Where the cows come home: one farm family shows how to work the land and save it, too - Profile - Ellen and Bill Straus; rural west Marin County, California

Sierra, July-August, 2002 by Jennifer Hattam

If you're going to experience farm life--even for a day--you've got to start out with a big farm breakfast. When I arrive at Ellen Straus's home in rural west Marin County, California, she greets me warmly and offers a cup of coffee. I gratefully accept, mentioning that all the stores in my San Francisco neighborhood had been closed when I left that morning. Before I realize what's happening, the 75-year-old grandmother has eggs frying on the stove, and a bounty of local delights--organic cottage cheese, fresh bread, homemade jam--covering the red and white checkered tablecloth, with water boiling in a cow-shaped kettle.

Scanning the kitchen as Ellen bustles about, I count six more cows: a blue and white ceramic dish on the table, a couple of refrigerator magnets, and a trio of colorful metal bovines frolicking across the wall. Ellen made the last three herself, just as she designed the cow logo on her T-shirt for the family business, the Straus Family Creamery.

Ellen's husband, Bill, came to this bucolic spot on the shores of Tomales Bay in 1941 and started ranching with 23 dairy cows on 166 acres. On a trip east in 1950, he met Ellen, a young immigrant from Holland who had recently graduated from college. "I never knew a farmer before I married Bill," she laughs. "I had lived all my life either in Amsterdam or in New York City, so it was quite a change. But I loved it."

She learned to milk the cows, got used to sharing a phone line with half a dozen other households, and settled into the neighborliness of rural life. "One day, I went to Petaluma to go shopping and our neighbor complained to Bill afterwards that he had driven his truck down the street and I hadn't greeted him," Ellen says. "I didn't even know he was there. So for a while, I just started waving at everybody!"

In some ways, it seems the last half-century has brought few changes to this land of weathered fences and circling hawks. A lone oncoming driver waves as we pass each other on the narrow, winding country road to the creamery grounds. The rolling, verdant hills above Tomales Bay are dotted with cows and rocky outcroppings, and the little town of Marshall, where Ellen and Bill still live in a house built in 1864, has a population of 50. Stoplights are nonexistent, "Cow Xing" signs plentiful. It's hard to imagine this place as anything but farmland. But not long ago, it looked like agriculture's days in west Marin were numbered.

When Ellen arrived in 1950, there were 200 dairies in Marin County, a total that would drop precipitously over the next two decades. Larger operations in the state's central valley could produce more milk, more cheaply, and booming urban populations were encroaching from the east and south. In 1967, Marin County envisioned 125,000 residents on 43,000 newly urbanized acres. Scenic Highway One, which clings to rugged cliffs over the crashing surf of the Pacific, was to become a four-lane parkway, and the serene two-lane road I had driven from the subdivided eastern portion of the county would have been replaced by a freeway. Worse yet, Ellen says, "the word agriculture was not mentioned. At all."

Instead of being outraged, many ranchers seemed resigned. "They thought the game was over--that agriculture was a goner," says Gary Giacomini, a member of the Marin County board of supervisors from 1972 to 1996 and the scion of a west Marin ranching family. "They'd seen it happen all over the Bay Area, with subdivisions coming in and ranchers being pushed out. So they weren't keeping fences up, they were putting their ranches under option for development-you could see all over the county that they had given up the ghost."

"Some of our neighbors would say, `Well, you can't stop progress,'" Ellen remembers. "They didn't think that they could stay, so they wanted to get as much as they could from developers." Not Ellen. The memory of her family's emigration in 1940--"to escape Hitler," she says quietly--had stayed with her. "I couldn't understand why such a man was allowed to become head of a country, to do the things he did, so I always wanted to be active in my community," Ellen says. "And I was selfish, too: I wanted to stay here. I felt that I had moved enough and I wanted to be able to continue this wonderful life."

Although just 60 miles north of San Francisco, Marshall seems a world apart. To the east rises Bolinas Ridge, home to both redwoods and ranches. On the shores of narrow Tomales Bay, small shops on rustic piers offer fresh oysters and clams from the estuary, now a national marine sanctuary. To the west, the fog-shrouded coastal wilderness at Point Reyes National Seashore harbors nearly two dozen threatened or endangered species. It's easy to see why people fought so hard over the area's future.

Long active in local Democratic Party politics, Ellen readily-jumped into the planning battle. Bill did too, becoming the first farmer to join the Marin Conservation League. "The Strauses didn't come from the traditional ranch families in Marin, many of which are in their fourth or so generation," notes Ralph Grossi, a dairy rancher from nearby Novato and the president of American Farmland Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to preserve agricultural lands. "They came from a different culture-they're one of the few Jewish families in the area--and very often it's people who come into a community without the baggage of having grown up there who can see the bigger picture."