The Jefferson Center for Holistic Management is offering a four-day Holistic Land Planning and Ecological Monitoring course, July 6 through 9 at the Smith Family ranch and learning site, Springs Ranch in Fort Bidwell, California. Participants will learn how to make a long-term land plan for their property and how to work toward this each year
Are you feeding in a sacrifice lot? All too often on ranches all over the west, people winter their livestock on feed grounds that end up looking like ground zero after a bombing. The soil is packed hard and when the growing season finally comes, all you can grow is Mustard and thistle. Does that
Spencer Smith stood before a filled conference room at the Artisans of the Grasslands conference in the Bay Area last October. His presentation on holistic planned grazing sparked questions from the audience, including one from Gareth Plank, owner and operator of Scott River Ranch. Gareth asked if whole families could attend holistic management courses together
I read a lot about health and longevity. Books. Blogs. Podcasts. Interviews. Seminars. I kinda had to. After my daughter was born I developed an autoimmune condition that took three years to diagnose. But even after a diagnosis, that wasn’t the root cause of my health problems. Conventional medicine didn’t have the answer (believe me
Soil Quality? Manage for health instead. The term “soil quality” thrown around a lot and I have a real problem with that. Soil quality leaves us with the impression that it is as good as it can be and at its potential. This is categorically wrong, no matter what soil type you have or its
Holistic financial planning, we figured, costs about $20,000 in labor to complete (assuming farmers and ranchers are valuing their time and paying themselves a salary, which doesn’t happen enough) and about 11 days total out of the year to complete. It is well worth the investment. It could save the ranch. It could mean peace of
Yesterday we left the ranch. At sunrise we loaded in the open truck caravans and bumped down the dirt road to meet a van waiting to take us to the Sizinda village and then on to Victoria Falls. The village was a Waldorf school’s dream. When we arrived the whole community was working together in
A few weeks ago we headed north to our demonstration site, Springs Ranch, to complete our holistic management baseline monitoring on the ranch. This is a process of collecting data on the land and setting up a process where new data is collected and evaluated each year in order to show change and/or inform management