Regenerative farming with White Buffalo Land Trust

We have a very special issue today featuring Jesse Smith from White Buffalo Land Trust. In this interview we dive into the weeds of regenerative agriculture, how it relates to wine growing along the central coast, and much more. It was an incredible experience to see the land and we hope the images below do it some justice.

Plus this week we have a couple featured wines that will go well with your summer BBQ’s and some local events to keep things lower key after a busy start to summer.

Regenerative farming and viticulture with White Buffalo Land Trust

Pulling up to the main barn on Jalama Canyon Ranch, where White Buffalo Land Trust operates its farm, we were greeted by 2 of the ranch dogs happy to get some attention in the afternoon heat. Jesse came bounding up behind them clearly ready to impart his knowledge of the land and explain why these 1,000 acres nestled between Hollister Ranch and the Sta Rita Hills is working on such an important initiative.

Jesse’s enthusiasm for not only the land, but the local community was infectious throughout our interview and it's clear why most people (us included) walk away from the ranch with a deep appreciation and respect for the work being done.

While wine and viticulture play a central part of the work White Buffalo Land Trust is performing, that’s just half the story.

Q: For those that aren’t familiar, give us an introduction to yourself, and a brief intro to White Buffalo Land Trust.

A: Absolutely. My name is Jesse Smith, and I'm the director of land stewardship for White Buffalo Land Trust. We're a nonprofit organization based here along the central coast of California and are working at the intersection of agriculture, land conservation and the field of regenerative agriculture. We're working in a space that is near and dear to my heart. I was born and raised here in Santa Barbara and my wife was as well. We're raising our two daughters here. It's a place that we truly are investing our life in, because not only do we know it so well, but we know it has the potential to be so much more.

Q: How did you get involved in agriculture and why does it play such an important role in Santa Barbara?

A: Growing up here with a love for food, and the culture around dining in community, that was the original kind of impetus to dive into this field of work (agriculture). We saw that we had a very diversified community of agricultural producers that produce incredibly high quality and organic food. Despite this I felt like we were missing something. You know, there wasn't something that I could really call quintessentially Santa Barbara, or the Central California coast.

We were always comparing ourselves to other places or foods. "We're the 'new world' version of burgundy,” or “we can grow avocados like Mexico”, "or citrus like spain". So for us, this was a place where we really wanted to invest in and find a unique expression of place that the central coast deserves. An expression that was more than the sum of its parts, and valued the people and time that we're in.

I moved away for quite a few years and worked in the creative world of design; print media, graphic design, product design and photography. But I found my path to agriculture and our food system through a permaculture design course I took in Germany.

That journey took me back to working with my family, my wife and in-laws on a diversified 50-acre farm between Carpinteria and Ojai called Casitas Valley Farm. The legacy of that farm lives on with a good friend and previous coworker who now runs Casitas Valley Pastures. They raise amazing proteins out of Ojai. We raised a variety of animals; pigs, chickens, ducks, and specialty crops; avocados, apples, persimmons, mushrooms and organic market vegetables and herbs. We were primarily focused on providing for our local markets and restaurant community..

Q: With respect to White Buffalo Land Trust, how did the idea for the organization come about and what’s the mission?

A: It really started with the Thomas fire and the ensuing mudslides that shook up our community.

Once the 101 was shut down, we saw firsthand the struggle within our existing food community. Both producers on the agricultural side as well as purveyors on the food service side who were reliant upon these import export dynamics of taking things to LA or receiving things from LA.

People all of a sudden remembered that we're bookended by the Pacific Ocean and our mountain ranges. So when you can't drive out to the ocean, and you can't drive over a mountain, then you've got to live with an island mentality. And that island culture needs to understand how to take care of itself, and know where its food processing, preservation and distribution occurs, as well as how to care for its healthy soil, water resources and the natural beauty and resiliency of its biodiversity.

So that was really the catalyst for this discussion between the founder of White Buffalo Land Trust, Steve Finkel, and myself. We had different but parallel and very synchronistic family journeys that led us into partnership with the founding of White Buffalo Land Trust in March of 2018. I was employee number one, and we've ended up growing an amazing team of 12 that we get to work with and who each have amazing skill sets that manage and develop our various fields of focus (Land Stewardship, Research & Monitoring, Education & Training, Media & Storytelling, Products & Enterprise)

Q: Regenerative agriculture is a relatively new concept that has been gaining more prominence among not only farmers but also wine growers. What is regenerative agriculture?

A: For sure. I think that when we talk about regenerative agriculture, we can break it down into 1) farming or cropping and then 2) grazing or livestock. Ultimately, what we're talking about is the process of producing our food, fiber, medicine, and materials in a way that not only takes care of, but through this regenerative process, actually invests back into the sources, and the livelihoods of those ecosystems.

