SARAH WENTZEL-FISHER
Sarah Wentzel-Fisher - Executive Director of the Quivira Coalition, on the Board of Directors of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union and the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance, farmer at her home Polk’s Folly Farm, and Planner.
Sarah Wentzel-Fisher is the Executive Director of the Quivira Coalition, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Quivira Coalition was founded in 1997 by two conservationists and a rancher who thought it possible to support the ecological health of ranch land while maintaining its economic viability. Three decades later, Quivira is a non-profit organization working throughout the West to build economic and ecologically resilient landscapes. In 2007, it adopted the mission to:
Build resilience on western landscapes by fostering ecological, economic, and social health through education, innovation, collaboration, and progressive public and private land stewardship.
Sarah is a passionate leader in this work, having spent the better part of her career focused on supporting farmers and ranchers through food and agricultural planning. Prior to joining Quivira, she was the editor of Edible Santa Fe from 2011 to 2017 and simultaneously worked for the National Young Farmers Coalition as an organizer. Currently she is on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance and the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. In her free time, Sarah is feeding animals and doing chores at her home, Polk’s Folly Farm .
The political and social barriers to addressing the most pressing issues facing rural communities and landscapes often feel insurmountable. Differing values and objectives between competing groups limit our abilities to support one another toward a common goal. The work Sarah and her colleagues are doing to find common ground between environmentalists, indigenous groups, ranchers, and others throughout the West is a hopeful model for how groups can come together to solve problems and create mutual benefits to challenges that often inspire passion and conflict.
Our conversation with Sarah addressed these issues and much more. Quivira Coalition is not a design group, yet it works in the capacity that designers working in rural regions should aspire to emulate. Sarah spoke of their three decades of addressing challenging issues and bringing competing interests together through a mutual love of the ‘land’. Sarah and her colleagues are doing some of the most innovative work in the rural West. We loved hearing about her personal journey to this work and her articulation of Quivira’s vision.
Sarah would like to invite all who are interested in this work to join her at the REGENERATE CONFERENCE in Santa Fe, New Mexico November 1-3, 2023:
The Quivira Coalition, Holistic Management International, and the American Grassfed Association collaborate each year to convene ranchers, farmers, conservationists, land managers, scientists, and thought leaders to share knowledge, build community, and create a culture of resilience and regeneration.
Sarah Wentzel-Fisher (Photo Credit - Alexis Bonogofsky)
You and your team at Quivira Coalition have become a trusted mediator between environmentalists and ranchers. Can you speak to what brings those two groups together and how you work with both groups?
In the simplest terms, what brings these groups together is a love of land – a deep and often spiritual connection to ecology and place. Often what separates ranchers and environmentalists are the tools these groups have for being in a relationship with the land. The most immediate tool for ecological engagement for a rancher is her livestock, and for an environmentalist it's the tools of advocacy and policy. Often the best way to shine a light on what these two groups share – and to get to a place of mutual respect and, ideally, collaboration – is through observation and working on the land together to improve water and carbon cycles and to support biodiversity. Much of the history and current practice of the Quivira Coalition is rooted in bringing people together on the land in spaces where we work together to prevent erosion, restore habitat and waterways, improve soil health, and by extension, improve the ecology and quality of life of those who support themselves from the land. In Quivira's case, this may mean moving heavy rocks to create Zuni bowls or one-rock dams or raking out compost over an acre of rangeland. Something magical and humanizing happens when we physically work together on the land and then take time to observe and consider our work.
Initially, the organization's work was specifically focused on bringing together environmentalists and ranchers to shift extremely antagonistic approaches to multiple uses of public lands. In the past decade, our work has focused more on connecting across differences between researchers, agencies, and ranchers, in addition to environmentalists. Our work has also focused on connecting across cultural and generational differences. We do this through collaborative research with ranchers on soil health in dry rangeland systems, cocreation of Soil Health Plans with ranchers, regenerative ranching apprenticeships, land-based restoration workshops, podcasts (check out Down to Earth and Regeneration Rising!), technical guides, and a lot of network creation through our Coalitions to Enhance Workinglands.
