#195, IN PRACTICE, January/February 2021

Creating Community Resilience

BY ANN ADAMS

As we enter into 2021, we continue to face numerous uncertainties and find our world vastly changed from the beginning of 2020. It is a time that requires us to question assumptions and to adapt. In November, we partnered with the Quivira Coalition and the American Grassfed Association on the 2020 REGENERATE Conference, and we had over 350 participants registered for the event. It was a new opportunity to learn how to create and curate an interactive virtual conference as we figure out how to be socially connected while physically distant. This skill is needed to build our global community whether we are dealing with a pandemic or considering our natural resource footprint on the planet.

The theme was “Creating Resilience in Times of Uncertainty.” The panels provided a diversity of opinion on the challenges we face and the work we must engage in to address those challenges. Through it all, all the conversation focused on what it meant to

In Practice

be resilient and the importance of diversity for creating resilient systems.

One definition of resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb change while still maintaining its basic structure or function. I believe what we have seen in the last 9 months is just how broken so many of our systems were. Living life on a razor’s edge is something many people had been experiencing long before this pandemic emerged to whisk back the curtain of denial and illusion.

So now we must focus on creating and recreating social, economic, and natural resource management systems that will actually serve all our communities in ways that are just, equitable, and regenerative. To do so, requires compassion and understanding of this complex web of life. It will require more of us than we have yet had to give. It will seem difficult because this time of great change will feel uncomfortable, requiring us all to question our assumptions and biases about people (including ourselves), agricultural practices, markets, and so much more.

I believe that the only way we can succeed in creating these just, equitable, and regenerative systems is to embrace what has been the knowledge of all our ancestors if we go back far

Mimicking Nature

enough in time. It was in our indigenous roots from which we all sprung whether we are Incan, Roman, Hohokam, Celt. Puebloan, Aborigine, Persian, Inuit, Chinese, or some combination of the hundreds of civilizations who have called Earth home. It is the knowledge that our actions must stem from the belief that “I am because we are. We are because I am.” Community must serve individuals and individuals must serve the community—including our natural community of plants, animals, birds, and organisms, who in turn serve us.

It is so important we engage in gatherings like the REGENERATE Conference where we have the opportunities to connect and learn new ideas with people we may not ordinarily speak with or listen to. It is only in working to create “civil discourse” across the various lines we have drawn around ourselves and our communities that we can discover the mutual challenges we face, the common values we hold, and the potential answers to creating a world of diversity, opportunity, resilience, and hope.

Wayne KnightHMI’s New Executive Director!

See page 18.

key component of Holistic Management is to understand how ecosystem processes function so you can better manage for improved ecosystem health by mimicking natural processes, thus increasing production and minimizing costs.

HMI educates people in regenerative agriculture for healthy land and thriving communities.

STAFF

Wayne Knight Executive Director

Ann Adams Education Director

Kathy Harris Program Director

Carrie Stearns Director of Communications & Outreach

Stephanie Von Ancken Program Manager

Oris Salazar Program Assistant

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Walter Lynn, Chair

Jim Shelton, Vice-Chair

Delane Atcitty

Gerardo Bezanilla

Jonathan Cobb

Ariel Greenwood

Colin Nott

Daniel Nuckols

Breanna Owen

Brad Schmidt

Kelly Sidoryk

Brian Wehlburg

HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT® IN PRACTICE

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Copyright © 2021

Holistic Management® is a registered trademark of Holistic Management International

Let’s Regenerate Iberia!

BY ANA DIGÓN

The drive up to the farm is a treat in itself. Against a backdrop of stunning mountains called Sierra de Gredos, “Sandaraca” is located in Toledo, 200 km (124 miles) southwest from Madrid. It is a privately-owned 200-Ha (494-acre) property with dehesa rangeland surrounded by other dehesas. And, the difference between Sandaraca and its neighboring land is astoundingly visible thanks to the Holistic Management of this farm, on which there are 140 pure-bred horses followed by a herd of 40 tame bulls for meat.

An Ancient Agroforestry System

A dehesa is a multifunctional, agrosylvopastoral system (a type of agroforestry) and cultural landscape of southern and central Spain and southern Portugal. Its name comes from the Latin ‘defensa’ (fence), referring to land that was fenced and usually destined for pasture. Spanning huge areas of prairies dotted with ancient, slow-growth trees, it is said to be the largest and oldest anthropogenic system in the world that still remains, with official figures varying from 20 to 40,000 km2 (2–4 million hectares or 5–10 million acres).

Dehesas used to be managed in what was a profoundly regenerative way by nomadic shepherds who would travel with their huge herds of sheep, seeking the southernmost prairies in the cooler months of the year,

and then escaping the scorching summer to find fresh pastures further north and up the mountains. Dehesas were and still are used to raise cattle of very rustic nature (including the Spanish fighting bull) and the Iberian pig, from which our famous Spanish cured ham is obtained.

The most appreciated type of ham is obtained from Iberian black pigs who roam beneath the main tree species found in this landscape: oaks like holm (Quercus ilex), whose acorns feed the pigs (and the sheep when grass is scarce), and cork (Quercus suber), which is harvested by peeling off the tree barks every nine years. These landscapes, when managed as the ancients did, used to provide not only an additional variety of foods such as wild game, mushrooms and honey, but also essential firewood for folks and wildlife habitat for all sorts of species, right up to imperial eagles.

Nowadays, highways and other constructions have irreparably sliced up the landscape, and only a few brave shepherds carry on with this ancient pastoralism called transhumance. As climate chaos looms on the horizon, more and more people yearn for a life away from the cities. And, there are concerted efforts being made to resuscitate and dignify this noble profession.

Ana Digón and José Luis Garcia de Castro

The Iberian pigs are famous for producing world-class hams. They can also be used as a regenerative agriculture tool.

The conventional rangeland management that has been practiced over the last decades has all but exhausted this ancient food basket. Overgrazing and feed-based farming have taken over, and the consequences are disastrous: what used to be highly productive prairies are now in very real danger of desertification. Still, they retain their rough beauty, and some of the wild nature has so much potential.

Our dear friends and mentors, Darren Doherty and Joel Salatin, who over a decade ago started introducing Regenerative Agriculture into Spain and Portugal (or Iberia as we like to call it), fell in love with this amazing landscape and were both truly fascinated by it when they started visiting us. Interestingly, the dehesa humaninduced ecosystem is also present in Southeastern Australia. That, plus the fact that Iberia is still the main food-producing country that supplies Europe, as well as the one most threatened by the desert that is traveling North at an alarming pace, attracted Darren 12 years ago. We believe that this area is like an acupuncture point for the healing of the planet. If it can be done here, it will prove a massive point and it will, hopefully, spread fast to other regions.

Regenerating Human Landscapes

Darren Doherty began “preparing the soil” by training the first agents of regenerative change in Iberia between 2007 and 2011, and then gave way to the “mature plants” that would go into further detail about how to manage these lands effectively. HMI Certified Educator Kirk

Gadzia and his wife, Tamara, visited us for month-long tours over three years to slowly but surely teach Holistic Management and advise the pioneering regenerative farmers. Joel Salatin has since flown in thrice to inject Iberia with his passion and vision.

Spurred on by these masters, and to the cry of “Let’s Regenerate Iberia!,” by 2013 a team of seven enthusiastic and capable

folk and delicious food and drink met along the way, and the potential for healing these soils have all added to attracting these wise, generous masters. As Kirk Gadzia concluded after his third training tour: “The impact here of regenerative practices is so quickly visible... Iberian soils want to heal!”

The combined knowledge and experience of these and other international experts, shared over no less than 26 national training tours between 2011 and 2018, added to hundreds of local events, farm visits and gatherings, have “composted” the minds, hearts and hands of a growing generation of farmers, foodies and other agents of local change.

For the last three years in particular, the Association of Regenerative Agriculture has been supporting and promoting pioneering regenerative local farmers who are adapting the acquired knowledge to their specific realities. The Association helps spread the vision and practice across Iberian lands and beyond with an open-code philosophy, fostering human connections amongst practitioners and supporters, and lobbying all levels of government.

One highlight was last October 2019, when we held our 3rd National Regenerative Grazing Gathering at the Basque Shepherding School with funding from the Basque Government and the European Union. Twelve regenerative cattle farmers shared their experiences, successes, struggles, warts and all, with a crowd of almost 100 farmers and technicians! For four intense days we shared knowledge and food, ignited

folks co-funded the national Association of Regenerative Agriculture, to help train, support and promote an emerging movement. Since then, we have had the honor of receiving other experts in regenerative cattle management, such as 90-year-old Professor Pinheiro Machado and his team from Brazil, top experts in Voisin Rational Grazing. No doubt the beauty and variety of Iberian landscapes, the good

This photo was taken in March 2018. On the left hand side of the road is a picture of Sandaraca. On the right hand side is the neighbors. Note the different in productivity between the two sides of the road.

This aerial view was taken in April 2018 that shows the two sides of the road even more dramatically.

The conventional soil is on the left hand side of the picture while the regenerative soil with a deeper layer of humus is on the right hand side.

HMI Certified Educator Kirk Gadzia (middle front) is one of the trainers who has worked with Association of Regenerative Agriculture to teach Holistic Management.

connections and passion, and came out ever-more convinced that “this is the animal husbandry of the future” and that, finally, we can say IT WORKS in Iberia, North to South, East to West, with sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, goats, chickens and more!

The Land Speaks

On the morning of March 7th 2018, Sierra de Gredos stood out on the horizon majestically, capped with sparkling snow against the clear blue sky, as I approached Sandaraca. This dehesa in Toledo is dedicated to the breeding and dressage of a wealthy foreign family’s thoroughbred horses, and for the last few years had been run by José Luis García de Castro, a highly-skilled horse vet who greeted me at the door beaming his huge smile. “You’ve come at the perfect time!” he exclaimed. “Let’s go see the first growth of the Spring.” And off we went, carrying his second-born child in a sling and armed with a long knife—a trick I learnt from Professor Pinheiro, who calls his large machete his “high-tech soiltesting equipment”, a mischievous statement which always gets a laugh from those clustering around him to learn how he analyzes the state of the soil.

José Luis was inquisitively skeptical at first about holistic grazing. Through his own process of trial and error, while receiving more in-depth training, thanks to a generous grant by HMI, he is now one of our key trainers, advisors and speakers. He excitedly and carefully explained his management to me as we walked. “We now move our cattle around 900 paddocks, with 17 lots of animals who stay no longer than three days in a paddock. We run the horses with highest nutritional demands in first, and we finish off the paddocks with the herd of tame bulls in two lots. This has added a product to the farm: high-quality grass-fed beef, which we sell at a very reasonable price, because we want it to be accessible, not an elite product.” José Luis was also experimenting with pastured broilers in a corner of the property, but today we would be focusing on the impact of larger herbivores.

As we strolled through the paddocks, varied vegetation greeted us in lush shades of Green, while across the perimeter fence, the neighbor’s dehesa looked gray and frayed, without any new growth to be seen. The neighbor’s rambling

cattle require a huge expense in hay, especially in the previous year, when there had been a prolonged drought.

“That is when I really noticed that things were different here with our Holistic Management of native and sown prairies,” says José Luis. “At the end of the drought, I’d had to buy hay for only two months of the year. The neighbor had to buy hay for seven months that same year. Imagine, at a time when hay is scarce everywhere around, how much money that is. We are talking about six-figure savings!”

On a normal, drought-free year, Sandaraca used to buy hay on average for 95 days of the year. Since José Luis began to manage the farm holistically, that went down to 35 days the first year, 16 days the second year and 25 days the third year, at the time of the drought.

of these horses have fallen by 95% since we started grass-feeding them. (Only the ones at the end of their pregnancy or who are lactating get some feed.) And we have not had to operate on a single colic, when before we averaged four operations a year.” “Is it much more work, then?” I inquire. “Our average saving in food is equivalent to about 3.5 times the cost of the labor,” he says.

