Farming on the Edge: Saving Family Farms in Marin County, California

by John Hart, Wendell Berry (Foreword), Joan Rosen (Photographer)

Part celebration of a farm community, part case study in successful land-use planning, Farming on the Edge offers what could be a nationwide model for farmland preservation.

During the 1960s Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, had plans to build suburbs almost from shore to shore. Freeways were about to cut across the farmland and land prices were rising. The struggling dairy industry seemed doomed.

Then in 1970 a group of politicians, farmers, and citizen activists forged an alliance to protect the county's agricultural land from suburban "conversion." An uneasy alliance at first, with ranchers and environmentalists used to waging battle with each other over zoning strictures, it has grown into a friendship based on profound respect and trust.

At a time when the United States is in danger of becoming the world's first suburban country, John Hart's profiles together with Joan Rosen's photographs of Marin ranchers and their families eloquently evoke the tough-mindedness, the sense of stewardship, and the rooted way of life that make the family-farm inheritance vital to preserve.

183 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1990

About the author

Lots of John Harts: This one is the California-based environmental journalist and poet, born 1948, author of fifteen books and counting, winner of sundry awards. My most recent title is "Storm Camp," my second poetry collection, from Sugartown Publishing. Next up, from University of Oklahoma Press, is my edit of an ancestor's frontier memoir: "Bluecoat and Pioneer: The Recollections of John Benton Hart, 1864-1868." Historian John Monnett calls it "a genuine attic find."

Reviews

[Rose Gowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I frequently-- I might even go so far as to say generally-- have the frustrating feeling that I don't have enough knowledge to understand my own experiences.

I read this book to try to understand West Marin a little better. I spent some of my pivotal growing-up years there-- it is the place I think of most when I think of where I'm from-- but I've always felt there was so much I didn't know about the place that I could hardly lay claim to it.

I don't know that I would recommend this book to someone with no connection to West Marin (although it does position itself as a case study for preserving agricultural lands), but I was fascinated to learn how narrowly West Marin escaped suburban development, how environmentalists and ranchers worked together to save it. It has some pretty pictures, too, and profiles of local ranchers.