Courtney White

Recently, an acquaintance asked me what I did for a living. After explaining that I ran a nonprofit that worked with ranchers and conservationists in the Southwest on land health and sustainability issues, he said summarily, “Oh, you run a Think Tank.” Without pausing, I replied “No, Quivira is a ‘Do’ Tank,” which elicited a nod and smile.

Afterwards, I thought about this brief exchange. What did I mean? Partly, I was being provocative – I believe the world needs another Think Tank likes it needs another TV pundit or Beltway lobbyist. I wanted him to understand that we are an organization that implements new ideas and not merely promotes them. But he wasn’t so far off either. Like a Think Tank, the Quivira Coalition has prospected for innovative ideas that solve problems, in this case “from-the-ground-up.” But we don’t just talk about “feeling the soil between our toes,” as Aldo Leopold once described the purpose of conservation. We actually get dirty – which is the only way to understand if ideas actually work.

Since our founding in 1997, we’ve explored many strategies that try to build resilience, enduring our share of failures along with successes. Initially, we focused on land health, collaboration, and progressive livestock management. Over time, our work expanded to incorporate riparian restoration, grassfed beef production, and youth mentorship. In the near future, we will try to integrate all of these ideas into mitigation and adaptation strategies for climate change, which, along with resource depletion, are the two great conservation challenges of the 21st century. Meeting these twin challenges means doing so in a way that creates a resilient fabric that can bend without breaking under the expanding stress we’re beginning to feel. And the only real way to do that is by testing this fabric in the real world – not just in a lab, classroom or think tank.

At the same time, Quivira has worked hard to disseminate both the innovative ideas of others and the lessons learned from our experience through a vigorous outreach program. I guess that makes us an “Information” Tank too. But everything that we have “informed” people about has been vetted through on-the-ground implementation of one sort or another.

What follows is a reflection from Quivira’s experience to date – what has worked and what has not. It is important to note that most of these ideas and practices came originally from the fringe – where innovation invariably starts – and were developed primarily to break through paradigmatic logjams in the mainstream. Quivira didn’t invent these ideas, but we were among the first organizations to give them a trial run.

The Radical Center

We endeavored to create a common ground where ranchers, conservationists, scientists and others could meet to explore their shared interests rather than argue their differences.

The term “radical center” was coined by rancher Bill McDonald in the mid-1990s to describe an emerging consensus-based approach to land management challenges in the West. At the time, the conflict between ranchers and environmentalists had reached a fever pitch, with federal agencies and others caught in the crossfire. This conflict was one of the reasons why the West had balkanized, or separated, into ideological fiefdoms, an important consequence of which was gridlock where it hurt the most – on the ground. Very little progress was being made on necessary projects, such as lighting prescribed fires, improving the chances of endangered species on private land, or helping ranchers fend off the predatory interests of real estate developers. Instead, it was a war of attrition, with the only real winners being those who had no interest in the long-term environmental or social health of the region.

The Radical Center was a deliberate push-back against this destructive process of balkanization. It was “radical” (whose dictionary definition means “root”) because it challenged various orthodoxies at work at the time, including the conventional belief that conservation and ranching were part of a “zero sum” game – that one could only advance if the other retreated. There were plenty of examples to the contrary, as Bill McDonald and the group he helped to co-found, the Malpai Borderlands Group, demonstrated. Success, however, also meant working in the “center” – which refers to the pragmatic, middle-ground between extremes. It meant partnerships, respect and trust. But most of all, the “center” meant action – a conservation plan signed, a prescribed fire lit, a workshop held, a hand shook. Words were nice, but working in the radical center meant walking the talk.

In 1997, two Sierra Club activists – Barbara Johnson and myself – and rancher Jim Winder decided to put the radical center to a test in New Mexico by founding the nonprofit Quivira Coalition. Jim had an idea: step outside the continuum of brawling between ranchers and environmentalists and create a “third way” that emphasized progressive cattle and land management practices. We called it the “New Ranch” and invited any rancher, conservationist, agency person, scientist or member of the public who was interested in “sharing common-sense solutions to the rangeland conflict” to join us. We took a public vow of no legislation and no litigation. We promised ourselves not to waste energy trying to pry open closed minds. We focused instead on those who literally wanted to start over at the grass and the roots.

Quivira was different from other radical centrist groups at the time, principally because we weren’t confined to a watershed or a bounded region. We went wherever we could find “eager learners” willing to try new ideas. As a result, we embarked on a lengthy series of workshops, tours, outdoor classrooms, conferences, clinics and public speaking engagements around the Southwest. In the process, we helped to define what the radical center in the so-called “grazing debate” actually meant, culminating in an “Invitation to Join the Radical Center” signed by twenty ranchers, conservationists and others in 2003 that we hoped would signal the end of conflict and the beginning of a era of peace.

Here’s an excerpt and a list of its radical centrist conditions:

“We therefore reject the acrimony of past decades that has dominated debate over livestock grazing on public lands, for it has yielded little but hard feelings among people who are united by their common love of land and who should be natural allies. We pledge our efforts to form the “Radical Center” where:

“The ranching community accepts and aspires to a progressively higher standard of environmental performance;

“The environmental community resolves to work constructively with the people who occupy and use the lands it would protect;

“The personnel of federal and state land management agencies focus not on the defense of procedure but on the production of tangible results;

“The research community strives to make their work more relevant to broader constituencies;

“The land grant colleges return to their original charters, conducting and disseminating information in ways that benefit local landscapes and the communities that depend on them;

“The consumer buys food that strengthens the bond between their own health and the health of the land;

“The public recognizes and rewards those who maintain and improve the health of all land; and

“All participants learn better how to share both authority and responsibility.

Land Health

We directed a series of innovative riparian restoration projects.

The term land health was coined in the 1930s by the great conservationist Aldo Leopold. He was referring to the ecological processes that perpetuate life – the processes of biological self-renewal that ensure fertility among communities of plants and animals, including the proper cycling of water and nutrients in the soil. Metaphorically, he sometimes likened land health to a self-perpetuating engine or organism whose parts – soil, water, plants, animals and other elements of the ecosystem – when unimpaired and functioning smoothly, would endlessly renew themselves. Leopold frequently employed words such as stability, integrity, and order to describe this “land mechanism,” drawing an image of nature that when healthy operated smoothly and ran in top shape.

By contrast, land became “sick” when its basic parts fell into disorder or broke down. This wasn’t just a scientific theory. Leopold began to recognize signs of land illness almost from the start of his career as a U.S. Forest Service ranger in 1909. They included abnormal rates of soil erosion, loss of plant fertility, excessive floods, the spread of plant and animal pests, the replacement of “useful” by “useless” vegetation, and the endangerment of key animal species. These examples of disorder in the land mechanism, whether caused by natural catastrophe or by human interference, often led to adverse consequences for wildlife and human populations alike. That’s because when nature’s ability to regenerate itself over time is damaged – what Leopold called the “derangement” of nature’s health – its ability to provide plants for wildlife or food for humans breaks down, as well.

After World War II, the rapidly emerging science of ecology refined Leopold’s ideas. The engine and body metaphors were replaced by a dynamic, even chaotic, vision of nature as ceaselessly changing, subject to bouts of disruption and stress. This revised idea of ecological health still focused on self-renewal and self-organization, but now scientists saw nature as fluid, not static; complex, not reductionistic. This view employed a new set of terms and concepts, including resilience, historic range of variability, sustainability, diversity, and perturbation.

Moreover, it cast human impact on ecological processes in a new light. Rather than simply upsetting the balance of nature, our activities could now be evaluated according to their roles in the processes of stress, adaptation, restoration and recovery. Those activities that encouraged resilience, for example, could be considered to be promoting land health, while those activities that reduced an ecosystem’s ability to recover from a disturbance could be considered deleterious.

