"Don't-Look-Back-at-the- Furrow" (DLB)
We did not have complete control of individual image selection from a wide variety of varied collections while building the very large block of images shown below. For images with titles, you can mouse-over the image; the image title will appear at screen bottom.
Above: Early in the Station's history; the majority of the original Forbes Hill, except for two small areas that straddle the Forbes Hill loop road. Freshly disturbed soil at the Headquarters Spring water supply installation, and the peaked roof of the prior residence, both still remaining. Truly an archival view. Below: The Lower Haworth Field, with the main irrigated pasture research facility on the Station, a product of long-term development that erased all remnants of its original form.
Charles A. and Paul D. Raguse
The title of this website is taken from the photo third from page top. My father plowed this field with a horse-drawn plow, guiding their course with their reins, began the furrows on the right-hand half of this field starting from the near end. He would visually align his course by aligning the far end of the field with a point beyond, say a tree in the forest. Keeping those two markers in constant alignment made steering a straight course possible. The Lesson? You don't look back on the furrows to keep them straight, you keep your gaze forward. In a sense, and to a degree, such also is true with the "furrows" of life.
Our intent is to limit Don't Look Back ... content to new information, relying primarily on captioned images taken from my collection of 35mm Kodak color transparencies and new text. While emphasis is placed on the historical record (which, broadly considered, dates back to the mid 1930s) of the pre-history, development, and current status of the UC Sierra Foothill Range Research and Extension Center (SFREC), we wish also to examine the present-day roles, activities, and contributions of such facilities along with opportunities to best serve the locations they represent within current and rapidly-changing times.
"Field Stations", as I still prefer to call them, were born on the UC Berkeley Campus. In time, lands bordering outside its campus were (hesitantly, perhaps) added. History of the now-defunct San Joaquin Experimental Range, near Coarsegold in Madera County illustrates that such facilities, where a broad tapestry of field and agricultural research had their origin on lands owned by the Federal Government became the main provider of field-based research, and focused on area-wide sets of landscape characteristics such as soils, vegetation patterns, and local informational needs.
Eventually, management of the riches of "San Joaquin Range" has segued to control by the California State University at Fresno, a kind of "circling back" to the UC Berkeley example, albeit at a lower level of administration and a broader view of its research, teaching, and outreach objectives.
Readers will quickly realize that "DLB" is indeed a Potpourri. I have long dwelt on the notion of basically writing what amounts to a memoir, calling it "The Great Big-little Book of my Life". ("Big-little Book" harks back to the days when I went to a rural 8-graded elementary school in north-central Wisconsin. Students indulged in "extra-mural" activities then too, but instead of trading drugs, we traded Big Little books.
I was born and raised in north-central Wisconsin. My early years were spent on a small dairy farm that included a mixed-species woodlot, which combination provided year-around work activities, farm product sales and a comprehensive grounding in the understanding of natural ecosystems. The 8-graded country school was followed by skipping High School (after one semester Father fell ill and decreed that I helped run the farm; "Higher Education" was not held in high esteem in those parts in them days!). A decade passed by in what I later described as a time as simply turning my hand over. Prevailing over my father's wishes, the combination of a local Farm County Agent, the minister of the Methodist Church we attended, and my mother, enrollment in the University of Wisconsin Farm Short Course emerged as a life-changing possibility. What we UW Short Coursers referred to as the "Long Course" was followed by undergraduate, Master's and Doctoral degrees, the latter two under the guidance of UW Professor Dale Smith.
I had the (again, life-changing) opportunity to present a (then) unique part of my doctoral research at the national meetings of the Agronomy Society in Denver in 1963. At the meetings UC Professors R. Merton Love and Horton Laude took me aside to talk. Between Christmas and New Year's Day of that year I received a telegram (copy on Page ) bearing an invitation to join the (then) Agronomy Department at UC Davis at Assistant Professor level.
Acceptance would mean leaving home, family, friends, and a life and surroundings I was familiar with, and travel to a place never before seen, not even for an interview.
The cross-country trip, in July of 1964, with my wife Norma and six-month's-old daughter Janet, the latter riding in a back-of-the-seat car bed was marked only by narrowly missing a tornado while sleeping in a wood-frame cottage in Nebraska and crossing the Utah salt flats in a steady rain.
