Dixon Water Foundation

Promoting healthy watersheds through sustainable land management

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DWF receives Leopold Conservation Award®

May 22, 2017 by Administrator

The state’s top land conservation award typically goes to a private ranch, but this year the honoree is the Dixon Water Foundation, a North Texas-based nonprofit which manages not one, but six different ranches, all of them devoted to demonstrating how good land management using cattle grazing can lead to more and better water for people and wildlife.

Founded in 1994 by the late Roger Dixon, the Dixon Water Foundation promotes healthy watersheds and sequestration of carbon through regenerative land management to ensure that present and future generations of Texans have the water resources they need. In 2005, the foundation acquired the Bear Creek Ranch in Parker County west of Fort Worth. In 2008, they went west to try their approach in drier soils, acquiring the Mimms Ranch near Marfa. Today the foundation operates six ranches totaling 21,960 acres. Each one utilizes a high intensity/low duration holistic grazing system which mimics the natural effect of large herds of bison which used to migrate through Texas.

On May 18, the foundation received $10,000 along with a Leopold Conservation Award crystal at the 22nd Lone Star Land Steward Awards dinner in Austin. This award is given in honor of renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold, and conferred each year by Sand County Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to private land conservation, in partnership with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. In Texas, the Leopold Conservation Award program is sponsored by the Lee and Ramona Bass Foundation.

Dixon Water Foundation staff and board members receive the Leopold Conservation Award at the 22nd Lone Star Land Steward Awards ceremony in Austin on May 18th. (Photo by Texas Park and Wildlife Department)

Photo by Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept.

Since 1996, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has hosted the Lone Star Land Steward Awards to recognize private landowners for habitat management and wildlife conservation.  In addition to the statewide Leopold award, multiple eco-region recipients are acknowledged in various parts of the state.

A primary purpose of the award is to elevate outstanding landowners who can serve as a positive example to other ranchers and landowners, and to demonstrate how good land management practices can be both profitable and ecologically sustainable.

“Even though they’re a nonprofit, the Dixon Water Foundation always makes management decisions with the bottom line in mind,” said Justin Dreibelbis, who leads TPWD’s private lands conservation efforts. “If their ranches don’t pay for themselves, the demonstration won’t apply to other landowners.”

And the foundation has demonstrated decades of results, using only one tool: cattle.

“The only tool that we use is cattle, because that’s the tool that’s on the landscape; that’s what most landowners across Texas are using,” said Robert Potts, foundation president. “If you’re ranching for the long-term, this is the way to build the wealth in the land. This is going to be a much more profitable way, we believe, to run a ranch. Because you’re not mining the soil, you’re building the soil. That makes it more resilient during drought, and makes it more productive when you do get rain.”

Alongside its cattle enterprise, the foundation is committed to education, outreach and community service, and its list of these credits goes on and on for pages in the award nomination form. For example, Mimms Ranch serves as an outdoor classroom for K-8 students at Marfa International School. Students study sustainable land management, water quality, soil health, desert plants and animals, and other topics through hands-on activities at the ranch. Similarly, more than 1,200 students from Aledo I.S.D. west of Fort Worth complete field labs at Bear Creek Ranch. From studying how wildlife rebound after drought to pronghorn restoration, the foundation also hosts research projects on its properties in partnership with multiple colleges and universities.

Ultimately, it all comes back to water, which the foundation views as the single most important resource for Texas’ future.

“Lots of people worry about how much rain falls,” Potts said, “but what really matters is how much rain gets in the ground. That’s the rain you can use. The rain that runs off, that creates flash floods, that erodes creek banks, that silts up reservoirs — that doesn’t do you any good.”

“What’s easy to happen in these drier environments is that you lose the ground cover, and when that happens you end up with bare ground, and when you have bare ground it’s like not having skin on the earth,” Potts explained. “So we’ve been really pleased that we’ve been able to bring back a lot of the native cover with low grasses like curly mesquite interspersed with bunch grasses like blue gramma.”

“By owning these ranches and being able to raise and sell cattle and support the economics of the enterprise, we’re also able to build wealth in the soil. We’re able to build micro-life in the soil, sequester carbon in the soil, create healthier forage, and then that pays dividends over a long period of time.”

