Ellen Straus, the Marin County dairy farmer shunned fifty years ago by the local agricultural community who went on to become the face of the farmland preservation movement in the Bay Area and a pioneer of organic dairy farming, died Saturday. She was 75.
Straus died of brain cancer at the family farm bordering Tomales Bay north of San Francisco, said her daughter Vivien.
Outside the Bay Area, Straus was better known as the pioneer of the burgeoning California farmstead cheese movement and gourmet trade in high-end butters, yogurts and cream products.
Within her family, she was known as someone with the sublimely tactful ability to lead people without their knowing she was doing it, a quality her son Michael called "the gestalt of Mom."
Ironically, her beginnings could scarcely have been less agricultural. Straus was born Ellen Tirza Lotte Prins to a Jewish family in Amsterdam. She was 13 when her family fled the Nazi invasion of Holland for New York City.
She had completed a science degree at Bard College when a German-born family acquaintance, Bill Straus, came to call. "Actually, he came twice," she liked to boast. "The first time I wasn't there."
He was a rare suitor: a Jewish dairy farmer. European Jews were traditionally restricted to towns, but Straus' family had come to the U.S. from Hamburg to study agriculture at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, then stayed when World War II broke out. When Straus came courting in 1949, he was already the owner of a small farm on the shores of Tomales Bay, replete with 23 cows named after family and friends. After 16 days, he proposed, adding, "Hurry up. I have to get back to my cows."
Three months later, they were married. "It was like moving to paradise," she recalled in a speech before the American Farmland Trust in 1998. But, while the Dutch New Yorker loved California, not all Northern Californians loved her.
"The Strauses really tried to be part of the community, but the ranching community froze them out," said Phyllis Faber, a local wetland biologist. "They were Jewish and they were newcomers, so the Strauses turned to east Marin, the Democratic Party and Marin Conservation League."
Straus served on the Democratic Central Committee from 1959 to 1970 before her attention turned to conservation. John Alden, chairman of the Marin Democratic party, said Straus led the way in alerting dairy farmers to the impact of manure runoff on Tomales Bay, and the local oyster fisheries. "Ellen Straus' dairy was the most aggressive in starting to spray the fields to wash manure into retaining ponds," Alden said.
