Floods, Drought, and the Grasslands, LLC, Experiment
Floods do not begin as floods. They begin with drops of rain hitting dry earth.
—Allan Savory
“Rain doesn’t only fall from the sky,” I suggested. “It also falls up from below.”
—Masanobu Fukuoka, from Sowing Seeds in the Desert
EVEN IN AN ERA OF SATELLITE NAVIGATION and Google Maps, the Cinch Buckle Ranch, which straddles Powder River and Carter Counties in southeastern Montana, is tricky to find. In a surveyor’s drawing the dirt roads get thinner and squigglier and eventually run to dots. That off-the-map sensation truly hits home when I’m driving around looking for it close to 5 am and the sun is lifting in dusty orange bands and I’m wondering if I’d missed the old windmill or the clump of corrals that would mark the left turn and, several miles after I thought I should have reached it I’m beginning to suspect I’m lost.
Still, it’s a beautiful drive, with the slowly brightening late-May sky and sightings of pronghorn antelope, fleeter and huskier than their more common white-tailed cousins, zipping across a hillside or in a frozen pose. I finally see a rise tall enough for cell reception and climb out to confirm that, yes, the turnoff was fifteen minutes behind me. I’d left Broadus, a ranching and hunting outpost that styles itself the “Wavingest Town in the West,” at four thirty because Cinch Buckle manager Ron Goddard said he’d be moving some cows from a spot miles away from headquarters and if I wanted to watch this I had to catch the early show. The ranch is run according to Holistic Management, so the grazing schedule is essential. And here not only am I off course and bothering my host at odd hours, but I’m also holding up the cattle.
When I arrive at the base, Ron and his wife, Kathleen, are suited up and on their horses. Ron asks if I ride. He catches my stunned expression—I’d only ever done group trail rides on super-docile, usually elderly horses—hands me a set of keys, and says, “Here, you take the pickup.” As there’s no time to lose I jump in and follow the couple on horseback, down into a dry streambed and through an open fence and out into beautiful open pasture with a backdrop of hills pushing back toward higher, sharper hills. We go on a good distance, into and out of culverts, through high grasses. Even driving a vehicle feels athletic; I could only imagine what the riding must be like. The two look so regal on horseback, straight-backed and kitted up in fine leather gear—tooled boots and fringed chaps—moving in and out of silhouette as they weave across fields. I feel nostalgic for cowgirl dreams I never had and westerns I’d heard of but never seen.
As we pass over one broad ridge the cattle, mostly black and in pairs or groups of three, come into view and the horses pick up speed. We’re now in rodeo mode as Ron unfurls a whip and swishes it this way and that, sketching sharp lines in the air. Kathleen charges in from a side angle, her horse kicking fast and dustily and high. The cows step more quickly, mooing irritably to show they’re not happy about being told what to do. I’m farther back among the stragglers and realize that without thinking I’m “herding” cattle with the truck, nudging them to move faster and toward the gate. It feels like a kind of instinct.
When most of the animals are through Ron sidles up to me and motions toward a hill. This is where I should wait with the truck while he and Kathleen go to work. Their task now is mostly “cleaning up,” he explains. The gate between pastures has been left open so that calves can find their mothers. We’re toward the end of the calving season, and “when the cows calve it makes Holistic Planned Grazing more difficult,” he says. “You get about an hour right at gray dawn” to move them as a group. Apparently the calves nurse and then lose track of their mothers if you’re any later than that. Which we were—thanks, in part, to me. So Ron and Kathleen prod and chase lost calves—and cows moseying about looking for errant offspring—until they’re all past the gate and reunited in the next pasture. It is also, I realize, a somewhat noisy operation as cows complain loudly and continuously when they can’t locate their calves. I take a rest in the truck, taking in the sharp, dry scent of the sage that covers the hill and listening to the sounds of birds and the wind whipping against the partly open window. For a long while there is no cow, or man, in sight.
According to Ron, there are seven hundred cow–calf pairs in the section they were working, three thousand on the property. “We’re in a pretty severe drought. If things don’t change we’ll have some challenges,” he says. The year before, 2011, they had flooding. “It washed out fences and caused some severe erosion in places, but overall it was beneficial. Average yearly precipitation here is fourteen inches. We had eleven or twelve last April and May. If we could have had half of that last spring and half of that this spring, that would be my vote. But we don’t get to choose.”
I’d come to the Cinch Buckle Ranch to observe Holistic Management, the use of livestock to restore land function, in action. I’d read and heard so much about the model; it was my reporting on Holistic Management that drew my attention to soil as a hub for the ecological cycles whose disruption is leading to environmental crises—and whose restoration can bring aspects of our planet back into balance. In the course of writing these chapters, I’ve seen that there are many routes to repairing the carbon, water, energy, and nutrient cycles; different ways to put spokes back on the wheel. Whether we focus on biodiversity (as does Gene Goven in North Dakota) or carbon (like Christine Jones) or water (per Michal Kravcík), the other components will follow. You could say, then, depending on your theoretical or practical orientation, that biodiversity (or carbon or water or cover crops) is driving the processes.
With Holistic Management, it’s livestock that get it all going. Through their behavior—grazing, trampling, leaving waste—they set multiple biological dynamics in motion. I like cattle. I like their absurd, stolid, clueless bovine-ness. I like the disarming, seemingly preposterous notion that while we futilely chase technological and policy rainbows, a key to our problems could be something as prosaic or random as the browsing of a cow. So I wanted the chance to witness the cattle working their miracles, and to meet the people who make Holistic Management happen, the ones who do the work of moving cattle and monitoring changes in service of improving the land.