Soil Health Workshop (Photo by Amy Larsen)
Deeply understanding the value of different viewpoints and identities is critical to our work and is at the heart of collaboration. The culture at Quivira embraces seeing people in the multiplicity of their identities and seeing them as individuals. In other words, each of us has a complex, not always seen, multifaceted identity, which is an essential piece of how Quivira brings together diverse groups of people for the challenging work of collaborative land stewardship. I consider myself a farmer, a leader, a woman, a lover of nature, a thinker, an artist, a tinker, a big sister, an auntie, an advocate, periodically a stick in the mud – the list could be much longer, but the point is you may or may not know all of these things about me. In fact, you might limit learning some of these things about me if you label me as one of these over others. Further, the label applied may prevent inquiry or collaboration with some other rich aspect of my identity. Often ranchers are environmentalists, and environmentalists have a deep connection to animal husbandry, food production, or both. When we show up with an openness to the diverse facets of a person's identity and individuality in this type of work, it also creates space for seeing how we share frames of reference and ultimately building the trust necessary for long-term and complex work.
(Images from Left to Right) One Rack Dam, New Agrarian Program Workshop 2020, 2021 NAP Whit Hibbard Clinic
Collaboration is at the heart of your work. What does the collaborative process look like for you? And how does design thinking factor into your conversations?
The work of the Quivira Coalition does not happen without collaboration. This sounds so hyperbolic, but I am hard pressed to think of a single activity that doesn’t happen without the input or support of another group or individual in our work. When I think of collaboration in the context of our work, I often think about the scale and scope of stewarding working lands in New Mexico, where much of Quivira’s work happens. We are the fifth largest state in the union, with approximately 35 million acres of public land and 42 million acres privately owned. However, we are the 10th least populated state with just over 2 million people, half of whom live in Albuquerque – we have about 40 acres per person in New Mexico. What these statistics mean in a practical sense is that a tiny group of people (relatively speaking) steward many acres and that it takes an enormous team effort to ensure we balance the needs of the land and people.
Collaboration often starts with inquiry and/or a request for support, and the context often informs the process of the work. For example, we may collaborate by something as simple as providing feedback on another organization’s grant application; or we may have a much more involved collaboration where we work with ranchers, our state soil and water conservation association, extension, and three other NGOs on a two-year project to create a community of practice in New Mexico around soil health. Regardless of the scope and scale, collaboration has to move at the speed of relationships because it can’t happen without them being strong and functional.
Design thinking shows up in a number of ways in our work. As an organization committed to exploring and understanding regenerative agriculture, the idea of regeneration shows up in our work literally and metaphorically at many levels. Daniel Christian Wahl wrote Designing Regenerative Cultures, where he talks about design that mimics or actually is a part of nature, that returns more resources than it uses, and that considers whole systems and the impacts interventions will have on these. These are concepts that show up in much of what we do.
Currently, we are beginning a USDA Climate Smart Commodities Grant project where we will be looking at how we create meat value chains that reduce their overall emissions through adaptive and rotational grazing, through fewer steps from farm to plate, and through organic waste management leveraged to create an organic amendment to improve soil health (think compost and/or biochar application on pastures). In this project, we will collaborate with ranchers, meat processors, small rural municipalities, and government land management agencies to determine the feasibility of this type of system to create some more profound cultural shifts in how we consume meat and think about its value in our food systems and ecosystems.
I thought I would take a moment here to say there’s a significant need for folks willing to engage in design outside of the places where it is more likely to show up, such as landscape architecture, planning, etc. Rural places like New Mexico need individuals capable and willing to lead large-scale riparian restoration work and ready to put in the hard work navigating layers of bureaucracy and grounding their work in relationships.
What critical issues do you see impacting landowners and rural communities throughout the West, and how are you and allied professionals addressing them?