A further refinement of the land health idea began in 1994 with an effort by the National Research Council to address the persistent disagreement among range scientists, environmentalists, ranchers and public agency personnel about the health of the nation’s 770 million acres of rangelands. Not only was there a substantial lack of data on the condition of the land itself, but there was also an important lack of agreement among range experts on how and what to monitor. These voids contributed significantly to the acrimonious debate raging at the time about livestock grazing on the nation’s public lands. Were rangelands improving or degrading? Everyone had an opinion, which was precisely the problem.

A collaborative effort was launched by an interagency team of government scientists to develop both qualitative and quantitative criteria for assessing and measuring the health of the land. This effort reached fruition in 2000 when the team settled on seventeen indicators of land health, grouped into three categories:

Soil stability. The capacity of a site to limit redistribution and loss of soil resources (including nutrients and organic matter) by wind and water. It is a measurement of soil movement.

Watershed function. The capacity of the site to capture, store, and safely release water from rainfall and snowmelt; to resist reduction in this capacity; and to recover this capacity following degradation. It is a measurement of plant-soil water relationships.

Biotic integrity. The capacity of a site to support characteristic functional and structural communities in the context of normal variability; to resist the loss of this function and structure due to a disturbance; and to recover from such disturbance. It is a measurement of vegetative health.

All of this important work set the foundation for a variety of land management practices that aimed at both maintaining land health and restoring it. We now had clear goals to shoot for, methods by which we could measure success, and a vocabulary to use collaboratively.

For Quivira, the opportunity to implement an on-the-ground land health restoration program began in 2000 when we met riparian specialist Bill Zeedyk. Soon, we were working together on a creek project at the Williams Ranch, in western Catron County, NM. We employed Zeedyk’s innovative restoration methodology, which he calls Induced Meandering (for details, see Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels by Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier, published by the Quivira Coalition in 2009).

Within a few years we had been awarded two substantial grants from the EPA’s 319 program (Clean Water Act) to conduct riparian restoration work on the Dry Cimarron River, in the northeastern NM, and on Comanche Creek, within the Valle Vidal unit of the Carson National Forest. Both grants also contained funding for a series of educational workshops, publications, and conference symposia on diverse land health and restoration topics. Eventually, we expanded our restoration work to a variety of public and private landscapes across the Southwest.

Getting into the riparian restoration business was not an unprecedented step for the Quivira Coalition. Our “poop-and-stomp” project on the Nacimiento copper mine near Cuba, New Mexico, in 1999-2000, which was directed by rancher Terry Wheeler and employed his cattle (which he called FLOSBies – Four-Legged Organic Soil Builders) was an novel approach to land restoration on highly degraded land. We also created a “land health” map of the Valle Grande Grassbank, employing the seventeen indicators of health mentioned earlier, in order to prioritize potential restoration treatments on the allotment. But the scale at which we entered into the restoration work with Bill Zeedyk was much more widespread.

We learned two big lessons from all this work: (1) land health can be improved and maintained relatively easily and at a low cost if you “think like a creek and let nature do the work,” as Bill Zeedyk likes to put it; and (2) almost anyone can do it. The key is understanding natural processes, such how water wants to flow across the land, the role of riparian vegetation in soil stability, and how grazing animals will use the land. One doesn’t need a Ph.D. to understand these processes. Bill Zeedyk doesn’t have one, nor do nearly all the people involved in Quivira’s restoration projects. What is required is a working knowledge of land function, which anyone can pick up with the right amount of training, study and in-field experience.

Many farmers and ranchers intuitively understand how land works. What they often lack (if they are open-minded) is the technical knowledge of restoration. But many conservationists have picked up this knowledge quickly as well – in fact, most of the volunteers, as well as the contractors, on our restoration projects have an urban/conservationist background.

And this knowledge works. Our restoration projects have been highly successful, particularly in their goal of improving and maintaining land health. In case after case, we have documented the recovery of riparian health as a result of Induced Meandering and other methodologies, including the repair of low-standard ranch roads. This, in turn, helped break logjams.

Initially, Zeedyk’s ideas were met with resistance from certain agency personnel and some academics, but over time his high success rate on-the-ground convinced most critics to change their tune. Quivira helped, not only by organizing the restoration work itself, but also by providing workshops, symposia, training seminars and other educational opportunities for the curious and the eager. This helped to change the culture of restoration work in the region. Once considered an outlier activity in itself, restoration has now become quite mainstream, and innovators like Bill Zeedyk and his trainees, once marginal, are now in wide demand.

In sum, the details of land health and the restoration “toolbox” to improve and maintain it are now well-developed, thanks to many people and a lot of hard work. What remains to be accomplished, however, is making this work economic – i.e., figuring out a way to compensate landowners and others for improving land health. This will be critical to efforts to manage land for climate change and resource depletion, which will, frankly, require paychecks and entrepreneurial energy to be effective. We can now confront the West’s legacy of degraded riparian areas and rangelands proactively. Hopefully, we’ll soon be able to do so profitably as well.

In sum, the Quivira experience to date demonstrates that building resilience on private and public lands is possible, practical, and potentially scalable. Much of the toolbox necessary to manage the West for multiple pressing challenges has been developed and field-tested by many individuals and organizations across the region. But two important elements are lacking in order to get things moving faster: first, an economic model that values regeneration and restoration over exploitation and waste; and second, strong leadership at the county, state, and federal levels to break through Business-as-Usual paradigms and policies. Both have proven to be frustratingly elusive, but I am hopeful that as more and more organizations take the lead by “doing” and “informing,” others will follow and contribute their own innovation and entrepreneurial energy.

Most importantly, I see a lot of hope in the Next Generation. I believe that young people today are much more open to collaboration, innovation, and the implementation of “back-to-the-future” ideas than the current generation of environmental, agricultural, and scientific leaders. They have also come of age during a time when a crisis such as climate change is part of their everyday zeitgeist, which, combined with their technological savvy, means they are prepared for modern challenges in a way their parents probably are not. Their interests are also more agrarian than their predecessors, especially their interest in food systems, which means they have a lot of “soil between their toes” already. This may be one reason why they are more interested in pragmatic solutions to problems rather than finger-pointing or ideological posturing. In any case, we should do everything we can to teach, encourage and mentor this new generation of leaders. If anyone can build resilience in the West for the long run, they can.

Courtney White is Executive Director of the Quivira Coalition.

Print PDF

Quivira does this via four broad initiatives: 1) improving land health; 2) sharing knowledge and innovation; 3) building local capacity; and 4) strengthening diverse relationships.

Quivira’s projects include: an annual conference, a ranch apprenticeship program, a long-running riparian restoration effort in northern New Mexico on behalf of the Rio Grande Cutthroat trout, a capacity-building collaboration with the Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation, various outreach activities, and the promotion of the idea of a carbon ranch, which aims to mitigate climate change through food and land stewardship.

In 1997, the organization’s goal was to expand an emerging “radical center” among ranchers, conservationists, scientists and public land managers by focusing on progressive cattle management, collaboration, riparian and upland restoration, and improved land health. The original mission was “to demonstrate that ecologically sensitive ranch management and economically robust ranches can be compatible.”

They called this approach The New Ranch and described it as a movement that “operates on the principle that the natural processes that sustain wildlife habitat, biological diversity and functioning watersheds are the same processes that make land productive for livestock.” The principles of The New Ranch were disseminated through workshops, lectures, publications, grants, consultations, collaborative land and water demonstration projects, a journal (the New Ranch Network), a small loan program, and an annual conference.

From 1997 to the present, at least 1 million acres of rangeland, 30 linear miles of riparian drainages and 15,000 people have directly benefited from the Quivira’s collaborative efforts. Quivira has also organized over 100 educational events on topics as diverse as drought management, riparian restoration, fixing ranch roads, conservation easements, reading the landscape, monitoring, water harvesting, low-stress livestock handling, grassbanks, and grassfed beef; published numerous newsletters, journals, bulletins, field guides and books, including a rangeland health monitoring protocol. Their most recent publication is a 258-page manual on riparian restoration titled Let the Water Do the Work.