The Cinch Buckle Ranch is part of an ecological/business experiment called Grasslands, LLC, a joint venture between the Savory Institute and investors John Fullerton (whose firm is Level 3 Capital) and the family office of Larry, Tony, and Michael Lunt (Armonia LLC). Fullerton, whom I’ve had the chance to meet a couple of times, is a former managing director of J. P. Morgan. After leaving the firm in 2001, Fullerton began grappling with questions of economics and sustainability. He has since formed the Capital Institute, a nonprofit forum on the role of finance in a shift to a more “just, resilient and sustainable” system. In 2008 he embarked on a correspondence with Allan Savory. After much discussion and sharing ideas about the need for a “Brown Revolution”—an agricultural transformation centered on restoring soil health—they sketched out a plan for a custom-grazing business grounded in Holistic Management.
In 2010 Grasslands, LLC, was launched as a “triple bottom line” enterprise with the conjoint goals of creating a high-quality product (well-nourished beef cattle), generating equity and financial return to investors, revitalizing rural economies, sequestering carbon, and regenerating land on a large scale. Here the goals of improving land and making a profit would not be mutually exclusive: Holistic Planned Grazing requires a lot of animals, and in turn bolsters the carrying capacity of the land, sometimes two to four times. The more animal impact, the better the land—higher soil carbon levels, greater biodiversity, better water infiltration—and the more animals it can feed. This means greater income and a boost to local economies. It’s “impact” investing on many levels.
The company first purchased two ranches (the BR and Horse Creek Ranches, fourteen thousand acres combined) near Newell, South Dakota, land then under absentee ownership that was producing below its potential. (Jim Howell, Grasslands, LLC, co-founder/CEO and a longtime practitioner of Holistic Management, says the West is full of “trophy ranches,” tracts of rangeland with animals scattered about, bought primarily for the romance.) The Cinch Buckle Ranch’s thirty-nine thousand acres, much of it public Bureau of Land Management and state grazing lands, were added in early 2011, followed by another large (fifty-three thousand acres) eastern Montana property in 2012.
I decide to focus on the water cycle. Aside from higher profitability—the result of increased stocking rates—the most visible and dramatic improvements achieved via Holistic Management often involve water. (I have an image from the Africa Centre for Holistic Management of elephants happily watering on the newly restored Dimbangombe River, as opposed to having to travel to pools.) Also, every ranch treads the fine line between flood and drought, a surfeit of water all at once or a thirsty lack of it, with the specter of opportunistic grass fires lurking in the background. In “brittle” or seasonably dry areas, like the American West, the more frequent worry is drought. A livestock operation rises or falls on the availability and management of water, the vagaries of which are so unpredictable that few private insurers cover droughts, floods, or fire.
After a bowl of chili at the Cashway Cafe in Broadus the night before my early-morning drive, I’d walked up Highway 212 and noticed the sign at Copps Hardware, which read: pray for rain; we’ve got twine. And this was well before the extreme drought and the rash of uncontrolled fires that plagued the area—and much of the West and Midwest—in subsequent summer months.
Ron Goddard, who’s been in Holistic Management circles since the mid-1980s, is originally from Kansas. He came to Montana when he was just out of high school. “My family raised cows and grain,” says Goddard, who’s a fairly big guy and sports a brushy, graying mustache and broad straw hat. “I didn’t like farming. Still don’t. When I was old enough to get out from Dad’s sway I went around the country.” By the time he met Allan Savory he’d set up a custom branding business in Montana, working out of a horse-drawn wagon. “I kept hearing about planned grazing and went to one of the early workshops.” Which inspired him to make the switch to land and livestock management, freelance-style. While he’s tried to follow Holistic Management principles, “it’s been a struggle. I’ve been leasing land or working for people who hadn’t believed in it. Sometimes I did it under the radar.”
He and Kathleen have moved from ranch to ranch, living in eleven different states, and raised three children, schooling them at home. Jake, the youngest at eighteen, works with them at Cinch Buckle. “This is his bread and butter—horses and cows,” says Goddard. The older son shoes horses and their daughter, recently married, works on a ranch with her husband.
Goddard gives me the lowdown on the particular plot of land in front of us. “The previous owner had it five or six years and ran fifty to sixty head of cows year-round in this pasture,” he says. “The creek bottom is overgrazed, and noxious weeds are taking over. In this kind of environment most land is undergrazed, so it’s hard to change succession.”
By “succession” Goddard means the evolving mix of plant species in a given area. In well-functioning land, the plant community moves in the direction of complexity: a mix of varieties in which plants fill different ecological niches. This diversity creates resilience, the ability to withstand difficult conditions like an onslaught of pests or a drought. Land can become stalled at a low level of succession, whereby only a few kinds of plants dominate. Such land is inherently unstable and vulnerable to external threats. Succession in the animal population parallels that of plants, so that the biodiversity of plant life will be echoed in the variety of animal species. Animal impact promotes succession in several ways: Grazing exposes the growth points of different plants to sunlight; trampling helps decompose litter, breaks hardened soil, and pounds seeds into the ground so that dormant species can be established.
After a single year it’s hard to see much land improvement, but Goddard says they’re doing a better job of utilizing resources. He wants to keep a lot of cows, now in three herds belonging to three different owners, but expresses concern about scant spring rains. “We may need to de-stock if it gets severe enough,” he says. “What we want to do over time is improve the soil so that less rain does more good—that it’s more effective.” He notes that the fields near the house that had been farmed “have lots of bare ground. A drop of rain does more good in natural rangeland that’s undisturbed except by livestock. Hopefully by adding rest periods and shorter grazing periods, more plant [varieties] will come in. We’d like to see more forbs and perennial grasses. With the level of rainfall we have, there will probably always be lots of western wheatgrass”—a variety that is fairly drought-tolerant.
