Sarah Wentzel-Fisher grew up in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, in and around the small town of Custer. That Custer State Park was essentially her backyard and a National Grassland also nearby was extremely formative for her. 

“I was outside every single day,” she says. “I was one of those kids who would get kicked out the back door, and we would go saddle up horses and ride into the state park all day long by ourselves without supervision. There was so much to take in all of the time.”

She says even at a young age, she really cherished being able to take that time. She loved the forest, the waters, and getting to hang out with animals. In ways, it seems her life has always been about the land. Now, Wentzel-Fisher, a farmer herself, serves on the boards of the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance, the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, and is the Executive Director of Santa Fe, New Mexico-based nonprofit the Quivira Coalition. The coalition seeks to build soil, biodiversity, and resilience on western working lands and has been involved in food and agriculture planning, with a focus on supporting young and beginning farmers and ranchers. In addition to its staff and board, the coalition includes numerous family ranchers and farmers, conservationists, scientists, public land managers, and dozens of volunteers. 

Wentzel-Fisher discussed the coalition and its work toward resilient and regenerative agriculture in an interview with Bioneers.

BIONEERS: What is the mission of the Quivira Coalition? 

SARAH: The Quivira Coalition is a nonprofit, headquartered in Santa Fe, that works throughout the Mountain West. We’ve got staff in Montana, Colorado and New Mexico, primarily. Our mission is resilience on working lands. We do that through three primary program areas. We have a ranching apprenticeship program called the New Agrarian Program. We have an education and outreach program that is focused on convening a community of practice around land stewardship in the Southwest. Then we have a carbon ranch initiative, which is a soil health initiative focused on better understanding soil health in a rangeland context in the Southwest and supporting producers to change practices so they can improve or maintain soil health. 

A lot of our work is about agriculture and land restoration and how we shift culture from one that is extractive to one that is regenerative. At the end of the day, it’s about people and how we relate to each other, because I think that all of our land issues are very rooted in the way that we engage with each other and our resources as a result. 

BIONEERS: How did the Quivira Coalition come together? 

SARAH: Quivira was founded in 1997 by two members of the Sierra Club and a rancher in New Mexico. It was an interesting moment in the social-political landscape of public lands in the West, where there was a lot of contention about having grazers on public lands. I think that there was some real fire in the belly of the environmental movement, and part of that was about trying to get grazing off of public lands. This rancher, Jim Winder, was an early adopter of holistic management, which are the practices of Allan Savory. I think that introduced Barbara Johnson and Courtney White, who were the other two founders, to those concepts. A big light bulb went on that was like, ‘Oh, grazing is actually a conservation practice when it is done in an intentional way that really is paying attention to the economy.’ I think that that was the spark of our organization.

The organization has always also been about convening community, specifically convening community across differences. Some of the earliest things that they did were just bring people out to ranches to have dialogue and to see what was happening on the ground. That seems so simple, but when you bring people together in those types of spaces, it’s really profound what can happen.

BIONEERS: What’s an example of something profound that’s come out of those gatherings?

SARAH: I’ve been with the organization for seven-and-a-half years, and we’re an almost 30-year-old organization, so there’s a lot that I don’t know about. But one project that was still happening in my early days with the organization was restoration work on the Comanche Creek in the Carson National Forest, which is in the northeast corner of New Mexico. It’s a really beautiful place, but also a place that’d had a lot of damage because of grazing, mining, and extractive forestry practices.

I think it was 2001 or 2002. The work we were doing there was focused on keeping the Rio Grande cutthroat trout unlisted as an endangered species. Comanche Creek is a critical breeding ground for that particular fish, and I think everybody recognized that listing the fish would dramatically change the way many people use that landscape. 