The position was structured to include work and teaching responsibilities in the then Agronomy, Animal Science and Soil & Water Science Departments, continuing the work begun by Professor Maurice L. Peterson (who had recently ascended to a UC Vice President post on the Berkeley campus), and later extended to the then newly-acquired UC Sierra Range Field Station, now called the UC Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center( for sake of simplicity in these writings, the acronym SFREC will be used) .
In particular, Professor Maurice Peterson's career at UC Davis had focused on an integration of Agronomy and Animal Science in field-based research conducted on irrigated pastures located on Animal Science department lands at Davis. and annual rangelands. Initially, my own irrigated pasture research was conducted at UC Davis on some of the same fields.
As my research commitments matured, research conducted in field studies at the SFREC combined with controlled-environment and laboratory facilities on the Davis campus was based on problem solving and yield improvements related to the utilization of improved annual rangeland and irrigated pastures .
I developed and taught a number of undergraduate courses, one of which was co-taught with James G. "Jim" Morris from the Department of Animal Science, and served as the undergraduate advisor for the Range & Wildlands Science major I retired in 1993, taking advantage of the second of the three "Very Early Retirement Incentive" (VERIP) programs put forth by UC Davis (possibly to cull the flock" of highly-paid old fogeys in face of mounting "un-funded liabilities").
Nonetheless, I have retained strong interests (and concerns) related to the place I think of as my "Sierra Field Station". I was fortunate to have "done my time" during an era when a lot of things were happening. The "Sierra Field Station" was not even "brand new"; It didn't even exist yet until 1963, and its purchase of lands on which the new research station would be built was the University's response to summary and emphatic curtailment of the then-extant research relationship with the U.S. Forest Service San Joaquin Experimental Range (SJER) in California's San Joaquin Valley near the vintagely-named town of Coarsegold.
UC SFREC was "built from scratch", from the remains of 6 to 12 (depending upon who is counting) of pioneer ranches in that area. Its location, bordering the entire frontage length of its south border on the Yuba River (link), together with the boundless assortment of physical and biological riches, is un-rivaled in its capacity to become a travel "destination" location. So, "Why isn't it" is the question. Certainly, its general location is one. "East of Marysville, you say.... where is that? "East of Eden??" And all those twisty-turny miles off Highway 20 ("What? You call this a road?" ) Actually, it's pretty much a turn-pike now, compared with what it was when I first had reason to go there.the
Our intent is to limit Don't Look Back ... content to new information, relying primarily on captioned images taken from my collection of 35mm Kodak color transparencies and new text. While emphasis is placed on the historical record (which, broadly considered, dates back to the mid 1930s) of the pre-history, development, and current status of the UC Sierra Foothill Range Research and Extension Center (SFREC), we wish also to examine the present-day roles, activities, and contributions of such facilities along with opportunities to best serve the locations they represent within current and rapidly-changing times.
"Field Stations", as I still prefer to call them, were born on the UC Berkeley Campus. In time, lands bordering outside its campus were (hesitantly, perhaps) added. History of the now-defunct San Joaquin Experimental Range, near Coarsegold in Madera County illustrates that such facilities, where a broad tapestry of field and agricultural research had their origin on lands owned by the Federal Government became the main provider of field-based research, and focused on area-wide sets of landscape characteristics such as soils, vegetation patterns, and local informational needs.
Eventually, management of the riches of "San Joaquin Range" has segued to control by the California State University at Fresno, a kind of "circling back" to the UC Berkeley example, albeit at a lower level of administration and a broader view of its research, teaching, and outreach objectives.
Readers will quickly realize that "DLB" is indeed a Potpourri. I have long dwelt on the notion of basically writing what amounts to a memoir, calling it "The Great Big-little Book of my Life". ("Big-little Book" harks back to the days when I went to a rural 8-graded elementary school in north-central Wisconsin. Students indulged in "extra-mural" activities then too, but instead of trading drugs, we traded Big Little books.
