OUR PHILOSOPHY

Rebel West Farm & Conservancy was created in 2023 with the idea of “Bringing the Wild back to the West”…

We believe that conservation and restoration are for everyone, not just for the wealthiest amongst us, nor just for large, global NGOs, nor even just for governments. We believe in bringing diversity, equity, and inclusion to conservation through rewilding and regenerative farming. Everyone deserves a seat at the table because this is everyone’s home. Our landscapes are being degraded and our rural communities are struggling because too many crucial decisions have been taken out of the people’s hands. We all have a right to discuss and work on restoring our degraded landscapes, addressing biodiversity loss, and we all deserve a say in how our food is produced.

Conventional, industrial-scale agriculture and other extractive industries, such as mining and fossil fuel exploration, are leading causes of biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, and the lack of equity in rural areas. For Indigenous people and people of color, acquiring land, accessing capital, and getting their voices heard by the decision makers is nearly impossible and, when it is possible, it’s often regulated only to opportunities to volunteer or to donate. It’s a known fact that in the United States of America, agricultural producers are getting older, farming operations are getting larger, and conventional approaches to both agriculture and conservation at landscape-scale are exacerbating this.

Government agencies and large “landscape-scale” conservation organizations focus almost entirely on what many call fortress conservation, where we protect the land from the people. Large NGOs focus on keeping people who aren’t donors or researches off the land and focus on vast land acquisitions that take many years and millions of dollars to complete. They create “jewels of conservation and biodiversity”, yet ignore 80% of the world’s remaining biodiverse lands: working lands, rural areas, and Indigenous communities. As large and beautiful as these protected areas are, they are mere islands in a sea of working lands- islands that preserve only 20% of Earth’s remaining biodiversity- islands cut off from each other. These same large NGOs often don’t work with landowners whose acreage is deemed “too small” and many won’t work with Tribal Nations and tribal landowners due to the complexities of Indian Land Tenure when it comes to establishing enforceable conservation easements. We’ve heard this from Tribal members directly. We’ve heard this from NGOs directly. Federal and state agencies often focus on water and soil conservation practices primarily in the interests of conventional agriculture. These agencies often treat wildlife as game populations to be managed for sport hunting or as potential conflicts with agricultural operations and urban sprawl. If these approaches were going to work, they likely would have in the last century.

We need to change the paradigm. To do so, we need organizations that will support local, smaller landowners and the underserved communities and working lands that have, for too long, been ignored. These small-holder community members need to know that they matter and deserve our attention.

What we are proposing is the creation of a net work of “non-conventional conservationists”, and a broader patchwork approach to conservation, restoration (rewilding), and smaller-scale food production. Each acre matters and, when stitched together, they’ll form corridors of connectivity, linking not only to each other, but to the larger protected areas currently in place. When flying over the Northern Great Plains, one can see the patchwork pattern that already exists, but it’s almost entirely conventional agriculture. It’s time to revolutionize this quilt and work with these landowners to create corridors connecting biodiversity together.

Landowners (large and small) have an important role to play in helping us create this patchwork quilt approach to conservation and rewilding. Along the edges of their operations and holdings, in their marginal lands not suited to agriculture, and especially along their wetlands and riparian areas, we will work with them to establish practices that create a balance between their operation’s needs and the need to have areas set aside for connectivity, conservation, and rewilding efforts. This isn’t just for farmers and ranchers. This approach encompasses small towns, schools, and even simple backyards- everyone has a seat at the table. Subsistence farming is farming. Gardening is farming. These efforts take the support of a community and so community is at the very heart of Rebel West’s philosophy. From our proposed Patchwork Project, to your farm or ranch, your backyard, your main street, or your sovereign held Tribal lands, we want to work with you to both mitigate and adapt to a changing climate, save and restore biodiversity, all while producing the food for our communities in ways that give back to the land and the people. At Rebel West, we believe in putting people and food back into the forefront of agriculture and we strongly believe that food production must be both biodiversity and wildlife-friendly, regardless of the size of your operation.

Thank you for your support.

All photos property of Jason Schoch 2024