How one Oregon rancher puts sustainable practices to work

Jeanne Carver and her family have spent decades incorporating sustainable practices into their ranch. Her brand, Shaniko Wool Company, is certified under the Responsible Wool Standard. The certification includes third-party audits of the ranch and covers animal welfare and sustainable land management. More recently, Carver has studied how much carbon her ranch has stored in its soil. We check in with her to learn more about sustainable ranching.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with Jeanne Carver. She lives on the 152-year old Imperial Stock Ranch in Central Oregon. For decades now, she and her family have worked to incorporate sustainable practices on the ranch. Now, they are getting into carbon sequestration. They recently entered into a 10 year contract to sell carbon offsets. Jeanne Carver joins us to talk about all this. Welcome to the show.

Jeanne Carver: Oh, thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Miller: My understanding is that you and your family started a conservation management plan in 1989 for your land. Before that, what was the health of the soil like?

Carver: Well, that’s a broad question. I mean, this land hasn’t changed a whole lot for hundreds of years and it was first settled by the folks coming west on the Oregon trail back in 1871. In fact, the young man that settled here and filed a homestead claim was one of the first two to do so in this part of Oregon. So they were coming to a land that was essentially untouched and this is not land like the Willamette Valley. This is semi-arid. We always said we got eight to 10 inches of rain a year, but we haven’t seen that in the last four or five years. So this is primarily grazing land, natural ecosystems.

During the homestead area, they did clear their more level ground and establish crop fields. So this is dryland farming country where you get what nature provides in terms of moisture and you recognize how precious that moisture is. And so this has been some dryland farming but primarily grazing land for all of its history. It hasn’t had a lot of inputs and impacts the way you might think of as the Willamette Valley, which is typically all farm ground. The land itself is more unchanged, has less impact by humankind [than] land that’s been farmed more intensely.

We came here in the late 1980s and my husband’s philosophy had always been to see the land win. He was raised up in Western Oregon in a logging family and he grew up logging and he it hurt him every time he took down a big tree, he always said. So his goal was to have control of a piece of land. This ground is about 50 square miles of land we control and he wanted to see it win. So very early in his time here, he reached out to our local agency partners like the Soil and Water Conservation District and Natural Resource Conservation Service, and our Extension agents from Oregon State, to work collectively to look at this whole piece of land, look at its problem areas and identify a road map, if you will, of how we could ranch with the health of natural resources as our primary focus. And that total plan was put together in 1989 and it became the guide of what we would do from then on.

And of course, we continue to observe and we have agency testimony and monitoring and yield data and species counts. And those things combined help guide our management decisions and the practices that we implement…

Miller: I want to zoom forward 10 years after that conservation management plan started. My understanding is you got a really fateful phone call. What happened?

Carver: Well, we made a fateful phone call. You see, in agriculture, mostly we take our harvest and sell them as a commodity. Everybody knows that. And in 1999, we’ve been selling our wool to the same company for 100 years. So we were 10 years down the road of that conservation management plan.

And we were seeing amazing changes on the land. It was very motivating to begin to see indicator species grow in numbers, as well as other indicators. But that spring, we called our buyer for wool after shearing and said, “What will the price be this year for the wool?” And the answer was, “Folks, we’re not buying, we’re closing our processing and going off shore like everybody else.”

So where we have been managing very creatively on the land, we now had to take that attitude and apply it to the markets and essentially find a new way to sell the wool harvest and eventually, that led to the lamb and other things as well.

Miller: When did you start thinking about soil carbon and sequestration in particular?

Carver: Well, this is a logical process and I think that’s the thing that people should hear. What we did in the beginning in the late 1980s, was to preserve the health of natural resources, which would ensure our harvest and ensure our future here and collectively the future of all of us. The next thing that happened was a loss of markets. So we had to find a new way to sell the harvest. We went down that road.

