Stacy Pulice Takes on Regenerative Farming

When Stacy and Ron Pulice’s two children were young, Stacy took a deep dive into the politics and policies of their schools. She served as president of the PTA at one school and vice president at another. She also wrote a column on education, “Family Matters,” for the weekly Montecito Journal, covering the cultures that made different schools tick. 

During those years, she became a therapist and earned a PhD in psychology. She wrote a book on education, Listen to the Children, now in its second edition. She also served on the boards of various nonprofits, while developing the infrastructure on her avocado ranch and beginning to work on climate change. Not surprisingly, she calls herself a “farmer, Daoist, author, speaker, environmental activist, and educator.” 

I met Stacy a few years ago in a support group led by two psychologists; I’ve attended fundraisers at her spectacular house; I’ve heard her speak on sustainability and the climate crisis; and I took a class she taught on Pangu Shengon, a self-healing Qi Gong practice. Clearly, we share similar interests, but I am awed by her blend of intellect, energy, and ability to turn ideas — even impossible-seeming ones — into reality. 

My granddaughter takes AP Environmental Science and crack-of-dawn Small-Scale Farming at Santa Barbara High School. Popular teacher Jose Caballero, who taught Stacy’s children and is one of her mentors, runs these classes from a building the Pulices helped raise the funds to build. When Stacy learned that the old building was due for demolition, she told her husband, “Ron, we gotta do something.” No doubt it wasn’t the first time she’d said this, and it wouldn’t be the last. “Ron negotiated with the District and made it happen,” she says. “He’s amazing.”

Her latest — perhaps most meaningful — passion comes from a synthesis of spirituality, ecology, and reverence for the land and the part they can play in solving the climate crisis. The land is the 300-acre ranch in the foothills above Goleta, which Ron purchased in 1979 and started planting with avocados. At the time, as the CEO and chairman of Pulice Construction, he was also building interstate highways around the Southwest. The couple’s children were born in the mobile home they lived in before designing and building their current home. 

Curious to find what drives and inspires Stacy, I drove up Ellwood Canyon on a clear spring day after the extraordinary rains of the first few months of this year. The vegetation had more colors of green than there are names for them. In her large, wood-framed, glass-house dining room, Stacy poured chrysanthemum tea.   

A Daoist for the past thirty-five years, she says she has discovered a more balanced life through Daoism’s nature philosophy. Her morning rituals include a pot of Marco Polo tea, a bowl of vegetable soup, and a retreat to her meditation room, followed by Pangu Live with Ron at 8 am. These and daily practices of Qi Gong and Tai Chi sustain her and keep her on track. “It sounds disciplined, but it’s not,” she says. “I do what pleases me.” 

Stacy’s life — and the future of the ranch — changed dramatically four years ago when she went into liver failure from drinking a tainted bottled alkaline water product that has since been recalled. “I spent five days in the ICU at UCLA. I was dying. They were testing me for a liver transplant.” 

Coming home from the hospital, driving onto the ranch, she had a moment of enlightenment — not unusual after a near-death experience. “We came around a corner, and suddenly I had the most profound, overwhelming feeling of love and gratitude for this land.” Indeed, over the following year on the ranch, resting and walking in nature, she came to believe that the land played an active part in her healing.

Before she fell ill, she had collaborated with Margaret Klein Salamon and The Climate Mobilization, making presentations and working with groups on the psychological and emotional obstacles to engaging with climate change. While working on her own health, it came to her that climate change is an inside job.

“I had just healed myself. And I realized that is the first and most important step for everyone. How can it be that if you are angry, constantly inflamed, and out of whack, that you’re not impacting your environment?” 

Once she was in better shape, she began to think about the land itself. How is it out of balance? Depleted? Could her mission be the healing of the ranch as well as herself?

Per usual, she went to Ron and told him, “We have to change something. I have done some soul searching about why I am here. I want to live here for the rest of my life, if I can, and it’s not sustainable right now.” 

She didn’t even know the word “regenerative,” but she was asking, “What does the ranch need in order to be thriving in a hundred years, and how can we change our view from one of short-term profit to a hundred-year model?”

