stepped up, creating all sorts of dishes—stroganoff, soups, roast chicken served several ways . . . We have the best staff on the planet,” says Becky. “One of our cooks really wanted to try baking, so now they regularly produce zucchini bread, pumpkin bread, and pies.” They work with Food Runners to deliver three times a day. “One of the unexpected gifts of this program is the happiness it brings the clients,” says Marvin. “For some of these folks, it’s the only time in their day they see anyone. If the delivery guys notice that food has been left on the porch or not eaten, we will check on them to make sure everything is alright.” One client joked that her doctor said she is the healthiest she has ever been. It seems three sturdy meals a day has had a great impact. Becky chokes up as she remembers one client’s daughter reaching out to say that “Mom had beat cancer, and having wonderful food to eat each day helped make that happen.”
It seems the ripples of community reach far beyond the often precarious bank accounts of local restaurants. The employees, staff, and drivers that craft these meals each day have a way to safely continue to work, and the clients are receiving that human connection that can stave off not just hunger but loneliness and depression. An average 1,710 meals are served daily to 896 individuals. Seven restaurants in Mendocino County have participated in the program, including Angelina’s in Fort Bragg and Wild Fish in Little River, with $5,600,000 of direct contract payments coming into Mendocino County to help them weather this crisis, funding 221,519 meals to feed local seniors.
Unless something changes, the program is due to sunset on March 8th, 2021, after nearly a year of supporting countless local families. Great Plates Delivered has supplied meals, saved jobs, and provided human contact during a difficult time, more than earning the “great” in its title.
Mendocino County’s Carbon Farmers
Harnessing Agriculture to Help the Planet
By Connie Higdon
I’ve been roasting chiles this week—my favorite post-harvest activity—and thinking about food, dirt, and carbon. California’s recent fires have made it clear that the climate crisis is now, not ten years away. Our planet is burdened with excess carbon in its atmosphere, and one of the major sources of that pollution is agriculture.
But what if the food we eat didn’t only fuel our bodies but also helped save our planet? What if the world’s agricultural lands could help offset atmospheric carbon? Right now in Mendocino County, ranches, farms, and vineyards are doing just that—storing more carbon in the soil than they release through crop and livestock production.
The key is nature’s carbon cycle, the process through which carbon atoms move from the atmosphere to the earth and back into the atmosphere. In this closed loop, the amount of carbon doesn’t change. What changes is where the molecules end up—in plants and soil or in our air. By using methods that capture more carbon in the ground, farmers and ranchers can help to shift the skewed carbon cycle.
More than 15 local food and fiber growers are engaged in a multi-year experiment to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases and improve soil health. The “carbon farming” they practice uses the natural growth cycle of plants to pull CO2 out of the air, break it down, and store the carbon in soil organic matter and plant roots. Biodiverse and organically enriched dirt, it turns out, maximizes carbon capture.
At Strong Roots Farm in Potter Valley, Sorren and Gina Covina baled 25 acres of mixed grass and clover hay this past May. The previous year’s crop had been large—over 900 bales—due to a long rainy season. In the winter and spring of this year, however, less rain fell and the weather was cold. But something else had changed at Strong Roots.
“Last November, we began implementing the carbon farming plan I wrote for our Healthy Soils Program grant application,” Gina told me, as we looked out across long rows of amaranth, tomatoes, squash, and herbs. “The first step was to spread a thin layer of compost everywhere on the farm.”
Compost works in part by increasing plants’ ability to capture and use carbon, which produces crops that are healthier and larger. Sorren happily noted that the first hay cutting of 2020 produced 1,176 bales of hay—276 more than the prior spring. “And the garlic is huge this year,” she added. This increase in yield means that an investment in soil carbon results in significant gains for the farmer. Gina, who operates Open Circle Seeds, noted that such a change enables her business to produce more seeds to sell in a year when, due to the pandemic, many people are turning to home gardening.
