Sol Ranch as a company was created by Emily Cornell, who grew up working on her family’s cow-calf ranch, the Cornell Ranch southeast of Wagon Mound in the high plains of northeastern New Mexico. Though she is only second generation on this land, her family on both sides has a long history of agriculture in New Mexico. Her mother’s great-grandfather left France to come to Santa Fe to work as a stonemason on the St. Francis de Assisi Cathedral for the Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy before homesteading with Angoras in the Jemez Mountains. The other side of her mother’s family ran the McIlhaney Dairy in Albuquerque for many years. Emily’s father’s family trailed cattle back and forth to Montana in the late 19th century before settling near House, NM. 

Emily’s parents, Jeff and Camille Cornell, came to the Las Vegas/Wagon Mound area in the early 1970’s and have ranched in the region ever since, picking up practices of holistic resource management early on. They are each out-of-the-box thinkers who value self-education and trying new practices. They were early adopters of rotational grazing and have seen the land under their tenure transform through the implementation of principles such as rest and proper grazing use.

Emily went to elementary and high school in the local village of Wagon Mound then left to attend Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado where she obtained a B.S. in Environmental and Organismic Biology where she studied climate change and soil health in her thesis work. While in school, Emily worked as a river guide in the four corner’s region during the summer months. It was through this work and research that Emily reconnected with the land and deepened her appreciation for the natural world. In true Durango fashion, learned to see the landscape as a playground and developed a passion for hiking, climbing, trail running, snowboarding, camping, rafting, etc. Combined with her education in ecology and soil biology, she developed an ever growing passion for understanding the ecological processes at play on the land and the importance of careful land management.

After graduating college, Emily became a range technician for the Manti-La Sal National Forest outside of Moab, Utah where she worked in the forest performing range trend and utilization analyses of the grazing allotments while spraying weeds and working on spring developments.

After her first season, she returned home to the ranch to help her dad through his shoulder surgery recovery. It was then that she realized that if she intended to manage land, it needed to be her family’s land, so she moved home. She started out working for her dad, managing his cattle on part of the ranch. She attended Ranching for Profit school and completed online courses through Holistic Management International while soaking up as much education on land health and cattle management as possible.

She began custom grazing yearling cattle on her own in 2016 and transitioned to running mama cows and calves of her own by 2018. The first grassfed animals were sold to other grassfed producers in 2019 and by 2020 Sol Ranch was selling its first orders of grassfed beef from the ranch. Emily currently runs mama cows that she purchased from Jeff and Camille’s herd. For over 40 years, they have selected for cattle that are naturally healthy and have the basic ability to get fat on grass in this arid landscape without the need for bringing in outside hay, just a little bit of protein supplement, some free choice salt and mineral and that’s it for feed inputs.

Today, Emily’s focus is on improving the land while building her grassfed beef business and pursuing a healthy lifestyle. She spends her free time exploring the endless cañones on the ranch, pursuing agriculture and land health education whenever possible, and escaping occasionally to the mountains or rivers to play. She also serves on the board of the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance (SWGLA) and represents her region on the Mora County branch of the New Mexico State University Agricultural Extension’s Advisory Committee. She is an active member of the High Plains Grasslands Alliance, the Quivira Coalition, and a NM Soil Health Champion. Furthermore, Emily was a recipient of the 2021 Excellence in Range Management award from the New Mexico section of the Society for Range Management. She has a vision of healthy landscapes supporting healthy people through local supply chains and fostering of connections between humans and their watersheds or “foodsheds”. 

N E I G H B O R i n g C O M M U N I T Y

The neighboring community within northeastern New Mexico forms a social bond throughout the region. Ranching in the west has a long tradition of neighboring, sharing the workload and labor through the year. Sol Ranch values their unspoken reciprocity of the spring and fall work season. Neighboring is a great way to more efficiently work large herds in a safe, and frankly fun way. Whether it is help with gathering or branding, or building rock erosion structures, there are many helpful hands that make a village.