About Us
Stewarding the Land with Goats, Fire, and Community.
From a small Nevada City farm to a land stewardship movement - this is our story.
Where it all Started
First Rain Land Stewardship Services was born at First Rain Farm. In 2012, Tim Van Wagner started First Rain Farm, just outside of Nevada City, California. First Rain Farm produces vegetables, berries, vegetable seeds, and for many years, goat’s milk. The farm is situated on a lovely thirty-seven acres piece of land and has a bit of everything; a creek and pond, open fields, forested areas, and a mixture of topography that creates many different microclimates.
Like many places throughout the county that are heavily overgrown with vegetation, so too was this piece of land. Over the course of ten years “Farmer Tim”, his wife Kat, and their dedicated farm crew, worked diligently to create a successful organic farm and to bring the land back into balance. As an organic and regenerative farm, First Rain Farm has always integrated livestock into their cropping systems, utilizing the goats to help manage the entirety of the property and to produce manure and compost for crop fertility. ​
The Call to Stewardship
As the farm became more established, more energy was put into managing the forested sections of the property. Around the same time, we witnessed the Camp Fire in Paradise, CA. This fire shocked the community, and for Tim, it was a true summons to look beyond the confines of our production fields to the forested landscape. Over the course of several years after the Camp Fire, an inquisitive mind and yearning to make a difference in our community grappled with understanding the nature of this broad land and our role in it.
Naturally, we leaned into what we already knew; that livestock could do amazing work for helping to manage landscapes, if managed properly. At the time we were still operating our goat dairy. We were milking 15-18 goats daily and able to provide most of their feed from the land for about eight months of the year. We decided to start a new herd of goats that would be used to graze on surrounding properties in the neighborhood. The idea was that this would help manage vegetation and reduce the threat of wildfire. Over the course of several years we built up a new goat herd by keeping all of the kids from the dairy herd. Twenty to thirty goats per year were added to the herd as we pushed into different areas in the neighborhood that were heavily overgrown.
The learning curve was steep and there were plenty of goat escapes, starting this new enterprise while still managing a farm. Over time, however, we learned lessons and became more efficient as we worked to refine our system. Having observed the lack of hardiness in the dairy goats in this new grazing environment with minimal feed supplementation, we cross-bred more hardy genetics into our dairy goats using a Kiko billy goat, and continued to observe the animals and select for the best adapted as our breeding stock. We bought livestock guardian dogs for protection, and the herd continued to grow.
As we grazed more and more land in our neighborhood, we observed what the goats’ preferences were, and what they would not or could not eat. Most of all, we observed just how much dead material was remaining on the landscape after the goats grazed the live vegetation and “exposed” everything else.
"The land was starting to speak to us as we tuned into our senses and observations. There was something missing here."
Turning to Fire
When Fire Became Our Ally
Work continued to improve the land at First Rain Farm. Areas that were dominated by Himalayan Blackberries were cut down and grazed but they always seemed to grow back and dominate once again. That is, until one spring day when Tim let a burn pile “creep” into a blackberry bramble. As he watched, he was mesmerized by the work the fire was able to accomplish. The fire slowly moved into the bramble, against the light wind, and 4’ berries turned into open soil and ash. This area, approximately 30’ in diameter, had been transformed. It now looked like a completely different landscape; a landscape free of debris and readily accessible. We received a gentle warm rain that evening, and within three days we observed a plethora of freshly germinated seeds.
Life had responded to this fire in the most beautiful way, and almost immediately. Life had been renewed.
From this epiphany, this alchemical force has held our attention like nothing before. We understood the importance and usefulness of fire in a completely new way - not as a force of destruction, but one of renewal, regeneration, and protection. We developed an “itch to burn”, to see the beneficial impacts of fire on the land. Thankfully, we were able to experiment on our farm property with small broadcast burns, and as luck would have it, an opportunity to take a prescribed burning 101 course in the fall of 2021 came our way. This course was able to tie all the pieces of knowledge together for us - from fire science to ecological knowledge, and the legal landscape - and give us the confidence to burn larger areas. It was not long after this course that we were considering how prescribed fire could become part of our grazing services.
