HEALTHY SOIL
HEALTHY PEOPLE
HEALTHY PLANET
GLOBAL WISDOM, LOCAL IMPACT
The Las Cumbres Ranch Educational Foundation brings practitioners from the U.S., Mexico, New Zealand, and beyond to share what has worked on their own ground. They come to teach what they have already proven: how to rebuild soil, restore an ecosystem, and grow food that holds through drought and disruption.
A WORKING DEMONSTRATION SITE
The Foundation is based at Las Cumbres Ranch, a thousand acres of regeneratively managed rangeland held under permanent conservation easement. Cattle are moved daily. Pastures rest for a year or more before the herd returns. Five years of soil, grazing, and pasture forage data record what those practices have done to the ground.
Every one of our ten monitoring sites scored higher in 2026 than it did in 2022. Net gains ran from 15 points to 85. Covered soil rose at eight of the ten, in places by 30 points, which means less exposed ground going into each dry season. Dung decomposition rose at every site. No site improved on every measure, and the losses are recorded beside the gains rather than set aside.
A multi-year University of California survey of ranches across the state recorded five species of dung beetle at Las Cumbres, several of them rare. Las Cumbres was one of two ranches in the survey where Digitonthophagus gazella dung beetles were found in California. Researchers collected specimens to breed in the laboratory. Beetles disappear from pastures treated with chemical wormers, which makes their presence a direct reading of how a ranch is run.
That fieldwork has since reached print. A 2026 review in Ecological Entomology, written by Nathan McConnell, Sarah Britton, Avi Khanna, Ebony Argaez, and Patrick Rohner of the University of California San Diego, draws together what is known about how dung beetles respond to temperature, and what those responses mean for the dung burial, nutrient cycling, and fly control they carry out on grazing land. A beetle collected at Las Cumbres appears among the figures.
The Foundation keeps the ranch open to researchers. Ground that runs as a working business answers questions a research plot cannot.
McConnell, N. J., Britton, S. E., Khanna, A., Argaez, E. M., and Rohner, P. T. 2026. A review on true dung beetles’ evolutionary and ecological responses to temperature and impacts on ecosystem functions. Ecological Entomology, volume 51. doi.org/10.1111/een.70088
The Foundation leads daily educational tours of the ranch, where participants walk the same land the numbers come from.
PROTEIN FOR LOCAL FOOD BANK
The Foundation also donates ground beef from the ranch to food banks serving people in need. Protein is consistently the hardest category for food banks to source.
An independent board governs the Foundation. The ranch works with the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County.
COLLABORATING WITH EXPERTS
Sessions cover the ground where theory meets a working operation.
Land and water. Holistically managed rangeland, high-density grazing, fuel load reduction and wildfire resilience, water infiltration and retention, drought resistance, and the repair of riparian corridors.
Growing systems. Food forests, cover crops, and increasing diversity above and below the soil line.
The working side. Ranch and farm economics, and what consumers need to know to support the change with their own spending.
Questions matter here more than presentations. Every session is built to end in conversation.
PAST PROGRAMS
Rodger Savory Consulting practitioner, 2020 to 2023
Savory guided the first years of the transition at Las Cumbres, setting up the grazing plan, the herd movement, and the monitoring that the ranch still runs on. He works in the Holistic Management tradition his father originated. A video series follows Savory and general manager Stefan Selbert through those early stages, explaining each decision on the ground where it was made. It is published free online.
Alejandro Carrillo Workshop and evening talk, March 2023. 68 attendees.
Carrillo has returned thirty thousand acres of the Chihuahuan Desert to grassland on less than ten inches of rain a year, moving cattle daily across hundreds of pastures. He is president of Pasticultores del Desierto and a technical advisor to Soil for Water. His visit was covered by the Santa Barbara Independent.
Nicole Masters Two-day workshop and evening presentation, August 2024. 65 attendees.
