Texas Collaborative Grazing School: Holistic Goals, Healthy Soil, and Honest Numbers

Soil Health Workshop participants during introductions and orientation.

In the days ahead of the Southern Family Farmers and Food Systems Conference, held July 31 - August 2 in San Marcos, Texas, the Small Producers Initiative (SPI) of Texas State University hosted a collaborative Grazing School that brought three organizations, and three ways of seeing the land, into the same pastures and the same room. Understanding Ag, the Noble Research Institute (NRI), and Holistic Management International (HMI) each led sessions across the school.

In the Field

Dr. Ken Mix explains soil health using a rainfall simulator

Mornings were spent outdoors, on working ranches. Participants divided into three groups and rotated through hands-on sessions with each organization's teaching team.

HMI took on the role of consultant to the landowners themselves. Ahead of the school, each owner had prepared documentation setting out their goals, their aspirations, and the constraints they were working within. Wayne Knight facilitated the owners through live sessions to diagnose the land health issues on their own ground, then walked them through possible solutions, all of it guided by the holistic vision the owners had already defined for their land. For participants watching, this was not a hypothetical case study. It was a real consultation, playing out in real time, on the same land they were standing on.

 Chuck Cosgrove (right) from NRI Team explaining grazing concepts to workshop participants

Fernando Falomir of Understanding Ag took participants out to observe ecosystem function and soil health directly on the land, starting with what the ground itself was already showing them. The NRI team of Sky Toney and Chuck Cosgrove worked with each group on measuring and calculating forage, and linking that number to the carrying capacity of the land, turning a healthy looking pasture into an actual, usable figure for management decisions.

Bringing It Together

In the afternoon, the class moved indoors, and the day's work shifted from observation and measurement to the harder question underneath both–what are we actually trying to achieve, and who gets to decide.

Wayne Knight led the HMI session, and the ground he covered was foundational rather than technical. Clear goals, family communication, and planning are the first steps of any farming or ranching project, and they matter most precisely when a family is trying something new or unfamiliar against the weight of traditional practice. Taking the time to consider the business and its purpose, in terms of every family member and business stakeholder involved, is not a delay before the real work starts. It is the real work. Clarity, Wayne reminded the group, is what collective ownership and shared purpose are built on.

The session walked through the elements that make up a Holistic Goal/Context–clearly defining quality of life, the behaviors and processes that make that quality of life possible, and the commitments a family or business is willing to make to actually achieve them. Once those pieces are honestly defined, the Holistic Vision and the Future Resource Base that supports them come into alignment on their own. This is the basis Holistic Management is built on, and it is not an abstraction. Participants worked through each element of their own Holistic Goal/Context that afternoon, naming their own commitments and their own communication aspirations for keeping their families and operations aligned.

Sky Toney from NRI (far left), Fernando Falomir (left) from Understanding Ag with workshop participants listening to more grazing and soil health presentations.

Fernando Falomir returned to lead a second indoor session, walking the class through soil health using stories from his own operation and his clients', successes and failures both. His point was not that regenerative practice is easy. It is that the responsibility for improving ecosystem health, for the plant, for profit, and for a family's connection to the land, is collective, and it is ongoing.

The NRI closed the final afternoon by returning to carrying capacity, this time as motivation rather than method: calculate it honestly, adjust stock density to match the economic objective, and land health and profitability improve together, not one at the expense of the other.

What became clear across the 3 days is how closely aligned these three organizations already are. Each speaks its own language with respect to ecological observation, hard numbers, family and business planning, but all three are walking toward the same outcome. Giving participants that same content from three distinct angles, was the point.

Thanks Where They Are Due

Organizing team (left to right)–Hunter Francis of SPI, Christine Martin (HMI Certified Educator), Ranch Host Tim Auld.

None of this happens on a slide deck. It happens on real land, with real families willing to open their operations to a room full of strangers and ask hard questions in front of them. Our thanks go to ranch hosts Dan Connolly and Tim Auld, who shared not only their successes but the genuine challenges they are working through on their own operations, and who welcomed public consultation on that work so that both their own operations and every participant in the room could see regenerative and Holistic Management practice in action, not in theory.

Thanks are also due to the team at the Small Producers Initiative: Dr. Ken Mix, for the vision to bring three organizations together around one shared table, and Hunter Francis and Loren Mullins, whose execution made a genuinely complex two day rotation across ranches and classrooms run without a hitch.

Heading Into San Marcos

Participants walked out of this Grazing School and into the Southern Family Farmers and Food System Conference having already done the work, in the field and in the room, that the Forum's conversations would go on to build from. That is not a small thing. It is the difference between hearing about regenerative agriculture and having already started practicing it.