Far from the cameras that will be trained on President Obama when he stops in Fresno on Friday to see the havoc wreaked on farms by California's drought, barren pastures and empty ponds threaten the organic dairies of the North Bay.

Organic cows must forage on organic pasture, pasture that by definition must be within a cow's walking distance from the milking barn. Thanks to the drought, there is virtually no pasture in Marin and Sonoma counties - and without locally grown pasture, a farm can't keep its organic certification.

Last weekend's heavy rains helped a lot, dumping 11 inches on Richard Hughes' 200-cow farm in Bodega, turning the hills green and adding precious water to his pond, but he'll need a lot more rainfall for his herd to last another year.

Milk is mostly water, and dairy cows need a lot of it.

"You know how big a 50-gallon barrel is?" Hughes said. "A cow would drink almost that much water on a hot summer day. When they put their head into the water trough, they start sucking like a vacuum cleaner. On a real hot day, you can have a 400-gallon water trough and you can put five or six cows around that thing and they can suck it right to the bottom in no time."

Marin and Sonoma counties are the cradle of the organic dairy industry. The Straus Family Creamery on Tomales Bay became the nation's first fully organic creamery in 1994. Most North Bay dairies are now organic, meeting the rules of the Department of Agriculture's National Organic Program.

Under those rules, cows must forage at least four months on organic pasture, but the North Bay pastures are barren after 13 months with nearly no rain. Local officials have asked the USDA for temporary variance to allow cows to eat organic feed purchased from outside the area until their pastures recover. A decision is due Thursday, said a spokesman for the agency's Agricultural Marketing Service.

Yet a variance won't be enough.

Costs surge

Farmers can buy organic alfalfa, but with much of the West also in a drought, there is little available. Alfalfa prices have soared and trucking costs are exorbitant.

"This is the worst I've seen in my life," said Albert Straus, president of the Straus Family Creamery, which contracts with eight local dairies for milk from 2,500 cows to produce its organic milk, butter, yogurt and ice cream. "There are farms in this drought that are hauling water already for months. It's scary.

"There's actually no alfalfa," he said. "A lot of these feeds are running out, so there's nothing available to feed the animals if it doesn't start to get a pasture season really quickly."

Political attention has been focused squarely on the San Joaquin Valley, where farms growing fruits, vegetables and especially tree crops such as almonds rely on irrigation from the Central Valley Project that takes water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Central Valley focus

The House passed a Republican bill last month that would permanently reallocate water from the delta to Central Valley farms, as proponents argued that water is being wasted on restoring rivers and saving salmon runs and the endangered delta smelt. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, held a news conference near Bakersfield last month to put pressure on Democrats to prove they care about farmers, too.

Obama is expected to talk to local farmers when he comes to Fresno on Friday. On Tuesday, California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer introduced a bill to relax water rules to aid Central Valley farmers.

But little attention has been paid to other California farmers.

"One thing that needs to be in this discussion is the hardships that are being faced everywhere in California that have nothing to do with the delta smelt, hardships that are at least as extreme as what we're hearing out of the San Joaquin Valley," said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael.

Huffman said forage losses in Marin County alone were at 100 percent before the recent rain.

Survival fears

Jake Lewin, president of California Certified Organic Farmers, a group accredited by the Department of Agriculture to certify organic farms, said the drought problems on the North Coast are "especially pronounced." There is little groundwater to pump, and because the organic standard requires a pasture-based system, the dairies depend on winter rains.

"We're less worried about the variance than the fortunes and survival of the dairies," Lewin said. "We haven't seen a perfect storm like this in the past. It's a Western-wide drought with limited feed supplies, and the drought is so significant that people are buying water just to give the animals. They are already expending tremendous amounts of money."

Lewin's organization is asking member farmers who have organic waste such as vegetable matter or almond hulls that they might normally compost to send them to dairy and livestock farms to carry them over. "We're hoping we can all get through this together," he said.

Bodega dairyman Hughes said alfalfa is going for $7,000 a truckload, if you can find it. Before the drought, it was going for $5,000.

"If we don't get sustainable rains coming on, the grass is going to grow real quick and it's going to grow to maturity and it's going to dry out real quick," Hughes said.

The recent rains were a big help, he said, "but we need more. We're not trying to be greedy about this 10 inches of rain, but a normal year is 28 to 30. Last year it was not even near that."

With little pasture, low water supplies and a small amount of alfalfa, Hughes said, "we don't know what's going to happen."