Get to Know Our Agricultural Specialist, Mary Chambers
Mary Chambers is Ag + Open Space’s Agricultural Specialist, and is a member of Ag + Open Space’s Community Resources team that focuses on working with all of Sonoma County’s communities. We’re excited to share more about this role with all of you, with a focus on how this role is focused on helping agricultural landowners.
First off, Mary, we’d love to hear a bit about your background and what brought you to this work.
I grew up in Sunol, a very small town in the East Bay. As a kid, heading to the local farmers market to enjoy all the free fruit samples was definitely a highlight of every week! I stayed in the Bay Area to attend Stanford University. Farming and ranching hadn’t really been on my radar, but after taking a class on the food system, I realized that agriculture is truly connected to everything, from human health to international economics. I moved out of state to study sustainable international development at Brandeis University, and then headed abroad to work in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. But I missed California (and my now-husband) way too much, and realized I wanted to work with communities who I had more of a connection with. I moved back to California in 2020, and joined Ag + Open Space as the Agricultural Specialist in April 2021.
The Agricultural Specialist position sounds like it could encompass so much, can you share more about what you do? What do your days look like and where might landowners expect to see you? How do you go about directly supporting landowners?
It’s hard to say what a typical day looks like! But, at any given time you might find me striving to better support local ag landowners by:
- Sending out emails with resources for landowners, like funding opportunities, upcoming events, and so on.
- Joining our acquisition staff on field visits to potential properties, to support discussion of the agricultural features of a property, and identify ways in which our easement can be supportive of those uses.
- Joining monitoring visits to help identify resources that might be relevant to landowners, such as grants or technical assistance to support them with a challenge that they are having.
- Hosting workshops relevant to our agricultural landowners – I’m currently working with our Stewardship Assistant, Kendall Gutt, on an “Introduction to Succession Planning” workshop, which we expect to hold this summer.
- Attending agricultural community events like the Farm Bureau’s Love of the Land, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers annual conference, or Sonoma-Marin Young Farmers & Ranchers meetings. I am trying to meet more folks in our local agricultural community, so hoping to go to lots of these events over the coming months!
- Tabling for Ag + Open Space at various community events, like the Gravenstein Apple Fair or Sonoma County Pride. I love to talk with folks, answer questions, and hear about how Ag + Open Space can best support our agricultural community!
It would be great to hear more about some specific programs or projects you’ve been working on!
One of my core projects since I started in this role has been developing and implementing the Buy-Protect-Sell pilot program. This program aims to make land more affordable by buying a farm or ranch property, protecting it with a conservation easement, and then selling the conserved land to a qualified farmer or rancher. We’re currently researching properties for the first transaction, and already have a strong pool of qualified buyers lined up for when we find the right property!
I also work with my colleagues on conservation buyer transactions (when a property is conserved during the selling process, which helps lower costs), researching innovative land access programs, offering free workshops to landowners, joining Stewardship colleagues on monitoring visits, and overall building relationships to landowners so we can learn more about ways Ag + Open Space can support.
What’s the most interesting fact that you have learned doing this work?
A 1% increase in soil’s organic matter helps soil hold 20,000 gallons more water per acre! Caring for the health of our soil, including by adding material like compost, allows us to retain more water and continue producing food and other crops under the impacts of drought, climate change, and other disasters. These same practices also help improve the nutrient content of foods grown in that soil, and even store carbon. A win-win-win!
Thanks for sharing more about your work! To close out, we have one last questions: what’s your favorite vegetable?
Snap peas! A fresh snap pea is crisp, sweet, and juicy, and best of all you don’t have to bother with shelling them. I currently live in an apartment with a very small patio, so I have limited space for gardening. But I am trying to grow some snap peas – last year I had a lot of powdery mildew, so this year I’m trying some resistant varieties. We’ll see if that helps!