Image: Angeles Crest Creamery

It’s been a tough year for friend of the blog Gloria Putnam who runs the Angeles Crest Creamery goat ranch in the San Gabriel Mountains. Back in September the Bobcat Fire swept though her ranch. Thankfully firefighters were able to save her home and barn but goat’s forage is gone.

Image: Angeles Crest Creamery

Gloria is one of the most resilient people that I know. In response to this challenge she’s started an effort to restore what was lost and is chronicling those efforts in a newsletter, The Obligate Resprouter. As she says in the newsletter,

The real work of learning from the fire is just beginning. Angeles Crest Creamery was started to demonstrate that food could be produced in the arid Southern California mountains without importing water, by using human’s most time tested methods for managing land in partnership with ruminants. To reintroduce to the San Gabriel Mountains an agriculture that doesn’t put pressure on the very resources that climate change makes scarce—water and top soil. Now, at least temporarily, we find ourselves having to feed the goats hay grown by pumping water in the nearby desert, the very thing we have tried to avoid. Developing a new understanding of this agriculture’s relationship to climate change, drought and wildfire is necessarily the new project, and we are pleased to have you along for the exploration.

You can subscribe to The Obligate Resprouter via a link at the bottom of her website.

Gloria has also set up a hay fund to keep her goats fed.