Jesse and Jack, still riding in the back of the pickup, yell at their father to “Stop Papa! Stop!” as we drive past a pile of bleached white buffalo bones. Phil says out the window, “We’ll come back here, boys.” He turns to me and grins. “They are really into skulls.”
Only farm kids can be really into skulls, or grass for that matter. These children can identify different grass species and explain the role of dung beetles in the nutrient cycle. Most ranchers do not have the knowledge that the Jerde children already possess. Phil certainly didn’t in the past. He first learned about holistic management and Allan Savory over a decade ago at an informational meeting for ranchers hosted by the Cooperative Extension Service. His daughter Emily, then eleven, and son Payton, nine, were with him (even then Phil brought his children everywhere). It was a meeting that changed the course of the ranch’s future.
The message he heard—that overgrazing isn’t about animal numbers, but the amount of time the grassland is exposed to animals—was a major revelation. Anxious to learn more, he bought Savory’s book. Phil tells me, “They said [at the meeting], ‘You won’t be able to read this book because it’s too boring of a read.’” Note: Savory’s book is more than six hundred pages long in small type with few pictures. But Phil is an avid reader. “It didn’t take very long and I read it, and I read it again,” he said. “It was like a light turned on.”
Over the last decade, the Jerdes have divided the ranch into one hundred pastures of roughly 130 acres each. Phil forces the buffalo—1,000 to 1,200 of them, depending on the time of year—to graze these pastures to the point where ranchers would accuse them of being overgrazed. Savory’s “massive disturbance” happens, then Phil moves the buffalo to the next pasture and doesn’t allow them back again for a year or so. The Jerdes play what Savory identified as the role of predator because they push the bison to move every few days. While watching buffalo herds in Africa, Savory noted that animals walked gently and slowly when spread out, placing their hooves beside and not on top of coarse, inedible plants. They also placed their full weight on the soil, compacting it. When the same animals moved quickly and bunched together in new grazing areas or when they fled predators, the impact on the environment changed:
I noted that while bunched as a herd animals stepped recklessly and even very coarse plants, containing much old material that would not be grazed or trampled normally, were trampled down. That provided cover for the soil surface. In addition, the hooves of bunching and milling animals left the soil chipped and broken. In effect, the animals did what any gardener would do to get seeds to grow: first loosen the sealed soil surface, then bury the seed slightly, compact the soil around the seed, then cover the surface with a mulch.1
The impact of bunched animals is vital to the land’s health, not harmful as people perceive it to be. Because livestock have few predators today, ranchers need to re-create the herd behavior. And if there’s anything buffalo really enjoy doing, it’s running as a herd. A few months later, Phil shows me video clips of the herd galloping into fresh pastures, snorting and kicking their hind legs in the air with glee. They’re nimble and quick, dashing up hills and cutbanks on their skinny legs. In one video they charge through a stream, water splashing up around them. When I study them on that May morning as Phil and I drag the pipeline, I notice how they run almost everywhere: to the water tank, away from it, toward the pickup, back out to pasture. The young ones are like big hairy puppies, playfully jumping around. I can see why the buffalo shaped the prairie—they’re in almost constant motion.
The result is even distribution of animal impact, a major departure from conventional grazing, where animals return to the same areas frequently while leaving others barely touched. As even conventional grazers admit, livestock will eat choice plants first and leave behind woody, unpalatable plants. Because of this selectiveness, livestock left alone in massive pastures eventually overgraze and kill the nutritious plants, allowing woody plants to take over. Conventional grazing also results in uneven mineral distribution, in the form of manure and urine, across a pasture. “Typically what happens in big pastures is the animals go back to the water source where they drink, lie down nearby, stand up, pee and poop, and then they go out and graze again and repeat the process,” Phil says. “So what ends up happening is you move all the minerals from where they’re eating back around the water. Under planned grazing, you end up with even distribution of minerals back on the land. When we drive across here, I want to see manure patties everywhere, even, which I think we’re seeing.”
