Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.
PESCADERO, CaliforniaThe climate crisis is the trendiest topic for Democratic presidential candidates, and their trendiest idea is that agriculture can be a big part of the solution instead of a big part of the problem. Theyre pledging to pay farmers and ranchers to capture more carbon in fields and pastures. Theyre promising a new era of smaller and gentler regenerative agriculture to help reverse the damage conventional agriculture inflicts on the land and the atmosphere.
Bernie Sanders, as usual, has the most radical rhetoric: Were going to end factory farming, because its a danger to the environment! But almost all the Democratic hopefuls, from Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker to also-rans like Tim Ryan, are pitching regenerative solutions to degraded soils, polluted waters, and an overheated planet, not to mention their partys political struggles in rural America. Imagine what it would mean if a net-zero-emissions cattle farm were as big a symbol of American achievement in fighting the climate crisis as an electric vehicle, says Pete Buttigieg.
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Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate activist who launched his own long-shot campaign in July, isnt just imagining what that would mean. Hes trying to make it happen.
Steyer and his quintessentially California wife, the banker/social justice activist Kathryn (Kat) Taylor, are the proud proprietors of TomKat Ranch, a cutting-edge regenerative grazing operation on 1,800 acres of coastal scrub and grassy hills an hour south of their San Francisco home. While President Donald Trump accuses Democrats of wanting to ban beefand prominent climate activists and alternative meat entrepreneurs denounce beefSteyer is quietly producing beef: grass-fed, hormone-free and intensively managed through a system that mimics the wild buffalo herds that once roamed Americas grassy expanses. Hes also financing exhaustive scientific research on the property, hoping to prove that ranching in harmony with nature, without lethal chemicals to protect grass or corn feedlots to fatten cattle, can pull carbon from the air, hold water on the land, and produce enough delicious meat to disrupt the beef-industrial complex.
Basically, TomKat is an unusually spacious and scenic lab, experimenting on 110 mooing, cud-chewing, manure-dropping specimens, aiming to produce evidence to back changes on the agricultural operations that cover half the land on earth. So far, its experimentslike Steyers campaign, which has attracted enough support to qualify him for the fall debates but not enough to contendhave produced mixed results. TomKats regenerative approach has provided clear environmental benefits, reducing erosion and enhancing plant diversity at the ranch, and its scientific monitoring program has already been extended throughout the state. But theres no evidence that its sequestering more carbon in the soil to help the climate, much less demonstrating a viable business model for ranchers who arent billionaires.
We want to change the way people think about working lands, Steyer said in an interview. I mean, if we can show scientifically in the real world that this stuff really works and agriculture doesnt have to be destructive, that would be priceless.
Tom Steyer and his wife Kathryn "Kat" Taylor own TomKat Ranch, a cattle farm in Pescadero, California. | JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX PICTURES
Well, not quite priceless. Steyer and Taylor have sunk more than $10 million into TomKat, and the sales from their premium LeftCoast GrassFed beef brand dont come close to covering their costs. Steyer joked to me that ranching has been an expensive hobby, but thats the point: Most cattlemen cant afford to risk capital on unconventional eco-theories about holistic management and nature-based grazing, unless someone like Steyer can prove it will benefit their land and their bottom line.
Steyers fellow Democratic candidatesand sometimes, Steyer himselftend to talk about regenerative agriculture as a no-brainer, a mere matter of mustering the political will to get the right incentives in place, as though farmers and ranchers would then instantly transform their longstanding relationship to the land. Its a hot topic these days, featured in the Green New Deal climate resolution, in more than 200 state-level soil health bills, and even in corporate Americas emerging climate agenda. General Mills has announced a push to advance regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres of its supply chain, and the Boston-based startup Indigo Agriculture has built a multibillion-dollar valuation around scaling up regenerative practices to soak up carbon.
But theres not much consensus about what regenerative agriculture even is, much less whether it can convert farms and ranches from planet-threatening carbon emitters to planet-saving carbon sinks. TomKat is a moonshot effort to change that.
Steyer is a moonshot kind of guy, a summa cum laude Yale graduate who left Wall Street to make his own fortune investing in distressed assets. Some activists grumble that hes now transforming himself into a distressed asset, throwing away $100 million that could help save the climate on a middle-of-the-pack vanity campaign. He genuinely seems to think he can help save the climate by winning, and hell obviously have the resources to make his case; he often talks about how his father prosecuted Nazis at Nuremburg, his mother taught prisoners read, and everyone has a role to play for the world. In any case, he and Taylor are already throwing money at the climate in other waysfunding a clean energy policy center at Stanford, investing in the alternative protein company JUST, Inc., launching the environmental advocacy group NextGen America, even financing a national movement to impeach the climate denier in the White House.