Stacy believes the parallels between her own experience and that of the land are striking: She’d been poisoned, but once the poison was removed from her body, she recovered her health. “This is true in natural ecosystems, too, where a lifeless landscape can thrive again when toxic chemicals, gross overuse, and depleting practices are reversed.” 

She began by taking a six-month course from Quail Springs Permaculture. She and Ron started meeting with everyone who worked on the ranch, and they brought in new management more aligned with their ideas. “We also hired Sal Dominguez, who’s Mr. Avocado Wizard out of Santa Paula.” He advised them to take out their least productive trees and replant them with a variety called Gem. The fruit grows in the middle of this bushier variety, which is heat and wind resistant and uses half the water other avocados require. 

On a tour of the ranch, I saw a vast experimental playground for Stacy’s vision of creating a self-sustaining, regenerative, and — yes — profitable farm; one whose most important purpose might be to educate. 

She took me to her kitchen garden to see her experiment in vermiculture, her Subpod bin, where garbage-eating worms create “black gold.” A friend gave it to Stacy as a birthday present, and she clearly delights in it. She and her accomplice, Joshua Graae, a graduate of UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, are experimenting with compost tea, and Stacy has become quite fond of her worms. In the future, they plan to make this nutrient-rich tea on a very large — Ron-sized — scale.

On the way to see the berms — long, mounded rows of earth on which 6,000 new avocadoes will be planted — she talks enthusiastically of grasses with deep roots to break up the soil and sink more water; cover crops planted for nitrogen fixing; mulch made from their own fallen trees, used instead of poison or hand weeding; and the 400 sheep brought in by Cuyama Lamb to graze on weeds. I had the impression she’d love to get a few — or many — sheep of her own. 

“All these steps,” she tells me, “encourage and enhance fungus and bacteria growth, all the little invisible guys under the surface. That’s what determines the health of what happens above ground.”

We drive by the farm’s pollinator garden, where a botanist from UCSB has been conducting field experiments on the best attractants for these vital beneficials. She points out various structures she’s had built — workers’ houses, the Long Barn for storage, and a tiny little cottage that’s actually a filter station and pump for irrigation. At the pinnacle of the ranch, with what may be the most stunning views on the Central Coast, is the Tea House, built as a retreat and guest house using rammed earth construction. 

Recently, Stacy and Ron purchased a drone that uses specific software to measure moisture levels and the health of the property’s trees. “It’s technology meets the ancient methods,” says Stacy. “That’s what I see us doing. For me, technology is another area of expansion. I wanted weather stations up here, so we now have three or four on the ranch. They tell us wind speed, precipitation, temperature, those kinds of things, because I want to know where to plant windbreaks and such. Information is my thing,” she adds. “You can do a lot if you get the information.”

Business is another thing that interests Stacy, in particular the triple bottom line. “You’ve heard of the bottom line as profit.” she explains. “A double bottom line would be, ‘I want to make money, but I want to make a product that’s good for people.’ And a triple bottom line is, ‘I want to make money and I want to help people and I want it to be part of a greater good — to have a positive impact on the environment.’

“So, you’re not trying to make a killing, you’re trying to hit all three levels of your values. I’m a triple bottom line person. And the older I get, the more absolute I feel about that.” 

The next few years will be ones of experimentation. “We’ll find out what works and what doesn’t — we can’t learn it from somebody else. I’m having to get the information and extrapolate it onto our conditions. So, it’s a big, long scientific project. Then we’re going to teach it to others.”

To that end, she’s built the Meeting House, with its lovely view of the lake reservoir, to host speakers and workshops. She continues to make presentations on education and on climate change; she’ll moderate an upcoming Lotusland Sustainability Symposium; and she’s preparing for a TedX Santa Barbara talk: “Harvesting Wisdom: Nurturing Growth in Classrooms and Life.” She has also discovered that a one-minute mini-talk on Instagram is an easy, palatable way to get out her message, and followers can click links to read updates on her progress and get a dose of her lively, cheerful vitality.

“My mission is to help educate and inform people about sustainability and regenerative farming,” she says. “Because you can’t really argue with what is happening to the earth, and we don’t have a lot of time. Besides, it’s a happier and healthier way to live.”