The area was not always so dry, Goddard learned. During his first spring at Cinch Buckle he lived on his own while the family stayed at their home near Billings. “I went to the local library and read self-published memoirs,” he recalls. “There were a lot from the 1880s to 1930s and a comment I read several times was, ‘Back when the cricks used to run.’ Now they just run in the spring, maybe a little longer if it rains a lot.”
Goddard says that from the late 1800s on this region—the corridor that runs from eastern Montana down through Belle Fourche in South Dakota—“was like the highway for Texas cattle, the stop between Texas and Miles City, which used to be Fort Keogh, and is now a little Las Vegas.” I’d passed through Miles City the day before, and Route 59 was strewn with casinos, strip-mall-style, with western gold rush names like Golden Spur, Silver Star, Lucky Lil’s, and Gold Dust. It was a big homesteading area, he says, “initially big cattle outfits. It was always big ranching country, cattle and sheep.” Immigrants from England and Scotland in particular brought cattle to the land. “The grass was free, and the country wide open,” says Goddard. “That didn’t last long.”
Once we’re back at the house—at an hour I’d usually just be getting out of bed—it’s chore time. Kathleen asks: “Would you like to feed some calves?” This sounds like something I can handle so I say, “Sure,” and follow her into the calving barn, near the stable and paddock area where they keep their thirty horses. She hands me a repurposed plastic bottle full of milk and directs me to the calf I will feed, a near-black three-month-old baby cow with limpid eyes and out-flung ears. She’s a good feeder, determined to find more milk after she’s drained the bottle. There are three calves in the stalls, and I ask why they’re not out with the others. Kathleen explains that these were orphaned calves.
“During the Texas drought last summer, some ranchers sent their cattle up here to graze rather than buy expensive hay,” she tells me. “In dry weather, there’s a shortage of grass. Some mothers were thin to begin with and a number of cows died. They’d been through almost a year of drought and then came here in the fall. In the winter they started having calves. Though we had a mild winter there was still a week that didn’t get above zero and many couldn’t make it. We lost a lot of calves and quite a few cows.” She’s been feeding the ones without mothers, a group now down to three. “They’ll go out with the herd once they’re old enough to eat grass,” she says.
Ron, who’s come into the barn to return some tools, overhears us. “Everything that could happen to those Texas cows did,” he says, shaking his head. “There was a one-month-old whose mother drowned in a creek after getting stuck in the mud. I write a report once a month to send to the owners. I’ve had to say, ‘The good news is you have lower numbers to feed. The bad news is that it’s because animals died.’”
We head back to the house and eat breakfast, herb omelets from fresh farm eggs, while sitting on tall chairs around the counter. “In the place I grew up, and virtually every place I’ve been, the one thing I hear is: ‘When Granddad was here grass grew up to your stirrups and the crick used to run,’” Ron says. “We like to blame it on climate change or too many animals. But that doesn’t hold water.” In his younger days, he says, he “just wanted to ride horses. I wasn’t thinking of why.” It wasn’t until hearing Savory’s ideas that he understood the extent to which fluctuations of water are a reflection of how we treat the land: whether it’s managed toward resiliency (covered ground, high levels of organic matter, good soil structure, all of which retain water) or degradation (bare ground, depleted soil, crusted surfaces, conditions that lead to evaporation and runoff). The idea that running livestock—specifically, running livestock the way buffalo or wildebeest move across the savanna or plains—could invigorate land was a revelation, and has since inspired the couple’s lifework.
“This short-grass prairie is pretty high on the brittleness scale,” says Ron. “It’s similar to where I grew up in western Kansas, which is right on the one hundredth meridian.” That land, he says, has been “farmed up.” From childhood he recalls “a prolonged drought in the 1950s. I remember dust storms when my mother wouldn’t let us go outside. She was afraid she couldn’t see us in the dust. I went to a neighbor’s place after their house had blown away in a tornado. They were safe in the basement. Their telephone was found six miles away—in those days, they still had the number on the phone. Now that country’s dried up.” Both in Kansas and Montana, he says, “it seems the small towns continue to shrink. There was [once] a school right down the crick, about a mile from our house, the Moore School. You see it on old topos. Nothing left there now but a trace of a building.” A bit farther away, Powderville, which I’d unknowingly driven through that morning, was once a thriving town; its population is now listed as seventeen.
With dry terrain, wildfire is always a threat. “There are some hellacious lightning storms that come through here,” Kathleen says. Ron adds, “Last year [2011] it was wet and we had a huge amount of growth. Then it got real dry. Fire’s always in the back of your mind. When you see smoke when the conditions are right, you don’t worry whose land it is, you go to get help. There were 120 different fires last year in southeast Montana. One thing it does is take out all the good [plant] cover. It makes land like this more susceptible to erosion.”
The loss of plant cover after fire also alters land’s ability to hold carbon and water, and support soil microbial life. Peter Donovan has written that fire speeds up the carbon cycle, adding that “overall bio-diversity is compromised, as carbon is recycled through combustion rather than decay which is much slower and requires and feeds an enormous range of organisms.”
The pressure to make the land profitable is a constant backdrop. And the Goddards are continually aware of how much money is involved in the operation, in part due to the skyrocketing price of ranchland. This a reflection of economic uncertainty, says Ron. “A lot of people don’t want their money in the stock market. They want something real.” (A few days earlier when I was in North Dakota, land inflation was a big topic of concern, too. At Black Leg Ranch near Bismarck, owner Jerry Doan told me, “Granddad bought this land at $1 an acre. Other people wouldn’t risk that money. Today it’s up to $1,900 an acre.”) It doesn’t bother Ron that neither the land nor the cattle is “his.” “I don’t care whether we own it,” he says. “If we can manage the land well, that’s our goal.”