TomKat is a more obscure project, another illustration of Steyers willingness to take on big problems and big corporations against big odds. Its also an illustration of his willingness to defer to his wife of 33 years, because the ranch is Kat Taylors baby. And if theres such a thing as a typical politicians spouse, she isnt it. Shes a 61-year-old CEO with a Harvard undergrad degree, a Stanford law and business degree, and six tattoos. Shes an in-your-face dynamo with an out-there bohemian vibe; her official bio states that she and Steyer have four grown children, each pursuing their one wild and precious life. Shes an unlikely agricultural crusader who believes that nature knows best, that living soils should not be dismissed as dirt, that the billions of dollars Bill Gates is donating to help smallholder farmers in the developing world are only promoting a bankrupt industrial approach.
Taylor and Steyer, who briefly separated last year, met at Stanford Graduate School of Business in the mid 1980s.
Taylors day job is running Beneficial State Bank, a mission-driven financial institution the couple founded and funded to promote economic justice and ecological sustainability issues that Wall Street giants tend to ignore or undermine. She envisions TomKat as a similarly mission-driven challenge to agricultures corporate behemoths. "The way the world prosecutes its natural resource agenda is all wrong," she says.
Last year, the couple revealed they had decided to live apart, but theyre now back together, and Taylor intends to join Steyer in the White House if he pulls off a miracle. Its safe to say shed express her provocative ideas about food, agriculture and nature in a manner not traditionally associated with the Office of the first lady.
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At the Global Climate Summit in San Francisco last September, Taylor savaged Big Ag and its forever war on weeds and pests. She accused industrial mega-farms of broiling the planet, poisoning our air and water, ravaging our soils, manufacturing food that makes us sick, impoverishing rural towns and mistreating animals. She then concluded her impassioned case for regenerative agriculture with a soil-themed folk song, delivered a capella in a confident soprano:
Give me your heart, give me your song, sing it with all your might.Come to the soils, and you can be satisfied.Theres a peace, theres a love, you can get lost inside.Come to the soils, and let me hear you testify.
So not exactly typical.
Taylor had a comfortable childhood in a suburb not far from the ranch; her father was an electrical engineer, and her grandfather ran a San Francisco bank. She was always an outdoors person, exploring nature around the picturesque South Coast, riding and jumping horses. She was captain of the track team at Harvard, and met Steyer while training for a marathon on a track at Stanford. She says her conservation ethic was born on a fourth-grade field trip to a local redwood grove donated to the children of San Mateo County by Sam McDonald, a son of slaves who earned a relatively modest living overseeing Stanfords athletic facilities.
I mean, wow! Taylor marveled during an absurdly brisk walk up one of TomKats steeper hills. How could I ever repay that? She says that when she first visited the TomKat property in 2002, soaking in its rugged landscape of streams and shrubs and brush, she had a Sam McDonald moment, and decided to buy the property from a widowed Austrian countess to preserve it for future generations.
Taylor on her ranch, which also includes a portable chicken coop. | JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX PICTURES
At the time, I was very nave about how to do that, she said.
The ranch was in rough shape. The countess had leased it to farmers who reminded Taylor of the venal Snopes family from Faulkners fiction; they were literally selling off topsoil from its meadows, as well as shingles from its barns. Taylor initially figured she would help it heal by protecting it as open space, with an educational program to teach kids about conservation. But after reading authors like Michael Pollan on the dysfunction of the global food system, she decided the ranch could do more good as working lands, creating nutritious, chemical-free, grass-fed beef, as well as a scientific and economic blueprint for climate-smart agriculture. She also shifted its educational focus to grown-ups, trying to build fork-to-farm partnerships to grow support for regenerative food and bridge divides between rural producers and urban eaters.
Our value add was not for little people, Taylor recalls with a rueful laugh. Wed bring kindergarteners out here and theyd just fall asleep.
Cattle ranching in the farm town of Pescadero was an unexpected side job for a power couple in the liberal bubble of San Francisco, although Steyer had once spent a summer working as a cowboy on a Nevada ranch. (I made $100 a month, he told me. On a per-hour basis, not good!) Taylor hadnt eaten meat in 12 years, and she still bemoans the myth that cows are inanimate non-soulful creatures, so who cares what happens to them. But she was determined to create a more sustainable alternative to industrial beef, and after witnessing the slaughter of a cow she made a kind of New Age peace with the bloody side of the business.