From 2006-2010 Quivira managed the innovative Valle Grande Grassbank, located near Santa Fe, eventually becoming producers of local grassfed beef.

But more importantly, the Quivira Coalition lit sparks across the West that have grown over time into small bonfires of change. Quivira has convinced ranchers to adopt conservation practices, environmentalists to value ranching, agencies to be more open to innovations, scientists to get more involved, and the public to support all of the above.

One response to the multiple challenges of the 21^st century is to increase ecological and economic resilience of communities and landscapes. The dictionary defines resilience as “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” In ecology, it refers to the capacity of plant and animal populations to handle disruption and degradation caused by fire, flood, drought, insect infestation or other disturbance. Resilience also describes a community’s ability to adjust to change, such as shifting economic conditions, or a steady rise in temperatures.

To help address these concerns, in the fall of 2007 the Quivira Coalition board adopted a new mission statement: to build resilience by fostering ecological, economic and social health on western landscapes through education, innovation, collaboration and progressive public and private land stewardship.

Print PDF

Featured Speakers:

Bill McKibben – Author and Environmentalist – Vermont

Bill is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature (1989). He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him “the planet’s best green journalist.” In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William deBuys – Author and Conservationist – El Valle, NM

Bill deBuys’ books include A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American West (2011, Oxford University Press) and River of Traps (a 1991 Pulitzer finalist). He was a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Fellow. As a conservationist, he has helped protect more than 150,000 acres in New Mexico, Arizona, and North Carolina. From 1997 to 2004 he directed the Valle Grande Grass Bank in San Miguel County, NM, and from 2001 to 2005, he served as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust.

Featured Mentors:

Deborah Madison – Chef and Author – Galisteo, NM

Deborah was the founding chef of Greens in San Francisco in l979, one of the first farm-to-table restaurants. She is the author of eleven books, including Local Flavors, Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers Markets, was twice the recipient of the Julia Child Cookbook of the Year Award, and four James Beard Awards. She has written innumerable articles on food and farming, managed the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, and has been actively involved with Slow Food, both here and in Italy.

Miguel Santistevan – Taos, NM

Miguel is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Biology at UNM. His researches the traditional acequia-irrigated and dryland agricultural systems of the Upper Rio Grande. Miguel is certified in Permaculture and ZERI Design, has been a high school science teacher in Pecos, Peñasco and Taos, and has directed youth-in-agriculture programs such as Sembrando Semillas of the NM Acequia Association. Miguel maintains a conservation farm with his wife and daughter called Sol Feliz, where many visitors participate in hands-on workshops. He coordinates a “Living Seed Library” through Agriculture Implementation, Research and Education, a nonprofit he co-founded.

Jim Gerrish – American GrazingLands Services – May, Idaho

Jim is an independent grazing lands consultant for private and public lands across the U.S. and Canada. He works with farmers and ranchers using irrigated pastures and native rangeland. He received a B.S. in Agronomy from the University of Illinois and a M.S. in Crop Ecology from University of Kentucky. His experience includes over 22 years of beef-forage systems research and outreach while on the faculty of the University of Missouri, as well as 22 years of commercial cattle and sheep production on his family farm in northern Missouri. He writes regular columns in The Stockman Grass-Farmer magazine and has authored two books: Management-intensive Grazing: The Grassroots of Grass Farming (2004) and Kick the Hay Habit: A practical guide to year-around grazing (2010).

YOUNG AGRARIAN SPEAKERS:

Bryce Andrews – Ranchlands Program Manager – Montana

Bryce manages a cattle ranch in the Deer Lodge Valley, in the heart of the nation’s largest Superfund Site. He works toward achieving innovative and environmentally sustainable land management practices on deeded and leased land. When not herding cattle and fixing fence, Bryce works on community building and outreach. His experience includes ranching in the Madison Valley, on the doorstep of Yellowstone Park, where he worked on finding a balance between the needs of livestock and wildlife. He holds an M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana.

Dorn Cox – Farmer – Lee, NH

Dorn Cox is making a concerted effort to push farming squarely into the 21st century by building what he refers to as a “biological system” for his farm. By integrating the disciplines of plant biology and environmental engineering, he is constructing a near complete carbon cycle, making the farm largely self sufficient, reducing production costs and limiting off-farm purchases. Dorn is a two-time NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant awardee. He has completed his 2006 grant for Farm-based Biofuel: Production, Storage, Co-generation and Education. He is also a 2007 New Hampshire Young Farmer Achievement Award recipient.

Ben Forsyth – Manager, Three Rivers Station – Meekatharra, Western Australia

Passionate about rangeland sustainability, Ben is the manager of his family’s 1.3 million acre, “Three Rivers” Station on the headwaters of the Gascoyne River in Western Australia, where he is undertaking an extensive landscape regeneration project. Ben is a 2008 Nuffield Scholar, former WA Director of the national Future Farmers Network and a Councilor of the Australian Rangelands Society. He is studying for a Masters in Rangeland Management at the University of Queensland and recently became involved in the Meat & Livestock Australia Environmental Advocates Program. Ben has been instrumental in the development of “Grazebook,” an online forum for producers, practitioners and agencies.

Jeff Gossage – Ranch Operations Manager – Mosca, Colorado

“My parents owned the Stirrup Ranch in south central Colorado. My uncle and aunt ran it as a working cattle ranch using holistic management. I have been ranching ever since graduating high school. I have been managing the Medano-Zapata Ranch for The Nature Conservancy for the last six years. A couple other years were spent on other ranches in other states experiencing other kinds of operations and ranching styles. My passion is preserving ranching as a traditional and progressive way of life and a means to preserve our rangeland.”

Tyffany Herrera – Erosion Control Crew Leader – Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation, NM

“I’ve lived on the Navajo Reservation since I was 6 years old. I’ve learned a lot about ranching and farming. I’ve built erosion control structures, identified problem areas on the range, and fixed problems on my ranch. I’m currently attending NM State University, pursuing a degree in Soil Science with a minor in Business and English. I hope to learn more because I want to continue Walking in Beauty.”

Lilian Hill – Hopi Tutswka Permaculture – Kykotsmovi, Hopi Nation, AZ

Lilian is a member of the Tobacco (Pipwungwa) clan and is the mother of three children.
She has studied Applied Indigenous Studies at Northern Arizona University, focusing on Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and at the North American School of Natural Building. With her husband and children, Lilian is building a home in her village utilizing permaculture principles and encouraging the conditions for sustainability.

Sarahlee Lawrence – Rainshadow Organics – Sisters, Oregon

“Rainshadow Organics is a market garden at Lawrence Farms where Sarahlee has farmed and gardened for twenty-five years. Dozens of varieties of certified organic vegetables, herbs, berries and flowers are grown there on 27 acres. All of the crops are distributed within 50 miles through a CSA program to local restaurants and farmers’ markets.
Growing up in remote central Oregon, Sarahlee dreamed of leaving in search of adventure. By the age of twenty-one, she had rafted some of the world’s most dangerous rivers. But living her dream as guide and advocate, led her back to her family’s ranch. Her book, River House is the beautiful chronicle of a daughter’s return and her relationship with her father.

Nikiko Masumoto – Masumoto Family Farm – Fresno, CA

Nikiko first learned to love food as a young child slurping overripe organic peaches on the Masumoto Family Farm. Since then she has never missed a harvest. In 2007 she graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies and will soon complete a Master of Arts in Performance as Public Practice from UT Austin. She is now back in the Central Valley of California farming with her family, working on a cookbook, and developing “agrarian arts” projects.

