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Cheese, Bees, and Innovative Land Management: An insider’s look at western Marin County

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Cows in West Marin and rural Sonoma await your visit along the fables Cheese Trail.
Copyright Vivian Straus
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Cows in West Marin and rural Sonoma await your visit along the fabled Cheese Trail.

Join correspondent Laurie McAndish King as she chats with Vivien Straus, a Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) board member, at Straus Home Ranch in the rolling hills of Marshall, California.

The organization works with local ranchers—many of whom are struggling now because of the drought—to help them stay on their land, address climate change, and experiment with innovative ways to manage water.

Vivien knows the creameries in West Marin and Sonoma, and has been impressed with the area’s particularly skillful craft cheesemakers.

She founded the Cheese Trail to help draw attention to them, eventually expanding to include cheesemakers all the way from Crescent City to San Diego, including a significant cluster on the Central Coast. Vivien gives us the inside scoop on where we can sample cheeses, take cheesemaking classes, go on farm tours, experience goat yoga, and even pet a water buffalo—they apparently get ecstatic if you brush them the right way.

Funding for Journeys of Discovery provided by Nashville's Big Back Yard economic initiative focused on rural communities in the southwest quarter of Tennessee and the Shoals Region of Northern Alabama.

You are invited to subscribe to the Lowell Thomas Award-winning podcast travel show, Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer, featured on the NPR Podcast DirectoryiHeartRadioApple Podcast.

Laurie McAndish King is an award-winning travel writer and photographer who has been interviewing fascinating people since 2007. Her work focuses on nature, culture, and cuisine. King's true stories cover 20-foot-long Australian earthworms, a journey to taste the world’s best coffee in Bali, and an Ivy League astrophysicist’s explanation of how flying saucers are powered. Her three collections of travel stories—poignant, insightful and often quite funny—have inspired and entertained readers since 2014.
Tom Wilmer produces on-air content for Issues & Ideas airing over KCBX and is producer and host of the six-time Lowell Thomas award-winning NPR podcast Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer. Recorded live on-location across America and around the world, the podcasts feature the arts, culture, music, nature, history, science, wine & spirits, brewpubs, and the culinary arts--everything from baseball to exploring South Pacific atolls to interviewing the real Santa Claus in the Arctic.