How The Daughter of Conventional Ranchers Became A Regenerative Leader

My dad was running it as the family always had, but my siblings and I started getting more into it.

I was getting interested in the food movement, and I kept asking myself, “Where does our food come from? How is it made?” I didn’t feel great, and the food I ate was a big part of that. I started focusing on the ranch as an opportunity to change my and my family’s diet.

Soon after, we started selling wholes and halves from the ranch to family and friends. We were still grazing conventionally, but the quality of the meat meant something to people.

Pretty quickly, my dad started receiving requests from left field. People would call in and ask for a steer direct from the property, which wasn’t our normal way of doing things.

He would say, “I guess… you just want one?”

We started to see that this could be a business of its own, so my brother Tom, his wife, and I created Richards Grass-Fed Beef.

We would only sell wholes and halves for a few years. We saw that there was a real market, but we wanted more legitimacy.

To get that, we joined American Grassfed Association (AGA), which we love. They’re a great partner; a cornerstone of our transition.

We got our stamp of Grass-Fed approval, and that certification proved very useful.

As part of that certification, we had to start tracking animals for things like antibiotics and animal welfare. It was one of the first steps towards reshaping our ranch from an old-school conventional grazing operation into what would become Richards Regenerative.

Things kept growing beyond me and my siblings, and within a few years, we had to hire a sales guy. Quickly, we started selling out of animals, so we had to bring in more cattle to keep up with demand.

That’s when I said one of the siblings should move onto the property full-time.

I was living in Oakland as a freelance photographer at the time, but my husband, Dan, and I decided to make the jump for at least a year to assess what could help the ranch.

And that was a good idea. We didn’t realize how much was going wrong and how much needed to improve.

What stuck out?

First, when I came up here in the summer, we were just setting the cows out in the front. They were just covered in flies, and we were constantly treating them.

I didn’t know about Holistic Management or anything regenerative at the time, but my spidey senses told me we could be doing this better.

Second, we had to get organized and improve how we were tracking our animals for AGA.

And on top of it all, there were generations of random stuff that accumulated. We would walk out into a pasture and ask, “What is this random pipe for?” We had to clear everything out to start fresh.

How did the first year affect your perspective?

At the end of the year, Dan and I sat down to discuss what we wanted to do. We realized a couple of things.

First, we loved living on the ranch.

Second, we had a lot more work to do.

I enjoyed it, but there was still something missing. I knew we could do more, I just didn’t know what “more” was. I was reading a ton about different management practices and yearning to figure out that new approach.

We decided that we couldn’t leave – that this new journey was still unfolding.

So we decided to sell our house in Oakland, and that was a serendipitous moment. At the same time, I got what looked like a random email from AGA.

They said, “Hey, check out this Holistic Management training!”

And check it out I did. They put on this comprehensive training for three weekends to dive deep into holistic management.

That experience was transformative. I met many people that I lean on today – the Alexandres of Alexandre Family Farm, Will Harris from White Oak Pastures, and many others.

When I learned what holistic management was all about, I said, “This is it! This is what we’ve been looking for!.”

The people I met became great mentors as we decided to flip to a full regenerative approach over the next year or two.

By the grazing season of 2018, I was super gung-ho about holistic management… maybe too gung-ho to start.

We started jamming cows that had never seen electric fences into much smaller paddocks to manage their grazing, and that went about as well as you’d expect, looking back.

They blew out the fence immediately, and we were always rounding up the ones that escaped. Pretty quickly, we realized, “Yeah, we should probably train these cows on electric fences before pushing the throttle all the way forward.”

But that’s also what you have to learn. It was comical, but we learned to tone back the excitement a little bit.

Since then, we’ve figured out our speed.

What was the regenerative transition like between you and your dad?

It was an experience. He was used to his conventional way of raising livestock, and I was bringing in a lot of different practices.

At the beginning, our perspectives were on different ends of the spectrum.

That’s changed a lot, now. He’s been able to see what the changes do to the ranch, so he’s totally on board.

Before we started, the pastures would turn into dirt in the summer. They were completely overgrazed, and the grass just died every year.

Now, those same spots are flipped. They needed time to rest, so we gave them time and rest.

The years of conventional grazing left the fields with layers of dung and urine, and when we stopped the constant barrage of grazing, all of those nutrients were able to sink into the soil.

The worst spots before we started are some of our best spots today.

How did the business scale when you started the regenerative approach?

In 2017/2018 we were selling three or four loads of animals off of our property and six or eight loads off of our cousin’s. Each load was something like 20 or 30 animals.

We were mostly selling down the Bay Area to grocery stores and restaurants, which was going smoothly.

In those early years, I was still supplementing my income with freelance photography gigs.

But in 2019, our second year of holistic management, we made a big jump.

