S9 Ep7: Safeguarding Agricultural Legacy for Generations to Come with Lily Verdone
“If you have healthy soil then you have a healthy system.” —Lily Verdone
Series: World Food Day
Our agricultural lands are the beating heart of our communities, tended to by the hardworking hands of farmers and ranchers. Safeguarding these vital landscapes is not just an environmental imperative, but a moral obligation— a promise we make to those who came before us, and a gift we must pass on to generations yet to come.
As Lily Verdone settles into her third year as CEO of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), her focus has shifted towards reinvesting in the lands the organization has worked tirelessly to protect. By channeling resources into innovative stewardship programs, MALT aims to not only safeguard the land but also empower the farmers and ranchers who are the backbone of Marin's agricultural community. Lily believes that this reinvestment will unlock the full potential of the land, benefiting both the environment and the people who depend on it.
In this episode, Justine and Lily explore the critical role that land trusts and conservation organizations play in addressing pressing environmental and agricultural challenges. Join in as they discuss innovative programs that support farmers and drive holistic, systems-based approaches to land management, the value of partnerships, and the trend of younger, diverse leaders bringing fresh perspectives to traditional conservation organizations.
Connect with Lily:
Lily Verdone is the CEO of Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), a leading land trust focused on protecting farmland in Marin County, California. Lily has over 20 years of experience in environmental conservation, having previously worked with organizations like The Nature Conservancy on climate change and land management initiatives.
As CEO of MALT, Lily is responsible for leading the organization's efforts to preserve over 60,000 acres of agricultural land through conservation easements and sustainable stewardship practices. She is passionate about finding innovative solutions to support the viability of local farming and ranching communities.
Episode Highlights:
00:49 What is MALT?
07:44 Protect the Land
10:16 The Water Conservation Issue
15:30 Shifting the Quality of Life
18:17 The 5 Pillars of MALT
23:17 Building Partnerships
26:23 The Land Trust Movement
Tweets:
This week, we are diving into the complex, interconnected challenges facing farmers and ranchers. Tune in as @jreichman and @MALT_AG Executive Director, Lily Verdone share the importance of soil health, water conservation, and economic viability for thriving local food systems. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #Season9 #MALT #LandProtection #LandTrust #InvestBack #SoilHealth #WaterConservation #FarmlandProtection #ClimateResilience #SustainableLandUse
Inspirational Quotes:
03:57 “The biggest problem we're facing now is climate change and it hits on all factors of our lives, from the economy to how we live day-to-day, how we make choices, how we vote, how we enjoy our world, and how we think about the future.” —Lily Verdone
9:09 “The solutions that nature brings are so clear, so easy and so streamlined.”—Lily Verdone
10:33 “These episodic environmental issues that have been happening more frequently and with less time in between leads to the need to not just be resilient and bounce back, but to bounce forward into what the new future is going to be.” —Lily Verdone
11:11 “If you have healthy soil then you have a healthy system.” —Lily Verdone
16:23 “It's the quality of life, it's the accessibility, it's the ability to maintain it independently— that's the goal. We want to promote organic farming methods. We want to promote water conservation and reduce chemical inputs so that we can preserve soil health.” —Justine Reichman
16:54 “We all care about the land. We need to take care of the people who are feeding us and who are stewarding our lands.” —Lily Verdone
20:46 “To be viable for agriculture, we need to have land to do it on. But there's also other things that make agriculture viable— the economy, making sure that we have people coming in and can afford and be able to access land. Housing is a critical piece as well, too. There are lots of nuances within what it means to have viable agriculture in a community.” —Lily Verdone
27:34 “A lot of women are coming in and people of color taking into these leadership roles. It's been exciting to see this next generation of leaders come in and start taking over the helm of more of these traditional conservation organizations and making it their own.” —Lily Verdone
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman: Good morning, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. With me today is Lily Verdone. She is the CEO of MALT, Marin Agricultural Land Trust. I'm so very pleased to have you with me today.
Hi, Lily.
