Wendy Millet

Wendy Millet

Ranch Director, TomKat Ranch

Caroline (C) and Kepa (K): You were at the Nature Conservancy for a while before you started at TomKat Ranch and we were wondering how you got involved in your roles in the Nature Conservancy and if you could briefly explain what responsibilities came with those roles.

Wendy (W): I had 10 jobs in 12 years while I was at the Nature Conservancy, which is definitely not normal. But, in hindsight I would say I was the one who was either launching new products or fixing broken projects.  I didn’t train in conservation or forestry or water or marine, so I didn’t have the subject matter expertise that tied me a specific area. I’m an entrepreneur by nature and an innovator by nature so I was also looking for ways to launch a new product, to find an interesting way to position ourselves in the community to balance the three legs of the sustainability stool: economy, ecology, community. I was looking for those ways in all the different projects that I was working on.

C: How is real environmental change made in such a large organization like the Nature Conservancy?

W: That’s a great, great, great question. It’s a complicated answer. The simple version is that there’s a lot that happens at the global scale. Some employees work for the organization out of what we call the world office out of Arlington, Virginia. That’s the top level, and then there’s the grass roots staff spread out all over the world in project areas. We’re actually doing work on the ground and launching projects. Often times those reflect each other—the global mission reflects the work at the field level. Say, for example, if staff are working on a carbon credits project they make be working with Chevron in China or saving land in the San Louis Valley of Colorado. They’re both working on grassland issues and one would inform the other – that is definitely the way the organization is set up. Because everybody is so busy it’s often the case that once a year everybody who’s talking about grasslands gets together to share notes and then there are a lot of days in between where a few people were catching up on a 1:1 basis. The grassroots and the grasstops – people at the top of the organization and people at the field level – are all working simultaneously to move the conservation agenda forward.

K: You talked briefly about your roles in the Nature Conservancy. Could you talk about a significant experience and maybe a challenging experience you had in one of your roles at the Nature Conservancy and maybe a specific project you were working on.

W: One that I like to talk about is a project I started in Northern California called the North Coast Project, and the focus of it was working on forestlands and forest conservation. After I had spent a lot of time meeting with people in the community and looking at the forest issues that were going on globally within the organization and beyond, I went back to the state office and said, “I think we should launch a working forest project.” At that point we hadn’t done a lot of forestry work in California and where we had, it was forest protection, not working forests – basically where you harvest some amount of timber. My goal was to harvest some amount of timber and create economic value from the harvest. This also creates a more biodiverse forest. So, I pushed for that and the board approved it. The project was written about in the Natural Conservancy magazine last month called: “Timberland in Northern California Making Room for Low-Impact Logging.” Sometimes it takes a long time for these things to go mainstream. A lot of press went out when it first happened in 2003—but when it makes TNC’s global magazine it’s a sign of a great example.

C: I saw that you worked in Southern California for Nature Conservancy and now you’re in Northern California. I was curious if you’d seen a difference in the people and in the opinion about the environment in the two regions of California.

W: This is generalizing but people from the SF Bay are passionate about conservation. I think the ethic for conservation evolves and is directly proportional to how often you get out to appreciate nature and fall in love with places. In the Bay Area, it’s easy to get access and we have so many options. It’s easy for us to feel a regular, everyday kind of conservation. But I wouldn’t say that people in Southern California don’t have the same passions. I know a lot of great conservation people down there working on marine issues, urban gardens, planting trees, river parkways and urban parks – it’s just often a different scale, because it’s what they can get their heads around from where they are.

K: You have been involved in the environmental realm for many years and, coming from your perspective, have you seen a general change in the public opinion about environmental conservation.

W: My focus has always been very much on land. I’m speaking from that perspective. What’s happening in the land conservation world, and the land trusts are sort of the biggest voice for that, is that there’s a lot of interest now in how people connect with the land and how to connect more people from more cultures to land. And there’s a big opportunity, happening—a convergence with the food system culture – and thinking about how protected lands can also be lands that provide, not just recreation and biodiversity, but, food from grazing lands or farms. Our local land trust here [at TomKat] is an open space trust that is now working on farmland conservation. And the land trust community across the country is looking at these issues as well— how to be relevant to the next generation because so much of our population is urban. Maybe those people don’t get out and feel that connected to a landscape or maybe they’re not that connected to a park where they grew up visiting . Figuring out how to make land and places relevant to the next generation is a priority for the conservation community. You guys would know how to help; you’re the next generation.

