AoR 134: Contextual Adaptive Grazing Management & Patterns, with Jim Howell

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>> Welcome to The Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, Range and Livestock Specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online @artofrange.com.

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Welcome back to The Art of Range. My guest today is Jim Howell. Jim runs the organization Grasslands LLC, an organization that manages multiple ranches, aiming for, I think, as I understand it, profitable livestock enterprises as well as environmental benefits, and to show the world that it can be done well. Jim, welcome to the show.

>> Thanks a lot, Tip. I am really honored to be here.

>> Before we get into ranch management, what is your background? I know everybody in ranch is in a little bit of a niche spot, but people that are managing large landscapes in this particular way is a very small segment of the US population. What was your background and what got you interested in ranch management?

>> I was heavily influenced by my family's ranch in Western Colorado that my granddad put together in the 1930s. My dad, though, was an only child and elected not to be a rancher. And he got his teaching degree and became a high school football coach, and he moved to California in 1960. He met my mother out there, and my brothers and I came along. And he realized actually his family had a pretty cool thing back in Colorado. So, given that he and my mom were both teachers, we could get away for a good part of the summer. And we'd get back up to my granddad's ranch up in the mountains of Western Colorado in Monroe and Gunnison County. And I grew up just enamored with those high mountains, and fishing and horseback riding and moving cows and irrigating, and just absolutely loved it. But then I'd have to go back to California where my dad got the teaching and coaching job and go to school all winter. And so I grew up in two totally different environments, and I grew up knowing what I loved, I think partly because I had juxtaposition which my dad did not have. All he knew was the mountains in Colorado, didn't know anything different. Whereas I knew something different. And it was suburbs, California realized that's not what I wanted in my life to be centered on. So I always knew I wanted to be in ranching and livestock. In some capacity, I decided to become a livestock veterinarian, majored in animal science at Cal Poly, Pomona. But after a few years, decided that I was more interested or as interested in the ecology of the environments that livestock were interacting with than as I was in the livestock themselves. So I became really interested in range science partway through college and decided to kind of deviate from my livestock veterinary path and focus more on ranch management. And so after college, I cowboyed for a summer in Western Colorado, and then got a job managing a grass-based area in East Texas, which is great. But I realized I didn't want to live in East Texas and I didn't want to be a dairy farmer. And so my wife at the time, Daniela, who is still a great friend and great co-parent, great colleague, she and I applied for a ranch management job with HMI, with Holistic Management International in 1994. And we got the job managing a big desert ranch in the Chihuahuan Desert. And that was directly with, again, HMI and managing that under the supervision of Allan Savory. So Daniela and I asked ourselves if there was one thing we could do, what would it be? And we said, we'd like to work for Savory in some capacity. I become aware of his work when I was in college. And he helped me realize that it's not the cows that's the problem, it's the way the cow is interacting with the environment that's a problem. And how that interaction happens is largely a function of human management and the decisions that we make day to day. And so that was a huge epiphany for me. And so we wrote a letter to Allan Savory, literally, pre-internet, pre-email. Sent him a hard copy letter. And they called us back and said, "We think we might have the perfect job for you guys managing a ranch in New Mexico. And so I resigned from my job, the dairy in East Texas. We drove out to interview and we ended up getting a job. And so that's where we cut our teeth on large scale kind of brutal landscape, semi-arid environment. Ranch was in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. The ranch actually straddled the New Mexico on Arizona border. And we had a bunch of big open desert flat that merged up into some really rough mountains. And so we got to get experience in a range of topography on that place and learned a ton. And then we were in a position to try to take over the lease of my family's ranch. Again, the ranch that I fell in love with the ranching on as a kid. We took over that ranch, then started leasing that from my parents in 1997. And eventually, leased several ranches adjacent to us. And we had a summer custom grazing enterprise there for 17 years. So that was kind of my early ranching career. And because we were just seasonal random cows at high altitude just seasonally, we had our winters freed up to do other things. And we were passionate about land and livestock. And through being associated with Allan, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people in his network, including in Southern Africa. So we started putting together tours in the wintertime to other holistically manage ranches in various parts of the world. So we ended up doing tours in South Africa, and Zimbabwe, and Namibia. And expanded into Argentina and Australia. And so that's what we would do in the winter. And it was great because each one of those trips was kind of like a mini master's degree. And we keep going back to the same places over many years, and you learn a lot when you go back to the same place and see the evolution of their knowledge and experience and results and as opposed to just visiting a place one time and getting a snapshot view of it. So, you know, that was -- we set that up as a way to try to make a living in the winter, which it enabled us to do, but it was a lot more valuable as a learning experience for us as we developed our perspectives and experience on managing big landscapes. So that all led eventually into the development of the Savory Institute and Grasslands. And so the Grassland side of it it's what I took over and still lead. And so yeah, we're a ranch management company. We try to find good investment opportunities on big commercially viable ranches for our investor clients. And then we do everything from doing all the due diligence all the upfront work, figuring out if it's a viable potential enterprise, and then negotiate the deals and get them over the line in conjunction with the lawyers and the real estate agents. And then we engage in a full care management service for the owner of the property.

