Gabe and I climb into a pickup and head up the gravel road to see the cow-calf pairs. On the way he points out a field that he seeded back to native grass. “Everybody thinks I’m crazy,” he says again. He keeps the cow-calf pairs separate from the grass-finished yearlings, with each group rotating through its own set of pastures. Right now, the grass-finished ones are near Gabe’s house and the cow-calf herd is near Paul’s. Four miles separate the two chunks of land, which makes it impossible to run the whole herd as one group. In those four miles are houses on forty-acre lots—too many yards, dogs, children, and hobby livestock to pass by with a herd of cattle. “How do you trail cattle by all this and the traffic?” he asks, waving at the houses we’re passing. “It just isn’t worth it. When the neighbor calls that your cattle are drinking out of his swimming pool, then you know you got problems. That’s not a good thing.” His dream is to own contiguous land so he can run the cattle together.
While it’s been dry the last few weeks, overall the summer has been cool and wet—great for cool-season grasses like crested wheatgrass, an import from Asia that Russian agriculturalists brought back to their own prairies. Many years later, N. E. Hansen of the South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station discovered the hardy grass growing along Russia’s Volga River.1 He sent samples to the United States in 1898. It wasn’t until 1908, however, that seeds were planted on American prairies at South Dakota’s Belle Fourche research station. More plantings followed in 1915 at a Mandan, North Dakota, research station not far from Brown’s Ranch. By the 1930s ranchers were spreading crested wheatgrass across their ranges. This is one of the grasses Gabe is trying to replace with native grass. The going has been difficult because of the very traits researchers of the past loved about crested wheatgrass: its hardiness and ability to spread quickly. “A lot of people don’t realize, with crested wheatgrass, its roots send off a compound that inhibits others species from germinating and growing,” he says. “When you see crested wheat taking over, that’s why. That’s a defense mechanism that crested wheat evolved so it would be dominant. Why would we want to introduce something like that? Man does these things thinking it’s for the best when really you’re throwing nature all out of whack by doing it.”
We drive along a fence line and Gabe points out the difference between his pasture and a neighbor’s. The neighbor’s land isn’t completely bare, but the grass is short and thin compared to the tall, thick grass on Gabe’s side. “He’ll bring these up here at Easter and dump them in and leave them there until Thanksgiving,” Gabe says, pointing at the cattle we see grazing on what looks like slim pickings. “They’re just on the same pasture all the time. You wonder what those cattle think looking across the fence.” I take a picture of the fence line comparison. I don’t say this, but the grass on the neighbor’s side looks about like my father’s pastures do by August. “This is really good for him this year,” Gabe says. “Normally you could play pool out on there.”
Gabe turns on a dirt trail with grass between the tire tracks. He tells me we are driving past a field he bought in 1997 that the previous owner had enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. The whole field was nothing but bromegrass, he says. Smooth bromegrass, a cool-season variety that hails from Hungary, arrived in the United States in 1884.2 Livestock owners planted it because of its drought tolerance and forage quality, which is higher than most cool-season grasses. Bromegrass spreads aggressively not only through seeds, but also through rhizomes, or underground stems that send out roots or new plant shoots (also called creeping rootstalks). When the land was in the CRP, no cattle and few wildlife grazed it, which allowed the brome to take over. Gabe has been working for more than fifteen years to diversify that field. “Now through high stock density grazing, the alfalfa’s coming back, we got sweet clover, we got some native species coming,” he says. “It’s still a lot of brome, but it’s pretty good.”
He points out some leadplant (Amphoracanescens) coming in, a nitrogen-fixing flowering shrub that grazers love. I recognize the leadplant, although I didn’t know its name before—I see it all the time in my dad’s pastures. As a kid I used to yank off its stalks of purple flowers and bring them to my mom. Maybe our pastures are a bit more diverse than I thought. Gabe mentions that just like in the cover crops, he wants flowering species in the pastures. “It’s slowly getting better,” he says, about the number of species he finds when he scouts the pastures. “We’re getting a little more diversity, but it’s not near what we want it to be. That’s one thing I had to learn: you gotta have some patience. In nature one hundred years is a blink of an eye. We’re only on the earth a short time and we want to see the difference immediately. That’s not what nature’s used to.”
