On Trusting…the Cow

Melanie was the one who spotted her. Her tag number was A343–and she was trying to break away from the herd. They had already been horseback trailing the herd of 480 cattle for several hours, covering a few miles of switchbacks on the old logging road that meandered across miles of otherwise unbroken subalpine forest. 

And that one cow was trying to go back.

Back was to the big tree-speckled meadow where we gathered the herd last week. It was in high backcountry–over 8000 feet in the Idaho Rockies. Although their grass was still green, already it had frozen 3 times and snowed within the past week.

There was more snow in the forecast, and as I was tacking on a new set of horseshoes for one of our mares, I realized it was time to start the long trail home. It was 32 miles, and it would take the herd as much as 10 days as they grazed their way downhill. We herd the cattle on horseback and live with them all the time in remote cow camps on our 70 square mile section of the wild country. We found that our human presence gives the wolves pause before they eat our cattle. Before living with our cattle 24/7, we found that wolves had an unusual penchant for organic grass fed beef.

The herd had walked over 500 miles on their summer grazing journey. They had started from our home ranch in April. The calves that the mamas were raising had never been home; they were born on the range and knew nothing else.

In my mind, we get to graze on some of the most beautiful grass on the planet earth. There are over 1500 wild species up there, and it is truly wild country. It is likely one of the largest USDA certified organic parcels in the world, and likely the largest Real Organic certified one. 

We move them in the way of the wild bison before us, in a place where herds of wild elk, pronghorn, wild sheep and goats graze with us. We coexist with wild predators such as wolves, mountain lions and bears.

Because we live and work up there all summer we become part of a living, breathing ecosystem. And our cows function in that ecosystem as the bison did, delivering biotic input as they graze in a rotation that has rest periods that are measured in years.

Back to A343. We used to name our cows, but we ran out of names. Some still do get names like Myrtle, Betsy, Mathilda and Dudley. Melanie, Jed and Chris–the horseback crew that day—let A343 go back alone the several miles where they started out that morning. 

Her bag was getting tight. She was missing her calf.

After being with these cows in the wild for 22 years in this spot of backcountry, we’ve come to realize that cows can scent their calves from as much as 5 miles away. 

We guessed the old girl knew just where her little kid was over miles of trackless forest and glade. So they let her go. Because the crew knew that they could trust the cow to go miles back to exactly where her 2 week old was bedded down in thick montane forest, hidden from wolves, lions and coyotes.

And that is so much of what we’ve come to do on Alderspring. We’ve come to trust nature. Instead of trying to hack, reduce, industrialize and simplify all of the complexity, we’ve come to lean in. 

To diversity. To animal instinct. To soil biota. 

And when we’ve come to lean in, we learn just what is possible. 

Cows become incredibly healthy. There’s no pinkeye, foot rot and little pneumonia. We need no fly controls. Their coats glisten in the sun with their own secretions of insecticidal oils compliments of their salad bar of biodiversity. 

They calve on the range on their own. We assisted no-one this year on calving, and the malady of scours–calfhood diarrhea, a common calf killer, ubiquitous in the business of beef–was non-existent again this year on Alderspring.

Meanwhile, back on the home ranch, as the cattle come off of these rangelands of sagebrush and wild timbered peaks, the other half of Alderspring on 950 acres is on managed irrigated pasture. The beeves there gain weight that we assumed only happened in feedlots. We’ve gotten up to 4 pounds a day.

When we leaned in to nature, we stopped all tillage at home, and just grazed intermittently with long rest periods. Our soil test began to climb from a 2.4% soil organic matter to 6.5% in 10 years. Now, 3 years later, it is almost 9%.

What that translates to is increased productivity in a climate at high elevation that usually has between 80 and 90 days frost free. This year it was 85.

We used to think that productivity was linear. Now we are realizing that as our soil organic matter pushes 10% (one big meadow is over 17%) we are seeing an exponential rise in productivity. I think it is microbial biodiversity underground compounding efficiencies in ways that it used to before tillage. 

