What Capital Can Learn From the Land

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

EVENT HOST: Good evening, everyone. Thank you all so much for coming. It has been an absolute pleasure working with the Walton Family Foundation to bring this event together. And to kick things off, we'll hand you over to Moira McDonald.

MOIRA MCDONALD: Okay. So I want to thank you all for being here. This is the nuttiest week of the year, and so I am even more thankful that you have chosen to spend some time with us and with one another. Resilience is a big idea, and it's a big idea not just because it allows us to see our work as connected, but also because it allows us to see one another's work with more clarity and more purpose.

I hope and believe that there is common ground in our aspiration for resilience, so that feels like a powerful place for us to try to build the next chapter together. So with that, I'm going to get to the meat of the program that you all came here tonight for, and I'm going to try not to embarrass myself too much as a fangirl for Anna Sale.

You may know Anna Sale from her award-winning podcast, Death, Sex & Money, which is an interview show about things that we all think about and don't like to talk about. For a decade, Anna has built a sizable and dedicated audience, including me, who listen each week as she gets regular people and celebrities alike to open up in very relatable ways about the very real and human parts of their lives that we can all connect to.

She's launching a new project now that we're really honored to support, about people who are looking around at the realities of climate change and are working in their own communities to make a difference. This project is called People Trying, and it's a multimedia effort that's being launched this fall, and I'm going to let her tell you more about it.

But the big idea here is that environmental stories don't need more data. I know that's hard for us to accept. I know. They need more humanity. So with that, I'm going to introduce Anna. Thank you.

ANNA SALE: Hi, everyone. I'm so honored to be here tonight with you to talk about resiliency, and it's kind of incredible to think about the different paths that have led us here to caring about managing land, water, nature, and what's possible to manage it better. We're here under this tent in Central Park together tonight, all from a lot of different paths. Some of us might not cross paths again, but tonight we're here together, and so we're going to talk about the different vantage points that we bring to these deep values that we all care about a lot. I am so honored to be joined by two people trying. I'm going to quickly introduce them, and then tell you what we're going to do tonight.

Shelly Kelly is here. Shelly Kelly is a rancher from Broken Bow, Nebraska, the grasslands of the Sandhills. She also is the executive director of the Sandhills Task Force. So I want you to think about this: she has her own cattle operation, she leases land, and in her day job she works with fellow ranchers and state and federal agencies, trying to figure out how to talk with ranchers and land managers about how to manage for drought resiliency, how to manage for wildfire risk, among many other things. And so we're going to talk about her vantage point, the questions she has for you all, and how she thinks about nature-based solutions and resiliency.

Also with us is Cole Mannix. Cole Mannix, like Shelly, is a ranch kid, but he's not a rancher. He lives in Helena, Montana. His family ranches, and he runs something called the Old Salt Co-op, and if you haven't heard of this, it's really cool. It is a co-op of different cattle operations that does direct marketing of cattle and ranches in regenerative ways, really takes seriously the stewardship of the land, and also takes seriously doing this in a way that is resilient and sustainable. And so they have a business plan that has included opening a meat processing plant. They've opened restaurants to sell the meat directly to consumers. And every June they have something called the Old Salt Festival in Helmville, Montana, on the Mannix family ranch, where people gather, talk about land management, talk about challenges, talk about how they like to drink beer and listen to music together and eat good food, and it is quite a time.

It has the best vibes of any festival. I just went in June, and it was such an incredible experience, and I'm so honored that you are also here with us tonight, Cole.

Just to get a sense of who's in the room, I know a lot of you are not directly working with land, water, and nature on the ground. Raise your hand if, as part of your work and in your life, you think about where to deploy investments to create more resiliency with land, water, and nature. Okay. Now raise your hand if you are someone who has worked directly with natural resources: land, water, nature. You all can raise your hand. Okay. And now raise your hand if you're somebody who has been out and had a transformative experience in nature that has reoriented how you think about where you fit in the world and the intentionality you want to bring to making ecosystems more resilient. Okay.

I want to tell you a bit about People Trying before we dive in. So Cole and Shelly are two People Trying. People Trying is a journalism project, and it's a YouTube interview series, a social media effort, and also a newsletter. And what we're trying to do is speak to two pretty different audiences at once. We are trying to reach what we think of as climate-concerned laptop workers who might feel despairing. They might feel like they've read all the news and they just want to close their laptop, because they don't know how they can be involved in making more positive change happen. And we want to introduce them to people who day in and day out are working. You all don't stop, right? You have to go out, whether it's drought conditions, whether it's raining. We want to introduce them to people whose life is in relationship with nature and who can show the rest of us how to build that emotional resiliency to keep at it.

