In my parents’ black diesel-powered pickup truck, I zoom down a narrow gravel road in western South Dakota on my way to Great Plains Buffalo Company, where Phil and Jill Jerde and their family raise grass-fed bison. They do this according to a philosophy called holistic management, which sounds like it could be the name of a corporate seminar. I have only a vague idea of what holistic management is, but I heard it regenerates native grassland and produces practically organic, input-free meat—so I’m on my way to see for myself. The Jerde’s herd, over a thousand bison strong, is one of the largest commercial herds in the United States. About 2,500 other U.S. ranches include buffalo, keeping alive a species that almost vanished due to overhunting.1
It is early May, fifty degrees and sunny with only a slight breeze, rare stillness in this windy country. I wish it were summer because that’s when this part of South Dakota comes alive. A few sights a driver is sure to see from June to August: grassland, cattle, horses, wheat fields, corn fields, hay fields, hay bales, farmsteads, deer (mule deer mostly, especially in the evening and early morning), the non-native state bird called the Chinese ring-necked pheasant, grouse, sparrows, tractors, maybe a pronghorn antelope, pickup trucks, barbed-wire fences, brown hawks, rocks piled at the edges of fields, roadkill, wild sunflowers, white country churches, and people riding horses.
Instead I see empty or just-sprouted fields and pastures with no cattle. Spring comes late to South Dakota; May is often cold and has been known to bring snow. The pastures show a hint of green beneath last year’s dried grass, but the new growth is minimal: this area—and much of the Great Plains from North Dakota to Texas—is suffering from drought. The U.S. Drought Monitor map from that week shows the northwest corner of South Dakota colored in bright red that signifies the “Extreme” category; not as severe as the burgundy “Exceptional,” but dry nonetheless.
After 6 miles or so, I turn on a narrower, even less traveled road. By now I’m roughly 85 miles from the nearest fast food restaurant, 40 miles from a high school, 20 from a gas pump. This is remote, even for someone who grew up 10 miles from the “McFarthest Spot,” the longest distance from a McDonald’s in the continental U.S., which is 145 miles by car, 107 miles as the crow flies.2 Phil said there would be buffalo skulls and a fire hydrant at the turn-off to his ranch. This is how ranchers give directions. They tell you things like, “Go . . . well, I don’t know, about 5 miles down the road, and then you see the big cottonwood tree on the north side and go another mile or so after that and turn by the pile of rocks. You can’t miss it.” Right.
Found ’em: skulls and hydrant. I make a quick left onto a still narrower road and reach a large log cabin on a hill. A pickup emblazoned with the words “Great Plains Buffalo” tells me I’m at the right place. After visiting with Jill and all but one of the ten Jerde children—who range in age from newborn to twenty-one—Phil says it’s time to see the buffalo. Phil, forty-five, looks like a typical high plains rancher. He wears a long-sleeved white shirt with olive-colored checkers, dark blue Twenty X brand denim jeans, and what I’m sure is a hand-tooled leather belt, a common cowboy accessory. A short-trimmed beard covers his chin, cheeks, and upper lip. One unusual accessory, though: a baby carrier, the cloth kind that hooks in the back and allows the wearer to carry the baby in front, against the chest. Inside the carrier, baby Quilla sleeps, her blonde peach fuzz hair just visible. Phil loves taking his children along to do ranch work, especially the babies because he says they sleep well in the carrier (how I don’t know because ranch work is rarely quiet). “At this age they spend more time with me than Jill,” he says proudly later.
Phil, baby Quilla, and I get into a ramshackle blue Ford designated as “the fencing pickup.” Jesse, age four, and Jack, age six, scramble into the truck bed, which is littered with fencing material: a wire stretcher, barbed wire, a steel post driver, fencing staples, wire cutters. I am amazed because my family also has a ’70s-era blue Ford fencing pickup almost exactly like this one. We call it Old Blue.3 Fencing pickups are generally old trucks no longer reliable enough for highway use, and they serve the dual purpose of storing fencing supplies and transporting people around the ranch. Dents, torn seats, low-functioning brakes, touchy gas pedals, and tricky ignitions are common. My family’s fencing pickup has left me stranded more than once.
We head for the pasture, off to do a trial run of a new portable water delivery system Phil has devised for providing water to the buffalo herd as it moves from one pasture to another. He’s chosen a long, rectangular steel trough to act as a water tank, and to that he welded an even larger flap of durable rubber. To the rubber flap he attached a chain so he can drag the tank to new pastures. Whenever Phil needs something for the ranch, he first considers whether he can build it. If no piece of equipment exists to meet the need, as with this water system, then he often invents what he’s looking for, welding it to life in the Quonset machine shed.