Twenty years ago, our grass hay yields first languished at 1 ton per acre. It became very clear why people fertilize. On our type of country, with fertilizer, grass hay yields can boost to be up to 2 or 3 tons per acre. This summer, completely organic with no tillage or amendments, our tonnage spiked up to 3 tons per acre, a yield reserved for intensively farmed alfalfa fields. These were “wild” pasture grasses.

Neighbors remarked that they have never seen hay stacked on our places to that degree. Ever.

We hadn’t either. 

What all this grassland yield means to us is that we are finally approaching 1 cow per acre for 12 months. Ranchers in 10 month growing seasons sometimes achieve that, usually with added nitrogen, but not in a 3 month frost-free growing season like ours. 

What that means is that the hay feeds the cow over the winter, and the grass on the same ground feeds her over the summer. It’s a big deal–a goal of mine–for the simple reason that I like the elegance of numbers. 

One cow per acre means if all ranchers and farmers embraced this real organic expansion of nature, we could handily feed ourselves without concentrated feeding operations, a.k.a. feedlots. Bear with me through some numbers:

There’s 86 million cows in the US. That includes all dairy cows, calves, beef cows, bulls, and feedlot occupants. My one cow per acre ideal means conceivably with restoration, temperate or irrigated grasslands could support all of them on 86 million acres. That’s less than the combined area of the “I” states: Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. 

That means no feedlots. No confinement anything. Just cows on grass.  All of that, in this scenario is empty. Concrete bunkers, empty. Dairy confinement: vacant. Fields raising corn for cattle:  none. We would just have cows on grass. Interestingly, it’s actually a similar number to what some biologists guess used to be the total amount of bison in America before settlement.

First off, there would be way lower demand for corn. If the ethanol subsidy collapsed, it would be the nail in King Corn’s coffin, because only 10% of corn’s 96 million acres of yield is used for human food, and that, mostly for HFC (high fructose corn syrup–and who wants that anyway?). 

What? We could actually do away with corn (except for hogs and chickens).  And not effect human food? It’s true. It would offer up 96 million acres to other things. Maybe we could grow more produce, or make some of it into our 1 cow per acre pasture. We could make all the corn ground into 1 acre per cow pasture and still have some left over. And grow more food. Interesting produce note: there’s only 4 million acres in the US. We could quit corn, put more produce in, and end importation of things like Driscoll’s berries and tomatoes. 

And those cows–they don’t have to be on the 1 acre per cow ground. Many of them could be in our wild country, grazed like bison, like we do. It’s rewilding using managed cattle grazing with long rest periods and exclusion from sensitive watercourses and pristine habitats. 

Sure, we’re still horseback, but we are embracing the use of technologies like satellite controlled virtual fencing (yes, now, every cow has a collar and is thriving with it).

It’s exciting. Nature is shocking us with the potential of the exponential. I don’t even know if the curve is a sigmoid or if it just keeps going up, getting steeper by the year. I’ll keep you posted. 

People often say there is no hope of organic agriculture to scale up and feed the planet. 

We’re finding out just the opposite. We are entrusting our productivity to the likes of cows and soil microbia. And finding out that they can absolutely deliver when we get out of the way. We don’t need inputs because nature creates them. Light bulb idea: we don’t need to make nature better. 

Because it is pure elegance when we let it be just what it is.

I’m not saying we need to throw out technology. Things like our virtual fence collars, GPS tracking, pipeline water systems and our water-saving center pivots are fantastic tools for us to help us work in the image of nature even better. 

But nature is the foundation of it all. And our teacher.

Lean in. And get out of the way. 

Oh–wondering about A343? Melanie and her husband Jed made camp where they started that early morning. They just spread their bedrolls out under the stars along the trail. 

The next morning, in the gray first light of dawn, they rolled over to see the cause of a small landslide of rocks just 20 feet away from them off the trail. It was A343. Her little tyke clattered behind her, still unsteady but determined to go with mom to the new graze we showed her in the big meadow yesterday. She rejoined the herd after hiking up the twisty trail with baby in tow. On her own. 

See? We can trust the cow. And nature. And that…to me, is hope for agriculture.

And the planet. 

Happy Trails