Bill Zeedyk, a brilliant restoration ecologist, was there. He was really passionate about doing stream restoration. He was working with Trout Unlimited — we have a really great Trout Unlimited group in New Mexico. They were working with our state environment department to get all the pieces to fall together. Because when you’re working on public lands, there are so many decision-makers. There are so many interested parties involved. I think that’s not always obvious to folks who aren’t immediately engaged. They were making some good progress, but the folks they couldn’t get to the table were the grazing association who had the grazing lease. And grazing can have a really significant impact on riparian areas if the cows aren’t managed around those streams. I think there was a lot of stigma that the cows were really causing the significant damage to the streams that were impeding the fish from breeding. 

And because of the work of Courtney White and the Quivira Coalition, Bill called us and said, “Hey, would you be interested in potentially working with us to see if we can’t figure out a way to get the grazers involved in this project?” This is anecdotal because this was before my time. I think it took maybe three years, but they finally got them to come to a meeting and start to participate in the dialogue about how to make restoration work possible. How do we keep cattle out of those areas while the streams are revegetating? How can we work collaboratively on measuring the progress of this work? 

As time went on, the way that we would get the work done was we’d invite these big groups of people up. So we’d have these amazing four-day work weekends where like 75 people would show up and everybody’d be moving rocks around in creeks and getting stuff done. And I think that the grazing association loved being there, and I think that they saw the profound impact that it had on all of these folks who were not there routinely. Then I think they also started to see changes in the landscape that benefitted them in terms of revegetation and they started to get excited about it. And 15 years into the project, they really were the biggest champions of that type of work and were talking about it to other grazing associations and saying how important and beneficial it was to do riparian restoration. 

Then in 2018, we had one of the worst droughts ever in New Mexico. There was no snowfall that year, it was warm, things were not looking great. We went up to do our annual monitoring, and went out to one of the tributaries to the Comanche Creek. Nearly every blade of grass had been eaten. There’s this little teeny strip of green along either side of the creek because that area’s also grazed by big elk herds. We would do the monitoring right before they would put their cows out, and this was supposed to be the early summer pasture for the grazing association. But there’s no grass there. The project manager immediately called up the head of the grazing association and said, “You can’t put cows out here. Twenty years of stream restoration work is literally going to flush downstream if we put cattle out here after how much the elk have grazed.”

The president came up and assessed the situation, and he was like, “Yeah, you’re right. We can’t do this.” He and the rest of his grazing association figured out where else to put their cows for the next couple of months. They did not put them out there because they understood how all of those things were connected and how important it was to keep the cattle off of the creek that summer. To me, that is really where we’re succeeding, when they are empowered to make those decisions. It was a complicated decision, because the Forest Service, the Department of Game and Fish, and all of these folks had to be consulted. But at the end of the day, everybody was working together for the health of those stream systems. 

BIONEERS: One of the concepts the coalition puts forward is the idea of a radical center. Could you talk about what that means to you and what you are trying to convey with that term?

SARAH: I think that the idea’s about a couple of things. For me, it’s about how do we convene people in dialogue intentionally across difference? So, how are we identifying folks who we know are going to think differently about a particular topic than we do, but who we know are important voices in some kind of community decision-making process? We need to commit to being in conversation, learning about those viewpoints, and figuring out a way to stay in that space together because that’s where action happens. That’s where movement happens. That’s where community building happens, and then ultimately, in the case of Quivira, where land stewardship happens. 

I think the concept was first articulated in reference to cross-aisle politics in D.C., but there were a couple of groups in the Southwest, the Quivira Coalition being one and the Malpai Border Lands group being another, who were like, “This is a really interesting concept, what if we were able to engage in a similar type of dialogue and decision making but with environmental groups and ranchers, particularly on public lands.” I think that was the seed of the concept. 

But I think that we use it and apply it in a lot of other circumstances now. We are trying to think about it more broadly, particularly in the Southwest. We’re a really diverse place. We have a lot of tribes. We have land-grant communities. We have a lot of issues of equity. Those are spaces where we also need to be thinking about being in a radical center, where we need to be inviting in different viewpoints, holding space for them, and really listening to one another. So I think the way that we think about the radical center has expanded and shifted, in good ways.