The financial benefits are evident, and the dehesa here is looking splendidly alive. In fact, a PhD student who took data about the wildlife present on a selection of different dehesa farms including Sandaraca, found that this farm had an impressive surge in wild species of birds, insects and other animals. In fact, it is off the charts. Evidently, Holistic Management is not only benefiting humans, cattle and grasslands.

A Blessing in Disguise

The winter just before my visit, however, had finally seen good rains, and now these pastures were starting to burst with life. “This neighbor’s farm is three times larger and has the same amount of animal units,” says José Luis. “That means his carrying capacity is three times lower. We now need 1.67 Ha (4 acres) per animal unit on this farm, which is much better than anyone else around here”. When I asked what do the neighbors say about it, José Luis replied. “Oh, they say it’s because my bosses are rich!”

We stop and take a random soil sample with our “high-tech equipment”, and another from the neighbor’s side of the fence. The difference is simply astounding. Sandaraca has rich black earth that is building upwards and also penetrating the underlying clay stratum, compared to a thin, mossy layer of struggling soil cover on the neighbor’s land. José Luis says,“The horses were here last November. That is not manure—it is healthy soil! It’s happening! We can do it!!”

“The best thing about it all for me”, says José Luis, “is that the digestive pathologies

Six months after my eyeopening, doubt-dispelling, heart-warming visit to this farm, and after five years of Holistic Management at Sandaraca, a change in the directing board meant they wanted to go back to “letting the animals roam freely.” It was difficult news to bear for this passionate farm manager and for those of us following the experience. José Luis, totally convinced now that going back to conventional management is not what would benefit the soil, nor the animals, followed his principles, left the farm and launched his own venture in April 2019: Poultree, serving high-quality broilers that are pastured amongst a rented field of beautiful young walnut trees. During his years in Sandaraca he had experimented on a small plot with different forms of chicken coops, developed connections with the closest abattoir, tried various ways of getting the meat safely to his customers via special mail, so he felt ready now to throw himself in at the deep end.

Over the last year, in setting up his new farming venture, José Luis has had to deal with all the difficulties that a small-to-medium-scale producer has to face in Spain, made even more complicated for a regenerative enterprise. It is difficult for Spanish administrations at any level to even understand the concepts we are wanting to put into practice. They differ too much from the norm, and since Spain is a highly bureaucratic country that has multiple levels of legislation, you are in the hands of government technicians who, in many cases, depend on their own personal interpretation of what the

Horses and bulls were the two animals used to regenerate the pastures at Sandaraca.

convoluted wording of those laws actually allows or forbids.

We are starting to see interest and shifts in the perception of some officials and institutions, and this is another of the areas where the Association of Regenerative Agriculture serves to inform and change perspectives. We, of course, use all the argumentations that right now tick the boxes for officials and politicians, as they are the key words that are emerging in the present mosaic of interconnected crises: global issues such as adaptation and mitigation of climate change, stopping desertification, increasing carbon capture. We also focus on more local issues such as offering employment opportunities, particularly for the young (in a country with a 15% unemployment rate, that dramatically shoots up to 35% amongst the under-25s), stabilizing and increasing rural population (in the face of phenomenon called España vaciada or “emptied Spain”, by which literally entire rural areas are losing their population. We also talk about increasing resilience to drought (in a scenario where some figures speak of 75% of the country now being desertic, pre-desertic or heading that way). Lastly, we focus on improving food sovereignty (given that some areas import up to 95% of their food, while a lot of what the land actually produces is cheap exports for other more wealthy European countries).

However, as pioneering farmers like José Luis and others develop their experiences, they come up against all sorts of obstacles. It is not an easy ride at all. On the contrary, it is fraught with difficulties, and this is something we now explain clearly to folks. It is important that they be aware that they will need hard work, strength, ingenuity, courage, commitment and an aligned family and team around them who are on board and prepared to be called crazy by all and sundry!

officials tend to be very cautious and prefer not to risk thinking outside the box. The demands placed on small farmers regarding farm and food-processing installations are therefore as stringent and “sterile” as those that large industries have to comply with—making it excruciatingly complicated and expensive for small producers to put them in place.

Another challenge involves the sale of their products. Selling directly to the customers is the best, most profitable, socially and

Caption Needed

The Iberian Challenge

The good news I always give in my talks is that we now know we can do it! We can feed the people with healthy, affordable food that heals the land and increases sovereignty and local economies. And we can now, 12 years after Regenerative Agriculture was first mentioned here, clearly say that we know it is possible to do it here, in Iberia.

One big difficulty are the laws, that are now are so distant from the reality of farmers, and particularly of innovative farmers. For example, it is legislatively almost impossible to develop a Polyface-style farm in Spain right now. If you are breeding animals for human consumption, your official status is a “feedlot”—no matter what your method of fattening them up is! EU regulations do not allow you to have more than a single species on a land unit where there is a “feedlot.” Therefore, you cannot have chickens following cattle, nor rabbits following sheep, nor any sort of multispecies combination for meat. This has made regenerative farmers either give up for now on having multiple species on the same farm, or using only one of them as “meat for sale”, or chopping up the farm into different administrative plots, or coming up with other ingenious ways of getting around these stifling regulations.

One reason laws are so restrictive is because Spain enjoys a top-quality free public health service which works very well indeed. So if there is an illness or outbreak caused by a food item, the State will deal with the problem, answer for it and foot the bill. Added to strict EU health and safety regulations, this means

environmentally-friendly way. It involves the tasks of setting up systems for marketing and for fast customer services, managing orders and then delivering them, a step in turn made difficult by the legislative demands when it comes to the transport of food items, particularly meat.

A group of the first regenerative cattle farmers set up a joint online platform to sell grass-fed meat from all around Spain, under the brand-name DeYerba. This wonderful example of cooperation and resource pooling means that customers can easily choose amongst products, read up on the producers and the benefits of grass-fed meat, and order meats that are available at different times of year in the various regions of the country. The Association of Regenerative Agriculture supports this and other initiatives that are arising and being explored, to help reach the increasing demand with a supply of products that are distinct and should be marketed and sold that way.

A year after the launch of Poultree, and with a new baby on the way, José Luis’s broiler business is starting to pay him a small salary. His financial planning, alongside his grazing planning, which he constantly revises and finetunes, guide him. Following his experience so far, and with his vet-farmer-inventor thinking cap on, he also designed his own large-scale mobile chicken coop. He now has four of these on the land which are moved daily by him and his one

José Luis has developed a pastured chicken operation called Poultree that he has scaled to 250 broilers a week which he direct markets. He grazes the chickens within a walnut orchard.

Northeast Sustainable Ag Research and Education Program— Helping Farmers in the Northeast

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

For the past two-plus years, a group of 29 agricultural professionals in the northeastern states have been going through a Northeast Sustainable Ag Research and Education Professional Development Program (NE SARE PDP) program in Holistic Management, directed by Sarah Williford through the Center for Agricultural Development and Entrepreneurship (CADE). Sarah’s journey led her to connect with other HMI Certified Educators to see how they could expand the pool of agriculture educators in the Northeast trained in Holistic Management. The following is an article about that program and some of the educators who were trained in it and how the program has developed their professional capacity, as well as the communities they serve.

Sarah Williford

Sarah is a farmer herself, and a trained HMI Whole Farm/Ranch Planning instructor. Originally she had trained in HMI’s Beginning Women Farmer Program in New York State. “This training affected my life so much that I wanted to stay connected to others with this knowledge, and I eventually became a coordinator for the Beginning Women Farmer program that was still going on in the northeastern states through Holistic Management International. This was accomplished through two three-year USDA grants and we did this program for many years,” Sarah says.

When that program was finished she continued doing some other coordination with HMI for the Northeast. “Some of the Certified Educators with HMI in this area were talking about how the agricultural service provider world (like Cornell Cooperative Extension and other Extension programs all up and down the northeastern states) was changing. The older people who were there, who had training in Holistic Management, were phasing out and other people were being hired,” Sarah says. It was time to train a new crop of folks coming on.

“Some of the instructors who had been around for a long time, such as Phil Metzger, really wanted to see more of this happening.

He is now retired but continues to teach Holistic Management. In talking with him, this idea for a new program came about—to see if we could get a SARE grant and do a three-year program. So I reached out to different ag service providers who had studied Holistic Management, but were now retired or finishing up their careers or changing their lives. They all talked about how it had been so helpful for them in their work,” Sarah says.

Some of them, like Seth Wilner at the University of New Hampshire extension offices mentioned that some of these various agencies allow or encourage having this other tool (Holistic Management training and Whole Farm Planning) in their toolbox. “It was great to be able to connect with people who were doing some of this, and to reach out to them and ask if anyone they were working with would be interested in some in-depth training. They said yes! We received the NE SARE professional development grant, so here we are.

“We reached out to various ag support organizations all up and down the Northeast and received applications from ag technical service providers from Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and West Virginia.I was very impressed with the amount of interest.”

After the program began in 2017, which included residency programs as well as webinars—Sarah was leading support calls once a month. The group started out with 29 participants, and after a few months she realized it would be really useful to have mentors for them in addition to the support calls.

“I knew that in my own training it was very useful, and this is something that HMI tends to do—pair people up with mentors. So I reached out to a number of people I knew, who have skills in a variety of Holistic Management planning processes. I asked for four mentors so we could divide the group up, and had to get that approved through SARE as an addendum to my original grant proposal,” she explains.

“Some participants are working in groups, and some are working one on one with their mentor, and this is left up to what the mentor prefers or is most capable of doing, to help the participants.”

The instructors for this program, and people who instructed the classes are Phil Metzger, Sarah Williford, Crystal Stewart, Jean-Paul Courtens, Cindy Dvergsten, Larry Dyer and Seth Wilner. The mentors are Elizabeth Marks, Erica Frenay, Seth Wilner and Larry Dyer.

With the residency classes for this program, the group was together for 2 ½ days—though only once a year. “These were extremely

productive sessions, with a lot of wonderful shared ideas regarding how to absorb the content, because this is a group of people who are looking at how to implement much of this into their own lives in order to practice it as well as use the tools in guiding and helping farmers,” she says.

“Many of the participants are in fields of ag service providing because they wholeheartedly support farming or are farmers themselves. Sometimes with the marketing piece or the business planning piece they can use their own real examples for learning purposes or they could choose from something they might dream of doing one day, or use one of the farmers they are working with, for examples,” she says.

“What’s great is that a lot of the communication and learning really happens in the sense of how to provide the information to farmers through their own knowledge, work and experience. The participants learned how to bring these tools into the skills they already have.

“It has been great, and I am really glad that we have the opportunity now to do some regional residency classes. Rather than everyone meeting in one place over the summer, we will be able to travel closer to the people up in Maine, for instance, who travelled 10 hours to get to the whole group residency. We can do something on one of the farms that they are working with.

“The same with Pennsylvania; we are organizing something there. We will be doing three to four sessions within the region closest to some of the participants. Then we will also do a couple different online deeper learning and review sessions for areas where people were feeling that they wanted to dive in deeper or become more prepared. That will be our wrapup support effort.

“We will choose ways that work to have people remain in touch with each other, so they can feel supported, going on from here. I know that some of the participants started out with their own organizations supporting them, and then maybe a different director came in, or something changed organizationally, and they were no longer able to use their work time to be on a support call anymore. Figuring out how to support people who have seen the benefits of this—but are not supported in their work place— is something we are trying to address.”