>> And so Grasslands doesn't usually own the property?

>> No, we don't own the properties.

>> Yeah.

>> No, no. We don't own anything. We own a couple computers. And, I mean, I recently just bought a small ranch that Grasslands will own, but that's our first actual hard asset acquisition. So, now we just provide a full care management service, but we're very clear on the criteria that a given ranch has to possess to, you know, decide whether or not it's a project we want to take on, because it has to be, again, a commercially viable ranch that not only has a capacity to work financially, you know, to not only break but to generate hopefully competitive return for the investor but also has the capacity to justify Grassland's involvement as a professional management company.

>> Right.

>> Yep.

>> Yeah, that's interesting. I think, yeah, I've had a number of interactions over the 20 years that I've been with WSU and very much in the range in livestock management space. A lot of conversations with folks who have been, I guess, I would say, heavily influenced by holistic management. And, you know, for all of the controversy, those tend to be the places, at least in the Pacific Northwest that I've seen, that are managed pretty well. And I don't know if with our specific, you know, types of plant functional groups and physiology with bunch grasses that those plants really are not well suited to continuous grazing. You know, we're more of a solid forming plant community. You know, even some of the short grass prairie can to some degree tolerate that just because of the nature of where the growing points are and some physiological things. But the controversy is interesting to me. You know, it's a pretty big sandbox and we all have to play with each other. You know, there's that. I think it was a book that everything I need to know about life I should have learned by kindergarten. You know, one of them is that we need to play well with each other. And I have felt for years that, I guess, what I would call the conventional rain science folks and the holistic management folks are sort of talking past each other, and that there's maybe not as much actual substantive controversy there as it seems. I almost think that some of the -- well, certainly some of the controversy is due to, you know, controversial personalities like Allan Savory. You know, people that are trying to cut a wide swath, oftentimes are strong personalities and maybe aren't very likable. I don't know that about Allan because I've never met him, but I've heard that from people that do know him pretty well. And of course, we've got a really wide range of environments in the world. But to come back to a statement that you made that, you know, humans are almost always the ones responsible for directing the pattern of use of grazing animals. That's not a controversial statement. So now the next question is, you know, how do we begin to manage that? You know, all the usual things, timing, season of use, duration, intensity, level of residual. Like there's a lot of variables that we can manipulate and not just can, we are. No matter what you do, we're making decisions about what the cows are doing, even if it's a decision to not do anything to the cows for nine months out of the year. Those are active decisions. And I really enjoy science, and of course, this podcast has mostly been science communication, but I find myself gravitating toward people who integrate diverse domains of knowledge because, you know, people who think holistically. And I think it's unfortunate that that term has kind of fallen out of favor. You know, if you say the words holistic medicine, you know, that conjures up ideas in people's minds of quackery instead of medical care.

>> Yeah.

>> And yeah, that's not a topic for today. But I think some of the same connotations get borrowed when people think of holistic management or holistic thinking. And those word associations are maybe unfortunate. But anybody who's managing real live landscapes knows the necessity of thinking holistically, you know, with a lowercase h. Meaning everything is connected, and what the animals do have effects on soil and plants and species composition and insects, and, you know, everything that's in higher trophic levels from plant production. And so to some extent, it's unavoidable, even if we're not responsibly thinking about it. And I guess the way that I have seen this is that in my limited experience, it seems that what I have called holistic management is more of a decision-making framework than a grazing method. And I think that's part of where a lot of the controversy came, at least back in the 1980s when Savory was making the rounds in this country and, you know, encountering ranchers and ranch scientists with these ideas for the first time. And a lot of ranchers that were able to implement, say, you know, a wagon wheel, smoke design, grazing method on irrigated pasture where you've got lots of water and there's sufficient forage density to warrant spending money on fence, could make that work. Then it did work pretty well just because, you know, your production is related to the growth rate of the plants and letting them grow instead of -- if you're constantly defoliating your solar panels and removing the ability of the plant to generate growth, then you don't get as much production. That's also not controversial.

