The Fallini family also got its start in the Silver State in 1864, when Italian immigrant Giovanni Fallini settled in Nye County.
Fallini dabbled in mining for a bit, but by 1868 he was ranching near the Reveille Range outside Rachel.
Five generations later, Fallini’s great-great-grandson, 6-year-old Giovanni Berg, follows his parents, grandparents, sister, aunt and cousins onto the range as the family works Twin Springs Ranch, running 1,800 head of Hereford beef cattle across two arid valleys in spartan central Nevada.
At 663,000 acres, or more than 1,000 square miles, Twin Springs covers more than three times the acreage of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, and nearly 10 times the area of the city of Las Vegas.
But even as the family has sustained a thriving ranch under some of the toughest conditions in the country, its grip on the land has never been more tenuous. Giovanni Berg may never take the reins of the ranch his ancestors started in the state’s first days. The family blames a federal agency and courts that put legal minutiae over century-old law. Between the two, more than half of the ranch’s profit in 2014 will go to legal costs, an added expense in already difficult times for Nevada ranches.
“There’s no guarantee in this business, not just from decade-to-decade, but even year-to-year,” said Anna Fallini, Berg’s mother. “With the fragility of our operation, you have no idea how long you’ll be here.”
If ranches such as Twin Springs die, they’ll take a big part of the state with them. The industry isn’t huge in Clark County, but elsewhere it keeps rural communities alive. Ranching posted $441 million in cash sales statewide in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And the ranches are vital to protecting Nevada’s environment.
To get a look at what Nevada has to lose, the Review-Journal visited Twin Springs during branding season in early June.
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