Range Revolution

I first met Cate Havstad-Casad in the UK, when we were both at a sustainable materials trade show in London. We immediately connected over potatoes, a crop we were both intimately entwined with through our family farms, hers in Oregon, mine in Wisconsin.

The floor was filled with materials meant to replace something. Banana leather. Algae leather. Mushroom leather. Each booth offering a vision of the future based on technology, untethered from the animal, untethered from the unpredictability of land. There was an energy to it, a kind of optimism, but also a quiet absence.

As Cate and I walked the floor together, we kept circling back to the same thing. What’s missing?

It took a moment to say it out loud. Bovine leather.

Cattle are also a technology, just like the eco-fabricated materials we were seeing on the trade show floor. An ancient technology. One that has always existed alongside us, shaped by land, grass, water, and time. Hides have never been the sole reason for cattle production. They are part of what’s often called the “fifth quarter,” a byproduct of meat and milk.

Many ranchers pay to dispose of their hides. They bury them or burn them. Burial at least returns carbon to the soil, but even that is a missed opportunity.

Later, Cate spoke on a panel. She told the story of her farm beginning to shift under the pressure of drought. Irrigation water becoming less reliable. Systems that had once felt stable starting to fall apart.

She didn’t frame it as failure. She framed it as a question. What is the land asking for now?

For Cate and her husband, Chris, the answer was grazing. A move away from cultivation and toward a system built around ruminants. Animals as a way to work with water limitations, rebuild soil, and create something that could hold under changing conditions.

Once animals come back into the center of the system, another question follows. If you are going to raise them, what does it mean to fully utilize the animal?

That’s where Range Revolution begins. Because hides sit right at the edge of this conversation. They are one of the largest outputs of livestock production, and yet they’ve been quietly devalued, pushed into global commodity streams, treated as excess, detached from the land and animals they come from.

Standing in that trade show, surrounded by alternatives, it became clear how strange that is. We are searching for new materials while discarding one that is already here. Cate’s work doesn’t try to replace leather. It asks what it would look like to take responsibility for it.

Through Range Revolution, she builds from the hide outward. The material carries the life of the animal in it. Marks, variation, memory. It isn’t flattened into uniformity. It isn’t asked to become something else. It is allowed to remain connected to its origin. And in doing so, it closes a loop that has been left open.

Whole-animal utilization isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about coherence. When hides have value, the animal is no longer split into what matters and what doesn’t. The system holds together more fully. What was once treated as waste becomes part of the story again.

I think about that moment in London often. Walking past booth after booth of future materials, and realizing that the conversation we needed to have was about something much more immediate. Not what we can invent next but what we are already holding.

Cate’s work stays with that question. Close to the ground, to the animal, to the reality that solutions don’t always come from creating something new, but from learning how to use what is already here, completely.

I caught up with Cate from her farm in Madras, Oregon, to talk about what it actually takes to listen to land, build a material practice from the margins of a system, and follow a question all the way through.

Jonnah Perkins, Media Director, Mad Agriculture

Jonnah
You’ve described your family’s shift from irrigated crops to grazing as a response to what the land was asking for. What did it take to actually listen to that signal? And what resisted that change?

Cate
Let me start with what resisted the change. I think the resistance lies in sunk costs. Economically, everything we had invested up to that point was in being wholesale potato growers. To do hundreds of thousands of tons of potatoes, there’s so much infrastructure and equipment, and a decade of research and development to become really great organic potato growers.

So the resistance was letting go of something we had worked toward for ten years.

What did it take to actually listen to that signal? I think it was a “let go or be dragged” mindset. Speaking for myself, we ultimately understood that if we were going to bring potatoes to fruition, it would require drying up about 70 percent of the land under our management.

We have a Holistic context statement, which is to grow the most nutrient-dense food possible for our community while improving the ecosystems under our management. Fallowing that much land in potatoes, onions, and winter squash did not fit that context. So it took returning to that central pillar of our decision-making.

Jonnah
Hides are often treated as excess in the livestock system. When did you first recognize them as something worth building a practice around? And what shifted for you in that moment?

Cate
I have a photograph of myself from around 2018, long before Range Revolution. In that photo, I’m in the barn salting one of our steer hides.

