A rift between a high-school agriculture program and adjacent property owners -- a scaled-down version of rural-urban conflicts on the rise throughout California -- appears to have been amicably settled with the help of a UC Davis extension specialist. The neighbors have even given the students the money they had planned to spend on suing them.

Homeowners bordering Sonoma Valley High School were frustrated by noise, odors and dust from the school's Agricultural Center, where students learn animal-husbandry skills by raising 24 sheep, 14 cattle and seven pigs. The Sonoma County director of the University of California's Cooperative Extension program asked the extension service's Davis office for advice.

Cooperative Extension air-quality specialist Frank Mitloehner, of the UC Davis Department of Animal Science, surveyed the neighbors about their complaints and examined the animal facility, which was built in 2000.

To his surprise, Mitloehner found that the most common complaint was not flies, dust or odor, but rather that the sheep were noisy. "I am an agricultural engineer and facilities scientist. I had never heard of such a problem," he said. "So one day I stayed on the property for an entire day. I was stunned! Those sheep vocalized all the time. MAA, maaa, MAA, maaa. The neighbors could not even sit out in their back yards in peace."

Mitloehner figured out that the students' feeding practices were to blame. "Student A owns Sheep A, Student B owns Sheep B, and so on. Each student came at a different time of day to feed their own animal, and the sheep that weren't being fed right then complained. Loudly."

On April 15, an agreement negotiated by Mitloehner between the Ag Center and the neighbors took effect. It provides for a number of changes, including a common feeding time for all the sheep, and some dust and odor controls. Several thousand dollars collected by the neighbors for a lawsuit will instead go toward the mitigation measures.

"This is a typical example of what's about to happen with more urban people moving into rural areas of the state," said Mitloehner. "I'm glad UC Cooperative Extension was able to offer a solution that replaced litigation by mediation."