Freestone Ranch

Freestone Ranch Sonoma County Farm to Table Food Grass-Fed Beef, Pastured Pork, Pastured Chicken & Eggs. Beef, chicken, and eggs available here at the ranch by appointment.

Delicious and profoundly nourishing, for you and your family, for the watershed, for the land. Beef available at Andy's Produce Market, Bill's Farm Basket, and the Valley Ford Market. Eggs available at the Valley Ford Market. Enjoy and be nourished!

The news for freshwater fish globally is catastrophic. Here on the ranch in the Estero Americano and Bodega Harbor water...
01/25/2025

The news for freshwater fish globally is catastrophic. Here on the ranch in the Estero Americano and Bodega Harbor watersheds, the fish in our creeks are gone. We are not exactly sure why as we have worked to protect them for 20 years. Stressors include 150 years of habitat destruction, toxins everywhere, removal of indigenous watershed tending, hotter dryer summers, overgrowth of woody vegetation, and collapse of kelp forests. It’s heartbreaking to hear Trump dismissing the water needs of ecosystems but the reality is that our best efforts in California to protect freshwater ecosystems have been failing anyway. The world war says that there will be destruction and losers but we can embrace creation instead of the destruction of war. In our smaller watersheds, there any many indigenous tending practices that can strengthen ecosystems without sacrificing water for agriculture and cities but most are impossible within our scientific, economic and regulatory structures.

It’s a new world. Instead of token and ineffective promises to address environmental collapse it is now official policy ...
01/21/2025

It’s a new world. Instead of token and ineffective promises to address environmental collapse it is now official policy to destroy the biosphere in favor of profits and power. I’ve never seen a delta smelt that Trump has officially declared we can dry out and I think the endangered species act idea that we don’t have to care for life on earth until the last moment before it disappears has always been inadequate but this new path looks worse. We have been feeling that it’s dangerous to step forward and offer good care to the land we steward. Maybe gutting environmental regulation will make it safer to talk about land stewardship. It’s up to all of us to protect our living kin in all forms. How can we do it? These directive include pulling out of all global climate change accords, direct all officials to use any and all emergency powers to support resource extraction, take drill baby drill to the next level, stop the electric car transition, remove all appliance energy efficiency regulations and more. 😢

Modern agriculture is impressively productive but it developed in the unusually stable climate of the Holocene. As our c...
01/19/2025

Modern agriculture is impressively productive but it developed in the unusually stable climate of the Holocene. As our climate moves out of this safe zone, I think we should study more diverse indigenous food systems. Ancient food systems worked in diverse and variable climates. Technologies like desert shrubs that produce edible seeds, root crops that can rest underground through years of drought, valley’s that concentrate water and fertility in wetlands to grow food, trees producing staple foods, perennial prairie plants producing edible seeds, and many other technologies beyond annual grain crops deserve investment and study as our climate changes. We don’t have the resources or skills to harvest native food plants here on the ranch but we do work hard to repair watersheds and protect existing food plant populations.

The sophisticated skills used by indigenous people for millennia to shape California landscapes into beautiful and produ...
01/19/2025

The sophisticated skills used by indigenous people for millennia to shape California landscapes into beautiful and productive ecosystems have been lost. Wetlands were one of the most productive areas for people to produce food. Much of the collapse of freshwater fish and ecosystems is a result of the removal of the human partnership with these systems. A key part of leaning at Freestone Ranch is to look at the landscape, the plants, the soils, the animals, the needs of people, and the capabilities of people to understand how to bring more life, food and beauty to the land. I believe that this process of reverse engineering is a critical tool for protecting the life on earth that people need to survive. Unfortunately the ongoing erasure of the role of indigenous people in shaping California’s landscapes makes it impossible for institutions and professionals to learn how to care for the diverse life here. Our learning and work is crippled by social and economic constraints. What can we do?

Chaparral is the remarkable cumulation of thousands of years of humans tending food producing plants in an arid difficul...
01/14/2025

Chaparral is the remarkable cumulation of thousands of years of humans tending food producing plants in an arid difficult climate. The images of burnt beach houses in Malibu are clear evidence that “mowing” and completing the destruction of this ancient food technology will not make our expensive houses safe. These houses between a highway and a beach burned because one house caught an ember and then caused a chain of adjacent houses to burn. Also note that the chaparral institute that has taken responsibility for protecting this ancient food system does not acknowledge that it is a human artifact. Hiding the human origins of this landscape makes it impossible for them to succeed in protecting chaparral.

