Solstice Sown Designs Spring 2024 Update
“I thought you were doing permaculture gardens and food forest stuff? How is working with cattle and horses related? That seems like a big change!”
I’ve been hearing this a lot recently, as well as,
“Where are you living now? Are you going to settle down somewhere?”
I’ve done a poor job of explaining the connections and lessons I’ve learned in the past couple of seasons that have inspired my life and business decisions.
I’m experimenting with a broader definition of home than the current status quo allows. What if home can be more of a flow with the land? What if home means being in the right place at the right time? What if “home” is actually a series of camps/lodges along the trail.
Over the past few years I have fallen into a sort of seasonal flow that both keeps me inspired, challenged, and rooted to various communities in Colorado and abroad.
I find my self reconnecting with clients in Southwest Colorado each Spring and Fall (just so happens my favorite times of year to be in the high desert!) — planning gardens and planting trees, with huge help from my dear friend Patrick Mason at Redtail Farms LLC — he has become an invaluable business partner to help us install our designs and hold down maintenance on projects in Montezuma County and Telluride.
Every season I rely on my friends I couldn’t function without.
Pleasantree Farm supplies our projects with the best value trees and are doing amazing work as caring stewards of the land. I look forward to seeing Clay and Megan each season and wouldn’t be able to create high quality tree planting projects without them.
Another visit I cherish is seeing Ric, Matt, and Lisa at Cliffrose Gardens in Cortez. Their knowledge, experience, and selection of high desert plants is undoubtedly the best in the region, not to mention they are all just wonderful humans with good hearts dedicated to the community.
Southwest Seed is the number one seed supply for our work. They understand soils, seeds, irrigation, weeds, you name it! I always learn more every time I stop in and eagerly await a hug from my dear friend Robby Hennes, co-owner of Southwest Seed and my former neighbor. If you know Robby, you know what a gem she truly is!
I can’t help but swing by the Dolores River Brewery to check on the garden we built in 2020 and have a beer, I just love that place. Mark and the team have done a wonderful job taking care of it over the years, I always come snack on the Nanking cherries, Aronia, Gooseberry, and Serviceberry in the fall! The black elderberries should be good this year, fingers crossed.
So what about summer and winter? It feels right to get up into the mountains during the summers and winters, it isn’t as hot as the high desert and gosh, mountains just make me happy.
Winters can be a bit slow for planting so I take time to travel and work on designs and plans for clients. Last winter led me to work as a ski and snowshoe guide at Pine Creek Cookhouse near Aspen, Colorado. I dedicated most days to taking care of trails, reading tracks in the snow, and sharing stories of the land with visitors from around the world. With a new ski touring set up, over 90 days skiing on the mountain, and record snowpack, it was the best winter of my life to say the least.
I got to work with a wonderful organization for the second time, The Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, who I had worked with right out college in 2015 as a summer naturalist guide.
An opportunity came up to work in the role as the Livestock lead at Rock Bottom Ranch, a 120 acre diversified meat and vegetable production farm. I was thrilled to work with them having been inspired years ago. Suddenly, I was responsible for daily care of around 100 sheep, 500 layer hens, incremental production of 1,250 broiler chickens, 75 turkeys, 30 cattle, 5 rabbits, and two apprentices. Needless to say, we worked our butts off. We were operating on a multi-species rotational grazing system on about 30 acres of pasture. We moved electric fencing and animals daily to allow for periods of rest and recovery.
I fell in love with working with the animals. I still love doing design and consulting work and planning gardens, but for the amount of energy input for yields, animals seem to win every time.
I took a few holistic management classes with the Savory Institute and Bill and Kelly Parker of Parker Pastures years ago which guided a lot of my decisions on pasture management.
In the state of Colorado, and generally in the arid west, livestock have the biggest impact on the land. Check out the recent article in High Country News about water usage in the Colorado River basin, “Cattle are drinking the Colorado River dry”. s
Solstice Sown Designs has always been about leaving the land better than we found it. So, in an effort to focus my impact where it matters, I am doing everything I can to learn about cattle, livestock, and rangeland management.
What it comes down to is bioregional ecology. My home is in the west, Colorado specifically. There are a few bioregions that make up Colorado.
What is a bioregion? Why does it matter? The Nature Conservancy has a great interactive map called the Resilient Land Mapping Tool that outlines the major bioregions within the continental U.S. as well as the ecoregions therein.
“Science definitions for bioregion. An area constituting a natural ecological community with characteristic flora, fauna, and environmental conditions and bounded by natural rather than artificial borders…
It is sometimes defined as smaller than an ecozone but larger than an ecoregion: Farmers must develop an understanding of the geology, soils, climate, plant and animal life of their bioregion.”
I learned a lot during my time as the livestock lead at Rock Bottom Ranch near Basalt, Colorado. What I observed and continue to observe throughout the state of Colorado is how much habitat fragmentation and development are affecting bioregion ecosystem health.
I observed a huge amount of growth on our pastures from May to July. We could have increased our stocking rate ( stocking rate is the relationship between the number of animals and the size of forage resource on which they are placed) and density (Stocking density is the number of animals (or liveweight) on a part of the pasture for a certain portion of time) by 3 times during that period of intense growth. This would mimic historic patterns of huge migrating herds of elk or bison in the roaring fork valley as they moved from the river valleys to the higher elevation pastures over the course of the summer.
July ended up being hot and dry, growth of our warm season grasses slowed down significantly. The livestock and grasses would have been happier if we could move them to higher elevation pastures. So, this is what I wanted to do! I decided I would look for a livestock company with some forest service leases who are moving their animals with the seasons. It might be better for the land, but like anything, is not without its challenges.
With winter settling in, an opportunity to work as a ranch hand on a 100,000 acre ranch in northern Patagonia, Argentina came up. This ranch struck me, one because of its scale of unfragmented habitat, and two, because of how similar the bioregion is to the western slope of Colorado — high elevation and low precipitation, with a history of lots of livestock and overgrazing, as well as a diminishing rural workforce and gaucho culture — similar to the nowadays rare “real” cowboys of Colorado.
I decided I would do whatever it took to make it happen.
I headed back to southwest Colorado in November 2023 to work my tail off on projects for 5–6 weeks to save up for a trip to the southern hemisphere.
We built a native plant garden for the Cortez Sanitation district and I started working on several land plans for clients in the four corners region, and planting more trees at some of my favorite small farms and ranches.
I had an absolutely unforgettable December-April working at Estancia Ranquilco in Argentina. I will have to write an article solely dedicated to that experience. It was one of the more challenging work experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m so glad I made the trip. It was hot, really hot, and dusty, really dusty, and just good ole hard work.
Now, I’m back in Colorado and considering the ever shifting landscape of farming and ranching, land stewardship, development, local and national politics, wolves and cattle, water in rural areas and cities, and the likelihood of hotter drier summers ahead.
I’ve found work at a historic ranch near Basalt, Cap K Ranch, who run about 120 head of cattle on around 1,000 acres and national forest leases.
I’ll be working hard to learn the systems of the ranch this season, put up hay, and hopefully get out riding in the mountains as often as I can.
I’ll also be starting ecological design projects in the Roaring Fork area to plant more native trees, build natural swimming ponds, and to guide land owners towards more resilient landscape management practices.
Overall, I love the land. I love working with people who dedicate time to navigating the hard practical decisions of protecting the environment for future generations. I really love Colorado, it will always be home — whether in the southwest, high Rockies, or the front range.
Hope to see you out on the land, I’ll be out there getting my hands dirty doing my best to learn what it means to live naturally and be at home wherever I am.
Thanks for reading,
