The Soil Carbon Coalition hosted another one of its Rancher to Rancher days, bringing together ranchers and conservationists from across the state at Paicines Ranch in San Benito County to discuss water cycle function and drought resilience. The group gathered in the morning and sat in a circle, or listening session, on pasture grazed by Joe Morris’s herd of cattle.
Morris, a CalCAN Farmer Advisor, has been selling grass-fed beef directly to consumers in the Bay Area for the past two decades and helps lead the Rancher to Rancher initiative, which receives funding from the 11th Hour Project. “We don’t have a cultural space for this kind of dialogue, for the mundane, for the minutiae,” explained Morris to the group, opening the space for sharing of what, as producers and land managers, can be lost in the daily pressure of managing a ranch. The objective, Morris stated, was to create a “shared intelligence” around the “mirco-architecture” of the soil beneath our feet.