After building the water tank, Phil had to figure out how to pipe water to it. He bought thousands of feet of above-ground water pipeline made of plastic so strong “a bulldozer could drive over it,” he says. He cut two sections of pipeline for today’s test run and fastened on special connectors so the pieces can be spliced together as needed. Extra pipeline wraps around a six-foot reel mounted on a trailer—it looks like a huge spool of oversized thread. When the buffalo herd moves to a new pasture, Phil will connect the appropriate length of pipeline to the closest water well (there are several dotting the ranch) and then stretch the line to wherever the portable tank awaits.
Most conventional ranchers rely on one or more permanent water tanks scattered throughout sprawling pastures, as well as natural water sources. This forces cattle to constantly return to the same place for water, which limits their desire to wander too far away, especially during the hot high plains summers. There are several reasons Phil wants a system that follows the buffalo instead of remaining stationary. One reason is the drought. It’s been three weeks since the ranch received snow or rain, but the overall shortage spans several years. The last summer and two winters have been dry—so dry that the grass growth on Phil’s pastures was not abundant enough to support the bison through the winter, so he had to purchase supplemental hay. So dry that the region suffered prairie fires and failed crops. So dry that natural water sources such as creeks, ponds, and dams shrank until some were little more than shallow pools. Unless the summer brings rain, these sources will disappear and “we’ll have to do some serious destocking by fall,” he says, meaning he’ll be forced to sell part of the herd.
The main reason Phil needs a portable water system, however, is not the drought. Droughts occur in cycles on the Great Plains—years of plenty followed by years of want is typical, although climate scientists have proven that recent droughts are more severe and long-lasting due to climate change.4 Phil needs a new system because of the unconventional way he manages his pasture and livestock, a way that insulates the land from the worst effects of drought that conventional grazing can’t. His way encourages grass growth and soil health, discourages overgrazing, and treats the ranch and its soil, animals, and people as one ecosystem—and his way sets him apart from the majority of ranchers.
But before one can fully understand Phil’s method, it’s important to understand what it is not—and it is decidedly not conventional grazing.
Conventional grazing, practiced by the majority of ranchers in the United States, is generally this: ranchers turn cattle loose in large pastures and allow them to graze selectively using “free will,” choosing the plants they like best and leaving everything else untouched. Conventional grazing became standard practice on the Great Plains in the 1870s, when barbed wire appeared and cattle barons carved the Great Plains into pastures. Cowboys no longer needed to move cattle to fresh ground and keep them from straying; instead, ranchers could simply put cattle in wire-enclosed pastures, shut the gate, and let them be, a philosophy that hasn’t changed much since. Conventional ranchers rotate their cattle to new ground after a pasture becomes “grazed up,” as they often put it. This might be once every few months, depending on the size of the pasture and herd.
Not only does conventional grazing require little work, but cattle also perform well under this method. Because they consume the most nutritious grasses and leave the rest, they fatten quickly and rebreed easily. Operating under conventional grazing theory, ranchers opted for large-framed cattle breeds hard-wired for big meat production, breeds with high nutritional requirements best satisfied with selective grazing at low stocking rates (i.e., fewer livestock per acre), as well as with supplemental feeds and chemical parasite control. Conventional grazing can also include spraying pastures for weeds and applying fertilizers—quick chemical fixes for problems caused by this management strategy.
Instead of conventional grazing, Great Plains Buffalo practices holistic management, a theory of land management first espoused by biologist and environmentalist Allan Savory as he sought to understand and reverse the growing desertification of the world’s grasslands, particularly in Africa. Savory calls his method holistic because it accounts for the needs of the whole grassland ecosystem—soil, plants, insects, grazers, wildlife, people. Phil firmly believes in Savory’s work, and he mentions holistic management right away when I ask what makes Great Plains Buffalo different from other ranches. Savory first presented holistic management and the Savory grazing method in the early 1980s through journal articles and, later, more comprehensively in his book Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making. Holistic management is, at its heart, a decision-making framework, and Savory presents several key insights to guide land decisions. First, he says, land managers must realize that “no whole, be it a family, a business, a community, or a nation, can be managed without looking inward to the lesser wholes that combine to form it, and outward to the greater wholes of which it is a member . . . in studying our ecosystem and the many creatures inhabiting it we cannot meaningfully isolate anything, let alone control the variables.”5 A good land manager realizes that every decision has visible and invisible consequences in the environment, and no one action or inaction can fix or single-handedly create a problem. This sounds a lot like Joel Salatin, a farmer featured in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, when he’s talking about his biological farm with carefully layered enterprises: “In an ecological system like this everything’s connected to everything else, so you can’t change one thing without changing ten other things.”6 Good farmers and ranchers recognize and work with this complexity.