Annie Novak – Growing Chefs – Brooklyn, NY

Annie Novak is founder and director of nonprofit Growing Chefs, in the education department at the NY Botanical Gardens, and co-founder and head farmer of the first commercial rooftop farm in the country, the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Annie has worked with Slow Food and Just Food, promoting urban agriculture throughout NYC. Her work has been featured internationally as well as locally in New York Magazine, the New York Times, Grist and the Martha Stewart Show, among others.

A lifelong vegetarian, Annie’s passion for agriculture began while working in Ghana with West African chocolate farmers. She has since followed food to its roots in Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Turkey, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Fiji, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Alaska, through the West and Midwest.

Rochelle Vandever – Hasbidito Youth Advisory Council – Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation, N.M.
Rochelle is from the small community of Torreon, NM. She is currently attending NMSU in Las Cruces, majoring in Civil Engineering. At 14 she began working with Ojo Encino Chapter. She learned a lot about sheep, cattle and horses and wanted to become a veterinarian. When she worked with the Rio Puerco Management Committee she became interested in restoring the land for livestock. Her goal is to receive a B.A. degree in civil engineering and to attend graduate school.

Hai Võ – Real Food Challenge – Irvine, CA

Hai coordinates Live Real, an emerging community of young leaders focused on historical and current injustices of our food system. He is a 2009 recipient of the Earth Island Institute‘s Brower Youth Award for his efforts with the Real Food Challenge, a U.S. campaign of over 350 colleges and 3,000 students reallocating university procurement of “real food” that’s ecologically-sound, community-based, humane and fair. He is a 2008-2009 Sustainable Agrifood Systems Fellow with UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. Hai is also an aspiring agro-ecologist, passionate about traditional foods, and yearns to own and steward land.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming – The Greenhorns – Hudson Valley, NY

Severine produced and directed a documentary film about young farmers who are reclaiming, restoring and retrofitting this country. That film, “The Greenhorns,” grew into a small nonprofit organization that produces a weekly radio show on Heritage Radio Network, a popular blog, a wiki-based resource guide for beginning farmers, and educational events all around the country. Severine attended Pomona College and UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a B.S. in Conservation/Agro-Ecology. She founded UC Berkeley’s Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology, as well as co-founding the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Katie Wallace – Sustainability Specialist, New Belgium Brewing Company – Fort Collins, CO

Katie is the Sustainability Specialist at the employee-owned New Belgium Brewing Company. She helps set the strategic direction of NBB’s sustainability efforts and engages coworkers in these initiatives. Her formal education in Economics and Finance prepared her for analyzing trends and forecasting sales. She has a passion for cultural innovation, environmental sustainability and lifelong learning.

Print PDF

Wendell Berry

The Unsettling of America was published in 1977; it is still in print and is still being read. As its author, I am tempted to be glad of this, and yet, if I believe what I said in that book, and I still do, then I should be anything but glad. The book would have had a far happier fate if it could have been disproved or made obsolete years ago.

It remains true because the conditions it describes and opposes, the abuses of farmland and farming people, have persisted and become worse. By 2002 we had less than half the number of farmers in the U.S. that we had in 1977. Our farm communities are far worse off now than they were then. Soil erosion rates continue to be unsustainably high. We continue to pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons. We continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, useful primarily to farmers and local customers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose of this new global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace “food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.”

To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. I have never doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy land.

We agrarians are involved in a hard, long momentous contest, in which we are so far, by a considerable margin, the losers. What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense and fundamental decency – the high and indispensable art, for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.

I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures and our world.

Industrialism begins with technological invention. But agrarianism begins with givens: land, plants, animals, weather, hunger and the birthright knowledge of agriculture. Industrialists are always ready to ignore, sell, or destroy the past in order to gain the entirely unprecedented wealth, comfort and happiness supposedly to be found in the future. Agrarian farmers know that their very identity depends on their willingness to receive gratefully, use responsibly and hand down intact an inheritance, both natural and cultural, from the past. Agrarians understand themselves as the users and caretakers of some things they did not make, and of some things that they cannot make.

If we believe that the existence of the world is rooted in mystery and in sanctity, then we would have a different economy. It would still be an economy of use, but it would be an economy also of return. The economy would have to accommodate the need to be worthy of the gifts we receive and use, and this would involve a return of propitiation, praise, gratitude, responsibility, good use, good care and a proper regard for future generations. What is most conspicuously absent from the industrial economy and industrial culture is this idea of return. Industrial humans relate themselves to the world and its creatures by fairly direct acts of violence. Mostly we take without asking, use without respect or gratitude, and give nothing in return. Our economy’s most voluminous product is waste – valuable materials irrecoverably misplaced, or randomly discharged as poisons.

To perceive the world and our life in it as gifts originating in sanctity is to see our human economy as a continuing moral crisis. Our life of need and work forces us inescapably to use in time things belonging to eternity, and to assign finite values to things already recognized as infinitely valuable. This is a fearful predicament. It calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale. It calls for the complex responsibilities of caretaking and giving back that we mean by “stewardship.” To all of this the idea of the immeasurable value of the resource is central.

There is an agrarian theme that has been carried from earliest times until now mostly in family or folk tradition. Such people can also be found in books. They don’t have or require a lot of land, and the land they have is often marginal. They practice subsistence agriculture, which has been much derided by agricultural economists and other learned people of the industrial age, and they always associate frugality with abundance.

In my various travels, I have seen a number of small homesteads situated on “land that no one wanted” and yet abundantly productive of food, pleasure and other goods. And especially in my younger days, I was used to hearing farmers of a certain kind say, “They may run me out, but they won’t starve me out” or “I may get shot, but I’m not going to starve.” Even now, if they cared, I think agricultural economists could find small farmers who have prospered, not by “getting big,” but by practicing the ancient rules of thrift and subsistence, by accepting the limits of their small farms, and by knowing well the value of having a little land.

In any consideration of agrarianism, this issue of limitation is critical. Agrarian farmers see, accept, and live within their limits. They understand and agree to the proposition that there is “this much and no more.” Everything that happens on an agrarian farm is determined or conditioned by the understanding that there is only so much land, so much water in the cistern, so much hay in the barn, so much corn in the crib, so much firewood in the shed, so much food in the cellar or freezer, so much strength in the back or arms – and no more. This is the understanding that induces thrift, family coherence, neighborliness, local economies. Within accepted limits, these virtues become necessities. The agrarian sense of abundance comes from the experienced possibility of frugality and renewal within limits.

This is exactly opposite to the industrial idea that abundance comes from the violation of limits by personal mobility, extractive machinery, long-distance transport and scientific or technological breakthroughs. If we use up the good possibilities in this place, we will import goods from some other place, or we will go to some other place. If nature releases her wealth too slowly, we will take it by force. If we make the world too toxic for honeybees, some compound brain, Monsanto perhaps, will invent tiny robots that will fly about, pollinating flowers and making honey.

To be landless in an industrial society obviously is not at all times to be jobless and homeless. But the ability of the industrial economy to provide jobs and homes depends on prosperity, and on a very shaky kind of prosperity too. It depends on “growth” of the wrong things, such as roads and dumps and poisons – on what Edward Abbey called “the ideology of the cancer cell” – and on greed with purchasing power. In the absence of growth, greed and affluence, the dependents of an industrial economy too easily suffer the consequences of having no land: joblessness, homelessness and want. This is not a theory. We have seen it happen.

In our time it is useless and probably wrong to suppose that a great many urban people ought to go out into the countryside and become homesteaders or farmers. But it is not useless or wrong to suppose that urban people have agricultural responsibilities that they should try to meet. And in fact this is happening. The agrarian population among us is growing, and by no means is it made up merely of some farmers and some country people. It includes urban gardeners, urban consumers who are buying food from local farmers, organizers of local food economies, consumers who have grown doubtful of the healthfulness, the trustworthiness and the dependability of the corporate food system – people, in other words, who understand what it means to be landless.