Lily Verdone: Hi, and thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Justine Reichman: It's my pleasure, and it's mutual here. So for those not familiar with what you do with Marin Agricultural Land Trust, MALT, would you just let everybody know what that is?
Lily Verdone: Of course. So MALT, Marin Agricultural Land Trust is a land trust. We're based in Marin County in Northern California, and MALT was the first land trust in the nation that focused on Farmland Protection. So we were founded in 1980 by two women, Ellen Straus and Phyllis Faber, who brought together this coalition of ranchers, environmentalists and community leaders to protect the future of farming in Marin County. And at that time, there was a lot of pressure from development. There was not a lot of support for agriculture. It wasn't connected to all these staff benefits that it is now. And so our co-founders, Ellen Straus and Phyllis Faber, came together from really different backgrounds. Ellen Straus was a dairy woman and came from a dairy family. Phyllis Faber was an environmentalist in East Marin. They brought this group together and created a movement that's now impacted across the country. There are dozens of agricultural land trusts throughout the nation. There is a big land trust community throughout the United States and internationally. And now, 40 plus years later, MALT has protected close to 60,000 acres of farmland in Marin.
We're working with farmers and ranchers across the North Bay thinking about how not only to protect land for agricultural use, but what it means to build stewardship. How to actually work through the land has outputs that are benefiting people, the economy and the environment. And our mission is to protect Marin agricultural land for agricultural use. We have a vision to have a thriving and inclusive agricultural community in a healthy and diverse natural environment. So that's us in a nutshell. I came on, like you said, in 2022. I was the first woman CEO to lead the organization. And it just feels really amazing to be working with such a great organization. We're a community based organization, and so we're in service of our community, which is a fantastic group of people. Not only farmers and ranchers, but people who care about the land. And it's exciting,
Justine Reichman: That is a tall order what you guys are doing, and there's a lot of work to be done. I'm excited to hear from you how that connects with your past and all that you've done before and leads you to what you hope to achieve, going further. Each episode that we have features some part of this global conversation. I'm just curious, the role that you plan to make given your background, so if we could, let's just start a little bit before you come on board here and talk about what your mission has always been. Because I don't know, has it changed, has it evolved, or have you always had your eye on the prize here?
Lily Verdone: I think the proper place to start is that I grew up in this area. I was born in Marin County, and I grew up in Marin County. And then we moved to Sonoma County. I've always been so fortunate to be immersed in this beautiful environment. And I have never had a straight path. I put myself through both my undergraduate, my graduate degree, and just really kind of finding my path as I made it. I immersed myself in the experience. I was doing a pre vet program at University of Nevada, Reno, and I had a talk on environmental restoration. And this was back in the late 90's, and I had no idea that that was even a thing. I did some research, and I quickly was able to transfer down to Sonoma State, which at the time was a really forward thinking restoration track in their environmental studies program, which was kind of one of the only few in the undergraduate space. And then things just started plugging away from there. I worked my way through my undergraduate degree. I transferred and did a master's degree there at Sonoma State as well. And just started working.
“The biggest problem we're facing now is climate change and it hits on all factors of our lives, from the economy to how we live day-to-day, how we make choices, how we vote, how we enjoy our world, and how we think about the future.” —Lily Verdone
I got my first role in Sonoma, and I was working on invasive weeds and watershed management, and then I just started plugging away from there and have quickly found that my, although I went into it with a very heavy science approach, that's not how I think. I'm more of a big scale planner. I started working my way up. I worked with the Nature Conservancy for over a decade, doing a lot of work around climate change and people, nature and how we have impacts on the ground and impact communities in a positive way that's bringing people together to solve big problems. The biggest problem I think we're facing now is climate change in that environmental space, and it hits on all factors of our lives from the economy. Like I said earlier, how we live day to day, how we make choices, how we vote, how we enjoy our world and the world around us, and how we think about the future. So for me, that's really the main driver of the work that I do is bringing people together to solve problems, specifically around land use and around climate change. And so coming to be able to work for MALT is such a dream because it really we're bringing all those things together. We have the food space, which is so important. We can't have food without clean water and healthy soils. And people who have a viable economic background and can actually afford to live in an area and work in the area, and so bringing everybody together around agriculture is such a fantastic way to solve those problems.
