In 2020, the Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company celebrated its 20th anniversary. Long based in Point Reyes Station, the artisan cheese business opened a second creamery in Petaluma in 2018 to meet growing demand.

Last week, the Bohemian/Pacific Sun interviewed Lynn Giacomini Stray, a co-owner of the company, about the challenges of the past year—and the foreseeable future.

Indeed, between the Covid-19 pandemic, the worsening drought and ongoing debate about the future of agricultural leases at the Point Reyes National Seashore, this has been a historic few years for North Bay dairies. Struggling with a lack of water, dairies have started to truck in water from nearby cities or water districts—a practice which might prove prohibitively expensive for businesses in the long run.

Meanwhile, the debate over the future of the Point Reyes National Seashore continues to rage. Currently, the federal government, through the National Park Service, leases about one-third of the 71,000-acre public park to ranchers and dairies. Park administrators have delayed their decision on an Environmental Impact Statement which will determine whether agriculture stays long-term and, if it does stay, in what form.

The current drought has worsened the conditions for the Tule Elk which occupy part of the park. While dairy businesses throughout the North Bay have started to truck in water as needed, the National Park Service, which manages the Seashore, only recently installed water troughs for the elk in one area of the park.

Recent reporting for the Bohemian/Pacific Sun by Peter Byrne shows that over 150 elk have died in the past year due to a lack of nutrients—worsened by the drought—and crucial minerals in the areas where the elk herd live. On Saturday, Aug. 27, activists hiked into Tomales Point with about 100 gallons of water to give to the struggling herd of elk.

Although “Point Reyes” is in the company’s name and the Giacomini family, one of the North Bay’s historic dairy families, has leased park land in the past, Giacomini Stray says the company does not currently use any park land for its operations. Still, Giacomini Stray does support continuing leasing park land to dairy and ranching operations. “We do not operate a dairy in the park, but we fully support agriculture in the park,” Giacomini Stray told the Bohemian/Pacific Sun.

Here’s our interview. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What have the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic been on your business?

A: It’s been a huge impact. We sold a lot of our products to restaurants and hotels and food service. So when the pandemic hit, they closed; all of the restaurants and hotels and travel instantly stopped. And so our business decreased about 50%, initially. It is obviously starting to come back as things open up. But, as you know, with Covid closures the percentage of businesses that have been affected has gone up and down.

Labor has been another issue for everybody across the food industry and manufacturing. We were really hit initially with having to do a lot of layoffs. We have since hired back the same number of people that we had to lay off initially because of the decrease in business. So that’s been good. But we are still very much affected by the decrease in business from the food service industry. That has not fully come back. Nor has business travel or pleasure travel returned to pre-Covid numbers.

Q: How much of your business comes from your location in Point Reyes Station?

A: Consumer habits have changed, and people are buying at retail stores more instead of going out to eat. As a result, our business model has shifted to more retail sales nationwide. But a lot of Bay Area locals know us for The Fork, the culinary center on our farm. That is an educational center where we would have different value-added programs, including classes, wine-and-cheese pairings and educational tours of the farm. That shuttered back in March of 2020. When everything closed down, we had to close down The Fork. We just reopened that in June, with new Covid policies to make sure that everybody stays safe. Currently, The Fork is open by appointment on Friday and Saturday for two tastings each day.

Q: How has the drought impacted your business?

A: We milk about 400 cows, and they need about 40 gallons of water a day per cow. So the drought has drastically affected the dairy side of our business. We are hauling water, that’s an additional expense. Another reason why we have limited our tastings to the public at The Fork to only two days a week—we used to be open five days a week—was because of the water usage for that. So we really downsized everything because of the drought.

We’ve also added additional water reclamation programs in the past year, but sustainable agriculture programs have been a focus of ours for the past decade. We’ve been in and out of drought, but this is the most dramatic we’ve seen. Climate change is something that’s going to be around for a long time, and we’re trying to adapt to that.

Q: What do you think will happen if the drought continues to drag on?

