For twenty-six years, Gabe was in the specialty bull business, raising and selling breeding bulls, called balancers, or bulls that combine positive traits from several breeds into one animal. Being in the bull business meant timing the birth of his calves for February and March so they matured by sale season. February and March are cold, snowy, generally miserable months in North Dakota—awful weather for giving birth outside. Blizzards can dump several feet of snow on young calves, and temperatures can plummet well below zero. Calves born during a blizzard slide out of a warm placenta and land in a freezing snow bank—and their bodies go into shock. They shiver as the birth fluid creates an ice shell. Sometimes the tips of their ears and tails freeze and later fall off; sometimes they die.
My father’s cows calve in March and April—not quite as early as Gabe’s used to, but still challenging for rancher and calf alike. During blizzards, he races into the storm in his green and white ’70s era Ford, seeking out chilled calves. When he finds one, he lays it on the cab floor and barrels toward the garage, where he places the listless calf on empty feed sacks in front of a heater. As a small child I would sit next to the calves and rub their cold ears and stroke their velvet faces. One knows a calf is thoroughly chilled when the air exhaled through his nose feels cold—so I dried the calves with towels and snuggled with them until, when I placed my hand over their noses, their breath felt warm.
It sounds like a nice scene: a child cuddling with a baby calf and a father heroically saving his herd from the storm. When the calves survive, it is. But blizzards and the sicknesses calves develop later take a number of lives each spring. Early-season calving is also hard on ranchers. I barely talk to my father during calving season because he spends those months in a sleep-deprived daze. On top of watching over the 450 or so range cows and calves, every two or three hours, day and night, he walks through the herd of 50 to 75 heifers (those giving birth for the first time as two-year-olds) in the corral. He can never leave the ranch for more than a few hours during calving season. When a heifer is ready to calve, he puts her in the barn. About once a week, he stays up most of the night helping one give birth. Ranchers put themselves and their cattle through this because they, too, want their calves to be as big as possible by sale time. A calf born in February has more time to grow than one born in May, and a heavier calf brings more money at auction from the CAFO buyers.
Gabe tells me that as his thinking grew more regenerative, he saw how the conventional system forces ranchers to do things that don’t make sense, like calving in the winter, fattening their calves on grain, and producing animals for specialized breeders instead of consumers. He switched to raising grass-fed animals for meat and calving in late spring, when wild animals like deer, antelope, and buffalo give birth. Instead of barreling into blizzards, Gabe watches his cows calve comfortably on fresh prairie grass. Instead of corralling them and checking them every couple hours, he leaves them alone, which cows prefer anyway.1 “We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t keep cattle in the lots—very rarely, a little bit right after weaning,” he says. “Now we start May 15 or 20 and we’re done by the end of June. We calve out on pasture. Two miles from the nearest corral. If they have a problem, nature takes care of it. It’s unbelievable. Our death loss is miniscule. We’ve been doing that five years, and we’ve lost one cow in five years. We’ve lost some calves, but you lose calves calving in the corral, too, especially in February or March.”
I press him on this. I’ve watched my dad pull dozens of calves from cows that are having labor trouble—the calf is too big, the heifer is too small, or the calf is backward. Warmer weather doesn’t solve an issue like that. He nods, having heard my concerns before. “People say, ‘But what if you have problems?’ You don’t,” Gabe says. “Nature takes care of it. We lose way fewer cows than we used to. It’s just not a problem. I really think a lot of ranchers, we make our own problems. We think the cow needs help. If we just let her go, she’ll work it out. Nature has a way of making things work out.”
Gabe found that nature has a way of working out sickness, too. He stopped using vaccinations in 2009 (except for the Bangs vaccination). He’s in his eighth year of not using dewormers, insecticides, fly tags, or any form of insect killer. He’s noticed the same effect Phil did after quitting insecticides: a rise in the dung beetle population, which means manure is making its way into the soil much more effectively. When Gabe first quit using insecticides, he couldn’t find a single dung beetle in the pastures. Now he’s spotted fifteen different species, plus other predator insects that eat flies and fly larvae, such as dragonflies, spider mites, and Hister beetles. “It’s just nature taking over and working. It’s amazing,” he says. “Do we have flies on our cattle? Sure. But it hasn’t really been a big issue. You get a few cases of pinkeye, but those are the weak cattle. It’s just like a weak plant. They’ll die and the healthy will survive.” Only a few cattle die per year of something that an insecticide or vaccination might have prevented. By keeping the offspring of the survivors, Gabe’s herd grows stronger every year, which in turn means higher-quality meat for the consumer with no antibiotic or pesticide residues.