That's one part of the audience we're trying to reach. The other part of the audience we think of as the People Trying network, and that's what we're building with our newsletter. And that's people like Shelly and Cole, who are doing different things in really different landscapes, and sometimes in ways that make their neighbors look over the fence and go, "What's she doing over there with that weird mix of cows that look a little different than what we usually do around here?" We want to connect the people who are willing to do something a little different, and who don't always have time to go to all the conferences and all the networking events, to meet other people like them, so they feel more accompanied, and they feel like they can learn from each other and take more risks and feel like they aren't alone in it.

And 24 hours into People Trying launching, I want to tell you, it's working. We have reached both these audiences so far. Last night, Cole and Shelly and I were at a bar in lower Manhattan with a couple of other people who work in regenerative ag, some in the Northeast in forestry, some in Oregon who are also cattle ranchers and who've figured out how to harvest the hides and send them to a tanner so they have another revenue stream. And it was so cool to see you all comparing notes about different ways to think about equity investors, to think about financing, to think about where you could take the risks and keep your businesses growing and strong and stable.

And then earlier today, Shelly and I, I don't know how many of you are New Yorkers, but we went on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, which was quite an honor. Brian Lehrer is the talk show host who covers the New York City metro area, and he wanted to talk to us about People Trying, about getting more voices from people on the ground into our conception of climate and who's doing work that matters. And among the things Brian wanted to know from Shelly was, "Explain ranching 101 to me," and Shelly got to explain what a cow-calf operation was. And by the end of the segment, she's describing using prescribed fire and encouraging ranchers to think about prescribed fire as a nature-based solution, in a year that's had historic wildfire risk. So, how to talk about fire and using fire in positive ways.

And then we left that radio studio, and we walked out, and we ran into Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine in the lobby. He was there to promote his new album, and he told us about his concert coming up with Springsteen, and then he turned to Shelly and started asking her about ranching and grassland conservation and managing for wildfire in Nebraska. So that was the kind of conversation that we hope to see more of with People Trying, amongst people who are trying and also... I don't think Tom Morello has thought a lot about cattle ranching in Nebraska recently. Maybe he has before, but I don't think it's been at the top of his list this week.

So that's what we're trying to do. So tonight, I want us to kind of feel that in the room. I want us to feel like you can ask Cole and Shelly about their experiences working on the ground, trying to pull down resources to push the ball forward, to keep their community businesses more resilient while also managing land for more resiliency. And they also have questions for you all, about what your priorities are and how you think about what's a valuable investment and a risk you're willing to take. We're going to do that mostly after we get more of our dinner, but I wanted to start, Shelly, by asking you... I don't know if "nature-based solution" is a term you think about when you are talking with fellow ranchers, but prescribed fire is something you have advocated for in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Tell me why. Do you think of that as a nature-based solution?

SHELLY KELLY: Yeah. I'll try to talk in language that I hear in these circles instead of just the language I use at home. But prescribed fire is a tool that can be used to manage the land. We live in a prairie. Nebraska is a prairie state. When people traveled and settled Nebraska, they were told that to prove up on their land, they had to plant trees, so they planted trees in the prairie. We thought that was a way to make it less wild, to provide some shelter. It was really good. And then as the government got involved, and more environmental agencies and wildlife agencies got involved, they talked about the benefits of planting trees for shelter, because animals need shelter. But it's a grassland, and all of these native species have adapted to the grassland, and we're interrupting the grassland with all these trees we're planting.

And the other thing that we interrupted is, we started building structures, and a lot of structures out of wood, and wood is consumed by fire. And so wildfire, something that was very natural out there, happened on average every 10 years in our area, but we tried to eliminate all the wildfire. And so when you plant trees and you eliminate fire, what's going to happen to a prairie? It can start to turn into a forest. And a forest is not bad, but a monoculture forest is, and the most aggressive woody species that we have in the Sandhills of Nebraska is eastern red cedar. It does really, really well without fire.