Savory also calls for a new way to classify environments: on a continuum from nonbrittle to brittle according to the evenness of precipitation and humidity distribution throughout the year and how fast vegetation decays. Seeing land on this continuum explains why environments react differently to the same forces, such as grazing. A nonbrittle environment, or a humid place like the tropics with consistent rainfall and fast decay, responds well to rest or long periods of no grazing because the environment naturally induces the breakdown of dead plants. It doesn’t need grazers for that job. But a brittle environment, or a place with little humidity, and with erratic rainfall and slow decay, such as the grassland plains of Africa and America, turns into a desert when rested.
Why? Conventional wisdom suggests that arid or semiarid land receiving inconsistent rainfall should be rested, not grazed. Savory says that in these brittle places large grazers, not humidity, are the engine for recycling nutrients, breaking down vegetation, and keeping microorganisms alive during dry periods. Take those herbivores away, and the grass receives no fertilizer, insects and microorganisms have no food, and no plants decay, resulting in stands of dead grass that choke out new plant growth. Desertification is the end result. As evidence, Savory points to Africa, where millions of animals once roamed the plains—many times more than the number of livestock animals now present—and they enjoyed a plentiful environment. Yet when comparatively small numbers of livestock replaced wildlife, the grasslands deteriorated. Experts, scientists, and government land managers insisted that the desertification was a result of overgrazing and excessive trampling caused by too many livestock on pastures and too much wildlife concentrated within game preserves. Thinking the same thing, Savory once called for the culling of elephants and buffalo and ridding the African grasslands of livestock altogether. But the research station plots he saw that were “properly managed” with few livestock still became little deserts.
Years of observing wildlife and livestock finally led Savory to conclude that time, not animal numbers, was the key to understanding grassland health. Overgrazing is not connected to the number of animals in the environment, but instead to the amount of time the environment is exposed to the animals. If livestock or wildlife keep returning to the same area without giving the plants appropriate time to rest—and “appropriate time” can be short or long depending on where the land falls on the nonbrittle to brittle continuum—then the plants weaken, die, and are replaced by bare ground or unpalatable plants: desertification in action. In a brittle environment, it’s all about high intensity, short duration grazing followed by rest. That’s why grasslands supported high animal numbers in the past; herding animals, bunching closely as they did in the presence of predators, would produce dung and urine in high concentrations on their grazing area. Animals do not like to feed on ground they’ve fouled, so they keep moving to avoid it, and also to evade predators. A day or two of hard use or “massive disturbance,” as Savory words it, followed by a long period of recovery: that’s what ideal grazing looks like in a brittle environment.
At its most basic level, holistic management is similar to the theory of rotational grazing, which means moving livestock frequently to new pastures, grazing each area intensively for a short period of time, and then allowing it to rest. But Savory claims that rotation alone isn’t enough, and the insights mentioned previously are only the beginning of holistic management. He covers the water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow, community dynamics, technology, money and labor, fire, rest, and animal health. An understanding of all of these, he says, is necessary to manage grassland. Savory also remarks on financial planning, sustainability in resource use, society and culture, the purpose of research, and effective policymaking. My favorite is the chapter titled “Cause and Effect: Stop the Blows to Your Head before You Take the Aspirin” from the second edition.7 It’s a book about grassland management, livestock, and desertification, but it’s also about living holistically no matter one’s occupation.8
Savory’s theory united a variety of people—scientists, grazing experts, ranchers, government bureaucrats, and environmentalists—on the issue of stopping desertification. Unfortunately, it was usually for the purpose of denouncing his research. Savory’s grazing theory is highly controversial to some people, who write that he is eccentric and perhaps crazy, that his ideas actually create more deserts and destroy what is left of the world’s grasslands. Others say outside trials of holistic management prove it’s no better than conventional grazing, a claim Savory disputes by pointing out that the trials only test rotational grazing, not his entire holistic management approach.
Many ranchers take issue with Savory because his insights challenge the way they’ve raised livestock for well over a century. They don’t like the idea of throwing out generational wisdom and implementing a new approach. Adopting Savory’s theory means a paradigm shift in how they operate and major structural changes to their ranches. Most ranchers reject the argument that conventional grazing causes desertification in the first place. While there are some bad apples that overgraze their ranges, ranchers tend to see overgrazing as an abomination. I’ve heard my father say as he drives by pastures nibbled to the dirt, “Those poor cows have nothing to eat,” a comment not only on the sorry state of the grass but also on the rancher’s intelligence, which is assumed to be quite low if he or she has let the pasture get that short. As long as they don’t overgraze, ranchers tend to think, they’re doing things right.
