September 2021

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Levers for Change

by Wendy Millet and Kevin Alexander Watt

While our work at the ranch is about changing the way food is raised and land is managed to benefit people and the planet, there are many other levers for change that are helping to build the healthier world we want to see. To that end, this month we celebrate efforts off the ranch by our founder, Kat Taylor, and her partner, Tom Steyer.

SCHOOL FOOD

This summer a coalition of over 200 organizations called “School Meals for All” succeeded in making California the first state in the nation to permanently adopt universal free school meals for all K-12 students. This historic accomplishment helps ensure that California’s 6.2 million students will have access to healthy breakfasts and lunches each day. TomKat Ranch has been engaged for over a decade in advocacy and education around the importance of healthy school meals as we believe that equitable access to healthy food is a critical element to growing a regenerative food system. 

INVESTING IN CLIMATE 

This month also marked the launch of a new investment platform, Galvanize Climate Solutions that will strive to mobilize mission-driven private sector investment to promote meaningful solutions to climate change. The leaders of Galvanize have also pledged 25% of the organization’s profits to support climate and climate justice organizations. This is an important effort that affirms the sincere need for climate solutions based on inclusive collaboration and the explicit intention that economic benefits be shared broadly.

To learn more about Galvanize, please check out this article at Red, Green, and Blue.

Swath Grazing Harding Grass

by Mark Biaggi

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.  ― Mark Twain

Swath grazing is a practice where forage is cut into a swath (a long row of mowed forage) and left in a field as stored feed for cattle during the non-growing season. In the right climate, this can be an extremely economical practice as compared to traditional haying as it eliminates baling and handling costs.

While there are many options for storing feed for your animals, determining the ‘right’ one is a matter of matching practices to your context. My time in the Peace Corps taught me that feed does not alway need to be stored in a bale, silage pit or bag to retain nutritional value. Growing up on a ranch where we made and purchased hay, the idea of cutting hay, leaving it in the field rather than baling it, hauling it in, stacking it, and then hauling it back out struck me as a smart and efficient practice for TomKat Ranch especially as we have portable electric fencing to partition fields and ensure cattle get access to only the hay they need each day. 

Conducting Science to Inform Regenerative Stewardship: A Decade in Review

by Chelsea Carey, Point Blue

Conducting science is one important way to support regenerative stewardship of agricultural lands. Scientific endeavors can help to establish regenerative principles, document the practices that work, identify new tools for monitoring, and inform ranch-wide planning. For the past decade, Point Blue and TomKat Ranch have worked closely together to conduct and support science towards this end, and share what we’ve learned through ecological monitoring, controlled experiments and trials, and reviews of the published scientific literature. We thought we’d take a moment to compile and share this body of work with you all, much of which was conducted collaboratively with partners across the United States and beyond. Our hope is that it will serve as a useful resource that sparks curiosity, stimulates dialogue with new and existing partners, and ultimately helps to advance our collaborative work to inspire meaningful and equitable regenerative action. 

To learn more about Science at TomKat Ranch, please click here.

School Meals for All Update!

by Kathy Webster

We are thrilled that California is now the first state in the nation to permanently adopt free school meals for all K-12 students. The passage of the largest free school meal program was made possible by the advocacy of over 200 organizations in a coalition called “School Meals for All” (of which TomKat Ranch is a proud member), dedicated policy leaders, and an unexpected state budget surplus.

This program gives 6.2 million public school students a better shot at growing up healthy and ready to succeed by providing free breakfast and lunch, regardless of their family’s income.

“School meals for all was considered an impossible dream until the pandemic came along,” said Kat Taylor, founder of TomKat Ranch and a driving force behind the idea.

When schools were shut down in March 2020, many districts transformed their parking lots into pick-up sites for boxed produce and/or prepared meals, and federal funding enabled schools to provide meals for free. Additionally, applications or income qualifications that are typical of school lunch programs were eliminated negating potential stigma issues. The significant demand for these temporary free meals helped pave the way for state-wide legislation to make free meals permanent and available to all children throughout public schools in California.  

This program will reduce child hunger, support essential school nutrition staff, and bolster the state’s agricultural sector.  To see a short video with Kat announcing the program’s launch, please click here.

Follow Up to Last Month’s Regen Ranching Data Round Up

by Megan Shahan

TomKat Ranch is a well monitored landscape and learning laboratory committed to reducing the knowledge gap in implementing regenerative practices. Key elements of this strategy include improved access to useful and connected datasets and supportive technology for actionable management insights, as well as many other critical levers of adoption such as local technical assistance. To that end, we’ve been excited to engage with the Farm Foundation’s Regenerative Ranching Data Initiative to promote interoperable data in regenerative ranching.

As a follow up to last month’s newsletter article on data interoperability for regenerative ranching, we’d like to share additional information about The Regenerative Ranching Data Round Up & Rodeo events. In August, the Regenerative Ranching Data Round Up gathered a large, diverse and global group of regenerative ranchers, landholders, value chain partners, software providers, conservationists and land trust representatives, scientists, academics and more to link the information flows necessary to implement and scale regenerative grazing. Participants placed ‘sticky-notes’ on a virtual whiteboard to develop a community-led understanding of the regenerative ranching sector and highlight common data challenges.

The next event (date to be determined) The Regenerative Ranching Data Rodeo, will gather coders to write real world code to make real world software to help solve some of the data challenges identified in the Regenerative Ranching Data Round Up. We are currently exploring the usefulness of providing ecological data from TomKat’s Ranch Data Project to support this upcoming initiative.

For more details on the event as well as the upcoming Regenerative Ranching Data Rodeo, read the Regenerative Ranching Data Round Up Summary Report and accompanying blog post.

The collaborators are still in the planning phases for the Regenerative Ranching Data Rodeo. If you or someone you know would like to be involved in the Rodeo, please contact megan@tomkatranch.org.