And so when we think about the reintroduction of fire, we can do that under a prescribed setting. That doesn't mean that we control everything. It's still a risk, and it's still something that we need to pay close attention to. But if we apply fire to the landscape, wildfires don't have to be as devastating. And so when we think about the changes that we've made to the landscape, we try to find ways to address them. And prescribed fire has been a way for us to address the eastern red cedar encroachment issues that we have, to return the prairie to a more natural state, and that improves our ability to manage our ranch land for resiliency through drought, through all the climate variability that we have. And managing climate variability is something that farmers and ranchers have done since there were farmers and ranchers.

It's awesome to be here. It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

AS: Can I ask you to follow up, from a climate lens, on something you have taught me? When I think about carbon, and I think about red cedar in Nebraska, and I think about native grasslands, and what happens to carbon when grasslands are growing with deep roots, and what happens to carbon when there's woody encroachment, when these red cedars grow into what has been this incredible grassland habitat... Talk me through how you think about carbon on the landscape as red cedar encroaches on grasslands.

SK: Yeah. We've talked about trees. As a society, we love trees, and I've been called a shade hater, because I want to see the trees go away in the prairie. I'm more of a prairie chicken. I like to see the views, and so I don't want all the obstruction, but I'm not the norm out there, for sure. But trees are wonderful in the right spot, and the prairie is not the right spot for a tree.

And when we think about carbon and carbon sequestration, and these conversations have been really interesting, trees do hold a lot of carbon, but a lot of the carbon they hold is above ground, and it's vulnerable. So when we think about carbon sequestration, I think we need to think about permanence, too. In grasslands, a lot of the carbon storage is below ground, and that is there. Even if you burn off the top, those root systems are still there. They're still intact, and they're still going to respond. They're still going to sequester, and you're still going to build soil. Whereas with a tree, most of the time they top-kill, and that is the end of that plant. And underneath a tree, you don't usually have very much growing, especially a cedar tree. There's not a blade of grass or one thing growing underneath a cedar tree, and so when that tree is gone, we have bare soil. And bare soil does not sequester carbon, and it causes erosion and many other things that we don't want to see.

AS: Thank you, Shelly. Cole, you grew up on a ranch in Helmville, Montana. Will you describe the valley where you got to grow up, what it looks like, what it's like?

COLE MANNIX: Yeah. Glad to be with you all tonight. The Blackfoot Valley is right on the west side of the Continental Divide. It's about a 1.5 million acre landscape. If you picture Glacier National Park at the top, surrounded by the Bob Marshall Wilderness, with the Scapegoat Wilderness just to the south, the Blackfoot Valley is sort of the first place where there's private land intermixed with public land. And it's mostly a cattle ranching valley. To give you a little sense, I was the only kid in my class, K through eighth grade. Very tiny spot. We've got the Copper Queen bar, and that's...

AS: The only kid?

CM: Yes. For two years I had one other classmate.

AS: Okay.

CM: I graduated as the valedictorian of a one-person class.

AS: Congratulations. And you have told me a story about how, when you think about a nature-based solution, you think of sheep and the encroachment of this weed that your family wanted to figure out how to take care of, knapweed. Tell me the story of this particular part of the ranch where knapweed had taken over, and what you tried, and then what finally worked.

CM: Yeah. So knapweed is a European invasive weed. It's a taprooted plant that came in ships' ballast. It has a real competitive advantage in our environment. Picture about a 6,000-acre piece of the ranch. It's pretty steep. It's probably about half the size of Manhattan. I think Manhattan is 15,000 acres. It's pretty steep, deep gullies. It's dry, south-facing. We're mostly a cattle ranch. We historically were a sheep ranch. We run about 1,200 mother cows at any given time, plus maybe 600 or 700 other classes of livestock.

But we had struggled. Knapweed especially came as clear-cutting happened on public lands. We had a bunch of disturbed soil, and knapweed's great at colonizing disturbed areas. And the thing about knapweed is that it can very quickly become a monoculture. It kind of competes out other life. You end up with a lot of bare ground, much less life underneath the soil, and it is very hard to kill.

We had tried biocontrols. I used to work with the Fish and Wildlife Service. We had really great success with biocontrols on species like leafy spurge, but knapweed weevils, they were supposed to lay their eggs in the seed heads, and we just couldn't get it to take. You can't plow and reseed steep country, dry country, kind of the ancient shore of what used to be a lake bed. It's far too fragile. You can burn it, but burning isn't particularly effective to control knapweed. You're not going to pull it on 6,000 acres. And you're required by law to control it, and even if you weren't required by law, it's a huge ecological problem for everything from carbon to water-holding capacity to wildlife habitat.

