Part 5a: Regenerative Farming and Land Stewardship
Ok, But What Can I Do? Information and Inspiration towards Nature-Based Land Stewardship Perspectives and Practices
Anne: Hey again! Thanks for coming back for another great discussion about land stewardship. In this session, we’ll be chatting with Jesse Smith, Director of Land Stewardship for White Buffalo Land Trust, based in Santa Barbara, CA.
Jesse, perhaps you can start us out by explaining what land stewardship means to you.
Jesse: Sure. To me, land stewardship is a role that we assign to ourselves and that we wear, when we begin to recognize our place in connection to living systems — specifically those that are tied to living landscapes. As soon as we recognize that interconnection to water systems, soil systems, biodiversity, and the land’s ability to function and thrive, we then can steward those threads. In Southern California, due to the brittleness of the climate, those threads are continually getting weaker, but we have the ability to reinforce and strengthen them. I think that the only constant is a state of change. We can either see things slowly deteriorate or we can reinforce them, revive them, and reinvigorate them. Our role as land stewards is to restore all the threads of life, and the web of life.
(image source: https://thereluctantprogrammer.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/thread-weaving.jpg)
Anne: Oh, I love that idea of land stewardship as a role we assign ourselves, and how closely it is woven in with our interconnection to the life and health of the land. So, what’s the difference between land management and land stewardship?
Jesse: I believe it is a difference of approach and perspective on our ability to visualize what things we want to see, and that we can manage towards, versus our ability to understand how things should function, and we steward the processes for living systems to express their own unique essence. So there’s this role that we can play, where we can’t always articulate how exactly something should look, and what elements should be present, but what we can do is understand how it should function. Then we can be stewards of an evolutionary process and humans as part of it, towards that end.
Anne: Land stewardship sounds like a heavy focus on returning functioning systems to the land and helping the land be its best self. In biomimicry, we also look deeply at the functions that are being achieved in nature. If we look at the way a landscape functions (or how it should function), we can get a better idea of ways to support the improvement of that function.
Why might someone become a land steward?
Jesse: Things are either in a constant state of regeneration or decay. To recognize your place as a land steward is to be in service of the process of regeneration. Once you recognize that you’re either contributing to decomposition and decay, toward lesser levels, versus one that’s in service of regeneration and revival toward higher levels of evolution, then you want to be in service to the latter. You recognize it is in your own interest and in the interest of your family and your community, and your own mental well-being. The reciprocity you can experience through creating higher levels and larger systems of health, vitality, and interconnectedness, the more that you’re going to be able to feel that come back into your sphere of influence. So it is both selfish and selfless at the same time.
Anne: Land stewardship is definitely in my own self-interest, and that of my community — but is it scalable? How small is the smallest, and how large is the largest impact that land stewardship can make?
Jesse: When we think about the principles of regeneration, we all live within an infinite series of nested wholes. We can think of ourselves as land stewards in the concept of the physical, tangible, material nature of the land that we can walk on, that we feel, that we can apply an intervention to… but if we think of ourselves as life-stewards, then it is infinitely scalable both up and down, macro and micro. I think that one thing people continually forget is the fairly recent development of human capacity to understand microbiology — so then even when we recognize its existence, we still haven’t developed our awareness of what our role is in relation to the microscopic living organisms in living systems. In service of land stewardship and land health, so much of it resides in a microscopic world. Just by caring for our gut and the microbiome in our digestive tract, or our microbiome that is on our body, we too have reciprocity in effect between us and how all those other microbes engage with the living landscape around us. We can work in a one square foot area in our backyard and call that the smallest landscape that we could potentially service as stewards — or perhaps a potted plant on our kitchen counter, or a little hanging pot on our balcony, or we could talk about it in the context of million plus acre ranches, up to the largest continents. Land stewardship could be how we engage with migratory birds, and with predators, using fences, hunting, development, access roads — all those kinds of things. I continue to believe that regenerative land stewardship is size and scale agnostic — it is principle driven and those principles are universal.
Human Microbiome
(image source: https://theconversation.com/the-human-microbiome-is-a-treasure-trove-waiting-to-be-unlocked-118757)
Anne: So how did you get into Land Stewardship? Did you choose it, or did it choose you?
Jesse: I feel the that decision to actively engage as primary land stewards, and by primary I mean those that are direct decision makers to the interactivity of humans and what goes on on the land (we decide what to plant, when to water, what equipment to drive — all that stuff) was necessitated by our ability to communicate what the application of principles is in the context of our operation, and how those express themselves in the suite of practices that we perform. We develop our ability to create unique techniques that are going to be specific to each individual place and time. To be able to go through that process is the foundation of our ability to communicate outwardly, how we can effectively monitor ecosystem function, and how products can be developed in the marketplace in order to support ecological regeneration. What policies and initiatives need to be supported and developed in service to positive ecological outcomes derived from regenerative land stewardship?
This is also to further education and training that is in service to the community ecological awareness, as well as the future farmers/ranchers who will become the land stewards of tomorrow. So all of the constellations of priorities, that are in service of regenerative land stewardship, rely on our ability to actively be regenerative land stewards. We knew that we would always be a third party, speaking about something we don't truly know and understand unless we were doing it ourselves. That’s why we’ve taken up the mantle of land stewardship. I say that as an organizational “we” — but from a personal perspective, that’s all I wanna do — that’s what's in service of my life energy. That’s where I want my family to live, and the food I want my family to eat, and it is where I find joy, creativity, inspiration, and happiness. That’s where I belong, and hence, as the Director of Land Stewardship in this organization, it is also where I see the most weight and importance of the roles that we play.
