Profiles in Preservation
Spaletta Dairy,
Point Reyes-Petaluma Road
January, 2010—Charlie Spaletta was only fourteen at the time, but every morning he and his brother loaded cans of milk from the barn on his family’s dairy onto a truck and headed off to high school in Petaluma, seven miles away. “We’d park on the main street, and we’d go to school. Some small outfit in Berkeley sent a truck up, put the cans on their truck, and took them back. They’d leave us empty cans to bring home.”
All in a day’s work for a West Marin farm boy in 1949.
Early last fall, Marin Agricultural Land Trust purchased an agricultural conservation easement on that same dairy—the 772-acre Cypress Lane Ranch. Members of the Spaletta family have owned the ranch since 1933. Charlie Spaletta and his son Tony run a Grade A Holstein dairy cow operation there, producing fluid milk for the Bay Area.
Prominently located on Point Reyes-Petaluma Road at its intersection with Novato Boulevard, Cypress Lane Ranch becomes part of a greenbelt of protected historic farmland on the road leading to Petaluma. Seventy-five percent of the property is grasslands, providing extensive pastures, while silage is grown for feed on the southwestern part of the ranch.
MALT made the purchase with financial assistance from the Department of Conservation’s California Farmland Conservancy Program and the United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS), paying the appraised value of $2,495,000 for the easement. The department of Conservation and NRCS provided grants to MALT of $831,667 each for the project. The remaining third of the funds was raised from MALT members and supporters.
After high school, Charlie joined the Air Force, serving as an airplane and engine mechanic with the Strategic Air Command. When he returned to the ranch in 1954, his father was ready to turn the business over to him. By that time, the herd of cows numbered about 100, and stainless steel milk pipelines—some of the first in Marin County—had been installed from the milking barn to a holding tank. The days of teenagers driving milk to Petaluma were over.
Now Charlie has passed the management of the dairy on to his son Tony, whose crew milks 500 cows a day. “As a youngster, I always had 4-H projects,” says Tony who lives on the ranch with his wife Nadine, son Jake, and daughter Alicia. “I was in FFA. I always enjoyed the cows, and I just stayed with it.” Today he’s part of an industry that has struggled to survive in the past year. “It’s volatile,” Tony says, “It’s hard to compete.”
But he and his father have hopes that things are changing for the better. Early rains have brightened pastures and promise a good grass year. The culling of dairy herds throughout the nation has decreased the supply of milk, which the Spalettas predict will result in an increase in the state-regulated price producers like them receive.
The Spaletta family corporation’s sale of an easement to MALT will allow Charlie and Tony to continue leasing the property from the family corporation. And it has given them a stability that will help them plan for the future.
“I thought it was a good idea myself,” Charlie says. “It was an opportunity you didn’t have previously. You’d have to sell for development or something else if you didn’t have MALT. It’s been a help, a great help.”
To see a timeline of MALT easements, download MALT's Land Preservation Report.
