When Mark and Karen Harrison moved their family to Mark’s grandmother’s farm outside of Woodland, it was a bigger change in lifestyle than they had imagined. As soon as they moved into the small cinderblock house built in the 1950s, all of the plumbing broke. Pipes burst and the family had to haul water from taps elsewhere on the property.

They had moved from a comfortable house in suburban Woodland, to a simple dwelling in the country with no central heat or air, and temporarily no indoor plumbing. Though their kids went to the same school in town, they now lived a country life. A life full of country chores like stacking wood for the wood-burning stove, and tending to their chickens and goats- new 4-H animals they got when they moved to the farm. Not surprisingly, even though they had only moved a few miles, it felt like a huge change.

They call their property, Harrison Farms, but before that it was known as the Burr Ranch. Lloyd Burr was Mark’s step grandfather. He built the little cinderblock house with the help of his brother-in-law and raised his 5 children on the farm. Mark grew up in Woodland and as a child would visit the farm along with his cousins. Later, he and Karen and their kids would visit his grandmother, Eleta, enjoying weekends exploring the rural property. Shortly after his grandmother passed away, they moved to the farm.

Karen says there were definitely some mixed feelings about the move- it was a big change, but an adventure. Mark and Karen really tried to give their children a connection to the land, told them to look as far as they could and to know that this was their land. Of particular importance was that they didn’t just buy the property for their nuclear family. “One of the beautiful things about it,” Karen says, “is that my husband grew up coming out here as a kid, all of his cousins did, and his whole family is still in the area, the whole extended family, they are all here. And they still come out”. There are even friends of cousins, who Mark and Karen have met only once or twice, who come out to fish in their pond. The friends come out every year to fish and now they know some friends better than the cousins.

“Right away we had a sense that this wasn’t just our space, it was for everybody. It would have been a loss had it gone out of the family”                                                                               

-Karen Harrison

Today, their niece’s husband manages their walnut orchards and his family lives just down the road from Mark and Karen. In addition to walnuts, they also grow row crops and have implemented extensive habitat restoration projects. Before they bought the land, the property was farmed margin to margin, but now there is also space for wilderness. Building a pond, and creating a 5-acre habitat corridor really changed how the farm works.

With the help of volunteers from the Boy Scouts and endless hours of their own hard work, they built a v-ditch with tiered levels that allow for water catchment and areas to plant along the sides of the ditch as well as the bottom. Here they planted cottonwood, willows, spice bush, black berries, and toyon. Only a year after planting, they spotted a bobcat sleeping in a forked branch of a big cottonwood. Other visitors to the farm include otters, coyotes, heron, quail, horned owl and once even a juvenile black bear.

With a grant from the NRCS they also improved an oak corridor at the top of the banks of cache creek; where they planted oak trees, red bud, sycamores, quail bush and lots of grasses. The big oaks are where you can find Swainson’s Hawk nests. Almost half of the Harrison Farms property is protected with a conservation easement held by the Yolo Land Trust that is specific for Swainson’s Hawk habitat protection. Conserving the land was very important to Mark and Karen, they do not want to see it developed into housing, and they hope that the land will be in the family forever. In addition to protecting their land, the partnership with the Yolo Land Trust also gave the Harrisons a broader sense of community. The family attends Land Trust events and enjoys feeling like they are a part of a larger group of people who are interested in the stewardship of Yolo County land; a group of people who understands the importance of conserving land for future generations just as they do.