It’s true: one hundred years is short given the long history of the Earth. Yet human beings have altered the landscape more in the last hundred years than natural forces like wind, rain, heat, ice, floods, or earthquakes have in the last thousand. Every animal, plant, and insect has had to adapt to our actions or die, and it’s often painful to watch. Think of the lone Alaskan polar bear floating on a tiny ice chunk in the middle of an ocean heated by climate change. The natural world is in chaos, with some populations disappearing or decreasing under the changing conditions and others increasing out of control. Some people point to animals like the American crow and the mourning dove, two species predicted to increase in number as climate change progresses, and argue that climate change isn’t inherently wrong because it helps some animals.3 The crow and mourning dove are adapting and thriving, so they are obviously the fittest and therefore more deserving of survival, or so the thinking goes. Same with grasses like smooth brome.
But it’s not really fair to make the natural world play by the rules of survival of the fittest when human beings have altered those rules so drastically. Life evolved slowly over millions of years, not quickly over one hundred or so years. Few changes occur hastily in nature; when climates evolve, or environments shift to different plant or animal species, or water temperatures fluctuate, the modifications unfold over thousands of years. A plant or animal might be perfectly capable of adapting over a long period, but could die if not given adequate time. So is it truthful to say a species doesn’t pass the survival-of-the-fittest test and therefore doesn’t deserve to be protected when we’ve sped up the evolution time?
Gabe’s native grasses might be returning slowly according to the limited human conception of time, but the animals are already sensing a change and coming back. As the grassland grows more diverse, so does the wildlife population. “The amount of wildlife, it’s just phenomenal,” Gabe says about the ranges. “I like to use the grouse population as an indicator because it’s a native species. We’ve got hundreds of grouse up here. Lots of pheasant, partridge, hawks, coyotes, foxes, song birds.” Even the farmland supports wildlife. Conventional farming tends to make the land inhospitable to wildlife, with its lack of plant diversity, bare fields during winter, lack of fencerows for protection, and agrochemicals. In an article about the rapidly decreasing population of prairie birds, T. Edward Nickens writes, “Corn, scientists point out, is one of the worst crops for grassland birds. For starters, most species won’t nest in corn, and corn production requires high inputs of chemical herbicides and fertilizers—bad news for natural ecosystems in general.”4 A bird population analysis of South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa conducted by the National Wildlife Federation found that grassland bird populations have decreased by nearly 30 percent in areas with high corn increases.5 Birds aren’t the only animals affected. Badgers, antelope, deer, raccoons, porcupines, rabbits, ground squirrels, coyotes, and mice are just a few of the species left homeless by corn production. With corn taking up an ever-increasing amount of real estate, there are fewer places left for animals to move to.
Gabe’s fields provide a home for deer, antelope, numerous species of birds, mice, gophers, and many other animals. The difference between his land and conventionally farmed land is especially noticeable during the hostile Great Plains winters, when food and protection are scarce. “I can remember, when I first moved to that farm in 1983, you’d never see a deer on that home section. We would rarely see a pheasant or a grouse,” Gabe says.6 “Four winters ago, when we had 120 inches of snow, the Game and Fish Department came and flew over my place, and just in those cover-crop fields on that quarter with the tree rows—I had cover crops planted so my cattle could graze in the winter—they counted 876 deer on that quarter. They said they had deer that were tagged that came over fifty miles because they were starving. They needed something to eat. Well, where was there something to eat? The cover crops.”
Many farmers would be annoyed to see deer munching on crops intended for cattle. But Gabe sees the deer as crucial links in the prairie ecosystem, of which his cover crops are a part. Like the cattle, tightly bunched deer fertilize and aerate the soil. Because his fields are part of the ecosystem, he can’t deny access to wildlife, nor would he want to. Gabe does not see the land as his alone to use, but as something shared with the wildlife that live on it, a sentiment Dan Barber echoes when he writes, “Every farm is intimately linked to the larger ecosystem. . . . When you farm ‘extensively,’ you’re taking in the world.”7 That is what Gabe does: he farms extensively, using the surrounding ecosystem to enrich his land and vice versa. The idea that farms are somehow separate from the environment and therefore off-limits to animals—and the related idea that farmers needn’t yield anything to nature, even though farming the land robs resources from the environment—is a core tenet of conventional farming. Both are ideas that Gabe rejects.
We crest a hill and see the cows in a swale below. We are gazing over two sections of land (640 acres equals one section, so 1,280 acres) divided into forty-three permanent pastures fenced with barbed fire. Gabe and Paul divide those pastures into even smaller units with the polywire. I spot a water tank in the distance, and Gabe says he pipes fresh water into the units instead of relying on natural sources. Fifty or so water tanks dot the ranch, and as the cattle move he turns on the appropriate tank. “There are no creeks or rivers or anything through any of our land,” he says. “It’s either stock dams or fresh water. We still have stock dams in several, but we pipe fresh water into all of them. It works much, much better.”