Partial truths are dangerous. Coastal prairie people primarily ate plants, fish and seafood. Elk and deer were a seconda...
01/12/2025

Partial truths are dangerous. Coastal prairie people primarily ate plants, fish and seafood. Elk and deer were a secondary food. Burning of grasslands was primarily a tool to produce human edible foods like the soaproot in the second photo. People had to limit the elk and deer populations because elk herds would quickly eat, trample and destroy human plant foods. I am not aware of a single acre of California grassland that is tended with the burning, weeding, seeding, and digging that fed people here for millennia. For some reason, experts, indigenous people, and all of us use code phrases like burning for elk or protecting rare plants to hint at the food system that was here. If we want anything more that token protection of a dying shadow of the incredible indigenous human system that covered California, we have to acknowledge that learning, tending, and eating by people is core to protecting the “wild” landscape that surrounds us.

Why are squirrels eating voles? Why are declining deer populations defoliating invasive blackberries on the ranch? Why h...
12/23/2024

Why are squirrels eating voles? Why are declining deer populations defoliating invasive blackberries on the ranch? Why have most of our insect pollinators disappeared? Why have our chorus frog populations collapsed? Why are the fish and freshwater shrimp gone from our creeks? Why are trees and shrubs dying on the ranch? We don’t know but, environmental toxins and climate change are prime suspects. Squirrels quickly learning to cleanly butcher and eat voles demonstrates the resilience of life but it’s also alarming. Will we just stand back and watch our screens while life on earth unravels?

People and salmon were partners for millennia here. We are relearning too slowly. Willow Creek has reformed a stage zero...
12/21/2024

People and salmon were partners for millennia here. We are relearning too slowly. Willow Creek has reformed a stage zero reach. It provides good food for young salmon but the salmon are getting lost on their journey to the ocean. The plan now is to hand build simple structures to shape a clear channel for their journey. The humans living here for millennia must have done similar work shaping channels, forming pools, ensuring good spawning gravel, growing wetlands, and limiting predation on fish. The loss of this ancient human aquaculture work is a major contributor to the loss of salmon. Today we have a sad and not very successful system of hatcheries instead of learning to create natural salmon rearing habitat as people did for millennia. Our learning and habitat work is stunted because we insist that salmon were a product of untouched nature instead of a product of an incredible partnership between fish, people, and nature. Valleys on our ranch were filled with human shaped wetlands before colonists came, there could have not been fish habitat here without people shaping channels and pools. Modern fish science looks at the rocky incised creeks created by colonial disturbance and imagines that is what fish need. Humans need permission to study, relearn and implement the mutualism that nurtured fish and people for millennia.

Overburdened and expensive health care is a symptom of our increasing disease burden. Insect population collapse, Parkin...
12/13/2024

Overburdened and expensive health care is a symptom of our increasing disease burden. Insect population collapse, Parkinson’s, colon cancer, autism, obesity, and Alzheimer’s are all symptoms of a world poisoned by toxic chemicals and plastic particles. For me: mother, stomach cancer; father, Parkinson’s, mother in-law, breast cancer; grandfather, prostate cancer; uncle, cancer; aunt, Parkinson’s; nephew, blood disease; father in-law Alzheimer’s. Go ahead and criticize healthcare, but we know how to stop poisoning the planet. Living on a poisoned planet is a bad deal. We can adapt to climate change. Maybe our ancestors will adapt to our poisoned planet but it is a miserable path for us to choose.

If we want to save Joshua trees, we need to acknowledge that they were tended as part of an indigenous food system for m...
12/13/2024

If we want to save Joshua trees, we need to acknowledge that they were tended as part of an indigenous food system for millennia. We must learn the old ways of caring for these plants for them to thrive in our era of climate change. Also, ecosystems consist of plants, microbes, fungi, and animals. Preserving seeds in a freezer is not enough. It’s bizarre that in our modern age of “science” that we can study these ecosystems without studying the work of the people who created them. How can assisted migration be controversial when people spread these plants here thousands of years ago? What is like to be a scientist studying these plants who is not allowed to look at the human roll in shaping these ecosystems? The removal of indigenous people is a bigger problem for Joshua trees than fire, cheat grass, cows or climate change.