So we sprayed it for decades with Tordon. We sprayed it with a helicopter. We sprayed it by hand, trying to fight back. And the problem is, it does kill knapweed, but of course it kills a lot of other things, and this is a wicked problem. My family has been on this same ranch now for 150 years, and as my dad and my two sets of aunts and uncles worked on this problem, we were stuck.

In the early 2000s, when I would've been 18 or 19, we decided we were going to try grazing, but not by cattle. Instead, by either sheep or goats. We weren't quite sure which, but they eat something a little different than cattle, and we thought we could target them on the knapweed seed heads. And so we started a project. We found a landowner with about 2,000 sheep that would show up from July 1st through the early part of September. Actually, the first year was goats. And I wouldn't recommend that. I was...

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You're anti-goat.

CM: Goats are really fun. They don't quite move like an amoeba, like sheep do. They're even more vulnerable to mountain lions and coyotes. They're very clever, stubborn little fellas, and ladies. And so that didn't work.

We worked with the family that owned the sheep. It was mostly Peruvian herders. They had one set of dogs that was very good at the herding part, and another set of dogs to protect against predators. And we worked with the university to measure the rate of seed head capture. The goal was, if we can keep most of this plant from going to seed in a given year, then eventually we're going to deplete the seed bank. And for 12 years of doing this, and learning Spanish, and learning to move sheep camp, and learning how to communicate with the herders, and figuring out the predator problems, the problem got worse. Knapweed sort of marched on ahead. And then in year 13 or 14, somewhere in there, knapweed began to collapse. And when it...

AS: Thirteen or 14. So that's a lot of trying.

CM: A lot of trying, on the end of a lot of trying with every other tool that we knew how to use.

AS: Yeah.

CM: And so since then, we have continued the sheep grazing. We see it as an essential part of weed control on that piece of property. Knapweed is now just another plant that you may find. It no longer dominates that ecosystem. And we've also begun to learn to use other tools, like bringing fire back. In this case, 20 to 25 years is the cadence that fire often moved through that ecosystem. It's the cadence on which Native Americans would intentionally burn. And so it's a mosaic now of sagebrush and native grass habitat, where we have, in this valley, the full complement of native species: grizzly bear, wolf, elk, moose, a whole bunch of migratory birds.

I took a walk this summer. I had a couple hours, and I walked up through that country, and it's just vibrant. And I asked Dad, "How's that country up Kenarwe looking?" And Dad had to turn away, because he was tearing up. It's one of the hardest challenges we've ever taken on, and at the end of the day, it might not sound enormous, but it was an incredible success. Not just because this land is now producing much more livestock than it was before, but the habitat, the carbon sequestration, the water-holding capacity are much better, and no more chemicals.

AS: I love that story. And I just want to know, Cole, for 12 years you didn't know if this was working. Where did you find the money to keep trying this sheep grazing experiment to control this weed, not knowing if it was actually effective? How did you do that project and experiment?

CM: Yeah, I mean, ultimately the bulk of the money came from a working operation that was profitable. Profitable on the basis of cattle and a little bit of forestry that we do. There was a little bit of help from a group called the Sheep Foundation. They helped pay the freight from several hours away, where the sheep came from. We used NRCS funding to develop...

AS: Shelly's first job was with NRCS, the federal agency, starting at age 17, before she became a rancher and the executive director of the Sandhills Task Force.

CM: Yeah, the Natural Resources Conservation Service. We used that money to develop off-stream water that would allow greater density for livestock and then greater rest periods, which is really important to try to mimic the way that native ungulates use the landscape. And the biggest source of funding came from the family that owned the sheep and provided the labor, these 11 siblings. I think seven of them worked on the ranch. And then from the family operation. That's how it worked. That's about it.

AS: Okay. We're going to talk more about what it takes to build resiliency after dinner, but we're going to eat with you all, so you have to talk with us. Before we start having a dinner conversation, I wanted to invite Shelly and Cole to ask you all a question to prompt some dinner conversation. This is Shelly's first visit to New York City, first visit to Climate Week. When you think about this audience, what's a question you have for them, based on the work that you do, the community you live in, what ranchers wonder about? What would you like to ask them?

SK: Well, she's prompted me with this, and I've had time to think about it, but this is kind of a high-stakes question, because I don't know any of you. I have researched some of the groups that you work for, and the question that I've come up with is: What is a project that you've done recently that you really feel was successful? That's one part. And then, what is a project or something you would like to do but don't quite know how to do, and what's standing in the way?