Masters is a New Zealand agroecologist and the author of For the Love of Soil. Through Integrity Soils she and her team of coaches work alongside producers across more than a million acres in the United States, Canada, and Australasia.
Help us gather our community to imagine, explore, and create a healthier path forward for our soil, our planet, and our health.
Donate to accelerate the path toward regeneration.
OUR BOARD
TOGETHER WE MAKE IT HAPPEN
On a daily basis our skills come together to manage and maintain our precious land.
Christy Foley
Board Member
Christy is a life explorer, connector and philanthropist. She is passionate about the health of our food systems and our interconnectedness to all life on this planet. With her consulting and philanthropic efforts, Christy supports projects that foster spiritual development, social justice and community building. Christy is a marketing and business development veteran having spent her career immersed in the technology, media, natural food products, and nonprofit industries. She is a board member of the Hoffman Institute, and a member of Threshold Foundation and The Philanthropy Workshop. When Christy is not exploring the world, she spends her time between Santa Barbara, CA and Bend, OR.
Tom Sturgess
Board Member
Tom served in the U.S. Marines as an Acting Platoon Leader, is a Harvard MBA and Certified Public Accountant. Tom has held Chairman and CEO roles in several public and private enterprises.
Currently, Tom is Executive Chairman of Blue Star Print Holdings, New Zealand’s largest commercial printer, Executive Chairman of the Tiri Group, a New Zealand based manufacturing group and NXP, NZ’s second largest office and facilities supplies distributor.
Tom chairs the IC for Regen.VC, a climate change focused venture fund. Tom also chairs Methane Mitigation Ventures, actively reducing ruminant methane and HeadWaters, a sheep breeding genetic, production, marketing and sales collaboration, realising superior farm gate returns.
He owns Lone Star Farms Limited, producing for sale 80,000 lambs and 5,000 calves a year.
Tom is a board member for Direct Relief, Hospice of Santa Barbara, The High Health Alliance, and a Trustee of the Golden Bay Community Trust. He serves as Patron for the New Zealand Prostate Cancer Foundation.
Overall, Tom’s philanthropic interests include social justice, wellness, education and helping low-income families as well as climate change.
Jim Selbert
Co-Founder
Jim does the financial planning and acquisition of the physical infrastructure that supports the ranch’s holistic land management practices. Jim co-founded Warren & Selbert Inc., a software firm that specializes in the financial modeling of renewable energy projects. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Direct Relief, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that provides emergency medical assistance and disaster relief in the United States and internationally. Jim holds an MS degree in Finance from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and a BA in Economics from the University of Cincinnati.
Pamela Massey
Board Member
Pamela has lived in the Santa Barbara area for 28 years. She has served in different roles with various Santa Barbara based nonprofits focusing on education, the arts, homelessness and nutrition for children. Pamela has most recently focused on serving with organizations that work to address food sustainability, soil health and the overall health of our planet.
Previously Pamela has held positions as Director of Business Development, Project Coordinator, and Event Planner.
Pamela:
Nature is my “happy place” and best medicine. I love being in nature and hiking or biking. I am ever so grateful to be part of The Las Cumbres Ranch Family and their Holistic approach to Land Management.
Angel Iscovich
Board Member
Angel Iscovich has been referred to as a philosopher who happened to be trained in medicine. From philosophy, to psychiatry, to emergency medicine, and from the emergency room to the board room. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina then immigrating to the United States offered a world of opportunity leading to a journey of thought, medicine, and compassion in the hopes of making for a better world. Residency training in Psychiatry and the interest in human behavior made Emergency Medicine the perfect venue to explore crisis in its very essence, and insights into human nature. As a CEO he exercised leadership, organizational development, and strategy in the corporate health care sector. He now serves and guides several for profit and non-profit boards. As a past Board Chair of Direct Relief, a top-rated charity in the United States, who responds across the world to provide humanitarian relief, one sees impact of our social contract. He lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife Lisa and their Miniature Schnauzers. He is the author of the book “Art of Routine”.