Regenerative agriculture draws from so many of the existing fields of work in agriculture. Organic being one of them, and biodynamics being another. We're also focusing heavily on holistic managed grazing and the relationships between animals, and the grasslands and savannas they graze.

We’re also closely tracking soil health. For some historical context, after the dust bowl the loss of America's top soils was the critical issue of that time. That led to the formation of the Soil Conservation Corps that is now the Natural Resource Conservation Service, which supports an important community that understands and pushes for soil conservation. So that’s what we’re looking at when we’re referencing historical contexts that have led us to where we are today with the regenerative agriculture movement.

It’s asking ourselves as a society which direction we want to head in. Are we trying to save the last three acorns we have? Or are we trying to plant and grow a forest of oak trees? I believe conservation and preservation only get us so far. We need to start behaving as humans in a regenerative capacity in order to create an ecological system that functions at a high enough level so that we can continue to have a human population that thrives, and not just survives.

Q: Most of the land that White Buffalo Land Trust owns is populated with livestock instead of traditional crops. What role does livestock play in regenerative farming?

A: What we have witnessed in traditional modern agriculture in many parts of the world is the disassociation between livestock and cropping systems. Where we have fields of corn or soy or wheat on one side and then we have pens of cattle or chickens that are completely separate from that crop land.

This leads to 2 related issues. On one side we have the cropping system, where we have an issue of nutrients that are addressed through the purchase of inputs such as fertilizers. And on the other side, you have an output waste stream from the livestock that is a liability and causes polluted waterways in landscapes around feedlots and livestock pins. This is because of the concentration of the animals manure and urine, and no natural biological process to break it down to reincorporate back in the soil.

So our aim is in trying to find a way to reconnect those two systems. where the animals feed on the bounty of the land, and the biological processes that occur in their stomachs are reinvested in the soil to feed the land. It’s this holistic way of thinking and understanding to create regenerative systems, and it's practiced in many different forms all around the world, in many traditional indigenous communities, as well as many modern novel agricultural production systems. What we're hoping to do is accelerate the adoption of this approach to land stewardship, and raise the awareness of others to its occurrence so they can support.

Q: How did you decide on this specific piece of land?

A: : Jalama Canyon Ranch (the ranch White Buffalo Land Trust is on) is 1,000 acres and came into vision in 2019. We were looking to identify a piece of land in this region and at this scale that could begin to demonstrate the principles of regenerative agriculture in what we call Keystone cropping systems. That includes the growing of wine grapes, and raising of beef cattle to choose a couple from this region. These Keystone crops are at the nexus of Environmental, Economic and Societal importance.

The original thought was that the principles of regenerative agriculture are globally applicable and size agnostic. We wanted to demonstrate that people could do what we’re doing whether it was on 1 acre, 10 acres, 100 acres and 1000 acres. So what we really were looking for was land where we could demonstrate at scale the impact that can be achieved through the production of wine grapes or with orchards or livestock on the ecological health indicators that we rely upon to quantify the impacts of regenerative agriculture. These indicators are found in the areas of soil health, water cycles, biodiversity and human health. This landscape also needed to operate as a living laboratory where we can conduct research and monitoring, as well as operate our education and training programs in service to the other stakeholders working in the field of regenerative agriculture.

Q: Moving to the wine side of things, give us an overview of your relationship with the local wine community and the vines you have planted on site.

A: We're managing five acres of wine grapes, which includes about a half acre of Chardonnay and four and a half acres of Pinot Noir. We’re working with Sandhi Wines out here in Lompoc as our winemaking partners. That partnership really grew out of a mutual desire to utilize this vineyard in a way that demonstrates the potential of how we can invest in soil and vine health and the biodiversity around the vineyard. Our goal is to demonstrate how we can actually grow high quality wine grapes that make high quality vintages of wine that contribute to the overall health of the watershed and landscape.

We felt like we can play a significant role by being a little bit of a sounding board to hear what the larger wine community really needs to have addressed as it relates to resources and research, and to test some of these methods. So things like cover crop mixes and regimes, hedgerow species palettes, fertility programs, or test piloting federal or state funding programs to support things like composting, hedgerows, raptor perches, and water monitoring sensors.

Q: How do you feel like regenerative agriculture translates to the quality of the wine?

A: One of the reasons why we were excited to work with Raj Parr and Sashi Moorman over at Sandhi wines is because Raj is a very accomplished sommelier that has a very respected palate. And one of the things that he's come to recognize and share from his own life experiences is that wines being made from grapes that have been grown in healthy soils from diversified cropping systems in a very low intervention way, meaning low chemical and mechanical disturbance intervention manner, have more potential to express themselves uniquely, with more depth and character in their body.

