Episode 12- Your Land is Speaking- Are You Listening?

🌿💨 Did you hear that? Not just the rain and wind—but the land itself speaking to you. Every bare patch of soil, every rain puddle, every stubborn weed is sending a message. Are you listening?

When I first started my land stewardship journey, I thought I was in control. I had a vision and believed I could shape the land with money, labor, and effort. But nature had other plans. My frustration grew as my investments didn’t yield the expected results—until I realized something critical: I wasn’t managing the land. I was in a relationship with it.

In this episode, we dive into how to read the land by understanding the four fundamental ecosystem functions:
🌱 Water Cycle – How well is your land holding and cycling water?
🌱 Mineral Cycle – Are nutrients flowing effectively through your soil?
🌱 Energy Flow – How much sunlight is being captured and converted into life?
🌱 Biological Communities – Is biodiversity thriving, or are key species missing?

By learning to observe these natural indicators, you can make smarter decisions, reduce costs, and increase productivity—all while working with nature instead of against it.

📍 Want to learn more and how to apply this to your own land? Check out my self-study course Reading Your Land for Profitability, Resilience, and Regeneration

📍 Looking for a deeper planning framework? My Homestead, Farm, and Ranch Planning: Foundations for a Sustainable and Profitable Future course will help you align your land, finances, and vision for a thriving future. DM me "PLAN" for details.

🌾 Profit isn’t about doing more—it’s about doing the right thing.
Let’s dive in and learn how to truly listen to the land. 🎙️✨

🌿 Grab my free guide: 5 Essential Actions for Thriving Land Stewardship
🌱 Take the Ecosystem Quiz: Find out how well you can read your land
📚 Explore Self-Study Courses: Learn at your own pace!

• Reading Your Land for Profit, Resilience, and Regeneration
• Homestead, Farm, and Ranch Planning

📧 Connect with Christine on Instagram
📅 Schedule a Call with Christine: Get personalized guidance for your land. 

Let's make regenerative ranching and farming more intentional, profitable, and fulfilling. I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway from this episode—DM me on Instagram or schedule a call to chat about it!

Connect with Christine Martin:
Website: https://thrivinglandsteward.com
Email: info@thrivinglandsteward.com

Transcript

Christine Martin's video recording-16: 0:05

Did you hear that? I'm not just talking about hearing the wind and the rain. I'm talking about hearing and listening to your land. Every bear patch of soil, every rain puddle after the rain, every weed that grows where you don't want it to grow. That's the land talking to you. Are you listening? So when I started my land stewardship journey, when I moved to Texas 24 years ago, I thought I was in control. I thought that I could control the situation to create that vision. That we all have when we move onto the land. I thought I could put money. I thought I could use labor to plant the trees where I wanted to plant them, to seed the type of grass that I wanted in the soil that I could place the chickens in the permanent chicken coop and continue to have. Healthy birds and healthy eggs to eat. So I made all these decisions and very quickly I recognized that I was spending a lot more money than I was earning from the land. Which made me feel like I had to have my feet in two different worlds, one in the corporate world to earn the money so I could spend it on my land to get my vision implemented

1:55

And my other foot was on the land trying to create this dream life that I had envisioned and making all these decisions based on what I wanted.