The long time horizon often necessary before seeing improvement under Holistic Management is an ongoing test of commitment. “We were in one place for ten years and saw positive changes in the percentage of covered ground and the number of species, but it was years before we started seeing anything measurable,” says Ron. He and Kathleen accept, and even expect, this: “It’s a slow process in our mind.” Areas that had eroded in ten-foot-deep cutbacks were starting to stabilize, he says. “Then we lost the lease. The cattle market got so good the owner wanted back in.”
That ranch, in central Montana’s Clarks Fork Valley, was easier terrain to work than Cinch Buckle. “This is a hard environment,” Goddard says. “It didn’t rain June of last year till April. In degraded land, soil becomes less of a sponge. It runs off, eventually into the ocean. There are springs marked on maps from the ’20s and when you ride to that place now, it’s just a bit of mud.” Another challenge is the type of soil that dominates much of the land: “gumbo,” a heavy, sticky mineral soil that can get kind of gummy when wet. In Backpacker magazine, writer Tom Shealey described its texture as “somewhere between quicksand and Silly Putty.”
When Goddard first learned about Holistic Management and its framework for the interplay of livestock, land, and water, his response was, “This makes so much sense—everybody’s going to be doing it.” He found, however, that in most ranching circles it was a tough sell. “Allan Savory said that first your neighbors will think you’re crazy. Then when you’re doing well they’ll drive past your place and not look,” says Goddard. “We don’t hang out in the bars and coffee shops in town around here so that people can tell me how stupid we are. We help our neighbors and they help us and we’re social and go to church. But we don’t tell anyone they should do this.”
Kathleen concedes that migrating from ranch to ranch can be disruptive and lonely; she misses her friends in central Montana, bonds built over many years. I see that there’s a toughness to Kathleen, who’s petite and athletic and has thick brown ponytail-able hair, which I imagine sees her through the difficulties of this life. Rather than complain, she finds a bright side: “I’ve been blessed in that I’ve never had to go to town to work.”
For Kathleen, it’s all about the horses; she can’t imagine a life that isn’t centered on riding. If Ron landed in Montana upon fleeing the farm in Kansas, Kathleen came from Louisiana to immerse herself in equine country. “I came with my sister at age eighteen and we both ended up marrying ranchers,” she says.
She tells me about their adventure in herding horses. A friend, Warren Johnson, had bought a thousand Premarin geldings. These are horses whose mothers’ urine had been harvested to make estrogen replacement therapy; the female foals are raised for their role in Premarin production as mares, which leaves the geldings. He transported them from Canada to Roscoe, Montana, to prevent their sale to meat-packers. The rescue process involved much paperwork and a team of thirty riders to lead them down the highway to their new home at the Lazy El Ranch, which Ron then managed. “We ran eight hundred horses for two years to holisticate with them.” She smiles, acknowledging her conscious use of holistic as a verb. “They were pig-fat, ready for slaughter. The geldings, the boys, are seen as a by-product [of Premarin production] and are shipped to feedlots.” The market for horse meat is abroad, in countries like Japan, France, and Belgium where it is considered a delicacy.
Premarin mares are reportedly confined in pens for months at a time and deprived of water, which prompts greater estrogen production. The stressful conditions the geldings had endured in the feedlot where they’d spent most of their lives were still evident. “Their tails were bitten off, they were so bored,” Kathleen recalls. “They would herd up. They didn’t go slow and we had to train them to stop when they came to a wire fence. Initially they would pile up against it until the leaders were pushed through. You see, they had never been free. They’d spent their lives in small, steel pens. Eventually they wouldn’t be spooked by a butterfly or bunny rabbit—things they’d never seen before.” The horses have since been sold to farms and ranches and outfitters, as workers, Kathleen says. “There was a lot of draft blood in many of them, which made them desirable for outfitters to use as pack and saddle horses in the mountains.”
After Cinch Buckle, I leave for Belle Fourche, South Dakota, a former trading outpost that still holds regular livestock auctions and where I spend two nights. I take a sightseeing day in the nearby Black Hills, and it starts to rain. It’s surprisingly chilly when I get out at this or that switch-back along the Needles Highway to check the view. Mount Rushmore is locked in a wet fog, its famous stone faces invisible. I give it a pass.
The next day I head over to Horse Creek Ranch, an eight-thousand-acre tract purchased by Grasslands, LLC, in 2010, about forty-five minutes east of town. As I drive we get another dose of rain; I go through the town of Newell, once known as the “sheep capital of the world,” which still features the annual Ram Sale, where I see a man hosing down his red truck to clean up after the shower. I spot a band of blue in the horizon. The sky clears. It’s like a skywide film being peeled back bit by bit.
I arrive at the appointed gate in good time. Between the civilized hour—late morning—and the clearly marked grid of straight, broad dirt roads, the ranch is easy to find. A few minutes later a black truck rumbles up and out steps a very tall, blond man in a white western hat, a bright-eyed woman with copper-colored hair and straight bangs holding a baby at a casual angle, and a round-faced boy of about five darting toward a tree, now crouching near the truck, moving about to elude the indignity of adult scrutiny. This is the Dalton family: Brandon, who manages Grasslands, LLCs, two South Dakota properties, Brandy, Emmett, and Garrett, who is not quite one.
They make room for me in the truck, and I comment on the rain. The pastures are flushed green; I’m glad for my good timing. Brandy shrugs. “It’s about a quarter inch,” she says. “It’s not a game changer.” I feel disappointed, as if it were my own offering that had been rebuffed.
