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Zimmerman Ranch, Marshall As a founder of the Tomales History Center, Mary
McCullough Zimmerman appreciates tradition. In fact, the house where
she and her husband Merv live is the former Halleck School, a one-room
schoolhouse built in 1862 on the ranch overlooking Tomales Bay.
The building was modernized to suit their growing family over the
years, but the original roof still rises to a peak above the front
door. Windows on either side have the same thick wavy glass they
had when young Gladys Jacobsen (see Leiss easement story) was the
teacher from 1933-35, and the original cast-iron school bell is
mounted in a place of honor near the front gate. While it's tempting to look at agriculture through
the lens of the past, many of today's West Marin ranchers are caught
between history and a hard place. On the one hand, they may be part
of a tradition that goes back five or six generations, as it does
with Merv and Mary. Both are descendants of dairymen who settled
in the area in the mid-19th century. Both spent their own childhoods
pitching in with a capital "P"- before school, after school,
and every single summer. The ranches they grew up on, and later
their own operation, were self-sufficient enterprises that included
chickens, pigs, beef and dairy cows, and a big vegetable garden.
Hard work was taken for granted because, "You had freedom,
you had friends around," Merv says, opening his arms to the
rolling hills that surround his Marshall home on three sides. On the other hand, ranchers struggling with commodity
prices that haven't kept pace with the cost of living are increasingly
forced to make choices that could end longstanding traditions. Three
years ago, the Zimmermans closed the dairy Merv's father had started
in 1941, replacing it with a herd of beef cattle and another of
dairy heifers. As Merv and Mary reached retirement age, their
youngest son Bill wanted to continue the family business which he's
helped operate for the past 20 years. He and his wife Sharon, the
parents of four children, both have jobs off the ranch in addition
to running the current livestock operation, but they didn't have
the resources to buy out Bill's parents. Now their decision to sell
an agricultural conservation easement to MALT will enable them to
purchase the 308-acre Diamond Z Ranch from Merv and Mary. "Selling
an easement is the only way we could afford to buy the ranch. We've
saved it for another generation," Bill said. MALT paid the
appraised price of $677,000 with funding from the California Coastal
Conservancy and the California Department of Conservation's Farmland
Conservancy Program. An old milk can marked "710" sits in
one corner of the schoolhouse kitchen. It's a reminder of the time
not so many years ago when the number meant the Grade A milk inside
came from the Diamond Z. A driver from the cooperative creamery
in Petaluma picked up the milk each and every day without fail.
"Our biggest treat," Mary remembers, "was to take
a boat across the bay for a picnic." The boat may have been
rickety and the water choppy, but the children played in the sand,
and the day was fine. "Then we'd come home and milk the cows." As it was more than the occasional picnic that kept families in agriculture then, so it will take a concerted effort to keep the tradition alive today. MALT's program is one option for West Marin farmers. "But agriculture in California, as well as in rest of the United States, has a great struggle to survive," Bill Zimmerman cautions. "It's not just out here in West Marin. It's nationwide."
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