High Plains Grasslands Alliance
STAFF & BOARD
Michael Bain - President
Michael Bain is a native of Alabama where he spent 25 years training horses and running cattle before moving to New Mexico in 2002. While in New Mexico, he has been Executive Director of the Cimarron Watershed Alliance, Land and Water Program Director for the Quivira Coalition, and is currently General Manager of Twin Willows Ranch, Inc. in Ocate, New Mexico. Michael has an undergraduate degree in social sciences and holds an MBA. He has severed on the Board of Directors of the Quivira Coalition and the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance. He lives with his wife Julie, three bird dogs, and three horses in wilds of southwest Nebraska when not at the Twin Willows Ranch.
Josh Miner - Treasure
Josh Miner has been on the Fort Union Ranch Board of Directors since 1999 and on the HPGA Board as Treasure since inception. While he did not grow up in a ranching community, he has been in a learning mode since he first visited the area in the mid 1970’s. Quivera and the HPGA programs have helped move the needle on ranching practices at Fort Union Ranch where resiliency and sustainability are the focus. He travels from Massachusetts several times a year to be on the ranch.
Katie Meiklejohn
Katie manages Ranch Advisory Partner’s Monitoring and Advisory Programs, guiding the collection and use of the ecological data that underpins the company’s advisory and management services, as well as overseeing the development of operational tools such as grazing and drought plans, capacity analysis, and stock flow plans. Katie has been with Ranch Advisory for over a decade and has over 20 years' experience in landscape- scale natural resource management. She has worked extensively with ranchers to identify strategies that simultaneously enhance ecological health, financial success, and human well-being. She is currently also the Treasury Chair for the Plank Stewardship Initiative’s Board of Directors; a small foundation committed to supporting innovative solutions and younger generations operating at the intersection of agriculture and conservation. Prior to joining Ranch Advisory Partner’s, she heads up the Sonoran Institute’s Working Landscapes Program in the Northern Rockies, helped to found the High Plains Grasslands Alliance in
Northeastern New Mexico, was a Program Director for American Wild lands and helped get the Center for Large Landscape Conservation established in Bozeman, MT. Katie is a Kinship Conservation Fellow and obtained a Master’s in Conservation Biology from Columbia University.
Shantini Ramakrishnan
Shantini Ramakrishnan develops place-based outdoor learning programs to grow career pathways in STEM disciplines at the Conservation Science Center at Highlands University, based at the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute. Since the Hermit’s
Peak/Calf Canyon wildfire in 2022, she has founded, along with colleagues, the Fire-Informed Restoration Education (FIRENM) initiative which improves access to knowledge and practices in land restoration aimed at post-fire recovery. She has been working in northern New Mexico
since 2012 and joined the High Plains Grassland Alliance Board in 2019.
Ariel Greenwood
Ariel Greenwood has worked on farms and ranches on both coasts, Montana and New Mexico. She works on a cow-calf and yearling outfit in Mora County with her husband Sam Ryerson and daughter, Helen, which they lease with partners. Ariel has been involved with HPGA as a board member since 2024 and also serves on the board of Contra Vicente Journal, River Arts and Books, and the Wagon Mound Volunteer Fire Department. She is passionate
about range health, ranch hydrology, and raising ranch horses.