>> Right.

>> And everybody knows what that looks like. You've driven past those pastures where it never gets more than two inches tall because the animals are never there. And they've been out since the plant started trying to put up, you know, the first sphere of grass in March, and they're still there in November when it finally peters out for the year, the plants give up. You know, but somewhere in between, you know, where you let the plant grow and then you use livestock to harvest that crop, that's very much a natural process and it's a viable -- ought to be a viable business model where you're letting the animal do the work of harvesting plants that are harvesting solar energy. And that's a really good idea. So I've said a lot. So I think that's some of where the controversy seems to be in that people that are applying some intentionality to a grazing plan, you know, thinking about where animals ought to be and when and why, and for how long and what does that affect on everything. A lot of people, a lot of ranchers haven't taken the time to think through that. And what I see in people that are managing according to some version of holistic management is that they're applying that thinking and decision-making to what they do with grazing. And that's never a bad thing. And when they move out of a really productive environment like irrigated pasture or like a tropical grassland into a less productive per acre ecosystem type, like what we have in much of the western United States with arid and semi-arid biomes, there's oftentimes not enough grass to justify that kind of infrastructure that permits, say, a one day move. But if you do a 30-day move instead of 150 day grazing period, you know, my direct observations have led me to believe that that has positive effects in a variety of ways on those ecosystems looked at as a whole. You've been way more immersed in this than I have, at least from the holistic management side if not from the conventional rain science side. But how do you see -- where do you see as the actual touch points of some of that controversy?

>> Yeah, well, it's a big topic. You know, going back to kind of what is holistic management. It's highly, you know -- the core of it is that it's context dependent. And so we have this amazing range of landscapes around the world and these environments that are mostly still rangelands or grasslands because it doesn't make sense to do anything with them other than that because they're too dry, hot, steep, rocky, et cetera, to farm, to cultivate. So that comprises the majority of those surface areas, grazable landscapes that can't be done anything else with. But there's a huge range of those. And the context is unique in every single situation. Unique in terms of the productivity of the landscape, all the features that go with the given ranch or farm, the specific, you know, economic context that have given ranches in both in terms of the country that they're trying to make a living in, and the specific economic situation of that specific family or business. The specific values that drive a given family or people involved with certain operation are unique in every single entity. And so, you know, when Savory started working with ranches in Eastern and Southern Africa in the '60s, he gradually became aware of that. His original push was totally driven by his ecological perspective and his desire to try to get ranchers to manage their livestock in ways that mimicked these pristine areas of what was then Northern Rhodesia, now, Zambia in the 1960s. Allan was stationed in these areas that were completely pristine in terms of the number of herbivores and pocketing predators that were co-living. And he was stationed as a game ranger in these extremely remote areas that were full of tsetse flies, and so they were never settled by pastoralists. So they were still, you know, interacting the way nature intended. And when he realized that a cow or a sheep or a goat is just a surrogate for the wild herbivore out there and we ought to be able to manage them in ways that mimic these patterns of grazing that he was observing in pristine areas of Africa. That was his ecological driver. That's what he was passionate about. So he'd go and start working with ranchers that were also similarly motivated from the ecological side of things. And they made a lot of mistakes in the early days. But it was all on a learning curve, a lot of mistakes, especially from the animal production side of things and performance side with probably too heavy of a focus on the ecological goals and objectives that they were trying to manage for. And Allan realized, "Okay, I'm not dealing with just a national park here that I'm trying to recreate the dynamics that I saw up in Northern Rhodesia. I actually have a family here that needs to make a living and they have limited funds. And so, gosh, I need to start thinking about economics on top of ecology." And that's probably the priority because these people are running out of money and don't have the ability to do all the stuff and put all this infrastructure in, then I'm fighting a losing battle. So I need to just take a few steps back. And first things first is this business has to stay viable. And then even before that, you know, these people are motivated by certain drivers that motivate them to get out of bed every morning, and I can't come on and try to superimpose all my ideas without taking into account their specific human values. And so that human sociological side of it is the core driver backed by the need to be financially viable. And then obviously the long-term financial viability is supported by ecological health and resilient.

>> And vice versa. If you don't know whether or not you can feed your kids next month, you're going to sacrifice land --

>> Totally.

