Land Stewards First, Farmers Second H O W R E G E N E R AT I V E A G R I C U LT U R E
CAN
SAVE THE
PLANET
Jason Smith, Rock Bottom Ranch Director
It’s 5 am, and I can’t sleep. Coronavirus. Climate change. Newborn lamb #118 and her challenging start to life. Our unsustainable industrial agriculture system. These are the thoughts that run through my mind before I’ve even
Early on in my farming career, I realized that livestock services were more valuable than their products. Ruminants like cattle and sheep, for instance, are our lawnmowers. When frequently rotated through different pastures, ruminants eat the grass and fertilize the soil:
opened my eyes. But mostly, my head is filled with thoughts of my two
which produces more grass,
daughters, Addie and Ella, and what their future will look like. At Rock
which pulls carbon from the atmosphere,
Bottom Ranch, the agriculture team’s work explores food systems as
which makes the soil healthier,
part of our organization’s larger environmental dialogue and, hopefully,
which grows more grass, and so on.
teaches our visitors and students to rethink the role of agriculture in solving environmental challenges. A few years ago, Alyssa Barsanti, Agriculture Manager, coined the
The whole cycle is a self–sustaining process that works in harmony with natural systems rather than attempting to control them. Simply put, the potential of a well–managed parcel of land to sequester carbon,
phrase “Land Stewards First, Farmers Second.” For us, this means an
maintain ecological health, and grow healthy food outweighs the
approach to land management in which we let the land tell us the next
emissions from livestock (when raised in a regenerative manner), so in
steps. We don’t consider ourselves chicken farmers or cattle farmers or
the end we have a net negative carbon result.
sheep farmers; we’re land stewards.
Page 6 – ACES Annual Report 2020