C: You work with TomKat and LeftCoast now and you are a horseback rider, but how did you really fall in love with the land and decide that that’s what you wanted to concentrate on?

W:  I was always outside and then I was always on horses exploring new places and that’s just how I started. My grandfather was a hunter-fisherman, my dad was a hunter-fisherman so I was exposed to that part of nature as well when I was young. Nature or nurture? I just always liked the outdoors.

C: Would you mind talking about TomKat and LeftCoast?

W: At TomKat Ranch, we have a bunch of different entities that all operate together. We’ve got LeftCoast GrassFed, our beef business. We have Early Bird Ranch, which is a young farmer couple who lease from us doing pasture-raised poultry and pork. We’ve got Symbi Biological that does aquaponics and hydroponics—they’re our research-and-development farm. We do Gallop Ventures—a leadership and teamwork program with horses that I do. And then, we have Point Blue Conservation Science who is there full time. So we operate all of those entities on the same piece of land to be a “learning lab” on sustainable agriculture. It’s a great place to learn about a lot of different topics and our purpose is to be a place where people come, see what we’re doing, think about the issues, think about their opportunities. If we’re doing good stuff, we can share it. If people want to give us great ideas, we’ll gladly take those and implement. We want to be a place that fosters innovation and conversation so we can all learn together about this field.

K: We looked at the organizations and their websites. We know that these organizations have attempted to sustainably herd cattle using non-traditional methods. What practices have you found most effective and have you passed them along to other ranches? You’re running a business on one hand, but trying to find a way to conserve the environment on the other.

W: To us, they go hand in hand. The theory of change that we are out to learn more about is the theory that grasslands evolved with large herds of herbivores. Since we don’t have large herds of native species anymore like we used to, or native species, cows are the proxy for a grazing herd. We move them very intentionally around the grasslands and that’s the key because that’s what would have happened with buffalo on the Great Plains, that’s what would have happened in the Serengeti. The herds move a lot and graze. And the birds follow the herds. And when the herds go onto a piece of land they put a lot of natural fertilizer down, they mix up the soils with their footing. Then, after they’ve done all of that work, they move on to the next place and then all that land has time to rest and the biological communities in the soil get to work and that grows more soil and sequesters more carbon and improves the water cycle and the land. So that’s really what we’re all about is trying to actually use the herd as a land management tool. Other people are doing what we’re doing—we didn’t create this, we’re following in the footsteps of others who have done this before—and we’re definitely sharing it with other people because we’re seeing really good results and we want other people to know about it. The theory of change is if you actually can improve the water cycle, if you can improve the nutrient cycle, if you can improve soil on your land, you would grow more biodiversity and grow more plants. All of that would provide more forage for your cows. So you probably would do better in your business and there are certainly plenty of places around the world that have already, ahead of us, proven that this is working for them. And we’re three years into it and hopefully we’ll get to that point where we’re seeing the same kind of gains from our land, our forage, our biodiversity, and our actual cattle herd, as other folks before us have done.

C: How long have you been at TomKat relative to how long it’s been a sustainable ranch?

W: I started two+ years ago. I was hired to get the educational foundation up and running. It had been in existence for a couple years before and they had run kids’ programs in the summer time, they had started the planned grazing, and I was hired to move all that into 5th gear—full speed ahead.

K: Could you elaborate on those education programs? What programs do you offer for people who come into the education program?

W: We do a range of programs. In the summertime, we do programs for kids. It’ll be bird banding, sustainable agriculture and ecology, how healthy soil leads to healthy food. For adults, we did a program last month called “Whole farm and business planning”— for ranchers and farmers to learn business school skills, because it’s one of the things that often is lacking. People get into farming because they want to be outside all day and they want to grow awesome food, but they maybe don’t have the business or marketing skills they need to get that product to market. So, we offer that kind of a program. We do a fair amount of thought leader programs where we bring people together to hear speakers, to think about a topic of grasslands or water or soil or carbon, climate-smart ranching. Just bringing people together across a wide spectrum to learn together and share ideas and best practices and come up with more ideas.