According to Jeff Creque of the Carbon Cycle Institute (CCI) in Petaluma, “Agriculture is the one human activity that actually can transform itself from a net atmospheric emitter to a net storer of carbon.” Healthy soil-based farming turns pasture and croplands into deep sinks for the carbon that commercial agriculture strips from fields by excessive tilling and use of chemical fertilizers. It not only offsets on-farm outputs like fossil fuel use, but also improves the productivity of livestock and crops.
CCI’s modeling shows that carbon farming on 25 million acres of California’s arable land could sequester (store) 42 million metric tons of atmospheric carbon annually. Removing this amount from the atmosphere would render our state carbon neutral.
“Adding even a half-inch of compost leads to more grass growth, and that means more carbon capture,” Jeff pointed out. “Now, some of that carbon ends up in the soil, and that increase is measurable. Also, an increase in soil carbon leads to greater water holding capacity. Which means, in the subsequent year, we capture more rainfall on the compost-treated plots and grow even more grass. So, each year—and we now have ten years of data—we see more carbon coming into the soil, at a rate above that of our untreated control plots.”
This measurable increase in carbon storage begins with the development of carbon farming plans tailored to individual land conditions and uses. The grower usually collaborates with the county’s Resource Conservation District and other soil and water specialists. Together, they evaluate the present state of the property and clarify goals for cropland, pastures, forests, and riparian areas (creeks, springs, etc.), identifying opportunities to enhance carbon capture.
Locally, multiple organizations assist with carbon plans. These include the Mendocino County Resource Conservation District (MCRCD), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), CCI, and Fibershed, a textile fiber group based in Marin County. Several farmers and ranchers have funded plan implementation strategies with grants from the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) Healthy Soils Program, the NRCS, and private foundations.
Katy Brantley, the MCRCD’s soils program manager, finds that a wide variety of the county’s farmers and ranchers express interest. “Mendocino County has a lot of agricultural diversity,” she pointed out. “We’ve just completed carbon farming plans with Pennyroyal Farm in Boonville and the Apple Farm in Philo, and we’re starting several more throughout the county. Thanks to the latest round of CDFA Healthy Soils Program grants, Haiku Vineyards in Ukiah and the Boonville Barn Collective will begin implementing climate beneficial practices this fall.”
The diversity of food producers involved in carbon farming highlights our county’s unique agricultural community. Speaking of the Magruder Ranch, Kyle Farmer noted, “Carbon farming looks to a different paradigm for agriculture, one not based only on short-term gains. Wendell Berry put it this way: ‘Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.’ It’s a matter of how far beyond the immediate yield you can be thinking.”
Carbon farming also boosts shorter-term production, he added, “because carbon is such a useful molecule to have around. For example, if you’re feeding cattle with a bale of hay and some of that gets trampled into the soil, should you keep that from happening? Yes, you lose a little hay, but you also gain soil carbon.”
The Magruder Ranch has practiced elements of carbon farming since Mac Magruder took over management from his father forty years ago. Mac implemented rotational grazing—moving cattle from pasture to pasture on a schedule that allows grass recovery. Kyle and his wife Grace, Mac’s daughter, have introduced additional strategies to increase soil health and biodiversity, writing their first carbon plan in 2017 with the county Resource Conservation District.
“We’ve gone forward with spreading compost on every acre of land that’s flat enough,” Kyle told me. “We’re doing the soil tests to see how much carbon increase we can get in our upper hillsides.” They also are planting oaks and faster-growing trees to create silvopastures—tree-studded grassland. Planting trees in perennial pastures results in minimized soil loss and maximized water retention. In the midst of climate-related drought, water-holding capacity is critical.
Peggy Agnew, another Potter Valley rancher, runs 30 to 40 sheep on irrigated pastures and some hill slopes. Over several decades, she has crossbred her flock to develop a breed with soft sturdy wool for spinning. She and her husband are in the first year of implementing a carbon plan, funded by the CDFA’s Healthy Soils Program.
Through the Mendocino County Wool Festival committee, Peggy connected with Fibershed, a regional group that links textile fiber growers with resources and promotes farming methods that enhance soil and watershed health. Working with them and Agricultural Extension staff, she focused on compost spreading to enhance her ranch’s carbon capacity. Like Sorren and Gina, she spread a half-inch of compost in November 2019. Over the next three years, she will test the soil for carbon increases.
