Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Ellen Tirza Lotte Straus

By Barbara Euser
 In conjunction with the Writer's Center of Marin

Early Years in Amsterdam 

"What animal is this?" the radio host asked. Ellen listened intently as the naturalist from the Amsterdam zoo described the animal of the week.  Even as she listened, Ellen could see his face in her  mind. Dr. Frits
Portielje was an old friend of her father's and a dear friend of their family. Dr. Portielje captured Ellen's imagination as he described how the hippopotamus lives in its native habitat.

There were no animals that exotic in Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands. But there were wonderful birds. On Sunday afternoons, Ellen, her brother Geert and her sister Anneke would take long walks
with their father. The children would lead him outside the city to watch birds and enjoy the peaceful countryside.

Ellen captured the feeling of the countryside with pen and ink drawings and watercolor paintings. She lived in the city, but through her father and his naturalist friend, Ellen learned to love nature and animals from her earliest days.

Ellen's father was a diamond broker. She and her brother and sister and their mother enjoyed a comfortable life. Their four-story house stood tall and broad one block from the Amstel River.

In the morning Geert and Anneke and Ellen rode first one trolley car then another to school. Their school was called an Open Air School. It was an experimental public school. The five-sided building had windows on four sides. The blackboard and the door were located on the only solid wall. In the afternoons they walked through the busy streets, past the farmers market, past the fish market, back home.

On the Sabbath, they went to their grandmother's house for the mid-day meal. On their way walking home, they stopped on the bridge over the river and fed the seagulls.

In 1939, Ellen's mother took a trip back to Germany to attend the funeral of her last relative. When she returned, she was in shock. Hitler was tightening the laws of Germany. Kristallnacht, the infamous night of violence against Jewish people and their property had already happened. The Nazi program of Jewish persecution was escalating. Ellen's mother feared that Hitler would soon overrun the Netherlands. She told
her husband they would have to leave Europe immediately in order to find safety for their children.

Ellen's father visited the United States Embassy and applied for visas for his family to emigrate to America. When the U.S. Consul asked him why they wanted to leave, her father told him that Jewish people were no
longer safe in Amsterdam, and they were leaving to save their children's lives. The Consul appreciated his straightforward, honest answer and approved their visas.

Transplanted in New York

On February 15, 1940, Ellen's family arrived in New York. As their ship passed the Statue of Liberty, everyone on board came out on deck. Some people cried, some people cheered. Ellen eyes glowed with excitement.

Thirteen-year-old Ellen began a new life in a country where she knew no one and could not speak the language. Her family lived in New York City where her father could continue working as a diamond broker. Ellen and Geert and Anneke started school right away and began to learn English.

It was hard being teenagers in a strange country. But the reports of the war in Europe and Hitler's murder of the Jewish people made it clear that the Prins family had made the right decision.

Ellen attended Bard College, a small liberal arts college located in Upper New York State in Annandale-on-Hudson, on the banks of the Hudson River. She majored in Natural Sciences and Mathematics. When she graduated, Ellen applied for jobs doing scientific research. Research jobs were not offered to women at that time.  Interviewers asked Ellen whether she knew typing and shorthand.

In hopes of getting a job, Ellen enrolled in the Katherine Gibbs School in New York and obtained a College Business Degree in 1949. When Ellen had originally considered a career, she faced a dilemma. She knew she
also wanted to get married and have children.  She didn't believe it would be possible to succeed at a career and raising a family at the same time.

Through friends of friends, Ellen met William Straus while he was visiting New York from his home in Marin County, California. He was Jewish like herself. William and his family immigrated to the United States from Germany via Palestine in 1936. William studied at the University of California at Davis and received a degree from UC Berkeley in animal husbandry in 1939.

William had bought a ranch in Marin County in 1941 and was developing a dairy herd. He told Ellen about the beautiful hills rising out of Tomales Bay and the peaceful ranch and the life he was creating there. He asked her to marry him and move to California.

