In the Ag History Museum at the County Fairgrounds here in Watsonville there is a picture of our home ranch back in its heyday as a grade-A milk dairy, probably from sometime in the 1940’s.
The picture was taken at some distance, and visible in it are the house we currently live in, the old milk cooler that we now use for an employee break room, and the loose-hay barn that had mostly fallen down by the time we moved in. An occasional visitor from the Midwest will recognize our packing shed for what it truly is, or was, a six-stall herringbone milking parlor. When we bought the property in 2000, it hadn’t functioned as a dairy for nearly 15 years and by all indications had been in decline for sometime before that.
At the time the picture was taken ours was only one of dozens of dairies in operation here close to the coast along the Monterey Bay. And a better location for a dairy would be hard to find. Abundant wintertime rainfall and good soils meant lush grass for the cows to graze on, and the strong maritime influence meant the cows stayed cool and comfortable throughout the year. But people liked it here too, and as they flocked toward the coast the price of land inevitable rose. Even when measure “J”—a controlled growth initiative that effectively preserved Ag land–was passed in 1978, the conversion to higher value crops was well underway and so was the exodus of the dairies. Only a few commercial dairies remain here in the Monterey Bay. Most have moved into the Central Valley where the summer temperatures are so hot that they have to use misters and fans to keep the cows from being overly stressed. Mostly these are confinement dairies where the cows aren’t allowed onto pasture but lead their entire lives on piles of their own manure. They produce heavy environmental impacts.
Occasionally, on warm Sunday afternoons, we ride our bikes to the beach from here—almost entirely on dirt farm roads. Alongside one of these, appropriately named “Dairy Road”, is an abandoned farmstead that at one time must have been one of the premiere locations in the Pajaro Valley. The old house sits on the top of a ridge and would have commanded a supreme view of the Watsonville Slough and the Pajaro River below were it not for the invasive eucalyptuses that have now grown up around it. The windows have all been broken out and it is partially covered in vines, but it isn’t too hard to imagine things as they must have once been–a grassy field studded with cows where the strawberries now stretch in endless rows.
Personally, I have no interest in reviving the dairy here. It’s hard enough getting off the farm once in awhile when you grow vegetables–nearly impossible when you have 100 cows that need to be milked twice a day. I do, however, sometimes get somewhat nostalgic for a time when there were more cows around here and fewer people–especially when I am stuck in traffic. And when it comes to the economic forces that determine how land is used, I just have to scratch my head.
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