Springtime in the Rockies means change. Two days ago, I was in the midst of a backcountry ski trip with the three oldest girls to a remote yurt in 7 feet of snow. The four of us spiked out in the absolute middle of nowhere (no phone service here), with not even distant lights on the horizon…just rolling mountain peaks heading into the largest wilderness in the US outside Alaska. Temps dropped to near zero, and we put up with several horizontal gale driven blizzards that made us glad we had a GPS. Today we are seeing polar opposite change from those 2 days past: we are back in the valley below those mountains, working on the ranch over greening grass, in light cotton shirts under azure skies.
This spring, change also happens in people on the ranch. Daughter Abby and her husband, Ethan, showed up on Alderspring this week after being gone for 13 months on a working/learning/internship adventure in Australia and New Zealand. We’re excited to have them back in the valley and see what they’ve gathered from Down Under. They’ve worked on sheep outfits on the lush and rainy south coast and in the desert Outback, where the folks on the station there hadn’t seen rain for four years. They saw work on a cattle outfit in the hill country of New South Wales that had a direct market beef operation with some similarities to ours…and lessons for us to learn. Daughter Linnaea also flew back home from a NZ internship on a dairy farm. You’ll likely be glad to see her back because the looks of this newsie will definitely improve under her deft hand (so sorry, Caryl darling!), provided she doesn’t delete this little quip about her when she gets to publishing it.
It’s especially good to see the community of ranch hands coming back. We already have 2 others committed to returning from last year’s crew, and Caryl flew our internship announcement for three more summer positions this week (if you know anyone who might be interested in cowboying for a summer, you can pass the job offer on–click here to check it out). All told, we plan for about 11 cowhands on the ranch this year. I expect we’ll need it to run on the high ranges again to shepherd those beeves across that wilderness landscape.
For those of you who don’t know what we do during the grazing season, here it is in a nutshell: Come May, we’ll gather up about 250-300 yearling beeves off our 950 acre headquarters ranch here in the Pahsimeroi Valley, and begin their long summer walk by trailing them down the main Valley road to the Salmon River, about 8 miles away. When we cross one of the few bridges across the Salmon, at about 4500 feet elevation, the beeves are officially on our 70 square mile summer grass range.
At least 3 cowhands will be with the beeves on horseback 24/7 for the entire summer. They will not only herd them all day every day to great grazing, but they will also bed them down each night and sleep with them. They will travel nearly 900 miles over the course of the summer, in some of the most remote, rugged and wild country in the lower 48. They’ll herd beeves across canyon and mountain slope to elevations as high as 8000 feet, traversing low desert rangelands in springtime and high elevation pine and fir forests in summer. None of it has ever seen human habitation or farming of any kind. The herding crew will likely encounter a host of wild animals that share the landscape with us: wolves, mountain lions, bears, mountain sheep, elk and deer. The cowboy’s/cowgirl’s job is twofold: protect the habitats and wildlife we share the landscape with while strategically placing Alderspring beeves on some of the most nutrient dense wild forages on the planet.
Although this same twofold concept has been practiced for millennia, only a few animal husbandmen and women practice it today. In fact, we know of no other beef producers who practice it today (and we know many). Virtually all cattlemen who use the wild western ranges today “turn their cattle out” in the spring, largely unsupervised, and find them late in the fall. This creates several problems.
First, cattle, left to their own devices will graze the greenest, most tender forage as close to water as possible. They really are quite energy efficient, meaning they will not expend any more calories than they have to…to live comfortably. This means they will spend 90% of their time in creek bottoms and springs (we call them riparian areas). Therein lies the problem. Ninety percent of other plant life and wildlife utilize these riparian areas as well, and cattle can adversely impact them to a huge degree due to their appetite for green forage and sheer body size through trampling.
Second, wolves eat cattle. When cattle are left alone, wolves do not give a second thought to a tasty meal of grass fed beef (I blame them not!). This automatically creates an adversarial relationship between wolves and ranchers, and killing is stopped only by killing. Ranchers will take it upon themselves to kill predating wolf packs, or call in the US government’s Animal Damage Control agents in helicopters to do it for them (yes…this really happens and is quite common).
So, our way of managing our beeves on the range in today’s beef ranching climate is new, at least in the past 60 years. Thankfully we can learn from a few sheepherders in the US and cattle raisers in Europe’s Alps that are still doing the same thing. And, we can pick up puzzle pieces from journals and stories of the Old West, when herding the norm, before the advent of barbed wire.
And so, there is a lot to learn…or rather re-learn. It turns out that “cowpunching” is not pushing beeves across the landscape…or driving them. It turns into more of a partnership, where beeves actually start looking to us for guidance, and on saddling up in the early morning, they seem to look at us quizzically, with a “where to now, boss?” look. It’s because they’ve learned that we know beforehand where the best grass is. It will likely be high on some high ridge top, where the green grass waves in the mountain breeze, and they can almost taste the view. It will always be where their prey instincts will not kick in, because of the security that their accompanying range riders on horseback bring (wolves avoid us humans like the plague, and our scent alone is enough to make them head for the next range).
And that’s why we applied for and received that hard-won Sustainable Ag Research and Education (SARE) grant this winter. Last summer we put out nearly $15K of our own money to test out our intuition about bringing back this centuries old stockmanship tradition to modern ranching. This year, we plan on doing it again in a bigger way, and that SARE grant will support monitoring efforts that will measure our successes on habitat via ecological monitoring of plant and animal populations and measuring economic indicators like weight gain (we suspect they do better than beeves who are not herded). Oh…and by the way…if you’d like to check out our tome of the SARE grant application, you can see it here on our “Organic Beef Matters” blog. Warning: this is a government destined document; it can be a tad dry. But it does go into more detail than I can here.
It’s our hope that our range successes will become contagious for both the land managers and the ranchers, and create a new paradigm for stewardship of these wild western landscapes.
All that is very cool. But the coolest aspect of the entire idea has to do with the wild wellness we can export from these pristine rangelands…with no adverse impacts. You see, these ranges have never been exposed to extractive agriculture. Unfortunately, nearly all of today’s conventional agriculture is extractive. It is soil mining. And when the nutrient value of the soil is fully extracted and the biota dies, living soil is converted to dead and becomes a medium, a matrix for petroleum-originating soil amendments. It is on these kinds of soils that most US grass fed beef is raised—they graze on either current or formerly cropped ground, eating planted pastures or commodity crop residues.
Not so on our rangelands. Rich in native minerals and vibrant with soil biota, our montane grasslands grow forage that actually tastes exceptional. I’ve eaten it. No…not the beef. I mean the grass. Curious to see why our beeves would sample up to 20 different species of plants on a given day, I sampled all I could (when you are spiked out in the middle of nowhere with a herd of cattle…with no service bars on the smartphone…you find cool stuff to do). The flavor diversity from these different plants was akin to a salad bar—those beeves would try, and likely immensely enjoy, a chance at such diversity. And the next best thing is that this method of husbandry is truly sustainable. Bison have grazed our ranges before us for likely several thousand years, and the plants are adapted to the presence of large ruminants. And what we harvest with our beeves is a mere pittance: they graze off less than 2% of all the grass biomass up there each year. In addition, they give their own gift of life back to the soil with biota rich manure.
But the greatest gift of the rangelands is what the beeves bring back in flavor and nutrition to us, the partakers of them. That flavor has redefined beef. And where there is flavor, uncontrived and real, there is wild wellness. And that is what makes all the difference for man and beast.
Happy Trails.
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