He motions toward the pee and poop evidence outside the pickup window as we traverse the pasture and, yes, there are manure patties plopped consistently over the land. We work as we talk: we hitch the portable water tank to the pickup, pull it to the pasture where the buffalo are, go back and hitch up the waterline, and pull one end to the tank. I open any gates we encounter. When he stops the stick-shift pickup and it rolls just a little, Phil sometimes says “Whoa,” as if to a horse. “So, short duration, high intensity, followed by a long recovery,” he continues.
High intensity is right. Phil tells me he stocks his land at about one buffalo per fifteen acres of land.2 Under conventional grazing, a rancher might be able to stock one beef cow (which eats less than a buffalo cow) for every twenty-five to thirty acres of land in this part of South Dakota, he says. Phil’s land supports twice the livestock—yet his pastures contain far more forage than conventionally grazed land. The buffalo graze year-round, even in the dead of winter, something a conventional ranch couldn’t support. How can this be? Overgrazing is less about what the grass looks like above ground and more about what the roots look like underground, Phil explains. “Savory writes how you really can’t overgraze a plant in three days. Overgrazing is a matter of time, not a matter of animal numbers. When a plant is grazed off, and it’s starting to shoot up again like you see these plants out here”—he points to the shoots of grass as we drive by—“they’re doing that on root reserves. Until they get big enough to where they have their solar panels out, they’re all going to have to borrow energy from the ground.” He pauses. “There’s a root die-off going on, is what’s happening.” He means in the region, on the grassland as a whole. I can see from his expression that a root die-off is troubling. “So if I continue to graze that plant off before it can get up and start harvesting solar energy again, I deplete that root mass until eventually I kill that plant.”
A conventional pasture might look verdant, but the root mass underneath is likely depleted, because each time the grass launches new growth, livestock eat it. This happens all summer long, year after year. The plant never has time to fully launch its “solar panels” and restore what was taken from the root mass. It keeps growing, but on borrowed energy. Eventually the plant stops sending shoots to the surface because its roots are exhausted. That’s one reason pastures in the Great Plains are slowly becoming thinner, less diverse, more populated with weedy and woody plants, and more at risk of desertification.
The evidence for the desertification of America’s grasslands is startling. But first, what is meant by desertification? One group of scientists define it as “the loss of the ability of a landscape to provide ecosystem services that are important to sustain life,” like biological or economic functions.3 Bare ground exceeds vegetation cover and nutrients stop cycling. Desertification is not simply an expansion of a desert, though; it can occur anywhere, even far from an existing desert. Other scientists define desertification more widely or more narrowly, but most agree that desertification is caused by a number of factors acting simultaneously, primarily human activity (i.e., poor management such as overgrazing and over-farming), higher than normal temperatures, and lower than normal rainfall. The International Fund for Agricultural Development says about 29.7 million acres of land are lost to desertification around the world each year, which threatens the livelihoods of about one billion people in more than one hundred countries. The group also reports that 25 percent of the world’s land is desertified.4
Grasslands and other dryland environments are especially prone to desertification as climate change accelerates.5 Here in the United States, desertification is already happening. A joint report from the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council describes larger wildfires, shrinking rivers and snowpack, and the loss of forests, glaciers, and wildlife, all results of climate change.6 They note that ranchers are suffering because of desertification, with drought-related herd culling, lost profits, lack of feed, and stressed water sources.7 The report also reveals another disturbing fact: the American West is growing hotter and drier at a faster rate than anywhere else in the nation and in some cases the world. From the report: “For the last five years (2003 through 2007), the global climate has averaged 1.0 degree Fahrenheit warmer than its 20th century average. For this report, RMCO found that during the 2003 through 2007 period, the eleven western states averaged 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the region’s 20th century average. That is 0.7 degrees, or 70 percent, more warming than for the world as a whole.”8 In other words, the United States stands to experience some of the worst desertification caused by climate change in the world. A more recent study, the 2017 Climate Science Special Report, confirms the RMCO’s work, showing that temperatures in the northern Great Plains are, on average, 1.69 degrees higher now than in the first half of this century. The report also describes fires, heat waves, melting snowpack, severe storms, floods, and droughts caused or worsened by climate change.9