Given that our society is built on indigenous food technologies like corn, it’s been a frustrating surprise to me how re...
12/05/2024

Given that our society is built on indigenous food technologies like corn, it’s been a frustrating surprise to me how resolutely our scientific institutions avoid mention and study of local indigenous food and landscape technologies. We do have the scientific tools to learn a lot about how people produced food and managed watersheds here if we choose to apply them. Studying ancient local technologies for growing food on all land instead of just the fertile floodplains and food production technologies that are more resilient to an unpredictable climate can help us build a better future.

Archaea are an ancient form of life that produce methane while helping cows digest low quality forage. There is a lot of...
12/04/2024

Archaea are an ancient form of life that produce methane while helping cows digest low quality forage. There is a lot of work being done to reduce cattle methane emissions by developing feed additives that are toxic to archaea. Since many cows are fed processed and predigested feed, it may be ok to suppress archaea in the cattle digestive system but introducing toxins into food production to earn carbon credits feels sketchy to me. Should people take a pill to kill microbes that are a functional part of our digestive systems?

It’s time for us to embrace our responsibility as part of the natural world. After 20 years of trying and watching other...
12/01/2024

It’s time for us to embrace our responsibility as part of the natural world. After 20 years of trying and watching others try, I see that it is not possible to play the human role of ecosystem partner at level approaching the level we played for 100,000+ years. Humans can be good partners for diverse forms of life but not in a culture where the consequence of tending the landscape is poverty and ostracism. It’s comforting to see research in this article looking at these issues but the barriers to good ecosystem work here in California remain insurmountable. Lack of interest, lack of knowledge, regulations, and a cultural belief that we can protect ecosystems by removing people make it impossible to do ecosystem work in an economically sustainable way.

Our recent 3 day rain total was 25% higher than the 122 year record in Santa Rosa. This it a storm that might happen onc...
11/25/2024

Our recent 3 day rain total was 25% higher than the 122 year record in Santa Rosa. This it a storm that might happen once every thousand years looking back. Looking forward, this amount of rain will become common because a warmer atmosphere holds and drops more water. Our political power structure on both sides has decided to burn the rest of the oil we can get out of the ground so rains will get even more biblical over the next 100 years. Trump is more unapologetic about this than the democrats but not much worse. Our apologies to the less developed world for heating the planet include inadequate privatized predatory loans and carbon schemes designed to create profit for financiers.

Wow. I spent the summer working to prevent erosion, improve wetland and increase the water storage capacity of our water...
11/19/2024

Wow. I spent the summer working to prevent erosion, improve wetland and increase the water storage capacity of our water shed. Wednesday is the test to see how I did. I feel ready but nervous. The prediction is 6+ inches of rain from a bomb cyclone and atmospheric river over 4-5 days but it could be more if the storm shifts south a bit or stalls here. Watching the flooding around the world this year with the increased rain capacity of our warming world, I have been wondering how our winter will look. We do get rain events this large so this is unlikely to be catastrophic in our area but the storm looks like a record breaker for November a bit north of us. We don’t do any tillage on our ranch but for our neighbors, who do, it’s a bet that we will get gentle rain to germinate plantings before the big January storms. When the first rain after tillage is this intense, I imagine we will see some unfortunate erosion in recently filled fields.

Our warming atmosphere rains more water in more extreme and variable events. The warmer air also drys the land faster. T...
11/16/2024

Our warming atmosphere rains more water in more extreme and variable events. The warmer air also drys the land faster. This research suggests that increased drying has more impact than increased rain. Our work on the ranch to restore soils, watersheds, and wetlands helps the land hold more water. Indigenous people in California invested thousands of years growing a sponge to hold water in California. We can learn from and apply the technologies they used.

For decades our watershed professionals have underestimated the importance of floodplain and wetland habitat for salmoni...
11/14/2024

For decades our watershed professionals have underestimated the importance of floodplain and wetland habitat for salmonids. Indigenous creation of shallow lakes, ponds and wetlands was key to the abundance of fish in California. Most investment in fish in California is to prevent extinction. There are a few floodplain projects in the Central Valley working towards abundance but I’m not aware of any Sonoma, Marin or Mendocino counties. We are working hard to rebuild fragments of riparian wetlands on the ranch, second photo, but unfortunately our steelhead are gone. The key piece is our mainstream science needs to accept that people proactively created fish habitat here for thousands of years and start funding ongoing care of our watersheds to create abundance instead of only big spending on a few one time projects to slow extinction.