Christine Martin's video recording-16: 2:10

Because I was trying to control the environment, the situation I was in. It caused an awful lot of frustration. Because I had these outcomes that I was expecting, and guess what? I didn't always get those outcomes. So the frustration level was always very high. I remember when I started my garden, I bought the tiller. I came in and I tilled the soil and I went out and bought seeds, and I bought some transplants and planted them. And watered them and planted at the right time of the year after the first frost. And I used the right seeds with the right, growing days and germination days and all this other stuff. And the production was terrible. Absolutely terrible. So here in Texas, thankfully we can have two. Crops in the year, if we seed in the spring and harvest before the heat in July, and then we can generally plant in August and have a harvest in end of September, October. So I tried again in July for September, October harvest. Again, an absolute failure. So here I was trying to do these things and getting very frustrated'cause the outcomes weren't. What I expected, you know what the truth is? The land doesn't care about your vision. My land that I bought, it had no interest in making sure that my vision was being accomplished. Nature has its own plan. Nature has its own operating system. And when we learn what that operating system is and we learn what the indicators are of when that operating system isn't working, then you know what? We have to spend less money and we. Get more productivity out of it. You know what's even better than having more money in the bank and having higher productivity. I. It is the realization that you are not in control when you are a land steward. You are in a relationship with Mother Nature. Your job as a landowner, as a land steward is to learn how to read the land, learn what the indicators are to determine. Whether Mother Nature's operating system is functioning at its most optimal level or not, and then adjust your management accordingly so that your frustration level doesn't skyrocket so that you're not spending all this money and relying on an off-farm job in order to get all this done and so that you can spend less money on inputs and get a much better investment on. Any capital that you spend on your land, that to me is the most important shift that any land steward needs to have. We are managers of Mother Nature, and our boss is Mother Nature herself. So in this episode I'm gonna talk about how we can read the land so that we can increase our productivity so that we can spend less money so that we can not feel the frustration level that I experienced when I first started my land stewardship journey. Let's dive in.

6:02

When I say reading the land, I don't mean just walk outside and walk your pastures or walk your crop land. What I mean is truly understanding how to look for the indicators that show you whether nature's operating system is functioning or not. Because here's the reality, if you don't know what's going on, your decisions aren't gonna be very effective. You might think you have a forage issue, but the reality might be that you have a water cycle issue. You might see weeds as a problem, but the reality is it's mother nature's way of healing depleted soils, the land is showing exactly what it really needs. We just need to learn how to observe it. How to read it, and that's where the four fundamental ecosystem functions come in. These are the natural processes. That will guide your decisions in your management to increase productivity and profitability. Every piece of land, no matter where it is in the world, has four fundamental processes. What I refer to as the operating system, the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the energy flow, and the biological communities. Now, these four fundamental processes are not unique in themselves. They all relate to each other. When I speak about these four processes. What I'm asking you to do is, if you're looking at the ecosystem, you're gonna look through four different windows to look at the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the energy flow, and the biological communities. It is all one ecosystem processes, but to simplify, to help us manage better, we break it down into these four fundamental ones. I focus on this because if you affect one ecosystem process, you also affect the other three. They are not mutually exclusive. They all work in relationship to each other. When we understand these functions, we can make much more effective decisions that will address the root cause rather than symptoms that will prevent us from having wasteful activities and have more effective, efficient activities. The water cycle is the cycle of water from the atmosphere to the soil and back again. A side note here, I just wanna make a point that we are not creating any new water. We have a finite amount of water on this earth that is cycling through the atmosphere into the soil, and back again. So in order for us to address many of the concerns that we have with respect to water quality and water availability, we must make sure that we have an effective water cycle. An example of indicator that will show you that you have an ineffective water cycle are the bare soil. If you have any erosion or runoff. The type of plant species you have growing on your land will also be an indicator of how effective your water cycle is. If you have zero fi plants, these are plants that are adapted to growing in conditions that have very little water. As in a desert, or you may have hydrophilic plants that are adapted to environments where there is a lot of water. An example of that would be watercress or wasabi.

Christine Martin's video recording-21: 10:17

The mineral cycle. This is a cycle of nutrients from the atmosphere to the soil and back again. Indicators of how effective or ineffective your mineral cycle are the decomposition of dead material, how quickly that decomposition happens, The diversity of living organisms both above ground and below ground. Think the Soil Food web that Dr. Elaine Ingram has been researching for decades now. Earthworms dung, beetles, mites are all indicators of an effective mineral cycle. Roots are very important in order to have an effective mineral cycle because they are the conduit. They are what transports the nutrients from the soil up to the atmosphere, and so understanding what type of plants you have growing. In your pastures, we'll give you an indication if you have rhizome, gra grasses, like a Bermuda or a Broome grass, or if you have bunch grasses, like the little blue stem, a big blue stem, and Indian grass. Energy flow. That's the flow of solar energy through green living plants to all life, including humans made possible by photosynthesis. Indicators of how effective your energy flow is would be the volume of green living plants that you have on your land, the diversity of species of those plants. Do you have trees? Is it grasses? And the density of those plants, the more dense the plants we have, the more energy flow we have. And finally, biological communities. Biological communities is the ever-changing species. Of all living organisms, whether they be plant or animals. And the constant shift as ecosystem function increases and decreases indicators of how effective your, biological community is the biodiversity of all living species. When all of these four functions function properly, your land thrives. When even one of these functions is not functioning effectively, then your land is degrading. Once we learn how to read these functions and the indicators and the symptoms that the effectiveness or ineffectiveness provides, we can then adjust our management to make the necessary changes we need. So that we don't have to spend money on fertilizers. We don't have to spend money on buying hay.

