Another way to farm your land

The problem

Land under a Williamson Act contract has to be in agricultural production. That requirement is the whole basis of the arrangement, and it is a reasonable one: the contract exists to keep working land working rather than subdivided.

What it does in practice, though, is push owners toward the most legible kind of production there is. Clear the oaks and the bay laurel, plant a monoculture, run cattle on ground that cannot really carry them. The land ends up less alive than it was, and often less productive too, because the thing that was already growing there was the thing best suited to grow there.

People end up doing this reluctantly. We have not met a landowner who wanted to take out a stand of mature bay laurel. They did it because production was required and nobody had offered them another way to get there.

What we do instead

California bay laurel is a crop. Its nuts, sometimes called pepperwoods, have been food here for thousands of years, they roast into something between coffee and chocolate, and there is a real market for them. The trees are already on the land, already mature, and already doing everything else a native tree does: holding a creek bank together, shading an understory, feeding what lives there.

A harvest is an agricultural use of them. That is the whole idea, and the reason it is worth a conversation: production and restoration usually pull against each other, and here they do not.

We are a small nonprofit doing this in the East Bay and we do the work, not just the advocacy: identifying what is on a property, harvesting it in season with volunteers, documenting the stand, and restoring the habitat around it. Ourwild harvest page is the practical side of that, and themissions page is why we do it.