And some of your listeners may know, but 13 years later, during the 2012 Olympics, I got another fateful call which actually took our wool harvest to the Olympic stage as the face and voice of Ralph Lauren made-in-America Olympic uniforms for Team USA. But you see that recognition brought more and more brands to our door. And, 2015, one of those was Patagonia, and they wanted us to be third party-audited for our land stewardship and our animal husbandry practices. This is an evolving issue that is gaining a lot of momentum. So we said, “Yes,” to that and then became the first ranch in the world certified to what has become the leading global standard for responsible sheep and wool production. It’s called the Responsible Wool Standard.

So you see, now we have our observations, our yield data, our species counts, agency testimony and third party certification to the leading benchmarks in the world for soil water and grassland health, along with best practice in animal husbandry. But I was challenged in the winter of 2019 as to whether or not, in ranching and raising livestock, we were destroying the soil and just putting methane in the atmosphere. And so that was a wake up call also, that what was needed today, was to measure the ecosystem and climate impacts of our ranching operations. And so that winter, I reached out to Oregon State University and Dr. John Talbot answered my question, “Can we quantify the ecosystem and climate impacts of our ranching operation on an ongoing annual basis?” And he said, “Yes.”

So he has built a research model which we began implementing in the spring of 2020. And soil organic carbon capture is a key performance indicator of the health of our operation. And that’s when I really became focused on it. We were truly working on this all the way through because if you ask a soil scientist or a range conservationist how important soil carbon is, they’ll tell you it’s always been about that. But our focus has not been there.

Today, collectively, we have a new recognition of the importance of ecosystem health and the impacts of the climate. And so we have now emerging markets. And I first just wanted to know the answer: “On a net basis each year, as ranchers, do we bring a net negative or positive impact to the environment?” That’s the question I wanted to know. What do we do? Because we had never before actually measured it. And so that’s what they’ve been able to do. We now have three and a half years of very solid data on our net impacts. And the truth is, we deliver beef, lamb, wool, grains and hay to market every year and have for 152 years. But until now, we never knew that perhaps our greatest deliverable is that we are on a net basis, adding carbon by pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere into our soils and grazing lands and this information we have today that we never had before…

Miller: Are you saying that you’re pulling more carbon into the soils than…and all told, I mean, as a kind of a net, when you subtract the methane emissions, more than if you weren’t ranching, if you are simply letting the land fully be with no grazing whatsoever?

Carver: True. That’s true. And I’m not a scientist, but I’m learning a lot from the team of scientists that I work with. But yes, it’s true that if you have well-managed grazing or stimulation of plant communities, you will return a better environmental benefit than if there is no intentional grazing.

In other words, idle landscapes don’t function as well as landscapes that have had an impetus to grow. So if you think about our lawns, we mow our lawns, we apply fertilizer. The grazing animals are here for the same purpose. They’re here from the creator. They bite these plant communities and move across the landscape and naturally put organic matter in contact with the soil through walking on it. They prepare the soil to receive moisture with their hooves. They spread urine and manure naturally, which is returning nutrients and carbon back to the soil.

When we account for our electrical use, our equipment use and fossil fuel consumption, we account in our research project for our methane emissions from livestock. But when you look at the whole impact of grazing animals, well-managed ranching operations, we are actually able to now know that we return a net positive value to nature. This is a thing, and this is a growing market area. Ecosystem Services is a really emerging market in this country…

Miller: We just have about a minute left. I’m just curious about the question of scale, because my understanding is that to do what you’re you’re doing, you need to very actively manage your land and to be very careful about short grazing in a particular place and then moving the animals on and doing that throughout all of your land. How much can that scale up across the American West?

Carver: It can scale up in a big way. In 2018, I launched Shaniko Wool Company to scale the supply of wool produced in the Western US that meets these leading global standards. So we would have what our partners, fashion brands, want in terms of a better carbon footprint. And so right now, Shaniko Wool [has] 10 ranches in my group. We graze, collectively, 2.6 million acres and we are measuring that entire 2.6 million acres with amazing preliminary data.

So the truth is yes, you can ranch in a way that returns a net positive value to nature. And my hope today is that I can bring every rancher in my group a new income stream for that positive value we provide to nature, besides delivering food, fiber and shelter to the human community.

Miller: Jeanne Carver, thanks very much.

Carver: Thank you.

Miller: Jeanne Carver is the founder and owner of the Shaniko Wool Company.

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