Ashley Pierce—New York

Ashley Pierce, Livestock Educator in Capital Area Agriculture and Horticulture Program at Cornell University Cooperative Extension) was one of the 30 participants in this three-year

program. “I already had some background in Holistic Management but not as in-depth as what we have been doing in class as part of this training program. Working with Sarah and the other educators has been wonderful. I have a great mentor, Elizabeth Marks, who is really pushing me to learn as much as I can. I’ve been doing a lot of work with her lately and she goes deeply into the material and has taught me a lot,” says Pierce.

Many of the people in this class are working individually with farmers, but Pierce chose instead to have a discussion group where the farmers she works with can get together periodically as a group. “We work on everything together. This has created a great little network of farmers in my area, and they seem to hold each other accountable, as well,” she says.

“In the winter we meet at one of our extension offices, but during the growing season and nicer weather we’ve been rotating around to meet at member farms or do field trips. At this point we have been through every farm and now we’re going to go back and do a follow-up visit on each farm.

“We talked about the four ecosystem processes and also invited folks from the Soil and Water Conservation District to come give a presentation so the farmers could learn more about the programs that are available to them in this area.”

In addition to teaching the farmers about Holistic Management, Ashley is trying to tie in some hands-on, bootson-the-ground experiences, and show them more ways they can implement some of these practices. “In this particular instance, Soil and Water came and we walked around the farm and talked about the ecosystem processes and things that the Soil and Water folks could maybe do to help. For instance, they might be able to help a farmer with fencing or even just understanding their soils better,” she says.

“I might ask the farmer what the main obstacles are, on that particular farm, and then see how we can bring Holistic Management to help resolve those. Also, if there are some outside people who can bring more expertise to the situation, we invite them as well.”

One visit the group visited Carrie Edsal’s Black Willow Pond Farm near Cobleskill, New York where Carrie and her family raise pastured poultry, pork and lamb, and rabbits. She does direct marketing and also sells her meats through local farmer markets. Carrie spoke to the group about her grazing program.

Another visit the group toured Emaly Leak’s Autumn Hill Llamas and Fiber Farm near Duanesburg, New York. Emaly has been in the

facilitate that has been important and helpful,” says Ashley.

“They have been such a great group, and working with them has taught me a lot more, going through this process—learning it and then relaying the information. In order to teach it, you need to have a better understanding of it yourself.”

Ashley also feels that the field trips have helped the beginning farmers learn about a variety of practices and enterprises. “We find people to visit who are doing interesting things, and making their systems work. They don’t always know that they are doing things holistically or saying that they have such-and-such holistic goal. They are not necessarily putting things in those terms, but they are working in that way—maybe informally. We visit some of those folks, and it’s good for my group of farmers to be able to see the final product, and visualize what they could be shooting for in their own situation,” she says.

As the NE SARE project draws to a close, Ashley hope she can continue working with these farmers, in different capacities. “I have been working a lot with Elizabeth Marks, to try to work toward becoming a Certified Educator because I now see the value in all of this,” she says.

group for the whole two years. She has been raising llamas on that farm since 2017 and has had llamas since 2000.

Some of the farmers are beginners and Ashley feels it has been important and beneficial to help them create a larger network for support. “In the beginning a lot of them didn’t know what services were available, in addition to the Holistic Management information. This networking also allows them to meet other people in the area. Being able to help

“Everyone I talk to who practices Holistic Management sees it as a life-changing experience. I feel that this is true on the farm, but also in their lives and families. It has been a life-changing experience for me, and I think it will be that way for some of these farmers as well. I hope they will continue to get together to share ideas. That’s the great thing about Extension; we have a lot of great ideas and even if this specific program is finished, I think we could still have some kind of follow-up events and find ways to get together in the future.

“They have mentioned to me that getting together has been very energizing; it helps to share ideas with other people like yourself. There can be a lot of frustration in thinking you are the only one out there trying to do some of

CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

Ashley Pierce’s farm group during one of their almost monthly meetings which includes time for socializing.

Carrie Edsall talking to the group about her grazing (on her Black Willow Pond Farm).

Helping Farmers in the Northeast

these things.”

While the group has been meeting 10 times a year, Ashley things that meeting quarterly is more sustainable for her given her farm and Extension job. “It’s been wonderful, and I’ve met so many great people, being a part of this. I feel it has been a very successful experiment.”

program has really changed the way that he approaches these topics when speaking with farmers about them. This experience has also changed his understanding of these topics, as well.

“We started in December of 2017. As part of the project we initially talked about expectations. We would meet with and develop holistic plans with four to five farmers. Many of us had some sort of direct contact with farmers; a lot of us have worked with three or four people through the course of this project. Some farmers are really open to this and ready to work with something new and go through the process, but some are less open to it and wonder why we are talking about things like values.”

beginning farmer network and we’ve been able to share some of those resources,” he says.

“Sarah and the project leadership team have done a really good job to support us. We have monthly calls with other people in the program who are doing similar work and working with similar types of farms. All of the calls are supported by people with experience in Holistic Management who can encourage us to keep up with it and to continue to reach out to the farmers—even though the farmers are busy and often not getting back to us.

“We’ve learned just as much from what is happening in other states as we have about the Holistic Management framework and how to utilize that viewpoint in our work. It has been an interesting project. A lot of the Holistic Management principles in many people’s minds have been associated with livestock grazing programs and large acreages, but here in the Northeast—especially where I am, and the people I work with—most farmers are very small. Many of them just have a diversified vegetable operation,” says Jason.

Jason Lilley—Maine

Jason Lilley is a Sustainable Agriculture Professional for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension—Cumberland County) and also participated in the NE SARE program. “My primary role in the county office is to work directly with farmers to help them increase their financial and environmental sustainability and improve their production practices. More recently I’ve been working with the labor and social side of things, with farm management,” Jason says.

“When I started in this position, my background was in production practices, and all of the research that I’d done was on production systems. I had worked on various farms as a production manager and didn’t have much concept of the business and social side of farming. After being in this position for a few months, I quickly came to realize that the areas where farmers could benefit from the most— from educational opportunities—would be in social, managerial and financial management.

Jason found out about the NE SARE Program through an e-mail advertisement, asking for service providers to sign up. While he had the basic understanding of some of the content covered in the course, he feels that the

Some of the participants in this project have successfully gone through the whole chronological process and helped farmers create a holistic goal or helped them with financial plans and not really told the farmers that this is a holistic viewpoint. “We’ve simply used those tools and the vantage points that we’ve learned from this training, and utilized them in how we approach this discussion,” Jason says.

Jason has found this program to have been very helpful for him as part of his professional development. “Sarah Williford, who led our group has done a fantastic job. It was great to be able to have that many different people in one room together—people who have all worked with farmers, often from different perspectives. There might be someone who only does financial management and benchmarking with farmers. Others are very much into the production side of it. In Maine we also have a

Some of these small farmers have become very creative, utilizing these educational resources and tweaking them to fit their own situation, to make them practical and useful for that small scale and type of operation. Some people still have the mistaken idea that holistic management is mainly just a grazing method

and they don’t understand the full picture.

“Sometimes people are presented with a tool (like a certain type of program) and told that they need to plug their system into this, but that’s not what Holistic Management is all about. It’s more like a higher level of perspective and a way to think about your own operation.”

One of the groups he worked with is the Somali Bantu Community Association. “This is a

Flowering in the North Retreat Participants at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Medawisla Lodge where Jason Lilley provided support in Holistic Financial Planning.

Facilitators Carolyn Snell and Stacy Brenner discuss and categorize the strengths and opportunities, and weaknesses and challenges of the Northeast Cut Flower Industry.

group of new Americans, mainly refugees, who have come to me for help. Their director is from Somalia. They have a lot of farming background and knowledge from their home country in Somalia but this association has acquired some land and is farming here. Now they have 150 people who are growing crops on either a commercial scale where they are pooling produce from each of their plots, or they are using it as a community garden to produce food for their own family,” Jason says.

“I have been working them and we’ve created a resource list that includes everything they have accessible to them. We have worked through the holistic goals and identified what the values are of the association. We have done a little bit of land planning and also dived into the communication side of things. There have been some issues with some of the landowners due to the cultural brokerage between them and the people they lease the land from.”

Jason also recently helped with a meeting of cut flower producers from all across the Northeast. This was a three-day program focused on business planning, financial perspectives, labor issues, etc. “I was able to utilize many of the tools that I received through the NE SARE training, for this program. It was the Flowering in the North Retreat at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Medawisla Lodge.”

At that retreat, 35 Cut Flower Producers came together to discuss the state of the industry and their individual businesses. “The participants were encouraged to develop their values statements during the first night of the retreat. Building off of that, the group spent three days discussing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges to their own operations and of the industry as a whole. They then dug into holistic financial planning and the current financial practices and status of their farms,” he says.

A big focus of this discussion was the importance of paying yourself a wage, as a farm owner, and setting plans for doing that comfortably. The group also discussed marketing and the potential for regional collaborative marketing, highlighting other

successful models such as the Twin Cities Floral Exchange. “There was a lengthy discussion of work life balance and the difficulty of maintaining a healthy balance while running a farm and floral design business. The group developed a lengthy list of suggestions for setting boundaries and maintaining healthy relationships outside of work,” he says.

Initially some of the Holistic Management concepts may seem foreign to producers when first presented with them. But then they realize that Holistic Management is not some oddball thing but something very helpful and useful for their

Program Coordinator for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA).

“CISA is a buy-local organization that is now in its 26th year. Geographically this region is small, but has more than 2000 farms—most of them doing direct marketing, but some are also doing small wholesale, or selling to restaurants or doing agri-tourism,” she says.

“My organization usually works with about 200 member farmers, but we also provide resources and assistance to many farmers who are not members. One of the programs we offer is technical assistance for farmers who are members or non-members so we probably are in communication with about 400 farms at any given time. There are many gaps in expertise in our area, though more and more service providers are providing farm-related assistance in financial management and marketing, farm business management and planning expertise, production, land access, etc.”

own operation.

“We’ve been having some discussions about this,” says Jason.

“There is a lot of terminology in the worksheets that we use, and in all the resources, that can be a little intimidating, such as for the people who are just gardening. We’ve discussed what situations might be appropriate to not even mention that this is Holistic Management, because that term in itself can turn some people off or scare them away. We just go through the practices and simply say that this is how you could look at this differently.”

Stevie Schafnacker— Massachusetts

Stevie Schafenacker is the Local Hero

Stevie applied to be part of the NE SARE program with the hope that the outcome would be developing deeper relationships with the farmers she works with, while providing a framework and opportunity to have ongoing relationships with farmers outside the program. She particularly assisted them with business decisionmaking.

“When I first went into this program I thought it was a structure for potentially a business and production plan, but what has come out of this has been much more,” says Stevie. “I have leaned on the Holistic Management principles of working toward a holistic goal and using the framework of decisiontesting questions and monitoring—to really get down to what farmers need.

“In the process I have realized how much service providers can be sounding boards, and I’ve found this to be as crucial as any kind of technical expertise that we can give. The benefit of working one on one is that you can dive deeply into what that person’s biggest issue or logjam or opportunity might be, for their CONTINUED ON

The 2019 Whole Farm Planning participants at one of their residential trainings.

Stevie Schafenacker

& LIVESTOCK

Rancho Tres Papalotes— Improving Wildlife Habitat with Cattle

BY ANN ADAMS

Enrique Perez Carrillo, 31, and his wife Carolina Muñoz Cervantes, 30, run the 40,000-acre Rancho Tres Papalotes, near Janos, Chihuahua, Mexico. Their vision for the ranch is to strive for a sustainable way of ranching through raising adaptive cattle and Holistic Management. They say they still have much to learn but they have seen improvement in their herd and on the land as well as the numbers of species of wildlife now making their homes on Rancho Tres Papalotes—reversing the downward decline of functioning grasslands in Chihuahua.

