In Practice a publication of Holistic Management International M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 6
NUMBER 167
W W W. H O L I S T I C M A N A G E M E N T. O R G
Cultivating Community: Land. Food. Health. BY ANN ADAMS
s we've been working on HMI's 2016 Gathering and developing our new website, we've been pondering a lot about the word cultivate and how it relates to HMI. In fact, we decided to name HMI's 2016 Gathering “Cultivating Community: Land. Food. Health.” One of the key outcomes we want from any of our events and programs is that anyone who attends feels welcomed and included in a growing Joe Morris will be speaking community of people who at the Gathering. care about the land, and that they see regenerative agriculture as a critical tool for cultivating healthy land and thriving communities. At HMI, we believe that Holistic Management is a tool that helps people do that, as people are better able to discern the values they hold and develop the behaviors and systems to help them create the life they want. And, we are working hard to create a conference
A
Save the Date! HMI 2016 Conference October 14-16, 2016
At the beautiful Paicines Ranch in Central California 20+ speakers
Details will be emailed soon. To get on HMI’s email list, contact hmi@holisticmanagement.org
that will attract a diverse audience that will come to learn together and share their perspectives. If you look at the definition of cultivate, you find: 1. prepare and use (land) for crops or gardening. 2. raise or grow (plants), synonyms are grow, raise, rear, plant, sow 3. grow or maintain (living cells or tissue) in culture. 4. try to acquire or develop (a quality, sentiment, or skill). 5. try to win the friendship or favor of (someone). 6. apply oneself to improving or developing (one's mind or manners) with synonyms of educate, train, develop, and enrich From my perspective, as an organization, HMI is cultivating a community of land stewards who believe that we can create healthy food for a growing world. That community cultivates the land, not in the narrow sense of tilling, but in the broader sense of growing, preparing the land, as well as cultivating our relationship with the land, as collaborators. Likewise, we are cultivating ourselves, developing our abilities as global citizens. It is through that commitment to
To heal the land we need to cultivate a community of land stewards. Whether using grazing groups/ management clubs (see page 2) to share knowledge or building good teams on your farms or ranch as demonstrated at the Winecup-Gamble Ranch on page 9, investing in improved management skills is a gift that keeps on giving.
increasing our self-awareness so that we can more effectively tackle the task of what we need to learn next to help us and our community move forward. There are so many regenerative practices out there to help improve land health, but also to help people communicate better, function better as teams, develop business systems to improve profitability. You'll learn about a lot of these practices at the conference. There is always something to learn, and the more we share in that knowledge, the deeper our understanding and practice. I've worked with a lot of different practitioners and educators over the years, and consistently I have heard that they believe that the act of teaching or articulating what they have learned from their years of practice helps them improve their understanding and practice. This is the concept of reciprocal altruism that is an essential component of cultivating community. Our brains are hardwired for social relationships, and as a species we have evolved by learning that providing help to someone in our “tribe” will result in the eventual benefit outweighing the immediate cost. In other words, if we share information with others about what we have learned, not only does it often help us learn something more, that person will then be able to function at a higher level for the good of the community.
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CONTINUED ON PAGE 3
Building People Skills