>> -- in order to make sure your animals are getting fed.

>> Yeah, exactly. So it's all tied together, and you can't manage any of those things in isolation. And so the whole idea is to make decisions that are sound from these three perspectives, both short-term and long-term simultaneously. And that's really hard to do. Because our human brains, you know, most modern day humans are a lot more kind of mechanically driven as opposed to holistically driven in terms of how just culturally we're brought up with more reductionist, linear thinking paradigm. Thinking about all these things simultaneously and how they all interact and how tweaking one thing affects everything else isn't something that we grow up habituated to do. And so, Allan realized there needed to be a framework that helped guide us in thinking this way more holistically. So that's how he came up with the framework for holistic management that, you know, starts off with these bigger picture, defining your context, your people, your money, your resource base. Really getting clear around what it is you're actually managing. And then all these planning processes, planning procedures that help actually implement this stuff. So it all kind of sounds kind of touchy feely when you look at it from the big picture. The great thing about holistic management is that it brings it down to very specific planning processes, both in the economic realm and in the ecological realm. And a big part of it is integrating- the big part of the economic side is integrating your infrastructure design and development into your annual financial plans. And being really clear on getting the biggest bank for your buck in terms of where you're investing your limited funds year to year to generate both an economic and an ecological impact. And so, you know, we have very disciplined procedures that we follow if we're doing it by the book that enable us to bring a high level of order around something that is, you know, kind of nebulous at the end of the day. Bringing some structure to it. And so that's what the planning procedures of holistic management help us do. The land planning, the grazing planning, and the financial planning. And so I was fortunate to come across all this stuff early on in my career.

>> And you haven't said anything at all yet about a grazing method?

>> No, not at all. And so, you know, there's some key insights that Allan gleaned from his observations of these wild animals interacting the way nature intended in these pristine areas of Zambia. And so he gleaned these, you know, the predator/prey interaction dynamic as a key thing that drives how herbivory and grazing patterns happen in a natural context. And so those insights are integrated into our grazing planning process as are this recognition that animals move. They tend not to come back to an area until it's recovered from the previous grazing event in a natural context. It doesn't work out perfectly and cleanly at all in a natural context, but on the whole, plants typically have the chance to go through a recovery period before they're grazed again, especially severely grazed again in a natural context. And so he incorporated that insight into our grazing planning process. And so yeah, just that need to stay moving and the need to get stocked as high as we practically can in a given context, and the need to plan for adequate recovery periods for our given context as well. And so, you know, a lot of what Allan developed in his early years was in a fairly productive Savannah grassland and tropical latitudes in Africa, what's known as Zimbabwe, Northern South Africa, Namibia, with Namibia's less productive, but still is highly seasonal rainfall patterns that result in significant production when it does rain. And, you know, the insights that Allan glean there are absolutely applicable to grassland environments around the world, but the details of how we manage that recovery period and what kind of stock into these are practical to achieve and are necessary to achieve in these lower production for the landscapes, like characterize most of the American West and Patagonia and lots of Central Asia are different than tropical latitudes of Zimbabwe. And so the principles are the same, but the details of their application vary as we move from one context to another. And so --

>> Yeah, you're not going to graze the Chihuahuan Desert in the same way that you do seven foot tall C4 grasses.