What can ranchers do? In Phil’s eyes, reversing desertification primarily means preventing bare ground. “Bare ground is the worst thing because water doesn’t penetrate bare ground very well and water likes to evaporate off of bare ground pretty rapidly, too,” he says. A few months later, he illustrates the harmful effects of bare ground by showing me pictures that he took after “a big rain event.” More than four inches of rain fell during that summer storm. A picture of the neighbor’s side of the fence showed a clear path of dirt and matted grass where the rainwater had formed a miniature river. The neighbor’s land absorbed very little rain; it ran off instead because the conventionally managed pasture had bare ground and thin grass. Thistles, dried grass, and dirt clung to the fence where the water had flowed under. On the Jerde side, though, the mark of the miniature river disappeared. Phil’s land absorbed the runoff completely. Phil showed me another picture from a month after the big rain: his neighbor’s pasture still bore the scars of erosion, while his pasture was especially lush and green where the water had flowed in. Phil turns to me and asks, “Is it a problem of not getting rain, or not using the rain that we get?”
To Phil, people on the land like him and his family are responsible for keeping it healthy so it can, among many other ecological tasks, absorb rain. The stakes are high these days. Because desertification threatens food production, it also threatens national security. “A society that can’t feed itself soon goes to war to get food,” Phil says. “Throughout history this kind of stuff goes on. The ones on the land are the ones responsible for whether the land continues to be productive or goes backwards.” At first I think Phil is being overly dramatic. Flawed as our agriculture is, the U.S. will surely never need to wage war over food, right? Not so fast. Later, I come across Dan Barber’s discussion of the “law of return” in his book The Third Plate. The law of return, put into words by the father of organic farming, Sir Albert Howard, is based on the fact that soil regenerates itself through the circle of life: death, decay, regrowth. This circle creates what Barber calls “a long-term bank account that provides for the future needs of plants.”10 Farming extracts soil fertility, which is not inherently bad, but it means we have to put back as much or more fertility as we take—the law of return. If we don’t put anything back in the bank, the soil can’t regenerate, which is what happens in conventional agriculture today.
It turns out that past civilizations also neglected to pay the bank. Barber reveals that empires such as ancient Rome, Greece, and medieval Europe “built their success on the same system of careless banking. They grew food and transported it long distances to feed a growing population. They cashed in on the fertility without paying back the bank. This worked for a while, but ultimately the soils stopped producing.” We know what happened next: those civilizations eventually collapsed. These historical moments should be warnings to us about the danger of forgetting to pay the soil bank. But instead, we throw away the past-due notices and keep on going.
Holistic management also reverses desertification by increasing plant diversity. Phil says the many types of grass in his pastures thwart the logic of conventional management wisdom, which says this section of the Great Plains can only grow one type of grass: cool-season grass. “We’ve been told that this is cool-grass country, cool-season grasses,” Phil says, still with baby Quilla strapped to his chest.11 “Well, what we’re finding when we manage with this short duration, higher-intensity grazing is that our warm-season plants make a return.” The prairie once supported a diverse mix of cool- and warm-season grasses. In The Prairie World, author and ecologist David Costello counted in eastern Colorado’s prairie 143 species of forbs, 22 species of grasses, 10 varieties of shrubs, and 4 kinds of trees—and this was in 1969, when conventional grazing had been the norm for almost one hundred years already.12 Eastern grasslands, like those in Illinois and Iowa, once had even more variety than the short-grass western prairies. Having a wide variety of species meant something was always growing, whether in cold May or hot August. By July, cool-season grasses were gone or became too tough and dry for livestock to eat. Warm-season grasses took off at this point, providing forage for the hot months.
