a Nevada state judge, because Yednock and Frazer are suing the state water engineer. Yednock says he’s confident that once Nevada water laws are applied, Sadler Ranch’s senior water rights will be upheld, and who gets to pump how much will be reapportioned.
His down-valley neighbors aren’t so sure. To keep senior rights, you have to put them to beneficial use—use them or lose them—and before Yednock and Frazer arrived, Sadler Ranch wasn’t using them, says Mark Moyle.
“It was low end,” says Moyle, an alfalfa farmer and member of the Diamond Natural Resources Protection & Conservation Association, which was founded in 2010 (and was fighting a molybdenum mine’s claims for water before Yednock and Frazer came along). In a conversation with Xconomy, he disputed several of Yednock’s claims about historical water flow and use. Those figures will likely be a point of contention before the judge.
Even without a reinvigorated Sadler Ranch, Diamond Valley’s dwindling water supply will demand sacrifices, says Moyle. He’s worried the ranch will push the southern valley over the edge.
Yednock hears that concern: “People are worried about their livelihoods, but they’re all driving each other down. I’m doing this because the valley is going to die. I want there to be a viable economy, I don’t want to see it dry up.”
But his legal tactics have added to the animus. Sadler Ranch has asked the judge for a “curtailment”—a stop to all water pumping in the valley until the matter is settled. It’s hard to imagine a judge granting that request, potentially drying up farms and the Diamond Valley town of Eureka, population 610. Yednock says that in the “absence of any negotiation, the only recourse in the law is for us to ask for curtailment of junior water rights—an action that the state [water] engineer needed to address on his own 50 years ago, but has left to us to initiate.”
Forcing the issue and being the bad guys “is the last thing we wanted to do,” Yednock says.
For Moyle and allies, it’s hard to see the newcomers any other way. “Coming in, they knew what the water situation [at Sadler Ranch] was, and they started off by filing enormous claims,” Moyle says. “It’s like going to the junkyard, buying a wrecked car, then saying ‘Ten years ago it was a Cadillac, so everyone owes me something.'”
Yednock expects the judge to rule in about three months, although that won’t likely be the end of it. “Whatever he does will be appealed,” he says. Ultimately, the entire valley’s water situation will have to be sorted out, a process that could take 15 to 20 years, adds Moyle.
Yednock is about as unlikely a rancher—with 500 head of cattle on his property—as you’ll ever find. He’s a nature lover and avid hiker who admits he “always cursed the cattle in the national forests. But I’ve come to respect the fact you can responsibly grow them and, with them eating grass fed by sunshine, turn them into something people eat.” (Feed lots are a different story, he says.)
Yednock himself won’t be eating the cattle. He’s a vegetarian. And as much as he’s also come to respect the ranching culture, he admits he’s about as much of an outsider as one can get.
He and Frazer are a couple. “Being gay Californians coming in” and fighting with the locals over water rights, well, “it hasn’t helped,” Yednock says. (Moyle disagrees, saying their newcomer or outsider status “from San Francisco” has no bearing on local attitudes.)
What one might expect from a biotech scientist turning to agriculture actually crossed Yednock’s mind early on: “I was hoping I could do some sort of transgenic goats,” he says with a laugh. He’s still contemplating other additions, including a commercial fish ponds if more spring flow is restored.
Still, Yednock has brought other skills from his professional life to bear: amassing disparate but related threads of research into a single program; hiring personnel; and making a case based on what he believed to be the best scientific argument—even if others don’t see it that way.
Yednock could ask fellow Bay Area biotech veteran and neuroscientist Corey Goodman what it’s like to bring the scalpel of scientific analysis to a political knife fight.
Goodman has a long resume that includes cofounding several biotechs, including microbiome-based drug developer Second Genome of South San Francisco, CA, where he is chairman. He was tapped to run Pfizer’s main biotech research center in San Francisco before Pfizer, in a typical spasm of corporate zigzag, shut it down. He’s now a partner at VenBio, a San Francisco venture firm that he cofounded, with a string of exits from its first fund under his belt.
To top it off, Goodman and his wife Marcia Barinaga, a PhD holder in molecular biology and former science journalist, raise sheep for cheese making, meat, and wool on the Barinaga Ranch in western Marin County.
North of the Golden Gate Bridge and often shrouded in Pacific fog, the area has a long history both of agricultural work and environmental awareness. Sometimes those passions intertwine, sometimes they conflict. Goodman has seen both sides up close.
The Barinaga Ranch is near Point Reyes National Seashore, which was created in the 1960s by ranch families, oyster farmers in the surrounding bays, environmentalists, and the federal government to fend off development but keep the land (and water) productive.
Underscoring those common interests, Goodman and Barinaga recently bequeathed their 823-acre ranch to the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, a nonprofit that buys easements to protect West Marin working farms and ranches from the development that has turned the eastern half of the county into part of the Bay Area metroplex.
But Goodman and other agricultural people in West Marin found themselves in opposition to environmentalists over the fate