From New York to Marin

Bill and Ellen were married in New York City and honeymooned on Tomales Bay -- permanently. The original ranch was 166 acres. Bill had a herd of 23 dairy cows. He knew how demanding dairy ranching was. Cows have to be milked every day without fail. Bill always arranged to work with others so that he could take a day off each week. Ellen had to work hard, too, but she liked working alongside her husband. And she grew to love the wildness of the Bay and the serenity of the hills.

Ellen dreamed of having a family. First their son Albert was born in 1955, then Vivien in 1957, followed by Miriam in 1962 and Michael in 1967. Her house was full of children and her life was full of her family and the dairy ranch. 

But Ellen never forgot that her life had been forever changed by the rise to political power of Hitler. She realized the importance of politics in a way many Americans did not. Even when Albert was a baby, Ellen made time to become an active member of the Democratic Central Committee of Marin. She worked hard on the Committee for fourteen years.

Early Conservationist

In the early 1960's, Ellen supported the effort to create Point Reyes National Seashore. Many of the ranchers thought this was a strange position for a dairy rancher to take. There were a number of dairy ranches within the boundaries of the proposed National Seashore. It was initially unclear what would happen to them. Could dairy ranchers co-exist with recreational use of the area? It was not easy to envision. But Ellen did.

Many people assumed that conservationists were the natural opponents of agriculturalists. Conservationists were intent on preserving open spaces for recreation. Agriculturalists were interested in preserving open
spaces for ranching and farming. Bill was the first rancher to join the Marin Conservation League. He was eventually Chairman of the West Marin Unit. It took the special vision of Bill and Ellen Straus to see that
both groups were interested in the same thing:  preserving open spaces from being carved up into housing tracts, highways and shopping malls. Like her father, Ellen had a straightforward and honest approach to
dealing with people. They knew they could trust her. Ellen Straus' unique capacity for developing trust and cooperation between apparently opposing groups helped convince the conservationists and agriculturalists to work together.

In the mid-1960's, local politicians developed the West Marin General Plan which called for freeways, parkways, and urban development in West Marin County. High density housing would have lined the shores of
Tomales Bay. Freeways would have skirted the shore and run along the ridge line above the Bay. Ellen and her husband Bill were the only ranchers who actively opposed the high density zoning plan. They were
among the few who testified on behalf of A-60 zoning for the area, which means that only one house could be built on 60 acres of land. This would effectively prevent the subdivision of ranches into housing tracts or
ranchettes. Their position made them unpopular with other ranchers -- for a while.

Many ranchers had been convinced that they could not stop progress -- which in this case meant the subdividing of their land. They had already given up and were planning to sell their land to developers for the
highest possible price and use the money for retirement.

Carving up the land of West Marin was not inevitable. But someone had to stand up against it. Ellen was determined not to give up. She would fight to save her family's ranch and the lifestyle they loved. Finally,
the low density A-60 zoning was approved. The fight was won, but only temporarily.

Virginia Davis wrote about Ellen and Bill, "Taking positions so contrary to the conventional wisdom of your neighbors requires the utmost courage. In later years they were acknowledged to be correct by most of
the agricultural community, but at the time many ranchers felt they were being denied the right to, as John Hart described it in Farming on the Edge, 'take the last best harvest by selling not just their agricultural
products but the land itself.'"

Educator

In the early 1970s, Ellen realized that in order to gather support for protecting agriculture in West Marin, more people needed to understand what ranch life was all about. That meant educating the largely urban
population of the rest of Marin County. Ellen began inviting school groups to visit the Straus ranch.

Ellen describes a typical visit, "We begin by giving students a chance to meet the calves, to walk among them and pet them. The students even let the calves suck their fingers, and find out that calves and cows
have no upper teeth.

The children have fun. When we go into the fields, they find out that, when they sit very quietly, the heifers, being very curious, will gather right around them. We have a picnic lunch on the lawn of our house, and
they get to try our milk, butter and cheese.

We talk about farm life, and with the older kids we discuss issues concerning agriculture, impacts on the environment, and land use planning. We then go over to the dairy, so they can see the big milking cows up close. They see what cows are fed, and all the equipment we use daily. For the little ones, we clean up a tractor, take out the keys, and one by one they can climb up, and imagine to be real-life tractor operators. It is fun to see their faces all aglow. When they are back in school, they often send me artwork of their day on the farm."

