TomKat Ranch on Food for the Planet

In our ongoing “Gathering for Action” effort to engage the public about regenerative practices, our very own ranch manager (and rising star!), Mark Biaggi, was featured on Food for the Planet, a podcast project of Soundings from Stanford. Student producers visited TomKat Ranch to learn about applying soil health principles to ranching—and how we can manage our soils to hold more water. Of particular interest to us as a learning laboratory, when we turned around as audience members to hear this story told, was experiencing the message of regenerative agriculture reflected in new learners’ voices.

💭 “If that fairytale [of Las Damas] is true, that with smart cattle management even the desert can be made green, then theoretically we could take the quarter of degraded land in the US, like the Galisteo Basin and return its productivity, for both human and animal use.”

🥄 “In one teaspoon of soil, there’s actually over a billion bacteria. To put that into context, that would be like the human complexity of a place like India – all the millions of interactions, bumping, churning, moving, eating, sleeping, reproducing, all of it – crammed into a spoon. If this network is poor, or doesn’t exist, then the whole system starts to fall apart.”

🍿 “I would love them to make a Pixar Movie about a soil ecosystem, right, because people really think it’s this dead thing under their feet…”

💧 “By improving soil porosity by even a small amount, we can make a very accessible reservoir, and not only that but this water is where the ecosystem needs it, no need to create complex irrigation infrastructure to deliver the water half way across the state, the water delivers itself.”

🌎 “By thinking about the land we are actually on, and designing relationships that sustain it, we might just be able to make our world a better place.”

We agree, and we send our special shout out to Alex and Jett for saying it with accessible impact and inspiration. Pass the message on, keep the network alive.