Healthy Land. Healthy Food. Healthy Lives.
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2018
Developing HMI’s 55-Year Legacy BY ANN ADAMS
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s we head into our 35th year as an international NGO, HMI continues to offer training and support to farmers, ranchers, and other land stewards who are looking for a new path—a path towards regenerative agriculture. We also continue to build the capacity of our network through being the leader in Holistic Management educator training, training agricultural professionals around the world. As HMI wraps up our 7-year strategic plan we began in 2012, we are pleased to announce that we have averaged 110 days of programming per year. With the help of our 60+ Certified Educators we have reached an average of over 7,000 people per year for a total of almost 44,000 producers—agricultural producers who have gone on to get results on the ground and in their businesses and communities. As a result of these efforts, over 100 million acres are being influenced by the work of these agricultural producers. Our collaborators and supporters have also enabled us to bring Holistic Management to 130 countries, building momentum toward healing the planet and solving critical environmental and food security issues. People’s lives have been profoundly changed as they learn about how to improve the health of the land they manage as well as their ability to positively impact their communities. We are now looking ahead to our 20-year Strategic Plan with a focus on post-training support to achieve long-term behavior change and results on the land that we can capture and share to encourage others. Likewise we are building capacity for the next generation of our Certified Educators and Management Clubs that offer regional support and communities of practice. Lastly, we will use this strategy to continue to focus on HMI’s international role and our collaborative role within the global
In Practice a publication of Holistic Management International
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regenerative agriculture community. The goal is to reach an additional 80,000 producers in that time and influence another 60 million acres. This year’s conference we co-hosted is an example of the collaborations we have developed with regenerative agricultural organizations like the Quivira Coalition and the American Grassfed Association. Holistic Management teaches us that diversity is a critical component in the health of ecosystem function. Likewise, the power of symbiotic relationships is evident throughout nature whether with bees pollinating flowers or predators keeping prey herds healthy. At HMI we take these principles to heart as we work to collaborate with over 100 organizations each year. We identify the unique opportunities and resources HMI brings to the regenerative agriculture table. With our international network of Certified Educators and practitioners, we bring over 30 years of experience in Holistic Management practice, education, and research. We pair this experience and expertise from around the world with identified requests for Holistic Management training at all different levels, both place-based and online—teaching this powerful tool and growing the base of people practicing and teaching it. We also work to evolve the tool of Holistic Management and the curriculum to
keep the Holistic Management practices and principles relevant and current. Like any organization, HMI has evolved and changed strategies over the years. Since 2008, we have clarified our organizational objectives and grown our programming dramatically. In the early 2000’s we focused on supporting our Africa programs, particularly the work of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management with the Hwange villages near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. While this work was important, we realized that we needed to put more effort in supporting and scaling the work that all our Certified Educators were doing. We also wanted to leverage the additional capacity we had developed through our Certified Educator program that had been funded by the USDA through the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program in 2001 and 2003. By 2009, we had received more USDA support through the Beginning Farmer & Rancher Development Program to develop Beginning Farmer training in Whole Farm/Ranch Planning training. We developed curriculum that would engage producers from any region of the world regardless of the amount of land they were managing. In developing that programming and engaging our Certified Educators we were now able to train and influence 4–5,000 people a year around the world—bringing Holistic CONTINUED ON PAGE 2
Working with Nature INSIDE THIS ISSUE Ken Miller and his family won the 2017 Leopold Award in North Dakota for their efforts in improving land and soil health. Ken attributes Holistic Management as helping him to make the paradigm shift to working with nature—a shift that resulted in improved quality of life, profitability, and land health. To read more about his story, turn to page 10.