Brandon, twisting the steering wheel hard to minimize the bounce over uneven turf, says, “It keeps the grass going so it keeps it green. So that when the one-inch rain comes it can do something. If not, the land couldn’t do anything with it.” If it fell on dry land, much of the rain, he says, would simply run off.
When people consider the growing potential of a particular environment, they often look to the amount of rain it receives. Holistic Management emphasizes making effective use of whatever precipitation comes down. To Brandon, this is an inherently optimistic model: We can’t force rain down from the sky but we can take measures to ensure that the rain we get is used well. He embraces this philosophy. “The thing about Holistic Management is how uplifting it is,” he says. “When you look at things holistically you can find a lot of hope.”
As he describes it, the model is an ongoing exercise in hope and action. “Holistic Management is about making a plan, monitoring the plan, controlling deviations from the plan, and then replanning,” he says. “When you make a plan, you assume that something will need adjusting. This takes the pressure off from trying to be always right. I don’t worry about being wrong. I want to make sure I have a plan so I can adjust.” The rain pattern you get in a season is impossible to foresee, so almost by definition there will be tweaks along the way.
Both Brandon and Brandy grew up in Wyoming, Brandon in the western part of the state and Brandy in the east in Hulett, near Devil’s Tower Monument. Brandon is a direct descendant of the Old West train-robbing outlaw family made famous as the Dalton Gang; Emmett is named for the brother who lived to tell the stories. The two met at the state university in Laramie. Brandy studied agricultural education and nursing; she’s a licensed EMT, which, she says, “is good when you’re living in remote places.” Brandon earned a BS in biology and later a master’s in zoology at Washington State; he has a bit of the scholar about him, a thoughtful stillness as he considers a question. Brandy is the outgoing one. She radiates buoyant energy, a hint of fun.
Brandon was introduced to Holistic Management through Brandy’s family. “My dad [Nick Bohl] had taken on management of thirty thousand acres of land,” she says. “His goal was to be the best manager he could. He took a seminar with [Holistic Management educator] Roland Kroos. Kroos helped him implement a plan and made that ranch more profitable than it had ever been.” Brandon says, “The increase in wild-life from Holistic Management piqued my interest as a biologist.” As he began practicing, “I realized I had a passion for grazing—the habitat you can create with it.”
Brandon stops the truck and we get out near a dip in the landscape. The view, mostly green with strips of yellow, is vast, stretching in soft undulations toward the horizon. And this is one of Grasslands’ smaller ranches.
“I picked this spot where you can cross the creek,” he says. Apparently that minor indentation in the land is a creek. “Last year at this time it was full of water. When water comes down too fast and the bank is not stable, it’s cutting through the soil.” As he points and explains, I start to see the place through his eyes, as a kind of legible diagram or document. I follow the diagonal line that rushing water carved in the creek bed. “I’d like to see some bank stabilization and fill in these cuts. Above the cuts, the water dispersed. That kept more on the ranch and meant that flooding downstream was minimized.” He mentions the 2011 floods along the Missouri River, which caused tremendous damage throughout the Great Plains, and says, “Those floods were coming from places like this.”
Brandon crouches down and brushes his hand over the grass. “We want to encourage grass like this—cordgrass, a plant with deep roots,” he says. “Like willows. This ranch has one patch of willows. I’d like to see more healthy riparian vegetation on this creek, willows and perennial grasses with all those microscopic roots as opposed to our weedy species, which are taprooted. Those are better than nothing, but you need the fibrous roots to stabilize soil.” He muses about how to make this happen, perhaps bringing in thousands of willow cuttings to plant, then pauses and sighs. “Here at South Dakota Grasslands, we’ve got myself and part-time help. The time scale will depend on the resources. Grazing will be pivotal, though. Willows will come in with well-timed grazing and recovery periods.”
I stoop down next to Brandon and see an all-too-familiar plant, one that’s irritated my skin more times than I could count: Canada thistle.
He plucks a prickly leaf, which he folds up ragged-edge-inward and eats. He encourages me to do the same. It’s not as bad as you might think. It has a kind of generic-green taste. “Cattle do tend to eat it,” he says. “If they’re spread out season-long, they won’t. Most of this is western wheatgrass, a cool-season perennial grass. The landscape here is not very diverse. Livestock will look for something different. One species rarely provides all of what an animal needs.”
He stands his full six-foot-plus height and indicates the sweep of this pasture. “No one’s grazed this since August last year,” he says. “Last year, in late May, the grass was shin-high. A wonderful thing about this region is even in a dry season you reliably get spring green-up. I grew up at seven thousand feet, cold desert. This region is less susceptible to real droughts. But I know it gets real dry. The locals say,
‘Just you wait.’”
Brandon’s family is in southwest Wyoming, an area now under rapid natural gas development. His father and mother are, respectively, a social worker and middle school counselor (though his father just retired). “I’m still a biologist,” he says. “I probably do more biology now than most biologists.” In addition to managing the two ranches, he’s also working to set up research projects.
We get back in the truck and Brandon says we’ll head back for lunch. Unlike the Cinch Buckle, at the Horse Creek and BR Ranches they do their herding by four-wheeler. Brandon explains that it’s more efficient, as they don’t have spots that can only be reached on a horse. He says this somewhat shamefacedly, as the horseback version ranks so much higher on the authentic cowboy scale; few think Wild West and picture an all-terrain vehicle.