A: Well, I think it’s definitely going to impact the dairy industry. There are agencies that help out agriculture with farm services. The county of Marin is offering agriculture with cost-sharing programs for water resources. That’s a huge help for us. Having said that, if this continues, in year two, dairies are going to have to look at potentially downsizing their herd. Because it’s a lot of money that we’re putting in upfront to haul water. This is the new normal, that we’re going to have to find ways to increase our water-reclamation programs. I think this is a bigger problem beyond even agriculture, it’s the residents. Everybody’s been asked to decrease the water consumption by 20–25%. We’re no different, it’s just that we have a lot more water needs than residents, but everybody is responsible. Everybody needs to find new ways to conserve water.

Bayview Pasta isn’t noodling around

Joshua Felciano points to a thick pair of millstones the size of wine-barrel hoops, stacked in the belly of a tall gristmill. “This here is 800 pounds of Vermont granite,” he says.

The Sonoma County native and owner of Bayview Pasta, a fresh-pasta manufacturer in San Francisco, hand-mills flour from sun-ripened wheat berries grown on a fifth-generation family farm in Eastern Washington while we talk. The drought-tolerant grains were dry-farmed leeward of the Cascade Mountains, he notes, raised strictly on a diet of rain, snow and nutrient-rich, untilled soil.

“But did they lead happy lives?” snarky Portlandia fans may be tempted to ask, and Felciano readily acknowledges the satirical overtones. Actually, the grains lead a parched, somewhat stressful existence—but that makes for tastier pasta, he says, as low moisture concentrates flavor and gluten.

Who knew? Wheat may be America’s third-largest crop and as flour, a pantry essential, but we’re more attuned to the origins of our syrah than to the source of our spaghettoni. Felciano, however, digs a deeper plow-to-fork connection by bringing the story of pasta full circle—back to where the grain comes from, how it is grown and when it was milled. And he challenges the Bay Area’s relationship to a culinary staple by crafting fresh, whole-grain pasta that’s less about the sauce and more about complex flavor, rich texture and higher nutrients.

“Pasta’s part of my heritage,” Felciano says. He grew up in a “boisterous Italian-American family” from Healdsburg. And as a former sous-chef, working with flour has always been central to his livelihood; he cut his teeth at Manzanita, moving onto Simi Winery before landing at Delfina. But he admits, flashing an affable grin and beefy, dough-pounding forearms, that he gave little thought to the refined Italian semolina that used to dust his workplace.

When Felciano established Bayview Pasta in 2017, he initially bought wheat on Amazon—free Prime delivery!—from a small grain company in Utah. It was located about an 11-hour drive from San Francisco, so he called it on a whim. Could he check out their mill, maybe visit their farm?

“We couldn’t tell you where the grain’s from,” he was told. “It’s all commodity [that gets] thrown into a community silo.” It was a stark realization—“we were so far from the story of where our [grain] comes from, so far from the field, so far from the farmer,” he said.

Humans have cultivated wheat since the dawn of civilization and grown it in the Western United States since the early 18th century. It’s a large—but also a largely forgotten—part of California’s agricultural legacy; the state once produced much of the nation’s supply, until dairy, produce and nuts supplanted it in the mid-1900s.

“Growing grain is the missing part of the food revolution,” says Alex Weiser, co-founder of the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project. The small collective of farmers set out to re-establish a sustainable grain belt in Southern California eight years ago. On a patchwork of fields 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, they grow heirloom wheat like King Desert durum, Red Fife and spelt, along with Oaxacan dent corn—hardy, regenerative crops with disease- and drought-resistant pedigrees.

Felciano recalls his first visit there with his wife; they joined Weiser and gang in harvesting purple corn, and ended up geeking out with them on grain. “These farmers were sitting around, showing and asking each other about their plantings, like ‘Where’s this one from? Why are you growing it? Who’s it for?’” Felciano says.

The deep connection they had to their fields, crops and farming practices was a revelation. “I could come back to San Francisco and say, ‘I know the person who grew this grain. I know why it works well, why it’s so different from a bag of King Arthur [flour],’” he says. “And it was all happening right there in this cornfield.”

