From the Fields - Guido Frosini

By Guido Frosini, Marin County rancher

We have a half acre of no-till vegetables. We have broilers, ducks, geese, beef and sheep. It’s been a great grass year. We haven’t gotten that much frost, but the winds have affected us. In the last storm, it was like eight hours of howling winds of 80, 90 miles an hour.

We do contract grazing with the sheep. With the cows, we’ve started in the last couple years to work in Salmon Creek watershed to do restorative ecological grazing. We’re doing high-density grazing on Baccharis, which is the coyote shrub that has been slowly taking over coastal prairie. The animals are breaking up some of the plants to get more sunlight on the ground. We’re already seeing a lot more pasture coming back from the last 30 years of pretty much no disturbance out there.

That’s been our focus for the last five years, with the last couple years being paid to do some of this ecological grazing. It’s been a huge benefit, not just to tell a story but to see the effects of what livestock can do with some invasive plants, especially at the coastal prairie, which is one of the most biodiverse environments we have in California. Being able to produce beef while managing such a complex ecosystem is wonderful.

That’s helped us because we produce animals seasonally. We don’t feed hay, and we finish our beef and lamb during the grass bell curve between May and November. People purchase directly from us. We have a farm store that sells different types of eggs. Part of it is the celebration of the seasonal abundance that we have. Something changes every season. The geese produce only 60 days out of the year, and many people have never tasted a goose egg. It’s like the symbol of spring. We have a diversity of ducks and chickens, and we do a small amount of meat birds. The beef is a big seller. We cross Wagyu with Shorthorn and Angus.