Enrique took his first Holistic Management training when he was 15 years old in 2005 from HMI Certified Educator Elco Blanco. “Everything was an aha moment,” says Enrique. “I really liked the course and everything made sense. My grandfather bought the ranch about 40 years ago and then my father managed it. He waited until I graduated from Chihuahua State University in Animal Science in 2011 for me to start managing the ranch.”

Enrique had been working with his father on the ranch until he took over all management in 2015. Then he began making changes including creating more paddocks and reducing paddock size as well as developing water sources. They also got rid of cattle they had so they could begin stocking animals that were better suited to the forage native to Tres Papalotes.

The ranch is currently divided into two sections by a Mennonite farm. Originally they had only four paddocks in each section. Now the one section has 33 paddocks and the other one, which has more difficult terrain has 16 paddocks. Enrique notes that the investment in this infrastructure development paid for itself even with most of the investment coming from the ranch. However, they have worked with a variety of

conservation partners including The Bird Conservancy and IMC–Vida Silvestre (IMC), a local wildlife conservation group. These groups, in turn, collaborate with Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon, Pronatura Noreste, Rio Grande Joint Venture, and Profauna.

“We began working with the Bird Conservancy in 2011,” says Enrique. “I met some of their staff in university and they asked me to get involved. I am passionate about wildlife and photographing them, as well as the aesthetic of the landscape, so I agreed.”

Arvind Panjabi is one the scientists conducting grassland-bird surveys at Tres Papalotes and other ranches in the Chihuahuan Desert. But in 2006 they found that many of the ranches were being turned into cropland, reducing the amount of grassland habitat for these birds.

Grasslands make up 15% of the Chihuahuan Desert’s 140,000 square miles. This area is particularly important for the migration of the nine out of 10 migratory bird species from the Great Plains. Because these grasslands serve as wintering ground for many grassland birds, the need to keep these grasslands highly functioning is critical for the health of grassland birds which are a key indicator species for the health of the

grasslands upon which they depend.

The scientists are estimating that the shift of grasslands to croplands in this area has probably displaced 350,000 grassland birds. The shift to croplands has been fueled by the ability of farmers to tap aquifers 700 feet down to irrigate fields. Likewise, violence due to narcotics have also driven some ranchers to sell to Canadian Mennonites who have found the land suitable for crops.

Besides grassland bird habitat, Tres Papalotes is also good falcon

Golden eagles also call Tres Papalotes home.

Enrique and Carolina Carrillo

habitat, so the Bird Conservancy installed a nest platform on several ranches in the area including Tres Papalotes. In 2018, 11 pairs nested across the Chihuahuan Desert, the most since 2012, and fledged 10 young, half of which hatched on nest platforms. This group of 15 ranchers/ land owners and conservation groups have created the Sustainable Grazing Network (SGN) that covers more than 250,000 acres.

Enrique is excited about the results the Bird Conservancy is seeing on the land as well as the increasing bird numbers they see with their bird counts. The Conservancy has also helped him by suggesting which areas to graze and not to graze based on bird habitat. In this way, he collaborates with the Conservancy on the grazing planning. They also have trail cameras for different animals, not just birds, and have seen the return of mountain lions to the ranch. In the past two years they have been involved in research with golden eagles as well. While the ground cover is improving, Enrique is aware there is more work to be done to cover more bare ground.

barely feed them,” says Enrique. “But now I have 300 pairs in that section.” Because of the divide between the two sections they run two different herds (one for each section) and plan the grazing accordingly.

Water development has included four new wells ranging from 100 to 600 feet in depth for a total of eight wells that each serve four paddocks. The water line used to be 1 ¼- inches diameter, but now they have two-inch piping with 100,000 liter per stock tank holding capacity to be able to water more cattle effectively.

Improving Infrastructure

For the last five years Enrique has been focused on infrastructure development that helps improve their ability to be a sustainable and resilient commercial cattle operation, but also to improve the wildlife habitat. While Enrique and Carolina share a passion for wildlife and improving the wildlife habitat on their ranch from a conservation perspective, they also have a mule deer hunting enterprise to augment income for the ranch. They use their Facebook page to show the wildlife that use their water points at https://www.facebook.com/ Rancho3Papalotes. Enrique notes that they have added drinkers even where they don’t bring cattle so that the wildlife can use it. Their water is often the only source for several miles around.

In 2011 Tres Papalotes could run 1,000-1,500 steers for five months. Now they run 600 cow/calf pairs for six months, and Enrique estimates they have more than tripled their carrying capacity. “In the section where I first started developing the fencing and water, I could only run 100 pairs, and even then I could

All of Enrique’s new fences are permanent, one-strand electric fence. He then subdivides these paddocks with temporary electric fencing. Given the variety of terrain and size of paddocks the grazing periods range from one month to five to 10 days in some of the smaller paddocks. With temporary electric fencing he can get the grazing period down to two days. He also is working to have only one graze period a year to allow for adequate recovery The shortest recovery is 330 days with some small paddocks being used twice a year because there are alkali grasses that he grazes twice during the growing season.

Enrique grazes to increase the amount of desirable grasses like blue grama, sideoats grama, and galleta. He is seeing an increase in all of those grasses. The average rainfall, of 10 inches of rain, has become more sporadic with the summer monsoons in July and August not always materializing. They can get all of their rain in one or two months although their growing season is from June to October. Enrique monitors the height of grasses and residual on the ground to determine grazing moves. In some paddocks there is little grass and the cattle browse on mesquite, chamisa, and fourwing saltbush.

With his increased production Enrique has not had to feed hay at all while his neighbors usually feed from January to June. In a really bad year he might help the cattle a little with protein and he does provide salt and minerals.

Whenever possible, Enrique uses temporary electric fencing to divide permanent paddocks into smaller grazing units, increasing recovery and reducing overgrazing.

With improved habitat and water infrastructure, Enrique has seen mountain lions return to the ranch.

Tres Papalotes runs a mule deer hunting operation as part of their enterprise mix.

Slim Buttes Buffalo Ranch— Adapting Enterprises to Fit the Land

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Slim Buttes Buffalo Ranch is in the northwest corner of South Dakota, 30 miles from the Montana border and 50 miles from North Dakota. Owned and operated by Sandy and Jacki Limpert and their son Brodie, this ranch is mostly grassland pasture.

Sandy has lived here all his life and is the third generation on the ranch. His great uncle, Lawrence Oliver, put the home place together, starting in 1910 and raised sheep. In 1935, Sandy’s father, A.W. Limpert, and uncle, John Limpert, came to live on the ranch with Lawrence and his wife Mary. A.W. and John’s father had passed away and their Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Mary decided to raise the boys. These two brothers grew up on the ranch and helped Lawrence raise sheep and eventually some cattle. In 1955, A.W. married Kay Welch and they had five children with Sandy being the oldest boy.

The ranch continued to grow and in 1970 Sandy’s parents purchased the ranch from Lawrence. In 1985, Sandy married Jacki Johnson. That same year, Sandy’s father passed away and Sandy and Jacki purchased the ranch from Kay (Sandy’s mother) and the rest of the family. At that point in time it was 7,000 acres of pasture with 400 cattle and 350 sheep plus 1,200 acres of farm ground and hayfields.

“Jacki and I have been running it since 1985 and have expanded it considerably,” says Sandy. In 1989 they purchased an additional 7,000 acres that bordered the ranch to the north and expanded the operation to 400 cows and 1,200 sheep.

“We ran sheep and cattle until 1990, when we started transitioning to bison. We had decided we could not continue to operate the ranch with the sheep, cattle, farming and a custom haying business,” he explains.

“We had always been fighting the weather with traditional livestock. We lambed the ewes through the sheds through the winter and then started calving heifers in March and then the main cow herd would start calving. We were always fighting bad weather to save the lambs and calves. With the sheep, predators were also a problem. We live along a range of hills called the Slim Buttes and the coyote population is huge. Today there are no sheep anywhere near here because a person just can’t win that battle,” he says.

He and Jacki realized that some management changes were needed to address the huge work load and make the ranch more manageable. The ranch had a strong land base, so they began to explore their options for using the land.

Getting Started with Bison

Sandy and Jacki began looking at bison because they were both interested in them and the land was suited to this hardy animal. “I had two bison when I was in high school in the mid-1970s and really enjoyed them,” says Sandy. “We never built any fences that would hold them, however, and they just roamed the whole county. My dad got tired of them and told me to either get rid of them or he was going to shoot them. We finally got them in, but they were wild. We butchered those.”

Then in the late 1980s Sandy and Jacki started looking at maybe raising bison instead of cattle and sheep. “Financially, we were not getting ahead, and the weather was a big challenge. After my dad passed away the rest of the family left the ranch and did other things so it was just Jacki and myself doing it all. We were working from daylight till dark and not getting ahead. We started researching the bison industry and market and whether we could actually make a living raising bison. At first we didn’t think it would work, but the more we looked this business, the more

“We started touring the few bison ranches we knew of and really got excited about it. We decided to sell the sheep and start buying buffalo. Our plan was to run 200 bison cows and keep running the rest of the operation the way we had been. We kept raising cattle while the bison were coming into production. When we started buying them, it immediately became evident that they were a lot less work than cattle, and required less feed, especially in the winter.

“Like most wildlife, their metabolism slows down in the winter and they don’t need as many calories as cattle do, to survive. They are much more hardy. Cattle and sheep need additional calories and protein all winter long. We’ve bred the

Sandy and Jacki purchased a few more bison each year and, eventually sold the last of the cattle. “Once we started into this business we could tell it would probably work, even though the market for bison wasn’t very strong back then. The hanging carcasses were bringing about $1.85 per pound, yet the meat production seemed sustainable even at that level. So we just kept buying a few bison each year to replace the cull cows we sold,” Sandy says.

They had been buying all their replacement heifers, since they used a terminal cross for beef production rather than keeping any heifers. “So over a period of years as we gradually grew the bison herd we let the cattle herd dwindle down and sold the last of them in about 1997. We have not regretted this decision at all,” Sandy says.

The bison industry is still small but started growing dramatically in the late 1990s. “No one was paying much attention to marketing; we all thought that all we had to do was produce the product and someone

Brodie, Sandy, and Jacki Limpert

would buy it. Then that whole market crashed. The North American Bison Co-op had a lot of meat in freezers that they couldn’t sell. Then 2002 was a tremendously dry year. The banks quit loaning money on the bison industry just like they quit on a lot of farmers and ranchers. It was a perfect storm for the bison industry; we had a lot of meat that we couldn’t sell and the breeding market fell through the floor,” Sandy says.

“We had to travel 400 miles east to get hay because our part of the country never even greened up that spring. It was the worst of the worst. That crash got rid of a lot of bison producers. On the flip side, the meat

then the market has done nothing but go up or stay steady. Today the price is about $3.80 hanging, so from 30 years ago at $1.85 it has more than doubled. The past 15 years the price has been really strong,” says Sandy.

Business Model Adaptation

Sandy and Jacki have done a number of things to make their efforts sustainable. “Early on, while we were still raising cattle, I knew I didn’t want to be at the mercy of people buying my calves. So we built a small feedlot and after that we didn’t sell anything off the ranch (including bison) that wasn’t either finished or breeding stock that has been performance tested on grass and feed to other producers,” he says.

With all the farm land returned to grass production and the sheep and cattle gone, Sandy and Jacki now use the feedlot to finish their excess bison. This has worked very well. In 1997, they leased an additional 4,500 acres of grass to use for backgrounding young bison bulls which are later finished in their feedlot.

Diligent culling has produced bison herd sires and mother cows that consistently produce some of the finest animals in the region. From the calf crop each year, they select the top end bull calves as herd sire prospects. When the bull calves are yearlings, Sandy and Jacki offer the best of them for sale through private treaty at the ranch.

