New Mexico joined a host of other states this year by enacting the Healthy Soil Act to encourage and help fund education and agricultural practices that enhance the condition of this critical natural resource. 

Driving through the Cimarron Canyon near Eagles Nest, NM, rancher Kimberly Barmann stops at a small local post office to pin up a flyer for the Soil Health Academy’s upcoming “Regenerative Farming and Ranching” workshops, being held later this month. In fact, she stops at several spots along her way down to Albuquerque, posting the flyers where ranchers and farmers might see them.

“We need to get the word out!” she says, emphatically. Kimberly has been instrumental in organizing the Soil Health Academy workshops throughout the state.

Kimberly is passionate about soil and regenerative land management. There’s an urgency about the subject when she talks. “My daughter says I’m over the top about this,” she admits. “But as I see it, everybody needs to understand the importance of healthy soil – including people who don’t manage land. Ranchers’ and farmers’ livelihoods and our rural communities depend on it.”

“Rapid water infiltration on our lands is critical,” Kimberly says, by way of example, describing a recent demonstration on their rangeland where the water on bare soil took over five minutes to sink in, but on covered soil, it took 55 seconds. “Infiltration rates of three to five seconds or less, and no bare soil, is what I’m striving for throughout the CS landscape. The two, along with increased biodiversity, would be powerful indicators of truly healthy soil,” she added. Cover-crops planted in old hay fields on the CS are showing increased fertility and infiltration rates in just over two years.

Citing a report entitled “The Farmer’s Share” on the National Farmers Union website, data compiled by USDA, Kimberly is dismayed that farmers and ranchers, on average, take home only 14.8 cents of every consumer food dollar.

 The Soil Health Academy workshops will be presented by four rancher/farmer consultants who are part of Understanding Ag, a group dedicated to educating and guiding ranchers, farmers, landowners and communities in the principles and practices needed to restore, repair, rebuild, and regenerate what they term their “ranching ecosystem.” Workshop topics include: how to lower input costs through proper nutrient management; how to use cover crops to increase profitability; and the six principles of soil health and adaptive stewardship. 

From the November/December 2017 newsletter

A federal court recently ruled against motions filed several years ago by a group of ranchers seeking continued grazing rights on land in New Mexico that has been used by their families for centuries. The allotments at issue are both in the El Rito Ranger District of Carson National Forest. Attorneys for the ranchers argued that the U.S. Forest Service violated the law when deciding to limit grazing on historic land grants even though the government has recognized that the descendants of Spanish colonists have a unique relationship with the land. Earlier decisions on 2013 and 2015 dismissed most of the other counts in the complaint. The ranchers claimed the agency failed to consider social and economic effects that would result from limiting grazing in a region where poverty and dependence on the land for subsistence is high.

In the recent ruling, U.S. District James Browning DISMISSED COUNTS AGAINST TH GOVERNMENT, FINDING THAT THE NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ACT DOES NOT REQUIRE THE FOREST SERVICE TO CONSIDER SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF THES ACTIONS. The law narrowly centers on effects to the physical environment, the judge ruled. The ranchers are considering an appeal.