“Knowing that we’re improving soil and pushing back against climate change gives what we do more meaning,” Peggy shared. “If I can do this, then so can my neighbor. We’re creating scientific data that demonstrates how much small farms can do.”
Has she seen a difference since applying the compost? “My irrigated pastures usually get grazed down by summer’s end. That hasn’t happened this year. And the sheep are loving the extra clover and grass.”
Across the county in Caspar, Fortunate Farm is finishing up the third year of their carbon plan implementation. Farm manager and co-owner, Gowan Batist, says that the techniques they’ve included so far—composting on a large scale, reducing tillage, and cover cropping in the big vegetable patches, eradicating invasive gorse thickets, and rotational grazing for their sheep—have made a significant difference in the farm’s soil and fertility.
“North Coast Brewing Company supplies us with spent hops and grain,” she told me as we toured the compost yard. “We did our original carbon plan with the Carbon Cycle Institute and the MCRCD. Now we’re also working with Fibershed, because of the sheep.” Fortunate Farm has received funding assistance from the NRCS and a private foundation.
Gowan’s plans for the farm include building up the native plant landscape, intercropping vegetables with native grasses and wildflowers, and introducing hedgerows of elderberry, thimbleberry, and wax myrtle to reduce wind intrusion and hold soil along the creek. “I started out gardening with really low-income kids in the county schools,” Gowan shared. “I see our carbon farming as a continuation, an expansion of my environmental justice work, helping the planet.”
A major goal of the Carbon Cycle Institute and California’s Resource Conservation Districts, as well as many carbon farmers and ranchers, is to scale up these strategies and engage as many growers as possible. “We’d like to see full funding for a carbon farm program through the Resource Conservation Districts all across California,” Jeff Creque said. “There needs to be a significant commitment to the work by society at large.”
The Mendocino County food and fiber producers who practice carbon farming are in the vanguard of this critically important direction for agriculture in the age of global warming. Together with localized food transport projects like the MendoLake Food Hub and watershed restoration and protection programs, they lead the county’s push-back against the climate crisis. As consumers, we can commit to this movement by supporting our local carbon farms, ranches, and wineries, and the businesses that use and sell their products.
For more information on carbon farming:
Carbon Cycle Institute www.carboncycle.org
Fibershed www.fibershed.org
Mendocino County Resource Conservation District www.mcrcd.org
LandSmart www.landsmart.org/programs-services/landsmart-carbon-farm-plans/
North Coast Soil Hub www.soilhub.org/
California Department of Food and Agriculture, Healthy Soils Program www.cdfa.ca.gov/healthysoils/
US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/site/national/home/
Connie Higdon writes on land conservation and environmental issues and is working on a book exploring local solutions for climate change. She lives in Ukiah and can be reached at higdongannon@gmail.com
Slaughterhouse Rules
How a Local Meat Processing Plant Could Serve Ranchers & Strengthen Our Food Security
by Holly Madrigal
The concept of a local slaughterhouse—the idea that we would be able to purchase humanely raised and slaughtered livestock from our neighbors, avoiding the usual additional travel and expense associated with it—has been around for years. While not everyone eats meat, most can agree that a transition from horrific factory farms to locally controlled, transparent, smaller slaughter facilities would be a welcome change. Given that grocery store shelves and butcher counter freezers have been lean due to stressed supply chains during this pandemic, the idea of locally available meat only increases in popularity.
The Economic Development and Finance Corporation (EDFC) is a non profit organization tasked with supporting economic health in Mendocino County. They received grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2013 and worked closely with the UC Agricultural Cooperative Extension and Mendocino County’s Ag Department to develop a feasibility study for a meat processing plant. This followed a 2009 report that specifically explored the idea of a New Zealand style, small-scale abattoir. The projected potential financial benefits were hopeful.