“Look at the fence line,” he says. “Ours is green and across it’s brown. What we’ve been able to do is put litter on the ground. At the neighbors’ it’s still standing.” They accomplished this, he says, “mostly running yearling cattle. On the two ranches combined, in 2010 we ran twenty-three hundred cattle and in 2011 we had thirty-six hundred. These bigger herd sizes tend to knock down litter pretty well. If we get an inch of rain, the land will really hold water. Plants stay in contact with the soil surface. That allows the microbial life to break it down. The green/gold you see is from last year’s growth. The gray, mixed in, is from the year before that. There’s not so much old growth that it’s blocking sunlight, but enough to hold the snowmelt.”
Home turns out to be a camper in a field. Waiting for us is Emily Jerde, who helps part-time. At twenty, she’s studying violin long-distance via the Berklee School of Music and training to be a midwife. Her family runs buffalo using Holistic Planned Grazing, so Emily is well acquainted with the routine (if, indeed, it ever is routine). Brandon stresses how lucky he is to have her there. “As for people excited about Holistic Management, there’s no shortage,” he says. “People with the skills are another story.”
It’s a tight squeeze, but we gather around the camper dinette and Brandy dips into the Crock-Pot and serves the most amazing stew. It’s elk stew—from an elk Brandon harvested back in Wyoming the previous fall. “Elk is said to be sweet meat,” she says, adding that this one has carried them through the last several months. I empathize with what I imagine is the challenge of keeping a growing family equipped on a remote ranch with minimal space, but she seems unfazed. She puts Garrett down so he can speed-crawl about the cabin.
As happened at the Goddards, we lament the exodus of young people from the plains; it seems a theme we can’t escape. “What we need to do is instead of the best and the brightest leaving, get them to come back to the ranch,” Brandon says. Brandy adds that young people may be tempted to leave since they’re attractive to employers: “In a job interview as soon as they find out you were raised on a ranch, you’re hired. They know you have a lot of skills and can work hard.”
The other perennial topic is the threat of wildfire. “It’s a pretty high risk if you have a lot of fuel built up, standing stuff five years old” that hasn’t been reincorporated into the soil, either by cattle (trampling) or microorganisms (decay), says Brandon. “It’s always windy. In 2010 a thunderstorm passed by overhead and two weeks later we found a small burn patch, about half an acre. It had probably rained itself out, but that could have burned up a lot of acres very quickly.”
“If we’re successful with what we want to do we’ll increase fire resistance. A lot of fresh growth means moisture,” says Brandy. “You can also use grazing to create firebreaks. And build the southeast summer wind pattern into the grazing plan. You can mitigate some fire danger that way. If we can improve our water cycle so that we’re retaining more water in the ground and in the plants—that’s what we’re striving for.”
This management approach, she says, can also be applied to woodlands—where the largest and most intense fires occur. “A lot of forest fires are fueled by dried old grass or an overly high density of trees,” she says. “Grazing can keep vegetation vibrant and green in the understory, to reduce fuel loads and improve the water cycle.”
This is the family’s second season in the camper; they haven’t been overwintering cattle at the South Dakota ranch. “This place will never be good winter country,” says Brandon. “We’re facing northwest, where the winds are. In intense weather events, cattle can die.” Come November 1, the Daltons will be at the new Grasslands, LLC, operation, Antelope Springs Ranch, a fifty-three-thousand-acre property in east-central Montana north of Miles City. “It used to be called No Creek Ranch, but we want to name it after something it has,” Brandon says. He’s excited about the move, he says. “It’s a big transition, a good permanent place with seventy-five-plus square miles to get to know.” I pause, trying to wrap my head around the notion of seventy-five square miles. “There’s 640 acres in a mile,” he says. “That’s big. It might be closer to eighty. I love exploring new country, big country, and there’s a lot of it out there.”
Brandon reflects on his South Dakota time so far. “We grow more grass at this point in the season than where I grew up in an entire year. It’s working out well this year, but last year it was seventy-five hours a week with no days off for months on end. The thing about cattle is that it scales up nicely. Grazing management for five hundred cows [is] much the same amount of work as fifteen hundred cows.”
Brandy listens to the two of us talk about scale and strategy, grazing and planting, and puts in her two cents: “With Holistic Management it almost doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you’re paying attention.”
Allan Savory has said that floods and droughts are man-made. At first glance this seems a bold, even brazen statement. But here’s what he means: When it comes to the water cycle functioning in a landscape, the condition of that land is as important as what descends—or not— from the sky.
In an essay on the summer 2012 drought, Savory wrote:
In areas covering most western U.S. states suffering from drought you can, as I have done repeatedly, stop anywhere and sample the land from the best conventionally managed ranches to wilderness areas. Commonly you will find that no matter how good the grassland might superficially appear that anywhere from 50% to over 90% of the soil is bare between grass plants. This state of affairs guarantees ever-increasing frequency and severity of droughts just as is so tragically being experienced. I have found almost all range scientists, wildlife scientists, foresters and ranchers as well as conservation organizations believe this condition is natural. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is entirely unnatural and man-made.
The reason this happens, he says, is that there are too few large herbivores (mainly livestock) on the land—and those that do exist are showing unnatural behavior given the absence of pack-hunting predators. This leads to over-resting the land while overgrazing plants. Plus the overuse and misuse of the tool of fire.
Savory’s is an unconventional perspective, but ultimately a very empowering one. His analysis is that the things we humans have collectively done to the land have interfered with the effectiveness of the water cycle. These activities—farming, allowing for overgrazing and undergrazing, clearing trees and other vegetation, over-relying on fire as a management tool—have left land less able to absorb water. (Bringing in the New Water Paradigm model, I’ll add building on or paving over land, which also seals soil and impedes water infiltration.) This leads to drought and runoff, which then causes erosion and floods. However, this situation can be reversed by managing land in such a way that the soil’s ability to retain water is restored.
