Ranchers are manipulating their operations
out of business; better to mimic nature

By Dave Pratt
for Headwaters News

North American livestock producers are the most productive in the world. We are also the least profitable. Could it be that our battle to increase production is the reason for economic failure?

We are engaged in a Cold War with nature. We are armed with an impressive arsenal. We seed and fertilize and spray and mow and plow and burn. We vaccinate, drench, implant and supplement. We feed from barrels, blocks, bales and bags. We keep bunkers full of hay. We fight the weather to get feed to the cows and struggle to save calves born in winter and spring storms.

All of these things have made us productive. They have not made us profitable. We are running out of money. Just like the cold war bankrupted the Russians, our cold war will bankrupt us.

We work dawn to dusk, with a business that may have assets of a million dollars or more, living like paupers.

We are going bankrupt economically and biologically. Take for example our reliance on energy. Burt Smith, extension specialist in Hawaii says, "There's a lot of oil in a pound of steak," referring to the fossil fuel infrastructure of our industry.

What effect will increased energy prices have on the structure of our industry? Even more troubling are the projections from the U.S. Geological Survey, World Watch Institute and the American Petroleum Institute, reporting that known and expected fossil fuel reserves will be exhausted in 40-50 years.

We are running out of more than just energy.

According to Natural Resource Conservation Service estimates, the rate of erosion from range and pasture lands averages twice the rate of soil formation. Soil loss from cropland is more than four times the rate of replacement.

It seems as if the frequency and severity of floods and droughts are increasing. Weed problems are increasing and our dependence on fertilizers and herbicides is growing.

We work dawn to dusk, with a business that may have assets of a million dollars or more, living like paupers. These and other stresses are straining relationships within farm and ranch businesses. Conventional farming and ranching is not sustainable.

Will we keep farming and ranching until the money, oil, soil and family all run out?

There is an alternative. Ranching can be economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. But profitable ranching requires a drastic change in our thinking. Einstein could have been talking about the livestock business when he said, "the significant problems we face today can not be overcome with the same level of thinking which caused the problem."

Maybe we should start by thinking about one of the most productive grazing operations in history. The operation was incredibly productive before we ever built fences and barns, or grew and fed hay.

The operation still goes on today although on a much more limited scale. This efficient operation has no expensive infrastructure or capital costs. Overhead costs are at a minimum. It uses a concentrated breeding season, and a strict culling policy.

It may be the prototype of a profitable ranch today. It's nature.

What would happen if instead of fighting nature, we worked with nature ... if we tried to help nature do what comes naturally?

We can start by recognizing that we are not so much in the cattle business as we are in the energy business. Our job is to capture, harvest and convert solar energy into harvestable products.

Nature doesn't need equipment to harvest forage, neither do we. She uses four-legged combines. So can we.

Nature doesn't have high capital expenses or overheads ... and neither should we. Nature selects animals to fit the environment and matches the reproductive cycle of her animals to the forage cycle. So should we.

What would happen if we cut all of the fences and abandoned our ranches? Would all the animals die, or would some survive? What would those that survived be like? When would they calve? What would the conception rates be like?

Wild populations of deer, elk and bison typically have conception rates of 65 to 70 percent. When a rancher's cow herd has a conception rate of 90 percent, he added only 25 percent; nature did the rest without his help or interference.

Now think about the infrastructure we have established, all of the overhead we bear and all of the hay we feed to support that 25 percent.

Sustainable practices are management techniques that work with nature, have spinoff benefits and can increase profits by an average 22 percent, according to studies by the Corporation for the Northern Rockies.

Ranchers can fence livestock away from riparian and other sensitive areas and use timed-grazing to keep stock from overgrazing. This improves the health of range resources, which in turn increases the weight gain of livestock, brings a higher price at the sale barn and increases forage for wildlife.

Ranchers use livestock to control noxious weeds and to naturally fertilize pastures in lieu of chemical fertilizers and herbicides. This lowers operating costs and significantly reduces contamination of ground and surface waters.

Most important, ranchers learn -- and monitor -- the four processes critical to healthy ecosystem function: the water, mineral and energy cycles and biodiversity, and they adjust their management accordingly.

Sustainably produced beef, lamb and wool also qualify for lucrative niche markets, which bolster profitability even further. All told, there are compelling environmental and financial reasons for ranchers to choose sustainable practices.

Change is never comfortable, but there has never been a better time for change in the livestock business. The industry is not economically, biologically or socially sustainable. It's hard to go downhill when you are sitting at the bottom.

Tom Lasater, founder of the Beef Master Breed once said, "I think Nature is smart as hell. I help as much as I can but I try to let her do most of the work."

Lasater's approach of ranching with nature will be the key to sustainable production in the years ahead. It is a powerful strategy for businessmen who are ranching for profit.

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Studies: Ranches may help preserve habitat

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Nov. 27, 2002

While ranchers and environmentalists continue to clash over grazing on public land, growing evidence suggests that ranching may be the best way to preserve wildlife and habitat -- or at least better than some of the alternatives.

Three environmental groups last month sued the BLM for allowing so many cattle to graze central Nevada allotments that half the tested streams exceeded pollution standards, some by 8,000 percent.

The BLM's own study found those conditions in May 2000, but the suit alleged officials had failed to do anything since to limit grazing or ease the effects.

Also last month, one of the plaintiffs, Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians, bought another grazing permit in New Mexico, a 644-acre addition to the 2,637 acres of state school trust land on which it has leased grazing rights to since 1995.

The group outbids ranchers -- by seven-fold in the latest case -- then works to restore environmental damage. The group set its precedent with the purchase of grazing rights in New Mexico in 1995 and won an Arizona Supreme Court case last year that allowed it to expand the practice there.

In September, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals cut grazing in Idaho's Owyhee Canyons by 50 percent, a ruling in a lawsuit filed by Western Watersheds that said BLM officials were allowing the area to be overgrazed and that sought a ban on grazing.

Another case in the 9th Circuit could block grazing while officials study the effects on endangered species. An Arizona judge ruled there was no reason to keep cattle off three national forest allotments while officials decided whether grazing would harm an endangered minnow. But environmentalists appealed, saying the ruling would shift the benefit of the doubt to ranchers, instead of endangered species.

At the same time, a growing number of researchers are publishing data that suggest ranches may be the West's last bastions of open space, productive habitat and land on which natural process such as fire can be mimicked.

Some of those researchers are careful to note that poor grazing practices have done enormous damage. But, they say, working ranches may be far less destructive than subdivisions and ranchettes.

One Colorado study found ranches had as many species of birds, carnivores and plants, and fewer species of invasive weeds, than protected wildlife refuges. The 40-acre ranchettes in the study had fewer native species and more weeds.

A study of lands around Yellowstone National Park found that songbirds from higher elevations nested in lower regions that was home to both ranches and ranchettes. But on the developed parcels, songbird death rates exceeded birth rates, apparently because the developed tracts attracted magpies and other predators.

And in New Mexico, a study found that grazing has had relatively little effect on the landscape, and that natural habitats were not being disturbed enough. The missing element was periodic fire that impeded brush and encouraged grasses, and the owners of large ranches were more amenable to controlled burns than the managers of adjacent public land.

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Headwaters News is a project of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.