Paicines Ranch owners envision a Renaissance but getting there
is glacial
Before she became the co-owner of a sprawling San Benito ranch
that the county said it didn’t want developed, former software
consultant Sallie Calhoun made millions in the computer tech boom
of Silicon Valley.
Paicines Ranch owners envision a Renaissance but getting there is glacial
Before she became the co-owner of a sprawling San Benito ranch that the county said it didn’t want developed, former software consultant Sallie Calhoun made millions in the computer tech boom of Silicon Valley.
The last thing she and husband Matt Christiano envisioned was riding herd over 500 head of cattle and making plans to build a boutique slaughterhouse on the 7,500-acre Paicines Ranch.
“If you had told me I would have one cow on this ranch when we bought it, I would have said you were crazy,” Calhoun offers as she gave a tour of the premises last week.
Calhoun looks like anything but a computer whiz. Garbed ready to hike her rolling fields or oversee an ancient barn restoration, Calhoun cuts an unpretentious picture reminiscent of a tough pioneer who has just slogged through hundreds of miles of rough terrain and come out smiling. In Calhoun’s case, her latest odyssey doesn’t take her through endless outbacks or the boom and busts of a tech market, but through miles of red tape generated by the county planning department.
Articulate, brilliant, talking a mile a minute and nearly exploding with new ideas for using the hidden resources of her vast property, Calhoun manages to keep a sense of humor. She needs it, she says, because when she and Christiano (also a brainy self-made software millionaire) broached the idea of creating a $2.5 million local slaughterhouse, the reaction from the San Benito Planning Department was, to them, bizarre and glacial.
But senior planner Chuck Ortwein says approval of such an undertaking takes time, especially since San Benito doesn’t even have a provision for slaughterhouses in its codes. It means a long review process – just to create the new ordinance. It will take more time to obtain approval from the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors for the individual permit.
“It never came up,” Ortwein said. “When you create an ordinance it has to be circulated and reviewed, you have to take comments from other departments and agencies and address those comments.”
Some of the entities that must weigh in include the San Benito Water District, Public Works, the Ag Department – even AMBAG, the tri-county agency that oversees several regional issues in the area.
“The animals may be there (in the slaughterhouse corral) a short time but they are going to be producing manure,” Ortwein explained.
Beef is not made at Safeway
Calhoun envisions a USDA- and organic-certified facility that would cater to the beef needs of Bay Area producers and top chefs, as well as local hunters who harvest wild pigs and deer. The slaughterhouse (also called an abattoir as long as no meats are cooked and processed) would not just humanely kill stock animals, but also package the meats and provide specialty cuts, as well as accommodate Kosher or Halal (Islamically permissable) rules for butchering. Later, a poultry room could be added.
“We want to cater to five-star restaurants,” Calhoun said. “Our goal is to connect the people of the Bay Area to where their food comes from. We don’t want to build houses on this land, but the county isn’t being very helpful. We have encountered a gazillion obstacles.”
County planners – most of them transplants new to the area, hired after the Board of Supervisors fired veteran director Rob Mendiola – were taken off guard by the idea. At first, planners said it was conceivable – as long as no pigs were slaughtered.
“We asked them, ‘Why no pigs?'” Calhoun said. “They said pigs were smelly and drew flies, and that pigs are conceived as dirty and could cause cross-contamination to cows.”
And no poultry slaughtering.
“We were hoping to provide a service to (neighbor) Paul Hain and his organic chicken operation,” Calhoun added. “We haven’t even asked why we couldn’t do chickens. And amazingly enough, no wild game.”
Ortwein says his department is amenable to, even welcomes, the idea of a slaughterhouse. As far as the pig issue goes, Ortwein says the applicants added the hog clause to their plan after he had already circulated the original. Amending the plan could take up to another six months in delays.
Christiano and Calhoun are frustrated that policy-makers are making their project so difficult to realize.
“There are people who think beef has to come from Safeway and not be killed anywhere,” Calhoun said. “They don’t realize it takes sun and grass to make protein. And then it has to be slaughtered. It’s a fact of life.”
Christiano said that county policy wags appear to be under the mistaken notion that he and his wife want to start a massive feedlot, like the monstrous Harris Ranch off Interstate 5.
Ortwein said he understands fully that the owners won’t create a feedlot. Nonetheless, he adds, the rules are in place for a reason.
“When someone wants to come in and do something that has never been done before we have to look at the health and safety and welfare of the people of this county,” Ortwein said.
And yet a feedlot would be permissible, according to San Benito ordinances. That is not what the owners of Paicines Ranch have planned. Animals would be placed in an adjoining corral for no more than a day, probably less, before being slaughtered. The meat processing facility would start out small, perhaps a dozen animals a week, and then work up to 100 a week. The facility would not have a “fattening up” cycle at all. Cows would be knocked out, their throats would be slit and then the carcasses would be hung up and drained of blood before butchering.