One of the big questions that we are asking ourselves within this field of regenerative agriculture is, can we draw through lines from our management practices in soil health and plant health, and ultimately translate that to human health. So what we're actually looking at right now are the different indicators that we can start to use to derive inferences into nutrient density in the foods we consume.

Q: You’ve announced your wine club from the grapes that are grown on site and made by Sandhi Wines with an interesting twist relating to NFT’s. Tell us about the JCR club and how it works?

A: Being such a limited production of only about 500 cases per year, we wanted to have a community that is deeply interested in the wine, but also in the holistic nature of what makes this property and project so unique. Finding a way to bring people together around the wine led us to the emergent technology of blockchain and NFTs, which were well suited to help us represent this relationship of uniqueness between our annual wine allocation, the 1,000 acres of Jalama Canyon Ranch, and the community that supports it all.

Using remotely sensing satellites, we’re collecting digital data on a series of different ecological indicators which includes everything from soil moisture to evapotranspiration, biomass production, and soil type. We then use that data as an input stream to create these unique NFT’s. So there's 1000 NFT’s in total, that accurately represent the 1000 acres that are here on site. So one NFT for each acre, and each acre is not only uniquely represented but also uniquely generated from this data that is being collected on a 10 meter by 10 meter pixel resolution every day. So what people are receiving is a very literal digital representation of a snapshot in time. It's like a beautiful digital fingerprint of ecological data.

Q: How do people get access to the club?

A: To join, go to the thejcrclub.com. We're about to do our VIP minting at the end of the month, where the first 100 NFT’s will be released. And we're really excited about getting the first people through the door which will include a lot fun additional perks to owning one of these NFT’s.

The bounty of our land will be shared through this club which includes everything from grass fed beef, to wild harvested chanterelle mushrooms, to products made with our wild harvested botanicals, and dry farmed olive oil. So there's a lot of stuff that is small batch and artisanal from this ranch that we're really excited about bringing to the community.

Q: What’s the best way for people to support you?

A: The first step would be by going to our website, whitebuffalolandtrust.org, to start learning more about us. There, you can sign up for our newsletters, hear more about our education programs, our free farm field days, our workshops, our trainings, and read some of the outcomes of our work and projects. Our white buffalo Land Trust organization also started a small food brand called Figure Ate at figureatefoods.com where we have a grassfed, dry cured beef biltong (a jerky style snack) and an organic naturally fermented persimmon vinegar, so that’s supporting our food brand. And then ultimately, we are a nonprofit organization so any donation always helps support our programs and our education and research so we always welcome those contributions.

We’re big fans of what White Buffalo Land Trust is pushing for in regenerative agriculture and wine growing. If you found this interview inspirational we’d highly recommend learning more through any of the links below and consider a visit to the property when they have open farm days.

Uncorked

Piedrasassi Santa Barbara County Syrah

Looking to get a taste for what the quality of the JCR club wine will entrail? Look no further than this Piedrasassi Wines Syrah. Made by Sashi Moorman who is helping lead the wine making project at White Buffalo Land Trust, this label represents his love affair for Syrah along the central coast.

Nose: Pepper, smoke, black cherry, and leather.

Palette: Pepper, leather, blackberry, and plum.

Pairs well with: This is a bold Syrah so pair it with some red meat or steaks.

Available at: Satellite SB, Goodland Wine Shop, or Meritage Wine Market SB.

Refugio Ranch Grenache

We’re big fans of Rhone Varietals and this bottle of Refugio Ranch Grenache is a great example of why. There’s a slight blend of Syrah in this which makes it a little punchier than an ordinary 100% Grenache.

Nose: Strawberry, tobacco, and pepper.

Palette: Cranberry, Strawberry, and white pepper.

Pairs well with: Grilled chicken dishes or if you’re feeling adventurous lamb.

Available at: Roblar Winery in Santa Ynez

What’s happening?

• Legends of Santa Barbara: One of the biggest events of the year kicks off at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles this Saturday July 29th. All of the top Santa Barbara vintners and wineries will be in attendendance. Tickets start at $150/person for general admission.

• Tasting with Frequency Wines: Taste through a flight with Frequency Wines winemaker Zac Wasserman this Saturday July 29th at Meritage Wine Market in downtown Santa Barbara. There’s no additional cost to the tasting.

• Tasting with Hearst Ranch Wines: Break up the week and taste with Hearst Ranch Wines on August 1st at Goodland Wine Shop in Santa Barbara. There’s no additional cost outside the tasting fee.

Cheers!

Issue #11