BIONEERS: What’s an example of where the concept of the radical center has helped to heal rifts or move forward on a project?

SARAH: Two years ago, we were in Denver for our Regenerate Conference. We invited a woman named Beth Robinette, a rancher from Washington, to talk a little bit about her experience. She chose to talk about “land back” and what that meant to her. 

The idea of land back is one that is extremely touchy with ranchers, and I think evokes a lot of emotion and strong feelings and ideas. And she gave an amazing presentation, and was really able to convey how the way that she approaches that idea is about inviting people from the tribal community in her area back onto her land. As an organization, we have stepped into a space to say: How does equity show up in our work? And it’s really been a challenge to have that conversation with ranchers. I think there’s a lot of resistance. After Beth gave this talk, one of the ranchers who’s a mentor in the apprenticeship program came up and he was like, “I’m starting to get this now. I’m starting to understand why thinking about how people feel about land, what their connection to land is, how that connection may have been severed or disrupted because of colonization is important.” There was a light bulb that had gone on for him. And to me, that’s a really critical space for us to be thinking about it, and one in which the radical center really can go to work for us.

BIONEERS: Could you talk about the inspiration, founding, and growth of the New Agrarian Program? 

SARAH: Our New Agrarian Apprenticeship Program was started in 2009 by Avery Anderson Sponholtz, our executive director at that time, and George Whitten and Julie Sullivan, who are ranchers in the San Luis Valley. 

The inspiration was that people aren’t going back into farming and ranching. The generational succession just isn’t happening for family farms and ranches. George is a fourth or fifth-generation rancher in the San Luis Valley, brilliant guy, and really practicing ranching in a very different way from early on. There’s a great book about his ranch called, “The Last Ranch.” He has always been somebody who — through frugality and I think a really keen ecological eye — has managed his herd rotationally and in a way that is very tuned into minimal inputs into his operation. 

I believe it was in the late ‘90s that Julie Sullivan was working for an experiential education program. It was a college program that involved a semester in the West. They’d bring students around to different sites and meet folks who were in some type of land stewardship. She had read this book and landed at the ranch, and she was a flag-waving vegan at the time and had the cattle free in ’93 bumper sticker on her car. She came to this ranch and fell in love with George, and so now she is a rancher. 

That part of the story is really fantastic, but I think it was actually the potent combination of her being an educator and George having this particular approach to ranching. George has a couple of kids, but none of them wanted to come back to the ranch. That was sort of the seed for this program. She’s like, “Well, George, why don’t you teach what you know and why don’t we get some additional help on the ranch by bringing apprentices on and doing an exchange of work to learn?” That’s how the program started. 

Initially, it was just that one ranch, and thinking through what the curriculum looked like and what was important in these relationships that actually make it work. Then three or four years after that, we brought in a couple of other operations, so we had three to five operations a year. Actually, how I got to Quivira is through this program. Eight-and-a-half years ago, one of our funders was like, “This is an amazing program that is really doing a great job of empowering people to get the education they need to step into roles managing large landscapes through agriculture. But graduating one to three people a year isn’t going to necessarily have the impact that it needs to. What do you all need to scale? We’re going to give you a planning grant to do some planning work and research around this to figure out how to scale.” 

So I came in to manage some of the nuts and bolts while our program director did the research. Now, seven years later, we are working with anywhere between 18 and 25 ranches a year, from Montana to New Mexico. We’ve graduated over 120 people out of the program. Scaling up that way has been pretty profound — it’s been amazing to see how we went from a very small network of people to a much more robust network. What’s so valuable about that is that folks who have been through the program still stay connected to one another, and all of a sudden there’s a social landscape of folks who are engaged in regenerative agriculture, specifically regenerative ranching. It’s beginning to transform what’s happening on the land. We have a lot of different types of entities reaching out, being like, “Hey, can you put me in touch with the people who’ve gone through your program? (Or) We’re looking for a ranch manager. We’re looking for a speaker.” 

