New Voices, New Growth
An Interview with UVE Ecological Outcome Verification Monitors
By Bridgett McGrath
It’s been three weeks since Fiona and Laura Quick made their way back to their hometown of Sunland, California after assisting in their first Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) monitoring and completing UVE’s Holistic Management Training course. In just 35 days they traveled nearly 6,000 miles to monitor 5 different land bases totaling over 20,000 acres in Montana and South Dakota. They ended their journey in a 4-day immersive Holistic Management Training at UVE’s learning site, Bunchgrass Land and Livestock, in eastern Oregon. The twin sisters, who were raised in the greater Los Angeles county, didn’t grow up around agriculture or ranching, but they each separately found a deep interest and passion for understanding how to regenerate and repair our planet through understanding grassland management. Their passion for the restoration of California Grasslands and their commitment to protecting and caring for the environment has propelled them into the work of UVE. In this interview, we delve into their journey and gain insights into their unique perspective as first-time EOV monitors starting out on their Holistic Management path.
Bridgett McGrath: Hello, Laura and Fiona. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I was just with the UVE team last week, and Rachel and Andrea were both saying how inspired they were by your energy and contribution to monitoring work this past month and at the UVE Learning Site for the Holistic Management training. What an adventure you had!
Laura Quick: Yeah, it’s wild to think back on the last 30 days. So much has happened.
Bridgett McGrath: I bet! You’re twins, right? I’m sure you get grouped together all the time. I want to make sure that you are distinct individuals in the conversation, so I’ll make sure to get each of your individual perspectives! It’s so interesting that you both came to this work.
Fiona Quick: That is greatly appreciated.
Bridgett: So, how did this all start? Tell me about your journey.
Fiona: I'm Fiona, so I’ll start with that! I currently, and have, for all of my life, lived in Southern California. Coming up on finishing high school, I always knew that I wanted to work with the land or with nature. At first, I thought maybe forestry. I got some experience, and quickly decided maybe not forestry. But through that experience, I was turned on to a permaculture course. And so I got a permaculture (design) certificate, and one of the things that was very, very briefly mentioned in the course, was White Buffalo Land Trust and the work they were doing. I was surprised; that's actually pretty near me! So, I went back down to Southern California to check it out. I actually ended up, just purely by coincidence, meeting a UVE EOV monitor down there named Dylan Boeken. He highly recommended taking the monitoring course. Both Laura and I pretty quickly decided to sign up for the EOV monitoring course. Since then, we've just been adding on courses, building our skills, and keeping trucking along.
Bridgett: And how about you, Laura?
Laura: I hate to be repetitive, but mine's kind of the same events!
Bridgett: How did your background prepare you for the course?
Laura: Yeah, great question. We're both trained California naturalists, and our interests really centered around the whole native plant communities and that sort of thing. But when Fiona and I went into forestry, we saw the realities of that work. It was challenging. In many places, they're still spraying herbicides, and then, as a result, a lot of the work and labor that they do isn’t really effective. For example, in one season, the invasive species is removed, and then the next year, it comes back bigger and more prolific than ever. I just kept wondering, "What are we doing wrong? What's happening here?” It was that questioning that led us toward the permaculture path and looking for alternative solutions. I think Savory Institute really is that alternative thinking that we were looking for.
Bridgett: So I understand that your first intro was through an UVE monitoring course at White Buffalo Land Trust and then shortly after you got thrown into the deep end of monitoring with UVE, traveling 30 days with Rachel Lohof Larsen across hundreds and thousands of acres of land on a huge part of Montana and South Dakota. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like? How did you go from a 5-day monitoring course to spending 30 days on the road setting up short and long-term monitoring sites?
Fiona: That's a pretty easy and short story. We got a phone call from Jackie Eshelman. She's amazing. She basically said that UVE had landed a job monitoring a large landbase and that they needed help, and, even though we hadn't completed all the other courses yet, it would be a great experience. Even more incredible was that she said that if we could go out and monitor, that they would pay us! So we said yes. That was about two weeks before we left. So It was pretty spontaneous.
