HMI is excited to announce three new members who have joined our Board of Directors.
Seth Wilner has been a Holistic Management International Certified Educator since 2005. For 22 years he has worked as an agent educator with University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension where he specializes in farm business management with an emphasis on whole farm planning.
Seth works across the state and throughout the Northeast Region. He has delivered numerous presentations on Holistic Management throughout the northeast region, including several multi-day workshops for both farmers and agricultural service providers. He received his B.S. from the University of Connecticut in soil science and his M.S. from the University of Wisconsin in Soil Fertility. Seth also served in the Peace Corps working with farmers in Senegal, West Africa from 1993 to 1995.
Seth's areas of interest are in: financial planning, enterprise analysis, cost of production, effective communication, goal setting, whole farm planning, effective adult education, program development, program evaluation, and Beginning Farmer/Rancher Curriculum. Seth feels one of his most used talents in farms is systems analysis. He especially likes to hone in on social and financial systems as they relate to moving towards farm sustainability. Recently, due to demand, Seth has focused a great deal of his efforts on succession planning and farm transfer work.
When asked why he is excited to join the Board, Seth said it has been a dream of his for decades. He is excited to be part of the BOD team and bring his systems thinking and outlook as a resource. But he says he enjoys the synergy he experiences in serving on Boards and he emphasizes that he sees himself as just another team member working toward a common goal of advancing Holistic Management and HMI.
Alejandro Carrillo is a fourth-generation rancher, and he is quite familiar with the challenges of running a profitable cattle ranch in the Chihuahuan desert. Because annual precipitation seldom exceeds nine inches, every drop counts when it comes to growing more grasses. Grazing year-round with only sea salt as an input, he is not willing to waste any water in such a brittle environment.
An on-going drought that ranchers faced on these arid landscapes forced Alejandro to look for better ways of doing things, so in 2005 he took his first Holistic Management class. Since then, he has traveled and learned from ranchers around the world and through trial and error, he has adapted these learning experiences into his ranching environment. Today, Alejandro can carry three times more cattle than neighboring ranches on a per-acre basis, while substantially lowering his inputs. To accomplish this, he has relied on his adaptive grazing observation and management skills, selecting cattle that thrive under his conditions and management, and developing a solid, well-distributed, reliable water system to graze every paddock anytime of the year.
Before getting his boots on the ground full time, Alejandro worked as a software engineer in various countries. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Monterrey Tech and a Master of Science degree in technical management from Johns Hopkins University.
Jozua Lambrecht is from South Africa and divides his time between their home in Somerset West and their family farm in Sutherland, one of the coldest places in South Africa, where they farm with sheep. He is married to his wife Therese and they have two daughters.
Jozua has a background in education and is passionate about how people learn and change. He did his first course in Holistic Management in 2002 and completed the Certified Educator Training Program in 2006. He also did a Permaculture Design Course in 2001.
Jozua has been involved for over 20 years in adult education and worked on a variety of sustainable development projects in rural communities in Southern Africa in which the Holistic Management framework was used in various ways to develop appropriate curricula and training courses. He also worked extensively with the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe adapting the Holistic Management framework for communal farmers and communities in Africa where full-time herding is still the preferred livestock management strategy. He also does facilitation, strategic planning and conflict resolution for farming and ranching families by using the Holistic Management framework.
Jozua is very excited about joining HMI’s board and looks forward to learning from and working with other board members to strengthen HMI.
Welcome, Seth, Alejandro, and Jozua!