In November, Assemblymember Gregg Hart attended a site tour in Santa Barbara County, where he met with farmers, nonprofit organizations, and environmental advocates to discuss policy victories and future plans. The tour, organized by CalCAN, demonstrated the successful implementation of California’s Healthy Soils Program (HSP) and the continued importance of practices aimed at enhancing soil health, carbon sequestration and fire fuel management. The group was also able to observe and discuss the impacts of SB675, which improves California’s fire mitigation plans by codifying the prescribed grazing as a statewide strategy and developing practical recommendations for using the popular practice.

The tour took place at the picturesque Orella Ranch, a 300-acre property on the Gaviota Coast that has long been a beacon of sustainability and regenerative agricultural practices in the region. In attendance were representatives from several influential organizations, including the Community Environmental Council (CEC), White Buffalo Land Trust (WBLT), Gaviota Coastal Conservancy (GCC) and Cuyama Lamb (CL) and Gaviota Givings (GG), all of which are instrumental in advancing sustainable practices in the region. The group discussed various practices that have been implemented on the ranch, including prescribed grazing, tree plantings, pollinator hedgerows, and range plantings.

“It’s important to actually get out here and see it!” Hart remarked during the tour, emphasizing the importance of seeing the practices in action and the role of constituents to inform policymakers.

Healthy Soils at Orella Ranch

Orella Ranch has been in the Tautrim family for seven generations. The ranch, which has seen many iterations of agricultural practices over the years, became a hub of innovation in sustainable land management practices under the stewardship of Guner and Heidi Tautrim. Previously, the land had been used for set-stock cattle grazing and horse boarding, and had seen a decline in productivity as invasive species and low-value pasture plants took over.

Guner and Heidi created Gaviota Givings in 2016 and took a bold step toward transforming Orella Ranch into a model of regenerative agriculture. They developed a strategic vision for the ranch, focusing on sustainability, carbon sequestration, and meat production. With the help of many allies, they have been able to participate in several state and federal programs to improve their infrastructure, and pasture resources. In 2021, they secured funding through the Healthy Soils Program.

The Healthy Soils Program (HSP), is designed to incentivize and support farmers and ranchers in implementing soil health practices that enhance carbon sequestration. The program provides funding for practices like cover cropping, mulching, and tree planting. At Orella Ranch, these funds were used to implement three practices; planting pollinator hedgerows, tree plantings, and range plantings including native and nonnative plants. These practices contribute to the ranch’s ability to sequester carbon, growing perennial plants, increasing diversity and volume of productivity on the rangeland while improving soil health.

“Every improvement of the soil in our rangeland equals green sooner and longer, because the carbon in the soil acts like a sponge,” Guner said. “Every day that cattlemen don’t feed hay is counted in water and transportation emissions of alfalfa grown somewhere else.”

Guner and Heidi were excited to share the success of their plantings and range improvements. They also shared ways in which the program could be improved for farmers and ranchers. There was a gap in the funding and the actual costs of many practices, which Gaviota Givings had to source through other grants. Finding ways for local, high-quality compost producers to be eligible for HSP would reduce the transportation costs and emissions of sourcing compost. Guner and Jessie Smith from WBLT hope that future versions of the programs might include other auxiliary funding sources that support farmers and ranchers to take a bigger bite out of the carbon emissions in the state

Cuyama Lamb and the Role of Prescribed Grazing

Cuyama Lamb is a sheep operation based in Santa Barbara County raising lamb meat and wool products and performing ecological services around the region. Founded in 2018 by Jack Anderson and Jenya Schneider, the operation is focused on improving California grassland; in diversity, native plant population, soil improvement and agricultural productivity.

Since 2019, Cuyama Lamb has partnered with Orella Ranch to use sheep and cattle to manage pasturelands, control invasive plant species, and promote healthy soil. In 2021, the Alisal Fire blazed up to Orella Ranch on its East property line where they abut the Las Flores Canyon, now owned by the oil and gas company Sable Energy. The neighboring unmanaged fuel load brought fire close to structures at Orella Ranch and was narrowly fought off. Where the sheep grazing had occurred, the ranch land did not burn or burned very slowly. The burned area allowed for new fuel grazing to take place as Orella and Cuyama Lamb developed a fuel mitigation strategy for important infrastructure. That fire break and grazing management was on display at the tour.

Cuyama Lamb has been an important player in Santa Barbara County’s adoption of prescribed grazing as a regional strategy. Since 2018, Cuyama Lamb has been working with county and city fire departments, as well as restoration ecologists and private landowners to manage fire fuel and ecological goals. The Santa Barbara Fire Safe Council wrote a CalFire grant funded in 2022 to implement 3000 acres of grazing across the south county and Cuyama Lamb has been serving a large portion of that fire mitigation work.

With the recent passing of SB 675, Sigrid Wright of the Community Environmental Council expects there to be more opportunities for using prescribed grazing and the numerous benefits that come along with it. “Fire management is a gateway to ecological management,” she says. By using timed grazing to reduce large loads of fire fuels and thatch and creating cycles of disturbance, Cuyama Lamb hopes to also improve habitat for ground nesting birds and native plants. Quick-growing invasives often crowd out native plants and create hot burning and fast-spreading fires, while carefully grazed grasslands can reduce competition for native plants and open space for struggling animal species that depend on the relatively open native grasslands of California.

SB 675 will create more opportunities for fire fuel mitigation by helping codify practical and helpful standards for prescribed grazing for fire fuel as well as encouraging entities to develop a broader strategy for using the tool and allowing allocation of existing funds to the practice. Considering wildfire is California’s 2nd largest source of emissions, the California Air Resources Board has been prioritizing funding fire fuel management projects that prevent all of those flashy fuels from becoming atmospheric pollution. “It makes a compelling case when you lay it out,” said Hart.