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It
takes time, practice and awareness
to manage a ranch by heeding the land
By
Tony Malmberg
for Headwaters News
Tough times through the mid-'80s brought me to my knees. Work in
Wyoming's oil fields and Nevada's mines provided income to keep
our ranch limping along but left me wondering, "What's the
point?"
We ranch 35,000 acres in the foothills of Wyoming's southern Wind
River Mountains. Twin Creek, a small mountain stream, flows through
an incised canyon for four miles before it comes to a narrow alluvial
meadow at our headquarters.
The creek then turns north through juniper breaks for eight miles
before leaving the ranch. Elevation ranges from 5,800 to 8,000 feet.
Desperation drove me to Allan Savory's course on Holistic Management
in 1987 because I heard that we could double our cattle numbers
with this newfangled way of grazing.
In a Holiday Inn meeting room, a troop of young ex-agency range
scientists laid out the basics. I listened politely as they lectured
on the core of Holistic Management: The Holistic Goal and its three
parts: the quality of ranch life desired, the production needed
to sustain that life and the future landscape necessary to support
the production.
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Alberta
ranchers stuck in similar ruts
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
June 12, 2002
The region's farmers and ranchers seem to get little
in the way of a break from any direction.
They're under pressure to curb
grazing on public land, to defend their domain from encroaching
suburbs and their stock from
conflicts with wildlife, to keep their animals fed and watered
in the midst of a drought and their irrigation supplies intact in
the face of increasing demand for water.
And they -- at least those who aren't wealthy
businessmen maintaining a tax write-off -- hold out hope of
turning a profit in markets that seem perpetually depressed.
It's no doubt small consolation, but their counterparts across the
Canadian border struggle with many of the same issues.
Across Canada, family farms and ranches are being squeezed out of
existence, although arguably less in Alberta.
Alberta farms showed the country's highest gross receipts. The province's
farms are the
largest in the country and they're disappearing at a slower rate
than in other provinces, according to Statistics Canada.
The Calgary Herald finds much to praise about the trend, although
it notes that 90 percent of Alberta farmers' gross revenue goes
toward expenses, a painfully thin margin.
And while Alberta farms are also disappearing, the Herald concludes
they're the smaller, least profitable operations, and that bigger
is clearly better.
There are now 30,000 fewer farms in Canada than there were in World
War II, the result of improved technology and economies of scale,
with
the greatest drop between 1996 and 2001.
Alberta and British Columbia's losses were lowest, 9.1 percent and
7.1 percent, respectively.
Larger producers can be more profitable by diversifying, blurring
the line between farm and ranch. Cattle, grains and oilseeds and
dairy farms have increased by 35.6 per cent in Alberta and average
970 acres, compared with the national average of 676 acres.
Higher cattle prices gave Alberta ranchers a boost last year, nearly
doubling Alberta's net farm income, but experts warned it was
little cause for celebration.
The previous two years had been exceptionally bad, spokesmen said,
and impressive gains by comparison simply took the edge off the
crisis.
Ranchers say this year bodes ill, given a persistent drought and
higher U.S. farm subsidies that will likely cut their profit margins
even thinner.
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