>> Yeah, in Zimbabwe. Yeah, exactly. And so in our early years, they're managing that ranch down there in southwestern New Mexico, southeastern Arizona, that became clear to me kind of right off the bat. And so that kind of instilled on my part a search for, you know, what did the natural grazing dynamic look like in these semi-arid environments in the west. And unfortunately, we market hunted out most of the pristine, you know, the kind of those original pristine levels of herbivores that would've been here when Lewis and Clark came through. By the time scientists got out here and got around to studying them and observing them, they were largely -- those original grazing patterns were hugely disturbed, both by settlement and over market hunting, et cetera, before I really understood what was going on. So there's not good, you know, historical precedent in terms of how herbivores interacted with these landscapes. But there are parts of the world where kind of those intact herds did survive into the modern era in environments that are similar to the American West. And I started looking into those environments and trying to understand, trying to research as well as I could, what information is out there that can potentially inform me how I should be managing my cows in Western Colorado. And I came -- there's not any really good scientifically published stuff on that, but there's a lot of observational things looking at the chiru or the Tibetan antelope up on the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongolian gazelle in Eastern Mongolia. And there are some good studies on the wildebeest that's not obviously a temperate latitude grassland, but the southern Serengeti is only about 16-inch rainfall country. And there's good quantitative data around how the wildebeest interact with that environment over the span of, you know, 13 or 14 years study that was done in the '60s and '70s that I gleaned a lot from in terms of how those migratory herbivores, you know, hit a given chunk of ground, an acre of ground on a year over year basis. And what I kind of gleaned was that it's highly variable year to year, both the timing of arrival of the herbivores tends to be highly variable. The time that they're there, which is directly correlated to the intensity of utilization. The longer they're there and linger, the more it's utilized, obviously. Sometimes they just barely pass through and barely touch a place. Sometimes they won't touch a given area at all in a given year. Sometimes they'll graze it severely. The only thing that really drives the migrations are, or the main thing that drives these migrations is the need to get to a specific calving area at a certain time. Or birthing area. But even on the birthing areas, the areas that are heavily used year to year tend to be variable year to year. The timing is not that different on the birthing areas, but the intensity of use tends to be variable. But everything outside the calving areas, the timing of arrival and the intensity of use would tend to be highly variable year to year. Which is not like we tend to decrease most of our domestic -- in our domestic grazing context. Even in wild country like, you know, our federal permits in the Western US are largely wild landscapes, but, you know, up until maybe the last 15 or 20 years, the tendency would be to use those permits the same way every year. Turn in the same spot, go the same direction, use the same areas the same time, year to year to year, year after year after year. But now, you know, we are starting to try to incorporate these insights of the fact that in a natural context, these variables to grazing that we can manage, time and frequency and intensity and duration, we need to switch those up year to year. And again, based on my study of wild herbivores in these low production environments, that's indeed what looks like probably happened in natural context. These migrations were highly variable year to year. The other thing I gleaned was that in these low production environments, the migratory herbivores comprise the vast bulk of mammalian biomass. So typically, on the order of magnitude more than the resident herbivores. So as a result, those migratory herbivores, their populations are governed by the amount of biomass that's out there, the amount of forbs that grows year to year, not by predation. Because they're avoiding these high predation levels by getting to calving areas that seem to have very low predator densities. And that's why they have calving piece or [inaudible] piece, get it over with and then go moving once the young are big enough to avoid most predation. And unlike the residents herbivores which don't go along migrations, the thing is -- and that tend to set up camp and areas that do have resonant predators, their populations are governed by predation. The migratory animals, their population numbers are governed by the amount of available feed. And so if you go through a string of good years, obviously that migratory population will expand. But then you go through a mean time, and, you know, the first thing that happens, the animals don't die from starvation right away, but they tend not to breathe back like they would. And so, recruitment of young in a given year is low. And if that happens for several years though, then the old -- you know, you'll start to get mortality due to starvation within mature animals. So as a result of either young not being recruited because of poor conception rates or older animals dying at a more rapid rate than they would under more abundant conditions, the herd shrink. But then it takes -- and, you know, eventually it starts to rain again, the landscape recovers, but that herbivore population takes it a few years to recover back to the level of the carrying capacity. That's because the numbers have plummeted so much. So stock carrying capacity rises above stocking rate in the natural context at the end of an extended drought. Well, we tend to not take that into account, or we haven't historically in the arid west. We go through a drought situation, we don't really stock the way we should. And then when we get a good year, right back up there where we're at that full stocking rate.

>> Well, and the populations aren't subject to the same pressures.

>> No. Because we probably can prop them up.

>> We prop up reproduction rates with supplemental nutrition to make sure that we don't have these catastrophic crashes.

>> Yeah. Exactly. But I guess the point is that it's a forged resource-base that controls that kind of waxing and waning population of herbivores. And so I just think there's good lessons to glean from that as well in terms of how we should be managing our domestic livestock out there. You need to give yourself a chance to recover from drought, you know. You need to destock during severe drought situations. Do it strategically, do it early in the drought to minimize damage both economically and ecologically. And then build back, you know, as the land permits. And so anyway, all those kind of lessons I glean from looking at trying to study the way the native herbivores would've interacted in these more semi lower landscape -- sorry, lower production brutal environments. So yeah, so that's been an insight that I kind of started putting together 20, 25 years ago and now implement in the management of these big ranches that we now manage with Grasslands.