The 2009 estimates found that a local slaughterhouse could increase the gross value of livestock in the region from $15 million to $29 million annually. The study also found that such a project could create 682 jobs (44 directly attributed to the facility). These estimates were calculated with a baseline service area of Mendocino, Lake, Sonoma, Marin, and Napa Counties, with possible expansion into additional counties in the future. Total estimated value added to the regional economy would be $23 million.
Prior to joining the staff at EDFC, Diann Simmons had collaborated extensively with the Round Valley Indian Authority. Fresh off her work helping to create the Round Valley Community Library and Commons, she joined other like-minded individuals to discuss the feasibility of opening a slaughterhouse in that community. “The idea was to improve the viability of local food systems,” says Diann. “We received a grant from the California Endowment to pursue that idea, since we knew it would increase the value to local ranchers, allowing them to make more from each head of cattle, buffalo, sheep, or goats. Working in partnership with the tribal community, it seemed like it could serve an economic benefit to the area.”
Diann continues, “After a full analysis, it turned out that Round Valley was too far for ranchers to come from outside the valley, and it would be too cost prohibitive to survive just on the local supply.” She adds, “It is a shame, because there are herds of buffalo in Covelo that are currently sold cheap to a third party for processing. If we could do our own meat processing, ranchers could charge more and receive more of the benefit.”
Multiple ideas for local slaughtering options have been percolating around Mendocino County for years. Perhaps a small rig could travel to individual ranches, eliminating the stress on animals of long-distance travel. The carcasses could then be taken to a cut-and-wrap facility for further processing. In order to resell that meat to the public, a USDA inspector would be required, and this has proven to be a barrier due to expense and availability. The 2013 EDFC study estimated that a set up like this would cost approximately $430,500. If a modular slaughter unit and additional holding pens were set up on a leased site, with farmers transporting their livestock to the site, the cost would increase to $821,100.
Tyler Yadon, of Willits-area company Meat Box, was one of the people who operated with a similar travelling business model for many years. Demand was great. He would arrive at a ranch to kill the animal(s), which would then be taken to the cut-and-wrap butcher of choice. “We ran out of places that could take those carcasses. Bob Bennett in the Willits Valley, a retired butcher from Safeway, used to take them, but he is really trying to retire now,” says Yadon. “Larry Poss in Lake County and Geiger’s Market in Laytonville still do this work, but they get busy. If ranchers could bring animals to a small clean place with a good sized walk-in to hang and age the carcasses, and a top notch butchering area, you would never have an off day,” says Tyler.
The 2013 study also explored the option of a 24,000 square foot built-in-place facility that could slaughter and process up to 1,500 animals annually. At a cost of approximately $1.4 million, this plan had the greatest potential to create jobs, add value for ranchers, and boost economic development. Many local ranchers currently truck their herds to this type of setup, so providing a local facility would save them time and money, and reduce stress on their animals.
John and Charline Ford have been ranching in Mendocino and Humboldt counties for generations. “With the coronavirus problem, along with the old Rancho plant only slaughtering their own animals, this has made the need even more worthy than it was five or six years ago,” says John Ford. Currently, Ford takes his cattle to Redwood Meat Co. in Eureka, where the wait times have not been excessive. But they also have cattle coming from ranches within Humboldt County, so that involves coordinating the slaughter schedule. “I would definitely use a local facility if it could satisfy my needs and produce a similar end product, which Redwood does provide at this time. If the plant is built and operated properly, I do not believe the financing is a problem. The location is still the biggest problem,” John concludes.
This brings us to the primary stumbling block for a local slaughterhouse: location, location, location. The requirement to both be near our city centers and out of sight is a significant barrier. The EDFC feasibility study found that any facility would need to have access to a municipal water supply and sewer system. This is often in conflict with neighbors that either have a perception of a slaughterhouse as being smelly and awful, or who have ethical concerns about eating meat. In fact, if run properly there should be no detectable odors or outdoor feedlots.
One possible location is just north of Willits at the old Apache Mill site, perfectly situated on Highway 101, but lacking the municipal hook-up requirements. John Ford is aware of another potential property near Ukiah. “I believe it is still on the market, but we heard that there are neighbors in that area that have threatened a lawsuit if slaughterhouse plans move forward. They apparently do not believe in the slaughtering of any animals. Too bad, as this particular property has a municipal water hookup already. So the big drawback is an acceptable location that will satisfy not only the slaughter house’s needs, but also the acceptance by the public.”
