River Ridge Ranch
Location: Springville, CA - *Sierra Nevada Region: Southern (Tulare County)
Contact: Gary Adest and Barbara Brydolf (559) 539-0207 - info@river-ridge.net
Located in the oak savannah foothills of the central western Sierra Nevada, River Ridge Ranch is a rustic, environmentally conscious recreation, event, and education center on a historic working cattle ranch. People hike, ride horses, study birds, camp, and attend concerts and hold weddings, while cows graze. Ranch buildings were constructed with reclaimed local wood; hardware was crafted on site, by blacksmith Dean Diaz de Leon, who keeps this practical art alive by taking commissions and shoeing horses.
Most River Ridge Ranch systems, including its on-site host location for a new community-wide high-speed, wireless internet, are solar-powered. Hosting the infrastructure at the ranch provides a community service, co-marketing opportunities, and an additional service to guests, at no cost to the ranch.
Biologists Gary Adest and Barbara Brydolf bought the 722-acre property in 2000 to save it from becoming a major housing development. An important riparian corridor along the North Fork of the Tule River runs through the ranch, and it borders the 323,000-acre Giant Sequoia National Monument as a wild land interface. By working with the Sequoia Riverlands Trust, Wildlife Conservation Board, The Packard Foundation, National Fish & Wildlife Foundation, and a other partners and donors, they were able to place a conservation easement on the ranch at purchase, and market the development rights to mitigate part of the purchase cost. During the process, they found that by allocating a portion its historical use as a ranch, they were able to craft a multi-use easement that netted more money for the purchase than if the property had it been entirely re-purposed.
Through the River Ridge Ranch Habitat Recovery and Rangeland Restoration and Demonstration Project, it partners with Wild Places, and public and private schools to create an interdisciplinary hands-on curriculum using all stages of restoration to teach environmental and social science, and wild land safety. River Ridge Ranch allows WildPlaces, an ecological education and restoration nonprofit, to collect no more than 20% of native wild seeds & seedlings on the property at no charge. WildPlaces propagates them in their nursery, & River Ridge buys some of them back when they are ready to transplant. Students plant them to restore riparian corridors.
Students learn plant cultivation, environmental monitoring, and ecology; how native plants improve the quality of grazing, and how an ecologically sound range management plan, protecting water quality and quantity, nets "no effluent sewage. They learn compass reading & map skills, history and first people's culture.
"Students are also introduced to emerging careers in environmental sciences, and new models of science-based farming. Many of these students are from farming families; some are future farmers..." - and, as Gary adds, "they all eat! If we choose to live in rural areas, we've got to learn how to take care of the land so it can feed us. So we also teach basic concepts of local and sustainable food security, and fair trade with food producers."
This emerging business model couples private enterprise with public education and recreation, adding to the local economy and culture. Gary muses, "On wedding weekends, and concert nights, the local hotel is full, and the restaurants do very well, even during off-season (winter) months. And with this new venue, we can have year-round, outdoor live entertainment right here in our small town - not everyone wants to drive forty miles - and back - just for a show. And a lot of local people use us as the community backyard for family events, which is great, so they don't have to own or manage lots of land in order to benefit from it."
For more about:
- Specific grants and programs of these organizations for purchase and protection of working landscapes, see Sequoia Riverlands Trust, Wildlife Conservation Board, The Packard Foundation, National Fish & Wildlife Foundation
- Land trusts: how they assist land owners to craft owner-specified agricultural, specific-use, and conservation easements, and to find your local land trust, see the Land Trust Alliance
- EPA papers on new technologies for reducing agricultural effluent, see no effluent sewage
- How to bring Rural Community-wide high-speed wireless internet to your area, and the network at River Ranch, Springville Wireless
- WildPlaces, an ecological education and restoration nonprofit
- Giant Sequoia National Monument
- A new marketing Co-op for similar ranches, High Sierra Beef, originally a project of the High Sierra Resource Conservation & Development Council
Similar Businesses and Organizations:
- Nevada County free range beef, grazed at Linden Lea Ranch, a working landscape conservation easement partner of the Nevada County Land Trust that, nevertheless, still has issues with adjacent development