AS: That's a good question. Cole, what's your question?

CM: You've got to be careful, because we're going to sit together. I think my question is, working in Montana in the ranching industry, we've all got things about the world that frustrate us as we're trying to do what we see as conservation. So my question for you is, if you could snap your fingers, what would you change? What just frustrates you to no end about what ranchers and farmers don't seem to get? I'd like to know that.

AS: Okay, extra points to whoever says that straight to Cole's face over dinner.

CM: I do want to know.

AS: We do want to know. So we're going to come back after dinner, and we're going to have a revolving mic, so this is going to be a little bit more of a conversation. You'll hear more about Cole and Shelly's work, but we also hope you'll ask questions and share some of your experiences and expertise. For now, let's have a nice dinner together. Thanks for being here.

AS: I invite Shelly and Cole back up here. And the first question I have for you, Shelly: Did you get an answer to your question?

SK: No.

AS: No?

SK: Partially.

AS: Partially. Okay, what did you learn?

SK: We learned about Trout Unlimited, and how aggregating larger dollars makes it a better bite-sized piece for smaller organizations to use, and so we talked about that process.

AS: Okay, how that works. Did you get an answer to your question, Cole?

CM: It was more of an observation, maybe, would you say? It was just an observation about how livestock agriculture is perceived in our cities. When a large animal dies, there's clearly death and it's right in front of you, and there's pain. There's just no question that you're living from that death, and so it's a controversial thing a lot of people have concerns about. I just shared with her that the first time I was really out of Montana, I was in graduate school in Boston, and those were the questions I got. Like, "Didn't you know ranching is bad for public lands?" Or, "Didn't you know that meat is a problem for health?" Or, "How do you grapple with the way that you participate so directly in death? Animal ethics." And so that was my first experience of having to grapple with those same questions. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.

AS: I want to open up the conversation to define resiliency, because it's a very powerful idea, and a lot of people define it differently inside their hearts. There are a lot of different components to resiliency, and I want to talk about one in particular that you've thought a lot about in the way that you designed the Old Salt Co-op, and that is resiliency in rural communities: having business models that work so that people can imagine their children and grandchildren getting to tend to the land in the ways that the generations before them have. Tell me how you thought about capital and resiliency in the way that you designed the Old Salt Co-op.

CM: Yeah, I guess what I learned from the sheep lessons, and the goats were a smaller part, is that the beauty and the possibility of regenerative agriculture is that if you unleash life underneath the soil, and you unleash diversity in the plant community, there's no longer the bare ground that gets really hot or really cold and runs off water. Now you have a much greater density of plant community. It's really about allowing the space and working elegantly alongside the land as a partner: the right kind of interventions, eliminating the wrong kind of interventions, and letting life flourish, and figuring out how to do that. It's really about a whole bunch of creatures having an opportunity to live, instead of one species dominating and choking out the rest of the life.

And the same thing is true downstream of the farms and ranches. If you have domination in the economic system, then the people who are actually on the land can't see a future for their children and for their neighbors' children, which is a big part of health. The people who are stewarding land in any place have to be able to see it as a viable thing to apply their talent and their time and their passion to, through failure and through all the hard things that are in the way of any kind of success and progress.

And so Old Salt Co-op is a business. Right now there are four ranches that manage about 200,000 acres together, of both private and public lands, and it was built to say, "We need to build our own meat marketplace downstream of the ranches that competes against the monoculture main system that is currently our option to sell into." And so we build that brand. We do meatpacking, we do restaurants. We're trying to eventually scale our little version of Shake Shack. When we do our...

AS: You just met with Danny Meyer.

CM: We actually did get to meet Danny Meyer while we were here, which was great. We need to make sure that the producers and the workers, the people whose labor is involved in these businesses, have a significant ownership stake in the parent company. And so the parent company has producers as an ownership group, workers as an ownership group, it has investors, and then it has the key employees that I can't afford to pay what they really need to make long term, so that's an equity piece for them. And it owns all the subsidiaries wholly, so that the subsidiaries share the benefit and the risk of all of the activities the subsidiaries do.

And I think that's significant. There is no founder share, the 30% of a company that often goes to that. There is no founder share. Investors take less over a longer period of time. Still, if we are successful, it could be an 11 to 13% IRR, but I show them a 15-year pro forma. Nobody wants to look at a 15-year pro forma, but as we learned in the sheep experiment, unless capital is patient, you may not achieve that threshold where life starts to explode. And then the positive results, we may not have been able to imagine how successful that is.

