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The New American Shepherd with Cole Bush
144 Plays17 days ago
For Cole Bush, life as a shepherd is more than a job—it’s a calling. As the founder of her own grazing business in Southern California, she's using livestock to help restore land, reduce wildfire risks, and promote better agricultural practices. At the same time, she’s using her knowledge to train the next generation of pastoral graziers through the Grazing School of the West.
We’ll dive into her journey, sharing the insights she gained along the way about the co-evolution of humans, animals, and our environment. Cole’s work is changing the way people think about grazing, and today, she’s here to share how livestock can be a powerful tool for healing the land.
In this episode, we cover:
- An introduction to prescribed grazing - using sheep and goats to benefit local ecosystems.
- The history of pastoralism in California and how plants, animals, and people have co-evolved.
- Pastoral strategies to build fire resilience.
- The importance of learning from ancient indigenous practices
- Training the next generation of graziers through the Grazing School of the West.
- And much more...
Learn more and get in touch with Cole at Sherpherdess Land and Livestock and the Grazing School of the West.
Follow her on Instagram:
@bcbshepherdess
@shepherdess.land.and.livestock
@shepherdesshides
@grazingschoolofthewest
More about Cole:
Cole Bush, known for bringing the practice and ancient vocation of shepherding to Southern California, is an entrepreneur, advocate, and creative liberator in the fields of climate-beneficial agriculture, land stewardship, and prescribed grazing. With over a decade of experience, Cole has developed and managed prescribed grazing projects on thousands of acres of private and public lands throughout California for ecological enhancement and fire hazard reduction. Guided by her drive for meaningful work Cole is passionate in supporting others to find vocational pathways for non-traditional agrarians.
She is the founder of Shepherdess Land and Livestock Co. - a prescribed grazing company based in Ojai, California, Shepherdess Holistic Hides - a purveyor of mindfully sourced sheep hides, and Grazing School of The West - a non-profit 501(c)3 multidisciplinary vocational training program for the next-generation of graziers.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller of You Should Have a Podcast, who also wrote our theme song.
Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Learning from the past to inform the future is where we're at. And right now, we are all hands on deck for creating resilience, which requires adaptation and requires very contextualized solutions in your place, in your place. Really, I think solutions for pretty much most everything is going to be a grassroots approach.
00:00:37
Speaker
You are listening to Agrarian Futures, a podcast exploring a future centered around land, community, and connection to place. I'm Emma Ratcliffe. And I'm Austin Unruh. And on the show, we chat with farmers, philosophers, and entrepreneurs reimagining our relationship to the land and to each other to showcase real hope and solutions for the future.
00:01:07
Speaker
Cole, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to have this conversation with us. Can we get things started off just by having you introduce yourself and share with people who you are and what you do?
00:01:18
Speaker
Awesome. It's an honor and privilege to be here. Thank you for the invitation. My name is Cole Bush. I'm based out of the Ojai Valley in Southern California, and I'm the owner operator of Shepherdist Land and Livestock, which is a prescribed grazing business. And I'm also the co-founder and director of Grazing School of the West, which is a nonprofit project supporting the next generation of land stewards working with animals on the land.
00:01:48
Speaker
Can you tell me a little bit about prescribed grazing? How does that differ from you running a sheep farm? Yeah, I do not identify as a farmer or a rancher. I am a grazier. I take note and inspiration by my pastoral friends around the world from the past and also ancient futures, the future of pastoralism and what it looks like in Southern California. So what is prescribed grazing and how does it differ from traditional livestock rearing?
00:02:21
Speaker
The typical forms of revenue for a livestock producer may be meat or dairy or fiber, but for us, our main driver is providing prescribed grazing as a land stewardship tool.
00:02:38
Speaker
We work with sheep and goats, and in some cases cattle, to achieve specific ecological goals or vegetation management goals. And our revenue stream as a business is as a service provider. So you mentioned ancient futures, which I'd like to get back to later, but also taking inspiration from a lot of pastoralists throughout time.