 

Filed Under: Recent News Tagged With: awards, ranching, wildlife

More international accolades for the Josey Pavilion

September 8, 2016 by Administrator

The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion has been honored with an American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design. The Josey Pavilion is the state’s first Living Building, the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment. Since 1994, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press, have organized The American Architecture Awards to honor the best, new significant buildings and landscape and planning projects designed or built in the United States and abroad by the most important American architects, landscape architects, and urban planners practicing nationally and internationally and International architects and designers practicing inside the USA.

Filed Under: In The Media Tagged With: awards, Josey Pavilion

Pavilion officially certified as Living Building

June 3, 2016 by Administrator

The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion is now officially a certified Living Building, following a year-long rigorous performance evaluation. Lake|Flato architects donated more than 1,500 hours in designing this project. Their work was recognized recently by Public Architecture’s 1+ program, which connects non-profit organizations with pro bono architecture services. Public Architecture published an excellent overview of the pavilion in a new case study.

 

lake-flato-living-building-announcement

Filed Under: Recent News Tagged With: awards, Josey Pavilion

Pavilion receives AIA environment award

April 25, 2016 by Administrator

The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion is among the prestigious AIA Committee on the Environment’s (COTE’s) Top Ten award winners, as reported by Architectural Record. Designed by Lake|Flato, the pavilion was recently certified as Texas’s first Living Building. The education and event center on Dixon Ranches Leo Unit has received several other honors, including the 2015 Architizer A+ Award for Architecture + Sustainability, the 2015 Texas Society of Architects Design Award, and the 2014 AIA San Antonio Design Award.

 

Filed Under: In The Media Tagged With: awards, Josey Pavilion

Josey Pavilion in Wall Street Journal’s Best Architecture

December 27, 2015 by Administrator

“This year’ s best buildings proved that architecture doesn’t have to be loud to be important,” begins Julie Iovine in the Wall Street Journal’s article, “The Best Architecture of 2015.” The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion tops their list of four buildings that “stand out not only for their silhouettes but for working with what already exists, with what their communities need, with the environment and, above all, with an expectation of lasting for longer than a season of attention-grabbing headlines.”

The pavilion is the foundation’s 5,000 square-foot meeting and education center at Dixon Ranches Leo Unit in Cooke County. It’s on track to become Texas’s first Living Building, the most rigorous international green-building certification.

“Architects Ted Flato and David Lake posit that a connection to beautiful architecture can lead to caring and a desire to preserve and conserve one’s surroundings. This low-key, elegant building makes a case that it could truly be so,” Iovine writes.

Filed Under: In The Media Tagged With: awards, Josey Pavilion

Foundation honored at environmental awards

May 11, 2015 by Administrator

tceq awards ceremonyThe Dixon Water Foundation was honored with a Texas Environmental Excellence Award in Agriculture at the TCEQ’s Environmental Trade Fair and Conference in Austin last week. Ranch manager Casey Wade and board member Leslie Rauscher were on hand to accept the award. TCEQ produced this video about the foundation’s work for the ceremony:

Filed Under: Recent News Tagged With: awards, ranching

Environmental excellence award in Alpine newspaper

April 2, 2015 by Administrator

A film crew visited Dixon Ranches Mimms Unit this week to shoot a video for the Texas Environmental Excellence Awards ceremony in May, during which the foundation will receive one of the prestigious TCEQ awards for agriculture. Alpine Avalanche reporter Jim Street joined the crew and penned this article about the foundation.

 

Filed Under: In The Media Tagged With: awards, Mimms Unit

Gainesville Daily Register features foundation’s TEEA award

March 14, 2015 by Administrator

The Dixon Water Foundation’s Texas Environmental Excellence Award was featured in the Gainesville Daily Register.

“We’re deeply honored to be recognized by TCEQ and the governor’s office,” said Robert Potts, the foundation’s president and CEO in the article by Kit Chase. “We are thankful for all of the hard-working people and collaborative partnerships that make our ranches, as well as our grant and education programs, successful. And we hope this recognition sparks more interest in the sustainable grazing practices we demonstrate on our land.”

Filed Under: In The Media Tagged With: awards, education, ranching, research

OUR MISSION

The Dixon Water Foundation promotes healthy watersheds through sustainable land management to ensure that future generations have the water resources they need.
https://youtu.be/WdtvsHgsnPo

NORTH TEXAS OFFICE

4528 County Road 398
Decatur, TX 76234

WEST TEXAS OFFICE

P.O. Box 177
Marfa, TX 79843

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