Apologists for industrial agriculture rely on two arguments. In one of them, they say that the industrialization of agriculture, and its dominance by corporations, has been “inevitable.” It has come about and it continues by the agency of economic and technological determinism. There has been simply nothing that anybody could do about it.

The other argument is that industrial agriculture has come about by choice, inspired by compassion and generosity. Seeing the shadow of mass starvation looming over the world, the food conglomerates, the machinery companies, the chemical companies, the seed companies and the other suppliers of “purchased inputs” have done all that they have done in order to solve “the problem of hunger” and to “feed the world.”

The primary question for the corporations, and so necessarily for us, is not how the world will be fed, but who will control the land, and therefore the wealth, of the world. If the world’s people accept the industrial premises that favor bigness, centralization and (for a few people) high profitability, then the corporations will control all of the world’s land and all of its wealth. If, on the contrary, the world’s people might again see the advantages of local economies, in which people live, so far as they are able to do so, from their home landscapes, and work patiently toward that end, eliminating waste and the cruelties of landlessness and homelessness, then I think they might reasonably hope to solve “the problem of hunger,” and several other problems as well.

But do the people of the world, allured by TV, supermarkets and big cars, or by dreams thereof, want to live from their home landscapes? Could they do so, if they wanted to? Those are hard questions, not readily answerable by anybody. Throughout the industrial decades, people have become increasingly and more numerously ignorant of the issues of land use, of food, clothing and shelter. What would they do, and what could they do, if they were forced by war or some other calamity to live from their home landscapes?

It is a fact, well attested but little noticed, that our extensive, mobile, highly centralized system of industrial agriculture is extremely vulnerable to acts of terrorism. It will be hard to protect an agriculture of genetically impoverished monocultures that is entirely dependent on cheap petroleum and long-distance transportation. We know too that the great corporations, which now grow and act so far beyond the restraint of “the natural affections of the human mind,” are vulnerable to the natural depravities of the human mind, such as greed, arrogance and fraud.

The agricultural industrialists like to say that their agrarian opponents are merely sentimental defenders of ways of farming that are hopelessly old-fashioned, justly dying out. Or they say that their opponents are the victims, as Richard Lewontin put it, of “a false nostalgia for a way of life that never existed.” But these are not criticisms. They are insults.

For agrarians, the correct response is to stand confidently on our fundamental premise, which is both democratic and ecological: The land is a gift of immeasurable wealth. If it is a gift, then it is a gift to all the living in all time. To withhold it from some is finally to destroy it for all. For a few powerful people to own or control it all, or decide its fate, is wrong.

From that premise we go directly to the question that begins the agrarian agenda and is the discipline of all agrarian practice: What is the best way to use land? Agrarians know that this question necessarily has many answers, not just one. We are not asking what is the best way to farm everywhere in the world, or everywhere in the U.S., or everywhere in Kentucky or Iowa. We are asking what is the best way to farm in each one of the world’s numberless places, as defined by topography, soil type, climate, ecology, history, culture and local need. And we know that the standard cannot be determined only by market demand or productivity or profitability or technological capability, or by any other single measure, however important it may be. The agrarian standard, inescapably, is local adaptation, which requires bringing local nature, local people, local economy and local culture into a practical and enduring harmony.

Farmer and author, Wendell Berry has published numerous novels, collections of poetry, and essays. He lives in Port Royal, Kentucky with his wife Tanya.

Print PDF

Courtney White and Avery C. Anderson

Sustainability. Adaptation. Mitigation. Local. Grass-fed. Resilience.

These words, so much in the news today across the globe, barely registered on people’s radar screens 15 years ago. For example, when we founded the Quivira Coalition in 1997, we were focused on peace-making, collaboration, land health and good stewardship. Issues such as climate change, local food production, grass-fed meat, and other “modern” concerns were rarely discussed, if at all. That’s not the case anymore. Soon, these words will require a new conservation paradigm, one that combines the ecological, the economic and the social.

Fortunately, one is emerging, and it has a name: a new agrarianism.

What is this new agrarianism? Here is Wendell Berry’s definition: “There is another way to live and think: it’s called agrarianism. It is not so much a philosophy as a practice, an attitude, a loyalty and a passion – all based in close connection with the land. It results in a sound local economy in which producers and consumers are neighbors and in which nature herself becomes the standard for work and production.”

Across America, there is a resurgent interest in local, family-scale, sustainable food, fiber and fuel production. It began slowly, but has gathered speed recently. Local food is the focus and key to this new movement, but it’s more than just food systems. New agrarians have a vision of resilient food production from farms and ranches that are managed for land health, biodiversity and human well-being. It means working to sequester carbon in soils, improving water quality and quantity, restoring native plant and animal populations, fixing degraded creeks, developing local energy sources and replenishing the land for people and nature alike. It is a vision of coexistence, resilience and stewardship – a place for people in nature, not outside it.

This new agrarian movement is being led by young, energetic and passionate people – as every movement before it has been. The difference, however, is that today’s new agrarians can stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and thus see farther. Fortunately, the toolbox at their disposal is full of ideas and practices that have been tried-and-tested in the field already. And undoubtedly they will innovate new ones to go along with what we know already works.

But who are these new agrarians?

1. Too old to be a new agrarian? In the U.S. today, for every farmer under 35 years old, there are six over 65, and the average age is 57. In 2007, there were only 118,613 farmers under the age of 36 – only 6% of the 2 million farmers nationwide (down from 6 million farmers in 1910). The National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) reports that between now and the year 2030, half a million (one-quarter) of American farmers will retire. Unless we plan to stop eating, these facts give urgency to mentoring, training, and creating policies that help young people get a start on a farm or ranch.

1. Where do they come from and what motivates them? New agrarians come from communities across America, urban as well as rural, and are motivated to take care of the planet and feed their neighbors. In contrast to the back-to-the-land movement of their parents’ generation, they are tech-savvy, business-minded, well educated, and highly collaborative. They are also quite aware of the challenges they face, including climate change. Many do not come from agricultural backgrounds, but instead entered agriculture because of an interest in local foods, environmental values, renewable energy, a desire to be physically active outdoors, or an interest in exploring new economic models.

1. What works and what are the biggest obstacles ahead? A national survey conducted by the NYFC identified five programs/institutions that are successfully serving the needs of new agrarians: apprenticeship programs, local (community-scale) partnerships, the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, land-link programs that connect landowners with young people, and diverse educational/training programs. On the flip side, the five biggest obstacles standing in the way of new agrarians are lack of access to: start-up capital, land, health care, credit, and marketing/business planning skills.

New agrarians need our support.

In the words of young farmer Severine vT Fleming: “The need is urgent, and the message is clear – America needs more new agrarians, and more new agrarians want a piece of America. We know it will take millions of these rough-and-ready protagonists of place to care for our ecosystems and serve our country healthy food, but we are equally confident we have the skill sets and perseverance to tackle the challenges ahead.”

Courtney White is Executive Director and Avery C. Anderson is a CARLY Program Director with The Quivira Coalition.

Print PDF

Courtney White

Dorn Cox’s goal is as audacious as it is visionary: reignite New Hampshire’s local farm economy.

When I first met Dorn, he stood in a hayfield behind a University of New Hampshire professor’s house, spreading wood ash carefully among a grid of study plots. His research (for a Ph.D.) is aimed at figuring out the best way to turn the hayfield into a vegetable farm without tilling it. Normally, in order to convert a grass field into a farm, the farmer would bring out the plow and a tractor and go to work furrowing the land in preparation for seeding and fertilizing. Dorn wants to do no such thing. He wants nothing to do with tilling because it is destructive to soil health, releases stored carbon into the air as a greenhouse gas, requires synthetic fertilizer to grow crops, and contributes to soil erosion, further reducing the land’s fertility.

