Inside a Movement to Restore the Soil— and the Future of Farming
In southwest Montana’s Madison Valley, the green is holding on thanks to a wet, cool June. A thunderstorm is creeping in from the edges of a seemingly endless horizon. The warmer months are like that here—expansive, lush, all fertility and possibility.
As I drive into Sacred Pine Ranch in McAllister, Montana, I see 60-some ranchers sitting on hay bales stacked on a flatbed trailer, like kids on a farm field trip, being towed back to the home base. It’s day one of the Adaptive Grazing Workshop, a two-day hands-on school where producers come together to learn from some of the world’s most respected regenerative farmers about how to implement regenerative agriculture practices on their ranches and farms around the country. Scott and Christina Farquhar purchased Sacred Pine Ranch in 2020. When they arrived, the property’s 1,400 acres had been overgrazed for decades and was in desperate need of a rest. So, that’s the first thing they did: nothing.
A NEW GENERATION OF RANCHERS
Scott and Christina are not multigenerational ranchers. They spent much of their adult lives and careers raising a family of five in Orange County, California. Scott was a successful business owner and Christina a licensed psychotherapist. But for a long time, Scott had been itching to get back to a life that was a little closer to his youth. Raised in Topanga Canyon, California, Scott grew up on a kind of homestead, with horses, goats, chickens, and a big garden. When their youngest child left for college and the COVID pandemic hit, like many from the city, they got in their RV and drove, looking at communities and ranches for sale along the way. Then they found Sacred Pine Ranch.
When the couple first arrived, they stepped onto ground where sagebrush and juniper had grown so thick in places, due to overgrazing, that Scott could barely get a horse through. Each juniper can drink up to 100 gallons of water a day, which doesn’t leave much for the grass around it. But Scott knew the land hadn’t always looked this way, and that with the right steward, it could thrive again—not only producing solid profits, but becoming a more sustainable, symbiotic part of the Madison Valley once again.
THE CRAZY FARMER
All of us, including Scott, are at Sacred Pine today because of a crazy farmer: Gabe Brown. Parts of his story are documented in the films Kiss the Ground and Common Ground. But his origin story did not come from vision; it came from getting wrecked.
In 1991, Gabe and his wife, Shelly, purchased a ranch east of Bismarck, North Dakota, from Shelly’s parents. Just a few years later, they lost 100 percent of their crop to hail. The next year, they lost it all again. Then drought. Then another 80 percent lost to hail. Gabe endured four years of losses, no income with a young family, and a bank that no longer wanted to lend him the necessary operating cash.
“I started just reading, studying,” Gabe says. He wondered, “How am I going to make my farm profitable without all the expensive inputs, because the bank didn’t want to loan me money?”
Gabe started planting cover crops. The earthworms showed up first. Then the birds. Instead of shedding water, the ground started soaking it up. He became, in his words, “a student of the soil,” back when that meant driving to the library.
“We became known as the crazy farmers,” he says. “My neighbors thought I was crazy, and many still do.” But they were making a profit and their land was weathering the demands and trials of nature with improved resiliency. People wanted to know how he was doing it.
When Gabe’s son turned 30, Gabe and his wife passed the ranch down to him. Moving to his next chapter, Gabe co-founded Understanding Ag in 2017 as a regenerative agriculture education and consulting company to help producers learn and incorporate the soil practices that saved his farm and led to actual profits.
In 2020, while on his RV trip, Scott, not yet a rancher himself, attended one of Understanding Ag’s workshops and met Gabe. They became friends and later colleagues when Scott took the helm as CEO of Understanding Ag. Sacred Pine’s Adaptive Grazing Workshop is led by Understanding Ag and is one of many educational opportunities the company provides to ranchers and farmers everywhere.
It’s a full-circle moment as I snap a few frames of Scott and Gabe together, the vast fields at Sacred Pine spanning out behind them. The attendees—some just curious, others already implementing regenerative practices on their own land—are gathered in the arena behind us, a murmur of voices and laughter floating into the cool night air. They’re eating Sacred Pine lamb for dinner. Scott is now an active participant in the regenerative agriculture movement, helping carry Gabe’s legacy forward, offering a space for other producers to learn what he has.
‘IT’S NOT THE COW, IT’S THE HOW’
The workshop has ended for the day, but I get a glimpse of what the producers experienced out in the field when Scott gives me a tour of the land. To give the soil what it needs to thrive again, all of the cows on Scott’s ranch are in dense herds, constantly on the move, sometimes every 12 hours. Then, that grazed land is rested, often up to two years for the drier areas of the ranch. Until this season, that was fairly laborious work—hundreds of miles of temporary poly wire, set up and moved daily, to ensure the ground was not overgrazed. Now Scott manages it all from his phone, setting a grazing perimeter with GPS collars to keep the cows inside an invisible fence.
They’re mimicking what bison did before they were decimated from the plains: massive herds moving fast across the land, pressing seeds into the soil, fertilizing heavily, then gone for long periods. With cattle constantly on the move, Scott doesn’t have to deworm or treat for flies. The fly larvae cycle takes three or four days, and by the time anything hatches, the herd is many acres away. The dung beetle population has taken off, and flocks of birds follow the cattle, picking their manure apart. This is increased biodiversity. This is nature allowed to do its thing.
“We need animals on the landscape,” Scott says. “But if I turned out too many cows and left them to graze for five months, I’m going to end up with a dirt patch, and wildlife do not like that.” He has an expression for it: “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.”
Walking the pastures with Scott, it’s hard not to ask the obvious question: If this works this well, why isn’t everyone doing it?
“Farmers and ranchers cannot implement what they do not know,” Gabe says. “The [local university] extension service doesn’t tell them. The fertilizer and chemical dealers don’t tell them. Very few colleges teach these principles.” Then there’s peer pressure. Then there’s the bank, nervous about lending against something it doesn’t understand. (More recently, though, some lenders now offer better rates for regenerative operations.)
Gabe is realistic in knowing that none of this works if it doesn’t pay.
“Without profit, we just have an expensive hobby,” he says. “It’s our livelihood. And it’s important that we’re not just taking from the land; we’re actually helping the land heal and be more productive year after year.”
WHAT’S STILL POSSIBLE
Gabe has walked land on nearly every continent, and Scott tells me that Gabe says he’s never once stood on a landscape that wasn’t degraded. It’s likely that as a culture, we have mistakenly adopted a degraded baseline as the standard, which means it’s difficult to picture what’s possible. What if the ceiling is much higher than any of us are picturing?
I ask Gabe what any of this can mean for the general public, since most aren’t going to take up ranching anytime soon.
“Consumers vote every day with their buying dollar,” he says. “Get to know your farmer, get to know how it’s grown and raised. When you buy food from those regenerative farms and ranches, you’re going to improve your own health, and you’re going to support them. And when you do that, it’ll regenerate more landscapes.”
The principles behind regenerative agriculture work anywhere with dirt and something to grow. A woman in Detroit, tired of watching neighborhood kids go hungry, called Gabe. She shared an idea to grow food on abandoned lots but told him she didn’t have animals. He told her she had millions of them right beneath her feet.
As my tour with Scott concludes, it looks like it could rain at any moment. A few producers are still standing in the parking lot, chatting about the challenges on their ranches, planning follow-up questions for day two. They look optimistic— hopeful that changing how they steward their land can not only lead to improved profits, but also a healthier landscape to pass on to the next generation.