Earlier, I asked Gabe how he knows when to move the cattle. It depends on many factors: how much forage is growing in a pasture, how old the calves are (younger ones eat less, older ones eat more), what the weather is doing (cattle eat more during cold weather), and what kinds of grasses are available. He also relies on Brix readings of the forage, mostly for determining when to move the grass-finished cattle, which require the most nutrients. The Brix system, named for German chemist Adolf Ferdinand Wenceslaus Brix (1798–1890), measures the sugars and minerals dissolved in a liquid by looking at how the liquid refracts light.8 This is done using a device called a refractometer. The angle of light refraction reveals the density and chemical composition of the liquid: the sugar and mineral content, or the nutritional value.
In the case of forage, the liquid is plant sap squeezed from leaves or stems onto the refractometer. Digital refractometers make it easy: put a few drops into the well hole, press a switch, and a Brix number pops up. The angle of light refraction corresponds to a number on the Brix scale. The higher the number, the more nutritious the plant. Oranges grown in nutrient-poor soil might clock in at eight, for example, while those grown in rich soil might read at twenty or better. Winemakers use Brix readings to determine the nutrient density of their grapes, which in turn affects the taste of the wine. Nutrient-rich grapes equal delicious wine, and forage is no different. In fact, cattle prefer such forage and can tell the difference between nutritious and non-nutritious grass through their facial hairs.9 These hairs relay nutrition information to the cow, who then decides whether the grass in front of her is worth her time and energy. If not, she moves on. Nutrient-dense forage also boosts the cow’s health, which is especially important to Gabe because he uses no chemicals to control insects or diseases. Healthy cattle resist sickness and—here’s the part my consumer side is interested in—they produce better-tasting meat. Just as nutrient-dense grapes make good wine, a nutrient-dense steer becomes succulent steak, ribs, and burgers that not only taste delicious, but also provide more nutrients. In addition to the bovine benefits, using the Brix system helps ranchers use grassland resources more responsibly. Nutrients are consumed at their highest levels and don’t go to waste, which means ranchers can use less grass to feed more cattle.
That’s exactly what Gabe is doing. He moves the cattle to new pastures when the Brix readings are high, forcing them to eat the grass at its nutritional peak. He has discovered that Brix readings are usually highest in the afternoon because plants have had more time to photosynthesize. He might let the cattle linger in a pasture during the morning, working up an appetite, then move them several times in the afternoon over high-nutrition grass. He harvests hay using the same philosophy: he never cuts hay in the morning, always in the afternoon and evening so that it contains more nutrition. The Brix readings don’t stop there. Gabe tests his garden vegetables and any produce he buys at the grocery store or farmers’ market.10 “You want to create a stir, go around the farmers’ market testing Brix on everything,” he says with a chuckle. “They won’t like it.”
He rummages around the machine shop looking for the refractometer. After a few minutes he finds it sitting not far from the chicken evisceration table. He tears off a few blades of grass growing near the shop doorway, squeezes green juice from them with a vise grip, and drips the liquid into the handheld refractometer. Gabe’s refractometer is an optical model, not digital. It looks like the tube-shaped eyepiece of a microscope that has been snapped off. He peers down the tube to look at the prism, where there is a thin layer of plant juice, to determine the angle of refraction and thus the density. A scale embedded inside the viewfinder reveals the Brix number.
The grass reads between three and a half and four—very low, Gabe says, shaking his head. Ideally, he tells me, plant health starts at around twelve. A crop at twelve or higher will resist most disease pressure, insects, and weeds.11 I am confused. To me, the grass appeared nutritious: dark green, thick, and tall. I would have turned animals into a field of it thinking they’d fatten up. Gabe explains that the soil around the machine shop doorway is poor, meaning the grass has little access to nutrients. It might look healthy on the outside, but contains no nutrition on the inside. “The goal is to get your soils healthy enough that you have a higher Brix reading,” he says. “It’s not uncommon for us in our alfalfa and some of the grasses we put up for hay to have eighteen to twenty-four, really high.”
I ask Gabe how he learned about the Brix readings. Late at night on the internet, he says. “One of the things about me is, I don’t sleep a lot,” he says. He tells me later that a good night of sleep for him is four hours; he averages three. He spends most of his sleepless nights reading and researching. He reads two or three books a week, more than I do, and my job is to write them. Talk about combating the dumb farmer stereotype. Reading is yet another thing Phil, Kevin, and Gabe have in common. I’m starting to think I should add “reading and other forms of self-education” to the list of components in regenerative agriculture. “My mind is always going. I’m not a scientist; I don’t need to know all the intricacies and all the big words, all I want to know is what works and let them explain to me why it works,” he says. “I’m always studying and trying to learn.”