Bridgett: And how did that feel, kind of jumping into it? Was there any excitement or nerves?
Laura: Yeah, there was definitely some excitement to jump in and see what it's like. Also, going somewhere like South Dakota or Montana, where we’ve both never been before, was an amazing opportunity to see the different landscapes and plant species. We were delighted to go. I will say that in the first week of monitoring, there was definitely a bit of a learning curve because we took the course a couple of months prior, and then hadn't really done anything since. To jump right into baseline monitoring off the bat was intense. Plus, the first ranch we monitored was one of the bigger ranches too. It was very fun, but there were definitely some very full days at the start. After that first job, we sort of figured out a groove, and each landbase got progressively easier and more efficient. You know how it goes. You find a flow.
Bridgett: Yeah, for sure. There is a value to repetition and hands-on use of those skills. A muscle memory for the flow of monitoring. I'm curious for both of you on this journey: What was something surprising that came out of the learning process, or maybe were there moments of clarity that you gained through that experience?
Fiona: Through specifically going on this outing to Montana and South Dakota? I mean, I think the thing that hits me immediately is, obviously, I'm down here in California, and here, we're considered an annual grassland. But out there, it’s so different. The experience of truly seeing the potential of a perennial mixed grassland where you have both warm-season and cool-season grasses really opened my eyes. To fully understand what that can look like, and just how amazing the potential is. I've traveled around a bit, but I definitely didn't have the data and understanding that I do now. After having done the EOV monitoring course, I understand more deeply about land regeneration and what the degradation looks like, what I'm looking for in a diversity of species, how to tell if a plant is perennial or annual, etc.
And so it's funny that you experience this mind shift through this kind of training. It's cool because you can look at a landscape and see what it is. You can communicate with it better to some degree, right? But also, it has changed how I see my favorite places here on the coast. I go back and I look at it and I'm like “This is all annual, what's happening? This should be perennial!” I would say that the biggest “aha” and kind of meaningful thing that I've taken away is just being able to really see things better. It's definitely been a learning experience, and I loved it.
Laura Quick: I totally agree. You don't ever see things the same after. Which is good and bad, but I think it's mainly good. Now every time I see dead material, I'm like, gosh, I want to go stomp on that and get some animal impact! Also, just seeing all these warm season grasses change. We got some rain, and then everything was green. It was magical. One day, you go out, and it's kind of brown, then it rains, and the next day, you're whoa, what happened?! It's green. It just made me think this is what our grasslands in California could be.
Fiona: Yeah, the potential. I mean, I felt we were probably really easy to impress, though.
Bridgett: It's such an interesting thing to see ecosystem processes when you travel to different locales, and you see different sorts of species diversities popping up in different ways. It does change your perspective of what you're looking at. I'm from Southern California as well, and it's a total mind shift when you start looking at your plant populations through a holistic lens. I'm curious, for both of you being new to the world of monitoring, how did it feel utilizing technology in these landscapes?
Laura: I will say that, at times, it made our jobs a lot easier and a lot quicker. In other moments, it made our job a lot harder and a lot longer. We did have some technical difficulties and had to reach out to the tech folks to help get it sorted. There were some moments when we had to struggle through to get the right accuracy. I definitely think that there is some room for improvement.
Fiona: But I will say that on the long-term sites, having the Trimble to enter the data was so much quicker than doing it on paper. There was way less room for error, and it was so much nicer. When we did our course at White Buffalo, the Trimbles were just an idea, no one had that kind of technology integration. UVE just recently started using Trimble, so it comes with working out a few kinks when you are on the leading edge. Where it really helped was setting up the long-term [monitoring]. It was very nice.
Bridgett: I can imagine. What advice would you give to someone in your position starting out in this field and having an interest in monitoring?
Laura: Know your grasses!
