NORTH FORK, Calif. -- Amid the bright popcorn flowers, tidy tips, lupines and goldfields on Kennedy Table Mountain, the dark blobs might go unnoticed.

Call them meadow muffins, cow pies or maybe cowplop. You get the picture. Cattle are here, chomping grass and clearing off foothill land for nature - especially dazzling wildflowers.

Nature and cows are valued companions here. This is the Sierra Foothill Conservancy, preserving open space in Fresno, Madera and Mariposa counties.

It's a special spring around the Kennedy flat top. The 17-year-old conservancy is celebrating a growth milestone - 25,000 acres, including a 1,360-acre conservation easement last year preventing development on the Topping Ranch around Kennedy.

This moment wouldn't be complete without mentioning an innovation the conservancy added in the last two years. The organization is raising and selling grass-fed beef, perhaps among the first conservancies to do it.

"People across the country are watching us to see how this goes," said Jeannette Tuitele-Lewis, executive director of the conservancy. "You have to manage the grass on these lands with grazing. So selling grass-fed beef makes sense."

It's all part of this progressive land trust, working with ranchers and protecting this sensitive belt of the Sierra Nevada for animals, plants, water, air and people. Since 1996, the conservancy has tried to keep city pavement out of this attractive ecosystem.

Over the years, showcase spots such as Tivy Mountain and McKenzie Preserve at Table Mountain have become a trademark. But more than half of the conservancy's acreage is in conservation easements.

Using state bond money from Proposition 84 last year, the conservancy paid the Topping family $800,000 for the easement to prevent future development.

It amounts to buying the development rights for a fraction of the property value. The Toppings are still the landowners and continue ranching.

"This is a special place," said Bart Topping, a third-generation rancher here. "The easement was a way to preserve it. The money helps us. We have a grandson. We hope he will be the fifth generation here."

The Kennedy Table Mountain on Topping's property has a history, too. How did nature create a mountain top as flat as an aircraft carrier?

Flat tops around the area actually are the course of the ancient San Joaquin River bottom. Basalt lava from volcanic eruptions flowed down the river 10 million years ago, cooling and hardening. Over time, everything around it eroded. Now the old river bottom is hundreds of feet higher than the surrounding, present-day landscape.

But the geology is just one of the attractions here. Volcanic table tops are filled with natural wonders, such as vernal pools teeming with tadpole shrimp and other tiny forms of life.

Around the foothills, you see blue oak, carpenteria shrubs, brilliant wildflowers and thick grasses. It's an elegant grassland and oak woodland.

The foothills landscape is part of the sprawling Sierra Nevada where California gets more than half its water through pure snowmelt. The trees, shrubs and grasses absorb a lot of air pollution and produce oxygen.

Paving over the land would reduce the natural benefits of the foothills, scientists say. But there also is a natural threat to diverse life in the foothills - grasses from other countries.

The foothill grasses are mostly European species, brought into this region hundreds of years ago. The grasses are a problem, because they could smother the native plants here.

"Many plants wouldn't be able to emerge if we didn't manage the grasses," said conservancy board president Bea Olsen, who is a wildlife biologist. "Even young oak trees could have a problem."

Cattle seemed to be one obvious answer, but environmentalists years ago resisted and for good reason. Environmentalists had seen the results of poorly timed and badly managed grazing, which can lead to trampled meadows and streams.

It was considered wiser to keep cattle off the land in the 1990s. But soon after, scientists found that the best vernal pool areas were on ranches where cattle were grazing, and the tide turned.

State leaders and conservancy managers now routinely use bovine intervention to help sensitive habitats that nurture all kinds of wildlife.

In 2010, the Sierra Foothill Conservancy decided to marry good management practice with a money-making venture. The nonprofit trust formed a separate entity, called Sierra Lands Beef, to handle the business. The operation started a small herd and began selling beef in spring 2011.

"It's a source of revenue and a way to wisely manage the land," Tuitele-Lewis said.

The idea of grass-fed beef fits the profile of locally and naturally grown food, said Darla Guenzler, executive director of the California Council of Land Trusts, based in Sacramento.

She said she likes the idea but doesn't know if other conservancies have tried it yet: "I think the Sierra Foothill Conservancy is out ahead of the others. It is in the vanguard."

• Read more articles by MARK GROSSI

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