Sandy doesn’t think he’d be ranching today if he hadn’t made the switch to bison. But with improved profits, they’ve been able to expand their ranch from 10,000 acres to 40,000 acres over the last 30 years.

got cheaper and more people started eating it because it was cheap. They discovered they liked it.”

Also, about that time Ted Turner started building his restaurant chain, called Ted’s Montana Grill. His restaurants served bison and more people became familiar with it. “He’d been selling all his meat to the Co-op and they’d just been putting it in freezers. So he opened up about 45 or 50 restaurants and sold his meat through them. When you think about what that did—with more people having a good experience eating bison meat in all of those restaurants for several years—before long there was a shortage of bison meat again. The price rose again,” Sandy says.

“Our marketers who ran the Co-op told us that if we ever got above $2.50 hanging it would be the end. They didn’t know what they were talking about, because now the consumers demand this product. In their mind it is a healthy food, and more people are wanting to eat healthy, especially in today’s world.

“For a while, however, we found ourselves over-supplying because we had no market but it was partly because no one had spent any money on marketing. After 2002–2003, we realized that we had to spend some time and money marketing our product. Fast-forward to today and the supply is about perfect to meet the demand. The demand continues to grow but the numbers of bison are staying just about the same.”

“We built a sale barn in the late 1990s and started having auctions to sell breeding stock to other bison producers, but when the market crashed in 2002 we quit having sales and started

With Holistic Management, the Limperts work to provide 90 days of recovery within the 33 paddocks they have. They also try to take only about 30% of the forage so that they continue to improve soil health and range productivity.

Not very many people are jumping into the bison industry because most folks don’t want to deal with bison. It’s a lot of work to get set up to handle these animals. “Thirty-some years ago I never would have imagined that we would just be raising bison, but these animals have been really good to us. There was the downturn in 2002-2003 but ever since

through their growing process, and this in itself sells animals,” he explains.

Bull prospects are put through a rigorous feed trial their first year, making it easier to select only the best animals to be sold for herd sire prospects. The young bulls are performance tested, with the data on weaning weights, weight gains on grass, and weight gains on feed being used as the criteria for selection.

“There are still many bison producers who think that a bison is a bison,

the whole grazing season. Water developments were crucial to make this work. “By creating so many different pastures, we realized we needed a lot more water. We started on a plan of adding big tire tanks in each pasture. The pastures are anywhere from 500 to 700 acres, depending on the lay of the land, and every pasture now has five tire tanks. Across the whole ranch we have put in more than 30 miles of pipeline and 190 tire tanks. When there are five tire tanks and at last one reservoir in each pasture, water is never an issue.”

The ranch runs 1,600 mother cows and 100 herd bulls all in one big herd. “When we put them in one of those pastures they are never hanging around the tire tanks because they don’t have to go very far to water. They just wander by and take a drink, and we never see those tanks drained down,” he says. The bison don’t beat out the areas around the tanks because they have plenty of water in various locations, and they are only in that pasture for a few days.

“It is so easy to manage them, and the bison are so easy on the pastures. Our NRCS guy thought we were nuts when we wanted to put that many tanks in each pasture, but I’ve never regretted it. We did all the work ourselves; we do most of the work on everything ourselves, and it’s been quite an experience. We are not finished; we just leased another place where we plan to put in a waterline project this summer. It is so crucial in each pasture to have plenty of water and then graze it and move on. This has been the key, for us,” he says.

“These bison are so contented and happy. To move them, I simply go out with a pickup and some cake because the cows are all trained to come to the pickup. I honk the horn and they come. They know the routine. I open the gate and honk the horn and I can move that whole herd by myself in 15 minutes. They are ready to go to fresh pasture even though there is a lot of good grass left where they are.

a cattle and sheep outfit I don’t think the ranch could support the two families. We have taken the ranch from about 10,000 acres (when I took it over) to more than 40,000 acres now. We could never have achieved that growth raising sheep and cattle because there is not enough market to do that. With bison, however, between the meat sales and the feedlot—selling all of our meat animals to Rapid City, South Dakota or Brush, Colorado, to Bob Dineen, the Founder and President of Rocky Mountain Natural Meats—we have a great market,” Sandy says. They process about 60% of all the bison meat in North America.

The conversion of the ranch to bison created a more profitable and lower labor-input operation than what the ranch had seen for several decades. It took a little work to make the fences more secure for bison, but it wasn’t that hard. “We had some good fences already, and we just went around them and welded extensions on the short steel posts. We mostly had sheep fence to begin with so it wasn’t very tall, but it was woven wire on the bottom with two strands of barbed wire on the top. We just added one more barbed wire to make it taller,” Sandy explains.

If bison are not crowded or upset, and have adequate room, they generally don’t press the fences. “If you keep them happy they are much easier to contain because they are not wanting to go somewhere else.” Good pasture management gives them exceptionally good grass through

“Kirk Gadzia told me that it’s like putting out a buffet. If you put out a buffet every Monday morning it will get pretty rank by the end of the week. There is still food there but your favorite things are gone. When these cows are going to fresh pasture nearly every day, a lot of times I don’t even need to cake them because they are simply eager to come through the gate to go to fresh pasture. They just drop their heads and start grazing.

“They are very easy to manage this way, and now we are seeing many warm-season grasses coming in. Our side of the fence has bluestem all up and down the creeks and swales, and on the neighbor ’s side of the fence where they continuous graze yearling cattle, and have grazed this way for 100 years, you can’t see any bluestem. It was eyeopening to me, to find that we now have bluestem galore on our side just because of the way we graze.

“We are working with nature instead of against nature. I don’t know how we got off track in this country, grazing the wrong way. We were taught the wrong way, in school,” he says.

Thanks to the success of their own operation, the Limperts envision the bison industry as a way for ranches with good grass to not only survive, but to excel in agriculture. Currently, Slim Buttes is home to 1,600 mother cows and produces enough grass to grow out some additional bulls and heifers which are then finished in the feedlot.

“We grass 200 to 300 heifers and 100 bulls. The ranch also sells about 35 bulls as breeding stock each year. We also sell 100 to 200 heifers each

Sandy and Jacki’s son, Brodie, with bison calf.

year for breeding.”

One of the benefits of bison is their longevity. The cows will calve well into their 20s. “We preg-test them every fall, and if they are ever open we get rid of them. By doing this, we have a very fertile herd. We always wean a 95 to 96% calf crop and these cows do it on a fraction of the feed in the winter, compared with what our cattle needed. In nature, the bison didn’t have to calve at such a high percentage, but when they are managed you can get 18 to 22 calves from one cow,” Sandy says.

“I am 60 years old, and the heifer calves we are keeping right now as herd replacements will still be here when I am in my 80’s. So we don’t need to keep very many replacement heifers. I remember when we had cattle, we bought all of our replacement heifers, and every year by the time we got our calves sold and bought the heifers we needed, there wasn’t much money left to operate on. It was a vicious cycle. We bred Black Angus cows to Charolais bulls so we didn’t keep replacements. It was always a terminal cross.

“In the 1980’s we were raising 600-pound calves and thought we were doing well. We calved in March and put a lot of feed in them to get that 600-pound calf, but we were beating the neighbors on calf weights! This is what we were taught, to try to maximize production, even though it might cost too much to raise those big calves.

“My beef neighbors look at our bison and laugh. We wean off 450 to 500-pound calves and the neighbors think that’s pretty small. The bison market crashed in 2002 and that’s all they can remember, and they think these animals are still worth that low price. Our national association likes to promote growth and herd expansion but I like it just the way it is right now. We have good numbers and a good, strong market, and everybody in our industry is making money. The cow-calf bison folks are making money, the feeders are making money and the processors are making money; everything is in good balance. I don’t know why people always think we need to change a good thing,” he says.

Currently there are not a lot of people getting into this industry because it is very capital intensive to get started. A cow bison is worth twice what a beef cow is worth, so a person has to borrow more money to buy the cows. Then that person has to build fences and corrals that will hold bison. “It’s a bit prohibitive for young guys to get started and this is a deterrent for a lot of folks. Once we got our herd going, however, we found we could pay ourselves very well by running our bison calves through the feedlot and selling them ready to butcher,” Sandy says.

“I remember back when we decided to get rid of the cattle, the main

reason was that we had no control of our market. Our government has a cheap food policy and can import beef and keep the prices down. It doesn’t seem to matter if our own producers go broke. The government wants us to just barely make a living. Importing beef right now is really hurting our own producers.

“This is why I got rid of cattle; I had zero control. It didn’t matter how good a job I did raising cattle because I was still going to have to take the price the buyers give me, and more often than not it was less than what it cost to produce them. That was 30 years ago and I don’t know how some guys have hung on this long with everything we have to buy being higher priced. A pickup costs $60,000, haying machinery is more expensive, feed costs have gone up, etc. yet calf prices are basically what they were when we got out. I wouldn’t still be on this ranch if I was still raising cattle and sheep. I think I would have lost it.

“Our son, when he came back from college, decided he wanted to try some beef cows. He bought some big 1,600-pound Angus fallcalving cows. He was feeding them through the winter and they were eating 60 pounds of hay a day, nursing their calves, and he was also caking them.

“After the first year, he told me this couldn’t work. He said that if he had to buy the hay to feed these cows, there would be nothing left after selling the calf crop. So after that first year he sold them and bought bison and has never looked back.”

Improving Production and Profit

The Limperts investment in continuing education has been a key factor in their ability to adapt and improved their production and profit. “About 14 years ago we started looking into Holistic Management. Our first class was with Ann Adams in Albuquerque, and this totally opened our eyes. I never believed something like this would work in our part of the country; I always thought it maybe worked somewhere else, in a better climate. Here on the northern plains we only get 15 inches of moisture each year, in generally the grass only grows about 90 days out of the year,” Sandy says.

He also notes that Holistic Management principles completely transformed the whole ranch. “In the past 13 years we have attended several classes, including a few by Kirk Gadzia. Once you get your head wrapped around these ideas, it all makes so much sense, and it helped us make a lot of improvements. We used to have big pastures and graze continuously, like most ranchers did back then and still do—putting the

While it takes some effort to convert a cattle ranch to a bison ranch, the Limperts have found the returns to merit the investment.

herd in a pasture and leaving them all summer.”

“We cross-fenced the whole ranch into pastures that were each about one section in size. Right now we have 34 pastures. We have one big 8,000-acre pasture that we calve in, putting the cow herd in there for 60 days in the spring. You can’t really rotate the mother cows while they are calving because it’s better to just leave them alone. So we put them in that big pasture to calve and bring them out of it in mid to late May—to start rotating through the 33 smaller pastures,” he says.

This process gives every pasture a chance to recover and grow again before it is grazed again. Even in drought times, there are 33 pastures ahead of the herd when they start the grazing season--that are not being grazed. This gives these pastures a chance to grow a little (even if it’s dry) before they are grazed.

“Most years we rotate through pastures pretty fast in the spring when they are growing fast. We only want to take about 10% of the grass that’s there the first go-round, staying only three to five days in each pasture. Then by the time we get back to those pastures the grass has fully recovered and matured. Three days times 30 pastures is 90 days rest that each pasture has had. The first pastures we graze in the spring and early summer, you can’t even tell that they have been grazed because they rebound so quickly,” he says.

“We are also starting to see more warm-season grasses coming in and thriving because they don’t get continually eaten off. Continuous grazing is hard on any pasture. Back in the days when we had sheep—and sheep had been here for 100 years—the pastures were not in good shape. Sheep are really hard on a pasture because they eat so close to the ground.

“Everything we have learned has helped us change this. Today we run more animals here than we ever did before, yet we also leave more grass that we ever did before.

“It is an amazing system. I told my banker one day that all the financial institutions should demand that the young guys who are borrowing money have to go through some holistic training.