>> Yeah. I was trying to find some previous notes that I had from visiting with Sam Fellendorf about heterogeneity. Which interested me because I feel like one of the common accusations toward holistic management is that there's this impulse to homogenize everything. And what you're describing is maintaining that heterogeneity, because that's part of what's important both for the ecosystem and for animals. And I was trying to find, there were like six principles of managing for heterogeneity, and I couldn't find them. But I like that idea. And it still seems like that's important. And in the West, we do have that kind of natural variability even independent of any effects of climate change. The variability is significant already and always has been. And we haven't done a very good job of accounting for that.

>> Yeah. So a big insight that I glean from looking at those migratory populations in these lower production environments is that there would be -- it was frequently multiple years in a row that the migratory herbivores don't come back to a given spot. And so, like George Schaller, who's an incredible mammalian biologist that did a lot of work up there on the Tibetan Plateau, he'd go out with his crew trying to study the migratory patterns of the chiru antelope, and they'd go back to a spot that they thought the antelope were going to show up in the next year. And they'd get up there and get set up ready to film and document, and not even remotely close to where the migration was going. And so I started thinking, that means that sometimes you -- probably, there's multiple years in between grazing events in these low production environments. And I also had just kind of this little anecdotal observation on my family's own place there in Western Colorado. We had a bunch of stock ponds that would fill up with snow, and that was part of our water resource base for the livestock. But I would fence those ponds off and had a floating solar power submersible pump out in the middle of that pond and I'd pump up to a trough because I was trying to maintain water quality. We had some ponds that would kind of shrink up, especially in the dry summer and water quality would really suffer unless we could keep animals out of that pond. So I'd put a portable fence around the pond, and I would get up, put that fence up above kind of the riparian edge of the pond a little way. So get away from the rushes and the edges and get up into the dry land plant community. And so it had this buffer there around the pond. And I started doing this in the late '90s and I think it was the summer of 2000 we were really dry. And a bunch of those marginal ponds were dry by the time I incorporated them into my grazing plan. There were other water sources. So these marginal ponds were just a secondary source in each one of these pastures. So I could still graze them, but because the ponds didn't have any water in them, I didn't fence them off. I would just do it with portable poly wire. So I didn't fence them off that year in 2000. But because I had fenced them off the previous two or three years, I had this accumulation of biomass there. Not only on the riparian edge of the pond, but in the strip of dryland range around riparian edge. It had two or three years of accumulated biomass there. Unlike the area right outside the fence, which I was grazing every year just one time for a short, concise grazing period, but I was darn effective at removing all the biomass with my cows. And I did various levels of recovery depending on how good the summer rains were, typically. Sometimes you wouldn't get any recovery at all, which is somewhat depressing. But that strip of dry land ground that I didn't stop the previous three years had all this standing biomass in it. And I started realizing I would walk that edge where my portable poly wire had been, and I was starting to realize, oh, my gosh, it's this two or three years of accumulated biomass that's necessary to create soil covering litter in these environments. Where I was grazing it every single year, I wasn't doing it in an incredibly effective way with high stock density and getting my cows to every square foot and grazing into a fairly tight residual. I wasn't creating any litter. And our monitoring transect were bearing that out. And I was starting to get frustrated that I couldn't increase litter at all. And then I saw those strips that I happened to fence off because I was trying to preserve water quality and the litter was excellent. And the year that I graze -- well, the cows didn't graze around those ponds because there was no water in them. And I thought, huh, that means I probably need to be given multiple recovering periods in these low production environments.

>> At least a full growing season.

>> A full growing season.

>> Where they're not defoliated.

>> Exactly. And unlike tropical Africa where one growing seasons of vegetation is a liability to that plant, if it's not removed before the next growing season starts. If it's not removed during the dormant season, there's a huge amount of accumulated biomass that are shading growth points at the base of plants. And it's a problem. So you have to get it removed. Most of Africa burns now to get rid of that, because there's none of herbivores to actually cycle all the carbon.

>> It'd be like a wetland here.

>> Yeah.

>> Where you get just gobs and gobs of herbaceous biomass that literally choke it out and then it starts to fall apart if it doesn't get burned or grazed or something.