It’s a stance we might want to reflect upon, for floods, droughts, and wildfires (a greater threat when conditions are dry) affect more than just those who work the land. I’ve mentioned Hurricane Irene that swept the East Coast, killing sixty-seven people and causing more than $15 billion in damages. In Vermont, this deluge followed spring floods bad enough to warrant a presidential declaration of disaster. That same summer, Thailand saw severe flooding during the monsoon season, disrupting the lives and livelihoods of people in much of the country, including in Bangkok. We’d hosted a Thai exchange student, Naim, a few years back, so I’m somewhat tuned in to news about Thailand. Due to high waters, the school Naim enrolled in, near Bangkok, was suspended midterm and its resumption was delayed three times. It’s been called the worst flood in the world to date—Noah notwithstanding— in terms of water and the number of people affected. Even here we felt the effects; much of our local industry centers on car components, and the temporary closing of automobile plants in Thailand caused a work slow-down. Mega-floods also brought chaos to Pakistan, the Philippines, China, India, Mexico, Japan (after the tsunami), and numerous other places.
In the United States, at least, 2012 has been the opposite: very dry. At the end of July, more than half of all land in the lower forty-eight states was in moderate to severe drought. Diminished grain crops were expected to push global food prices upward and cause inflation. According to an August 31, 2012, article in Businessweek, agricultural losses would exceed $10 billion and homeowners will likely spend more than $1 billion repairing cracked basements, foundations, and walls due to dry, shifting soil. The fire season has been quite intense; as the Billings, Montana, newspaper put it, “one for the books.”
A September 2012 Oxfam report (“Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices”) says that global changes in rainfall patterns and temperatures could lead to the cost of staple foods more than doubling over the next twenty years (from 2010 prices), with price spikes following periods of extreme weather. Sudden price jumps, such as those sparked by droughts or floods, are especially hard for vulnerable populations since there’s no opportunity to plan or adjust.
These catastrophes are unpredictable and yet inexorable. We feel there’s nothing we can do so we keep our heads down and pray that if a storm, drought, or fire hits, it hits elsewhere. Other than, say, clearing a fire path or stocking up on batteries, we’re helpless. It’s seen as the inevitable result of climate change, yet another unpleasant manifestation of the “new normal.”
Allan Savory’s belief that drought and floods are man-made and therefore not inevitable opens the way for a different response. With this principle in mind, Grasslands, LLC, seeks to apply Holistic Management to thousands of acres of land, creating islands of ecological resilience with regard to the water cycle. So that perhaps when, say, an inordinately heavy rain comes in the spring, the pasture can absorb the water and there’s little runoff. Without big torrents streaming off the property, there’s no rush of water to cut into the cultivated hills downstream—so there’s no erosion. Since water isn’t flowing so fast, it’s able to soak in and turn the fields green. The good crop of grass that results feeds more animals. These animals enrich the soil and increase the diversity of plants, and this enables the land to retain more water and organic matter. Well-hydrated land rich in organic matter sustains a greater variety of microbial life. And when the next spring and summer see little rain, the water cycle is functioning well enough—in part through the “small water cycle,” the evapo-transpiration of plants, that’s enhanced when water stays in the ground—that there’s no drought or lack of vegetation.
Replay this scenario again and again, using Holistic Management (with cattle, sheep, goats, horses) or other restorative models (agroforestry, pasture cropping, natural sequence farming), and those islands of resilience expand and connect and, in time, are no longer islands but rather large intact areas of revived ecology. Floods happen less frequently and droughts aren’t as severe.
All summer I’d watch for news about the areas in Montana and South Dakota near the ranches. I checked for reports of rain that would change the grazing season’s trajectory. They never came. The word drought began popping up in reports here and there, and by early July the lack of rain became a big national story. I saw that a fire had jumped the 212, the highway that passes near the Cinch Buckle Ranch; the area around Broadus was without power for a week.
At the very end of August I chase down the ranchers to see how they fared. I catch Brandon Dalton at the camper. He’s in a chatty mood; the family has already moved up to Montana, so he’s been on his own. Emmett is about to start kindergarten, so he and Brandy wanted the kids settled. The spread of land up there has four houses, each with five bedrooms, and several outbuildings. He laughs, observing that they’re “going from one extreme to another.”
He gives me a retrospective on the season, Holistic-Management-style: “Going into the season, the planning process forces you to really evaluate your resource—what your grass is, what you anticipate—and plan for the worst. In April and May, we had a lot of cattle lined up to come onto the ranches. We assessed our situation and asked: What can we do? We knew we had poor growing conditions. If we took the cattle on that would leave us praying for rain, which usually doesn’t turn out very well. We made the difficult decision to not take twenty-seven hundred yearlings. We felt we did not have the conditions to. Instead, we took only eight hundred cow–calf pairs. That meant well over $100,000 worth of cattle that we didn’t take. This was early in the year when no one was talking drought. In fact, ranchers were expecting a banner year because of the anticipated record grain crop. At that exact time we were thinking, This looks really bad.”
As it turned out, says Brandon, “we were pressed pretty hard with eight hundred cow–calf pairs. We’d decided we would ration out the grass we had from the get-go, knowing that if we got a lot of rain we could replan. It’s gone about exactly as planned. By far the most difficult challenge we’ve had to deal with is water. We have enough grass to carry the cattle, but our water is lacking in a lot of places.”
In terms of rain, he says, “it’s been a tale of two ranches. At Horse Creek there’s been almost no rain. We’ve gotten a tenth or quarter inch here or there, but up to a half inch doesn’t go deep into the soil.” The BR saw one mid-May thunderstorm “that really sunk into the soil and kept the ranch moist into June.” In late July, he says, the BR had an inch and a half of rain two days in a row, while Horse Creek, twenty miles away, got nothing. “It’s such wide-open country, I could see the storm brewing and watch it go just south of the ranch. Maybe we got a quarter inch. That’s just how it is out here—a lot of thunderstorms that are really spotty. Wherever they happen to hit, that’s where it is.”