BIONEERS: What are the challenges of introducing regenerative agriculture and ranching practices in an economy that’s built on corporate industrial food systems, such as major meatpacking and other interests? 

SARAH: I feel like agriculture in general and livestock agriculture in particular is a wicked, wicked problem right now. There are three or four companies that own something like 80% of the market share of all the meat that is produced in this country. Consolidation is insane, and we can’t seem to get the federal government to really crack down and lean into antitrust rules when it comes to meat production in this country. It’s an enormous issue, and I think all producers butt up against that. 

Another hat that I wear is board member of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, which is a grassroots farm organization. The Quivira Coalition doesn’t do advocacy work, but I really enjoy advocacy work, and I do that through the Farmers Union. We’ve been pushing for decades for the government to break up the monopolization of our food system, and it just seems to go nowhere. In the last couple of years, we’ve had the good fortune of being able to actually go in and meet with the Department of Justice when we do our annual fly-ins, which feels like progress. But it’s also disheartening when we go into those meeting spaces and it’s like this is brand new information to the folks who are working there, that our food system is consolidated this way. That’s hard. 

But I think that there are also things that are hopeful. There are people carving out space and trying out models in spite of how challenging the situation is. In some ways, I feel like we’re at a moment of significant paradigm shift because things are so bad. It’s like when things are so broken, that’s when you start to see new, better, more resilient things emerge through the cracks. I’m hopeful that that is the type of moment that we are in right now. 

BIONEERS: Are there particular obstacles you’re dealing with that you feel the general public should know about? 

SARAH: I think that consolidation in the meat industry is one. I wish that people understood better how livestock production works — the really critical role that having grazing animals on the landscape has. When it comes to beef cattle, 97% of animals go into a feedlot system. Confined animal agriculture is very problematic and very challenging, but when that’s stacked up against the type of market system that we have, it really is the only option. The other dimension is the meat processing part, which is also consolidated. 

So in New Mexico, for example, on any given day of the week, we have somewhere between two and five USDA-approved meat processing plants. So for folks with a cow/calf operation — in which you have a mother herd that gives birth to calves and then you raise those calves — when they get to be of a certain age, you have to make some decisions about where they’re going to go. Most people will sell them, and then they get channeled into that feedlot track. There are folks who will try to sell direct-to-consumer or find a more regional wholesale market. But one, they have to have enough grass to continue to feed those animals and have them grow. Then two, they need to have space at a USDA-approved processing plant to then be able to sell that meat. And so the amount of consolidation of every step of the value chain is what presents the barriers. I just wish people knew more of that. 

So I’d say one thing is read about it, learn about it, get educated about it. The second thing is to know where your meat comes from. Know the people who grow it and produce it and understand what their practices are. Because if we’re waiting around for the federal government to break up meat consolidation, that is a battle that has been waged for over 120 years. It is not new. Consolidation was behind the whole founding of Farmers Union, and it’s a 110-year-old organization. 

I think that the way that we start to shift that is through consumers. If consumers really demanded to know who’s raising these animals; where they’re coming from; that they’re not confined; if they’re being finished in a feedlot system. I should say, I don’t want to totally demonize feedlots; There are situations in which it makes the most sense to put a group of animals together and bring food to them rather than have them out on the landscape. We have to balance impact to the land with the food production piece. But know where your food comes from is the point that I’m trying to make. 

BIONEERS: And it’s hard to find that out sometimes, right? People see these company names and don’t realize they’re part of a larger company. 

SARAH: Absolutely. There’s so much greenwashing that could happen. I also recognize that it’s a privilege to be able to have the time and space to figure out some of those things. But for those of us who have that, if we can really advocate to have more market share for small family farmers and have the support in place for those folks to practice agriculture and to get paid fairly for the food that they’re producing, all of those things go a long way to make a big difference.