EDUCATION, INNOVATION, RESTORATION
ONE ACRE AT A TIME
The Quivira Coalition consists of a small staff, a dedicated board, dozens of volunteers, numerous family ranchers and farmers, conservationists, scientists and public land managers, hundreds of members, and thousands of others touched by our work. What we all have in common is a dedication to building economic and ecological resilience on western working landscapes.
http://www.quiviracoalition.org
WHAT WE DO
The Quivira Coalition builds soil, biodiversity, and resilience on western working landscapes. We foster ecological, economic, and social health through education, innovation, and collaboration.
- Our Land and Water program helps ranchers develop plans and management strategies for restoring and building resilience on slope wetlands, grasslands, and other working landscapes.
- Our New Agrarian program helps to ensure that living and working knowledge of these practices, and the landscape itself, is stewarded into the future.
- Our Education program, including our annual conference and open source publications, creates a space for our coalition to share ideas and resources, and for the general public to learn about the critical role working lands play in the health of our food systems, communities, and our planet.
- Our Carbon Ranch Initiative is working to build the capacity of producers, land managers, and technical service providers to implement land management practices focused on mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.
At the foundation of all our work is the concept that well managed working rangelands and forests are two of the most effective, efficient, and immediately viable paths to remedy the devastating impacts of climate change.
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COMMUNITY
In two decades of collaborative conservation, Quivira has grown a web of knowledge and a network of human relationships focused on soil, water, and neighbors. Our original tagline—working to achieve harmony between humans and nature—has changed and our methods have evolved, but the essence of our work has not. We continue to cultivate hope, innovation, education, and collaboration as the nexus from which soil is restored and relationships are grown.
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RANCHING AND FARMING AT THE RADICAL CENTER
The Radical Center remains at the roots of a growing movement to restore and perpetuate innovative agrarian stewardship on public and private lands in order to ensure healthy ecosystems and abundant food around the world.
We believe that how we inhabit and use the West today will determine the West we pass on to our children tomorrow; that preserving the biological diversity of working landscapes requires active stewardship; and that under current conditions the stewards of those lands are compensated for only a fraction of the values their stewardship provides. We know that poor management has damaged land in the past and in some areas continues to do so, but we also believe appropriate ranching practices can restore land to health. We believe that some lands should not be grazed by livestock; but also that much of the West can be grazed in an ecologically sound manner. We know that management practices have changed in recent years, ecological sciences have generated new and valuable tools for assessing and improving land, and new models of sustainable use of land have proved their worth.
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LAND AND WATER
The Land and Water Program is designed to embody Quivira’s core principles…education, innovation, restoration…one acre at a time. We offer a suite of wetland and rangeland monitoring and restoration services for western working lands. We leverage knowledge and experience garnered from our fifteen-year partnerships in the Comanche Creek watershed and with working ranches in New Mexico, West Texas, and Colorado as the basis for providing climate-smart conservation services to land managers. For each acre restored with the innovative ideas of our partners, we aim to educate volunteer participants in the ways of healing the ground through seasonal community volunteer weekends and workshops.
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NEW AGRARIAN
The New Agrarian Program partners with skilled ranchers and farmers to offer annual apprenticeships in regenerative agriculture. Together, we create opportunities for comprehensive, full-immersion experiential learning from expert practitioners in professional settings. This program is designed to support the next generation of food producers and specifically targets first-career professionals with a sincere commitment to life at the intersection of conservation and regenerative agriculture. NAP mentors are dedicated stewards of the land; they practice intentional, regenerative methods of food or fiber production, provide excellent animal care, and are skilled and enthusiastic teachers.