00:03:02
Speaker
What was that journey like? and And of all the things you could have done when you finished high school or college, what took you down this path of looking into these pastors traditions and ultimately deciding to start a business doing grazing in the Ojai Valley? Great question. And the short answer is I feel like it's a calling, so it's more of a qualitative answer. But the direction ah part of my meandering path really came from my passion for Ecology, it actually I studied environmental sciences and agroecology in university and it was through studying at UC Santa Cruz. I i was ah studying agroecology at that time. I also was exposed to permaculture and then from permaculture I was exposed and started training in holistic management and within holistic management livestock are used as a ecological
00:04:02
Speaker
tool to achieve certain outcomes. And so really, I came in not through agriculture, but I came in through the my love for the land and the environment. And then I realized that there's all these other cool things that can weave in with that passion of the land, but also my passion with animals. So I'm a non-traditional agrarian. I don't come from an agricultural background, at least it's been a couple of generations since.
00:04:34
Speaker
ah My family has been in agriculture, and so I'm kind of the black sheep coming from Southern California beach town, Gao. But I think a lot of my path coming into this was not just like you know my studies and love of the land, but the recognition that I was not going to take a typical prescribed path to finding what it is I'm going to do with my life.
00:04:58
Speaker
so I was one of those people who was like, I'm not ready for college. This stuff is expensive and there's a world to see. so With the entrepreneurial spirit that I had, I decided to work really hard, save up money, and I went to Africa. and I hung out in Tanzania, I climbed Kilimanjaro, but the most impactful part was I hung out with the Maasai people who are nomadic pastoralists. and it was really That seed was planted there when I saw A,
00:05:27
Speaker
how people can live so differently on the earth. than my you know small little weird bubble in Southern California. The intimate relationship that these pastoral people had with the land, and then the tight culture, intact culture, and the vibrancy of just such deep roots and tradition, that was very inspiring to me because in Southern California, everything's pretty pretty new in our cultural context.
00:06:00
Speaker
and not recognizing or identifying pre-colonial diversity and cultural richness, which was certainly there and is in fact still there. It just has another lots of layers now, right?
00:06:15
Speaker
So that's really what inspired my beginning of this path into becoming a first generation, whatever you'd like to call me, neo-modern pastoral grazier of the weird west. it It was really those experiences that got me to this place.
00:06:36
Speaker
Thanks for sharing that story. And it's stories like yours that kind of inspired us to start this podcast. Because for so many people, it seems like they're struggling to find something that's meaningful meaningful to them. But there just aren't that many other stories, at least it feels like in my sphere, that show people doing things differently, that you can invent a job and a lifestyle for you that kind of falls outside the very restrictive boundaries that we set in our modern society.
00:07:04
Speaker
Going back to the sheep as an ecological tool, what are the goals that you're trying to achieve and what are the challenges that you're having to face? And Cole, if this is not too big of an ask, because there's a lot of things floating around here, but could we go back even further yet and set a stage where we're talking about what this landscape looked like pre-historically and how that has been changed over the time period that people have been on the landscape?
00:07:34
Speaker
Absolutely. So California, what a very interesting and dynamic place. It is so incredible the diversity of ecologies around the state.
00:07:47
Speaker
How did it evolve? It evolved with ecological processes that include migratory ruminants. The grasslands here in California and all over the world for that matter have co-evolved with grazing impact migratory ruminant relationship.
00:08:10
Speaker
A lot of our landscapes today, of course, have been impacted and encroached upon by human development and we often think about people being the problem or a problem.
00:08:24
Speaker
As much as I'd like to agree with that, I look into the past and I learned that actually people have been a part of a solution in creating resilience and creating health of ecologies by their interaction, by proactive stewarding. So it was the native of communities around California that were a part of the process of this co-evolution of our ecologies in the grasslands.
00:08:54
Speaker
in forests and all kinds of different eco-tones, if you will. So there's actually some interesting debate on this certain type of ecosystem called oakland savannah, where the the oaks and the grass co-inside in this beautiful mosaic of these gorgeous oak trees and these grasslands.
00:09:17
Speaker
Well, the the the controversy is, and maybe there isn't controversy, but the conversation is, well, is that natural? Did that happen naturally? Or was it informed by Indigenous people's relationship with the landscape?