If all else went away, and we constricted down to just being really good land stewards, that would still be enough for me. But if all else boiled down, and I was trying to push policy initiatives, or I was trying to create projects, or I was trying to educate other people, then it wouldn’t be who I am and who I believe our organization is at its core. I believe that we have an active role to play in actually regenerating landscapes.
Anne: You have a very clear picture of your place in this work.
Can you share more about the land stewardship context you’re working within?
Jesse: Our farm is quite an interesting representation of a continuum of evolutionary processes of what land was prior to agricultural interventions. I say this in the modern context of agriculture, where agriculture is the agrarian “cult” of cultivation — the mass disturbance and overlay of our management directives (deciding what we want to be there, instead of what this land wants to express itself as).
The original plan took a native landscape in the California coastal region and supplanted an avocado orchard in the early 1970s, being managed conventionally up until the early 2000s. New land stewards came and said they want to take it out of conventional production and move it to organic production. Then the current landowners came in in 2015 and said “We wanna move beyond organic, and we want to see what it is going to look like to actually regenerate this land and this place and the people who are interacting with it. From that perspective, we have a landscape that has the bone structure of all these different evolutionary processes that have brought us to this point.
Now we have to understand how we’re going to move forward without placing a “good” or “bad” label on any of the lineages of thought that got us to this point — it just is. That’s history. Now we’re able to make new decisions and learn from that to move forward. So avocados are still an economic driver within this community of land stewards, here in Santa Barbara. It is an ecological impact on our watershed and our water resources, and there’s a huge amount of fertilizers and insecticides, and herbicides that are applied to some of the avocado orchards in this area. We felt and continue to feel that it's an important system for us to steward in a way that can also show a process by which other people can continue to transition.
Anne: Watersheds are so important to consider! Anyone upstream of the land you manage might be using the fertilizers and insecticides and herbicides and that just tumbles down the land into the land you manage. And in the same way, any chemicals you add to the land have the potential to get washed further down the land, and eventually into the ocean — so limiting chemical use to protect our watershed is vital.
What exactly are you doing to transition the land to regenerative practices?
Vision for Land Stewardship at White Buffalo Land Trust
(image source: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/05f8ffbcd8194e63b3d5be47054e2907)
This 12-acre flagship farm is a legacy avocado orchard that we’ve taken on the mantle of transitioning into a multi-strata agroforestry system. We are demonstrating how we can continue to support avocado trees, but within the context of fertility plantings, contour planning and access, mulching and hedgerows, biological inoculants, and cover crops, — all these things that support a healthy functioning agroforestry system with coffee, overstory nitrogen fixers, and ground covers, all in service of the system as a whole, but without losing the avocados.
We’ve also begun to transition away from avocados on some of the property, incorporating Mediterranean and dry-land adapted plantings. This shows that even if you don’t have avocados on site, or if you don’t have the ability to maintain avocados on site, there are still ways to steward agricultural landscapes in a diverse, agro-ecological approach that have fewer inputs and are more resilient to changing climate extremes. This approach can still provide habitat, food, and shelter to wildlife, and all the other stuff.
That’s our approach. We want to maintain our “foot in the door” with avocado, so we can speak that language across the fence line, while also showing a transition process towards other cropping systems and individual crops.
Anne: I really appreciate that you have a multi-pronged approach to this transition -- keeping some of the farms as avocado so that you can use the farm as a demonstration of how the neighboring farmers might layer on more regenerative practices of agroforestry, while also taking the big steps into testing the practicality of dry-land adapted plantings, and showing that they can be an option for others to consider, too.
So in your context, how much autonomy do you have to make decisions?
Jesse: We have a decision-making hierarchy within the organization which was mutually agreed upon at the outset of this project: primary, secondary, and tertiary decision-makers. Primary decision-makers work primarily around financial decisions and sign-off. So as long as budgetary considerations are approved, then me, as the secondary decision maker, have significant autonomy to design the implementation and management monitoring plans. That being said, as the Director of Land Stewardship, I hold myself accountable to those individuals above me in the hierarchy (that hold the title to the land or the access to the checking account), but I also hold myself accountable to those who are the tertiary decision makers because they’re the ones who are ultimately going to be on the ground managing these systems, and helping implement these systems on a day to day basis. Without team buy-in, the overall process of its management, the health and vitality of the land, and the morale of the team dynamics would begin to deteriorate if there wasn’t cohesive buy-in. Those are always kind of having to be balanced (with varying degrees of success) when decisions need to be made and sometimes the holistic context of those decisions that need to be made isn’t always known to all the parties involved. So if you’re in the final sign-off and you’re looking at budgets, you won’t always know the context of the day-to-day of how things actually work on the ground. Whereas if you’re working on the ground every day, you don’t always understand the context of all the stressors and strains on the checking account. That’s my role as the intermediary is being able to communicate to those on the ground all day every day, as well as those who have the ultimate sign-off on what we are ultimately able to put our resources into or not.
This is part 5a of the manuscript I drafted for the final project of my Biomimicry master’s degree. I feel it could help you to understand the impact that each of us can have on our hyper-local ecosystems as we step toward stewardship practices that heal the soil.
— Anne LaForti —
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