>> Exactly. If it's not distributed somehow in cycle somehow. So that's what happens in those tropics. That happens eventually in these arid western environments as well too. But it's many years until that situation develops. So one year of accumulated, or two years of accumulated above ground vegetation is not a liability to that plant because it's sparse enough and there's still enough sunlight that gets to the base of those plants that you can initiate your growth without that old growth really impeding photosynthesis in the new growing season. And then I kind of went back to these lessons I'd gleaned from these reading about these migratory herbivores and realized, well, that's what they do. They come back -- they don't necessarily come back every year in the same spot. And so maybe I need to try to manage for multiple year recovery periods. And so about that time is when I got the lease on an adjacent ranch up in there in Colorado, adjacent to my family's place that hadn't been grazed well for a long time, and hadn't been grazed at all for 20 years before I took the lease. So we had a lot of bunch grasses on our slopes, especially the south and west facing slopes that were getting, you know, quite decadent and weren't healthy. A lot of dead canopy cover, not a bunch of wide canopy cover. And the previous management on that place was, you know, set stock when I was a little kid. That place was grazed. Set stock, cattle would spread all up and down the riparian areas, and all the slopes would get grazed up about a third of the way up the slope at the top two thirds of the slope and the tops of all the ridges were untouched. And so I had taught myself how to distribute cattle in that kind of rough country in my family's own place. And the opportunity to lease this place arose with a new owner. And I went out and did an assessment of kind of the forge capacity, the carrying capacity of that place, assuming I could get cattle to every square foot of it, which again, historically wasn't done. Maybe 1/3 of the ranch would get grazed, 2/3 barely touched just because topography and stock density and poor grazing distribution. So I determined that I could probably run about 2 and 1/2 times as many cattle on that place as was historically done if I could get cattle to all the slopes. And I could also only graze half that ranch in a given year outside of the irrigated ground that I would graze twice every year. But outside of that and all the native rangeland canyons that went up above the irrigated bottom, my approach was to graze those every other year to give a two year recovery period in between grazing events. So by the time I came back to a given pasture, I'd have last year's growth and all of this year's growth coming up to it, you know. Some of last year's growth, obviously. Some of it gets knocked down by snow and weather events and little bit of elk grazing. But for the most part, you had a lot of your, you know, previous year's growth still standing there in that grassland. But again, it wasn't a liability to that plant, just one or two years of accumulated above ground biomass. And anyway, through managing stock density all with portable electric fence for the most part, we were able to get cattle to graze to the tops of those ridges typically with three to five day grazing events with a herd of 400 cows, grazing three or 400 acres at a time. They would make it to the top of the ridge. And so on day 1, we'd fence off cross sections of canyons, basically with portable fence going from rim to rim with the portable hot wire. And then it had wires going down the ridges. And in day 1 of a three-day grazing event, three or four day grazing event, the cattle would graze the riparian bottom. By day 2, they'd be way up the slope. By day 3, there'd be cattle right on the top of the ridge. And by the end of a four-day grazing event say, you'd get that whole slope evenly grazed. And so indeed, I was able to basically triple the size of that ranch as a result of getting cattle to go to the tops of the ridges. And so if you think about that, getting back to the heterogeneity of the landscape, if you think about the result of that, so we graze irrigated bottom in May, June, May to about the middle of June. Then we'd start grazing the upland country. And the stuff that was -- and again, was three, four, five day grazing events. So short, not long enough to be re-grazing, plants are trying to grow back. And if we had any kind of decent summer monsoons in late June, July, August, those early grazed dry land pastures would, you know, have excellent quantities of very high quality regrowth on them by fall. When we never came back and re-grazed that, I realized that those plants really weren't fully recovered, and I'd be hurting them if I came back and grazed them again in the fall. But it was excellent tracking for elk. And, you know, the elk would come in and there was probably a little bit of damage created by the elk, but not significantly. And the reason that -- getting back to holistic management being context specific, that ranch was owned by a wealthy landowner from the Midwest who would fanatical about elk hunting. And that's why he owned the ranch. And I convinced him, or my kind of spiel to him was, I could improve your elk habitat here by managing cattle the right way and effectively conditioning your forage in a way that's going to attract more elk hunting in your ranch. And so indeed, that's what would happen. And so getting back to, again, to heterogeneity, by grazing those landscape the way I was, you know, you'd have all the landscape with various, or half the landscape with various degrees of regrowth throughout the course of the summer. Half the landscape in the upland drive -- the upland rangeland environments, I'm talking about, not grazed at all because of that and then again, everything else in various stages of recovery. So you had this patchiness of different vegetation structures all over the place. And the elk in the fall loved the stuff that had, you know, two or three months of regrowth, four or five inch tall leafy stuff. But then if you got a snow event in early October, you had all this other country that hadn't been grazed at all. Half the ranch hadn't grazed at all. All that stuff was sticking up above the snow. The elk would end up going in that stuff typically if you had an early snow. So you had this heterogeneity of landscape of vegetation structures which created choice for the elk to go where they needed to go, depending on the weather conditions. And then, you know, down on our irrigated bottom, we graze that early, then we wouldn't graze it all season. It'd have about a 75-day recovery period before we come back onto it. And then it would just be profuse with biodiversity down there, including, you know, when we were able to stay off of it through the bulk of the season, all this clover volunteered back into the bottom. So those irrigated bottoms that weren't there under continuous grazing at all.

