PESCADERO, CA—It was the turn of the new year, and Californians’ prayers for rain were being answered. Ten times over.
An atmospheric river, or a stream of air transporting water vapor, ferried moisture from the tropics of the Pacific Ocean to California. Residents in Pescadero, a small coastal agricultural community 45 miles south of San Francisco, sand-bagged their doors. More than ten inches of rain fell in ten days, flooding Pescadero Creek and carving mini streams that turned into floods. A road collapsed. The power went out.
Drivers brave a flooded street in Pescadero in January. San Mateo Daily Journal
Whether the torrential rain damaged a property depended on interacting factors, some obvious and some not. But up in Pescadero’s hills, one parcel of land was doing exactly what its owners engineered it to do: adapting.
TomKat Ranch, an 1,800 acre cattle ranch, is led by a team of scientists, ranchers and advocates with a mission to evaluate regenerative farming practices and inspire their uptake across the state. The ranch is the project of billionaire environmentalist couple Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor.
As the planet warms, scientists expect an increase in the occurrence and intensity of heavy rains like the ones seen at the turn of the new year. The “precipitation whiplash” phenomenon -- a rapid swing from drought to flood conditions -- endangers property, lives and the state’s $50 billion agricultural sector. Regenerative farms and ranches like TomKat are implementing soil-conscious techniques intended to support the natural resilience of ecosystems.
“Our adaptive plan is our drought plan and our flood plan,” said Wendy Millet, director of TomKat Ranch.
The ranch’s plan consists of regenerative agriculture techniques that aim to enhance the ecosystem health and leave the land better than it was found. For example, they use an “adaptive grazing” technique, meticulously timing the rotation of herds across pastures to allow grass to grow back stronger between grazing periods. And instead of paved roads, they have grassy dirt ones, increasing the area of land covered by soil-enhancing plants.
These practices both support the ecosystem and mitigate flooding: rainfall is absorbed into the land instead of pooling into puddles and streams. When the recent rains came, it seemed to work, though Millet noted that TomKat is situated away from Pescadero’s major floodplain.
Healthy soil absorbs water, carbon and the nutrients crops need to grow. But industrial farming processes, like planting the same crop repeatedly; using chemical pesticides, fungicides and herbicides; and constant tilling kills the microorganisms in soil that make it productive and adaptive. One study published in 2022 found that soil in some agricultural regions of the Midwest is eroding up to 1,000 faster than it should.
This is a big problem for agricultural profits and food security. A 2021 study found that climate change reduced farm outputs by 21 percent since 1961, compared with a model of yields without climate change. That’s like losing seven years of crop yields.
A flooded farm in California’s Central Valley. The Independent
But even the healthiest of soil can’t protect against increasingly intense floods and drought. TomKat Ranch escaped damage partly due to its planning, but also due to lucky geography. Further down the road, along Pescadero Creek, 25-acre fruit and vegetable farm Brisa Ranch was not so lucky.
Verónica Mazariegos-Anastassiou, one of Brisa Ranch’s co-founders, said their soil management practices mitigated harm, but it still lost a lot of crops to flooding and wind, in addition to property damage due to felled trees. Brisa Ranch doesn’t have a billionaire backing them like TomKat does, and the financial safety net for small- and medium-sized farms has holes.
“There was so much relief for drought,” Mazariegos-Anastassiou said, but the programs aren’t built to respond to damage from rainfall. And, since she’s growing vegetables instead of grain or livestock, she doesn’t qualify for many federal assistance programs. The only relief she’s been able to find is a low-interest loan from the federal government’s Small Business Administration.
If anyone has felt the whiplash of weather extremes, it's Brisa Ranch. Barely two and a half years ago, the CZU Lightning Complex fire inflicted damages amounting to at least $50,000.
Despite the setbacks, Mazariegos-Anastassiou is committed to plowing ahead with Brisa’s regenerative approach.
“The type of farming that we’re doing I believe so much in,” she said. She hopes “that our local governments, state governments, and even at the federal level see that how land is managed, stewarded, farmed -- not just for the production of food but also public land -- all of that is a very important way in mitigating the inevitable consequences of changing conditions.”
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Grace Scullion (she/her) is a journalist and senior at Stanford University. She loves reporting because it gives her permission to ask strangers lots and lots of questions. Always a ravenous consumer of stories, she now hopes to tell some that inspire others to act, think or care. Aside from storytelling, she loves dancing, running and settling Catan.
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