Toluma Farms
A FAMILY CIRCLE KEEPS THE CHEESE WHEELS TURNING
It’s a Friday, midday and midsummer, and the large light-filled kitchen at Toluma Farms, home of Tomales Farmstead Creamery, is full of a whole host of very good things.
The first very good thing is food, and lots of it. Starting with Tomales Farmstead Creamery’s own line of delicious Italian Robiola-style soft-ripened goat, sheep and cow cheeses. Accompanying the cheese are platters, bowls and baskets of delectables—herb-corn chicken salad sandwiches with heirloom tomatoes, grilled cheeses with chard and dill and watermelon and feta salad (all from K&A Take Away down the road in Tomales), fresh blackberry pie, bright cherries, and enticingly warm and crusty baked bagels and hand-churned cultured butter. The bagels and butter were crafted at Daily Driver, the brand new Toluma Farms/Tomales Farmstead Creamery satellite outpost in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, near Potrero Hill.
The second very good thing is community. A group of West Marin neighbors, many of them fellow farmers and ranchers, are seated on stools around the central island; they are putting their heads together to figure out ways to work with the county (Marin) to prevent future flooding on area roads. As the meeting wraps up, the buzz of shared goodwill rises, in spite of the problematic situation they are there to address. There is an unspoken but palpable bond amongst the attendees—this is a group beholden to the land and subject to the vicissitudes of nature, including a changing climate.
Last, but certainly not least, there is family in the room that day. All kinds of family. Tamara Hicks and David Jablons, wife and husband, purchased the 160-acres of rolling hills that would become Toluma Farms in 2003, when their two girls, Josy and Emmy, were small children. Now the Hicks-Jablons girls are young adults, one in college and the other already graduated and working on the East Coast, and it is baby Abigail who sits in the high chair munching her lunch and soaking up the farm talk. Abigail is the 1-year-old daughter of Ashley Coffey, head cheesemaker at Tomales Farmstead Creamery, and her husband, Christian Coffey, farm manager of Toluma Farms. With the encouragement of Hicks and Jablons, the Coffeys have also launched their own cheese label, Folly Cheese Co., making Alpine-style cheese, and they will soon open a retail shop in Tomales, where the couple lives.
According to Hicks and Jablons, it is the people—their extended farm family—that matter most when they reflect on the past decade and a half of hard work it has taken to get the farm and creamery business to where it is today. It is worth noting that in the case of this husband-wife duo, the phrase “hard work” does not do justice to their efforts. Without previous farming experience and while holding onto their “day jobs” to help fund Toluma Farms—Jablons is a doctor, professor and oncology researcher who runs the General Thoracic Surgery department at UCSF, and Hicks is a clinical psychologist practicing in San Francisco—they took a decrepit former dairy, the buildings and barns falling down, the soil abused and neglected, and brought it back to life.
Over the years, despite commuting back and forth from SF to Tomales, they formed relationships with fellow farmers who have become long-term mentors and friends. They also worked with the county, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust and the Agricultural Institute of Marin (Hicks is now on the boards of both organizations), creating a conservation easement and preserving their land as agricultural, forever.
They have also aligned themselves with STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed), Marin RCD (Resource Conservation District) and NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service), planting trees and other native plants in an effort to restore creeks and watersheds, prevent erosion and enhance carbon sequestration.
They have learned the practices of animal husbandry and herd management (they currently ranch 250 goats, including six different breeds, along with 130 East Friesian sheep), dairy farming and cheesemaking, as well as value-added product marketing and distribution. They secured organic certification for their land, as well as Animal Welfare and Certified Humane certification for their herds, wrote USDA grants and designed and built a (gorgeous) 12-bed farm-stay farmhouse, hosting educational farm tours for paying guests and also for school children, as well as farm dinners, cheesemaking and soil science seminars, and other unique events such as “goat yoga.”
Most significantly, at least from the perspective of both Hicks and Jablons, they have hired exceptional individuals, people they have trusted to help them make this seemingly impossible dream come true, and with whom they have established strong long-term relationships.
“We have had 35 apprentices come through over the years,” says Hicks. “So many have come here at the beginning of their careers and then they are off to start their own things in the world of sustainability and agriculture and food justice. They come back to see us, and I stay in touch with almost everyone, every couple of months.”
The opening of Daily Driver—San Francisco’s first and only cheese- and butter-making creamery—a 7,000-squarefoot space in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, is an example of the next generation taking their experience at Toluma Farms out into the world. The idea was born, Jablons recounts, when David Kreitz, an industrial designer (and husband of then Tomales Farmstead cheesemaker, herdswoman and event coordinator Hadley Kreitz), built a wood-fired oven at Toluma Farms. When Kreitz later “confessed” that he knew how to make bagels, finishing them in the wood-fired oven, Jablons, who grew up in Manhattan, could not have been happier.
The bagels tasted like they were made especially for pairing with Hadley’s dairy products—rich delicacies such as hand-churned cultured butter, sweet cream, quark and cream cheese. And just like bagels and cream cheese, the two couples formed a partnership to create Daily Driver.
Daily Driver opened for business this past June, and now a refrigerated DD truck makes its way from the Silva Family Dairy in Tomales to the SF creamery, carrying Jersey cow milk supplied by sixth-generation West Marin farmer and former Toluma Farms milker Marissa Thorton. “We try to keep everyone in the ’hood,’” jokes Jablons, adding. “That’s because we fall in love with everyone we work with.” City dwellers can’t get much more farm fresh than that.
Up close, from a micro-perspective, it becomes clear how Hicks and Jablons do it: They never stop moving—ever! But what is it that makes them different in the macro? How have they sustained the energy it takes to continue learning and growing, raising a family, maintaining their careers, running a sustainable small-scale dairy, and making award-winning cheeses, even as they contribute to their communities—both in Tomales and in San Francisco? Both Hicks and Jablons cite the early advice of West Marin farming mentor Kevin Furlong as critical in preparing them for success. “Kevin told us, ‘If you’re a farmer, the first thing you do every day is you get up and you see what’s broken. And that’s just what you do,’” says Hicks.
Sometimes, Jablons adds, he tells people that working to cure cancer at UCSF is easier than agriculture. “Really, on Sunday evening I’m so tired from the farm that I can’t wait to go to work at the hospital.”
For many years the problem-solving the pair had to do at Toluma Farms was mostly damage-control and land and building restoration, and they say they mostly felt in over their heads. Now, with so many days and so much experience under their belts, and having, over time, created a viable business model, Jablons and Hicks have a greater sense of creativity and fun. “Where it feels especially fun now for me is that this is our primary community, and we feel like we all have a shared sense of purpose,” says Hicks. “That makes it fun to expand and take on new projects, like Daily Driver, layering on to the community we already have.”
It is early afternoon and the Toluma Farms kitchen now sits empty. The lunch meeting has wrapped up, the counters are wiped clean and everyone has headed off to prepare for the next round of chores. Baby Abigail has gone home for her afternoon nap. The only sound is the gurgle of a pot of coffee brewing. But even in the cleaned-up quiet, this central room retains its warmth, a lingering sense of people coming together for good—the generosity of spirit that infuses the air of Toluma Farms.
