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.

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.

LEALI RANCH

250 acres, Protected in 2021

For nearly a century, the Leali family grazed beef and dairy cattle on 250 acres above the east shore of Tomales Bay. Rolling grass, rocky outcrops, springs running down through wooded draws to the tideline below. A classic West Marin ranch, until 2017, when it came into the hands of two oyster farmers.

John Finger and Terry Sawyer started Hog Island Oyster Company in 1983 with $500 and a five-acre lease. Four decades later, it’s one of the most innovative food operations on the West Coast: a certified B Corp that farms oysters which filter and clean the very water they grow in, and a working climate lab, monitoring Tomales Bay’s chemistry alongside university scientists to understand what a warming, acidifying ocean means for the food we pull from it.

When Leali Ranch came up for sale, Hog Island bought it. Two hundred fifty acres adjoining their bayside operation, room to grow. Not to solely run cattle themselves, but because the land and the water are one system. Oysters take on the character of the bay they grow in, and the bay is shaped by the land around it. Protecting these hills was how they protected the water below, and everything they harvest from it.

Watch the video above and hear from Terry Sawyer, one of the owners of Hog Island Oyster Company and the Leali Ranch, about the significance of this first year of ownership and his philosophy of land stewardship.

Then the pandemic arrived, and the restaurant business that carried the company nearly went under.

That’s where MALT came in. In 2021, we purchased the development rights to Leali Ranch, permanently protecting it from ever being subdivided or built on, and structured the deal to close fast, at a moment when that mattered. It was the first easement MALT ever written to make room for mariculture, accommodating the shore-based infrastructure the oyster operation depends on while keeping the land in agriculture.

Today a local rancher leases the hills and grazes cattle on them, as the Leali family did for a hundred years. The oysters grow in the bay below.

Leali also builds on decades of protection along the east shore of Tomales Bay, joining an unbroken run of more than 10,000 protected acres — a continuous stretch of working coast, held whole. This is what protection makes possible: not a place frozen in time, but a place still at work.

GALLAGHER NORTH BEND RANCH

330 acres, Protected in 2016

The Gallagher family has worked this land just outside of Point Reyes Station since 1875 — one year before the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.. The Gallaghers persevered through two world wars, the Great Depression, the mechanization of farming, and the loss of farms across the U.S. By 2016, the ranch ownership was split between five cousins, and there was a fear the land might be split and productivity lost.

Two brothers, Paul and Kevin, were determined to keep the ranch whole. With MALT, they found a way — selling a conservation easement and using it to buy out their cousins’ shares. Today Katie Gallagher, Kevin’s wife, runs her own herd on this same land, 151 years later. “One of the last Gallagher ranches,” as Paul put it, “still owned by a Gallagher.”

What that decision protected reaches far beyond one family.

Start with the water. A well on the ranch supplies close to 150 gallons of drinking water a minute to Point Reyes Station and the communities around it — a source that exists because this land was never subdivided into luxury estates. “This land,” Paul says, “is a regional asset of which we are all beneficiaries.”

Then the Lagunitas Creek, a bend of which gives the ranch its name, holding the largest run of endangered coho salmon on the central California coast. When storms tore at its banks, MALT’s Stewardship Assistance Program helped stabilize them — hundreds of willows planted, and five years on, they’ve held the ground.

And then the land itself: grassland grazed by cattle, forest along the water, creek winding through — the same habitat that MALT has protected across nearly 60,000 acres of Marin. Grasslands kept that way by the animals that graze them. 

This is what protection makes possible. Not just a family kept on its land, but a whole community living better because the land stayed whole.

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.