After looking at the cow-calf pairs, Gabe and I get back in the Ranger and cruise out to see the grass-finished cattle. On the way we pass the chickens pecking at the grass in front of the modified horse trailers Gabe calls eggmobiles.12 He’s renovated the horse trailers to include roosts and waters and a tiny door. A loose fence made of netting surrounds the trailers so the chickens have a “pasture” to graze. When the chickens exhaust their pasture, Gabe hooks the eggmobile to the Ranger, pulls it to fresh ground, and sets up a new grazing area. One eggmobile houses broilers, or chickens grown for meat. They follow the cattle and “clean up” after them by picking at the insects gathered in the manure. When needed, Gabe feeds them peas or oats grown on the farm. The broilers have fresh air, natural food, and plenty of room to walk around, quite an upgrade from the crowded chicken confinements most broilers live in. “That will be real meat that you’re eating there,” Gabe says, pointing at the pecking broilers.
Another eggmobile houses pullets—young hens less than a year old—that just started laying their first eggs. A third eggmobile is home to the laying hens; these hens are so used to the system (and so concerned about staying close to their eggs) that they don’t need the fence. Every day or two Gabe hooks up the eggmobile and the hens follow along. “Talk about no work,” he says. This winter the chickens will stay in a new hoop house that Gabe is planning to build in the fall. In years past, they weathered the winter in a barn with a run that led outside.
We stop to look inside an eggmobile, bending over to see through the tiny door. “Girls, we’ve got a visitor!” Gabe yells. The hens peck at the floor, unconcerned. He sells their eggs at the farmers’ market. “The longest it’s taken us this year to sell out is about ten minutes,” he says. “They’ll stand in line over an hour. Four dollars a dozen and people just go nuts. It’s unreal. There is a huge difference between a factory egg and an egg from here.” I’ve tasted the buttery, bright yellow yolks of farm-fresh eggs and I understand why people go nuts. They taste like eggs. We jump back in the Ranger and keep driving. “Okay, girls, you gotta move,” he yells at the hens, not without affection. “They get like pets when I come out to do chores. They jump up in here.” I chuckle, imagining Gabe driving around with a hen in his lap.
As we drive, Gabe tells me about the morning he saw a coyote sitting right by the eggmobile door. Gabe was at the breakfast table and could see the eggmobile from the window. Its aluminum door has a photosensitive eye: when the sun goes down, the door closes (the hens know instinctively to roost before nightfall so they’re already inside), and when the sun comes up, the door opens. The coyote had learned that the door’s opening coincided with the sun and he was waiting on schedule, poised to nab a hen the second she stepped out. Gabe leapt from the table and burst out the door, but the coyote grabbed one before he could get there. He loses twenty to twenty-five chickens a year to coyotes and other predators. “People say, ‘Well, why don’t you kill all your coyotes?’ If I start killing all my coyotes, then we’re going to start having gophers to no end, rabbits to no end,” Gabe says. “It’s all part of the ecosystem. You can’t do that.” Just like he won’t chase the deer from the cover crops, he won’t shoot the coyote that eats a chicken now and then. Most ecosystems include predators to maintain balance in prey populations, and an unbalanced ecosystem will collapse. The coyote is simply doing what it evolved to do: consume prey. Gabe doesn’t fault the coyote for that, even if it means losing some chickens, because he realizes he can’t keep all of nature’s bounty for himself.
We reach the grass-finished herd, which consists of steers and heifers borne by his cows. Unlike conventional ranchers who wean in the fall, Gabe leaves his calves with their mothers all winter and weans them at the end of March. “The goal is to have as little expense into them as possible,” he says. “We don’t have to have them in a lot where they’re getting sick and we have to start a tractor to feed them every day. They’re better off just out on the cow.” I ask if the cows lose weight over the winter, being pregnant and still nursing last year’s calf. “The cows are getting better,” Gabe says. “They’ll lose a little body condition during the winter, but right after we wean the calves end of March, first of April, as soon as the grass greens up they go out and they just blow up like ticks, put on weight.”
Gabe keeps the weaned calves and runs them another year on grass (they are termed “yearlings” at that point). The heifers are exposed to bulls over the summer; those that breed rejoin the herd of cows and give birth the next spring. Gabe sells most of the yearling steers to companies that slaughter them and market the meat as grass-fed. When the remaining heifers and steers become two-year-olds, they enter the grass-finishing stage, after which Gabe will have them slaughtered locally. Instead of fattening cattle for slaughter using CAFO feedstuffs like corn or ethanol by-products, Gabe uses grass, proving, like Phil, that CAFOs are not necessary for meat production.
