Say you’ve farmed vegetables on a Sonoma County hillside for five years and now you want to plant wine grapes. You’d hit a wall: under current rules, that swap counts as new vineyard development, with the same permit process as breaking raw ground.
A proposed change to county law, circulated June 16, would fix that.
The county’s Agriculture Department is asking the Board of Supervisors to amend the Vineyard Erosion and Sediment Control Ordinance — VESCO — so farmers who have worked a parcel for at least five years can switch to grapes or orchard crops with a lighter “replanting” permit instead of the heavier “new development” one, so long as the planted footprint doesn’t grow.
The county doesn’t regulate what farmers grow. It regulates what they do to the land to grow it.
Planting a vineyard means moving a lot of dirt. Growers grade slopes, cut roads, install drainage pipes and terrace hillsides. All that earthmoving can send soil into streams — and Sonoma County’s streams hold coho salmon, endangered under federal law, and steelhead, listed as threatened. VESCO makes farmers file erosion control plans before the dirt moves.
Right now, a grower converting a cultivated field — land already being farmed — goes through the full new-development process, minus one step: the biotic resource assessment, a survey for sensitive plants and animals. On land the federal government has mapped as critical habitat, those conversions get a narrower check instead, called a focused species assessment.
The amendment would pull conversions out of the new-development process and put them on the replanting track, which carries its own, generally lighter standards. The definitions of cultivated and uncultivated land would come out of the code entirely. What the memo doesn’t spell out is whether either wildlife check would follow a conversion onto the replanting track.
“Because crop conversions would instead be regulated under the provisions for replanting permits,” the Agriculture Department wrote in the memo, “the permit requirements for new vineyard and orchard development would revert back to the prior ordinance language before the cultivated lands exemption was introduced.”
The idea came out of an April 14 workshop held by the Board of Supervisors’ Agriculture Ad Hoc Committee, where industry stakeholders and members of the public told the county that farms needed more room to rotate and change crops. The board told the committee to come back with a workplan; it returned June 2 with a multidepartment plan that put the VESCO amendments in the first year.
The proposal would also put on paper an extension option the board approved in 2021 but never wrote into the ordinance. Replanting permits run five years. The new language would let farmers ask for one more five-year stretch before a permit expires — 10 years total to finish a conversion.
The Agriculture Department prepared the proposal under Agricultural Commissioner Andrew F. Smith.
The board hasn’t set a hearing date.
Correction: An earlier version of this story said conversions in critical habitat would face a focused species assessment for the first time under the amendment. Current rules already require that check for cultivated-land conversions in critical habitat, and the memo does not spell out which wildlife checks would follow conversions onto the replanting track. The earlier version also said the ad hoc committee directed staff to develop the workplan; the Board of Supervisors directed the committee.