Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast Quivira Coalition and Radio Cafe

Joe and Jenn Wheeling talk about how to avoid the pitfalls of a family ranch business––ego, speechifying, wasted time––and arrive at consensus decisions with the full support of each family member. 

When wool processing suddenly moved overseas, Jeanne Carver and her family were left without a market for their products. Through determination and creativity, she turned a setback into a regenerative success story. They pivoted their business to a local/regional model, selling lamb to restaurants and developing an artisan-based apparel and yarn business––and eventually selling to international clothing brands.
Now Carver runs Shaniko Wool Company, which comprises multiple ranches across the Western US and produces in accordance with the Responsible Wool Standard. Because of its regenerative practices, Shaniko is generating income as part of the growing market for ecosystem services and sequestered carbon.

How do you restore an entire forest, or mountain, or watershed? The key is...collaboration. Jan-Willem Jansens has been restoring landscapes in New Mexico for three decades. Owner of Ecotone Landscape Planning, he is part of a network that works to restore land that has been damaged by generations of mismanagement. Using low-tech methods, they restore soil, ground and surface water, trees, and habitat––for the benefit of large-scale landscapes, including forests and watersheds, wetlands and streams, farm and ranch lands, and human communities. As he describes in the podcast, this is the work of decades, and involves not only executing the projects themselves, but also navigating bureaucracies, organizations, landowners, culture, and history.
 

Roxanne Swentzell was a young mother on a small piece of land at Santa Clara Pueblo when she was introduced to permaculture design principles––which dovetailed with indigenous patters of thinking and land use. She turned her yard from hard, sun-scorched earth into an agroforest that provides food, wood, fiber and habitat. She founded the Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, which focuses on teaching principles and practices of desert gardening, composting, seed saving, animal husbandry, beekeeping, building, and maintaining cultural knowledge--based on principles of integrity, love, reciprocity, communication, work, and consideration.

Lorenzo Dominguez was a successful marketing and corporate communications executive in New York City. But during the pandemic he and his wife made the decision to change their lives in order to find a more nature-based and connected way of life. They bought 350 acres in northern New Mexico, called it Chelenzo Farms, and are working to restore the land, grow both market produce and desert plants, and above all to connect with neighbors and regenerative agriculture and restoration practitioners in order to foster research, education, and community.

Konda Mason is co-founder and president of Jubilee Justice, a non-profit dedicated to regenerative agriculture, racial justice, cooperative practices, and healing the wounds of Black American land loss and racism. They are in the fourth year of a rice-growing program, the system of rice intensification (SRI), a dry-land technique for growing rice that's healthy for land and consumers and efficient and productive for farmers. They have built a mill and are actively working toward a vertically integrated business model to provide domestic, regeneratively produced rice varieties.