I think it's maybe significant to say my own family's experience with capital is to say, "Okay, here's this ranch that, on the market today in Montana, could sell for 50 million." If we just wanted the get-out-of-jail-free card, we'd sell the ranch, 1031 part of it into some undervalued land elsewhere, and do a DST 1031 into some real estate, fractionally own real estate, not have to think about it. But my family, my grandparents, my parents, they worked really hard to instill in us kids that if we're off ranch and we have another career, they really encouraged that. That was a fine thing to do. You will not receive a distribution, and the goal is never to sell this. And so if you think about the $2.5 million per year of opportunity cost, we set that aside. That's an investment in the ecosystem that's producing a whole bunch of life and benefit, not only to our own family, but to society, and the production on the landscape itself supports the livelihoods of the families that live on the ranch. And so in a lot of ways, on one hand, we're land stewards, and on the other hand, we have capital. But we treat capital quite differently, especially when it applies to land. And that's what, in my opinion, capital needs to understand if it wants to see a regeneration of life from the ground up.

AS: Something that I have really learned from talking to both of you is that when you grow up in such an intimate relationship to the land, you get to see the smallness of your role, the critical part of your role, but the timescale is so different. And I think it was you who said, "We learned that we don't own this land, we learned it's our turn with this land." And so, thinking at a much longer timescale, and how that shapes the way you think about the ongoing work of what resiliency is... And that's my question for you, Shelly. As the Sandhills Task Force, you all are bringing down grant dollars from the state of Nebraska. You're bringing in federal dollars from NRCS. You're trying to figure out how to deploy them most effectively, and you are trying to figure out what the metrics for success are, meeting those, and what the time horizons are, and how you talk back to these programs that are asking you to make certain outcomes happen on the land. Can you describe where those pain points are, as a rancher yourself or when you're talking with ranchers about using this resource to have this outcome and measuring it in this way? Where does that get hard?

SK: Okay. So we have been successful at meeting their metrics, and the metrics are generally acres: acres restored, acres enhanced. And because the Sandhills Task Force is large, we can impact a lot of acres, and that's really great. But those acres restored take people, and this is a private landscape. And so not only does it take people, but you have to make changes in attitudes, in ideas, in thought processes. We're changing paradigms, especially when we talk about prescribed burning, and that doesn't happen overnight. You have to build trust. You have to build a relationship.

The Sandhills Task Force was created 33 years ago. I've been working for them for 12. And every day I think about what we're doing to build trust, because a five-minute mistake could completely undermine years' worth of progress. And I have seen many groups come in and try to do great things, and they have really good ideas, but they haven't built the relationships on the land, and so then it gets to be really hard.

We work in acres, and we've grown to be big enough and diversified what we do with the Sandhills Task Force, so we start sneaking things in. Some of the things that we've snuck into these grants are to build stewardship. One way we started building land stewards is the Sandhills Ranch Internship Program. Labor is a huge issue in Nebraska, especially on farms and ranches. And you'll hear people say, "There's no young people that want to ranch." And I know that there are, because I used to be one. I am one. I think I am one. I don't know.

AS: You count.

SK: But when we think about that, really what they needed was an opportunity. And so when we built that program, we had over 100 applications every year to come work on a ranch for pennies, to come get the experience. And then people in the Sandhills start to see that, and we're bringing people in, sometimes from out of state, sometimes from in state, and they're spending three months working on a ranch and getting this opportunity. And sometimes they'll come back and be there. Sometimes they'll hire on full time. Sometimes they'll go be a politician. They might go be a vet. They might go just be a citizen. But they're always more educated on the stewardship practices in the Sandhills. So we are building stewards. Four years in, we've had over 44 interns that have spent summers in the Sandhills on a working ranch.

But what's your metric? Your metric is one person, and that costs $12,000. And what's your metric for what they learned? Sure, we do skills assessments. Sure, we talk about the trainings they go to. But when you think about what that looks like on your piece of paper or the presentation that you're taking, it maybe doesn't look all that good. When we have people show up to those meetings and they're figuring out how to be better employers, better employers means the landscape is getting managed better. And so the metrics piece of it does get to be challenging.

AS: But you sneak it in. Don't highlight any of the things Shelly's trying to sneak into grants. She's just going to get 'em in under the radar.