Justine Reichman: I appreciate your story and how you got where you are. It all seems to just pile on top of each other to make the perfect amount of, make sense. You're following it. You can follow the thread really easily. It's really perfect so I appreciate you sharing that because I know that our viewers and listeners really appreciate the story behind the person. I think it's inspiring, invigorating, and it also talks to sort of what's important to you. And I'm curious, because as I talk to many people that are trying to create change, whether around climate change, whether around food insecurity, whether it's better for you foods, one thing pops up for me that I keep wanting to ask is, was this because of a passion? Or was this because of the problem, or passion for the problem?
“The solutions that nature brings are so clear, so easy and so streamlined.”—Lily Verdone
Lily Verdone: Can it be both? I'm so passionate about the work. For me, nature has always been very healing. A place that I can go and spend time outside and I feel better personally. That's always been the case for me. I grew up and was fortunate enough to be able to live in an area in Northern California, it is so beautiful. You can be at the beach, and you can be in the redwoods, be in the mountains. And so that's always been appealing to me. I'm also a problem solver, and so I see nature through this beneficial place for people personally. And then I also see it as a place to solve problems. If you're thinking about climate change, if you're thinking about fire resilience, or clean water needs, or agriculture and having local foods, you need to have the place. And so being able to protect land is a really critical way and a good first step in a permanent input. So if we're able to protect land and then use it in a way that's beneficial, and whether you're protecting agricultural land and it's working land and natural land, and you're doing better practices for soil health, then you're bringing in more carbon, and you're helping reduce impacts for emissions. And so that's a huge benefit. The solutions that nature brings are so clear, so easy and so streamlined. That's where my passion, and a problem solving aspect come together for me.
Justine Reichman: I appreciate that. I think to myself when I hear problem solvers, most entrepreneurs and people at senior levels just want to solve the problems. They want to fix things. Am I right? We see it's a clear path. I don't understand why nobody else is seeing it, but let's go. So as we talk about that and problem solving, one thing that has become a really large issue even more here on the West Coast, I think, is water conservation because we have such a problem with that. So I'm wondering your thoughts on any strategies for sustainability among the land trusts and working to create an environment that is understanding what's going on with global change, and creating strategies and changes with farmers to preserve the land and build a more regenerative system.
“These episodic environmental issues that have been happening more frequently and with less time in between leads to the need to not just be resilient and bounce back, but to bounce forward into what the new future is going to be.” —Lily Verdone
Lily Verdone: Water is such a huge issue. This year, we've been so fortunate coming out of a massive drought that was epic in all proportions. And we'll see it again, and we'll see it sooner than we want to see it. And these episodic environmental issues that have been happening and then happening more frequently with less time in between, it really leads to the need to plan, to be prepared and to build not just be resilient and bounce back, but to bounce forward into what the new future is going to be. When we think about natural and working lands, just go to that immediately. We need to have good soil health for so many reasons. It's the baseline of life. And if you have healthy soil, then you have a healthy system. You have the ability to absorb water, to maintain really robust water sources when it does rain, that's critical. You have healthy riparian areas, creek areas that are adjacent to all these working lands that if you have healthy soils, you're not having run-off. You're having cleaner streams. You're having more vegetation that's growing within the streams that then allows for more filtration. To me, that is a really good first step.