00:09:33
Speaker
And I'm under the impression that it is that co-evolution of human interaction. In this case, it must have been prescribed burn. And then in that case, if humans were using fire as a tool, in that way, they're also managing ruminants. Because what happens if you burn an area? OK, there's no more feed. Animals leave.
00:09:57
Speaker
In that way, that is a kind of a version of herding animals by converting their their food source. So that is the the point I want to make about this region of the beautiful world in which we live, is that there's co-evolution going on with grazing animals, with fire, and with people.
00:10:19
Speaker
And there has been a large deficit and gap of our deep relationship with the environment. To understand its processes, to be a part of the system instead of a hierarchical, we have to control the system. We are a part of the system. And so essentially what I am passionate about doing in my work is learning to observe on how I can best be impactful on the whole system, recognizing that these landscapes co-evolved with animals, with people's interactions, and with fire. And why do we have the situations that we have today with these catastrophic fires? Well, one impacts of a changing climate in our world.
00:11:07
Speaker
but also large gaps of humans interacting with our landscapes that are a part of these ecological cycles. And that ancient or indigenous wisdom fortunately is coming back into our quote-unquote mainstream cultural context. And we're bringing fire back to landscapes because these landscapes need it. It needs it. We need it. And our relationship to the fear around fire is needing to change and is changing.
00:11:43
Speaker
So I think that grazing animals can also be a really good synthesis of prescribed fire in the conversion of vegetation management. We're trying to do some things that fire can do with livestock in places that we can't do prescribed burns easily. And right now,
00:12:04
Speaker
we're at a really dynamic time, learning from the past, now in the current context, is what is the relationship to these chaparral or scrub land ecologies that have not burned for decades and decades and decades, and also our forests in that case. And in my work in prescribed grazing, what I'm trying to learn is How can I use ruminants to do some of that impact that the burns would do? Could you quickly walk us through what is it that burning or in this case prescribed grazing does that's so beneficial to the landscape? So there's short-term and long-term benefits.
00:12:48
Speaker
As a prescribed grazing operator who gets paid to graze, each client generally comes in with a reason why they want to spend $1,000 an acre for me to graze it.
00:13:01
Speaker
Often it is because of fire fuel mitigation, reducing annual flashy fuels that are a threat should there be a fire. There are other clients I work with that have ecological goals in reduction of invasive species.
00:13:20
Speaker
If you think about it from my perspective, the goal is the same because I believe that a healthy ecology in balance or as close into balance as possible is a fire safe and fire ready ecology.
00:13:35
Speaker
So when i work with clients who are on the fire sign and say eat all of this i want this all gone i say. We actually don't wanna moonscape we don't wanna eradicate all of the vegetation we want to impact in such a way that we achieve our fire fuel reduction goals.
00:13:54
Speaker
But also support the health of the native ecosystem that has been adapted to be fire resilient Not resistant but resilient meaning if there was a fire the fire wouldn't be a catastrophic mega fire There are systems that are in place in these fire ecologies That make it so we don't have these huge mega fires the reason why we have the mega fires is because a we have ecologies out of balance. We have a lot of invasive plants, forbs, and trees that have come in that perpetuate imbalance. We can go into all of the dysfunction in our ecologies, but in terms of the short term and long term, I always approach it. I hear my clients, but and on the back end and with all of our shepherding team,
00:14:45
Speaker
We know that our job is actually to focus on all of the dynamic functions of the ecology, the watershed function. What's the water cycle? What's the soil situation going on? What's the the nutrient and mineral cycle in our soils? In some of our cases, do we even have soil? you know What's going on in the soil? What's going on? The soil is going to dictate what's above the soil and in disturbed Unhealthy or not alive soils your that is the cozy place for all of those flashy fuels invasives that are our biggest problem in fires
00:15:24
Speaker
So in short term, we often get paid to grace to reduce vegetation, but it's actually up to us to come up with the prescription of what does that actually mean? We have a medicine kit of various tools and implements and strategies to address both symptoms, but realistically on long-term, we want to address the systemic issues.
