A Woman with a Mission: Wool, Cotton, Wheat, and Sally Fox’s Regenerative Farming

Sally Fox’s mutually beneficial, seasonally shifting dance between colored Merino sheep, colored cotton, and Sonora wheat has reduced her farm’s need for tractors and off-farm fertilizers, rendered pesticides unnecessary, and removed an impressive amount of CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestered it in her soils as carbon.

How does it all work? Good grazing is nuanced and complex, as ecosystems are, but the short version is that Sally’s sheep eat the stubble of her naturally colored cotton and Sonora wheat crops. As ruminants—walking fermentation vats—the sheep predigest these plant materials, making them more palatable to the soil microbes they feed with nutrient-rich manure and urine. As a bonus, the sheep produce fine, naturally colored wool, which is itself about 50% carbon. (Cotton is 40% carbon.)

It may sound simple, but implementing this requires a tremendous amount of care, observation, intelligence, and knowledge. This way of farming calls on decades of experience with place, animal husbandry, plant recognition and need, seasonality, and more. There are no rules, only contexts, and farming in Sally’s style requires constant adaptation to myriad climate and financial shifts. It is not for the faint of heart.

Naturally colored cotton tolerates the Capay Valley’s summer heat well, serving as a cover crop in addition to beautiful fiber.

Farming with a Sense of Place

Sally’s farm lies in the Capay Valley, about 90 miles north of Oakland, California. It is the traditional home of the Patwin or southern Wintun people, known today as the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation. “Capay” comes from the Southern Wintun Indian word for “stream.” [PAYWALL]

The Capay Valley’s fertile land explains the large number of small and mid-size farms within it, and it is bounded by hills that would be called mountains outside of the American West. Sally’s farm—with her small home, a much larger barn, sheep paddocks and shelters, and an irrigation pivot—rolls up into these hills from a low point along a road, from cropland to rangeland that is green in winter and brown in summer. A one-mile-long wildlife and pollinator corridor divides the rangeland and cropland, which includes milkweed that visiting monarchs depend upon.

Rangeland is a very broad category of land that makes up more than 40% of the Earth’s land area, what we often label as “wild,” even though these landscapes have been tended by indigenous people for millennia. Rangelands have native plant communities, which in North America supported grazing herds of elk, bison, buffalo, and deer, and today include cattle, wild horses, antelope, wild and domesticated sheep, and more. Rangelands are managed by ecological, not farming, methods.

Rangelands can include seeded lands (like prairies) that are managed like rangeland, which Sally does. In the American West, rangelands are often arid and not irrigated. Soil type is a distinguishing factor between rangeland and cropland, too. Cropland generally requires rich and deep soil, to feed more intensive systems—nuts, fruits, vegetables.

“When I got here, this place had a mix of land types,” Sally says. “Some with rich spots of deep, wonderful soil, others rather spare.” Sally set about building those poor soils. “What one wants in order to build topsoil is a great diversity of species growing,” she adds. Invasive species create monocultures by outcompeting native grasses and reducing biodiversity. Re-establishing native perennial grasses— with the addition of sheep—adds diversity while also reducing the use of herbicides and fuel-powered mowing often used to tackle invasives.

Spin Off editor Kate Larson met some of Sally Fox’s naturally colored flock on a visit to Viriditas Farm. Photo by Kate Larson

Sally has developed a rotational system that builds biodiversity and works for her farm and with Northern California’s climate of distinct rain and fire seasons. She implements the aspects of it that are feasible in a given year, which is rarely all of them at once or every year in a row. As with most things in agriculture, the answer to whether something can be done is often “It depends” and “Maybe.”

Northern California is dry from May to October, with no such thing as the “occasional shower” rolling in, and—if there is no severe drought underway—rainy from November through March. Native plants are adapted to both: they can go months without water, tolerate or even benefit from fire, and handle heavy winter rains and soggy soils.