“A lot of folks are still calving in February, living with the calving cows, pulling calves, battling all the elements that we don’t have to deal with later in the year. I have neighbors in their 70s and 80s that have no way to bring their kids home to the ranch because their kids (or grandkids) don’t want to come home.

“It’s a sad state of affairs and I fear for the future of many small ranches. Jacki and I are just tickled that we are able to have our son and his kids here. He has two boys and two girls and those kids just love it. With the COVID pandemic, those kids were home-schooled this spring for nearly three months and it has really been good. That whole experience has been good for all of us here.”

Sandy says that Holistic Management has been the key to success for this ranch. “We took our son to these Holistic Management classes when he was about 17 years old. The younger generation gets it quickly. He

wrapped his head around it immediately. If someone had taken me to one of those classes when I was 17, there is no way I would have believed it. Most of our neighbors still don’t believe in what we are doing, yet they see us continuing to expand, and leaving a lot of grass. It looks like we leave more grass than we utilize, and that’s in fact what we do. We typically utilize only about 30% of the grass, and this builds a good reserve in case of drought.” This gives flexibility; in extreme conditions there will still be some grass.

“One of the downsides with bison is lack of flexibility in marketing, however. With cattle, if things get bad, you can get some of them in during the middle of summer and haul them to a sale barn if you have to. It’s tough to do that with a herd of bison! So we try to keep our numbers lower than they need to be for the forage resources we have. Last winter was a relatively open winter and we fed the cows hay just 10 times. We don’t cake them in the winter because they don’t need the extra nutrition.

“They actually need to lose weight from fall until spring; this is the natural situation for all wildlife. They have adapted to these conditions. We are very enthusiastic about raising bison. They are fun to have, and it’s great to be able to make a decent living and pass this on to my grandkids.

“I know a guy on Kodiak Island who has some bison, where the big bears live. He used to have Hereford cattle and lost a lot of his calves to bears. After he started raising bison he very seldom loses one of them to bears. The mother cows are very protective of their calves. I have seen where bison have stomped coyotes into the dirt and they are dead.

“I highly recommend to anyone to take some classes in Holistic Management. I don’t know why it is so hard for people to change their minds, but maybe it’s because they’ve done something for so long.

“The more success stories like ours—and other people who have done what we’ve done—the better. There are ways to make it work. It’s all about the organic matter in the soil. For every 1% increase in organic matter, a cubic foot of soil will hold several more gallons of water. It’s not that we don’t get enough rain here, it’s that when we do get it, most of it runs down the creek and we don’t capture it. The more organic matter in the soil, the more water it can hold. By grazing the way we do, it will keep getting better over time. I know people who have done this longer than we have, and they say they have not reached the top yet. Everything keeps changing, and the more organic matter you have, the more organisms you have in the soil, the healthier it is, and the more water it will hold. It just all makes sense.

“If I was ever forced to go back to ranching the way I used to, I would not be ranching! I was working all the time and felt older then than I do today, because I just never could get caught up. We were always behind and I had no time for the kids. I would leave in the morning before they got up and they’d be in bed before I got in at night. That’s not a good way to live.”

The Limperts found that bison were a much better type of livestock to raise in the harsh conditions and heavy predation that are part of Slim Buttes Buffalo Ranch. Bison do not need the same caloric input as cattle and can be raised more profitably through the winter months.

Helping Farmers in the Northeast

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

particular farm. I have done that, in some capacity, with all eight farms that I have been working with in this program.

“The strengths I have developed through this program permeate into my non-direct whole farm planning work as well. Rather than sitting down with the farmer and saying we are going to do Holistic Management and some elemental farm planning, I make sure that I spent at least two meetings in which the farmers understand those principles and practices as the platform for whatever work we do.

“We develop a holistic goal, run through what the decision-testing questions, and how you create an action plan and monitor those actions. Then I spend some time just getting to know the farm and the farmer in what seems like a casual way—so I can glean what that farm, farmer or farm family values are, and find out what is important to them. I learn about their history, what their long-term goals are, the state of their business and where they feel the pinch points are.”

Stevie has worked with one farm on pricing and how their cost of production would change with an enterprise they are transitioning. With another farmer she helped her with land planning and market planning. Yet with other farms she helps them with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.

On the actual farming end of it, this can be a very important and helpful step for many farmers to realize there are some options and doors that can open. “We do have service providers in our area who are able to give some direct financial record-keeping analysis or help in creating marketing plans, developing products and enterprises and production techniques and efficiencies but there are not very many people in our area who can help the farmer focus on the whole farm in making decisions in alignment with your values,” says Stevie. “This is something that I have been driven more toward, with HMI and wholefarm planning—which is more than land planning or business planning.”

These conversations are intimate discussions and she has learned a lot of people skills while doing these one on one meetings. “I am not sure if this is something that can be taught through Holistic Management, but it is very necessary--to build trust with the people we work with—to provide individual assistance and not just cookie-cutter assistance,” says Stevie.

“It’s not just a business for them. It’s also someone’s life or legacy, their family members and relationships. It gets pretty intimate, very quickly. This is something that takes a certain amount of finesse and I am enjoying developing this skill.”

Improving Wildlife Habitat with Cattle

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

covering 20 cows.

All of these changes have moved Rancho Tres Papalotes toward their vision of a sustainable and resilient ranch, providing not only employment and business for humans through a commercial ranch, but also an oasis of grassland in a critical grassland bird habitat for thousands of birds and other wildlife. In this way, Enrique and Carolina’s use of Holistic Management has enabled them to create a ripple effect that has spread across thousands of miles and to other lands that are on the flyway of

Enrique has been working hard to improve the herd genetics. The bulls are Angus and Hereford, and he focuses on keeping only the cows that perform, culling strictly. All cows are expected to have a calf each year and culls are sold at the sale barn. They aim for an average cow weight of 350-400 kg (772-882 pounds).

Enrique is proud that the cattle are now more docile than when he first started to manage the ranch as the cattle are moved more frequently and he has been working with his three employees on better livestock handling skills. With improved animal management and genetics, death losses have dropped to 5%. Birthing rates are now 75%. When Enrique started on the ranch birthing rates had been 50% with a continuous breeding program all year long. The breeding season is now three months long with each bull

Javelina.

Javelina and quail are other wildlife that enjoy the improved wildlife habitat on Tres Papalotes.

From the Board Chair

BY WALTER LYNN

Last Saturday, my CrossFit coach, Mike, made a statement that made me think. He said, “In 10 years, it is going to be lonely for you, because all your friends will be dead!” That got me thinking about how it’s important to not only make a commitment to working out, but also connecting with community, particularly the younger generation who will be around for the next couple of decades I’ll probably be around.

I do CrossFit five to six days per week. In my journey, over the last eight years I have lost 80 pounds. Our class is called Longevity and the average age of our class is 71. We have a retired orthodontist who is 79 years old. I have not arrived at that the average age, but I am currently 69 years old. I cannot say enough for what coach Mike has helped me to accomplish.

I did not think it was possible to do some of the things we do and change some of the medical markers used to monitor our own personal health. My diet has changed over the eight-year period. The social aspect of our class is huge! If someone is gone for a few days, someone from my class will be reaching out to check on you. We share our outside interests with each other. We share our recipes or the books we have read. The power of the group and the changes each of us has made is astounding to say the least. What has the physical part of our class and social interaction done for our own well-being?

I try to extend that commitment to social connection with my other passion of regenerative agriculture. For example, when I’m driving at 6:40 a.m. to my CrossFit class, I may be connecting via Bluetooth

GRAPEVINE

New Executive Director for a New Year

It is with great excitement that HMI announces our new Executive Director, Wayne Knight. Wayne will be replacing our current Executive Director, Ann Adams, who will remain on staff as HMI’s Education Director. This transition completes our Executive Director succession plan which the HMI board began three years ago. Wayne will begin his new duties starting January 1, 2021.

Wayne most recently has served as HMI’s Director of Strategic Initiatives and was an internationally-recognized rancher from South Africa as well as a Holistic Management Certified Educator and consultant since 2006. He also served on HMI’s Board of Directors from 2013-2019.

In 2013 Wayne was a runner up for the Peter Edwards Award (Grassland Farmer of the Year) presented by the Grassland Society of Southern Africa (GSSA) to the best conservation farmer/land user in recognition of the sound application and practice of the principles of range and forage science and conservation. His management practices from

with a younger person in production agriculture, like Luke a 32-yearold who stepped away from a secure job with an ag supplier to start his personal journey with a 62-year-old neighbor to diversify their joint farming operations. The older neighbor as a whole has a new view about agriculture and their local communities because of the additional income possibilities. Enterprises are being added and stacked on these regenerative farms. The neighbor has given Luke access to a land base and equipment. It’s a win/win relationship.

I also have connected with a grandfather after CrossFit class earlier in the week. Last Sunday I got out of my house and took a country drive. Because of our current Covid-19 situation, I drove by his farm and didn’t stop. When I called him later, I shared about driving by and he asked if I had seen some new infrastructure. He proceeded to tell me about the enterprise he would be supporting for this high school granddaughter in a new small 1,650 square foot hoop building. His granddaughter definitely has an understanding of the possibilities of high value crops when we chatted. Corn at $4 per bushel and 200 bushels per acre grosses $800 per acre or 1.8 cents per foot. The granddaughter being mindful of diversification would be pushing over $12 per square foot and selling locally. The grandfather was giving access to his granddaughter on his multi-generational homestead.

In 10 years, I hope to still be connecting and sharing with others like I am now and be thinking about the impact of all my decisions holistically. In a recent HMI Board meeting, Australian board member Brian Wehlburg shared how we can routinely ask ourselves what are the social, ecological, and economic impacts of our own business decisions? I think that’s true of all our decisions and greatly appreciate the efforts of my neighbors who are thinking about how to engage the next generation of farmers and ranchers in creative ways.

1997 resulted in a 300% increase in carrying capacity during his 23-year tenure as the land manager on the 9,600-acre Knight Ranch.

Wayne is headquartered in Van Alstyne, Texas and has added a great deal of capacity to HMI’s staff with his expertise and hands-on experience with ranching as well as his international experience in training and consulting. Wayne has been focused on expanding HMI’s key strategic initiatives and engaging stakeholders.

“I’m very excited about all that Wayne has been able to accomplish since he has been on our staff,” says Ann. “Wayne has a remarkable ability to connect with all different types of producers and learn what they need and what motivates them. I have the utmost confidence in his ability to successfully lead us in implementing our 2021–2025 strategic plan. I am also eager to spend more time focused on our educational programming as we engage new customers and clients.”

HMI would like to express its appreciation to Ann for her seven years of service as Executive Director. Ann has steadfastly led HMI to a higher level of Holistic Management practice and implementation than ever before and we’re eternally grateful she stepped up to the Executive Director role when we needed her, and for her decades of work and leadership at HMI.

Reader’s Forum Living With The Land And Not just On The Land

BY JACK VARIAN

So where do I fit in? My journey from living on the land to immersing myself into the land started after attending a three-day seminar. Allan Savory, a gentleman from Zimbabwe, Africa, was offering up a new way to manage a ranch. The year was 1991.

My rebirth as a different kind of a ranch manager came on the last day of Mr. Savory’s Holistic Resource Management presentation when he set forth a new way to make a decision. He said “When you make a decision assume that the decision you are about to make is wrong. For if you assume that it is right, you will never change it.” He then taught me by using the Holistic Management model how to prove that a particular decision is right or wrong by examining what the outcome might be. Are things better? Has the circle of life been kept intact because of my action? How is my quality of life? The hard part comes when a practice or idea can’t pass muster any longer and it must be discarded to be replaced by some new way of doing things and that can be pretty scary.

This new doctrine jolted me to my core because I knew that the things I was doing made little sense, but I didn’t know how to fix

them. Now I had permission to look at all facets of my management practices and then let my imagination run wild in a search for better ways of doing things, like encouraging more kinds of recreation as they passed my holistic goal with flying colors. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is when I started my journey to living with the land and not just on it.