As we continued expanding our grazing outfit, and explaining to clients and neighbors the benefits of prescribed fire, it became clear that there was a very important niche to be filled in providing burning services. This was the missing link; using fire to fight fire and to nourish the land. Fire is able to do what no other practice does - it can turn dead fuel into nutrients and remove the fuel from the landscape.
Building a Prescribed Burning Service
Since 2021, we have developed our prescribed burning services by becoming State Certified in Prescribed Fire (CARx), expanding our team of employees, and gaining invaluable experience on over ninety burns in the area, totaling over 600 acres. We continue to provide education to our clients on how this “alternative” treatment can have amazing benefits for the land and fuel reduction goals.
As our operation expanded, we identified the importance of selective thinning to improve forest health and to remove excess vegetation from the understory and mid-story canopies before and/or after prescribed burns. A chainsaw crew is a crucial component in preparing for prescribed fire and reducing excess vegetation in congested forests and landscapes. In 2023 we started maintaining a saw crew seasonally, October through March and in 2024 we moved year round with the saw crew. Our crew now ranges in size from 10-20 sawyers and swampers depending on the amount of work and the size of contracts at a given time.
Water is Life
Weaving in the Missing Link
Our host of services had now expanded to include complimentary and overlapping treatments to serve the land and our clients in improving the fire-resilience of the forest and the protection of homes and infrastructure, but there was still one missing link - water. In the foothills we are constantly working between ridges and drainages, which means we come across many creeks and streams. Due to the destructive history of mining in the region and the change in forest structure as a result of fire suppression and exclusion, our streams and creeks have become highly degraded and no longer support the rich riparian flora and fauna they once did. Instead, they have become conduits through which water quickly moves off the landscape. Once again, experiences at the First Rain Farm home site informed our understanding and perspective on the creeks and streams that flow through this land. At the heart of the gold rush, Brush Creek flows through our farm. For years we viewed our shaded, overgrown, and bedrock creek as a normal piece of the landscape, as something that had always been the way it was. As we delved into the grazing, thinning, and burning on our land, however, we saw that the areas along the creek responded in unexpected ways.
Sedges and rushes we had not seen before started establishing in moist areas along the creek’s edge, now that there was more sunlight and open ground for them to thrive. We noticed that sections of the creek that had storm-fall debris creating log jams were inadvertently altering the stream’s course, resulting in significant sedimentation in eddies along the edges. These sediment deposits were directly on bedrock in many cases, and as the depth of this sand and silt increased, seeds began to germinate and stabilize this sand. In some areas we witnessed the “de-chanelization” of our creek system as the sediment became so deep that it was reconnected with the soil surrounding the creek. We came to understand that our creek, although beautiful in its own way, was actually a highly degraded system. Piles of granite rock on both banks, remnants of intensive gold mining, had resulted in the loss of stream sediment and the confinement of the water within a narrow channel. During high flow events, this channelization concentrated the force of the water, scouring the rocks clean of vegetation and sediment annually.
We came to see the woody debris and vegetation we were actively thinning from the surrounding forested landscape as the very ingredient needed to repair our creek. Pursuing a “processed-based” restoration by installing various woody debris structures and “beaver dam analogues” within the creek system, we have been able to continue this recovery of the system by supporting the sediment capture, water diffusion and water storage capabilities of these structures over time. We have become students of the water, and as we intervene in the system, we observe the outcomes and adjust our actions in response to what we observe. What we observe over time is that we are able to have a beneficial impact on this system with these low-tech methods utilizing “waste” products from surrounding forest thinning operations.
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We see the diversity of plant and animal species increasing, the saturation of surrounding riparian areas expanding, and less sediment being flushed out of the system altogether.
"Through the journey of learning to steward a piece of land we call our own, we have developed the knowledge and capability to weave together a host of land stewardship services that we can now offer to our community. Through this work we hope to share the knowledge we have gained and to empower individuals to become better stewards of their own land. "