The Grind

It’s 6am, and the sun casts a warm glow across the Bay in front of the Hunter’s Point Shipyard. Felciano grinds away in the commissary kitchen where Bayview Pasta is based—has been since 4am—milling plump, hard red wheat berries grown in the Horse Heaven Hills of Prosser, Wash. As he pours them into a spout, the mill roars into action, drowning out the chorus to Volare streaming in the background. The grains pulverize into a stream of silky, amber flour speckled with golden hints of their former selves, releasing the malty aroma of toasted oats.

Encased in a fire-engine-red steel frame, Felciano’s workhorse is a slick take on a classic piece of machinery. But it serves a basic purpose: it grinds the entirety of the grain, integrating the bran, germ and endosperm into whole flour. And the massive granite millstones manage to stay cool, effectively preserving the grain’s aromatic oils, nutrients and flavor.

Industrial mills operate differently, using steel rollers to crack and separate the bran and germ from the endosperm, Felciano says. Refined flour is then milled uniquely from this gluten-rich core—very shelf stable and great for making toothy pasta, he notes, but void of fiber, vitamins and healthy fats. “So when you buy a sack of flour in the store,” he says, “you have no idea how old it is.”

Fresh, whole flour, on the other hand, has a shelf life of about a week, but Felciano never lets it sit for more than a day. He quickly moves onto the next step of mixing the hard red with other fresh flours including spelt, Red Fife and Desert durum from Tehachapi. With the scantest addition of water, the flour blend turns it into a crumbly dough, which, when squished, is cohesive yet surprisingly light. The rich oils give it the consistency of egg pasta without the eggs, with fuller nutrients, taste and texture.

The morning pace picks up as Felciano’s three employees set up their individual stations. Each one extrudes a different kind of pasta; one rhythmically chops wide, stubby tubes of rigatoni that curl out of a traditional bronze die, while another slices ropes of bucatini, twisting them into nests with a flick of the wrist.

Other items on today’s docket: fettuccine tinted sage-green with nettles, brilliantly yellow turmeric spaghettoni and pappardelle, which Felciano makes by hand-feeding flattened dough through a pasta cutter. The wide, hearty ribbons are his favorite, he says, tossed with “just butter and parm[igiano-reggiano].”

The rich and robust flavor of the pasta, in fact, favors simplicity. Causwell’s, a bistro-style restaurant in San Francisco’s Marina District, rotates its offering of Bayview’s pasta every few weeks; currently it’s spaghettoni paired with a tomato-braised pork ragù and sprinkles of English peas and spring onions. It highlights the taste and texture of the pasta, with tender shreds of meat clinging to the thick strands without drowning them, all accented by a pop of fresh greens and pecorino cheese.

“The pasta has a really nice tooth to it—you can tell the quality of the grain,” says Chef Adam Rosenblum. And it’s in line with Causwell’s fresh-and-local ethos: “We make everything from scratch, so if I’m getting something from somewhere else, it needs to be of the same caliber and craftsmanship.”

The quality of the pasta, as Rosenblum points out, is sown in the grain itself—and that’s every bit the craft for Garrett Moon, of Moon Family Farm in Prosser, Wash. The fifth-generation farm grows “grain with big flavor and a small carbon footprint”—drought-tolerant heritage wheats like hard red, hard white and spelt—on 2,400 unirrigated and untilled acres.

Relying solely on precipitation and soil management, the farm avoids the energy costs and impacts of pumping water from aquifers or rivers, Moon says. But it faces increasingly steep challenges: the region, located in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains, is the driest in the state, and 10% of normal spring rainfall this year is putting a sobering strain on yields.

Artisan producers like Felciano “understand that we put a lot of extra effort into our grain, land and conservation efforts—things that aren’t recognized in a commodity market,” he says. “So we try to make connections with people who care about the same things, who appreciate wheat done right.”

It’s clearly a kindred connection. As Felciano boxes up the morning batch of fresh pasta, he points to a message printed on every label, below the stamped mill date of the flour: “We buy our grains directly from the farm that grew the grain.”

The boxes of pasta stack up by late morning, awaiting delivery to stores and restaurants around the Bay Area. The farthest, Felciano notes, is Big John’s Market in Healdsburg, where he held his first job as a teenager. “It’s the only place where I’ve been hired, fired, then rehired,” he says. It’s yet another wholesome loop in the story of his pasta.