We had all of these sales opportunities, but our ranch couldn’t meet the demand on its own.

There weren’t enough people around us doing holistic management, so we worked with the Savory Institute to help educate ranchers about the opportunity. Over time, we created a network with other Savory Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) properties to boost the number of animals we could supply to the market.

That’s when it kicked up. I went full-time into the beef operation.

How does the ranch’s income break down?

Cattle is definitely the biggest part.

We sell some animals locally, and we have some groups that come to us for a few animals every year, but the majority of our animals go into our grass-fed beef program.

We occasionally sell yearlings that we don’t want to keep in our program to buy more mature animals that we can finish on our property.

We also started a pastured pork program, and that is really exciting.

Right now, we have over two dozen pigs running around, and they’re serving a purpose for us. We’re running them out in the bushes on our property, and they’re helping us convert unusable parts of our property into new grazing opportunities for our cattle.

We have a lot of bushes, and we were constantly worried that anything we cleared and attempted to burn would wreak havoc. They’re able to get in there, dig around, find food, and improve our operation in the long run.

They’ve done an awesome job so far, and now we’re able to burn what we need to burn without fear of torching everything around us.

We follow up our pig herds and burning with native seeding to restore our ecology. It’s an approach that we can use to grow food and heal pastures without burning a bunch of diesel.

All of our animals are at a specific number right now because we can manage it. We can start smaller and build to the next level when our customers grow.

We can always get bigger, but it’s all about the math of what we sell.

We talk all the time with our sole distributor, Cream Co Meats, to guide our decisions. They’re an amazing butchery, and we’re super happy to work with them.

How has the property changed since going regenerative?

When we started the regenerative journey, we had a few groups reach out to come to do some baseline testing.

Now that we’re five or six years in, all of the numbers we want to go up have gone up.

We test for soil organic matter, bird counts, and a whole plethora of other signals for improving the health of our ecosystem.

We did a control test on a part of the property that hasn’t transitioned to regenerative yet, and the difference was astounding.

The amount of vegetation on our managed fields is more than 4x what it is on the old conventional pastures, so that’s been crazy to see in such a short amount of time.

What’s life look like on the farm today?

I spend Monday and Tuesday on the phone and with my kids in the city. They have school, so my husband goes back and forth on those two days.

Zeb, our employee/apprentice, stays out here full-time, and then Dan and I come here Wednesday through Friday to handle our projects for the week.

Once the front fields are ready, we start moving the cows around up here. We plan out their movements and rotate them.

Once we’re finished with those cows, we load them off and we focus on our pig program until we start again with the cows.

What message do you want to share with new regenerative farmers and consumers?

Telling the world about regenerative ranching is one of the most critical parts of the process. For us, the best way we do that is with our farm dinner.

We invite people to buy tickets and come stay on the farm with a chef. We prepare a bunch of great food – great food from our property – and we tell the story.

We’re able to walk around and show people exactly how it works. We can show how the cows walk around in their small pastures, they eat just enough of the grass, get rid of their waste on the pasture to fertilize the roots, and we move them around before we create golf-course-short grass.

People start to understand that it’s creating something wonderful underground. The grass stays alive, the roots stay alive, and the soil gets a boost.

What’s the next step for the business and the vision for the ranch?

The next step for us is deciding what size we want to be.

Most of America has a mindset of “Bigger, faster, stronger all the time.”

But unfortunately, the cattle markets can be crazy. We have to pay producers what we have to pay producers, so our margins are constantly fluctuating. Right now, they’re getting squeezed.

Bigger, faster, stronger is the direction we have to go, over time. But we don’t want to sacrifice our quality.

We need to balance how many animals we bring in across our properties, we don’t want to overgraze, and we need to figure out how we grow as a network of regenerative ranchers to build supply.

We’re talking to partners and investors to figure out what the next level would look like.

Our vision is pretty straightforward. We want three things.

First, we want to keep the ranch in our family. We want to take care of it and want to keep it in one piece.

Second, we want to create a business that we can pass on to our kids if they want to be a part of it. We don’t want to create a burden.

Third, we want to do it all and still be home in time for the baseball game.

It’s a simple life, but that’s the important stuff to us.

Want to support Carrie and Richards Regenerative?

If you’re interested in getting your hands on some Richards Regenerative beef, you can support them through their distributor and butcher, Cream Co. Meats.

Even better, Carrie and the Richards crew put on an Open Sky Ranch Dinner where you can see the magnificent ranch, eat farm-to-table meals from Chef Lee Desrosiers, and spend the night in a luxury tent in your own private part of the property.

The tickets for May 20th’s Open Sky dinner are selling out quickly, so get your hands on the final few here.

Check out Richards Regenerative’s website here

Follow the Richards on Instagram

See you next week, fellow earthlings.

— Permacultured