We harvest a portion of our animals on farm, and I watched the hides go into a pile in the back corner of the property where they more or less fed coyotes and birds of prey. I remember thinking, we need to try to do something with these.

I never completed tanning that hide. That moment taught me how hard it is, and that I was not going to complete the project myself.

The real shift came in 2020. I wanted to build something on the design side of my life. I wanted to make a bag and find materials that aligned with my ethos. When I started looking for regenerative leather, I realized the supply chain didn’t exist. That realization set me off to contact ranchers and figure out what it would take to turn hides into leather.

Jonnah
You’re working with a material that carries the full life of the animal, including marks, variation, and memory. How do you think about design when the goal is not to erase those qualities, but to hold on to them?

Cate
This comes down to brand positioning. We’ve built the voice and ethos of Range Revolution around the innate beauty of natural fibers, and the idea that natural characteristics are not flaws.

That starts with photography, the models, the campaigns, the copy, the website, the entire value proposition.

On the production side, we’ve learned a lot through iteration. If we take a load of 900 hides, we know there are different grades. Some are cleaner, some have more variation or damage.

We design accordingly. For example, hides with more variation or holes might be used in products where we emboss or finish the leather in a way that softens those characteristics. In our bag line, we also use tumbled versus untumbled leather. Tumbled leather is softer and more flexible. Untumbled leather is more rigid and shows every mark.

We’ve moved toward the softer, tumbled leathers because they align better with our brand.

We also now have three arms of the business: direct-to-consumer finished goods, wholesale, and business-to-business leather sales. That allows us to absorb a wide range of hide qualities. We can embrace variation in our own products while reserving the most uniform hides for other brands that need that level of consistency.

Jonnah
There’s a growing conversation around alternative materials, many of them trying to replace leather. How do you situate your work within that landscape?

Cate
I see myself as uniquely positioned to work directly with ranchers and processors to build a regenerative, traceable leather system because of my background.

My priorities are to increase the circularity of the regenerative meat sector and improve economic outcomes for producers. That comes from my lived experience running a meat program and understanding the economics of a midsize family ranch.

As for alternative materials, everyone has to pick their lane. Someone with a bioengineering background working in a lab might be best suited to develop synthetic alternatives. That’s their lane.

I know where I fit. And the reality is, none of those alternatives have reached commercial scale or profitability yet. If they figure it out, great. I just haven’t seen it happen.

Jonnah
This is really about coherence rather than efficiency. What does a fully integrated system look like to you across the ranch, the workshop, and the person carrying the final piece?

Cate
My background is in closed-loop farming systems, and I was raised by a systems thinker. Efficiency has never been the highest standard. Coherence has.

We’ve built resilience on our land by doing things that are not always efficient, but serve long-term outcomes.

In practice, that looks like what Range Revolution is becoming. We aggregate hides from regenerative ranches, process them regionally, and manufacture within that same ecosystem. Right now, hides move from California to a tannery in León, Mexico, and then into finished goods either there or in Los Angeles.

It’s a regional system.

As for the consumer, they don’t even need to understand all of that. I hope they do, but they don’t need to. We succeed by selling more bags, which allows us to absorb more hides and return more value to ranchers.

The customer just needs to love the product and carry it for a lifetime.

Jonnah
When you’re holding a finished piece, do you see the animal and the landscape in it?

Cate
Personally, yes. I’m so close to the supply chain that I always connect the dots between the object and where it came from.

But when I see someone else carrying one of our bags, I’m not thinking about the animal as much as everything it took to get that product into the world. I feel proud and honored.

Jonnah
Is there anything else you want to bring into this piece?

Cate
We just completed a custom bag and jacket collaboration for Post Malone. It’s the first time I’ve bridged my design work of 13 years with Havstad Hat Co world with my newer work with Range Revolution.

He originally requested ostrich leather, which isn’t aligned with my thesis. So we embossed our cattle hides to mimic the look of ostrich. The hides came from regenerative ranches in California.

It’s a way of staying true to the material while meeting a cultural moment.

When you’re building something like this, having people like him wear your work helps elevate the brand and expand its reach. My vision is to reach mass scale so we can move more hides through the system and have a real impact.

This work is a long game. It takes years of planting seeds and having the endurance to see them through.