Ive gotten comfortable with the premise that death is part of life. Were all heading towards it, and every cow is heading towards it, too, Taylor says. Our cows have two beautiful years here, and then one bad day.
Taylor believes those bad bovine days will be worthwhile if TomKat can help spread a new philosophy of agriculture, restorative rather than extractive, reviving rather than depleting the soil and its life-sustaining microbes, relying on natural processes rather than herbicides, pesticides and synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. She is not a fan of the so-called Green Revolution of advanced genetics, chemicals, fertilizers and irrigation that has dramatically boosted agricultural yields since the 1960s. Her complaint with Gates, whom she calls an earnest, incredibly generous person, is that he actually believes in the Green Revolution.
The Green Revolution was real, saving perhaps billions of people from starvation, but its downsides were real, too. Today, agriculture uses 70 percent of the worlds fresh water and emits about one fourth of its greenhouse gases. Runoff from vast fields of chemically enhanced row crops as well as feeding operations crammed with pooping animals are creating massive dead zones in water bodies like the Gulf of Mexico. And the United Nations estimates that at current erosion rates, most of the worlds topsoil will be gone in 60 years.
In recent years, the climate movement has targeted beef as the worst offender in the food chain. This is partly because cattle emit greenhouse gases even more potent than carbonnitrous oxide from their manure, and especially methane from their burps and (to a less damaging but better publicized extent) farts. But its mostly because beef requires so much land, about 20 times as much as plants per unit of protein, and seven times as much as chicken or pork. So more pasture generally means more deforestation and fewer natural carbon sinks. A World Resources Institute report on the future of food estimated that the worlds agricultural footprint would have to expand more than a billion acres to satisfy current predictions of global meat demand by 2050, requiring deforestation of a land mass twice the size of India. Thats a serious dilemma, because the United Nations has warned that by that date, if humanity wants to avoid the worst climate catastrophes, it will need to halt all deforestation, and then significantly expand forests and other natural landscapes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
Stacy Claitor, the ranch's equine specialist, is one of TomKat's 20 employeesa noticeably large staff for its size. | JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX PICTURES
This is why environmental groups tend to encourage eating less beef, not more sustainably grown beef, and why the Drawdown Institutes list of the top 100 potential climate solutions included a global shift toward plant-rich diets at #4. Impossible Foods, the Bay Area-based producer of the plant-based Impossible Burger, dismissed regenerative grazing in its 2019 Impact Report as the clean coal of meat, arguing that theres no such thing as beef thats good for the earth.
The flip side of the argument is that grasses, trees and other plants are still the only reliable technology ever discovered for soaking up carbon and reversing the atmospheric mess made by fossil fuels. And the worlds rangelands, an undeveloped and vegetated area more than three times the size of the United States, present a tantalizing canvas on which to try to paint a carbon storage masterpiece. Thats why Taylor decided to buy some heifers, learn about regenerative agriculture, and help reinvent beef. Its whats for dinner, as the marketing slogan goes, and she didnt think that hoping people would stop eating it would save the climate.
The regenerative agriculture catchphrase thats so in vogue in political news releases and corporate sustainability goals usually refers to regenerative farming, which has started gaining in popularity in recent years. All-natural organic food has found a market with upscale shoppers, and even some conventional growers who douse their fields with chemical sprays and synthetic fertilizers to boost yields have adopted regenerative soil health practices like reducing tillage and planting off-season cover crops to fight erosion. But regenerative grazing is still pretty fringe, and the Savory Institute, the Colorado-based group that pioneered it, sees TomKat as an influential force bringing it toward the mainstream.
TomKat is leading by example and demonstrating whats possible, says Bobby Gill, Savorys communications and development director. And now, to have a presidential candidate whos not just talking about the regenerative space but actually walking the talk, its a wonderful moment for the movement.
Its just not clear whether TomKats example will help ranchers who need to worry about profit, much less whether it will help them help the climate.
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Oh, look! Thats beautiful!
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but this particular beholder, TomKat ranch manager Mark Biaggi, had objectively dubious standards, because he was pointing at a plump and slightly trampled cowpie. Biaggi liked the shape and consistency, which he said indicated a healthy diet for the animal that had expelled it. He especially liked the way the hooves of the herd had started mushing it and some of the grasses around it into the ground, so that microbes and earthworms would be able to break down the organic material and enrich the soil.