Conventional grazing, however, caused a gradual shift toward more cool-season grasses because livestock return again and again to the same warm-season grasses as the summer wears on.13 With no time for regrowth, the warm-season grasses rely on their root masses for nutrients, a losing battle because every time the plant grows a little, the livestock come back. After years of root-mass depletion, they eventually stop sending up shoots, allowing cool-season grasses to take over permanently. Seeing that their pastures are thin by July, many ranchers accidentally exacerbate the problem by introducing non-native cool-season grasses, such as crested wheatgrass, to boost forage. Cool-season grasses seem like the ideal fix: the seed is cheap, they are easy to establish, and they green up early in the spring so ranchers can turn livestock out to the pasture earlier. If rains come in the fall, then cool-season grasses will green up a second time. But when the summer heat hits, as it always does, these grasses retreat, and on most conventional pastures there are few native warm-season grasses waiting to replace them. Weeds and woody plants such as yucca and sagebrush move in, bare ground emerges, and wildlife move elsewhere.
Phil has coaxed warm-season grasses back to his ranch, another reason the pastures stay so lush through the hot South Dakota summers. “Warm-season grasses, one way to look at ’em is, they’ll use half the moisture and produce twice the forage,” he says. Cool-season grasses tend to be short and lose their nutrition early in the season, while warm-season grasses tend to be tall and highly palatable with lasting nutritional value. They provide better erosion control, more cover and forage for wildlife, and higher fire tolerance, too. During times of drought, having warm-season grass is especially beneficial because they have deeper root systems to access water, as Phil witnessed during the bad drought years of the early and mid-2000s.14
The deep root systems also mean that warm-season grasses are a more complex (read: desirable) nutrition source for the buffalo and, in turn, for the consumer. “A lot of these [warm-season] plants, they have roots that go down fifteen, twenty feet in the ground,” Phil says. “They are accessing different minerals and bringing them up and making them available to the animals, whereas when we have monocultures of crested wheatgrass or monocultures of whatever, we only end up accessing minerals at a certain depth of the soil at a certain time. We want diversity; we want many different warm-season grasses, cool-season grasses, warm-season forage, cool-season forage.”
Phil isn’t targeting any particular species of grass. As long as his pastures contain a diverse mix, he says, he likes any grass that will grow and provide good nutrition for the buffalo, native and non-native alike. “Most of this is native,” he says as we drive through a pasture. “And now we’re driving though the smooth brome—well, that’s an introduced grass. A bunch of the stuff we have is crested wheatgrass, which is another introduced grass. Native, non-native, like Savory says, the non-native species are just ones that didn’t get here soon enough to get their green card.” Phil chuckles. “We arbitrarily assign that title to them. Most of the ones people consider invasive, non-native, are really just a function of our management. If we are going to manage for cool-season grasses, that’s what we’ll get.”
Many ranchers think the grassland can’t be changed to grow different things. What grows in the pastures is just what grows in the pastures, period. Most don’t see the connection between conventional grazing decisions and the near monoculture of cool-season grasses, or don’t believe it when they hear about it. One reason for this disbelief is that most ranchers were not alive to see the grassland as it used to be: diverse, with warm- and cool-season grasses swaying waist high and lasting all summer. Cool-season prairie is all they know. Phil, on the other hand, sees the grassland differently—as part of an ecological whole in which he can’t manipulate one thing, like introducing cool-season grasses, without impacting everything else. In the natural world, one action or input does not yield one result or output. He can’t simplify nature’s diversity, something industrial agriculture seeks to accomplish with monocultures, a militaristic focus on yields, and human-made substitutions for natural processes. He views himself as a member of the ecological whole, meaning he is responsible for its well-being. This whole extends beyond the ranch—it’s the entire world.
