Recent Press

Back on the Ranch
Rick Polito, IJ reporter
April 13, 2004

THE FIRST-GRADER is missing two front teeth, but his sense of smell is working just fine. "Ewww stinky," he exclaims, adding, moments later, "Did I just step in a stink bomb?"

A few feet away, Mimi Luebbermann, surrounded by a gaggle of other first-graders on a field trip from Mary E. Silveira School, is smiling. She wants the kids to smell a bit of what she calls "real life."

"They're being raised in such antiseptic situations that they're not used to real smells," Luebbermann says. "Everything is Lysol and antibacterial soap."

At Luebbermann's Chileno Valley ranch in rural West Marin, smells are part of the package. It's not a large farm - just 25 acres, 50 sheep, 30 chickens and one llama -but she wants it to be real.

It has to be. It's the farm she's been looking for most of her life.

"It took me 50 years to get back to the farm," Luebbermann says.

The 59-year-old writer/mom turned writer/farmer grew up on a farm in Virginia. "We had cows and we had sheep and we had chickens. We had everything," she recalls.

But the family traded farm life for coastal Florida when she was 7. At that age, farming was still a wonderland of childhood curiosity. "If we had stayed a little longer, I would have had real chores," she jokes.

Whatever it was, the dream stuck and a nagging agricultural instinct wove its way through her life, evolving into a personal slow-motion back-to-the-land movement.

Settling into the Bay Area in the late 1960s, Luebbermann was immediately drawn to gardening and the beginnings of the organic revolution. Although she'd dreamed of a career in photography, life turned out differently. "I ended up getting married and having kids instead," she says.

She raised her two sons in the Rockridge area of Oakland. Arann Harris, one of those sons, is living in San Francisco and pursuing a career as an environmental educator. He remembers his mom standing out in the neighborhood.

"She was slaughtering rabbits in our backyard in Oakland," Harris says. "We had chickens and our neighbors would holler at us."

A woman of unmistakable energy, Luebbermann was spinning careers in publishing and event planning. The move from working for publishing houses to publishing her own books was a natural step. She started writing. Not surprisingly, gardening became her principal subject. "I think I'm up to 20, 21 (books)," she says now.

But her love for the land and sentimental recollections of a childhood on the farm were not being satisfied in Rockridge. She needed a farm, not a back yard with chicken coops and a tiny orchard.

She looked first in Napa, but the land that was flat already had grapes on it "and they just kept adding zeroes," she says of real estate prices. She lived for a while in a converted chicken coop in St. Helena, but eventually discovered the Chileno Valley parcel she bought and quite accurately named "Windrush Farm."

That was 1995. The way she remembers it, leaving behind "beautiful three-story, wood-shingled house in the Rockridge area" was hardly even a choice. The idea of a middle-aged, single woman leaving her life behind for the never-finished, economically unforgiving toil of farming may not have seemed sensible, but it felt right.

"I couldn't talk myself out of it," she says.

Arann Luebbermann calls the farm a perfect fit for his mother's energy. He can't go to see her without finding himself caught up by what he calls "the whirlwind mom."

"People come and want to experience Mom and the real deal is you have to keep up," Harris says.

That whirlwind of Windrush Farm has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. Marin Agricultural Land Trust spokeswoman Elisabeth Ptak says Luebbermann's energy fits a needed niche.

The parcel is not large enough for MALT to consider for an agricultural easement, a contract mandating the land be kept in agricultural use in perpetuity. It instead falls into the gray area of hobby farming - Luebbermann relies mainly on her books for income. Such plots are vulnerable to development and, however small their agricultural operations, dreamers such as Luebbermann are what keeps the smaller parcels pastoral. This is particularly true in Chileno Valley where the proximity to Petaluma makes the acreage especially attractive to developers and people looking to build a monster home.

"It's very fortunate that she is the kind of person she is," Ptak says.

Luebbermann's passion for agricultural education is another factor that makes the ranch more than a hobby farm, Ptak says. Windrush Farm is a frequent site for MALT tours (the next one comes up May 8).

"Her enthusiasm is just contagious," Ptak says. "She really makes the connection between the land and the animals and the human use."

Nine years after buying the ranch, Luebbermann is living her dream and sharing it with everybody she can. She recently received a Marin Arts Council grant and is applying for a home equity loan to create a classroom in her farm to teach about wool spinning and natural fibers. The ranch is also a "model farm" for the Marin Agriculture Education Alliance. On many spring days, she will have multiple classes of children getting a look and a whiff of farm life.

On Thursday, the Mary E. Silveira first-graders were there. Luebbermann's main agricultural interest is in wool and natural fibers. She raises Lincoln and Corriedale sheep for fleece.

Standing before the proverbial "three bags full," Luebbermann asks the children "This came from an animal. What do you think it is?"

"SHEEP!" they chime in unison.

With that, Luebbermann launches into a 20-minute explanation of how wool is harvested, processed and knitted into clothing. By the time, she sits down at the wooden spinning wheel to turn a handful of fluffy wool into yarn, the first-graders are absolutely absorbed.

"Maybe we should go and see the animals now," she announces.

With a basket of bread scraps in one arm, Luebbermann leads the class to the pasture as if it were her own personal herd.

Susan Ritscher is the teacher. While Mary E. Silveira is locally renowned for its environmental education, Luebbermann is providing the suburban children an experience they are unlikely to find anywhere else. "They don't live on farms," Ritscher says. "This is something we can't do at school."

Later, when the children pull out sack lunches for a picnic around Luebbermann's pond, the kids are still buzzing with the experience. Ritscher points to one boy, still tugging on the piece of yarn he'd spun from a wisp of wool. "He's not eating because he's too busy spinning," she says.

It's the sort of moment that reminds Luebbermann why she bought the farm. She wants the kids - this particular group is the same age she was when her father sold the family farm - to understand where their food comes from, where their wool sweaters come from and what a farm is.

"I just want them to have a sense of things that have been forgotten," she says.

Even the smells.

IF YOU GO

The Marin Agricultural Land Trust is scheduling a trip to Luebbermann's Windrush Farm for May 8. Visitors will get a textile tour of the wool spinning operation and a guided walk through the pastures. The cost is $20 for MALT members and $25 for the general public, $10 for children and $55 for a family of four or more. Pre-registration is required. Call 663-1158 or check www.malt.org.

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