Microbes dont have wings or legs, so their food needs to be down where they can get it, said Biaggi, who worked for agribusinesses like Tyson and Cargill before embracing the regenerative path. Thats when the magic happens.
The magic of regenerative agriculture, for livestock as well as crops, is about regenerating soil, about nurturing the worms and fungi and bugs that help plants grow instead of sacrificing them as collateral damage in agro-chemical warfare. For Biaggi, that means making sure the ground is covered all the time, by grass, shrubs and even weeds that cows can eat, or else by that smelly trampled mulch that microbes can eat. Biaggi always tries to respect natural cycles of water, nutrients and grass, and he moves the herd with a whistle rather than a cattle prod. But mission-driven beef production is still beef production; I ate some tasty LeftCoast chili at the ranch, and at one point as we walked past an injured cow who seemed to be cuddling with her calf, Biaggi casually mentioned shed be hamburger once she weans. Not even TomKats healthy cows get to wander where they want, and they cant be choosy about their diet, either. They go and they eat according to Biaggis plan, which he plots on a large chart in his office like a general preparing for battle.
Every day or two, Biaggi uses portable electrified fencing to cordon the cattle into a fresh section of meadow, where they devour most of the plant material while crushing the leftovers along with their manure into the soil. Then he moves them to another new paddock so the previous one has time to regrow. Its supposed to be like a gym workout for the land, intense stress followed by extended recovery. And this heavy but intermittent grazing is supposed to mimic the migratory patterns of herbivores, who ate in dense packs on the open prairies to protect themselves from predators, then moved on to new ground. TomKats cattle also bunch up in tight clusters, a safety-in-numbers strategy to deter attacks from local mountain lions.
Top, Claitor on horseback talks to ranch manager Jeremiah Stent. Bottom, a solar module is used to power a section of electric fence at the ranch. | JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Lions dont have workers comp, so theyre not as likely to bust in there, Biaggi explained.
TomKat is not ideal cattle country. Its got more scrub and brush than grass, and much of the grass it does have is on steep terrain. Its Mediterranean-style climate keeps it dry most of the year, and when it does rain its usually too cool for the explosive grass growth that makes pastures economically attractive. When I visited in September, TomKat had gone three months without a downpour, and most of it looked brown and parched. But there were green patches where native perennials like needlegrass and oatgrass were thriving, stabilizing the soil with deep roots and providing the cattle with extra autumn forage. When you see green and it hasnt rained in this long, it means were doing something right, Biaggi says.
When TomKat began its regenerative grazing program in 2011, native perennials had disappeared from all but eight of its 75 fields. Now they can be found in almost every field. Biaggi believes the new regime, by preventing cows from overgrazing their favorite grasses, is promoting better plant diversity, preventing soil erosion, and reducing the amount of hay he needs to buy to supplement the herds nutrition. The ranchs problems with runoff that used to cascade down its hillsides whenever it rained have also vanished; Point Blue Conservation, the group TomKat hired to conduct research at the ranch, has conducted ongoing soil samples and found that water infiltration has improved significantly.
The patterns are really exciting, says Elizabeth Porzig, Point Blues director of working lands. Our theory of change is that if were seeing more native grass and diversity above ground, it should support better soil health below ground.
But Point Blues data for soil carbon, available on TomKats website, suggest the ranch is actually storing less carbon than it was in 2014; only nine of the 42 sites sampled by Point Blue showed improvement, 20 registered declines, and only two achieved the ranchs carbon goals for 2020. Porzig speculated that Californias severe drought may have artificially depressed TomKats numbers, and noted that soil carbon tends to be a lagging indicator that can take years to improve in measurable ways.
But yeah, those results are a bummer, she acknowledged.
Theyre a particular bummer considering all the hype around compensating farmers and ranchers for regenerative practices, under the assumption that those practices will automatically store more carbon. Booker, Ryan, Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Steve Bullock and Michael Bennet all pushed the idea during the recent presidential debates and televised climate forums. Were going to put farmers and ranchers in the drivers seat, renewable and sustainable agriculture, to make sure we capture more carbon out of the air and keep more of it in the soil, Beto ORourke declared. The Drawdown list of climate solutions has regenerative agriculture at #11 and managed grazing at #19, with the combined potential to remove 40 gigatons of carbon. But if TomKat cant even realize that potential, why should the government spend taxpayer dollars to get others to follow its lead?