Gabe’s hands-off approach extends into the winter as well: his cattle graze on open pasture and unharvested cover crops, a strategy most ranchers would scoff at. Ranchers in cold climates feed their cows hay during the winter. Every day, they start the tractor and shuttle bales to the pasture or corral. When the snow is deep, this takes hours. Ranchers feed hay because they don’t have enough pasture forage to carry the cows through the winter; they grazed up their ranges during the summer and fall and didn’t give them adequate time to recover. With his mob-grazing system, though, Gabe’s land has plenty of forage to last the winter. The cows graze the native grass pastures well into December, then work on the cover crops until late January or early February. Gabe says ranchers are wrong to think cows can’t dig through the snow to eat. Conventional cows don’t do it voluntarily because eating hay is easier. Ranchers just need to remind the cows that they can dig. “We graze through two feet of snow all the time, it’s no problem at all,” he says. “They learn. The cattle I had ten years ago, could they do it? No. How we started this is, we just didn’t feed and they learned. If they couldn’t handle it, obviously we didn’t let them die; we sold them and went on to the next one. The fittest survive.”
But the cows aren’t completely on their own, Gabe points out. His second winter strategy is bale grazing. Gabe dots hay bales across certain pastures in October. If the winter gets tough, Gabe puts the cows in the paddocks with the pre-positioned bales. Otherwise, the cows bale graze only from early February to late March or early April, depending on when the spring grasses return. The cows have free-choice hay, but they can still graze. Best of all, the system is labor-free during the cold months, a huge savings in time, fuel, and stress on the rancher. For example, Gabe’s son, Paul, wintered 250 cows at his place last year, and he started the tractor just once to bring them bales. The only labor involved is positioning the bales in the fall and moving the cattle once a day or so (they move less often in winter than summer).
Driving along in the Ranger, Gabe shows me a paddock that he bale grazed last winter. I see a few circular patches of weeds where the bales once sat, but otherwise the paddock is as lush as the others. He points out one area that is full of radishes, great soil aerators. Weeds, radishes, and other plants that pop up where the bales were enjoy the high carbon content of the soil created by the hay breaking down. “It’s just nutrients cycling through,” Gabe says about the weedy patches. “Everybody says, ‘You waste so much hay.’ No, you don’t; that’s nutrients cycling. These annual weeds, they’ll be gone in a year or two.”
Gabe has just mentioned two of the most common objections to bale grazing: waste and weeds. Ranchers often believe that, given free-choice hay, cows will waste more than they eat by scattering the hay and trampling it until it’s soiled. Hay is expensive to buy and time-consuming to make, so ranchers want to conserve as much as possible. The truth, Gabe says, is that the cows waste barely any free-choice hay, and not any more than they wasted when he used bale feeders. “Wasted” hay is not really wasted anyway, he says. When the snow melts, the trampled hay breaks down into the soil, adding nutrients for the next season. The weeds that come up where the bales used to be are simply part of that process, Gabe says. As he shows me, the weed patches give way to grass within a year or two. What’s so wrong with a few weeds, Gabe asks, if the cattle will eat them? One doesn’t want a pasture full of them, but a patch here and there won’t hurt anything. “My philosophy is, as long as a cow or sheep will eat it, it’s not a weed, it’s forage,” he says. “It’s only a weed if they won’t eat it. And there are very few things our cattle won’t eat.”
What about bad winters, I ask, when snowstorms lock people inside their homes for days, water tanks freeze up, and cattle suffocate under the snow. I think of October 2013, when a record blizzard struck western South Dakota. The Atlas Blizzard started with freezing rain that soaked and chilled the livestock; they did not have their winter coats yet and were still out in summer pastures because it was only the first weekend of October. The rain switched to snow, and it didn’t stop falling for three days. Winds reached seventy miles per hour. Most weather stations had predicted light snow, so no one was prepared. Ranchers ended up snowed inside their houses with no electricity. Up to four feet of snow covered the plains and the Black Hills, burying cattle, sheep, and horses. Entire herds drifted into creeks and dams and drowned. Others huddled together, churning the ground beneath them into mud and drowning in the muck. About fifty thousand livestock died; ranchers in the hardest hit areas lost between 20 percent and 50 percent of their herds. Dead livestock covered the prairie for months—in road ditches, in creeks, under bridges, on Interstate 90. To make matters worse, the federal government was shut down and did nothing in response for several weeks. Somehow my parents only lost a dozen or so cattle; my dad credits the tree-lined ravines and gullies on our land that protected the cows and kept them from drifting.
I look around: there’s hardly any natural protection for cattle here on Brown’s Ranch, no draws or hillsides to huddle into. The land is flat and open. The only trees are in a handful of shelterbelts that he and Shelly planted years ago. Left out here in a blizzard, a cow would probably die. The mob-grazing system provides a solution, though. The portable fencing that Gabe uses to divide large pastures into small paddocks allows him to give the cows access to the closest protected area—a shelterbelt or a corral for example—if they want to get there. He builds in a corridor to safety. Cows can sense when storms are coming, and they will naturally find protection. I’ve seen my dad’s cows do this: they bunch together against a cutbank or lie down in a deep ravine. The portable system also allows him to graze the pastures farthest from home in the summer and the land closest to home in the winter. Plus, a blizzard that isn’t forecasted is rare, so if a severe storm is on the way, Gabe simply brings the cows home. The benefits of winter grazing outweigh the “what ifs,” he says. “Cattle would rather graze than be standing in the corral,” he says. “Living proof is in the spring and all the fences are leaning. They would. So why not allow livestock to do what they’re evolved to do, which is graze?”