Kyle Farmer of Magruder Ranch is pragmatic in his assessment of the issue. “One of the problems with the concept is that, while we don’t have slaughter as local as I would like it to be, we are pretty well off considering what most of the country is like.” Mac Magruder, Kyle’s father-in-law, has been selling his high quality pork and beef locally and throughout northern California for many years. They also take their animals to Redwood Meats. Kyle muses, “This is all for USDA. For state-inspected, there are much more interesting options. Recently, a law passed legalizing what people had already been doing, pre-selling an animal, having it slaughtered on farm, and processing it at a state-inspected facility. We can do five animals per month that way.”
Kyle continues, “The problem is that the only person who does on-farm slaughter recently partnered in purchasing a state-inspected cut-and-wrap facility, and now only kills for that facility. For on-farm slaughter, all you need is a tricked out pickup truck, some sort of boom hoist, preferably some refrigeration capacity. I think that the focus in Mendocino County should be helping someone who is raising animals on a small scale and is looking for diversified cash flow to acquire a tricked out slaughter truck to do on-farm slaughter, five animals per month, for as many ranches as possible.“
Additional progress is happening at the federal level. As recently as this past July, the California State Grange sent out an email encouraging members to support Senate Bill S1620 and House Bill H.R. 2859, the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption Act (or PRIME Act—humor!). The act would allow small, privately owned slaughterhouses to process meat for sale to the public without requiring a full-time inspector to be on site. As the email states, “Custom slaughterhouses are regulated and inspected, but are not referred to as ‘inspected facilities’ because they do not have an inspector on-site during processing. The Federal law [that this act would negate] is not about safety. There have been zero recalls from these custom slaughterhouses.”
The CA State Grange closed by encouraging its members to contact their representatives to urge them to pass the bills. “Passage of the PRIME Act would support small farmers who currently lack reasonable access to processing facilities, thus helping to re-localize food systems, build more resilient supply chains, and improve consumer access to locally raised meat.” Decentralizing meat processing improves efficiency while providing better conditions for the animals, and therefore better product for the ranchers and omnivores involved.
When this health crisis first began, it was difficult to find flour at the grocery store. And yet, our local Mendocino Grain Project was able to step up to mill flour for our residents. A local slaughterhouse could serve a similar function, providing a smaller, more nimble food source closer to home. Much work has already been done to make this a reality. The findings of the 2009 and 2013 EDFC studies still have relevance, but as time moves on, they will quickly become outdated. Kyle Farmer reflects, “It is a great idea if there is a brilliant, committed person willing to lose sleep over the thing. The entrepreneur should be the starting point, not a fuzzy detail to figure out at the end. In this case, we aren’t looking so much for an entrepreneur as a mid-career professional who has experience in managing a slaughterhouse. Without that person, we’re just talking.” To turn that talk into action will take funding, commitment, and drive, and would make meat raised in Mendocino County more widely available to a supportive public that’s hungry for it.
Holly Madrigal is a Mendocino County maven who loves to share the delights of our region. She’s fortunate to enjoy her meaningful work as the director of the Leadership Mendocino program and takes great joy in publishing this magazine.
Eco-Culinary Activism
Eat Your Pest
by Robby Bruce
We are lucky to live in an area that is abundant in local organic and healthful food sources. A rural population and a bounty of farmers give us a security in food supply that is not available in many other parts of the country. Our Mediterranean climate, our forests, and the oceans are also a source of sustenance through foraging.
The ocean, especially, can supply us with a wide variety of choices, from plant matter such as kelp to animal protein. As the Southeast Alaska native Tlingit say, “When the tide is out, the table is set.” For practical purposes, almost everything you see at low tide is edible and enjoyed by various cultures around the world. One of the unlikely edible creatures found at low tide are sea urchins.
