Shed a tear…
A cow town no longer
Dairies, cattle ranches fleeing development in Sacramento area
By Phillip Reese - Bee Staff Writers
Published 12:00 am PST Thursday, March 8, 2007
Sacramento, get ready for an identity crisis. You are no longer a cow town. Or, at best, you are an ever-poorer excuse for one.
The county's cattle census dropped from 130,000 in 1979 to 61,000 in 2006, according to estimates from the National Agricultural Statistics Service. That leaves people outnumbering cows 22 to 1 -- more people-per-cow than all but a few counties in California.
On the bright side, that means the area likely smells a little better and there's more lucrative development -- many people prefer, say, a shopping center to a field pocked with cow patties.
It also means local cattle ranchers and dairy farmers have had to adapt -- either selling their land or coming up with new ways to make money off of it. Rancher Stan Van Vleck, for example, rents out parts of his cow pasture to everyone from paintball players to the National Guard.