One of the cool things that MALT was doing when I came on is that we were addressing drought. Really innovative for us, and really innovative throughout the country, small grants programs for drought. It was an emergency action that our board came up with, and our staff came up with. We were hearing from farmers and ranchers that they were about to go under because they didn't have water coming into the second year of the drought about three, four years ago. And we shifted our approach, and we created a small grants program to grant all four rows and ranchers in Marin County with this drought resilience funding. We end up giving away almost a million dollars in grants so people could tap into different water sources so people could move and use fencing to move cattle around to do different grazing approaches. And so there's different ways on the land. I think regenerative is a really good term that's being used more and more. That approach climate smart agriculture is another term that's thrown around. But really, it's just being smart with how you're using your land, what you're doing. You know how to keep the soil healthy, and that's a really good way to not only have good benefits on the actual output of the agriculture, but on water retention, soil health, all those key pieces that we move forward on and want to see happening.
Justine Reichman: I'm still on the million dollars and wondering what the impact of that in terms of the land, the people that it serves, etcetera.
Lily Verdone: It was so impactful even if you think about it at community level. I talked to farmers and ranchers in our community all the time who said that they were able to receive a grant from us through this drought resilience and water security program. It's an acronym for drought, a good way for water. So they said that they received these grants, and they were about to go under, and they wouldn't have been able to get water for their cows, water for their operation. And so just that community impact is huge. And when the drought ended last year, we didn't want to lose that impact. And so we went out and fundraised more dollars, private dollars, and created a permanent Small Grants Program. And we've now launched our third round of small grants. And so these go to all farmers and ranchers, available to all farmers and ranchers throughout Marin County, and they're up to $50,000 and we've changed the focal round. So the first round was for climate resilience. The second round in the spring was for biodiversity, for agricultural working lands. And then we're doing another climate resilience round right now that's open. So it's really exciting to see that. And for a small land trust, community land trust, to be able to do this, it feels really good.
Justine Reichman: Do you have any statistics on the impact?
Lily Verdone: We have data on the number of projects and things like that. But kind of those softer statistics, we don't have anything. But we've done a lot of interviews, and we've got great videos and things like that. Those are harder for us to get. Once we probably close out two rounds of the small grants, plus with the drought resilience grants, we can start gathering a little bit more data on it. But we've got some good impact numbers and things like that.
Justine Reichman: I think it'd be great to survey everyone to say that without this grant, would you have gone under without this grant, what would have happened to the animals without this grant? How many people would not be able to have been served food, or how much more things like that would be interesting.
Lily Verdone: I'm not a farmer, I'm not a rancher so I can't tell a story as well. But going out, there's one family in particular where they were going to drive 20, 30 minutes twice a day to fill their water truck up then bring it to their cattle operation. And so the family was working almost 24 hours a day for this period. And so then, we were able to give them funding for a grant to tap into a different water source, and they then got to take a little bit of a break. And it was a reprieve from working for eight months straight, going twice a day to get started at 4:00 in the morning, taking a little nap after, and then doing it all again. That quality of life shift is huge.
“It's the quality of life, it's the accessibility, it's the ability to maintain it independently— that's the goal. We want to promote organic farming methods. We want to promote water conservation and reduce chemical inputs so that we can preserve soil health.” —Justine Reichman
Justine Reichman: It's the quality of life, it's the accessibility, it's the ability to maintain it independently you're hoping you can do, because then you can be able to provide, have a life, not get overworked, and also work towards conservation of all these things. That's the goal. We want to promote all these things. We want to promote organic farming methods. We want to promote water conservation and reduce chemical inputs so that we can preserve soil health at the end of the day.
Lily Verdone: It seems so simple. When I was working with the Nature Conservancy and I was working internationally, I was working in the Gulf of Mexico in the five Gulf States. I was working in Mexico and Cuba, and we were working on projects, agricultural projects that had the same issues, very narrow margins to make improvements on the land. Overworked families, staff, and really very minimal time to innovate or do practices that would then take them to the next level. So whether you're in California, whether you're in Texas, whether you're in central Mexico or Cuba, all these farmers and ranchers are having the same issue. That is such a huge data point right there, and we need to shift it because we all need to eat. We all care about the land, and we need to take care of the people who are feeding us and who are stewarding our lands.