The part of the urchin that is edible is called uni, considered a delicacy in Japanese cuisine. Uni is growing in popularity in America primarily in sushi bars, but it is also increasingly prevalent in a variety of nouveau cuisine. Its flavor is most often described as creamy—rich and buttery, melt-in-your-mouth, with a taste of the sea without being fishy. According to researcher Phillip Hayward, a Japanese colleague of his said that “Eating raw sea urchin is like sharing an intimate kiss with the ocean.”
The use of uni as a food source also has a long tradition in Europe, from Norway to southern Spain and along the Mediterranean coast. In these regions, uni is often consumed in its most basic form—raw, fresh out of the shell, with a sip of the local liquor, cognac, pernod, or ouzo. Uni has also been combined with caviar, spread on toast or crostini, or used with such neutral tastes as eggs or rice as a backdrop to accentuate the flavor of the sea. Much the way anchovies are used as an additive, uni is used to add a delicate richness to sauces for pasta, risotto, or ceviche. In the South Seas, urchin is a staple of the islanders’ diet. It is high in Omega 3 fatty acids, low in calories, and reportedly an aphrodisiac (there is some evidence that it contains chemicals similar to cannabis that, when ingested, can cause a state of euphoria).
For many years, the California coast has enjoyed a productive commercial fishery for red urchin, supplying the domestic and export markets and providing a good living for many families in our small coastal communities. A healthy and vibrant kelp forest is essential to productive coastal fisheries. Kelp forests are nurseries of the ocean. They sequester carbon, dampen wave related erosion, produce oxygen, and provide a food source for humans. However, the kelp forests on the Pacific Coast have been struggling with warmer than normal ocean temperatures for some time now. Then in 2013, a mysterious wasting disease began wiping out the sea star populations. There is some evidence that both temperature increase and the wasting disease are both linked to long term climate change.
The sea star happens to be the only real predator in our area of the hardy and voracious purple sea urchin. With the sea star numbers devastated, the purple urchins increased by 60 times their typical numbers. The main food source for purple urchin is our abundant kelp forests, so within a few years, 90% of those kelp forests were devoured. In many areas, underwater surveys showed nothing but beds of purple urchins, with little life of any other kind. However, this hardy species will eat almost anything, including each other, to survive. They can even go dormant if food sources disappear, living for years without sustenance.
Kelp is also the primary food source for both the abalone and the red urchin populations. In 2016 and 2017, after the sea-star die-off and the destruction of the kelp forests, the recreational abalone fishery began to land a record number of large-sized abalone on the Mendocino coast, as the marine mollusks moved up out of the deep to the intertidal zone in search of food. Though their shells were much bigger than normal (because these animals were more mature), the bodies were tiny and emaciated, evidence of starvation. By 2018, the sport abalone fishery was shut down and has been closed ever since.
As John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The loss of the sea-star is an example of how removing a keystone predator upsets the balance of an entire ecosystem. Essential to our local ocean ecosystem, the restoration of the kelp forests will have formidable obstacles. We can hope the sea-star will recover and re-establish its critical place in maintaining the balance of the ocean ecosystem. There is certainly no shortage of their preferred food, the purple urchin.
Another possible solution would be to introduce another apex predator of the purple urchin, such as the sea otter. Once plentiful from the Aleutians to Mexico along the Pacific coast, they were hunted to near extinction by fur traders in the 18th and 19th centuries. Otters eat urchin but also many other kinds of shellfish, so it is wise to look carefully and cautiously at reintroduction to avoid unintended consequences, even if it is an indigenous species.
We all know that the primary global apex predator is human beings. We have a long history of being efficient when it comes to resource extraction, often to the detriment of our environment and ourselves. Enter Urchinomics, a company that specifically focuses on resource extraction, but with the intention to improve habitat and provide food. Their goal is to “restore ocean habitats to feed the world.” Brian Tsuyoshi Takaeda, CEO and founder of Urchinomics, explains, “Urchinomics is about turning an environmental challenge into an economic, ecological, and social opportunity.” Urchins are resilient, versatile, and destructive, so harvesting them provides the company with a restorative seafood product while helping the kelp forests recover from their decimation.
