collective context

Green Valley Farm + Mill

The land where we live and farm is the ancestral lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok people.  The land was settled in the late 1800s by an Italian family named the Giovaninni’s, who built the land up as a Farmstead with vineyard, cattle, a lumber mill, and several residential homes for their growing family.  The land was sold in the 1990s to a man named Windham who wanted to flip the property, but instead sold it to a man named Michael Paine, where the land became home to an intentional community named Green Valley Village.  (Enter Scott and Aubrie to the picture :)

After Green Valley Village fell apart, the land was sold in 2016 to a new group of folks with the vision to create a rural working lands project and educational center.  The land is currently a parcel of 172 acres, held in an LLC collectively owned by a group of six folks (Aubrie, Scott, Temra, Jeremy, Josiah and Jeff), and called Green Valley Farm + Mill.  The land is home to 20 residents, 15 small-businesses or other projects (i.e. art/maker space), and 4 different farms (including Bramble Tail).  Everyone living or working on the land has a use agreement with Green Valley for their respective home or project, creating a mosaic of zones of autonomous management surrounded by an amoeba of communal land.  This creates a dynamic integration of folks’ need for creative control over their project, nestled in a context of community that allows for synergy when it makes sense, and allows for a viable financial picture - no one is buying hundreds of acres in Sonoma County and paying for it on a farming income!  But farms together with homes and light industrial use, everyone chipping in proportionally for their space, and the whole financial puzzle starts to come together…

In addition to owning and operating Bramble Tail, Scott and Aubrie are among both the ownership and management teams for Green Valley.  Scott is the Facilities Manager; in between Bramble Tail farm chores, he tends to the physical infrastructure of Green Valley, from improving leased buildings to maintaining communal water systems, and continually putting out physical and metaphorical fires.  Aubrie wears many hats for Green Valley, and in between Bramble Tail farm chores, she manages the overall finances for Green Valley, runs the Marketplace, tends to landscaping, and coordinates the worlds of events, tenants, contracts and community happenings.  This leads to some very full plates, but plates that are dynamic and integrated, rich in the ways of community and land-based living, working towards a future where shared ownership models are more prevalent, land is tended, and food is grown in a way that nourishes humans and regenerates landscapes for all beings.