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But, season by season, the ranch is coming back to life. The last of the houses was just rebuilt, and the old redwood outbuildings have been replaced by shiny red metal barns. Just the other day, over by the pond, LaFranchi spotted a bald eagle. A new family of foxes made a den nearby and a flock of around 75 geese wander the ranch, looking for bits of leftover grain. Ground squirrels and deer are still scarce, but the turkeys are back, eating hay side-by-side with the cows.<\/p>\n
As you get to know Cheryl LaFranchi, you get to know a lot of her sayings, passed down from her father, Henry, who picked them up from his father. She\u2019ll pepper sentences with \u201cJesus criminy\u201d or \u201choly smokes.\u201d When things get bad, they \u201cgo sideways.\u201d If something is high-end, it\u2019s \u201cCadillac,\u201d as in, \u201cYou might not make the Cadillac money if you do like we do, but we\u2019re doing just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you farm, it\u2019s not all sugar and roses,\u201d LaFranchi likes to say. By the time she gets to, \u201cI don\u2019t need to stick the fat hog to every steer that runs through the place,\u201d it doesn\u2019t matter if you technically understand or not\u2014you get it.<\/p>\n
Every day, LaFranchi is up by 6 a.m., often starting the day bottle-feeding young calves. Until recently, she used to run a truck over each day to Bear Republic Brewery in Cloverdale to haul as much as 40,000 pounds of brewer\u2019s grains to feed the cattle. The spent grain is a novel source of recycled nutrition LaFranchi and her husband discovered in the early 1990s, long before other ranchers took note. After Drake\u2019s Brewing bought Bear Republic earlier this year, they now source local spent grains from Lagunitas instead. Raised at first on grass and hay, the cows will eat the barley-based byproduct for the last six months to a year of their lives. It\u2019s what gives Oak Ridge beef its unique flavor, tenderness, and marbling\u2014a different flavor profile from entirely grass-fed beef or beef finished on corn.<\/p>\n Their beef is sold primarily through Sonoma Meat Company in Santa Rosa, another family business with strong local ties. LaFranchi \u2019s husband, Frank Mongini, a large-animal veterinarian, first approached the company in 2011, and the relationship began with just a single animal. Now, Oak Ridge sells around 12 to 14 cows a month, lending their name to the beef but leaving the butchering, marketing, and sales to S onoma Meat Company. Much of the appeal of the branded campaign is the story of the ranch and its animals. Given no antibiotics or hormones, the Black Angus graze freely, from the valley floor to the hilltops. In addition to natural grass and spent grain, they also feed on leftover almond hulls brought in from the Central Valley.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all part of the regenerative, sustainable farming model the LaFranchis have practiced for over a century, long before \u201csustainability\u201d was a marketing catchphrase. That same appreciation for the land also translates into a love of community. That\u2019s what LaFranchi had in mind when she dreamed up the Range to Table program in 2012 with the Redwood Empire Food Bank. The idea was to use excess brewer\u2019s grains to help feed cattle in the region, even those from other ranches, and donate the beef. It\u2019s a way for cattle that might otherwise go to waste\u2014steers with one testicle, cows with blindness or ones that are too big or too small\u2014to go to work in the community.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of just getting rid of them and not getting a lot of money for them, we said, \u2018Send them up here. Frank and I will feed them, and we\u2019ll donate them to the food bank in your name.\u2019\u201d Ranchers in the region jumped at the opportunity. In 2018, the last full year of the program before the fire, they donated over 22,000 pounds of ground beef.<\/p>\n Attending a well-known industry bull and gelding sale up in Red Bluff this February for the first time since the fire, LaFranchi says she was happy \u201cto see the bulls back in the top end of the bull sale, grading like they\u2019re supposed to.\u201d Breeding and selling cattle was once the lifeblood of the business. But these days, more than 80% of their revenue lies in the branded beef program with Sonoma Meat Company. Every so often, she\u2019 ll get a text from a friend sharing a photo of a local menu, whether it\u2019s \u201cbacon-infused Oak Ridge Angus beef sliders\u201d at Gravenstein Grill in Sebastopol or brisket at Butcher Crown Roadhouse in Petaluma.<\/p>\n Her grandfather Massimino would surely chuckle. \u201cI think he would just be like, \u2018Holy smokes!\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cAnd my dad, too. My dad would really get a kick out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n But Cheryl LaFranchi is most proud of keeping the ranch in the family so far. She doesn\u2019t have any children of her own. Her brother works in computing. Her two nieces work at a nonprofit and at Redwood Credit Union. And her nephew is an airplane mechanic.<\/p>\n \u201cBut everyone still lives on the farm,\u201d she says. \u201cThat, when it\u2019s all said and done, will be my greatest accomplishment\u2014that the kids were able to come back to the ranch and stay on the ranch. It\u2019s not much of a family ranch if there\u2019s no family.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oak Ridge Angus Ranch in Knights Valley was ravaged by the 2019 Kincade fire. Now the LaFranchi family is rebuilding from scratch. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":105869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2620,5],"tags":[],"layout":[5590],"class_list":["post-105849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","category-things-to-do","issue-may-june-2023"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/www.sonomamag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/79A6589.jpg\")
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