Allan also said “When you decide to leave the traditional ways to manage land, you will become an annoyance to many, by rocking the boat of tradition, in your industry.”

Of the four building blocks of an ecosystem (succession, water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow) the one I want to address today is the “water cycle,” for here the results of increasing water availability is almost immediate as all sorts of critters appear at each new water point.

With the passage of a proposition passed by the California electorate in the 1990s to save the mountain lion making him off limits to hunt. Many of us in the ranching and hunting community predicted that the blacktail deer population would go in the tank as lion numbers increased. And it happened, as I personally saw about a 75% decline in the ranch deer population over the following twenty or so years. It looked like there would be no more Blacktail deer and then who would be next on the mountain lions’ list of what shall I dine on tonight?

Several years ago I had one of those holistic moments when all kinds of ideas entered my mind, and after letting them rummage around

Kiss the Ground Video Review

BY ANN ADAMS

If you are looking for a new movie to share with your friends and family to help them learn more about soil health and its connection to carbon sequestration, I recommend you have them watch “Kiss the Ground” now streaming on Netflix.

“Kiss the Ground”, produced by Josh Tickell, was a Tribeca Film Festival 2020 Official Selection and almost 7 million people have viewed the trailer already. The goal is to reach 10 million viewers, so pass the word about the trailer!

This documentary is narrated by actor Woody Harrelson and features Holistic Management practitioners Gabe Brown from North Dakota and Doniga and Erik Markegard from California, as well as footage of Allan Savory at the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, soil scientists Dr. Kristin Ohlson and Dr. Kris Nichols, and other regenerative agriculture producers.

The goal of the movie is to help the average consumer to better

awhile out comes the answer to solve the mountain lion problem. All life needs three things: food, water, and cover! Supposing I made more water available by building more stock ponds, installing more water troughs, and vastly improving the system to deliver this new water.

Looking back just five years with, I hope, an impartial eye, the results are plain to see that when good drinking water is made available (for all), the results are more of everything. My deer population has been growing steadily each year even though the mountain lion population is also increasing. I attribute this increase in both deer and lion population to the fact that as you add more places to get a drink, the lion can’t cover them all, so the survival rate goes up. And by leaving plenty of grass at all times, even after my cattle graze a pasture, the ground nesting birds are now more prevalent.

I’m not worried anymore about the mountain lion as I believe that there is now a symbiotic relationship between the grazing population and this necessary predator. As I strive to keep an abundance of feed, water and cover on the land, then “the balance of nature” will prevail and I will be living with the land.

See Ya.

—Jack

Jack Varian ranches on the V6 Ranch in Parkfield, California and can be reached at: jovv6ranch@gmail.com.

understand how climate change has been exacerbated by industrial agriculture, and how regenerative agriculture can sequester carbon in the soil so that it becomes the asset we need in the soil rather than the problem it has become by having large quantities of carbon in the atmosphere.

As Ray Archuleta, retired Conservation Agronomist for the NRCS says at the start of the film. “We get the soil right, we can fix a lot of our issues. Healthy soils lead to a healthy plant. Healthy plant, healthy animal, healthy human, healthy water, healthy climate.”

Even if all this information is old news to you, the videography and graphics developed to help people new to these concepts better understand how soil works is well worth the watch. It is always inspiring to see the results and hear the stories of people who care for the land and who have been creative in figuring out how to make regenerative agriculture pay for itself.

To view the trailer or learn more about the movie go to: https:// kissthegroundmovie.com/

PROGRAM ROUNDUP

Online Holistic Land Planning

Seventy-five participants from seven countries participated in the Holistic Land Planning: Grazing Infrastructure and Strategies for Success workshop facilitated by long-time Professional Certified Educator, Larry Dyer this September. This workshop was in conjunction with our 2020 Regenerate Conference which was held virtually this year due to COVID-19.

This four-week course focused on the key holistic land planning design principles and practices to allow participants to more effectively manage all their resources as they explored key infrastructure/land improvement projects for improved return on investment. Participants developed management consideration lists, land plan options, and explored tool options and the return on investment of the different land planning options using the Holistic Management decision making framework and considering how such options will affect land productivity.

After each weekly webinar a guest speaker participated in a Q&A session about various grazing and land planning topics. The guest speaker listed included Certified Educators Kirk Gadzia and Roland Kroos speaking on water management and fencing respectively. We were also joined by Louis Wertz, from Western Landowners Alliance who is also an avid permaculturist, as we well as Casey Holland, an accomplished urban farmer and food advocate in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Special thank you to the Thornburg Foundation for funding this event as well as our sponsor the Western Landowners Alliance.

Participant Results

Urban Edge Pilot Project Report

In 2020, HMI began The Urban Edge Pilot Project, a broad concept for a new model of urban edge based regenerative agriculture. Because

of proximity, we chose to work within the Bernalillo Bosque of New Mexico for this pilot program.

Bernalillo Bosque is a small-walking community, near the Rio Grande within Sandoval County, but not within Bernalillo city limits. Most residents have ¾–3 acres of land, with some agriculture use –chickens, goats, horses, gardens, and orchards. Residents of Bernalillo Bosque vary in age, economic status, and life location with many landowners of retirement age that have raised families in the “Bosque” and have long family histories tied to their lands.

Our goal was to find a young, experienced individual who was self-motivated but lacked land for their farming enterprises to partner with Kirk (a long time Holistic Management Certified Educator) & Tamara Gadzia to begin this project. We were also planning to have this individual connect with other landowners, especially those applying for agricultural exemptions for tax purposes, in the neighborhood who have underutilized plots, fallow land, fruit trees that overproduce, bees, berries, chickens, pruning, milk cows etc. who need help managing their agricultural land to create a mutually beneficial partnership. They would create individual enterprise contracts with each landowner outlining how they plan to use the land and the soil/land health goals for each property.

This year was unique for many reasons but three things unexpectedly changed the way this program played out. The first was our ability to find the ideal farmer to participate in this project. Because of the timing, when we began searching almost everyone we spoke with was already set for their farming season and taking on an extra project was out of the question. The second was the late freeze. We had originally thought that a good starting point for integrating the farmer into the neighborhood would be through helping to harvest all the fruit trees but the late freeze meant no fruit. The third challenge was COVID-19. Ideally we would have been able to connect with the neighbors and create more of a community building opportunity around this project and around regenerative agriculture pulling in their shared resources, knowledge and time, but because of social distancing restrictions and a general hesitation to engage with new people, it proved to be very difficult to engage the neighbors.

In April we were connected with Sage & Andrea of Tierra Sagrada Farm. They live within walking distance of the Gadzias and were eager to partner with them and put the Gadzia’s two-acre pasture into production through pastured poultry. After a few initial planning meetings, they set off right away with building the tractors and getting the birds ordered and out on the land. Kirk and Tamara worked with them to help set goals, analyze enterprises, and develop excel sheets to better manage the flock, their stats and the daily move schedule.

They were able to invite some folks to help with the chicken processing days which was our only real opportunity for community involvement because of the previously mentioned challenges. From

“We didn’t just become better farmers,we became better people.”

—Sage Joseph

Certified Educators

The following Certified Educators listed have been trained to teach and coach individuals in Holistic Management. On a yearly basis, Certified Educators renew their agreement to be affiliated with HMI. This agreement requires their commitment to practice Holistic Management in their own lives and to seek out opportunities for staying current with the latest developments in Holistic Management.

UNITED STATES

Kirk Gadzia

Bernalillo 505/263-8677 (c) • kirk@rmsgadzia.com

Jeff Goebel Belen

541/610-7084 • goebel@aboutlistening.com

* Katherine Napper-Ottmers

Las Vegas 505/225-6481 • katherineottmers@icloud.com NEW YORK

* Erica Frenay

Brooktondale 607/342-3771 (c) info@shelterbeltfarm.com

Guy Glosson Snyder 806/237-2554

glosson@caprock-spur.com

Kathy Harris

Holistic Management International Dallas/Fort Worth 214/417-6583

kathyh@holisticmanagement.org

Tracy Litle Orange Grove 361/537-3417 (c) tjlitle@hotmail.com

Peggy Maddox

CALIFORNIA

* Lee Altier College of Agriculture, CSU Chico 530/636-2525 • laltier@csuchico.edu

Owen Hablutzel Los Angeles 310/567-6862 go2owen@gmail.com

Richard King Petaluma 707/217-2308 (c) rking1675@gmail.com

Doniga Markegard

Half Moon Bay 650/670-7984 Doniga@markegardfamily.com

* Kelly Mulville Paicines 707/431-8060 • kmulville@gmail.com

Don Nelson Red Bluff 208/301-5066 • nelson-don1@hotmail.com

Rob Rutherford San Luis Obispo 805/550-4858 (c) robtrutherford@gmail.com

COLORADO

* Joel Benson Buena Vista 719/221-1547 joel@paratuinstitute.com

Cindy Dvergsten

Dolores 970/882-4222 • wnc@gobrainstorm.net

Tim McGaffic

Dolores 808/936-5749 • tim@timmcgaffic.com

* Katie Belle Miller Calhan 970/310-0852 heritagebellefarms@gmail.com

KANSAS

William Casey

Erie 620/ 423-2842 bill.caseyag@gmail.com

MICHIGAN

Larry Dyer Petoskey 231/881-2784 (c) ldyer3913@gmail.com

MISSISSIPPI

* Preston Sullivan Meadville 601/384-5310 (h) 601/835-6124 (c) prestons@telepak.net

MONTANA

Roland Kroos Bozeman 406/581-3038 (c) • kroosing@msn.com

* Cliff Montagne Montana State University Bozeman 406/599-7755 (c) • montagne@montana.edu

NEBRASKA

* Paul Swanson Hastings 402/463-8507 • 402/705-1241 (c) pswanson3@unl.edu

Ralph Tate Papillion 402/250-8981 (c) • tater2d2@cox.net

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Seth Wilner Newport 603/863-9200 (w) seth.wilner@unh.edu

NEW MEXICO

Ann Adams Holistic Management International Albuquerque 505/842-5252 ext 5 anna@holisticmanagement.org

Christina Allday-Bondy Edgewood 512/658-2051 christina.alldaybondy@gmail.com

AUSTRALIA

Judi Earl Coolatai, NSW 61-409-151-969 judi_earl@bigpond.com

Graeme Hand Franklin, Tasmania 61-4-1853-2130 • graemehand9@gmail.com

Dick Richardson Mt. Pleasant, SA 61-4-2906-9001 dick@dickrichardson.com.au

* Jason Virtue Cooran QLD 61-4-27 199 766 Jason@landlifeeducation.com.au

Brian Wehlburg

Kindee NSW 61-0408-704-431 brian@insideoutsidemgt.com.au

CANADA

Don Campbell Meadow Lake, SK 306-236-6088 doncampbell@sasktel.net

* Craig Leggett Chestertown 518/491-1979 • craigrleggett@gmail.com

Elizabeth Marks

Chatham 518/567-9476 (c) elizabeth_marks@hotmail.com

Phillip Metzger Norwich 607/316-4182 • pmetzger17@gmail.com

NORTH DAKOTA

* Joshua Dukart

Hazen 701/870-1184 • joshua_dukart@yahoo.com

OREGON

Angela Boudro

Central Point 541/ 890-4014 • angelaboudro@gmail.com

SOUTH DAKOTA

* Randal Holmquist

Mitchell 605/730-0550 • randy@heartlandtanks.com

TEXAS

* Lisa Bellows

North Central Texas College

Gainesville 940/736-3996 (c) • lbellows@nctc.edu

Deborah Clark

Henrietta 940/328-5542 deborah@birdwellandclarkranch.com

Blain Hjertaas Redvers, SK 306/452-7723 • bhjer@sasktel.net

Brian Luce Ponoka, AB 403/783-6518 lucends@cciwireless.ca

Tony McQuail Lucknow, ON 519/528-2493 tonymcquail@gmail.com

Kelly Sidoryk Blackroot, AB 780/872-2585 (c) kelly.sidoryk@gmail.com

FINLAND

Tuomas Mattila Pusula 358-407432412 tuomas.j.mattila@gmail.com

NAMIBIA

Usiel Seuakouje Kandjii Windhoek 264-812840426 kandjiiu@gmail.com

Hermleigh 325/226-3042 (c) westgift@hughes.net

* CD Pounds Fruitvale 214/568-3377 • cdpounds@live.com

Peggy Sechrist Fredericksburg 830/456-5587 (c) peggysechrist@gmail.com

WASHINGTON DC Christine C. Jost Washington DC 773/706-2705 • christinejost42@gmail.com

WISCONSIN

* Larry Johnson Madison 608/665-3835 • larrystillpointfarm@gmail.com

* Laura Paine Columbus 608/338-9039 (c) • lkpaine@gmail.com

For more information about or application forms for the HMI’s Certified Educator Training Programs, contact Ann Adams or visit our website: www.holisticmanagement.org.