Justine Reichman: I agree. It's clear for me from the few minutes that we've been talking about why you're doing this. You've joined MALT and you've been there, what are you hoping to spearhead in the next year? It's going to be your third year there, and you've been there for two years. So tell us where was MALT before you came on, and what are some of the things you're hoping to achieve through MALT, with MALT, and because of MALT?
Lily Verdone: Like I said in the intro, we've been the first, and we have focused so heavily on protecting agricultural land through conservation easements. We have done a fantastic job, and we've been so successful. But it's also a time now that we need to shift a little bit, that we've been so successful that we actually now need to think about what's the next phase, and how do we steward the lands we're protecting, invest back into those and then think about what's happening next for an organization. And so my role coming in was really thinking about how we first secure the organization and really be focused on some key pillars of work. I came in at a pretty hard time not only for just the organization in general, but for the United States focus coming out of covid. It was a challenging time. We had a lot of turnover on staff. There's just a lot of unrest happening and feelings of not being stable and safe. And so I came in and worked with our fantastic board and our team, and we really stabilized the organization. We rolled out a conservation strategy of working through five pillars to focus where we're going as an organization.
So the first pillar is to preserve agriculture. The second is to protect biodiversity. The third is to build climate resilience. And then the fourth is to connect our community. And then the final one is to strengthen the organization. That's the work that I solidified in the first year. This last year, I've been working really hard with the board to think about what is the future of the organization. How is the board moving forward? Supporting our work as a nonprofit board of directors is critical to be strong, to be well resourced, and to then be able to give back to the organization and grow. This coming year, my third year in, I'm really excited to be growing our stewardship work thinking about, what is next for MALT? How can we invest back into the lands building out this small grants program, thinking about what's next for land protection? And how we help with not just protecting land because that's viable. We need to be viable for agriculture. We need to have land to do it on. But there's also other things that make agriculture viable. The economy. making sure that we have people coming in and can afford and be able to access land, Housing is a critical piece as well too. So lots of nuances within what it means to have viable agriculture in a community.
“We all care about the land. We need to take care of the people who are feeding us and who are stewarding our lands.” —Lily Verdone
Justine Reichman: So as you're building out your strategy for this, with the team, with the board, what role does research play in all this for you?
Lily Verdone: I have mixed approaches to research. I think sometimes, we really need it. And then sometimes I'm like, let's just get it done. And I think that there's been so much fantastic research around stewardship and land protection, and what it means to do good work on the land. How to get more carbon sequestration and better approaches for land protection, water retention, all those things. And so I think that there's a lot of research around that. What I'm really interested in seeing more research around is more of these social sciences. What does it mean to have better housing? What does it mean to have an economically viable approach to farming? What does it take to get people from wanting to farm to actually farming? And so I think that there's some really good focal areas of research that we could be doing. And then partnering is always critical. I'm not going to have our team focus on doing research when we can partner with an amazing university or fantastic group of people who are already doing that, and that's their specialty.
Justine Reichman: It makes good sense to me. Why reinvent the wheel, right? You might ask other questions that might be different research, but it's a great place to start Especially to have that university resource because they have so much, they have money, they've got people, they've got time, they've got all the different things that they need that we only wish we had the resources to create our own organizations.
Lily Verdone: Absolutely. We're an applied community based organization. We're not a research organization, but there's plenty of space for us to connect and partner.
Justine Reichman: Who would be your ideal partners?
Lily Verdone: We've got amazing partners right now, and so that's great.
Justine Reichman: Maybe you could give a shout out to a couple or a few partners that really make an impact for you.
Lily Verdone: We had the UC Berkeley Cal Bears on boards. Graduate students work with us throughout the whole year, and they come from the Haas School of Business, and they focus on board health. And we had really amazing relationships throughout the year to help us with our board health, thinking about governance and all those really fun things about boards of directors that every day you don't really dig into. And so that was fantastic. We work locally with our resource conservation districts. We have a fantastic one in Marin. There's a few in Sonoma County. We have great partners at the UC extension. We're so fortunate here. We're part of a collective, the marine carbon project that's been going on for a really long time and has made so many inroads talking about research on carbon farming and how important that is that's grown to be a really household term, almost. And there's funding at the federal level for carbon farming across the United States now, and thanks to a lot of the marine Carbon Project. So we're fortunate. We're in the Bay Area. There's so many people thinking about so many different things here that we have the most amazing partnerships.
