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October 2020

Picture (Video) of the Month

Introduction: Success in a Hard Year

by Wendy Millet and Kevin Alexander Watt

The story of the mythological phoenix rising from the ashes is a popular one to invoke in these times of environmental, social, and economic crises. The phoenix, a symbol of hope, shows us the possibility of emerging from hard times renewed and empowered.

Hope is incredibly important medicine for the human spirit. More potent than optimism or distraction, it gives us strength to see our way through difficult times. “Hope does not mean that we will avoid or be able to ignore suffering” writes author Henri Nouwen, “it becomes matured and purified through difficulty.” The shining phoenix rises from the ashes because of, not in spite of, fire, destruction, and pain.

In this spirit of hope, we would like to share successes we have seen during this challenging year including ways we’ve come to think about and relate to fire, stronger ties to our community and neighbors, and new online regenerative educational resources that are available to more people than ever before.

We also want to highlight the hopeful work of our founder, Kat Taylor. Throughout 2020, she has helped guide and support us and many others through these challenging times by collaboratively forging a generous and compassionate path towards a regenerative world. Her impact can be seen not just through the work of the ranch, but also through the Growing the Table Program that we highlighted last month and in her work to support changes in philanthropy and investment. For more information on Kat’s projects, check out the amazing article and video that Forbes recently published on her work.

Lastly, we are excited to share the announcement that we are hiring a new Regenerative Ranching Apprentice.  While so much has been disrupted or changed this year, the need for well-trained regenerative food system professionals is greater than ever. To learn more about the position, please click here.

As beef harvesting goes, California lacks enough USDA certified processing facilities to serve small local producers.  The COVID-19 crisis has made that shortage more striking. That’s why, in order to create a more resilient local food system, a group of Bay Area ranchers came together to form an agricultural cooperative–by ranchers, for ranchers– called BAR-C (Bay Area Ranchers Cooperative). 

The need for this effort started in 2019 when the local ranching community lost access to the only multi-species (beef, pork, lamb, and goat) USDA processing facility within 150 miles of the San Francisco Bay Area. With only a handful of facilities in California, the loss of one more facility further reduced options for local ranches to provide their communities healthy, grass-fed meat without  driving hundreds of miles for processing. To add to the bottleneck, the pandemic led to the closure of a number of big meat processing plants forcing large cattle operations to look for alternative processors and adding to competition for access to processing facilities.

Groundwork - A Virtual Summer Pilot Program and Learning Opportunity

Kevin Alexander Watt

Earlier this year as COVID-19 grew from a concern into a pandemic, our team had to make the difficult choice to cancel our TomKat Ranch Summer Internship Program for 2020. This was a hard decision not only because interns bring energy and fresh thinking to the ranch, but also because our internship program is an important part of our strategic mission to grow a regenerative food system.   

The TomKat Ranch Internship Program welcomes people from a wide variety of educational, professional, and social backgrounds into the world of regenerative agriculture. Over the course of a summer, interns are exposed to all parts of our work from science and grazing to Farmers Markets and food access. Our intention is to give interns a chance to discover how they best combine their skills, perspectives, and passions into a career that will help build a regenerative food system. 

This past summer, I had the opportunity to film a series of instructional videos for the Regenerative Organic Alliance, first at beautiful True Grass Farms in Marin County and then at Green Valley Community Farm in Sonoma County. The videos, which walk through 10 different soil health assessments from soil smell to aggregate stability, are intended to help farmers and ranchers connect with their land and achieve Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC). For those who aren’t familiar, the goal of ROC is to rebuild soil organic matter, improve animal welfare, and provide economic stability and fairness to farmers, ranchers, and workers by promoting holistic agricultural practices in an “all-encompassing certification” program. Soil health is one pillar of the ROC framework. 

While specifically designed to support ROC, these tests are meant to be widely accessible and easy to conduct, and my hope is that the instructional videos will help serve the broad and growing community of ranchers and farmers who aim to manage their land regeneratively, whether they seek certification or not. Please enjoy, and feel free to share! 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/c/RegenerativeOrganicAlliance/featured 

My Thoughts On Regenerative Fire Mitigation - Part 1

Mark Biaggi

“Log it, graze it, or let it burn.” It seems I hear this sentiment a lot when catastrophic fire strikes and people start wondering how to manage forests and grasslands full of fuels. I’ve heard some people even suggest “pave it, build on it, till it to death, or just spray a lot of herbicide” - anything to help prevent another fire. While these options may accomplish the goal of preventing land from burning, they also create significant and cascading impacts on the environment and surrounding areas and downstream communities of humans and wildlife, sometimes well into future generations.  

Instead of these one-time fixes, I think a new approach to fire mitigation that looks at this management challenge from the perspective of how to create fire-resilient, rather than “fire-proofed” communities and environments. After all, fire has been part of the environment since plants began growing on earth, drying, and becoming fuel. Many of the plants that exist on the land today in California likely evolved in relationship with fire, a relationship that started long before human impact came to this continent.

Local Food Security: Coops, Veggies, and Meat

Annie Fresquez, Susan Hadacek, and Marianna Zavala

Annie - Mini Coop Project 

A large part of what we do at TomKat Ranch is focused on food systems change. While this work often is at the state level with programs like California's Farm to Family, Growing the Table, and the Beef to Institutes pilot program which you can read about it in our August 2019 Newsletter under Beef2Schools & Hospitals, we also strive to be good and supportive neighbors in our local context. 

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Susan - Food in the Gardens 

In normal times, landscaping at the ranch focuses on the care of beautiful flowers, orchards, and a modest market garden; but 2020 has been anything but normal! When the impact of COVID-19 began to be felt, we knew we could do more to address food insecurity in the community. Immediately, we jumped in to significantly increase the amount of vegetables we were growing so we could donate as much as we could to the food drives being led by friends at Puente.

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Marianna - Challenges Compounded 

The Pescadero community has been hard-pressed over these past several months. The pandemic has brought on increased issues of job insecurity, food insecurity, and inadequate healthcare for many.  The  CZU August Lightning Complex fire compounded problems with a majority of the Pescadero Area evacuated for a week or more, and many losing their homes. Tragically, while the troubles of this year have been widely experienced, they have been disproportionately felt by the most vulnerable in our small coastal town. To respond, we made the choice to set aside a sizable portion of our LeftCoast Grassfed beef for donation. To date, we have donated close to 4,000 pounds of grassfed beef to local facilities and will continue to donate beef to Puente each week through the remainder of the year.

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