SK: And they've bought in. Over time, they have bought in. They've seen the success, but it is hard. I've been told that it's hard to report back out on what that does.

AS: We have some microphones if anybody has anything they want to add or ask. We have about 10 minutes left together, and then we're going to have dessert and a few more drinks. Anybody have anything they want to add at the moment? You have a question. Let's get a microphone to you. And if you could tell us where you live with your question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Tim Searchinger. I live in the Washington area, I work in Princeton, New Jersey, and I'm a certified prairie lover, so I'm very happy to hear about all this. One of the first things I do in my class is teach them about the disappearing prairie. So I'm curious: you're midgrass prairie, and how many acres could you improve in the Sandhills area, or whatever area you can speak about? And what kinds of testing have you done, or what kinds of surveys have you done, to see improvements in diversity, insects, whatever? What could you prove? How could you prove the benefits that you're actually seeing in a science way?

SK: That's a great question.

AS: That's a question about metrics, that we were just describing.

SK: It is. And we've reached over 50,000 acres this year. I've worked for the task force for 12 years. I started as the only employee, and now we're a team of five. And so we are on this trajectory, and we are improving, we are growing, we are doing better with our reach. And so the 50,000 acres this year, I do think, could translate into 100. I expect us to get to 100 acres next year. And if we had the right resources, I think we could double, triple that very easily, because we have the buy-in, we have the interest, and with the proper outreach...

So we've been doing our work on the land, and we've been busy, busy little critters trying to do all of this work. And we want to take all of the capital and do all of the work, but we haven't been telling our story very well. And so I just hired an outreach coordinator, because that's not my great skill set. And my hope is after we get her on, we'll be able to tell the story better, and then we'll have even more reach and more ability.

When you're talking about what we're measuring, we do rely on established research to tell us what we're improving, so that we don't get bogged down in the minutiae of measuring each and every ranch. But it's very, very visual, something that you can see very easily. When you get up in an airplane, in my lifetime, I have seen the encroachment visibly spread, and it makes me sick. It makes me really sad to see all of that. And I've started to see some areas where we're really doing good work, and it's coming back, and you can see it from the air, and those pictures are really powerful.

So I am not a scientist. We partner with scientists. And we've toyed around with ideas on doing more individual project-to-project science. But Dirac Twidwell with the University of Nebraska has encouraged me on our journey with eastern red cedar encroachment to try some new and different things, and we've implemented some of that. He told me, "A few years ago, when we evaluated your projects online..." It's not lidar, but when they evaluate the orthoimagery, he's like, "Something changed right around there." And I'm like, "Well, that's when you convinced me to clear-cut instead of just getting all the machine-accessible acres." And so something that he had taught us changed how we implemented a practice all across the Sandhills, and it pops when you look at the orthoimagery. And so the power is there, and it can just keep multiplying.

AS: And Dirac Twidwell at the University of Nebraska is the scientist that Jim Colgan, our executive producer of People Trying, reached out to, saying, "Who should we talk to? Who's a person trying?" And he said, "Shelly Kelly." So that's how we met Shelly Kelly. So thanks, Dirac. Big thanks to him. That's another way scientists can be handy. They can tell you who to talk to on the ground.

AS: And Cole, I want to ask you, you have a unique position in a ranching community, where you are not busy moving cows and running a ranch operation. You get to think at a slightly higher level about the business model, about the way to tell your story by having this festival in Helmville every summer. What is enabling you to have this role in creating a more resilient landscape and ranching economy where you live? Not a lot of people in ranching get to have that kind of job, where it's a little bit higher up, where you get to come to events like this and tell your story. What's enabling that?

CM: What's enabling that? My wife is watching our two little feral boys right now. That's part of what's enabling it. The four founding ranches of Old Salt Co-op sat around the table five years ago when we started, and they looked at each other and said, "Today, these ranches are profitable, and ecologically they're better today than they were 20 years ago. But our neighbors are going out of business. In 30 years we've gone from 900,000 ranches down to 300,000. It's less viable to make a living in this industry over time." And so they said, "We need to take a risk." To just maintain the status quo would leave these operations, which we think are doing biomimicry profitably, and that's a pretty cool thing, out of business, if we allow the monoculture downstream in the agricultural industry. And so they decided to take a risk.

