Cattle grazing at Coyote Ridge in Santa Clara County. (Photo by Sheila Barry)
The San Francisco Bay Area may be one of the densest metropolitan areas of the country, but roughly 40 percent of the region’s total land area is made up of farms and rangelands.
A group of renegade agricultural activists is challenging the notion that nothing comes for free by grafting fruit-bearing branches onto trees lining city streets.Over the past year, the Guerrilla Grafters – a diverse group of volunteers who started in San Francisco – has been splicing fruit-bearing branches onto ornamental fruit trees around the city in an effort to grow apples, cherries, pears, and other fresh produce that urban residence can enjoy for free.
Whether you're looking for lessons in seed saving or hikes in nature, you'll find them in the hills above Los Altos at Hidden Villa, which was home to the region's first youth hostel and interracial summer camp.
Proponents of the Yolo Bypass Floodplain Fishery Enhancement Project are starting small but thinking big. During the first year of the pilot project, scientists will test whether raising juvenile chinook salmon on flooded rice fields in the Yolo Bypass will help the fish get stronger and bigger before being flushed down to San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific.
A Petaluma farm is adapting the methods of farming popularized in The Omnivore's Dilemma to the West Coast climate. The animals work all year round, preparing the soil in the fields for the spring planting.
Panelists at a sold-out forum on November 16 talked about their farming and farm-education enterprises on the San Mateo Coast, San Francisco, West Marin, and Santa Rosa. From food sovereignty to occupying your foodshed, check out the highlights.
Urban Adamah is a one-acre farm and Jewish environmental education center that recently opened in West Berkeley, just a stone’s throw from Interstate 80. Named for the Hebrew word for “earth,” Urban Adamah provides local food banks and community organizations with fresh produce while accommodating 500 visitors a month.
Bayer Farm brings open space and food security to a section of Santa Rosa that needs more of both. With help from the nonprofit Landpaths, people in the Roseland neighborhood are helping each other plant and harvest food, and community.
In the Sunol Valley, beyond the subdivisions of Pleasanton, Fred Hempel grows tomatoes alongside other farmers growing figs, strawberries, and more. It’s all part of an unusual experiment in micro-farming unfolding under the leadership of Sustainable Agriculture Education on land owned by the San Francisco water department.
For more than a century, Jeanne McCormack’s family has grown grain and raised livestock on a few thousand acres near Rio Vista. But she and her husband Al Medvitz didn’t take a straight line to ranching. Instead, they detoured through Africa and Asia. Now, they’re in it for the long haul.