Biaggi sees evidence all around that regenerative grazing works. His cattles scores for body condition, pregnancy rates, and weight gains are solid and improving. The herd is healthier, even though it no longer receives deworming medication, and the land is healthier, too, even though it no longer gets sprayed or mowed to control weeds and brush. He just cant tell whether its soaking up more carbon.
Carbon is sexy, but honestly, Im not sure how to manage for it, he says. I manage for water and grass. Soil carbon is more of a long-term fight.
Unfortunately, greenhouse gases are a short-term threat to the planet. And if TomKat isnt storing more carbon in its soils, its almost certainly emitting more greenhouse gases overall than conventional beef producers. Its herd puts on weight more slowly than cattle in industrial feedlots, which means they spend more time burping methane to produce a pound of beef. Its stocking rate of 17 acres per cow also means its using land much less efficiently than conventional U.S. ranches, which often aim for as little as two acres per cow. The world would need gargantuan amounts of new rangeland to meet beef demand at TomKats rates of production, and as the ongoing crisis in the Brazilian Amazon has shown, creating new rangeland often involves the cutting and burning of precious carbon sinks.
Princeton research scholar Tim Searchinger, the lead author of WRIs food report, has no problem with efforts to restore degraded habitat and soil on relatively arid grasslands like TomKat. But Searchinger, a longtime environmentalist who spent two decades at the Environmental Defense Fund, is worried about the excessive romanticizing of back-to-nature agriculture, and particularly the recent frenzy of policy proposals designed to encourage carbon storage on existing farms and pastures. He says the science behind them is still uncertain, and their impact on the climate would be modest at best. Focusing climate mitigation on these measures seriously risks diverting effort and money better used elsewhere, Searchinger says. Hed rather see more focus on innovative approaches to reduce cattles methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and especially to help farmers and ranchers boost their output to help limit agricultures footprint. Higher yields on existing land mean less pressure to clear forests that do a great job storing carbon.
Whatever you think of industrial U.S. agriculture, it does a great job producing higher yields. Its gigantic diesel tractors, arguably excessive antibiotics, possibly carcinogenic pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and other modern advances make it unusually efficient at manufacturing food. Nitrogen fertilizers derived from natural gas are rough on air and water quality, and even conventional farmers are trying to use less of them, but organic farmers who dont use any of them tend to have lower yields. Factory-style feedlots may seem gross or cruel, and some of them struggle to handle millions of gallons of manure every year, but they help explain why the U.S. produces 18 percent of the worlds beef with only 8 percent of the worlds cattle.
Top left: A sign for TomKat Ranch's premium LeftCoast GrassFed beef brand. Top right: Taylor with dog Gus. Bottom: One of the ranch's two bulls. | JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
I recently visited a Colorado feedlot with Sara Place, the director of sustainability research at the National Cattlemens Beef Association, and it was remarkable to witness what was in essence a fully optimized assembly line, manufacturing protein from raw material that happened to come in the form of 25,000 live animals with hooves and hides and voracious appetites. The owner explained that he uses precisely 10.23 gallons of water per head per day, that his finishing feed is precisely 72.5 percent yellow corn, that his mill converts the corn kernels into flakes at 208 degrees Fahrenheit so that their digestibility increases from 82 percent to 95 percent. TomKat cant match that kind of industrial efficiency.
Even feedlot cattle start out in pastures, and the Savory Institute claims that regenerative grazing will eventually double the stocking rates of traditional ranches by rejuvenating soils, while storing enough carbon to create a truly carbon-neutral industry. But Place says the evidence remains far too sketchy to persuade most ranchers to adopt such a labor-intensive approach. TomKat lists 20 employees on its website; most operations its size would be fortunate to hire a ranch hand or two.
If ranchers can store carbon and mitigate some fossil fuel emissions, thats all to the good, Place says. The problem in this space is theres a lot of enthusiasm for things that dont have a lot of data. People have gotten way out over their skis.