Today we've raised $6 million. We've used $10 million of debt, with another 5 million. I believe that within 10 years we'll be in the hundreds of millions in sales. After five years, we're in the black. Just barely, but we're in the black as a parent company across these enterprises. And so what's enabling it is 90 employees, 40 investors that believe in it, and thousands of customers now, and we have to keep building this infrastructure to survive.

And I think for me, I'm the oldest of four, and I've got all three of my siblings and several first cousins, as well as my parents and aunts and uncles, on one operation, taking care of this place, in a robust community where our analog to the Sandhills Task Force would be the Blackfoot Challenge. This is a collaborative that has been around for 35 years, and it's why the sheep thing could even work, because there was so much NGO and agency and landowner support pulling in the same direction. So I think what's enabling it is a culture of care that I've been lucky enough to be a part of, and now we're trying to scale a downstream economic model that can make that happen regionally across the country, with all kinds of nodes and hubs building resilience. That's what I believe needs to happen, and it just takes a lot of people, and all the trust built up between partnerships, and nourishing by parents.

I think people are nature. We say land is kin. The Native Americans talked about being the youngest siblings of creation. We are the nature-based solution: how we decide to run our economy and treat capital. We've never really had environmental problems, because if we weren't here, the environment would do what it does without our part of nature. It would be fine. We've only ever had problems organizing ourselves. Nourishing living landscapes is no different than nourishing children. It's very hard to set metrics for your children. What you have to do is nourish, stand by, connect them when you can, support them, make sure they eat good food and get good exercise and have all kinds of experiences that challenge them and stretch them and make them strong, instead of making the world around them soft. It's very hard to build a five- and 10-year plan for them. Nourishing a living landscape is no different. We're not in control. We can't just turn switches and knobs. It's about standing by and nourishing life. And so we've got to have an economy that allows time for love, which can only be patient, and it does take time.

AS: Thank you. Wow. That was beautiful. I want to end our conversation on stage, Shelly, by inviting you to reflect on something that's special about our time in New York this week: you're getting to be in Manhattan and engage with people who don't often come to Nebraska, and that includes people who don't work on the land. And then last night, when we were at the bar with people who work on land in really different landscapes and talking together, it was really moving to me to hear what that meant to you. So what has it been like to get to talk to other people trying who work directly with land, water, and nature, and what will you take back to Nebraska from those conversations?

SK: Boy, Cole really keyed us up for this conversation too, because it really is the people. We can come up with ideas. When it was asked of me, "What made you decide to try something innovative, something different than what all of your neighbors are doing?" it's just this whole series of life events that led me to doing what I'm doing. You can't really pinpoint something, but there are conversations that I've had with all of the ranchers that I've had the opportunity to work with, and piecing together the different things that they've had and the unique ideas, and trying to figure out how I could make that work for my operation and improve my land in the ways that they did. I get to talk to a lot of ranchers, and that's really helped me. But not everybody has that same opportunity.

And so at the Sandhills Task Force, another thing that we've tried to do is peer-to-peer meetings. Cole, I don't know about your area, but there used to be card parties in our area when I was a kid, and that's how we got to really socialize. We had card parties, and that seemed like a social event, but really it was information sharing. We need to connect with each other, and we learn from each other really well. As technology has developed, as we rely on technology more and more for our social needs, we don't get together the same way, which means we don't share information the same way that we used to. At the Sandhills Task Force, we have started some peer sharing networks, and they've been really popular and really fun. But that's in our area of the Sandhills.

When I get to have a conversation with Russell from upstate New York, who's talking about grazing and multispecies and how they've developed their operation, when I get to talk to Kate from Oregon about how she went from an organic vegetable farmer to a rancher raising animals, that's what really gets you thinking, and then it gives you better ideas. And even though Oregon and upstate New York are wildly different than the prairies of Nebraska, how they solve their problems and their innovation makes me think of better ways to treat my land and my business and those around me, and it helps us move better.

And so the more that we get together... I'm really excited about this event, because I'm going to get to learn from all of the people that Anna's going to interview, and we hopefully can build a community and learn from each other. And so if you ever have the opportunity to help people that are innovating and really interested in this topic, if you can help get them together to share ideas, I think it will be something that will look poor on their metric scale, but it would be really worthwhile from a landscape scale and from our overall goals, to be able to move the needle.

AS: So I'm going to leave our conversation on Shelly's pitch for you all to fund our first anniversary party, okay? We gather back here in a year. We invite more farmers and ranchers and people who work close to the land. Thank you for being here, and we look forward to talking and dessert-ing with you. Thank you.