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Weaving the Regenerative Web: A Gathering of Abundance and Inspiration

Updated: Jun 3

There are gatherings that inform you, and then there are gatherings that change you. The American Regeneration Summit in Bandera, Texas was unmistakably the latter. Terra Advocati's Bryan Hummel and friend of TA David Casillas joined me, as we gathered in the middle of nowhere in the Hill Country, not quite sure what to expect, and left with a renewed sense of just how wide and deep the regenerative movement has grown.


What made this conference different was not just the caliber of the practitioners and policy leaders in the room. It was the love. The joy. The unmistakable sense that these people had given their lives to something real, and that the work was working.


Sovereignty Ranch and the Vision of Ryland Engelhart

The conference was hosted by our friend Ryland Engelhart and his sister Mollie at Sovereignty Ranch, a 200-acre regenerative property in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. Ryland is the co-founder and Chief Mission Officer of Kiss the Ground, the nonprofit that helped bring regenerative agriculture into the global conversation, and a producer of the documentary trilogy that followed: Kiss the Ground, Common Ground, and the newly released Groundswell, which hits Prime Video on June 5, 2026.


Hearing Ryland speak about the journey from garage conversations and a film idea to a global movement reaching hundreds of millions of people was genuinely moving. He carries that rare combination of visionary energy and grounded humility, and it set the tone for everything that followed.


Groundswell was on the verge of release at the time of the conference, and Ryland had been gracious enough to let our CREA student group watch the entire film at Sovereignty Ranch just a couple of weeks before, a preview that made hearing him speak about the trilogy's journey feel even more personal. The film went on to win the Golden Globe Prize for Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival shortly after, a recognition that signals how far this movement has traveled from the margins to the center of global conversation.


Food as Medicine: Dr. Ben Edwards and Erin Martin

The first full day of the conference brought two of the most compelling voices in the food-as-medicine movement, and their presentations reminded us why land health and human health are not separate conversations.


Dr. Ben Edwards, founder of Veritas Medical in West Texas, has built his practice around a simple premise that the body is designed to heal itself when given the right conditions. After years in conventional family medicine as the only physician in Garza County, a pivotal moment introduced him to integrative medicine and changed everything. His clinical model works from root causes, not symptom management, and the outcomes speak for themselves. Patients with decades of type 2 diabetes, metabolic disease, and polypharmacy are walking out of his clinics with their prescriptions cut in half or eliminated entirely. What he is doing is not fringe medicine. It is the future of medicine, and it was thrilling to be in the room when he described it.


Erin Martin, founder of FreshRx Oklahoma, brought a complementary and equally powerful story. A gerontologist by training and a regenerative soil advocate by conviction, Erin launched FreshRx in 2021 as a produce prescription program connecting primary care clinics directly with local regenerative farmers. Patients enrolled in the rigorous one-year program receive biweekly boxes of fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables along with cooking tools and nutritional coaching. The results have been extraordinary. Across 75% of participants, FreshRx has documented an average two-point reduction in HbA1c levels, the key marker for type 2 diabetes management, and in many cases patients have been able to step away from prescription medications entirely. The program has also saved the state of Oklahoma an estimated nine million dollars in healthcare costs.


Both Dr. Edwards and Erin are living proof that what happens in the soil ends up in the body. Watching them present back to back was one of the highlights of the entire conference.


Rodger Savory and the Solar Dollar Economy

One of the most fascinating conversations we had at Sovereignty Ranch was with Rodger Savory of Deserts to Grasslands. Son of the legendary ecologist Allan Savory, Rodger grew up inside the holistic management tradition and has spent his career taking it further. His work centers on what he calls the solar dollar economy: the idea that totally desertified land, land most people have written off entirely, can be transformed into productive, self-regenerating grassland through dense animal traction and mob grazing.


Central to Rodger's work is what he calls the bio carpet method. After dense animal traction has pugged the landscape, the animals lay down a thick mat of dung and urine across the hoof prints. Water accumulates in those depressions. That biological covering gives the land just enough insulation and moisture for the first rain to spark germination and ignite the soil microbiome. It is, at its core, a story about the thin living layer that exists between the sterilizing power of the sun and the raw geology beneath it, and how that layer can be rebuilt with the right tools and the right timing.


The concept immediately resonated with our own work in watershed restoration. In many parts of Texas and the broader region, working with livestock is far more practical and economically viable than attempting to regenerate degraded land through crops alone. While agroforestry systems can absolutely restore farmland, they take time and are not always appropriate for land pushed to true desertification.


What Rodger has demonstrated at sites across the world is that the right animals in the right density can bring that land back. The grass returns. The water infiltrates. The soil microbiome rebuilds itself. And the rancher makes a living in the process.


What makes this conversation even more exciting today is the emergence of virtual fencing systems, which now allow us to graze on contour at the landscape scale, moving animals precisely where the land needs them most and holding them there long enough to do the biological work. This is watershed restoration at profit, and it is already happening.


We look forward to continuing this conversation with Rodger, and supporting his work in any way that we can.



Rick Clark and the Art of Covering the Land

Rick is a fifth-generation farmer from Williamsport, Indiana, who manages 7,000 acres with essentially zero synthetic inputs, no herbicides, no commercial fertilizer, no fungicides, and no insecticides. What he uses instead is the land itself, coaxed into abundance through cover crops, roller crimping, and strict no-till practice.