So is holistic management working? On Phil’s ranch, holistic management has helped heal the land from decades of prior conventional management, bringing it closer to what it was in presettlement days. “It’s pretty amazing over time what can be done, in pretty fast order, too,” he says. The ranch isn’t 100 percent restored—that will take many more years—but the Jerdes are on the right track. Phil has seen dozens of native species return and bare ground give way to vegetation. On land he purchased in neighboring Harding County, for example, Phil noticed a rectangle of bare ground in the midst of the pasture. “You drove out there and saw it; you saw the straight lines. I think that that was the original homesteader’s piece of ground he dug up. A hundred years ago, we did something, through our management, to the soil. That guy went broke and moved on, but under continuous grazing, season-long grazing, that land was never quite healed. Now you go out there and you have a hard time finding those lines that were clearly visible eight years ago.”
We drive into a low spot near a creek through a small patch of “buck brush,” as ranchers call a certain perennial, shrub-like plant with woody stalks and small, oval leaves. Buck brush grows in thick stands about two feet high, and it can take over low-lying areas. This stand is small, less than ten feet across. “We had lots of buck brush out on that Harding County land, which cattle don’t like. It’s obvious,” Phil says. “But yet this is where the most moisture in the pasture is. It should be our most productive piece of land. It’s being wasted really. What we would see over there, is when we were in a pasture for a short period of time, good manure and urine distribution, pretty soon the species started changing. Warm-season, waist-high, chest-high; big bluestem, switchgrass, instead of buck brush. It’s pretty exciting stuff.”
Better management has also encouraged more animal biodiversity. “We have way more sharp-tailed grouse and partridge,” Phil says. “Deer and antelope not so much of an increase; we had a lot of them anyway. The birds are the big one.” Invisible creatures are just as important as visible ones. “When we go move buffalo, I thought we were moving a lot of buffalo. But it didn’t take very long and I figured out we were moving way more birds—there were thousands of cow birds following the herd,” Phil says. “Then pretty soon I figured out, well, the birds are following because there is all kind of insect life, dung beetles mainly. I figured out we were moving way more dung beetles than we were moving birds when we moved the big herd.”
Why do the dung beetles matter? In Phil’s eyes, grassland operations such as nutrient, water, and carbon cycles perform best when animals like dung beetles and birds do the work. He shows me a picture of a manure patty that he opened up with a shovel—yes, Phil documents the contents of buffalo poop—and I can see the small, brown dung beetles. “There are three different species in this one pile. These guys are taking that manure and taking it down and burying it in the ground. If you put Ivomec on the cows, they quit working for you.15 It kills them. These are the most common ones, the little red ones. You can open a pie up and find one hundred to a thousand in each one.”
The dung beetles move the nutrients from the manure back to the soil, so more grass can grow and continue the cycle. The birds help the buffalo by eating insects that can carry disease and be a nuisance. The birds also leave droppings on the ground, another variety of fertilizer for the grass, and they eat and poop out plant seeds, which means they assist in creating diversity on the grassland. There are probably many more unseen benefits from this symbiosis that add up to healthy grassland. Fascinating enough—and then Phil discovered he was moving creatures even smaller than dung beetles. “It turns out there’s these little mites that ride on the backs of the dung beetles, and when they get to a new patty then they jump off—and they eat fly larvae, that is what they’re going after, fly eggs—and so when it’s time to leave they jump back on the back of the dung beetles and head to a new pie. It’s a symbiotic relationship because the fly larvae are competing with the dung beetles for that manure space. It’s a win-win for them.”
Diversity from the micro level to the macro level: that’s what agriculture is all about for Phil. In the agricultural world, diversification has two meanings, the first and simplest being that the operation includes either a combination of crops and livestock or many different species of crops or many species of livestock. The second, more complex meaning includes the environment. Diversified farming systems (DFS) are, collectively, an agricultural model that “share[s] much in common with sustainable, multifunctional, organic and local farming systems, but are unique because they emphasize incorporating functional biodiversity at multiple temporal and spatial scales to maintain ecosystem services critical to agricultural production. These ecosystem services include but are not limited to pollination services, water quality and availability, and soil conservation.”16 Diversification in this sense means welcoming nature into the farm model as Phil does, using its free services to accomplish tasks like fighting disease or controlling weeds. An adjacent marshland helps with flood control, or a section of forest provides natural habitat for wildlife that fertilize the farm’s soil, or birds and mites control insects on buffalo.
