Stackable Enterprises and Deep Animal Husbandry

Allen Edwards is not  your typical economist.  He has substantial training in forestry and he also operates a 520 acre ranch in Colfax where he is better utilizing his land by utilizing natural cycles and exploring symbiotic relationships.  Allen worries about the viability of a rurual land based economy losing all its ground to real estate development.  If you ever get the opportunity to meet or visit Allen's place I highly recommend it.  He is really making a difference in the way foothill lifestyle will be viewed for generations to come.http://www.uli.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home&CONTENTID=73399&TEMPLATE=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm
'Ranchette' Buyers Take a Slice of Rural West; 'Very Low Density' Housing is Gaining Ground, and Grief

USA Today
October 6, 2006
John Ritter

COLFAX, Calif. -- Allen Edwards grows trees and salad greens and raises sheep and goats on 520 acres in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of greater Sacramento's relentless sprawl. The land has been in his family 60 years, but never under pressure like it is today.

Edwards says residential developments, including upscale trophy homes known as "ranchettes" -- rural dwellings on several acres -- are making it harder for farmers like him to operate.

Ranchette neighbors tried to block renewal of his permit to harvest timber over worries that logging trucks would obstruct their access road. When he cuts trees, they complain that it degrades their views. All around him, developers have pushed land prices beyond what farmers and ranchers can afford.

Edwards and his wife, Nancy, are becoming an anachronism in the foothills: farmers who still make a living off their land.

"Even among our friends the norm is you're always looking for some way to divide your land and sell it off," says Edwards, 59. "It's probably the biggest business in this area."

And not just here. In California's Central Valley, the nation's most productive farm region, on the slopes of the Colorado Rockies, in western Montana's big-sky country and in other popular Western locales, ranchettes are fragmenting the countryside at an alarming rate, environmentalists and land-use experts say.

"Ranchettes are a way to eat up the landscape very fast," says Ed McMahon, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C. "Essentially it's the suburbanization of the American West."

The boom is hard to gauge. A few studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that it's spreading unchecked, McMahon says. Few local governments muster political will to keep ranchettes off farmland and forests. Zoning usually permits landowners to easily subdivide property.

Some counties try to curb rural housing by requiring large lots, figuring fewer people will pay for acreage they don't need for a home. "But that just accelerates the process," McMahon says, because people today are willing to pay a premium to live next to "green space."

Counties, state forestry agencies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have data on development outside urban areas. But that information is broad and relies on zoning and land-use plans, not what's actually built.

"No agency keeps a close track of ranchette expansion," says Matt Samelson, a consultant for the Sierra Business Council in Placer County, which includes Colfax. "There's no ability to track it well." Business leaders in the Sierra worry that the forests and open space that drew people in the first place are being carved up.

"Maintaining working landscapes and the natural environment is good for business, good for tourism," Samelson says.

Speckling the map

Last year, California's Conservation Department mapped five counties from aerial photography, color-coded the maps -- red for ranchettes, green for farmland, tan for rangeland -- and posted them on a website. It's a stark picture: Red ranchette plots, for example, make Fresno County look like it has a bad case of measles.

The mapping was a $105,000 trial program that ended when funding ran out, well short of statewide coverage -- or the quiet woods Ginger and Rex Johnson call home.

The couple fled Southern California traffic and eventually built a 4,200-square-foot house on 3acres in Eden Valley View Estates, 21 lots a few miles from Allen Edwards' farm. With stunning sunset views of coastal mountains and lots of wildlife, the property is worth about $1 million today, Ginger Johnson estimates.

"I don't care what people say about how much land we have, we don't have the rat race here," she says. "We're just 3acres out in the middle of a forest. We didn't take a place that had artifacts or anything like that."

Up Placer Hills Road are Bill Briasco, his wife, five teenage children and their 4,000-square-foot house on 5 acres. Briasco, a plumbing contractor who grew up in Los Angeles, says suburban developers chewing up farmland in the fertile Sacramento Valley is a bigger problem than housing in the foothills.

"Leave the flatland alone -- that's where all the harvesting is - - and build up here," Briasco, 52, says.

A March report by Environment Colorado, a non-profit advocacy group, found that ranchettes are the leading cause of farmland loss. The report relied on 2000 Census data and "bits and pieces of studies," says author Pam Kiely. It estimated that large-lot rural development had consumed more than 2million acres statewide.

'Gentleman's ranch'

California appraisers say 20 acres has become a new standard lot size in the countryside. Migrants from pricey real-estate markets in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas -- retirees, second- home builders, even commuters -- can buy 5 acres, build a house, maybe keep a horse or two, for less than a tract house back home.

"Realtors are pushing these rural home sites," says Allan Barros, a rural appraiser who works in six Central Valley counties. "This is your ranchette, your gentleman's ranch out in the country."

After the 2000 Census, Mike McCoy, a University of California, Davis researcher, noticed population spikes on land that historically had been zoned for agriculture. "We thought it odd. We knew farmers weren't having bigger families," McCoy says.

He started driving rural roads. "Sure enough, here were these beautiful white fences out front with arched entries and palm trees," he says. "And a quarter-mile up the property was a grand home, and a half-mile down the road was another one."

At the current rate, two-thirds of land developed by 2050 in the Central Valley's eight top farm counties will be ranchettes or other "very low density" housing, McCoy estimates. The loss of farmland and related business would cost Fresno, the nation's top agriculture county, $345 million a year, he says.

The valley is vast and even if acreage lost to housing more than doubles by 2050, urban uses would consume just 5% of the total area. Where does it stop? The state estimates California's population of 35 million will grow by 20 million by 2050. Preservation advocates see a tipping point somewhere.

"It's like the bow wave of a ship," says Ed Thompson, American Farmland Trust's California director. "Long before the ship hits, long before ranchettes have a physical impact on agriculture, the bow wave is causing enormous disturbance in the market."