His method is elegant in its simplicity. Diverse cover crop mixes are planted to build soil armor and pull nutrients up from deep in the profile. When the time is right, a roller crimper lays those crops flat into a thick mulch mat, and seeds go in directly behind it, no-till drilled into living biology rather than bare, disrupted earth. The mulch suppresses weeds, retains moisture, and feeds the soil microbiome. Chemical herbicides become largely unnecessary. Rick shared that by farming this way at commercial scale, he has eliminated millions of dollars in annual input costs.


Hearing Rick describe his journey from conventional farming to full regenerative practice, at industrial scale, without sacrificing profitability, was one of the most practically inspiring presentations of the conference.


Jimmy Emmons and the No-Till Future

It was an honor to share a few words with Jimmy Emmons, NRCS Assistant Chief and one of the most respected voices in the American no-till movement. A lifelong rancher and farmer from Leedey, Oklahoma, Jimmy has spent decades proving that soil health is not an ideology but a measurable, bankable outcome. His trademark phrase, "Long Live the Soil," is not a slogan. It is a mission statement backed by forty years of practice and a 2,000-acre operation that runs on no-till, cover crops, and adaptive grazing.


Having someone with Jimmy's depth of experience now leading federal conservation policy gives us real reason for hope. The $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program recently appropriated through the NRCS is a reflection of exactly the kind of farmer-led thinking that Jimmy has championed for decades.


Trails to Swales and a Conversation with Secretary Kennedy

We were proud to showcase the trails to swales work that Terra Advocati has developed in collaboration with Drought Proof TX, led by Bryan Hummel. These groundwater infiltration features slow, spread, sink, soak, and store stormwater, biologically filtering what would otherwise be flooding liabilities and converting them into groundwater assets that recharge our aquifers from the uplands down.


The demonstration drew significant interest, including from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who visited Sovereignty Ranch and engaged directly with the practitioners and technologies on display. We had the pleasure of a brief exchange with Secretary Kennedy about the future of regeneration in Texas.


Garry Stephens of the Wildlife Habitat Federation and Rebecca Tasker of Grassroots Carbon co-led the rainfall simulator presentation for Secretary Kennedy, showing in real time how regeneratively managed soils with healthy grass cover absorb water, filter contaminants, and recharge groundwater at rates dramatically higher than degraded land. Lee from Southwest Farms and Mollie Engelhart then walked Secretary Kennedy through the no-till drill, and Clint Brauer showcased his farm robot, Botony by Greenfield Robotics, that is capable of eliminating the need for chemical herbicides entirely.



Grassroots Carbon, founded in San Antonio in 2021, has become the largest soil carbon removal company in the United States, now operating across more than two million acres in 22 states and having paid more than $40 million directly to ranchers for verified carbon sequestration.


Garry Stephens came to this work after nearly 30 years with the NRCS, serving as a district conservationist and wildlife biologist across dozens of Texas counties before joining the Wildlife Habitat Federation. He is a lifetime conservationist in every sense of the word, and we found him to be an extraordinary wealth of knowledge. His generosity in sharing that knowledge, and his genuine curiosity about the work we are doing at Terra Advocati, left us eager to build something together. We look forward to what comes next with Garry and WHF.


Voices from the Land: Loy and Helen Sneary

Among the many meaningful conversations at Sovereignty Ranch, we found ourselves especially grateful for the time we spent with Loy and Helen Sneary. Loy is a lifelong rancher in Matagorda County and the President and CEO of Gulf Coast Green Energy, a company working at the intersection of clean energy and industrial efficiency. Helen was right there alongside him throughout the conference, and together they were simply wonderful people, warm, generous, and genuinely curious about every conversation they entered.


Loy has spent decades at the intersection of land stewardship, public service, and clean energy innovation, and his perspective on the future of regenerative agriculture in Texas is grounded, practical, and deeply hopeful. His cattle operation on the Texas Gulf Coast is itself a model of what adaptive mob grazing and high-density management can accomplish for both the land and the bottom line. We look forward to staying close to them.


Others in the Room

The gathering drew an extraordinary cross-section of the regenerative community. Mary Michael from the Texas Water Resources Institute brought deep expertise in watershed science and agricultural water management. Fred Morales of Morales Feed, and Green Cover Seed represented the supplier network that makes regenerative transitions practically possible for ranchers across the region. Lee from Southwest Farms offered a view of regenerative practice from the ground up, and his knowledge of the tools and inputs that actually work at the field level added real texture to the conversations around us.


What We Carry Forward

The regenerative movement is not waiting for permission. It is already happening, on ranches and in clinics and on desertified hillsides being coaxed back to life by the careful movement of animals and water and human intention. And it is not just happening here. It is happening around the world, in languages we are still learning to speak, by people who have never stopped believing that the land can heal.


Terra Advocati exists to weave networks like this one, to move knowledge and relationships and resources between people doing the work. We left Sovereignty Ranch with new partnerships, new tools, and a renewed sense of just how much possibility lives at the intersection of soil, water, food, and community.


The stories we shared inspired others, and the stories we heard inspired us. We are carrying all of it forward, and we have never felt more energized to do so!

 
 
 

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