Guide to Regenerative Grazing Leases: Opportunities for Resilience

CHAPTER 4. Into the Next Generation (Continued)
Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), for example, issues RFP’s outlining goals and
values for a lease opportunity, then asks prospective lessees to share their vision
and goals for the property and how those align with POST’s. This land trust also asks
about a candidate’s qualifications and how identity and life experience influence their
vision for the property.
Landholders issuing RFP’s for a particular lease opportunity should have a process
for evaluating proposals, narrowing down the top contenders, making a selection, and
negotiating the lease itself.
Selecting Lessees
Of course, landholders must consider the livestock and land management skills and
experience of potential lessees. What skills and experiences are most needed to
uphold the regenerative grazing values, i.e., What will the grazier do for the land? But
landholders should also ask what the grazier will do for the community (human and
biotic), and even what the land can do for the grazier. Depending on a landholder’s
goals, and the support available, each landholder will need to consider a grazier’s
reputability and experience, along with the opportunity to invite innovation and
diversity in a new generation.
A clear set of eligibility criteria can help high-profile landholders screen for quality
candidates and simultaneously extend equal opportunity to underrepresented
individuals.
At the top of this chapter, we summarized a few of the known race, gender, and age
inequities in land access, tenure, and business ownership. Each lease presents an
opportunity to push the needle toward land justice and begin leveling the playing
field for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, immigrant, refugee, and other ranchers of color as
well as younger and women ranchers. The public sector is responsible for promoting
diversity and equity in alignment with its ecological and economic sustainability goals
for rangeland leases. Private landholders should consider their power to support land
justice as well. This does not mean locking out excellent ‘dominant-culture’ graziers,
but it could mean setting selection criteria that prioritize BIPOC (Black, Indigenous
and People of Color) and other under-represented graziers who bring their own skills,
experience, and vision to a lease opportunity. A predetermined, even transparent,
scoring matrix of selection criteria can help any landholder—private, nonprofit, or
public—overcome potential biases and begin changing business as usual.
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