The Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) at UC Davis has announced that for the first time in one year, two people will be given ASI’s Eric Bradford and Charlie Rominger Agricultural Sustainability Leadership Award: Dr. Stephanie Larson, UC Cooperative Extension Sonoma County Director and Livestock Range Management Advisor; and Annie Main, pioneering farmer at Good Humus in Yolo County.

This prestigious annual award will be presented to Larson and Main on Wednesday, May 15, at a ceremony featuring distinguished speaker Hannah Wittman, Interim Co-Director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice.

The Bradford-Rominger award recognizes and honors individuals who exhibit the leadership, work ethic and integrity epitomized by the late Eric Bradford, a livestock geneticist who gave 50 years of service to UC Davis, and the late Charlie Rominger, a fifth-generation Yolo County farmer and land preservationist. The COVID-19 pandemic suspended the award, and these will be the first awards given since 2020.

Dr. Stephanie Larson has spent more than 40 years working for UC Cooperative Extension to address opportunities and issues that California ranchers face in their agricultural businesses. Her interdisciplinary approach to issues facing livestock producers, rangeland owners and managers, and the public aims to maintain and increase the sustainability of agriculture systems and the environment, with a particular focus on ecosystem services in counties under threat from encroachment by urban development.
As the UCCE Livestock and Range Management Advisor, Larson conducts education and applied research to integrate livestock production with rangeland management in Sonoma and Marin Counties. She assists local livestock producers, including those raising beef cattle, sheep, and goats, to improve production and marketing for her clientele. Her program integrates ecosystem services provided by rangelands and highlights the benefits of using grazing animals as tools to manage local landscapes. As a certified rangeland manager, she works with land managers, helping them to make sound ecologic decisions about managing working landscapes for the benefit of all users.

Stephanie leads efforts to educate the public on the importance of managed parcels of land, both small- and large-scale. Her work has gravitated toward two land management practices for the long-term sustainability of forest and rangelands: grazing and prescribed burning. She has led two educational and research-based efforts utilizing grazing and fire on working lands. To increase grazing opportunities for overall management of rangelands, Stephanie created Match.Graze, https://matchgraze.com, an online platform to assist livestock grazers in finding lands to graze and landowners, with no livestock, in finding animals to reduce vegetation. She also created a geospatial web application to assist local landowners and managers prioritize and plan fuels reduction activities, https://wildfirefuelmapper.org/.

“Livestock producers are the stewards of our rangeland and pasture lands, and because of their management, we all benefit from the ecosystem services provided from these lands,” Larson says. “If we don’t support our local agriculture industries, our local food systems and community resiliency will be impacted. And, without the management of our working landscapes, our ecosystem services, natural resources and scenic attributes will be gone. Sustainable agriculture ensures that rancher’s use their resources to their best use, minimizing waste and generating long-term resiliency to mitigate production impacts.”

Larson was nominated by a team of 20 of her UC Cooperative Extension peers. One of that team, UC Cooperative Extension advisor Theresa Becchetti, summarized the reason for the notable support. “Stephanie is the gold standard of what a UC ANR advisor should be – she has a robust, relevant county program, provides leadership and vision for statewide programs, she offers her service to professional societies, and she is highly regarded by all who work with her.”

Annie Main is a UC Davis alumna who, along with her husband Jeff, owns Good Humus Produce, a certified organic family farm of more than twenty acres in Hungry Hollow, just to the southeast of Capay Valley. The diverse farm includes orchards, vegetables, herbs, flowers, cover crops, and California native hedgerows which are braided together in the landscape in a way that makes evident Annie and Jeff’s attentiveness and stewardship. Good Humus Produce is available at the Davis Farmer’s Market and the Davis Food Co-op—institutions they helped found—as well as other regional outlets and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that serves nearly two hundred members.

Main started farming after graduating in 1976. While at UCD she lived in a co-ed cooperative on campus called Agrarian Effort which highlighted food, gardening and cooperative living. The house started a buying club and eventually become a store front, and in time it became the Davis Food Co-op. As some of those organizers started the Davis Farmers Market, Main became very involved with that effort as well.

Good Humus is at the forefront of building sustainable food systems in Yolo County. Main says, “Farming organically is important. Learning to farm with nature instead of trying to control the environment is important for our future. Farming allows us to be able to provide food for our community while being connected to those that eat our food. Our customers know and trust where their food comes from and thus it creates a sense of relationship that I believe has been lost in today’s society.”
In addition to farming, Annie has pioneered many community nutrition and education efforts. Good Humus has been a partner in local school district lunch programs, farm-to-school visits, and watershed education courses for underprivileged teenagers. Annie has recently taken a leadership role in advocating for groundwater sustainability in Hungry Hollow and throughout Yolo County. The values of cooperation, social equity, and respect for nature continue to guide Annie’s work.

Beyond farming, Annie has inspired and mentored countless young people to participate in sustainable agriculture. Eliza Oldach, UC Davis graduate student who worked with Annie at her Davis Farmers Market stand said, “So much of what is essential to Davis – the bounty of good food grown in these soils, and the creation of community spaces for people to gather over that bounty – flows directly from Annie’s work. Her labor has touched this entire community.”

After the Bradford-Rominger award is presented to Larson and Main at the May 15th ceremony, distinguished speaker Hannah Wittman, Professor of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia, will give a talk called “Cultivating collective responses to climate change: Grassroots leadership and knowledge co-production in agroecological transitions networks in the Americas”.

Past winners of the Bradford-Rominger award include UC Cooperative Extension livestock waste management specialist, Deanne Meyer, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) advisors Rachael Long, Rachel Surls, and David Lewis; Sustainable Conservation Director of Resources (and UC Davis alumnus) Daniel Mountjoy; UC ANR advisor Rose Hayden Smith, specialist Ken Tate, and advisor Mary Bianchi; UC alumna Kelly Garbach; and lecturer emeritus Isao Fujimoto.

Eric Bradford and Charlie Rominger Agricultural Sustainability Leadership Award Ceremony
4:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 15, 2024
UC Davis Alumni Center, AGR Room