VINA — Harvest activity was well underway at the Abbey of New Clairvaux’s ranch in Vina Wednesday morning in an annual ritual.
And now, the monks who operate the monastery have taken steps to make sure agriculture will be the only use for the expansive parcel of land, forever.
Thanks to assistance from the Northern California Regional Land Trust, the abbey will soon have a “conservation easement” — a legal stipulation that makes permanent the designation of the property to be solely agricultural for all time. The easement will remain a part of the property’s deed for all time. Not even a change of mind among the monastery leadership can reverse it.
“It’s so nobody can develop this place into a Disneyland,” NCRLT executive director Cynthia Perrine said with a laugh.
Agriculture has been a crucial activity on the land ever since people of white European ancestry arrived in the 1840s. Prior to that, the River Nomlaki band of Native Americans occupied the area.
Leland Stanford, a railroad executive and, along with his wife, founder of Stanford University, owned the land in the 1880s for purposes of growing wine grapes, but his venture was not successful. The abbey came into existence in 1955 when monks from the Kentucky-based Abbey of Gethsemani arrived.
“This has been a project for a couple of years,” Perrine explained. “The abbey has been looking to make sure the property stays in agriculture. They had an opportunity to sustain themselves and have made this big push.”
How can this partnership between the abbey and the NCRLT accomplish this?
“We’re creating a baseline report, showing how the property looks now,” explained Hannah Espinosa, NCRLT’s stewardship director. “We’re also creating a management plan, which takes into account what the landowners hope to restore.” This includes improving riparian habitat along Deer Creek, the waterway marking the abbey’s northern boundary.
Father Paul Mark Schwan, New Clairvaux’s abbot, described the group’s reasons for creating a conservation easement.
“It means that this land supports not just the present generation of monks but that this property will remain sacred and serve future generations of monks and visitors,” he wrote.
“This reminds us that there is more than just ‘today’ and that there will always be a future, a ‘tomorrow’ that we must remember and reflect upon for another generation to benefit from, enjoy, and hand on to future generations.”
The abbey currently raises walnuts, almonds, prunes and apricots, along with wine grapes, which the New Clairvaux Vineyard uses to create award-winning wines under the supervision of vintner Aimee Sunseri.
For the first time in many years, the abbey has grown tomatoes in 2023 — in response to a plunge in the market price of walnuts.
Perrine said the NCRLT applies for a grant, and commissions an appraisal of the property to determine its value if the abbey were to sell. The state of California then compensates the landowner when the easement is complete and after the group submits all necessary documentation.
It is difficult to know how much money the abbey will net: “The amount is all speculative,” Perrine said.
The NCRLT is busy helping to create four other conservation easements, three in Butte County and one other project in Tehama County, which is on a property at the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
In Butte, Perrine said, two of the projects involve preservation of rangelands and orchard land. The other is called “mitigation banks” — created when a developer of homes needs to set aside lands because of the impacts the development has caused. In this particular case, the conservation easement comes by way of a 232-acre parcel near the Chico Regional Airport.
Meanwhile, harvest action continued at the abbey ranch, with “shakers” — machines that drive between rows of a nut orchard and shake each tree’s nuts loose, for later collection — hard at work. Two monks, Brother Paul Garsuta and Brother Peter Kao, worked in the winery as they sorted freshly harvested grapes for the crusher. That machine takes out the stems, but the “must” — skins, seeds and juice — go into a large tank for fermentation.
Wednesday’s processing involved the petite sirah grapes. Today’s processing will wrap up the main part of the harvest for the year, though some specialty grapes will be coming in within the next several days.
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