00:15:54
Speaker
And so when we approach a project, we look into that toolbox of wonder and we start creating our prescription. And the animals are only one part of the formula because we have all of these various choices we can make at what time of year.
00:16:15
Speaker
How many animals, how densely are we going to pull the animals together using our electric temporary fences? Like that's the density. How long are they going to be in any given place? Those are some examples of some of the formulas that we have in using a prescriptive approach.
00:16:35
Speaker
So the long and short answering, what impacts do we do? What do our clients want? They're scared of fires. There's state funding for reducing fires. do The animals come in and just eat everything. Well, no, actually we don't want to eat absolutely everything. So we are educators as much as we are graziers.
00:16:57
Speaker
I love how Fred Provenza puts it, we're ecological doctors as gracers because we're not just looking at the animals and moving animals around and making sure they're happy and healthy. We're also working to understand our landscape and observing our impacts from season to season and learning our ecology and building the relationship that we have lost through generations and generations.
00:17:23
Speaker
and learning from our indigenous comrades of today to reconnect our relationship to the land. And as a grazer, running around with sheep and goats and dogs and people is my way of reconnecting back with the land.
00:17:42
Speaker
And the overgrazing piece of it I think is important for people who are not as familiar to understand. Like there's this idea that we've overgrazed a lot of the the west, which I guess we have, but it's not because there were too many animals on the landscape. It's because of animals being on the landscape with not enough rest period for that landscape. And that you could actually have a higher density on the same amount of land. It's more about moving them frequently and giving the land the time to regenerates growth. I'm probably oversimplifying it. but I think you did a good job. Yeah, overgrazing is not a symptom of too many animals. It could be, can be at times, but it really is not allowing the land to revive itself. The detriment to the American West through grazing was never the animal's fault.
00:18:40
Speaker
It is not the animal, it's the way they were managed. And if we truly understand how nature has teamed up with comrade ruminants to do wonderful things in the ecology with resilience and, you know, a thriving environment,
00:18:59
Speaker
if we kind of tap into that, then we know that you have to kind of right size and basically mimic those patterns that nature has created for us. I think that a big issue that we've seen with overgrazing in the West historically comes along with Dun dun dun fence lines you keep animals from moving around you build big roads and highways At that point we are not mimicking nature's flow and rhythms and seasonal movement which defines pastoralism When we've built fences and when we've built roads and when we've decided we own a piece of land and this is mine and this is yours
00:19:45
Speaker
We just basically broke that cycle and so in the wild wild west days westward manifests destiny. We're gonna do cool stuff Beautiful wonderful things happen horrible things have happened. That is human history but what we have to learn from is some of the mistakes that were made that at the time We we didn't know we didn't know we wanted to feed the people the gold rush came and then that's when you see Tens if not hundreds of thousands of sheep come up through the belly of what is the united states of america today through new mexico Heard it all throughout the west into california to answer to the fact that there's oh my gosh There's a wild gold boom and we need to feed all of these miners Send in the sheep
00:20:35
Speaker
And there were a lot of animals that came in a pretty short duration of time. And there wasn't much time for humans to co-evolve with that or the landscape to co-evolve with it. Learning from the past to inform the future is where we're at. And right now, we are all hands on deck for creating resilience, which requires adaptation and requires very contextualized solutions.
00:21:04
Speaker
in your place, in your place. Really, I think solutions for pretty much most everything is going to be a grassroots approach and, you know, understanding our watershed and our relationship to it and getting as close to eating from our watershed as much as we can, you know, tightening what our food and fiber shed look like and just really you know knowing the the implications of our choices as consumers. So we're coming from this deep history where you are functioning in a fire adapted landscape and it has been built up, it has been developed, there is now lots of expensive infrastructure and houses and all kinds of buildings and all these things that cannot burn.
00:21:53
Speaker
And so in you step with ruminants. So I want to get into the business side of things and what that looks like. and So can you start off with who is it that even hires you? Is this individuals? Is this towns? Is this contracts with the state of California to be doing prescribed grace and in certain areas? The answer to who are our clients? Pretty much anyone and everyone can be our clients.
