HMI Welcomes New Board Members
- Jul 2
- 2 min read
HMI is excited to welcome 2 new board members to the HMI Board of Directors.
Gary Reding graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. in Animal Science and then started farming on a 900-acre diversified family farm with his in-laws in southeast Indiana.
He farmed for 31 years, raising soybeans and wheat for seed, corn for the livestock and forage for the cattle. He operated a 2,200 pig per year farrow-to-finish hog enterprise alongside 25-45 cow-calf Angus breeding herd.
During the 1990’s, with various industrial agricultural shifts, Gary started looking for ways to become more productive and financially sustainable on a small farm to support his family.
Around 1995 he read Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making, by Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield. The concept of Holistic Management became the basis for much of his decision-making on the farm.
He began producing food grade crops and eventually organic grains and hay. Using the conditioning equipment he had for the seed industry, he started getting farmers to grow specialty grains including organic popcorn. By 2002, he had one of the largest organic popcorn programs in the country, needing to go to four states to find enough organic farmers to produce enough to meet the demand.
As Gary was designing his organic transition through the use of cattle grazing, he attended a Holistic Management 3-day course that gave Gary the confidence to go forward with his plan and later start his own consulting company. Gary has worked with converting large acreages to organic for a land-owning company and also works as a plant and soil specialist selling regenerative ag nutrients and system to farmers across 10 states and Ontario, Canada.
Attending that Holistic Management class made a lasting impact on his decision making for the the past 25+ years. When asked if he would join HMI’s board, Gary wanted to help keep this organization going and felt he could pay back for the good the organization did for him.
Louis Martin is the founder and CEO of Round River Resource Management, LLC, a land and livestock management company dedicated to managing ranch lands and livestock for economic and ecological sustainability. Louis has been involved in the ranching industry for over forty years and has been a student of Holistic Management since 1985.
As a graduate of Texas A&M University, Louis served as the manager of the TAMU Beef Center for 18 years, before moving to eastern Utah to manage a large public lands ranch near Vernal.
In 2003, Louis moved to Colorado, and in 2008, founded Round River after being selected to lease and manage the Brett Gray Ranch by the Colorado State Land Board and The Nature Conservancy.
Today, Round River manages over 50,000 acres of ranch lands, using regenerative, time-controlled grazing practices and livestock as tools to restore ranch lands and provide profitability to land and livestock owners while offering a pathway into ranching for aspiring agriculturists through an internship/apprenticeship/mentoring program.
Louis also serves on the CSU Board of Governors and he and his wife Cathy live on the Brett Gray Ranch near Rush, Colorado.