Christine: 13:34

At this point, I want to share an insight that I learned through the school of hard knocks. As we learn to read the land, we will be adjusting our management accordingly. As humans, we have been spoiled and gotten used to instant gratification. I wanna warn you, when we're dealing with Mother Nature, it takes time for her to heal something. She can heal very quickly. Ecosystem functions sometimes take a while depending on how degraded it is. So we must have patience and constantly be observing and monitoring to make sure that our management decisions. Are providing us the results that we want. If they're not providing us the results that we want, then we need to go back to the drawing board. You might be wondering how you actually apply this on your land. This is exactly why I created a short self-study course called Reading Your Land for Profitability, resilience, and Regeneration, so that you can learn about the ecosystem functions and their indicators, and then adjust your management accordingly, to address this dysfunction. A link to the self-study course will be available in the show notes. So if you're interested, go check that out. or DM me on Instagram at regen Ranch Consulting with the word land and I will send you more details I've said several times that if you work with nature, you'll end up becoming more profitable. Profit isn't about doing more, it's about doing the right thing. If you don't know what the land is telling you, then you're gonna make a wrong decision in your land management. Using the old adage of a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We wanna make sure that anytime we're gonna invest money, labor, or capital, that we're gonna fix that weak link. We wanna make sure that if Mother Nature's operating system needs a reboot. That we spend the Money labor or time on addressing that reboot component to make sure that Nature's operating system is working effectively. This will provide you. A better return on investment because the minute you address that weak link, then that's improving Nature's operating system, which will improve your productivity. I've talked about two critical foundations of stewardship. The land stewardship, which is how you're gonna read and manage the land. And financial stewardship, making the right financial decisions so that you're making progress. But there's one more piece to stewardship. The most personable and often the most neglected component, your vision for your life on the land, because at the end of the day, you didn't come onto the land. Just to survive. You came onto the land with a vision. Are you moving towards that vision? Are you making decisions that are gonna get you there? When we're born, we don't start off running a marathon. We first have to learn how to crawl. And then walk and then run, and then we train so that we can complete a marathon. We do the same thing in our stewardship with the land We learn how to read the land. We address Mother Nature's weak link. To improve the operating system while also honoring our financial and ecological desired outcomes. Whenever we make decisions. We need to make sure that we take into consideration those long-term consequences, we wanna make sure. That every decision we're making on the land is moving us towards that vision that we would like to achieve. So many times, land stewards get stuck into a reactive mode where they're just dealing with problems based on the here and the now and making those decisions without reflecting. Is this gonna move me towards my desired outcome? Is this gonna provide that quality of life that I had envisioned for myself? We need to make sure that we're also addressing the weak links in our quality of life. How is our time management? How is our time with our family? Are we taking the vacation with the family? Are we enjoying our life? Have we resolved all the conflicts that we're dealing with as a land steward? Are we making that profit that we need in order to be able to retire and hand over the operation to the next generation? These are all very important aspects of stewardship. Not only do we have to steward our land and our finances, we need to steward our quality of life. Because of my own experience and because of my experience with coaching other land stewards, I have created a self-study course titled homestead farm and ranch planning foundations for a sustainable and profitable future that will help you realize that vision that you want from your land. A link to the course will be provided in the show notes, or you can DM me on Instagram at the Regen Ranch Consulting the Word Plan, and I will send you more details. Thank you for listening. I hope you've gained some insights in how to work with Mother Nature so that you can spend less money, be more profitable, and be more productive.