Young Dairy Farmers Continue Marin-Sonoma Ranching Tradition, Stick to Organic Milk

San Francisco Chronicle

Photos by Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

By Tara Duggan

Louis Silva says he doesn’t need Saturdays and Sundays off. He loves taking care of the 125 dairy cows he and his wife, Marissa Silva, keep on her family’s ranch in the Marin County town of Tomales. It’s what he’s wanted to do since he was little, when his dad and uncle and grandfather had a dairy operation in Elk Grove (Sacramento County). It’s what Marissa has wanted too, even if it means that Louis, 34, now works 16-hour days while she cares for their two young children.

“We both love it, and we both understand that that’s the nature of the business,” says Marissa Silva, 31. “It’s good that we found each other, because not a lot of people understand that or would want to put up with it.”

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A person wearing a hat, gloves, and work clothes stands at an outdoor research station at Correia Family Dairy, pouring a reddish liquid into a large funnel-shaped container connected to hoses and pipes. Several plastic sample bottles sit on the ground nearby, and shade cloths overhead provide cover. The setup includes pumps, tubing, and monitoring devices, suggesting a water, soil, or nutrient treatment experiment.

These very hungry microbes devour a powerful pollutant

PETALUMA, Calif. — The cows had to be deterred from messing with the
experiment.

Researchers from a Bay Area technology company had come to the sprawling
dairy farm north of San Francisco to test an emerging solution to planetwarming emissions: microscopic pink organisms that eat methane, a potent
greenhouse gas.

Kenny Correia, 35, of Correia Family Dairy, watched the team from Windfall Bio
working near the lagoons used to store manure from the farm’s several hundred
cows. The researchers erected a futuristic system of vats, pipes, tubes and shiny
metal supports. Then, when everything was assembled, they poured pink liquid
into one of the vats. “They were looking like mad scientists out there,” Correia
recounted.

He acknowledged initially thinking it was a “crazy idea” to integrate an outdoor
laboratory into a working farm. There was the potential for the cows to “be all
over it — licking it, pulling out wires and scratching on it,” he said.
But livestock farms are a significant source of methane emissions, and Windfall
wanted to see how much the microbes could help.

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