Ellen has hosted not only students from elementary and high schools. She has hosted adults participating in the Environmental Forum training program annually for twenty years. She has welcomed politicians and
members of the press. Visitors have come from abroad. In thirty years, she has contributed to the education of hundreds of members of the Marin community. Single-handedly, she has offered all her visitors a deeper
understanding of what agriculture contributes to Marin County.

Innovator: Marin Agricultural Land Trust

But as the population of Marin County increased, Ellen realized that more than education was needed to save West Marin from eventual development. The A-60 zoning that she had supported so vigorously in the 1960s could prevent housing tracts, but it was not enough to prevent the land from being developed into estates and hobby farms.

In 1980, together with Phyllis Faber, Ellen co-founded the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT). She and Phyllis envisioned a legal mechanism that would allow ranchers to sell a portion of the rights to their land, specifically the right to develop their land for something other than agricultural use. If she and Phyllis could find the money, they could pay ranchers to give up development rights to their land. The ranchers could continue to live and work on their land and to sell it to other ranchers if they decided to. But the land would be protected from development into non-agricultural use.

Land trusts had been formed in other parts of the country. Some of them protected public lands, such as village greens in New England. Some trusts conserved land for recreational use. Ellen and Phyllis created
the first land trust in the country focused exclusively on the protection of agricultural land.  In order to created MALT, Ellen and Phyllis had to convince many other people to support their idea. Together they worked to involve conservation and environmental activists, political leaders and farmers and ranchers. It was the right moment to bring them all together.

Robert Berner, the Executive Director of MALT, describes her work, "Ellen was instrumental in all of the tasks that were required to give birth to this new kind of organization: understanding the concept of separating out development rights from the other rights of property ownership, developing the form and language for a workable conservation easement, establishing policies for what to buy and how much to pay, finding money to start up, even the week-to-week challenge of ranchers and environmentalists working side-by-side."

Ellen served on MALT's Board of Directors for ten years, from 1980 to 1990. During her tenure, she attracted key community leaders to MALT's board and obtained necessary funding from individuals and foundations.
She served as a liaison with older and larger conservation organizations, obtaining support for MALT. In 1996, Ellen returned to the MALT board, serving as Chair from 1999-2001.

Ellen's vision, commitment and energy have paid off. MALT continues to grow. MALT easements now permanently protect 25 percent of all privately owned agricultural land in Marin County. Over 45 Marin farms and ranches including over 30,000 acres are included. The organization Ellen created and developed has become a national model for private efforts and public/private partnerships for agricultural land preservation. MALT, supported by its 4,500-plus members, is a respected voice both locally and statewide for agricultural land preservation.

An Organically Certified Dairy

The most basic reason Ellen had for founding MALT was her interest in protecting and preserving the life of her family on its dairy ranch. Her son Albert now runs the dairy. Ellen and Bill still live on the ranch. A dairy is  a dynamic, ever-changing business, and Ellen is still involved in it. Protecting the dairy ranch from development was not Ellen's only interest. She has always wanted to be sure the Straus dairy produced the
very healthiest, highest quality milk possible.

In the 1980's, Ellen became convinced that one of the reasons for the increasing incidence of cancer in the agricultural community could be the amount of chemicals  people eat in their food. Albert began to look
into what would be required to transform the Straus dairy into an organic dairy. Ellen and Bill supported the transformation.

 They discovered that there were several expensive and time-consuming steps. The first thing was to get the land certified as organic. As no pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers had been used for at least three years on the Straus land, that was not a problem.

 Albert had to learn how to keep the cows healthy without the use of antibiotics. He was also prohibited from using any hormone, including bovine growth hormone. The really expensive part of the transition was the requirement of feeding certified organic feeds for one year prior to being able to sell any milk as organic. The organic feeds at that time could cost anywhere from 50-100 percent more than conventional feeds.

Since the dairy was the first one to produce organic milk west of the Mississippi, marketing the milk to customers was the key to success. Ellen became an enthusiastic volunteer in that process by visiting
stores and also selling Straus dairy products at  farmers markets.