Christiano calls the planning department’s dearth of experience in ranch operations “honest ignorance.”
For Christiano and Calhoun, the planning department’s perceived lack of knowledge on the subject of harvesting meat is indicative of previous problems the couple has encountered with the bureaucracy as they try to restore and use the historic ranch for multiple public uses.
A vast eco-palette
Situated 15 miles south of Hollister, the Paicines Ranch has been a working cattle ranch since it was a Mexican land grant in the early decades of the 1800s. In the 1860s, Alexander Grogan, a San Francisco land speculator and financier, bought the vast property. At one time nearby Paicines was named Groganville – before it became Tres Pinos and later swapped names with the town several miles north of it.
In the latter part of the 1900s, the Law family owned the property until 1989.
Ridgemark Corporation bought the property and submitted a proposal to the county to build a new city on the ranch – a massive gated community replete with hotel and six golf courses and enough condos and homes for 5,000 people. But the Board of Supervisors believed the county could not sustain services for such a colossal project. The county ultimately demanded that the developers widen Airline Highway, which they refused, and in 2000 the board voted the project down once and for all.
It wasn’t long before the two self-made millionaires from the dot.com boom made their move.
Before they bought Paicines Ranch, Calhoun and Christiano owned a small ranch on nearby Limekiln Road, off Cienega, and kept abreast of what was happening with the proposed development of Paicines Ranch. The couple had fallen in love with the county in 1996 when they first visited and were amazed they had lived in the Bay Area for 20 years and not heard about San Benito until then.
They had their work cut out for them. The spread came with a Victorian farmhouse and several other smaller abodes from the 1800s, as well as an old cheese house, two mammoth barns and a Moroccan styled water tower and horse stables. Calhoun and Christiano have restored most of the buildings to their original luster and now are working on the barns.
When they first obtained the ranch, county ranchers approached the new owners to lease their land for conventional cattle ranching, but that’s when the couple’s thoughts on stewarding the property began to evolve. Calhoun wanted the land to sustain “holistic ranching,” a method that relies on natural grasses and pasture rotation – rather than auxiliary hay – to raise better, healthier beef. It’s a property diverse in ecosystems supremely suited for such an endeavor.
Stocked with ponds and natural springs, the ranch boasts riparian habitats, oak woodlands and wetlands. Calhoun said ranchers Joe Morris and Joy Law taught her the methods of grass-fed ranching, and once her eyes were opened to the possibilities, she decided to get her hands dirty.
“People think we’re just developers disguised as ranchers,” Calhoun laughs.
Christiano and Calhoun think as big as their ranch when it comes to using its wealth of resources, and they want to share its wonders with the public. For 20 years the ranch has been the site for the annual Kinship Center charity fund-raiser, a posh event where up to 1,600 local “who’s whos” sip local wine and delectables to benefit the adoption agency.
Calhoun and Christiano want to host their own events for up to 200 people – corporate retreats, dude ranch-style riding getaways, birdwatching pow-wows, photography “safaris,” even country weddings.
Except now the planning department says they must get permits for such events.
“People just don’t understand,” Christiano said. “Ranchers need to generate alternate sources of income if they are going to keep the land agricultural. And they can’t wait years for the county planners to get their act together, because in the meantime, they go broke. Well, we’re not going to go broke, but I don’t know if we have the patience, either.”
A county incomplete
One thing everyone agrees on, even Ortwein and his associates, is that there is a huge need for a local slaughterhouse that caters to sustainable stewardship in the region’s ag-heavy economy.
Holistic ranchers Joe and Julie Morris run a grass-fed operation based in the hills near San Juan Bautista, and they are wildly successful examples of sustainability. They see holes in the economic fabric of San Benito. If a farmer’s tractor breaks down, he has to go to Salinas for parts. When it comes time for slaughter, ranchers have to ship their cattle to the Central Valley, as there are only 13 USDA-certified meat processing facilities – slaughterhouses – in the U.S.
The Morrises have to transport their cattle to the abattoir in Los Banos. The ordeal is repeated a dozen times a year.
“That takes up a little fossil fuels that shouldn’t have to be used,” Joe Morris said. “The processing link is just not available and that’s a big problem for ag ranch producers all over the place. A local slaughterhouse in Paicines would be a boon.”
Morris confirms Calhoun’s claim that people are clamoring for the service.
“The average pound of beef travels 1600 miles in this country,” he said. “In an era of global warming that’s not sustainable. We have 8 million people in the Bay Area and an awful lot of them would like to buy local beef.
Prices for locally slaughtered beef could only be better than what they are now, but Morris said the bigger savings would be to the environment.
“If were only looking at economic savings we’re losing sight of the big picture,” he said.
Christiano said San Benito policies seem to be almost anti-ag oriented.
“San Benito County is way too frustrating. They don’t want the Paicines Ranch developed, but the way they operate, that’s exactly what is going to happen to all the ranches.”