00:22:19
Speaker
The shame ah of the situation or the bummer part is because we're service providers, we got to get paid to to work, right? so Because we don't get we don't make money on the back end selling animals for meat. I'm not a meat business. So a lot of our clients are municipalities that are able to tap into state funds and federal funds for fire hazard suppression. We have private landowners who pay us to graze.
00:22:50
Speaker
We have found ways to make it more accessible for landowners who are not used to paying every single year for quite a bit of fire suppression. And I can talk a little bit about what that looks like in the Ojai Valley we have.
00:23:07
Speaker
what is called the community supported grazing program. and The goal is to get as many private land owners who have continuous properties to recruit the sheep and goats to graze a swath, essentially a fuel break around many properties, many homes, and thus reducing a lot of the cost which can be transportation costs. We essentially get to herd our animals from quote, unquote, property to property to property. And so that's one cool dynamic way we work with private landowners. But where I'm seeing the, well, one, great business, but two, the opportunity for the biggest growth potential is collaborating and educating
00:23:57
Speaker
co-training really one another is the fire departments we're working with the Los Angeles County Fire Department right now in various locations around Los Angeles in some of the most fire prone areas that are you know adjacent to You know the highest populated city in all of the West and Working with the fire departments is great. A, they have a lot of access to cool resources like water tenders, but they know the landscape looking through the lens of of fighting fires and preventing fires. And then we can come in and by learning through how they're seeing things, we can jump in and tell and share and show what animals can do.
00:24:48
Speaker
And then a really cool thing happens where they can come up with creative ideas like, oh, actually, it'd be really great to have the animals come in, prescribe graze before we prescribe burn.
00:24:59
Speaker
or post prescribed burn, bringing in those animals. And so when we're seeing more of these dynamic opportunities for combo prescriptions, we're actually opening up the type of work that we can do and who we get to work with. So our clientele base is pretty broad. It's pretty broad. Schools are another one. I mean, any land owner or manager that is,
00:25:26
Speaker
in a fire ecology and next to open space can essentially consider prescribed grazing as a tool, especially if it's unsafe for hand crews or other mechanisms to manage vegetation. And can you speak to the cost effectiveness of using ruminants versus maybe prescribed burns or hand crews or the worst case scenario of like large fires coming through?
00:25:55
Speaker
Yes, well, large fires coming through will be exponentially more catastrophic and economically devastating than any of our other approaches.
00:26:08
Speaker
So when people say, well, that's too expensive, I can also say, well, it would be pretty expensive to lose everything you own and more. But it's not an argument I make because quite frankly, it's very expensive for a lot of people who aren't used to spending lots of money on prevention. We as a culture are used to spending money in the aftermath. We also come together in the aftermath.
00:26:38
Speaker
But learning from how close-knit we come after disaster, we need to come in with that spirit in prevention and resilience. We need to know our neighbors and come together and support each other but in preparation or prevention of the impacts of natural disaster. And so when we think about cost-effectiveness,
00:26:59
Speaker
If we come into fire preparedness, for example, with that spirit, and we recognize that together we can do more, then cost can be mitigated and reduced if many people come together.
00:27:17
Speaker
In some instances, prescribed grazing is going to be a lot more expensive than a dude on a big flail mower or something. If it's if the terrain is flat and you have an old pasture that's degraded and full of invasives and it's yucky, no bueno for the fire deal, then it will be cheaper in the short term for someone to hop on a mower and a fossil fuel dependent machine to get it down. But you know if we are thinking bigger picture, if we are starting to move away from fossil fuel dependent machinery, especially two-stroke machines that are known to be
00:28:03
Speaker
the highest greenhouse gas emitting machines that we have. We have to kind of think of the values or not. It's not just dollars and cents, but it's also these environmental impacts. Ones that actually we might not see the cost benefit immediately from some of those choices. There are clients that we have who will opt for us even if we're more expensive than say the tractor or the mower on flat areas.
00:28:31
Speaker
where we are more economically viable and actually huge cost savings are in places that are almost impossible for folks with weed whippers on sides of canyon hillscapes. You just can't do that there. You can't do that. Or it's really expensive because it's really dangerous.