While we culturally continue to be disconnected from land in both urban and rural places, I believe there’s still a certain synonymy between rural and agrarian people – in other words, the challenges of farmers and ranchers are a substantive part of the challenges that face rural communities. Ranchers grazing livestock on rangeland and pastures manage 790 million acres of working lands in the US, 41 percent of all US lands, excluding Alaska. These rangelands, pastures, and forests constitute our best tool for addressing climate change – for maintaining healthy watersheds, fostering biodiversity, and sequestering carbon. The ranchers and farmers who tend these working lands in the future—and how knowledge and strategies for their stewardship are shared and implemented—will have an enormous impact on the resilience of our environment, economies, and climate.
Traditionally, ranchers and farmers have learned their vocations through family. Today, there are very few pathways for individuals who do not grow up on ranches and farms to enter careers in agriculture. A century ago, 25 percent of our population made their livelihoods in agriculture. Today less than two percent produce our food, fuel, and fiber. Few pathways exist for seasoned agrarians to share their knowledge and teach their craft. According to the 2017 US Agricultural Census* the average age of US ranchers and farmers was 58. To ensure that we have skilled land stewards prepared to tend critical land and water resources and to produce healthy food, we must increase the quality and quantity of hands-on education provided by skilled mentors in regenerative agriculture.
Water & Wildlife Management on Working Lands Field Day at Berlier Ranch
Seasoned ranchers and farmers face growing challenges in land stewardship, including erratic weather patterns, pricing and consumer expectations of food, corporate control of food supply chains, and constricted financial and technical support through the Farm Bill, just to name a few. Historically, scientists, civil servants, and producers have not always worked in tandem to identify critical land management questions and gather substantive data, and to inform long-term holistic land use. We are in a moment of paradigm shift in agriculture and food, and we must cultivate and encourage these relationships.
Resilient working lands, stewarded through good agricultural and conservation practices, guarantee fertile soils, the preservation of essential biodiversity, abundant, nutritious food from local ranches and farms, and the vitality of rural and urban communities. Quivira’s work, at its foundation, advances the current shift from extractive to regenerative culture and economy. This includes restoring carbon to depleted soils through proven ranching and farming practices, on-the-ground mentoring for the next generation of ranchers and farmers, outreach and educational opportunities for established agrarians, and facilitating agricultural land and business succession. All of our activities aim to regenerate working lands for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.
*The 2022 Ag Census will be published soon but has yet to be released.
NAP apprentice 2022 in Montana (Photo by Alexis Bonogofsky)
Tell us about the ‘Radical Center.’ What is it? And how does it impact ranchers, conservationists, and rural communities?
The idea and practice of the radical center have always been challenging to articulate. This idea grew out of a political philosophy that says to meet in the middle with creative and out-of-the-box ideas that work for folks across the political spectrum. As an organization that’s not doing policy work, the concept was reconceptualized by early members of the coalition. They created a manifesto of commitments – an approach that led with a love for the land (and sharing work on the land) as a way to bring ranchers and environmentalists together for more ecologically and economically viable stewardship of public lands. The tensions between these groups have shifted but continue to exist, making the need for the radical center as relevant as ever.
We have, however, expanded how we think about this idea. It’s more broadly about a commitment to working across differences, to valuing and incorporating perspectives and knowledge different from your own, and knowing that both ecology and economy ultimately lose if we can’t find ways to share work as human beings.
Water & Wildlife Management on Working Lands Field Day at Berlier Ranch
What does your ideal future for the rural countryside look like?
An ideal rural future is one where we are navigating the challenges of climate change peacefully, cooperatively, with hope and humility, where we have a much more diverse and thriving community of people engaged in producing food, fuel, and fiber in ways that are creative, beautiful, abundant, resilient, and rich in the sense of biodiversity. One where we’re deeply honoring the knowledge and energy of those who have come before us in this work and supporting those who come after us with the mentorship, tools, and resources they need to engage in the hard but good work of land stewardship.