C: Have you seen a difference in cattle ranching since you have shared your ideas?

W: I think people are hungry and eager for ideas and that’s really the reason we hosted the [business program]: because there are so many good ideas out there from other sectors and especially in the technology side. Farmer’s are getting much more tech savvy especially the new generation of farmers and ranchers. Sharing ideas is important to give them a head start.

K: We know that you’ve been involved in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and we were wondering if you could explain what your involvement entailed and explain a little bit about what that organization is all about.

W: I was the Director of Programs at the Woods Institute, and the Woods Institute is a clearinghouse for the environmental institutes at Stanford. It got its start when a few environmental professors agreed that it would be great to have a place on campus to talk about how their research related to what other researchers on campus were doing. So, it’s a great center on campus for people who care about the environment. They have programs for students to focus on environmental topics—sometimes they’re applied, sometimes they’re research projects, there are grant programs for faculty doing interdisciplinary work on the environment. I ran the program side of things focused on bringing thought-leaders to campus and a program called Uncommon Dialogue that would take a topic like rangeland, for example, and bring people from across perspectives on that issue to talk through the bottlenecks or policy issues and come up with a solution and research needed in order to solve it. I also helped run a program taking Masters and PhD students to DC for a week to help them learn about the environment of DC. If you’re working on environmental issues, what does it look like in DC and in the policy realm: how do you do lobbying to your Congress people?, how do you talk to non-profits?, what do the agencies do?, what do the lobbyists do?, and giving them a hands-on, weeklong tour of how things work in DC. It’s obviously an important part of exposing students to future career opportunities.

C: You’ve been involved in so many methods of environmental change making. What have you found to be the most effective way of bringing about change?

W: Definitely getting people outside is the best way to do it. If you want to get people excited about a project you get them outside to see the place. There’s so much, in nature, to see and be fascinated by. Bringing [people] to the ranch so we can talk about where food comes from, the cattle grazing benefits to the soil, and how the soil sequesters carbon. I feel like the number one most successful thing is getting people outside to these places and giving them a hands-on experience —not just a bus ride tour where they’re looking out the window at beautiful places. You get a little bit dirty. In one of our programs at the ranch we were doing a habitat planting project and it ended up pouring on that day. Initially everyone was worried, “Oh no, it’s going to rain, it’s going to be a terrible day.” Afterwards, they couldn’t stop talking about that day. It was so much fun to be outside and to get wet and have a gritty, real experience. That’s what I love – getting people outside to be a part of nature, connect with it themselves in a direct way.

C: Does Nature Conservancy bring people into nature, too?

W: They’ll take people outside for trips but that is not a main focus. They have a new program called LEAF, which is connecting kids with nature and doing internships for inner-city kids. They have a program called Conservations Journeys where you can go for a week to a Montana Ranch, where the Nature Conservancy works, or a Colorado ranch or Ramsey Canyon, a place in Arizona where there’s awesome bird watching. They have some eco-lodge places where you can pay to go. That’s a way that they’ve tried to make their places available to the public. They partner with organizations that do he outdoor education as well.

C: So, I mentioned that I’m an Environmental Economics major.

K: And I’m an Environmental Analysis and an Econ major. So we’re both very much interested in Environmental Economics.

C: I’m taking an Environmental Economics class now and it’s very much focused on the cost-effective or efficient solution rather than having complete bans on certain pollutants and whatnot and I saw that you did some Environmental Economics. How do you feel about straight environmental economics and being efficient versus just the good of everyone?

W: I lucked out because I started out as a literature major at Harvard studying Emerson and Thoreau and John Muir and that’s a pretty far cry from Economics. Then I moved to Seattle—and worked for an Environmental Economics think-tank. I think it was the best thing that ever happened to my conservation career. My boss said, “You need to take some economics classes,” so I went to the University of Washington and I started taking economics classes and ever after that I became quite a practical conservation person. The forest example I talked about earlier was a direct result of that training that I had. I could have gone  to the state director and said, “We need to conserve this forest.” But, I was thinking “If we conserve it, who’s going to pay for it in the long term? And isn’t there some way that we can keep it as some kind of economic, revenue-generating property to pay for some of the costs”. It’s the same thing for ranching and it’s the same reason that I think rangelands and ranching are important—because that is the economic use of millions of acres of the global grasslands of the world. Otherwise, they’re going to go to houses or golf courses or something that does have an economic use. If we can’t keep some kind of Economics on them, who’s going to afford to own that land? I think it’s awesome that you are studying economics because its a critical piece for keeping lands protected from turning into subdivisions or golf courses and figuring out some economic use so that people can support the ecological values with some economic value. Dude ranches are another example and when I got hired to work in Wyoming on a dude ranch the boss specifically said to me, “You either get us a dude ranch that makes some money or we’re going out of business.” They already had a cattle ranch, that was supposed to be their revenue generator, but it wasn’t paying the bills. That Dude Ranch is still up and running today – and that property is protected by a conservation easement. I’m a huge fan of environmental economics and I’m really excited you guys are making that choice in your studies.