I was born and raised in north-central Wisconsin. My early years were spent on a small dairy farm that included a mixed-species woodlot, which combination provided year-around work activities, farm product sales and a comprehensive grounding in the understanding of natural ecosystems. The 8-graded country school was followed by skipping High School (after one semester Father fell ill and decreed that I helped run the farm; "Higher Education" was not held in high esteem in those parts in them days!). A decade passed by in what I later described as a time as simply turning my hand over. Prevailing over my father's wishes, the combination of a local Farm County Agent, the minister of the Methodist Church we attended, and my mother, enrollment in the University of Wisconsin Farm Short Course emerged as a life-changing possibility. What we UW Short Coursers referred to as the "Long Course" was followed by undergraduate, Master's and Doctoral degrees, the latter two under the guidance of UW Professor Dale Smith.
I had the (again, life-changing) opportunity to present a (then) unique part of my doctoral research at the national meetings of the Agronomy Society in Denver in 1963. At the meetings UC Professors R. Merton Love and Horton Laude took me aside to talk. Between Christmas and New Year's Day of that year I received a telegram (copy on Page ) bearing an invitation to join the (then) Agronomy Department at UC Davis at Assistant Professor level.
Acceptance would mean leaving home, family, friends, and a life and surroundings I was familiar with, and travel to a place never before seen, not even for an interview.
The cross-country trip, in July of 1964, with my wife Norma and six-month's-old daughter Janet, the latter riding in a back-of-the-seat car bed was marked only by narrowly missing a tornado while sleeping in a wood-frame cottage in Nebraska and crossing the Utah salt flats in a steady rain.
The position was structured to include work and teaching responsibilities in the then Agronomy, Animal Science and Soil & Water Science Departments, continuing the work begun by Professor Maurice L. Peterson (who had recently ascended to a UC Vice President post on the Berkeley campus), and later extended to the then newly-acquired UC Sierra Range Field Station, now called the UC Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center( for sake of simplicity in these writings, the acronym SFREC will be used) .
In particular, Professor Maurice Peterson's career at UC Davis had focused on an integration of Agronomy and Animal Science in field-based research conducted on irrigated pastures located on Animal Science department lands at Davis. and annual rangelands. Initially, my own irrigated pasture research was conducted at UC Davis on some of the same fields.
As my research commitments matured, research conducted in field studies at the SFREC combined with controlled-environment and laboratory facilities on the Davis campus was based on problem solving and yield improvements related to the utilization of improved annual rangeland and irrigated pastures .
I developed and taught a number of undergraduate courses, one of which was co-taught with James G. "Jim" Morris from the Department of Animal Science, and served as the undergraduate advisor for the Range & Wildlands Science major I retired in 1993, taking advantage of the second of the three "Very Early Retirement Incentive" (VERIP) programs put forth by UC Davis (possibly to cull the flock" of highly-paid old fogeys in face of mounting "un-funded liabilities").
Nonetheless, I have retained strong interests (and concerns) related to the place I think of as my "Sierra Field Station". I was fortunate to have "done my time" during an era when a lot of things were happening. The "Sierra Field Station" was not even "brand new"; It didn't even exist yet until 1963, and its purchase of lands on which the new research station would be built was the University's response to summary and emphatic curtailment of the then-extant research relationship with the U.S. Forest Service San Joaquin Experimental Range (SJER) in California's San Joaquin Valley near the vintagely-named town of Coarsegold.
UC SFREC was "built from scratch", from the remains of 6 to 12 (depending upon who is counting) of pioneer ranches in that area. Its location, bordering the entire frontage length of its south border on the Yuba River (link), together with the boundless assortment of physical and biological riches, is un-rivaled in its capacity to become a travel "destination" location. So, "Why isn't it" is the question. Certainly, its general location is one. "East of Marysville, you say.... where is that? "East of Eden??" And all those twisty-turny miles off Highway 20 ("What? You call this a road?" ) Actually, it's pretty much a turn-pike now, compared with what it was when I first had reason to go there.the
The UC Sierra Research and Extension Center, aka Sierra Field Station
While some parts of the 5,720 acres of the station are off the right edge of this photo, the results of complete, partial, and selective clearing of the resident foothill oak woodland are shown here. A greater survival density of oaks had been intended for the partial clearing area (right edge), but impact of the control burn following tree removal made its own adjustments. Station headquarters area is nestled in the tiny green "valley" near the right edge of the photo, and the storied Timbuctoo Bend of the Yuba River is fully shown in the distance.