Pest control through diversified farming contrasts sharply with conventional pest advice. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Beef Division, for example, offers the following for controlling flies: dust bags filled with insecticide powder that the cattle rub against to dispense powder onto their backs; back-rubbers (oilers) filled with oily insecticide that operate in a similar fashion as dust bags; animal sprays that the rancher or a hired contractor mists on the livestock, oral larvicides (feed additives) that the cattle consume in the form of loose mineral, lick blocks or lick tubs; pour-on insecticides like Ivomec applied to the cattle’s backs; and insecticide-coated ear tags. UNL Beef also recommends a device called the Vet Gun that shoots capsules of insecticide, which burst open when they hit the cow. Every product is connected to the agribusiness supply chain. There is no mention of natural fly control methods.17
Recognizing and encouraging diversity and its many symbiotic relationships saves Phil time—and money. The ranch’s input costs stay low, a financial boon because his bottom line improves and his business is insulated from input price jumps or buffalo market crashes. He doesn’t pay for feed, vaccines, pest control products, antibiotics, or fertilizer. He doesn’t spend money or time raising corn, hay, or other crops for feed. As a result, Phil is more independent. He relies on himself and nature, not agribusiness.
I see the evidence that holistic management works. But isn’t Phil’s system a kind of buffalo monoculture? Shouldn’t ranchers focus on many species instead of just one to better replicate the original grassland environment? In some parts of the world, yes. In others, not necessarily.
In a 2009 study, researchers analyzed three types of grassland in South Africa and three types in Kansas: one with multiple herbivores at work, one with a single species, and one with no herbivores. The land with no herbivores experienced a high loss of plant diversity, with woody, unpalatable plants taking over—proving, as Savory observed earlier, that insufficient grazing is just as harmful as overgrazing. Areas with multiple herbivore species had the highest plant diversity and richness at the end of the year, followed by the plots with one species. This, the authors write, shows that a diverse population of herbivores has the power to positively change the composition of the grassland.18 But that discovery doesn’t translate to American grasslands. The authors pointed out the following about their Kansas test site, Konza Prairie Biological Station: “At Konza, although white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) occasionally co-occur in low abundances with bison, there is no true ‘multiple herbivore’ treatment comparable to that in South Africa.”19 In other words, the Great Plains was never a true multiple large herbivore environment like Africa; buffalo were the keystone species here. In fact, the Kansas plot performed equally well with single and multiple herbivores. So more diversity is preferable, but not required, on the Great Plains.
As far as American ranches go, Great Plains Buffalo is pretty diverse, even if not every species impacts the grassland. Chickens and milk cows provide food for the family, while horses provide transportation over the rough terrain. In terms of large wildlife, mule deer, white-tailed deer, and antelope love the ranch for its rich grass. Phil also keeps cattle, eight hundred cow-calf pairs and one-hundred-some yearlings. Raising two species for profit is already more than most conventional ranchers do. Like farmers, ranchers obeyed calls for specialization under “get big or get out.” Many focused on a particular breed or special market area, such as bulls, bred heifers, or slaughter-ready calves. They altered their operations to meet the demands of concentrated animal feeding operations, meat processors, and consumers. Also like farmers, they adopted conventional practices one new implement at a time, creating today’s input-heavy meat system that is one of the worst outcomes of industrial agriculture.
Raising buffalo is one way of flouting this system. Unlike cattle, hogs, and chickens, they are a relatively new form of domestic livestock. No scaffold of agribusiness products and services surrounds them—yet. Running buffalo on the Great Plains also represents a physical and psychological return to the native prairie. When we see the buffalo, we remember what the prairie used to be: an intact and thriving ecosystem capable of withstanding the natural wet and dry cycles, an ocean of grass where humans fit into that system instead of disrupting it.