That’s the story of New Hampshire’s agriculture in a nutshell, he said. The loss of soil fertility is a main reason why farming declined in the state over the years, to the point where it is essentially a cottage industry today.

Dorn wants to reverse these trends. Like a growing number of young farmers, Dorn practices a form of agriculture called no-till,which involves “drilling” seeds into the soil (by a machine) without turning any dirt over. But he goes one step further, implementing a new idea call organic no-till, which involves growing a cover crop (rye or hairy vetch), crimping it with a heavy roller so that it forms a mulch over the soil, and then drilling the soil with the cash crop (grains, for example). This way, no herbicides or pesticides are needed to control bugs and weeds – which means it can be an organic process for growing food. Organic no-till was developed by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, and has been spreading rapidly around the country. It combines the best of two worlds: the soil-building practices of mulching and no-till with the myriad benefits of organic agriculture.

It sounds great – and it is – but Dorn wants to go a step further. He calls it “Beyond Organic No-Till.” It involves all aspects of farming, including its role in climate change.

In addition to his study plots, Dorn is putting this idea into practice on his family’s 250-acre farm, called Tuckaway, located near Lee, NH. Dorn’s parents homesteaded the farm decades earlier as part of their generation’s back-to-the-land movement. They were the first farmers in the area to go organic – growing fruit, hay and vegetables. The farm had been in agriculture for decades, but it also had been losing soil fertility as a consequence of tilling, erosion, fertilizer and pesticides. Dorn’s parents checked the downward slide of the land’s fertility with their organic production. Dorn and his sister decided to take the farm one step further: turn the arrow of soil fertility back upward.

Dorn came to these ideas not through thinking about agriculture, but by thinking about energy. He has been attracted to renewable energy since he was a kid, to the point of leaving the farm for a while in order to pursue developments in the renewable energy field. When he returned to the farm he was determined to produce as much energy on-farm as possible. He succeeded. Today, Tuckaway generates 100% of the energy needed to produce food from only 10% of its land. They do it with biodiesel –powered by canola – which they grow on the farm. They make the biodiesel on the farm as well. Additionally, Dorn’s sister and her husband are avid horse farmers, which is their way of moving away from machinery as much as possible.

That’s why I think of them as re-homesteaders; they are reinventing their farm from the ground up.

Dorn views much of what he does with an eye to climate change. It’s not just the biodiesel. By purposefully increasing the organic content of the farm’s soil (from 1% to 4% today – and hopefully 8% in the future), Dorn and his family are sequestering additional carbon dioxide, thus helping to mitigate, in their small way, the carbon dioxide overload in our atmosphere. Improving the organic content of the soil is also good for their bottom line, because they can grow more crops. In fact, there are many reasons to improve soil fertility; the climate connection is just one!

Tuckaway is involved in a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. It coordinates its work with other farms nearby, it shares its knowledge and success with other farmers, and Dorn’s research will continue to be implemented in on-the-ground ways. It’s exciting to see, daunting to imagine, and hopeful in so many ways. We all need to become re-homesteaders, in a sense. And thanks to young agrarians like Dorn Cox, leaders are emerging to show us the way.

Dorn is a young agrarian speaker at the Quivira conference this year.

Print PDF

Planting Three Seeds

“Para mi, para vos, y para los animalitos de Dios”

– Miguel Santistevan

The 2011 growing season was approached, as any, absolutely enthusiastically in anticipation of what a growing season will bring; what crops we are growing-out and how many students’ lives might be changed as accomplices to creating life through the planting of seed, nurturing of plants and harvest. As a farmer rooted in acequia technique, looking at the relatively meager snowpack, I was also excited to see how my crops would differentially survive. Lack of snowpack is not enough to deter us. We believe that if we do our part to work the land and plant seeds, rains will always come at the right time. This 2011 season was of particular significance, as we were bringing two new groups of students onto “new” pieces of land in two communities. The purpose was not only to teach and inspire youth while expanding our seed stock; it was also to conduct research on the relative resilience of landrace crops compared to imported seed – especially knowing that drought would likely ensue.

We planted two fields in Taos County; one in Taos and one in the Peñasco area – each with different crops and different youth groups but with the same basic goals: involve the youth, grow-out seed, and conduct research on crop production. As with any growing season, it is impossible to predict what successes and challenges lay ahead. As the growing season comes to a close, reflecting on the last several months offers perspective on the realities of revitalizing agriculture. This season was a hard lesson in what that really means in the context of climate change and drought, along with considerations of youth-in-agriculture programming.

A fundamental belief espoused within the activities of our non-profit Agriculture Implementation Research & Education is that landrace crops, or heirloom varieties that have been maintained in particular communities or regions for generations, are fundamentally resilient to adverse climatic conditions. These landraces have been associated with their soils, waters, farmers’ generations and climatic events for so long that they have practically seen it all: late frosts, hailstorms, drought, floods, early frosts and the like. Throughout their years of cultivation, the most extreme climatic events have “thinned the herd” of the genetic base of the population, leaving only the strongest and most resilient members to propagate future generations of seed that most likely share the qualities of strength and resilience of their parent generation. This process has resulted in inherently adaptable strains of crops in the hands of traditional farmers in regions throughout the world.

Northern New Mexico and the greater Southwestern U.S. is such an area, containing cultures and crops that are well adapted to the extreme and uncertain climate patterns of the region. Knowing this, we strive to continue to develop agricultural practices that honor the experience and capability of the crops and cultures we have inherited from past generations. We never use a prediction of drought to deter our plans of planting; rather,+ we embrace the difficulties as an opportunity to discover the “champions” in our crop populations while we hone our techniques to learn how to meet the challenges of drought and climate change. This is a viewpoint of agricultural interest and luxury, as we still can go to the store and buy our food if, perchance, our perspective and crops absolutely fail. This so far has never been the case. Our crops have survived several years that were characterized by drought, pest attack, competition with weeds, and freak storms. In these kinds of years, sometimes the crops are hit so hard that the totality of production has to be saved for seed. It is too much of a risk to satisfy our culinary interests. With our future research, we have an opportunity to compare production of crops that survived the challenges of the year with their parent generation, which doesn’t necessarily have that degree of experience.

So this year we set up our fields for spring planting, irrigated with regularity while there was acequia water, and resorted to cultivating our soil (hoeing weeds and mounding soil around our crops) while waiting for the rain to come after the acequia went dry. The Río de Don Fernando and her Acequia Madre del Sur in Taos went dry the third week in June. Irrigation water in our Peñasco-area field also dropped to the point that it lost its utility. We began to watch the clouds on the horizon as well as the weather outlook on the Weather Channel in hopes of watching the situation turn around. We heard that the monsoons were due to arrive in early July. When that didn’t happen, the predictions turned to later in the month, then August was supposed to hold promise…

What really happened is that no substantial rains came. Every one of our four or five rainstorms was less than half an inch, so the moisture never reached the subsoil. It seemed as if our suffering crops had to resort to utilizing the drops of moisture that came in contact with their bodies, running down their leaves and stems to the roots. Surprisingly, this turned out to be enough for many of our crops. Our alberjon (peas) were flowering with the last irrigation in the third week in June and were able to set seed in the next several weeks without substantial water. We were also able to feast on fresh peas during that time. The maíz blanco (white corn) looked shorter than usual with water stress-inflicted leaves, but when it was all harvested, we had several ears of corn that were obviously unaffected by water shortage, confirming all my beliefs in the potential resilience of this ancestral staple. Some other crops, such as lentils and fava beans, shriveled up in the heat as if they were burned under a magnifying glass. Surprisingly, we were still able to bring in a few dozen seeds of each.

But the real challenge in weathering the drought was not the persistence of the crops but rather the persistence of other herbivores. We came to realize that, as the drought began to take a toll on the crops, it was also taking a toll on other organisms that began to view our crops as a resource for their own survival. One of our fields in Taos was completely obliterated by prairie dogs. Similarly, the corn in our Peñasco field was taken out by magpies. A member of our “living seed library” program reported that her entire field was eaten by elk.