00:28:55
Speaker
So high incline, we have a lot of poison oak out here. Putting folks in poison oak is really expensive. You can think of a hand crew could probably get through an acre a day and so and it just all depends on the vegetation. But you have to pay people a lot of money if they're putting themselves in these really horrible. I don't know if anyone's gotten poison oak or poison ivy from head to toe, but no one could pay me enough money to get that or work in it. So why don't we just put some animals in there? I mean, it's a lot harder than just putting animals in there, but like, let's throw the animals in there who will actually get fat and happy.
00:29:35
Speaker
rolling around in it, not hospitalized. So in that case, yes, very economic to bring in animals in areas that are unsafe for folks, for humans. And then also I run anywhere from 100 animals to 600 animals on a project, depending on the scale of the project.
00:29:58
Speaker
But we can be quite effective in how many acres we can treat. We can treat three acres a day in some instances with 400 animals when it would take hand crews a lot longer because of the complications of the terrain and vegetation.
00:30:15
Speaker
So, I mean, it sounds like the more extreme the train, probably the more just from a purely economic standpoint, the more economical it makes sense to have animals versus a person. In general, describing what you're doing, it sounds like very labor intensive, lots of moving sheep.
00:30:31
Speaker
a lot, lots of observation, lots of adapting. I'm guessing that to do this at a bigger scale, which hopefully we're moving in that direction where you would see lots of animals impacting landscapes, you would need a lot more people also working managing these animals. I know that you're starting a school, the grazing school of the West. Could you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. Folks need opportunities to learn by doing And it is very hard for an operator, rancher, farmer to bring somebody in and help them start from the ground up. As an employer, a business owner, I think of investing in my labor. I don't think of my people as my employees, but rather I think of them as collaborators because
00:31:26
Speaker
When you tend to animals, we all equally love and care for them and are responsible for them. So with my collaborators, my team are all first generation. I think of when people come in and at the point when I, as an ah a business owner, I have to think like, okay, what's my labor costs? Because I'm bringing in a whole bunch of people who don't know what they're doing to begin with. it's like OK, I've got to go work with shepherdess. The first thing I learned is how to use a ratchet strap. You know, it's like you're starting fresh. So our folks liabilities or assets. Well, beginning for a long while, people are liabilities and not assets to an operation. And Grazing School of the West is creating a solution to the challenge, which is we don't have enough people who know how to do this and and have the opportunity to learn on the job.
00:32:20
Speaker
Their margins are so tight already in agriculture and running around animals that it's a big leap to bring on somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. So Grazing School of the West is creating opportunities for folks to learn by doing in several different ways.
00:32:37
Speaker
and to provide training and education that weaves together all of those dynamic parts on the animal husbandry side, grazing practice and theory, ecology, business, professional development. And the most important piece is the culture around caring about what we do with our lives on the daily basis and caring about our individual impact and our impact on our communities and then it ripples out to create a larger culture of care that is not just Me or my family or my neighborhood out out out out It's actually how do we create opportunities for people to have work that is creating a culture around caring about what we do our impacts to each other and the earth and
00:33:37
Speaker
When you have a culture of care, I think you naturally begin to have a culture of resilience, and that is not just on the land. It is creating a stronger fabric of humans seeing each other as humans, and we are all together in this, and our differences start to melt away when we realize that we are all one.
00:34:03
Speaker
So that's my my that's like kind of my my ah my spiritual talk around what grazing school of the West is, but really we're just creating opportunities for people to run around, sheep and goats, and see what not to do if you're gonna start grazing business.
00:34:20
Speaker
Well, Cole, I want to be respective of your time. Thank you so much for being able to sit down with us, take this time to share about your history, about the landscape that you're able to work in, and opportunities for more people to get into this game. And thank you so much for starting the Graydon School of the West and getting that going and getting people through that program so that we can have a lot more people out on the land having fulfilling careers doing good work. So thank you very much.
00:34:47
Speaker
it is It makes me so thrilled that there's other people excited about this too. Thank you so much.
00:34:57
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice. As a new podcast, it's crucial for helping us reach more people. You can visit agrarianfuturespod dot.com to join our email list for a heads up on upcoming episodes and bonus content.