Staff Spotlight: Dallas Hall Defrees

Dallas Hall Defrees is a fifth-generation rancher from Baker City, OR. She grew up enjoying ranch things: branding cows, fixing fences, and riding four-wheelers. With all that time outside — and with her mother’s influence on her as a biology teacher — Dallas became more interested in the natural world. 

Dallas studied biology in college, and for a time, she thought she would follow in her brother’s footsteps and go into medicine. 

“But every summer, I’d come back and work on the ranch, and it was always a breath of fresh air for me,” she says. 

After college, she worked for OMSI’s outdoor school program and for a medical research lab. While both were fun and interesting, those experiences made her realize how much she cared about ranching and the outdoors.

About five years ago, on a ranch owned by Country Natural Beef (CNB) director Dan Probert, Dallas met SNW’s Dylan Kruse and Greg Block during the early stages of Grazewell — CNB’s regenerative ranching program. Then, in 2022, SNW launched its Regenerative Ranching program with a newly-hired Dallas as Program Director. 

Because the program is so recent, Dallas has worked hard both to build the program and operate it, with new and exciting challenges cropping up along the way. Working with the Climate-Smart Commodities grant and growing Grazewell, while not easy, have been a few of Dallas’s most rewarding projects.

While she doesn’t get to spend as much time outside and on the ranch as she’d like, she’s passionate about being able to work with ranchers.

“I love when I get to meet with ranchers who care about what they’re doing and the ranch they’re working on,” she says. “I just really love working with the people who are working on the ground.”

Outside SNW, Dallas loves ranching — plain and simple. She enjoys spending time outdoors with her family, whether that’s mountain biking, skiing, or hiking. An eastern Oregonian at heart, the Wallowa and Elkhorn Mountains are some of her most cherished places in the Northwest.

Dallas attends a monthly book club. A fantasy lover, her all-time favorite book is Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez — most of whose other books she’s read as well. In another life, if she wasn’t a rancher,  Dallas believes she might’ve been a woodworker.