Urchinomics capitalizes on using both aquaculture and commercial fishing capabilities. Often these activities are in opposition to each other, but in the Urchinomics system, the fishers collect the urchin under the authority of their commercial dive permits. The urchins are then transported to a shore-based facility where, over a 10 week period, they are fed a nutrient-rich feed designed to maximize growth. The uni is then processed and entered into the commercial domestic and export markets, and sold at a profit. One of the underlying objectives of Urchinomics is to restore coastal kelp forests, and to support that effort, they return a portion of profits for urchin eradication, outreach, and education. Full circle.
Urchinomics is active in many places worldwide, such as Scandinavia, Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Here in Northern California, Urchinomics has formed a partnership with the Noyo Center for Marine Science in Fort Bragg and UC Davis at their Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory. In this trial phase, the purple urchins are harvested out of Noyo Harbor, transported to the aquaculture facilities at the marine laboratory, and made ready for market. “The trial was very successful, and Urchinomics has recently obtained the lease on an aquaculture facility in Bodega Bay to start commercial production,” says Sheila Seamans, executive director of the Noyo Center for Marine Science. Sheila explains that the Noyo Center will help administer the funds for kelp recovery, and the hope is that it might, in the future, be a source of income for promoting other research.
The Noyo Center for Marine Science is an organization based on the Mendocino coast dedicated to “advancing ocean conservation through education, exploration, and experience.” The Noyo Center has recently opened the downtown Discovery Center at 338 North Main Street in Fort Bragg, as well as an informational center called the Crows Nest on the north side of the Fort Bragg coastal trail. The Noyo Center has a goal of opening an aquarium/research center on the coastal trail site as an economic driver for the coast through research, education, and tourism.
The Noyo Center for Marine Science is also a partner in the “Help the Kelp” campaign that includes California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Reefcheck, the Greater Farrallones Association, UC Davis, the Ocean Protection Council, and the Watermen’s Alliance. This is a collaborative effort to hire commercial divers and utilize volunteer citizen scientists to remove urchins from designated conservation areas, to investigate the most efficient methods for removal, and to monitor the success of those methods.
The restoration of the balance of our ocean habitat is going to take a combination of all our resources. If we can turn the over-abundance of the purple sea urchin into an economic boost for our coastal communities and environmental salvation for our oceans, then the eco/culinary activist adage “eat your pest” will be part of the solution. So everyone please—eat up, eat uni, and kiss the ocean.
Find out more about Noyo Center for Marine Science, the Help the Kelp program, and how to get involved as a citizen scientist at NoyoCenter.org.
Robby Bruce is a long time Mendocino County resident, commercial fisherman, and general man of the sea. He has served on the board of the Noyo Center for Marine Science for three years.
Journey to a Plant-Based Life
by Dawn Emery Ballantine
Heart disease is the biggest killer in America, followed by cancer, and trailing not far behind, complications from Type Two Diabetes. Nevertheless, I was shocked when my husband—a healthy, lifelong tennis-player—recently suffered a heart attack. Coming home from the hospital with a heart stent and a pile of meds, he immediately began to search for some alternatives. He read articles and watched documentaries (Forks over Knives, The Game Changers, What the Health, to name a few). Researchers were demonstrating tremendous improvements in cardiovascular health and a reduction in diabetes and cancer rates in people who removed all meat, eggs, and dairy products from their diet, and instead ate whole-foods (non-processed) meals made exclusively from plants.
Our research convinced us that this plant-powered diet would be the way to both heal his heart and continue to play tennis into his dotage. So, though he was a stalwart carnivore, we are now following a vegan diet and mostly loving it, in spite of reactions from friends and acquaintances that range from surprise to dismissive frustration.
Apart from health considerations, there are other compelling reasons to consider a more plant-based lifestyle. Greta Thunberg, the young climate change activist, has contributed to the conversation, amplifying the message that animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of global warming and climate change (a greater impact than the total of land, air, and sea transportation). This industry uses 20-33% of the world’s fresh water and occupies 45% of the world’s total land, which might otherwise be used for cultivation of crops.
