Freestone Ranch

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Freestone Ranch

Sonoma County Farm to Table Food Grass-Fed Beef, Pastured Pork, Pastured Chicken & Eggs. Beef, chicken, and eggs available here at the ranch by appointment.

Delicious and profoundly nourishing, for you and your family, for the watershed, for the land. Beef available at Andy's Produce Market, Bill's Farm Basket, and the Valley Ford Market. Eggs available at the Valley Ford Market. Enjoy and be nourished!

26/12/2025

Lots of little projects cleaning up from recent wind storms. This section of electric fence bounced back to keep protecting the creek from our cattle.

13/11/2025

Twenty years of careful cattle grazing and riparian restoration have restored fragments of the giant wetland sponge and filter that used to be here. Seeing 2” of rain soak in while our creeks clean muddy water flowing from neighbors shows our work here.

12/11/2025

There are posts with very dark redwood on the ranch that might be 100 years old. There are others that I suspect are 40 to 50 years old. They are all better than anything I can buy today. These old posts feel precious and irreplaceable but the best I know to do is to reuse them when I can.

20/10/2025

Will dam removals save salmon or are salmon near extinction? Decades ago, farmers on Stemple Creek pitch forked steelhead from the creek to feed pigs. Idle hope is the only investment or prospect for steelhead return to creeks like Stemple today. Indigenous people spent thousands of years building wetlands, ponds and lakes in California to build habitat for massive salmon runs. Removing harm with dam removal and once and done creek restoration projects is not enough to bring back huge salmon runs. We also need to actively rebuild and maintain the huge sponge that covered California. Beaver are a start but we also need to empower humans to rebuild wetland water storage and habitat. We don’t have salmon or steelhead on the ranch but we are practicing at building habitat they might use. Brush in gullies, sediment capture and preferring big sedges over willows look like important work for life and fish in California.

19/10/2025

The nutrients and carbon in wood are food for soil, insects, fungi, and trees. Leave “extra” wood on the land or at lease make compost with it. I’m thinning drought stressed eucalyptus this week. Putting brush and wood in erosion gullies feeds life and builds a sponge of wetland soils that keeps nutrients soil and water on this landscape to bring more life. Putting wood deep below the living soil layer for carbon credits takes life away from the land. Sad that people can get paid for taking away life while people restoring watersheds to support life have to navigate complex permits and risk fines. 😕

23/09/2025

In the winter, there is a larger cold area at the North Pole that pushes the jet stream south and makes Northern California wet. In the summer, this cold region shrinks and we are dry. Four years ago I wondered if Northern California will get less winter rain as the jet steam moves north with climate change and if Southern California would get more summer monsoon rain from the same shift. A professional meteorologist mostly dismissed my question but it still looks like a good question to me. Even if we keep our rain, as a land manager I have to manage drying creeks and dying woody plants as summer heat from climate change drys this place. Should I plant trees for the future? What kind? These questions have caused me to let the scrub jays do my tree planting work while I invest in wetland restoration instead.

18/09/2025

This is an amazing example of post fire sediment captured by simple wood structures. I suspect that indigenous people used simple intentional fire, and simple wood structures to build soil and food producing water storing valley wetlands on the land I manage. It was slow technology that built highly productive landscapes that fed their families for millennia. This photo shows it was possible. Smaller controlled fires would have delivered finer more fertile sediments at slower rates than this photo shows. I suspect that studies of soil layers would show people actually did it.

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+17078764654

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http://freestoneranch.com/, https://buttondown.com/freestoneranch

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Grass-Fed Beef. Delicious and profoundly nourishing, for you and your family, for the watershed, for the land. Beef available here at the ranch by appointment. Beef available at Andy's Produce Market, Bill's Farm Basket, and the Valley Ford Market. Enjoy and be nourished!