Fiona: Gosh, That is a hard one. I don't know, I think I'm still trying to figure that out myself. I would say, if we're talking about EOV monitoring and the Holistic Management courses that we've done, I think that you need to find the balance of application and theory because I find that if I get too much theory (how you do stuff and why you do stuff) without having little breaks to have an application, it doesn't become very real to me. And I tend to forget certain things. When you do other courses, you tend to review some things, and they make more sense to you. Now that I’ve completed them, I get it now. I definitely think that a happy medium is if you get some theory or information, and then you're able to either apply it or see it in real life. To really see firsthand how it works. So it's not an overload, and things don’t fall through the cracks. Then, with the EOV monitoring specifically, I think that it's always nice to start monitoring in your area because you tend to know your area the best.
Laura: And to some degree, even if you don't know what the plant potential could be, you've seen those areas before and so you have a little more context to go off of.
Bridgett: So to sort of move us ahead in your story, you completed a record-breaking 30-day monitoring on the road with Rachel and segued straight out to Eastern Oregon to the UVE Learning Site, Bunchgrass Land and Livestock, with Andrea and Tony Malmberg for a Holistic Management four-day course. I'm curious, what did that feel like coming into that space?
Laura: Everything was amazing. I will say, we should have maybe given ourselves a week break between (the two events) to digest what we’d learned and recover a bit.
Fiona: Regrow through recovery? Haha, it was great but yeah maybe we should have had a little break. But I mean, I love Andrea and Tony. When we went up to the class it was like a vacation for me. All the people are great, and they always feed us really well.
Laura: I like just to set the scene for the first day. We were all connecting with the other people in the course and talking about stuff and then Andrea had this beautiful dinner to end the evening. It was warm inside and we were all around her dining table just talking to each other and it really felt like we were all collaborating and we were all friends, really a community.
Fiona: That's the one thing that I love about this sort of work is that you're definitely creating a community. Whether these are your fellow monitors or holistic land managers or even talking to the landowners when you're in South Dakota and getting them excited about being able to regenerate their land and encouraging them even to get more familiar with their own land, sometimes it can be so exciting, and it's really fun to see that.
Bridgett: Yeah, were there any takeaways or big moments in your training course?
Fiona: Many. I think the biggest, especially after looking into forestry where everything is so complicated, is realizing that change is simple. it may not be easy, but the solutions are usually simple. And I love that viewpoint, and it's normally true.
Laura: I find that the general truths of life are simple, but like you said, that doesn't mean they're easy.
Bridgett: Yeah. I feel that we're all in that space of trying to find simple solutions. And usually, the ones that are easier to implement come with more complex outcomes, and not necessarily good ones. So it takes time to really go back to the drawing board time and time again. What's the simplest thing that we do? What's the lowest impact that we can make? That solution might require more work, which almost sounds counterintuitive, but that's how nature works.
Laura: Yes, definitely.
Bridgett: I’ve found that this work is so centered around Community Building. In many different ways within Holistic Management the regenerative work happens at all levels. Where are you excited to go next? Where do you think your journey is going to take you?
Fiona: I mean, we definitely want to do more monitoring. We've only done this one monitoring stint. We've taken the courses, but we need to do our exit review for being APs. So I think right now we're just excited to monitor in California, basically in our own region. Supporting the ecosystem and stuff like that.
Laura: And hopefully, in the next coming years, we’ll be monitoring our own property and managing livestock. I think we are both working toward that goal. We'll see!
To learn more about EOV Monitoring and UVE Holistic Management Courses contact info@uvehub.com.
Bridgett McGrath supports UVE’s outreach, marketing, and communications efforts. She is a Bay Area Land Steward and Operations Director of Sienna Ranch, a 21-acre outdoor education and nature connection program. Bridgett has a degree in environmental studies and geology with a focus on land stewardship, agroecology, and urban food systems. You can often find her hiking with her shepherd dog, Rocky, in the Oakland hills, as they search for sunbathing Western Fence Lizards.