From an early age, Bella Wood, a graduate student at Northeastern University, wanted to become a diplomat. But as a teenager, she spent several weeks each summer with her grandparents at a family cattle ranch in northeast New Mexico.
Her grandmother’s family has operated the ranch since the early 1800s, passing it down through female heirs long before women could legally own property. The ranch has endured droughts, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, grasshopper infestations and other challenges. When Wood realized how much her grandparents had done to restore and conserve the shortgrass prairie ecosystem and that she would be the ninth generation to inherit it, she embraced becoming a legacy rancher.
“Land stewardship is a tremendous responsibility,” she says. “I reframed my life at 23 years old to accept that responsibility.” In 2022, Wood founded Ranch Lab, a startup connecting family-owned ranches with innovators, scientists and investors to co-develop affordable and sustainable technologies. She also enrolled in Northeastern’s graduate public administration program to strengthen her leadership and policy skills. “I thought to myself, ‘I need to figure out a way that this is going to work for me and that this aligns with the protection of the ranch,’” she says. “How can my impact be bigger than just our operation?”