Calves raised on rangeland by attentive mother cows is the last fragment of humane animal agriculture and it may be in t...
11/12/2024

Calves raised on rangeland by attentive mother cows is the last fragment of humane animal agriculture and it may be in the early stages of disappearing. This Amish run farm raises 100,000 orphaned calves before sending them to feedlots. These are cattle that never set foot in a pasture. Instead of scampering across fields with young friends and napping in the sun, these male calves grow up in barns with no mothers. Dairies use artificial insemination with sexed s***m. Their best cows produce female replacement dairy cows and the other cows get male sexed s***m to produce Angus/Holstein beef cattle. It’s an impressive accomplishment that uses machines and diesel to replace the ancient work of graziers tending mother cows on rangeland. The machines and huge piles of manure are cheaper and scale easier in part because labor is heavily taxed and the production of machines and diesel is subsidized. With the economic distortions of taxes, regulations and subsidies, it’s impossible to know which path is “better” but as usual in our economy money is pushing towards machines and away from people and biology. Away from humanity and Mother Earth. It may be the right choice for the machine that is our economy but I don’t think it’s the right choice for us as humans. Our traditional ranching systems are shrinking quickly with 107,000 independent ranchers lost in the last 5 years. Ranchers can’t compete with giant industrial corporations. Producing calves with an industrial model has been of dream of large agribusiness for decades, it looks like that dream is being realized. It’s ironic that Amish farmers are making money playing a key role in this work to degrade the traditional cow calf model. The idea that Holstein/Angus cross beef can be marketed as “Angus” beef if they have a 50%+ black hide shows the rules, games, and deception that underpin our industrial food system.

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750 Freestone Ranch Road
Valley Ford, CA
94972

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Videos

We are keeping the cows out of our soggy valleys and up on the hills. They are heading to the water trough after eating a bit of hay.

At first, it seemed amazing that a falling oak leaf would impale itself on this tule but of course the tule probably impaled and lifted the oak leaf as it sprouted out of the mud. Also amazing.

I’m still learning how to manage Doug fir that displaces our coastal scrub and coastal prairie. This steep canyon has a fantastic diversity of native food plants that deserve care and protection. It’s pretty easy to girdle and kill unwanted trees but these steep hillsides with dense brush and poison oak are hard to access. It’s interesting that the doug fir understory tends to be even more bare than our eucalyptus understory.

Such a beautiful place that was busy with people for millennia, now abandoned. Rebuilding eroded soils, water storage, and food production would be a great investment for a changing climate but it’s not possible in our current culture. Now it’s just a beautiful place I visit every year or two. I wish our culture could explore choices here.

Planting silverweed, spike rush and tule. These edible plants will grow a wetland sponge and slowly reverse erosion in this deeply eroded canyon. People created hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of wetland soils while growing these foods and others in these valleys. One bucket of plants feels very inadequate but it’s a start and they will grow.

This caterpillar fortress is new to me. These fall webworm moth caterpillars are impressive engineers. Online references talk about how to control these but the ugliness on the tree will fade and I’m happy to have life forms like this in the face of our ongoing global insect population collapse.

What’s the function of this newt armada? Mating season is in the spring here and the males tend to be pretty competitive. These newts look a bit young and very social. There are very few pools of water like this left in this creek so maybe they are celebrating their last chance to swim for a while.

Fun to see this little bird eating milk thistle seeds.

This valley was a wetland created to grow food by human land tending over thousands of years. The post erosion eucalyptus forest is much less productive than what was here before but it does provide good habitat for birds and we are working to restore aspects of the riparian food system that was here for millennia.

This willow species has developed an amazing mat of roots to filter nutrients from winter stream flows. Most of our willows grow in deeper soils, this species seems magically adapted to growing in a rocky channel with little soil. It creates a perfect starting point to build brush barriers to accumulate sediment and start growing other wetland plants. Add people to nature to get more life.

Old hay, eucalyptus duff, fertile soil and pond water are growing erosion control in this repaired stock pond spillway. Most people would buy jute netting from India, rock from a quarry, seed from a store, or plastic erosion netting from a factory. Long term erosion repair is about organic matter, living plants, brush, sod, and healthy soil. The ranch has all those things on the land.

Fun to get my first sighting of a juvenile turkey vulture. t feels good to provide habitat where birds can nest successfully.

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Grass-Fed Beef. Delicious and profoundly nourishing, for you and your family, for the watershed, for the land. Beef available here at the ranch by appointment. Beef available at Andy's Produce Market, Bill's Farm Basket, and the Valley Ford Market. Enjoy and be nourished!