Made Local Magazine Mar/Apr 2024

Small-scale farmers are inherently resourceful. They have to be. Often operating on a shoestring budget, they make the most of what they have: stacking functions, repurposing materials, taking a tool designed for one task and, after a bit of welding and duct tape, jury-rigging it until it can accomplish a dozen different tasks.

But lately, some local farmers, especially those who don’t own their own land, are beginning to question that ingenuity, wondering if even they can repurpose one big multi-million-dollar tool in particular: Ag + Open Space, otherwise known as the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District.