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.”