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Tom Steyer is dork-preaching his favorite sermon to 200 supporters in an Oakland ballroom, explaining his plans to decarbonize the U.S. economy for a Climate Emergency Broadcast on Facebook Live. Hes talking about net-zero buildings and clean cars, about the climate refugees showing up at the southern border to escape chronic drought in Central America, about his fights with fossil-fuel interests in California and nationwide. Theyre saying wed rather make money than save the world, which is just an amazing statement, he says with an air of actual amazement. He sees climate as the moral crisis of our time, and he tries to cut through the complexity with moral clarity: Theres no reason at this point to build a fossil-fuel infrastructure. Its insane! He described President Donald Trump as an ignorant and incompetent criminal whose assault on the climate has made America a global pariah: Were already going to them and asking them to forget Donald Trump ever existed.
At one point Steyer takes a question from Free Dominguez, an activist who runs a food education program for poor families, and wants his thoughts about how to create nutrition for a warming world. Our plan is to turn from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy, he says. And let me say this: Kat Taylor has actually been running one of those experiments about an hour from here in Pescadero, which is a cattle farm to show that you can raise animals in a way that actually sequesters carbon in the soil! Weve been doing this for 15 years, and we know we can do this in a way that makes farmers richer.
In fact, the experiment does not yet show more carbon being sequestered in the soil, or any farmers getting richer. In an interview afterward, Steyer says his larger point is that the climate emergency is not just about greener electricity and transportation; agriculture needs to change, too, otherwise the planet will broil. Steyer doesnt spend much time at TomKat these days, except to film campaign ads in front of its weathered barns, but it has transformed his view of the crisis.
I wasnt used to having to think about root systems, but weve got to figure that stuff out, too, he says. And we will. The question is: How fast?
Steyer, a late entrant into the 2020 Democratic primary field, campaigns in Iowa. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
The team at TomKat will keep trying new things, and ditching things (like recent experiments with aquaponics and poultry) that arent working. Biaggi wants to bring in some goats and sheep to graze some native brush, and eventually integrate a few crops that could be fertilized with manure to create a truly regenerative cycle. Steyer is also excited about work restoring vegetation around TomKats streams; theyre now clean enough to attract impressive steelhead trout, a point he illustrated using the international yay-big hand gesture fishermen use to exaggerate the size of a fish. In any event, the scientific literature is clear that riparian restoration can produce tangible benefits not only for water quality and biodiversity but carbon sequestration, much clearer than the science about carbon sequestration in soils.
But these are minuscule drops in an extraordinarily large bucket. The most animated Ive ever seen Steyer was when he tried to convey to me the immensity of a pork processor he heard about while campaigning at the Iowa state fair: It kills 20,000 pigs per day. I mean, hwaaaaaaaaaugh! he stammered, as if he were choking on a slab of bacon. Whoooooooooooa! Youre talking about scale thats just incredible! One of TomKats goals is to inspire the adoption of regenerative practices on 1 million acres of California, but there are more than 1 billion acres of agricultural land in the U.S.
The one industry that can drive rapid change on that kind of monumental scale is politics, and over the past decade, thats become Steyers focus. He helped defeat a fossil-fueled effort to roll back Californias groundbreaking climate laws in 2010, aired off-message climate ads during the Republican presidential debates in 2015, and bankrolled successful ballot measures to advance clean energy in Michigan and Nevada (as well as an unsuccessful one in Arizona) in 2018. Hes become a leading donor to progressive Democrats, a leading funder of youth voter registration drives, a lonely voice trying to build grassroots support for impeachmentprompting Trump to tweet that hes wacky and totally unhingedand now a not-so-lonely voice trying to replace Trump. He recently became the seventh of eight Democrats to poll well enough and attract enough donations to secure a spot in the debates through November, but he knows seventh-place finishes dont drive monumental change.
Hes definitely fully on the game board, Taylor says.
Its her way of saying that Steyer is trying to play his role for the world, pursuing his one wild and precious life like the couples kids in her official bio. But presidential politics is a weird game. I tried to ask her about it at the end of our tour, when she was showing me the shishito peppers and giant zucchinis in TomKats garden, but she kept changing the subject. She did discuss her own recent foray into politics, a crusade to get Californias schools to serve more sustainably grown food. She explained how she helped work out various compromises with more traditional agricultural interests to build a coalition; now districts representing a third of the states school meals are pushing more options grown in California, even though those options arent necessarily grown through regenerative operations. She said she had to be strategic and pragmatic if she wanted to get anything done.
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Theres no point setting off on a fools errand, she said.
Her observation lingered in the air for a moment, and I couldnt resist asking whether she had made that point to her husband. After another awkward pause, she bent down and moved on to her next task for the ranch, busying herself with some purple flowers.
I think this is lavender, she said. I can make a little bouquet!
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