SNW Celebrates New Regenerative Ranching Program
Sustainable Northwest board members, staff, and partners gathered in Joseph, Oregon, for a deep dive into our new Regenerative Ranching program.
After two years of lockdown, social distancing, and Zoom happy hours, Sustainable Northwest was eager to kick off summer 2022 with our first in-person board meeting and field tour since 2019.
Sustainable Northwest founder Martin Goebel, alongside Wallowa Resources President, Nils Cristofferson, welcomed everyone with the history of SNW in Wallowa County, including the hundreds of hours he spent shuttling between Portland and Eastern Oregon in the late nineties as he and his partners worked hard to find natural resource solutions that worked for the region.
Cristofferson grounded us within Joseph, explaining the great work that Wallowa Resources (which began as a SNW program) has done in the region for the past twenty years.
Sustainable Northwest’s Regenerative Ranching program is anchored in a partnership with Country Natural Beef, a cooperative of over 100 progressive family ranches that manage several million acres in the West. The ranchers collaborate to produce, sell, and market high-quality natural beef in a regenerative manner. The cooperative has been a leader and innovator in adopting cutting-edge attributes and meaningful management practices.
Country Natural Beef is seeking to build upon its track record of innovative responses to consumer demand and proactive sustainability by partnering with Sustainable Northwest to establish a Regenerative Ranching Program that measures, validates, and promotes successes in enhancing soil and rangeland health.
In an increasingly complex and rapidly expanding regenerative marketplace, the program will prioritize on-the-ground improvements to position ranchers to meet consumer demand for diverse certification standards, market access and certainty, and quantifiable and verifiable regenerative management claims. While developed and coordinated in close partnership with CNB, this program will be administered by Sustainable Northwest and complement other regenerative initiatives.
The program will be a model in the Western ranching community and support the following outcomes:
Marketing: Verify claims that producers are engaging in cutting-edge regenerative practices, providing strong conservation outcomes, offering opportunities for storytelling, and creating brand recognition.
Sales: Respond to growing consumer demand for regenerative management practices and products, and differentiate these products from competition in the marketplace.
Co-op culture: Promote conversation, share best practices, provide technical assistance, and challenge producers to improve management activities and business practices.
Individual ranch: Increase ecological literacy, land productivity, ranch profitability, and overall rangeland health.
Ranch viability: Provide ranchers with verifiable and credible data to demonstrate land management partners, the general public, and other interested partners that their management practices are making a positive impact on the land they manage.
Following the formal board meeting where partners discussed the goals and future of SNW’s Regenerative Ranching Program, everyone dogpiled into vans to visit CNB co-op member Dan Probert’s Lightning Creek Ranch.
Only a few of the more city-slicker staff members, including our Donor Engagement Manager Chaney Clifton, got lost on the way there. She says the views were breathtaking, even while trying to figure out which road led to Lightning Creek Ranch.. What a delight to learn about the entire regenerative ranching process from feed to finishing, and end by sharing a delicious brisket meal side-by-side with our partners.
Getting out in the field alongside our teammates, partners, and leadership is such an energizing part of our work - especially in 2022 after years of virtual isolation. We strongly recommend leaving the home office, breathing some fresh air, breaking bread with your community, and connecting with others face to face - there is nothing more refreshing or invigorating.