Greta is not the only one calling out the ag industry’s impacts on the climate. A study by the University of Oxford showed that switching to a plant-based diet could reduce both your personal water use “footprint” by 50% and your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by 73%.
Initial interest in the vegan diet came out of the animal rights movement, whose leaders encouraged people to avoid animal products because of the heinous way animals are treated in factory farms. And indeed, the more one researches this aspect, the clearer our personal choice remains. So begins our journey to plant-powered eating.
Cooking at home, I’ve enjoyed learning a host of new recipes and can usually whip up a feast of goodness, comfort, and health with the help of some plant-based cookbooks and Pinterest. The local food movement has made wonderful produce available year-round, whether through farmers markets or grocery stores. But sometimes it’s nice when somebody else does the cooking.
It’s easy to say that any restaurant should have at least one gluten-free, vegan option. There are a few fairly simple substitutions one can make to any traditional recipe (the delicious vegan tacos at Little River Inn come to mind), and concocting a stir-fry vegetable and rice/quinoa dish, or a baked potato with black beans and a salad, would go a long way toward making customers feel cared for. Even Forbes, a financial magazine, recently published an article on “How to Make Any Recipe Vegan.” Chains like McDonald’s, Chipotle, and Panera are now offering vegan options, the latter vowing to make at least 50% of its menu offerings plant-based. Celebrities are all aboard the vegan train, with the Golden Globes, the Oscars, and the Screen Actors Guild awards celebrations all offering vegan meals this year, the latter serving, for the first time ever, an entirely plant-based menu.
Our initial eating-out reality was not so shiny. My much-beloved Mexican restaurants often cook beans in lard and rice in chicken broth, and they put that yummy cotija cheese on everything (oh, how I miss that!). American-style restaurants have been the most challenging. With fewer alternatives, even the salads showcase cheese or have non-vegan dressings, and paying $15+ for a bowl of raw veggies is a bit off-putting. I recently went to a very nice restaurant, which we had enjoyed greatly in our omnivore phase, where I could “build my own” pizza. I came away with a $29 bill and the saddest pizza I’ve ever seen or tasted. (Note, I have made delicious gluten-free, vegan pizza at home, so I know it’s not that complicated or expensive.)
We have discovered that many restaurants put in the effort to provide options for folks with limiting dietary needs, like Plank in Cloverdale, where they made a delicious gluten-free, vegan sandwich with no fuss at all. And there are more than a few restaurants that feature plant-based cuisine in Mendocino County. Try The Ravens at The Stanford Inn (Mendocino) for multiple delicious vegan and gluten-free choices, as well as Fog Eater Café (Mendocino), Taste Buds (Ukiah), and Café One (Fort Bragg)—all yummy and happy to accommodate alternative diets. Little River Inn also offers super tasty vegan menu items, and it’s hard to beat that view! Asian and South Asian restaurants usually have a few options, such as vegan sushi or veggie rice noodle bowls—try Miss Saigon (Ukiah), Oco Time (Ukiah), Thai Spice (Cloverdale), and the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas restaurant (Ukiah), to name a few.
By following these new food tenets for the past few months, my husband’s lab numbers have enormously improved, and his medications have already been reduced. Greta and others are convinced that a plant-based diet will help to save our planet, and Joaquin Phoenix makes a poignant plea for the more humane treatment of our animal friends by not eating them and their by-products. I am on board for all of these reasons.
This seismic shift in our eating has been made easier thanks to the many vegan blogs and websites (check out WorldOfVegan.com or PlantBasedOnABudget.com). Some include shopping guides, tips on popular food chains with vegan options, and recipe alternatives to make the food we love healthier for us and the planet. In the interest of cleansing and hitting the restart button after the quiet of winter, going plant-based even one day a week could make a difference to our health, our animal friends, and our carbon footprint. Meatless Mondays, anyone?
Dawn Emery Ballantine lives in Anderson Valley, where she curates books for her bookshop, Hedgehog Books, edits this magazine, and enjoys learning new recipes to please the plant-based palate.
Photo by Mariana Medvedeva courtesy of Unsplash.