This week I’m visiting with Navona Gallegos. Navona is a rider, an ecologist, and a farmer. She is passionate about soil - not dirt. We’ll discuss the difference in the podcast. She lives in New Mexico, so she’s in a very beautiful landscape but one that is completely different from what I am used to. So I was really looking forward to learning how she manages horses in a climate that is so very different from my own.

We began not with the soil but with horses. Navona grew up on a ranch so part of her childhood experience was riding out on the range. But she also fell in love with jumping. She competed in Europe so talk about contrast - ranch raised horse to show horses whose turnout is tiny paddock. That’s the starting point of a conversation that takes us from the high pressure world of show jumping to the role our horses play in connecting us back to the land.