K: We know you have had formal and informal education and life just brought you to a place of leadership in the environmental and conservation field. Could you talk about an “ah ha” moment of yours when you realized conservation was for you.

W: It was when I was working at that ranch in Wyoming where we built a dude ranch and put a conservation easement on the property and stopped it from turning into a golf course. That was the moment I said, “I want to be a rancher.” as I saw a tangible path for protecting a ranch and a place that I loved. That was a very big moment for me.

C: So you co-founded Gallop Ventures, which focuses on horses more than on the environment. If getting people into the environment is so important in getting people interested in conservation, do you focus at all on conservation with the people who are using Gallop Ventures?

W: Gallop Ventures is like “ropes courses with horses.” To me, its another avenue to connect people with nature. We talk about how a herd works, how an animal like a horse, which is a prey animal, thinks and sees the world, and help people think about different ways of interacting with the world by watching and learning how horses act. One of our tag lines at Gallop Ventures is: “Connecting with your inner and outer nature”. They are reading us all the time and responding to that. We use their feedback to help people gain insight about themselves and tie it to leadership. I know it sounds pretty abstract, but it’s pretty amazing. The horses are awesome.  We talk about herd dynamics and how its like human dynamics and sometimes we’ll say, “Are you noticing the world around you? Are you noticing that the birds singing?” We use all of the nature around us during the program to wake people up to their inner, and outer nature.

K: What has been your favorite project that you’ve worked on and if you could tie that into advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and economists and conservation environmentalists.

W: So many fun projects to talk about! I’ve loved all the projects that I have worked on. I have a method in my life, which is: Do what you love and you will make good things happen. I would enjoy talking to you about most of the projects I’ve worked on. The thing that is really amazing about TomKat Ranch that’s a little bit different is that the ranch’s mission is to connect so many different topics in one place. That’s what I especially love. Here, at the ranch, I can do conservation and education and sustainable food systems. I can talk about soil and climate change and bring all these different people together to look at the system as a whole.

I think my advice is to not to lose focus of the whole; I know it’s helpful in solving problems to break things into parts, but if we don’t look at nature as a whole—it’s a big system, right?—and understand how things connect to each other… I think this is where we need to head, to find solutions that address all those interconnections including all the information that we don’t even know. For example, I was on a panel the other day with a bunch of farmers and they were talking about the drought and one said, “Well, as long as I can afford to buy water I’m not going to reduce the crops that I’m growing.” What an interesting thing to say. Why wouldn’t he look at the whole system of the land and water and try to make it better, and try to figure out how to reduce water use in a drought, and figure out how to make amendments to the soil that would hold water in the soil? I could go on and on but you get the gist. Trying to make a short takeaway: Look at the whole and not break down too much into parts and not lose perspective that we live in a very vast interconnected world.

C: Is there anything else you want to add before we let you go?

W: I think it’s important to university students to take the time to get out and do applied work. By design, academic research encourages people to specialize and get really, really deep in a specific topic and it can be hard to see the whole. Environmental Economics remind us of the externalities of the Farm Bill, for example. Are we doing full-cost accounting? looking at life cycle analysis? Paying for all the costs? You can play an important role by developing economic solutions to environmental problems.. The basic drivers for people are economic, as you know. There’s a percent of altruism that motivates people to act, but at the end of the developing economic solutions is key —and economic solutions that have a heart!

I really appreciate you sharing my story. Part of our collective effort to make the world a better place is sharing inspiration and sharing ideas with others. I’m glad to be a part of it, thank you.