For most of my adult life, I believed what many environmentalists still believe: that healing the planet requires eliminating animal agriculture. This conviction was deeply personal and publicly lived. I was raised by hippie parents, helped build a nationally recognized vegan brand called Café Gratitude around the idea that food could be medicine, and later cofounded Kiss the Ground to bring regenerative agriculture into the mainstream.
My values have not changed. My understanding has.
As I moved beyond labels such as “organic” and began paying closer attention to how food is actually grown, listening to farmers and ranchers who were healing land rather than exploiting it, I began to see that the answer was not as simple as removing animals from the equation.
The problem isn’t the cow. It’s the way we raise it.
When animals are removed from ecological reality and concentrated in industrial feedlots, known as concentrated animal feeding operations, they become symbols of environmental harm. But when grazing animals are integrated into well-managed grasslands, they become a powerful force for restoring soil, rebuilding water cycles, and healing damaged ecosystems. This is the difference between extraction and regeneration, and between a food system that depletes us and one that could help restore both land and health.
Today, I live in Texas, where my family helps run a regenerative cattle ranch in Bandera called Sovereignty Ranch. To some, that may sound like a contradiction. To me, it reflects growth. What changed was not my values, but my understanding of how nature regenerates.
Throughout my career, I have never claimed to be a technical expert. My role has been to listen deeply, recognize transformational ideas, and help elevate the people already living them. That is how Kiss the Ground began—not as a film, but as a desire to tell the stories of farmers and ranchers who had discovered that regeneration was possible.
One of those people is Rodger Savory.
Savory is not a theorist. He is a field biologist, rancher, and disabled American veteran who has spent more than three decades confronting one of the most destabilizing forces on Earth: desertification. Human civilization has degraded or desertified roughly two-thirds of the planet’s land surface over time. Today, we attempt to feed a growing population from what remains, while much of that land is still at risk.
Desertification is not merely an environmental issue. It collapses rural economies, drives food insecurity, fuels migration, and destabilizes nations. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt once warned, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.”
Scripture echoed this truth long before modern science named it. The prophet Jeremiah wrote, “I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert.” Yet Scripture also offers a vision of restoration, of land made whole again. Savory took that mandate seriously.
After graduating from the University of New Mexico in 1995, ranking in the top 5 percent of a 25,000-student body while studying desert field biology, Savory conducted research at the historic Jornada Experimental Range. Rather than pursuing a PhD, he left academia and moved to Central Africa. He believed that real solutions would not emerge from theory alone, but from the harshest environments on Earth, where failure meant hunger, instability, or collapse.
Over 13 years, he experimented, failed, and learned how to do what many believed impossible: consistently turn bare desert back into functioning grassland.
The breakthrough he developed is called biological carpeting, often referred to as biocarpeting. The insight is simple but profound. Deserts spread because bare soil is exposed to ultraviolet radiation, which destroys biological life. Biocarpeting jump-starts natural cycles by creating a living protective layer through organic matter, managed grazing, microbial activity, and thoughtful land design.
This biological layer shields soil from ultraviolet exposure, retains moisture, restores fungi and microorganisms, and allows grasses and insects to return. Savory has demonstrated this repeatedly under extreme conditions, and in ways that are economically viable for ranchers and rural communities.
This is where much of the debate around beef goes wrong. The issue is not animals themselves, but their removal from natural systems. Properly managed grazing does not degrade land. It builds it. Savory’s work shows that cattle, when used correctly, can be among the most effective tools available for regenerating millions of acres of degraded American grassland.
This matters environmentally, economically, and culturally. Regenerative grazing restores rural livelihoods, supports independent ranchers, and produces nutrient-dense, grass-finished beef without reliance on chemical inputs. It is one of the few approaches that heals land while keeping rural America economically viable.
America is also facing a health reckoning. Decades of industrial food policy have left us chronically ill, overmedicated, and undernourished. Across political lines, there is growing recognition that real food, not ultra-processed substitutes, must return to the foundation of health. Traditional cultures understood what modern science is rediscovering: Nutrient-dense animal protein and healthy fats belong at the base of the human diet.
Savory’s pasture systems contain more than 100 species of forage and thousands of fungal organisms, producing beef with healthier omega-3 to omega-6 ratios, no glyphosate residues, and improved finishing efficiency. This is food as medicine and agriculture as restoration.
Savory’s vision also includes training veterans as land stewards, regenerating degraded military lands, reducing wildfire risk, and turning wounded warriors into producers rather than dependents. He insists on radical transparency, with soil, water, and biodiversity data measured using modern tools and owned by ranchers themselves. No greenwashing. No manipulation. Just results.
Today, Savory and a coalition of landowners, ranchers, scientists, engineers, and veterans are launching a large-scale regenerative grazing demonstration in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, with the potential to scale nationwide.
One of the more unexpected partners in this effort is Turner Ranches. Years ago, through long conversations over vegan breakfasts at Café Gratitude, Laura Turner Seydel became both a friend and fellow regenerative agriculture advocate. Over the past seven years, her family has worked to move its ranches from a model of conservation to one of active regeneration. In a meaningful vote of confidence, Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture is willing to initially commit 10,200 acres of desertified land and water rights to help prove that this approach can work at scale.
This is the kind of solution the country claims that it is searching for. It is ecologically sound, economically viable, and immediately actionable. Projects such as this deserve serious consideration within federal regenerative agriculture initiatives and public-private partnerships aimed at restoring land while strengthening food security.
If we are serious about restoring America’s soil, rebuilding public health, and strengthening national resilience, we must move beyond ideology and focus on outcomes. The growing season does not wait, and neither should we.
It’s not the cow. It’s the how.