The loss of seed, effort and time are the obvious setbacks, but this whole experience forces us to look at the real challenge of reinvigorating the local food system. Those of us who have been on the land a while are able to consistently produce and deter most threats because of our constant presence. But as an organization who values having more land in production by the hands of more people and in more crops, it becomes increasingly difficult to anticipate and prevent these kinds of threats in the face of this uncertainty, especially if there is not a constant vigilant human presence on the land. We were not the only ones with this experience. I was able to speak with several farmers who had similar problems with predation by animals who were also suffering the drought.

My biggest question, however, was if this experience diminished the enthusiasm of the youth involved in our agriculture projects; youth who watched the fruits of their labor disappear week by week (literally). As I explained to them about the inherent gamble in agriculture, especially in the context of climate change, the students assured me that they are in this for a while longer yet and are looking forward to our fall and spring planting activities. This growing season was marked by the especially difficult challenges of water stress and competition for our crops, but it could be said that the real harvest was a realization of the potential extent of the challenge that lies ahead.

As we continue to develop agricultural methods that are resilient to water stress and climate change, we have to keep in mind the impact of these conditions on wildlife that will need our crops as a source of food and water as well. I am reminded of a dicho (saying) that is common to our region during planting time: that we plant three seeds in each planting place “Para mi, para vos, y para los animalitos de Dios (Planting three seeds for me, for us, and for all of the animals of God).” This saying reflects much wisdom and ethic, but was likely developed at a time when local agriculture was abundant and the effects of suffering wildlife could be spread out over a larger area during years of drought. With fewer areas in agriculture compared to then, we will have to be vigilant and innovative about how to secure a harvest for us human beings while also providing for “los animalitos de Dios” in a way that (hopefully) brings about more balance to our ecosystems and for all the organisms therein.

Miguel Santistevan, Executive Director of AIRE, is mayordomo of the Acequia Sur del Río de Don Fernando de Taos and a Ph.D. candidate in biology at UNM. He is a featured mentor at the upcoming Quivira conference. solfelizfarm@gmail.com, www.solfelizfarm.org

Print PDF

Don Bustos

When I was not more than 7 years old I remember going with my mother and father to the small villages of Ojo Sarco and Penasco. Mom and I walked from house to house, selling buckets of green chile for 50 cents (uno bota de diez). Empty lard cans were the standard measurement. We would also bring cucumbers, squash and potatoes. Dad would sell a 50-pound sack of potatoes for $2. He always made sure we would shake the sack and put in as many papas as the sack could carry. He wanted to make sure his customers got their full money’s worth, thus keeping his family business and community sustainable.

I also recall going on road trips through northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, trading and selling vegetables that we grew. In almost every village, Dad traded for products the next pueblo needed. I remember picking up apples in Velarde from the Velardes and Ferrans that we would then sell at the fiestas in Taos and San Luis. We would set up under the trees on the main road. From there we would go to Fort Garland and set up for a day or two; make our way to Alamosa and Center, Colorado to pick up seed potatoes; and finally head down to La Jara and trade apples and green chile for a couple of new piglets. Sometimes Dad would go down to El Paso, meet the trains, and bring bananas and oranges that he would sell on the side of the road or at the schools in Española and other towns. In this way we were creating what I term a food hub, operating within a larger food production and distribution system.

Flash forward to the ‘60s and ‘70s and the farmers’ market in Los Alamos. Getting there we would be stopped at the security gate. Armed guards would let us pass and sell vegetables. Mom would set up at the pond in front of the courthouse and sell corn and chile. At the end of the afternoon we would go from house to house, selling our produce that had not sold at the market (that was permitted back in the day). If we finished early we would stop at the Los Alamos dump and find all sorts of cool stuff. We still have bombshells that we used for irrigation pipes.

For important considerations such as the environment, economics, food safely, food security, child nutrition and much more, over the last two decades there has been a large national movement toward locally and organically grown products. These issues help illustrate the need for securing a local or regional food system. The Obama administration and USDA announced this spring that they want to develop the local and regional food systems by helping to support 100,000 new small farmers in the next 10 years in order to have a food-secure nation. The USDA has started to fund projects for development and implementation of training, and is creating infrastructure for pilot projects though several different agencies.

In New Mexico that development brings new pressures to contend with. The amount of land and water that can be used for farming and grazing in the state is limited, and some disagreement has arisen as to how these demands can be met. For example, a recent focus group from NM, organized by Cornell University, is looking at models for changing our diets in order to fit the carrying capacity for this region. Others are looking at season extension or year-round production in cold frames or greenhouses. All this is taking place in the context of a food hub within a food system that has several complex issues and needs relating to region, climate, culture and a growing population.

The influx of new farmers to NM and the new markets that are developing tend to be accessible to a more aggressive, capitalistic marketer – as opposed to the more traditional bartering economy, with respect to culture and land-based people. There is a need to develop more and different markets for farmers and ranchers to sell their products within their respective food hubs. Policies need to be created that support traditional values relating to culture and barter systems.

Over the last 10 years, because of the demand for local products, one of the more profitable ways has been through an increase of farmers’ markets. Another way of increasing profits is by CSAs (Community Support Agriculture projects), where the middleman is cut out of the food chain, allowing the producer to put more money in his or her pocket. In recent years, several studies have shown that additional markets have to be developed to truly support a local economy. Other venues being developed in NM include initiatives such as the Santa Fe’s Farm-to-Restaurant project, which is in its second year. Co-ops have also been developed as a distribution model for local producers. There are also efforts like Agri-Cultura Network in the south valley of Albuquerque, where three community organizations are working with beginning farmers to grow produce year-round. They aggregate their vegetables to meet the demand of larger markets.

At times it seems like some rules and regulations are being used as a pretext to get rid of traditional farmers and ranchers. Examples of this include rules and regulations around food safety issues, and the way FDA is going about protecting our food sources. Some farmers and ranchers feel that USDA and FDA are trying to squeeze out the mid- and smaller producers.

Don Bustos manages Santa Cruz Farms near Española, which grows several varieties of vegetables year-round. Dbustos@afsc.org

Print PDF

Courtney White

In 2008, the Quivira Coalition partnered with several ranches and farms around the Southwest to launch CARLY – Conservation and Ranching Leader­ship and Youth. While the CARLY program was originally established with a focus on the intersection of conserva­tion and ranching, it now offers aspiring young agrarians a broad range of agricultural experiences. CARLY seeks to pair eager apprentices with experienced men­tors in sustainable agricultural operations around the Southwest. The program strikes a balance between mentorship activities and self-directed initiatives, with op­portunities to attend workshops, classes and conferences that support apprentice learning. Quivira values applicants with a diversity of experiences and a sincere commitment to a life in sustainable agriculture.

The CARLY Apprentice Program has blossomed over the last three years to become one of Quivira’s most successful initia­tives. CARLY has developed into a comprehensive leadership-training program for young agrarians – the only one of its kind in the West. Quivira has created a curriculum and developed the capacity of CARLY mentors on four different agricultural operations, presented the accomplishments of the program at a national conference in Washington D.C., and recruited, trained and graduated three CARLY Apprentices: Amber Reed, Sam Ryerson and Daniel Escutia. These individuals represent the essence of “agrarian” and the hope for the future of the sustainable agriculture movement.

The first apprentice, Amber Reed, was placed on the San Juan Ranch, owned by George Whitten and Julie Sullivan, and located in the San Luis Valley of south central Colorado. George is a third-generation rancher there. As a consultant in Holistic Management, he is motivated by his experi­ence that ranching and conservation are inher­ently intertwined. Julie has a master’s degree in environmental educa­tion and worked for 10 years as a professor in Audubon’s Expedition In­stitute (Lesley University). Both have a passion for teaching. Together they have developed a successful busi­ness model. Their animals are grass-fed from start to finish, and their beef is certified organic. In addition, George and Julie are knowledgeable about rangeland health and have been trained in low-stress livestock handling.