Despite their best intentions, however, many conventional ranchers see undesirable plant species like Canadian thistle and leafy spurge replacing their grasses, prairie dogs overtaking their ranges, and pastures that come back less lush and thick each season. Their land collapses during drought years, forcing them to sell livestock. Some respond by spraying weeds and thistles, poisoning prairie dogs, and fertilizing with synthetic products. Others plow up native grass and try other varieties that supposedly work better. In their minds, the land is fine—it’s just outside forces like weeds and drought that need to be overcome. This is why it’s tough to convince ranchers that conventional grazing is harmful: they simply can’t see the connection between desertification and what they consider to be best practices, which to them means giving livestock huge amounts of space to scatter.
Meanwhile, environmentalists often see livestock as the source of grassland degradation, air pollution, and climate change (and cattle confined in feedlots do cause methane pollution, which contributes to climate change). Savory’s call to increase livestock numbers—“Only livestock can save us,” he has said—sounds like the worst possible solution.9 Many environmentalists want grasslands to recover on their own, without human or livestock intervention. This hands-off strategy has been implemented on many government-managed ranges across the country, mostly a result of pressure from environmental groups.
Yet we cannot just leave the grassland alone because today’s grassland is nothing like it was in the past, when many species of plants and animals fueled a vibrant prairie environment. Humans removed the largest herbivore, the bison, from that environment. An estimated thirty million to sixty million buffalo roamed North America when Europeans first set foot on the continent.10 Their herds sometimes numbered in the hundreds of thousands—anywhere they stopped would run out of grass and water quickly, so they had to keep moving. And after grazing an area along their seasonal routes, they might not return until the next year. Unbeknownst to them, they practiced holistic management. By 1884 just 325 wild buffalo had survived the U.S. Army–sanctioned slaughter campaign intended to make way for cattle and weaken the Plains Indians by destroying their main food source.11 The presence of white settlers also reduced other herbivore populations, such as deer, elk, and pronghorn antelope. Removing these herbivores had a ripple effect, since most flora and fauna evolved in response to impact from large herbivores.12 Bison, however, were the “keystone herbivores” in this ecosystem—without them, the chain of life started to collapse.
Because our forefathers reduced (and we continue to reduce) the presence of wild animals by plowing up the prairie to plant corn, expanding our cities, and polluting the water, we are now responsible for the health of the grassland. Whether we like it or not, we are the keystone species, and we are tasked with replicating the bison’s effect. Perhaps on government land we can reintroduce buffalo, following a model like the one at Custer State Park in South Dakota or Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. But that’s not an option on privately owned ranch land, which includes the vast majority of our nation’s grassland.
If livestock left the land, then most ranges would never experience the effect of herbivores grazing, excreting, and walking, at least not abundantly enough to fuel natural mineral and energy cycles. Leaving the grassland alone, virtually devoid of herbivores, is unwise for the plants, insects, and small animals that depend on symbiotic relationships with them. Brittle grassland environments become deserts without herbivores—some are already halfway there. Holistic management offers a way for livestock to be part of the grassland ecosystem. They can fill the gap in the symbiotic relationship between herbivores, soil, grass, insects, and other animals. Phil shows me a picture that illustrates such a relationship. The photo is of a buffalo hoof print. “That’s some bare ground that a critter impacted while we were in there,” Phil says.13 “You can see there are even some seeds lying there on top of the soil. That hoof print is seed to soil compaction. It made a depression so that when we do get a little bit of moisture it’s going to tend to funnel it right along that edge, and that’s where your new plants are going to grow.” The hoof print reveals the complex impact herbivores have on the grassland: they “till” the soil, plant the seeds, help water those seeds, and fertilize the ground.
Surveying the picture, I’m astounded at the intricate and mostly unseen relationship between herbivores and the prairie, a relationship I had no idea existed. No one I knew growing up talked about stuff like this. After several interviews with Phil, I start looking more closely at our ranch’s pastures for signs of desertification. They aren’t hard to spot: areas of bare ground, invasive plant species, woody plants, and prairie dog towns that cover hundreds of acres. The worst part is how thin and short our pastures are at the height of summer compared to Phil’s. When I try talking to my father about how better rotations might help, he’s not receptive. I can’t blame him. Before my Tri-State Neighbor days, if someone had told me our ranch contributed to desertification, I would have scoffed. I used to think I knew everything about cattle and ranching, used to think protecting and regenerating grassland was the same as making sure cattle didn’t crop it too short. It turns out I’m just starting to understand how cattle actually affect the land.