Beyond 100

We’re about to protect our 100th family farm.

It’s a number worth saying out loud. Forty-six years of work. 59,028 acres. More than half of Marin’s productive agricultural land, protected forever — the grasslands and creeks and coastline and working ranches that feed this region and will keep feeding it long after all of us are gone.

But here’s what four decades of this work has taught us: protecting the land was the first important step.

The harder part is what comes after. Keeping a dairy in the family when the next generation can’t afford the buy-in. Helping a young rancher find footing on land she’ll never inherit. Keeping a farm viable as the climate shifts, the costs climb, and the people who know how to work this land grow older. A conservation easement protects the soil forever. It doesn’t guarantee anyone will be there to farm it.

That’s the work we’re moving toward now. Not instead of land protection — land protection will always be our foundation — but beyond it. So this isn’t a countdown to a finish line. The 100th farm is a milestone, and we’ll celebrate it. But it’s also a beginning. The start of MALT’s next chapter, and the next generation’s.

Between now and spring 2027, we’ll tell the story of how we got here — one farm at a time. Each month, a new place, a new family, a new answer to the question that has always been underneath this work:

What does land protection make possible?

MILLERTON CREEK RANCH

862 acres, Protected in 2014

Mike Giammona, pictured right, wanted this ranch since he was twelve years old.

He grew up in West Marin, started running cattle in 1993, and spent years leasing ground that would never be his — the way most young ranchers here spend their careers. Land you can work but never own. A life built on someone else’s terms. Then the ranch he’d dreamed of came up for sale. And it sold to a developer.

Eight hundred and sixty-two acres on the east shore of Tomales Bay, split into parcels, primed for estates with a view. For most young farmers, that’s where the story ends — priced out, shut out, watching the land you love become something else.

But MALT had been trying to protect this ranch for years. So, when the opportunity arose, we bought it — not to keep, but to hold, until the right people could take it on. For four years, Mike and his partner Andrew Zlot leased it and worked it back to health. Then, in 2018, MALT sold them the ranch with a conservation easement attached. The land was theirs. Permanently. And it could never be developed again.

Here’s what protection made possible. Mike’s son Morgan came home after college to raise pastured hens, now Tomales Bay Pastures, alongside the cattle — the next generation, on land that will still be a ranch when his own kids are grown. The creek that runs through the property is being restored for steelhead and coho. And a family that never thought they’d own anything now owns the thing they wanted most.

That’s the part people miss about conservation. Protecting the land isn’t the finish line. It’s the ground everything else gets built on — the next crop, the next idea, the next generation.

This page will keep growing. So will the story.

Every month between now and spring 2027, we’ll add another farm, another family, another answer to the same question. Check back soon or sign up for our newsletter.