[Scpg] Orella Stewardship Institute/Earth Island Reports/Great Article /

Sun Jun 5 20:38:37 PDT 2011

Earth Island Reports
Orella Stewardship Institute
Digging Deep

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/orella_stewardship_institute/

On a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Guner Tautrim digs 
around in a barrel planted with native grasses and pulls out a weed. 
Instead of tossing it aside, he looks at the roots. "These are 
nitrogen-fixers," he says, prodding the tiny nubs glommed on to the 
roots. Behind him, piles of compost are lined up for testing. A 
keyline plow, recently used to spread compost tea and seeds as it 
loosened the soil in a nearby pasture, rests to one side. The goal of 
all the assorted materials and equipment: to create healthy soil. 
"When you have no life in the soil, you have no transfer of nutrients 
from the soil to the plants," Tautrim says.

Orella Stewardship Institute
The health of the soil - and the land itself - is central to Tautrim, 
who is the sixth generation of his family to work on Orella Ranch, a 
300-acre spread on the Gaviota Coast near Santa Barbara. It's also a 
central part of the vision of the Orella Stewardship Institute (OSI) 
http://www.orellaranch.com/OR/OR/Welcome.html, an Earth Island 
Institute-sponsored project started by Tautrim and his friends. For 
the past several years OSI has been running workshops in sustainable 
land use and other environmental best practices. Now, they're using 
the ranch to develop a working model of regenerative agriculture that 
they hope will show how ecological farming and ranching techniques 
can benefit the land while also providing a good living to those who 
work on it.
Ranching has long been a part of this area's history. Bruno Orella, 
Tautrim's great-great-great grandfather, bought the land that's now 
Orella Ranch in 1866. Over his lifetime, he acquired 5,000 acres in 
the area and used the rolling hills for cattle grazing. After 
Orella's death the land was divided among his 11 surviving children.
Orella's descendants brought in dryland farming - walnuts, garbanzo 
beans, tomatoes, lima beans - but cattle continued to be a central 
part of life on the land.

Guner Tautrim's father, Mark, studied animal science in college and 
graduate school and worked on a ranch in Clearlake, California before 
returning home to run a 150-head cow-calf operation. In 1984 the 
elder Tautrim moved his own family to the slice of land known as 
Orella Ranch.

Guner Tautrim spent much of his childhood at the ranch, but when he 
left for Humboldt State University, he wasn't sure he'd come back. An 
avid surfer, he spent two-and-a-half years after college sailing the 
Pacific on a 55-foot sailboat. He was hunting waves as well as 
looking for examples of sustainable tourism that could benefit 
traditional cultures, a subject in which he'd created his own major. 
"I had this vision of wanting to couple my love of surfing and 
islands, and nature and ecological preservation, into a living," he 
says.

Orella Stewardship Institute
Orella Stewardship Institute is using a 300-acre ranch near Santa Barbara
as a living laboratory for the next wave of land stewards.

But on his return in 2001, Tautrim realized that the ranch offered 
everything he was seeking. The Gaviota Coast was under similar 
pressures to those he'd seen on his travels: Developers were eyeing 
the area for homesites; farmers and ranchers worried about how a 
proposed national seashore designation could affect their land and 
livelihoods. The threatened rural culture, the endangered landscape, 
even the islands - on a clear day, the Channel Islands seem almost 
close enough to touch - were all within reach of his family's land. 
Tautrim says he realized "how beautiful it is here, how lucky I am to 
have the land, and how my skills and my passion were needed right 
here at home."

Tautrim began talking with a group of friends about how best to 
realize their shared interest in sustainability, both for themselves 
and for the wider community. They dubbed the nascent venture "Project 
Imagine," and took years educating themselves in sustainable farming 
techniques, low-impact building practices, and other environmental 
concepts. "We didn't really know what we were doing or where we were 
going. We were just a group of like-minded friends who wanted to do 
something bigger and better,"
Tautrim says. As a way of gaining the knowledge they needed for their 
eco-aspirations, they started to host workshops at the ranch for area 
residents. The Orella Stewardship Institute is dedicated to taking 
what the group learned through those workshops and putting it into 
practice, as well as expanding their research on regenerative 
agriculture.

One of the group's proposed investigations is to test out their 
repertoire of sustainable land-use practices to see what makes their 
pastureland thrive. They've applied for a federal grant to create a 
series of test paddocks where they'll experiment with everything from 
augmenting soil health with compost tea to creating contour strips 
with plant species that provide fodder, fix nitrogen in the soil, and 
attract beneficial insects. The results will be compared to 
already-conducted baseline studies on flora and fauna, carbon 
content, and the soil health of land that has been untouched for five 
years.
Cattle will be an important part of the process, too. Tautrim scaled 
back on cattle operations as the group started investigating land 
stewardship practices. "The whole thing drilled into enviros' heads 
is how cattle and livestock are ruining the landscape," he says. "I 
was probably one of those people who had that leeriness towards 
livestock." But OSI now has six Belted Galloway cattle, a heritage 
breed known for its well-rounded foraging diet, and is working on 
growing the herd. The institute plans to rotate them through pastures 
in order to let the soil regenerate. "When you give long recovery 
periods to land, it bounces back, and the biology beneath the soil 
surface totally responds to it," Tautrim says.

Tautrim dreams that in a few years people will look at the ranch and 
see healthy wells and streams and the benefits of cattle that don't 
need hay or corn - and a financially healthy environment as well. 
"Obviously there's going to be plenty of failures with the 
successes," he says. "But the hope is that the successes will be 
obvious to the point that it will spread - whether it be the neighbor 
next door, or ten ranches over, or a couple counties over."
"We have the opportunity to be a living laboratory for the next wave 
of land stewards," says David Fortson, one of OSI's founders.
Fortson, Tautrim, and their families, along with most of OSI's 
steering committee, live on-site. This has helped them create an 
intimate relationship with the land as they grow some of their own 
food. But it also forces them to pioneer ways of balancing their OSI 
responsibilities with their professional lives. The group includes a 
doctor, a soon-to-be-lawyer, a teacher, and a former nonprofit 
development director. "We're not all farmers, we're not all cattle 
ranchers," Fortson says, "and in a lot of ways, it requires that mix 
of people to make something happen."

Orella Stewardship Institute
Part of what holds the community together and drives its work is a 
shared passion for addressing the environmental concerns they see 
looming on the horizon, from global warming to peak oil. Regenerative 
agriculture shifts the land away from fossil fuel-heavy pesticides, 
herbicides, and fertilizers, Tautrim says, and it can also capture 
and store carbon in what's grown on the land and in the soil itself.

Tautrim wants to spread the institute's reach to those who might not 
consider themselves a part of the permaculture or other "green" 
movements. He's encouraged by the growth of interest, by people from 
all walks of life, in local foods. "These are everyday people who are 
realizing, 'Hey, I want good food for my family and I want to support 
local farmers, because if I support local farmers, I know where my 
food's coming from.'"

There's already one very important person who has developed an 
unexpected interest in OSI's work - Guner's father, Mark Tautrim. A 
traditional cattleman, he was initially skeptical of his son's plans. 
But along with leasing land to the institute, he's since attended 
several OSI workshops and is featured in a forthcoming video talking 
about using the natural contours of this land, land that's been in 
his family for generations, to gather water. "He's open-minded enough 
to come and listen," the younger Tautrim says of his father, "and as 
we got more and more into the agriculture stuff, he began to see how 
all this fits together."

Learn more at orellaranch.com.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20110605/90788c21/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: P68019991.png
Type: image/png
Size: 140622 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20110605/90788c21/attachment.png>