In Montana, they’ll be hiring another full-time person, which could be a single person or someone with a family. They’re considering a training program because of the extra available housing. “It’s definitely not for everyone,” says Brandon. “The closest neighbors are ten miles away, and you’d have to be prepared for that type of social environment.” There are those who thrive in such a setting, he says. “Some people who grow up on ranches feel lonely going to cities. Here, you know everybody. In a city there’s a lot of people but nobody says anything to you, waves at you.”
Meanwhile, at the Cinch Buckle, Ron says, “we’re a little more fortunate. There was a band of moisture that we got, several inches of rain in July, though still way below the average.” The challenge has not been grass but the cattle’s drinking water. “A lot of our water comes from man-made impoundments and reservoirs. What’s happened is the water level has dropped and the sulfate level has climbed higher and higher.” This, he says, is an ongoing situation in the region, particularly in dry years. “If you force cattle to drink that water, you’ll kill them. We started testing water because we were getting some inklings of a problem. In June we lost four cows that were watering in one spot right on the borderline of what is safe and not safe. I had sent in some water samples before the cows died and the results hadn’t come in yet. When we went out to move them we found them dead.” He wonders: Could he have saved them had they gone to move cows a day earlier? He’s now testing continually, he says.
The difficulty is that Holistic Planned Grazing works best when cattle graze smaller areas intensively for brief periods. With many spots lacking drinkable water, they haven’t been able to do this as much as Goddard would have liked. To address the water problem they’re extending underground pipelines, which, Goddard says, runs about $15,000 a mile. In conventional ranching cattle have a larger range, so managers wouldn’t be faced with same water problems.
I ask about the calves that Kathleen had been feeding, and Ron tells me the last orphan calf joined the herd a few days before. He says that due to the timing it’s unlikely the mother was among the seemingly doomed Texas cows. “Sometimes cows have twins, and as they’re not very smart they can’t keep track of both calves,” he says. “In this case we couldn’t find a cow so we took him in. You know, a cow can’t even count to two.”
Agreed, cows aren’t very smart. But as the land has shown, in the aggregate—that is, in their behavior as a herd—they evince a kind of genius.
Torrential Rains
Fifth-generation rancher Zachary Jones, Grasslands, LLC’s, division manager, whom I mentioned in chapter 1, was smack in the middle of the 2011 floods. Yet Twodot Land and Livestock, near Harlowton in central Montana, suffered few losses. I spoke with Jones in summer 2011, when the torrential rains that came fast after record snowmelt were fresh in his mind.
“The American Fork Creek, which goes through our land, turned into a large river this spring, which contributed to the Musselshell [River] being thirteen times its usual runoff. The creek has never had this kind of flow before,” he told me. (The American Fork Creek runs into the Musselshell, a tributary to the Missouri River.) “We didn’t have much water running off our pastures. Where it did run, it was clear—no runoff of soil.” This is because Twodot has porous soil, good ground cover, and plants with deep root systems, all of which retain water and minimize soil erosion. Some of his neighbors, however, didn’t fare so well. “Some lost entire diesel generators that run irrigation systems. Worth $20,000 to $40,000—those just washed away. Others lost barns or corral systems. Many lost livestock in barns or corrals. A lot of sheep drowned.”
That Twodot was relatively unscathed Jones attributes to the fact that, thanks to his father being an early adopter, it’s been administered under Holistic Management since the 1980s. He says years of Holistic Planned Grazing meant “increased carbon content of the soil, which holds way more water. It’s like a bigger sponge. Plus, increased ground cover to slow the water down so that it can soak in.” When water soaks in it feeds plant roots, fills aquifers, and recharges springs; moisture is released gradually and over time. Increasing soil carbon means more water can be absorbed by the land. “If everyone could increase soil carbon 1 percent, it would have taken even a more extreme weather event” to cause the kind of trouble they saw that year.
Jones acknowledges that, ecologically speaking, land knows no boundaries— and that, he says, is humbling, and a reminder of the ranch’s vulnerability: “We manage our twenty-four thousand acres pretty well, but there’s hundreds and thousands of acres up the creek from us. That has a lot more to do with whether we have a tragedy with an extreme weather event.”
In the northern Great Plains, where land is not badly desertified, you can increase the effectiveness of the water cycle in two to four years, says Jones: “Basically, you increase mulch—grass, litter, and manure—so that the soil is shaded and grass is not oxidizing. This significantly changes the soil surface to slow the flow of water. You also get better functioning of microorganisms in the soil and better cycling of minerals.”
Jones worries not just about the loss of property and infrastructure, but about prospects for the future. “Thousands of bridges and roads have been washed out across the country,” he says. “Everyone thinks they need to be replaced. But if you do a holistic plan you can look at your map and community and say, ‘What do you really need to withstand events, where do the winds blow, how many roads and bridges do we need?’ Look at the whole—don’t rebuild where it’s going to flood again. Rather, build in a way that you’re not afraid of the natural ebb and flow of disaster and abundance. What just happened—nature doesn’t view it as a tragedy, it’s just the way it is. We need to do a better job of managing our land or else we’re going to wash away.
“Slaps in the face like this provide opportunities for change. A drought definitely gets people thinking about how they can manage resources better. It’s easy to see then that our ranch has more grass and more animals, and makes more money. A flood is a harder link for people to make. People think they have no control over it. We actually do.”