Most of the cattle we’re looking at are two years old, all are heifers, and several will be ready to harvest in the next two months. Gabe tells me he prefers to grass-finish heifers because they fatten better and faster than steers. He moves this bunch three to four times a day (well, the Batt-Latch moves them). Gabe shuts the Ranger off, gets out, and walks slowly toward the herd. I follow, not looking at the cattle yet but at the grass under my cowboy boots. The pasture looks nothing like the one Gabe said ranchers would want to hay: the grass is trampled, the soil is churned black in some spots, and manure patties dot the landscape. That’s how it’s supposed to look, though, when grazers impact the land intensely. Instead of being scattered across a several-hundred-acre pasture, these heifers are clustered together on several dozen acres, tightly bunched like a herd of buffalo or antelope would be. Some have slick black coats, others have shiny red coats, and one oddball has a creamy white coat. One steps forward from the herd to inspect me more closely.
I try to imagine these heifers in a feedlot. They would be standing on cement in ankle- or knee-high manure and urine. They would be eating corn-heavy rations that make their rumens malfunction and livers shut down. Their waste would flow into lagoons that become toxic pools of sludge. That waste would spoil the air in nearby communities and the water in nearby streams and rivers. The heifers would sleep in that waste until their hair became matted with it. They would become less like cattle and more like corn-processing machines understood in terms of pounds gained per day compared to feed ingested.
At Brown’s Ranch, the heifer is not a machine. She is part of an ecosystem. Her worth is quantified not just in the pounds of meat she yields, but also in the pounds of organic matter she returns to the soil. She is prized for her ability to feed not only people but also soil—which in turn feeds microorganisms that feed plants that feed other animals, including more cattle. She produces the same amount of beef as a CAFO-raised animal, sometimes more, without the costly inputs. As with cash crops, the Browns have discovered that it doesn’t take inputs to produce meat. What it takes is healthy soil.
The Browns have eliminated not only the CAFO and its inputs, but also the industrial slaughterhouse. “The next step we did—it took a long time—but a bunch of us built our own slaughter facility at a small town called Bowden,” Gabe says. Out of necessity, the Browns, their like-minded neighbors, and other investors joined forces to fund and build the small slaughterhouse, a move most ranching communities wouldn’t think to make. “We are part owners,” he continues. “Paul is actually treasurer of the board. So we slaughter our grass-finished beef, lamb, and pastured pork up there.”
He describes the time-consuming inspections and paperwork involved with building the plant as “a huge headache,” but after three years the facility is finally done. “It can only handle fifteen head a week,” Gabe says somewhat regretfully. I say I’d rather eat beef that comes from a fifteen-animal-a-week, locally owned facility than a five-thousand-animal-a-day megaslaughterhouse. He says that’s one reason he and his neighbors decided to build the plant: people are growing uncomfortable with the harmful social and health effects of megaslaughterhouses, like worker exploitation and meat contamination.13 They want their meat not only raised responsibly, but also slaughtered responsibly. Gabe already feels the pent-up demand. “The plant just got up and running in January,” Gabe tells me.14 “We thought, boy, if we could sell one to two animals a month! Well, we’re selling one to two a week, and we can’t even begin to keep up. It’s just unreal.”
Gabe explains that North Dakota had just a handful of state-inspected slaughterhouses before the Bowden plant opened. The demand at those plants was prohibitively high, Gabe says. “The waiting list to get something harvested was over a year out. For us, trying to run a business a year out was . . .” He shakes his head. “That’s why we decided we gotta invest and do it.” The plant cost $1.3 million to build—and it was completed debt-free, Gabe is proud to add. Being a key investor and the plant’s largest customer, Gabe has several days a week “locked up” for processing his own animals. Now he is able to bypass wholesalers and market meat at the local farmers’ market under his own label, Nourished by Nature. “This is much more rewarding,” he says about the transition. One reason is that he knows the meat in the packages is from his animals. “With a wholesaler it gets mixed,” he says. “You don’t know what’s yours.” I think of Ryan Roth and the vegetables that get packed in the Roth packinghouse under a number of labels from a number of different farms. The only way Ryan can be certain that he’s eating his own produce is if he handpicks a head of lettuce or a sack of green beans from the field. It’s the same with my father’s crops. The truckloads of wheat he sells are mixed with wheat from thousands of other farms and ground into nameless, traceless flour.
The second reason selling meat is more rewarding than selling live cattle? The transition introduced Gabe to a person he rarely encountered before: the consumer.