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
How your land can produce a living for you and your family You can make a living off the land. Though your management, create an agriculture business that produces more, earns more, while saving the planet in the process, and the market will reward you for it. Consumers and manufacturers are calling for products that
Flood in the winter, drought in the summer This is a common enough thing to hear in seasonally dry environments, even farmers and ranchers will complain about too much rain in the winter and then lament about the long dry summers. Around here it’s California’s water scarcity problem that is often the topic of discussion. Few
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
The following post is a summary of a session on Springs Ranch led by NRCS soil expert James Komar. Spencer Smith spent the day with Komar and others from the Modoc County NRCS office evaluating soil conditions on the ranch and discussing holistic land planning. The post is written by Spencer Smith. Recently we were