The curriculum implemented on the ranch includes animal husbandry, range health moni­toring, pasture rotation planning, holistic management, herding, road restoration and maintenance, range-infra­structure maintenance, finishing process for grass-fed animals, marketing grass-finished beef, business planning, low-stress livestock handling and small-scale gardening. In addition, the curriculum includes professional development opportunities. Apprentices emerge with tangible skills, both technical and interper­sonal, that are essential for successful employment as a ranch/land manager.

CARLY’s 1^st Apprentice – Amber Reed

“My interest in agriculture started early. At 3 years old, my mom found me lying in the dirt under a goat to help her kid nurse. This seems to be a pattern. Lately, I’ve been kneeling in manure, mud and snow while trying to get calves to suckle their mothers. Just today one of the calves that we’ve been nursing along danced around, throwing out his back legs. That is a beautiful thing. I am thrilled to be the first CARLY apprentice at George and Julie’s. I knew from the moment that I visited nine months ago that this was the place to learn how to become a conscientious, resilient and sustainable rancher. I plan to use the knowledge that I gain here to start my own place in the next five years. I expect to spend these two or three years learning how to create a sustainable and economical operation from dedicated ranchers and farmers. Through the CARLY apprenticeship, I hope to become an ambassador and leader for sustainable ranching.

“I was born in West Virginia and then moved to a homestead in Maine with my mom and step-dad when I was 7. My sister was born on the porch four years later. Growing up in Wellington, I learned to carry hot water for baths, check the sky for Orion on the way to the outhouse, and trim kerosene lamp wicks until we got solar panels. (The house is still off the grid.) We ate porcupine pot roast in the winter and fresh veggies from the garden in the summer. In our self-sufficient household, I entertained myself by making things, reading, hypnotizing my bantam chickens, and wandering around in the woods. I would search out old cellar holes and overgrown stonewalls, where I found interesting plants like Ostrich Ferns and Jack-in-the Pulpits to bring home and plant in the yard, much to my mother’s delight. Even when I lived in the city years later, I noticed when barn owls were mating, ocotillo was blooming, or quail were hatching. During the summer I would go back to West Virginia and stay with my dad, where we went mountain biking and ate a lot of buckwheat pancakes.

“After high school, I went to Europe and worked for WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) in France and Italy. I also worked on two independent organic dairies in France and Switzerland. There I learned to milk goats and cows, make cheese, fertilize olives and bake apple pie. When I returned to Maine, I went to Bowdoin College and majored in Environmental Studies and Visual Art and minored in Biology. I spent the 2001 fall semester in Brazil learning about Amazonian Ecology and Natural Resource Management. On the Amazon Delta, I conducted an independent research project on the pollination system of a cashew-like tree, Anacardium gigantium. My project also focused on native sting-less honeybees that pollinate flowering trees and plants and can be cultivated for honey; forest productivity improvement; and economic alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture.

“Ranchers and farmers must be adaptive and observant; therefore, they thrive when they understand the specifics of their land. I believe that sustainable agriculture is the most important component of conservation, and grass-based ranching is the most efficient use of our natural resources and the healthiest, happiest system for animals and people. I want to be part of the movement with ranchers and farmers who are innovative, skeptical and care deeply for their land, animals and communities.”

Amber will speak at the Quivira Coaliton’s 10^th Anniversary Conference in Albuquerque in November.

Print PDF

Julie Sullivan

I’m kneeling in mud and manure, my hands through the metal bars of the crowding tub, propping up the bum front leg of this day-old calf who is trying to nurse his mamma. It just started to rain. Everyone else is in the house. Every life is precious.

It’s April. On our ranch, this means we are calving. Nighttime lows drop to single digits, and daytime highs may reach 50 degrees. Temperature swings and the shrieking endless wind are hard on calves and humans alike. Fourteen-thousand-foot peaks to the east are covered in snow.

I grew up in a small city, loving animals, the ocean and the empty field up the street that housed scraggly Italian pine trees, an ice plant and a city water reservoir. I became an actor, a teacher, a vegetarian, and a “Cattle-free-in-’93” environmentalist – sure my convictions were based in the truth. In graduate school, I slept on the ground every night for two years, studying the planet by living directly with it. For a decade I taught for the same school, exploring environmental issues by meeting the people who live the problems and strive for solutions. Then I met a rancher named George with a deep land ethic and a great border collie, and fell in love. Now I’m a cattle-ranching-Deep-Ecologist tree-hugger kneeling in the muck trying to save a calf.

During a radio interview last year, I was asked if it’s possible to be a rancher and an environmentalist. Possible. Not easy. Small decisions become huge when beliefs and needs compete: the belief that nature is sacred and has intrinsic value versus the need to make a living from a particular piece of land. Like all creatures, we use the planet in order to live and thrive, but we also have to play nice with others—find a way to make a living that doesn’t mangle every other life form.

Aldo Leopold said, “The sure conclusion is that the biota as a whole is useful.” [1] When George and I met, Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac was one of three books we both had read. Sportsman and wolf advocate, farmer and forester, academician, naturalist and public lands administrator, Leopold navigated the conflict between conservation and utilitarianism by holding to the belief that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” [2] Navigating my own set of internal and external contradictions, Leopold’s words and life provide good counsel.

I realize that Leopold wasn’t referring to an individual member of a species when he said that all biota are useful. He spoke as witness to the profligate destruction of any plant or animal deemed useless by humans. Examining the world and probing beyond convenient labels of useless and useful, Leopold saw the foundational undergarments that support life on this planet. All those “useless” entities actively support the “useful” ones; wheat doesn’t grow without soil microbes. We Need The Useless. Even this calf.

Our categories are too limiting. Like wearing a pair of shoes two sizes too tight, we hobble around pinched and irritable, unable to commit to something new until the old wears out. The categories “useful” and “useless” are worn out. Life is full of equivocation; even molecules can’t decide if they are mass or motion. Nothing is purely one thing or another. Not me, not you, not this calf.

If Leopold were around now, he just might subscribe to the first principle of Deep Ecology: “The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have intrinsic value. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” [3]

People tell us not to let sentiment and subjectivity influence our interactions with nature. Don’t anthropomorphize! But this advice runs counter to the gut experience we have as children: We feel the affinity that exists between us and other life forms until someone teaches it out of us. Biophilia, a love of life and living systems, may have been essential to the development of the very brain most folks believe makes us so different from other animals. [4] In other words, connecting with the rest of life may be what made us human. Connecting to a particular life, like this calf, makes us humane.

Facts alone don’t inspire us to change; we change when our mind and our heart are touched by the particular sorrows and joys of another life. Land stewardship, animal husbandry and what we buy at the grocery store are all matters of what Leopold calls the “ecological conscience,” which is “an affair of the mind as well as the heart. It implies a capacity to study and learn, as well as to emote.” [1]

Our bodies use the planet in order to survive, and our minds rationalize this use in 10,000 ways. But our hearts know that the entities living on this planet with us are not here solely for our use. Land, animals, soil fungi and rocks are not resources. They are “the community to which we belong.” [2]

Julie and her husband, George Whitten, run a grass-fed cow/calf-to-finished-steer operation, with the long-term goals of re-localizing food systems while increasing the ecological health of all the land with which they work. They shared in the 2006 Clarence Burch Award. moovcows@gojade.org

Reference List

[1] Leopold, A. (1992). The River of the Mother of God. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press

[2] Leopold, A. (1968). A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches from Here and There (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press

[3] McLaughlin, A. (1986). The Heart of Deep Ecology. In Sessions, G. (Ed.), Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. (85-94). Boston, MA: Shambhala

Print PDF