* Colin Nott

Windhoek

264-81-2418778 (c) canott@iafrica.com.na

Wiebke Volkmann

Windhoek 264-81-127-0081 wiebke@afol.com.na

NEW ZEALAND

* John King Christchurch 64-276-737-885 john@succession.co.nz

SOUTH AFRICA

Wayne Knight

Mokopane +27-82-805-3274 (c) wayne@theknights.za.net

Jozua Lambrechts

Somerset West, Western Cape +27-83-310-1940 • jozua@websurf.co.za

* Ian Mitchell-Innes

Ladysmith, Kwa-Zulu Natal +27-83-262-9030 ian@mitchell-innes.co.za

These associate educators provide educational services to their communities and peer groups.

Twin Mountain Fence Solar Energizer (S300)

Featuring

Fence 3-year guarantee, including lightning. Order online and receive a FREE 5VM fence tester! ($28.50 value)

Use Code HM20 at checkout!

Resource Management Services, LLC

Kirk L. Gadzia, Certified Educator PO Box 1100

Bernalillo, NM 87004 505-263-8677

kirk@rmsgadzia.com

www.rmsgadzia.com

CORRAL DESIGNS

Pasture Scene Investigation

How can RMS, LLC help you?

On-Site Consulting: All aspects of holistic management, including financial, ecological and human resources.

Training Events: Regularly scheduled and customized training sessions provided in a variety of locations.

Ongoing Support: Follow-up training sessions and access to continued learning opportunities and developments.

Land Health Monitoring: Biological monitoring of rangeland and riparian ecosystem health.

Property Assessment: Land health and productivity assessment with recommended solutions.

World Famous Dr. Grandin

By World Famous Dr. Grandin Originator of Curved Ranch Corrals

The wide curved Lane makes filling the crowding tub easy. Includes detailed drawings for loading ramp, V chute, round crowd pen, dip vat, gates and hinges. Plus cell center layouts and layouts compatible with electronic sorting systems. Articles on cattle behavior. 27 corral layouts. $55. Low Stress Cattle Handling Video $59. Send checks/money order to:

GRANDIN LIVESTOCK SYSTEMS

2918 Silver Plume Dr., Unit C-3 Fort Collins, CO 80526 970/229-0703

www.grandin.com

“Bud Williams” Livestock Marketing & Proper Stockmanship

with Richard McConnell & Tina Williams

Learn how good stockmanship can make your livestock handling experiences

how livestock marketing based on today’s price (no crystal ball) can help you realize

May 25-26 — 2 Day Stockmanship only, Dickinson, ND

May 30-June 1 — 3 Day Marketing/ Stockmanship, Wawota, SK

Coming also to Alberta, Wyoming, and Iowa!

www.handnhandlivestocksolutions.com

info@handnhandlivestocksolutions.com 417-327-6500

Become an HMI Certified Educator

Have you had Holistic Management® training?

Are you already consulting or providing training?

If you have written documentation of your Holistic Management practice and of the work you have done with others, we would like to help you get to the next level by becoming an HMI Certified Educator.

For more information: Ann Adams

anna@holisticmanagement.org www.holisticmanagement.org/ ce-training-program/

Software

• User-friendly excel-based interface

• Let the computer do the math while you plan

• Easy SAU and ADA calculations

• Account for multiple herds

• Grazing Manual hyperlinks

• Livestock and Land Performance Worksheet

• And many more features

Next Step

Holistic Management®

Comprehensive Training

One-on-one learning all at a fraction of the cost of a consultant!

Introduction to Holistic Management®

Financial Planning

Grazing Planning

Cropping Planning

Marketing/Business Planning

Biological Monitoring

Land Planning

$700 per module or 5 for $3150 scholarships available bonus materials

— Arnold Mattson, Agri-Environment Services Branch, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

TO LEARN MORE or TO ORDER:

www.holisticmanagement.org/ next-step/

Rangeland can provide an abundance of plant varieties for livestock nutrition. But what about the more “developed” pastures and hay meadows? Soils tests from all types of livestock producers show 95+% of all such soils do not have the correct nutrient levels to provide the best nutrition for livestock.

You can change that! Choose an area, split it and soil test both sides separately. Test your hay or forage from both sides too. Treat one side as normal. On the other side, correct the fertility based on soil tests using the Kinsey/Albrecht fertility program.

Test feed quality from both sides again next year. Take soil tests again and treat accordingly. Depending on nutrients requirements it may take two or three years to prove most profitable. Test each year and, as fertility needs are met, feed value and yield tend to increase for all three years.

Increased yields will more than pay for the investment with increased feed quality as a bonus. Prove it for yourself!

“This tool has already given us a many fold return beyond our initial investment and we have just begun to use it.”

please send address corrections before moving so that we do not incur unnecessary postal fees

DEVELOPMENT CORNER

Greenacres Scholarships Deliver Impact

In 2018, the Greenacres Foundation funded $20,000 worth of scholarships for HMI’s Regenerative Agriculture Scholarship Fund. To date those scholarships were used to train 60 people and support them in improving their business and land management practices through our online classes and distance learning in on-farm/ ranch decision-making and goal setting, cropping planning, grazing planning, and financial planning as well as providing additional training to help those interested in educating others develop their skills in HMI’s train the trainer program.

using sheep as a tool to heal the land. This is a huge achievement for me, because I want to improve the overall ecosystem health of Carabane. The agroforestry approach I used so far is weak in impact and high in cost and labor. The HMI approach seems to be a better option.”

Gena Pinheiro—Getting Started Introduction to Holistic Management Whole Farm/Ranch Planning

“One of the biggest things we gained was a paradigm shift. We no longer see ourselves as farmers, but rather stewards of the resources that have been put into our care – resource managers. The course gave us an introduction to understanding how nature functions and how we could harness that understanding to better care for our resources. Before this course, we didn’t always take the big picture into account before making decisions and now, it’s always center stage. Our hope is that we can continue building on the plethora of tools we’ve acquired through this course, to not only improve our personal and farm life, but also help others do the same.”

HMI is grateful to the Greenacres Foundation for their gift of these scholarship funds and to our many donors who also contribute to HMI’s Regenerative Agriculture Scholarship Fund.

Greenacres Scholarship Recipient Reflections

Below are a few reflections that some of HMI’s scholarship recipients have shared about their HMI training and how these scholarships have made a difference in their lives and their community:

Mika Diop—Holistic Grazing Planning

“I learned/ I am learning how to get the animals to the right place at the right time for the right reasons. So I do actually know how to start

Rianda

Brooks—Getting Started Introduction to Holistic Management Whole Farm/Ranch Planning

“The introductory course provided by HMI provided me with the rubric I needed to determine and articulate my needs, goals and vision. This course brought me a sense of clarity and gave me powerful tools for processing and assessment. I am now equipped with the knowledge and tools required to confidently develop a comprehensive plan for problem-solving and meeting goals whether regarding agriculture, or my work to advocate for environmental justice at the intersections of equity, health and climate resilience. I made a life-changing decision when I applied for the Holistic Management cohort, the effects of which will be felt by future generations of farmers in my family and in my community.”

Our Training Impact

HMI has measured post-program results achieved by our program participants and are pleased to report the following results as a reflection of the impact our training has provided to these participants:

• 54% trainees experienced increased net profit on an average of 39%

• 59% had increased forage and 47% had reduced feed costs

• 71% had improved herd health

Providing scholarships increases the number of people practicing regenerative agriculture and keeping working lands working.

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employee, producing 200 to 250 broilers per week, all year round. As well as running all the marketing and online orders, he spends many hours a week driving his van in and out of Madrid city to deliver his chickens to his clients at a very affordable price. Hopefully he will soon be able to delegate that chore, to spend more time with his family and provide more training.

The Association of Regenerative Agriculture organizes trainings at local level by demand (for farming schools and cooperatives, groups of farmers, local authorities...), putting together programs with local trainers wherever possible, and promotes these visions and practices in different media, online and offline. We generate freelyaccessible content and participate in all sorts of speaking events, meetings, congresses and wherever growing interest takes us. Our biggest dates in 2020 will be the 4th Regenerative Grazing Gathering to be held on September 23–26 in Zamora.

Celebrating Life and Hope

The day after my inspiring visit to Sandaraca in 2018 that confirmed so many things was International Woman’s Day. José Luis threw a party for the 15 employees on the farm, with cakes and a celebratory sign on the wall: “Thank you all for participating together in the regeneration of our Mother Earth.”

I sit here writing these words, exactly two years later, full of gratitude in my heart for farmers like José Luis and for all the women who support and encourage their men, often bringing in a salary that allows them to “explore this craziness”, as well as caring for the family and homes. Families like José Luis and Isabel, with their drive and passion, and their charming two daughters who already know how to move an electric fence and love to sit amongst the chickens, are the ones who ignite and keep alive the hope that we can change the world, in so many ways, one farm at a time, at an increasing pace, as the planet now needs urgently. We can do it, and we can show how. As the Poultree website states so clearly: “Welcome to the farming of the future.”

Ana Digon is the President of the Spanish Association of Regenerative Agriculture and can be reached at: coordinacion@agriculturaregenerativa.es

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the end of May through September there was a processing day scheduled for every two-three weeks and Sage and Kirk taught the volunteers how to participate and contribute to the processing.

Sage and Kirk built four chicken tractors together which they plan to use on neighboring pasture land in the future. There raised and sold a total of 180 birds on the 2.5 acres of pasture. They engaged numerous neighbors in the pastured poultry processing, but they still need to refine this system so that they can sustain the workload and be able to make it a profitable enough enterprise when they have to trade birds for processing help. HMI will be offering more Holistic Management training to Sage and Andrea and through our online training as well as using our online training of new farmers located in urban areas to be

Next year Sage & Andrea are planning to continue working with Kirk & Tamara and plan to begin to engage more of their neighbors, perhaps finding a young intern from the neighborhood to assist them. They are not only planning to produce pasture raised poultry again with the chicken tractors on their property and the Gadzia’s property, but will put energy towards working with neighboring landowners to incorporate other potential enterprises. They are also planning to dive deeper into biological monitoring and baseline monitoring of the soil health on all properties managed by the team.

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• 59% had a longer grazing season

Scholarships Provide a Lasting Impact

At HMI we believe that scholarships provide a lasting impact as these producers continue to improve land health and the profitability of their businesses. In doing so, they provide attendant ecosystem benefits to their community while staying in business and keeping working lands work.

If you would like to give to HMI’s scholarship fund, go to: https:// bit.ly/HMIscholarship