Justine Reichman: That's great. And I'm sure you only look to bring on more. Is there anything you feel like there's a need for a specific resource or partnership that would be really impactful for you?
Lily Verdone: I think right now, we're all struggling with what is the future of agriculture, and how can we really make sure that people know how valuable it is to have working lands in our community. There's a lot of dairies going out of business because they can't maintain it, it's too expensive. Water's expensive, feeds are expensive. So I would love to be able to support our local dairies, they're so critical. They're a part of the history of Marin County in the North Bay. I would love to see them thrive. And so if we could get economic viability studies on how to keep them going, what it would take to build the land connection of how to build back dairies and get people to dairy again would be fantastic.
Justine Reichman: If somebody's listening, and was a great resource who wants to recommend it to you, how can they contact you?
Lily Verdone: Get a hold of me through our website. We've got a fantastic website, malt.org, and I'm around.
Justine Reichman: While we're talking about that, and while we're looking for that resource, we can invite people to connect with you if they have an idea, a resource or something they want to tell you to talk to. I'm curious, because you mentioned this other thing a few minutes ago about all the other land trusts, is there anything you're seeing at these other land trusts that inspire you to do something differently, or that you want to follow in their footsteps and what they're doing?
Lily Verdone: Yeah, that's such a great question. So the land trust community is fantastic. There's hundreds of land trusts throughout the United States now, and there's a centralized organization called the Land Trust Alliance. And the Land Trust Alliance brings together land trusts throughout the country, and is a really great resource to not only connect people working in the same space, but also that there's an accreditation process so land trusts can be accredited through the Land Trust Alliance and share resources. Have good best practices for boards for protecting land, for all the legal pieces that go to holding land. And so that's a great resource. And I'm always looking forward to that. We get together on that annual basis and are able to connect with people across the country on what people are doing. I think for me personally, it's been interesting to see the last few years, and this is a trend in a lot of different industries. Especially with covid, you see a lot of the leaders who've been in a leadership position and starting to retire and make space for younger people. A lot of women are coming in, people of color taking into these leadership roles. And so we've seen a lot of that with the land trust movement, and so that's been really exciting to see this next generation of leaders come in and start taking over the helm of more of these traditional conservation organizations, taking it on and making it their own. And so I'm excited to see that. I love connecting with other leaders, other executive directors and different land trusts who are recently coming in. We can share problems, we can share solutions and think creatively about what is next for land trusts, not just our own.
Justine Reichman: Wow. So I think that's another great invitation to invite other folks of other land trusts that are innovating and strategizing in the space to connect. Lily, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate and love learning about you. I love learning about MALT and all the things that you guys are hoping to do. If anybody that's listening or watching wanted to volunteer, get involved and participate, what would be the best way to do that?
Lily Verdone: Like I said, jump on our website. We've got a ton of great resources. There are good videos if you're interested in learning. And then my contact information is on the website. All of our staff are listed and our board, and so reach out.
Justine Reichman: We'd love to hear from you. Awesome. Thank you so much, Lily. And just for those folks that are not familiar, can you just let us know what your website is?
Lily Verdone: It's malt.org.
Justine Reichman: Wonderful. We would look forward to continuing this conversation down the road to see what kind of progress you're making and new partnerships that are coming up, and how things are evolving because land conservation is for all of us. So important and dictates the future of our world, our food and so many things. So we're on your side if we can help.
Lily Verdone: Well, we would love to have you, and we have lots of events out too on the land. So if you're in Marin County, come out on a hike. Come out and taste some cheese and enjoy the beautiful area.
Justine Reichman: Awesome. Thank you, Lily.
Lily Verdone: Thank you.
