The Ranch to Regen Pipeline
The popular show Yellowstone provides a glimpse into the tensions that exist around land in the American West. It highlights the many, often conflicting wants and needs of the environment, government, indigenous tribes, property developers and ranch owners. Yes, it’s more violent and dramatic than what happens in real life, but the various stakeholders fighting for ownership of the land is very real.
Luckily, there is another way - a golden opportunity to convert these ranches into ecologically and culturally productive multi-use spaces that serve as common ground for a regenerative economy.
I call this the Ranch to Regen Pipeline.
Vast tracts of multi-generational family-owned ranchland across the United States are now changing hands because the inheritors don’t want the lifestyle or the business. The thing is, these ranches are often ecologically sensitive land holdings that need to be stewarded properly. The management of the ranch can have profound effects on the local watershed, food systems, biodiversity, human and wildlife communities. Taking care of all that is a lot to ask of one family business.
As the cattle ranching industry continues to decline, the predominant option for ranchers that want to move on from their responsibility to steward the land is to sell the ranch on the open market to speculative developers, wealthy property investors that love to hunt, or to let it fall into disarray through neglect.
The Housing Crisis x Re-Ruralization
A couple key trends have created the right conditions and the opportunity to convert ranches to hubs of regenerative community development. Specifically, those trends are the housing crisis and re-ruralization.
In the United States, more and more people have been moving away from dense urban areas and out to the country where they can live more affordably and peacefully. In recent years this trend has been exacerbated by the shift to remote work and large scale recognition of our failing civilizational infrastructure.
The result of this rural migration is that housing options are very limited and demand is greatly outpacing available inventory.
Existing house prices have been skyrocketing and the cost of building is too high for most except property developers. The rural housing development that does happen is largely uninspiring, disconnected from the environment and damaging to the surrounding habitat.
Many people that are attracted to the back-to-the-land movement want something of a homestead lifestyle, where they have a house, grow some food, have some animals, and own a little slice of the American Dream. But that’s much easier said than done, and most with that dream end up keeping it as just that - a dream.
So, the people require a better place to live and the ranches require a group of people to steward them regeneratively. I purposely say a group of people, not a person, because it literally does take a group of people to effectively steward a significant tract of land.
It Takes A Village
The reality is that homesteading is quite difficult. It not only takes a significant output of capital to acquire the land in the first place, but it takes a lot of skill, knowledge, and other resources to be successful. Most people don’t have all that it takes on their own. But that’s ok because we were never meant to go it alone.
This was acknowledged by Vinoba Bhanve, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, who started the Land Gift Movement in Rural India in the 1950’s and 60’s, where wealthy landowners gifted their land to the poor to farm.
But it was soon discovered that the recipients of the land didn’t have the skills or resources to take care of the land properly. So the model was adjusted, and instead the land was gifted to the village itself instead of directly to individuals. The whole village became responsible for ensuring that the land remains a productive community asset and not be misused.
A similar approach can be applied in the Ranch to Regen Pipeline. At ReCommon, we’re building the tools to acquire land, including ranches and other rural property, and hold that land in nonprofit, bioregional community ownership.
This alternative model of land tenure takes the responsibility of stewarding that ranchland off of the individual and shifts it onto the community, resulting in:
Perpetual stewardship
Improved accessibility & equity
Regenerative community development
Ecological use of the land
Permanent affordability mechanisms
Increased economic opportunity
Regenerative Economics
For the first time in history, regenerative economic infrastructure is being developed that can fundamentally shift how value is attributed and allocated.
Instead of the trees in a forest having value after being cut down, they have value by staying standing in the ground. And instead of a faceless corporation being rewarded for clear-cutting a forest, a local community of place-based stewards can be rewarded for taking care of the forest by tapping into the emerging carbon credit and eco-credit markets.
The economic mechanisms being created to reward such behavior are encompassed by the Regenerative Finance (ReFi) movement. When land is held by a private, for-profit speculator, it’s less likely to attract funding through these alternative regenerative financial mechanisms.
Although the ReFi movement is creating the economic tools to support large-scale regenerative work, there is a serious lack of groups on the ground with significant enough land-holdings or social coordination to support such activities.
Enter: the Ranch to Regen Pipeline.
Stakeholders come together to acquire a ranch.
A bioregional, nonprofit, RegenCLT-like stewardship entity is created to hold it in common trust for generations to come.
A sustainable place-based community is created on the land
This community takes on large regenerative projects that ‘plug in’ to various ReFi tools
Bioregional staking, local currency tokens, quadratic funding, carbon credits and other eco-credits create perpetual funding for regenerative work.
Rural Communities of the Future
As the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold said, “land should be a community to which we belong, not a commodity that is bought and sold.” The Ranch to Regen Pipeline achieves this by returning land to a bioregional commons, developing a place-based community of stewards, and integrating the economic value of the land into the community forever.
The complex problems of our time require creative solutions.
There’s an opportunity to convert the vast ranchlands of the American West into shining examples of the bioregional regenerative economies and the communities of our future. Unlike the radical competition portrayed in the show Yellowstone, the work we’re doing at ReCommon to create the Ranch to Regen Pipeline offers an alternative future of radical collaboration that allows everyone to win.
Help us make this a reality.