When possible, Sally seeds the sloping rangeland with perennials such as clover and ryegrass before November’s winter rains begin. Cover crops may include field radish and peas, bell beans, oats, and vetch. These plants have many benefits, including adding nitrogen, breaking up compacted soil with their deep roots, and more. In February, the Sonora wheat sprouts. In late April, if the soil is dry enough (and with more rain in California coming as atmospheric rivers, it isn’t always) and many other conditions are right, Sally finishes planting her colored cotton nursery.

The Sheep Get to Work

The rangeland grows free of sheep until late May, at which point the plants have gone to seed. The sheep graze it to reduce the dry fuel load and fire risk while adding nutrients to the soil. Sally says, “The past few years, I have kept the sheep off the hillside all winter, until all the plants have grown and set seeds. There are fewer patches dominated by a single species. For over a decade, I have been feeding clover seeds along with the dried forage to the sheep and letting them roam the rangeland during the dry season. The clover seeds are rendered viable by the sheep’s rumen and then nicely dispersed, encapsulated by their droppings. The sheep have been removing the worst plants, aiding in planting new, nitrogen-fixing clovers.”

“The worst plants” include medusa head and yellow starthistle, the latter an especially strong, widespread, and harmful invasive plant in the American West. Today, thanks to Sally’s grazing management and her sheep, the yellow starthistle and medusa head on her farm are nearly eradicated.

Sally Fox bales the straw from her Sonora wheat crop as straw, which her sheep disperse across the rangeland, adding organic material to the soil.

The Sonora wheat is harvested in mid-June, the wheat berries sold as food and flour for human consumption, and the stalks cut and baled for later placement on rangeland. “The sheep do their best to spread the straw around,” Sally says. “The hope is for all the straw to get placed and spread prior to the winter rains setting in. This wheat has quite literally added tons of root material and straw per acre, which has been beautifully building the soil organic matter up with each crop year.” In late June, Sally sows teff, a small fiber-and protein-rich, gluten-free grain. Sally’s summer cover crops are teff, cotton, and wheat stubble, sometimes some of these and not others. Cotton tolerates heat marvelously. The teff is first cut in August and sometimes again in the fall. Sally does not have the equipment to harvest teff for human consumption, so it is cut as hay for winter sheep feed, which keeps sheep fed and offrange in winter.

Carbon and Water Conservation

Sally has also slowed the flow of water on her farm, doing her best to mitigate climate swings between extreme, prolonged drought and heavy atmospheric rivers. “We have had consecutive days of downpours of two inches or more. Some days we get four inches or more. The water running off the hillside is stopped in the holding pond,” Sally continues. “Then it is slowed enough so that the water that overflows has a chance to spread out and descend into the soil in the fields below.” Ponds help rebuild groundwater through slow seepage.

Sally’s efforts add up to a lot of carbon sequestration. Thanks to Fibershed and the Gaudin Lab at UC-Davis, Fibershed producer-members like Sally have access to soil scientists who test and analyze a farm’s soil organic matter (SOM) every year.

Sally dives into the data behind these measures on her website, but the upshot is, as she puts it, that “by using heirloom grains and by raising sheep responsibly, SOM can be built up considerably faster than what climate scientists thought was possible to even consider. If you divide the pounds of product that has left this farm with the pounds of carbon sequestered over and above what was in the soil when I came here, that is 15.5 pounds of carbon sequestered per pound of product that I offer. I now look at each skein of wool yarn, each fleece, each bag of Sonora wheat very, very differently. That skein of Elderlana wool? Four pounds of carbon down into the soil. The two-pound bag of Sonora Heirloom wheat flour? Thirty-one pounds of carbon sequestered.”

All the more reason to look at the yarns we choose and use differently, too.

Stephany Wilkes is a sheep shearer and wool classer based in Northern California. Her 2018 book Raw Material: Working Wool in the West details her up close experiences in the fiber world. Find her online at her website or on instagram as ladysheepshearer. She was interviewed on the Long Thread Podcast in 2023.