>> That's interesting because I saw a couple papers published recently, specifically about bison grazing and how the bison patterns really promoted these early cereal forbs and maintained higher species diversity and patchiness that wouldn't have been there previously. And I'm reading the paper that's describing the levels of bison utilization. And I'm thinking that's flat out overgrazed. Like, that sounds bad. And I'm pretty sure if cows had done that, it would've been condemned. But I think it begins to get at, you know, some of these -- I'm trying to get at, you know, where does the rubber meet the road? What's the touch point in some of this controversy? And I'm neither defending nor condemning anything here. I'm just learning. But it seems to me that, you know, where there are problems, the problem is either defoliating too severely, and I think the case could be made that it's possible to defoliate too severely, even if you're providing a long rest period, that can do damage to the grasses. But, you know, what's that level? Or allowing inadequate recovery time before re-grazing, you know? But of course, in every single environment, the billion dollar question is, what is too severe and what is adequate? Like these are subjective terms that I'm not sure we always have tightly defined answers for. And I really do think that some of that is both a science and an art, meaning that it requires some contextual interpretation and that what works in one environment maybe not have worked very well in another. You know, but these -- I was recalling -- you mentioned of western Colorado reminded me of multiple conversations I've had with Floyd Reed. And he's evidently an excellent teacher because multiple times I've repeated this, you know, his grazing guidelines. And the first one was defoliate your primary forage species moderately. There's another subjective term. What is moderate defoliation? You know, you may feel like moderate is leaving three inches and somebody else thinks it's five inches. Well, five inches on blue bunch wheatgrass or Blue grama, or you know, what environment? That changes everywhere you go. His second guideline was, don't be in the same place the same time every single year. And I really do think that that works pretty well. And of course, the third is you've got to let plants grow back before you graze them again. And those are nearly universal guidelines, but what they look like in a specific location is going to be different. On irrigated pasture, you can come back in 45 days. But, you know, in some of these landscapes you're describing, it might need to be 800 days before you come back so that you build up some biomass before the animals come back to it.

>> Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, I know Floyd, he's a good guy. Did some great work there in the West Elk Wilderness there, close to where Grassland manages a bunch of country now. I knew Floyd in the kind of early 2000s, and him and Dave Bradford had a big influence on how that force was managed. And, you know, I definitely agree with Floyd in terms of switch up the timing of grazing year to year and allow for adequate recovery. I get less concerned about severity of grazing because, you know, you can hammer someplace as long as you give it the chance to grow back, typically it'll grow back. You can't hammer it indefinitely.

>> For every year.

>> For every year, yeah. But periodically you can -- you know, a place can be -- a specific spot can get grazed pretty tight. I shouldn't say hammer because I don't really like to hammer anything. But grazing heavily periodically is not --

>> Well, to that point, that can be accomplished with a short grazing period. And I think that does cover over a multitude of stance in the sense that, you know, if you graze severely but the animals aren't there for 90 days, then you don't have the corresponding soil compaction and dust creation and, you know, all the things we associate with animals being in the same spot for too long.

>> Yeah. And constantly looping away at those plants if they're trying to grow back.

>> Right.

>> And so that's -- you know, when I talked about fencing these cross sections of canyons, the water was at the bottom of the canyon so that, you know, and I'm talking to vertical elevation of four or 500 vertical feet from the creek up to the top of the ridge. So a decent climb. You know, not extraordinary, but a decent climb. It's definitely a climb that a cow typically wouldn't do unless you had to. But as you can imagine, over the course of a three or four-day grazing event on a cross section of a pasture, the riparian area gets hammered over the course of those few days. But they immediately start to bounce back when you're moving on. If you're only there three or four days, that's where you do get --

>> Essentially the entire growing season.

>> You get the rest of the growing season. And it largely grows back and it grows back in a very high quality vigorous way. And you get a lot of, you know, fertility deposition down in there as the cattles, you know, come down to water throughout the middle of the day as they're ruminating before they go up for their evening graze, you get a lot of fertility deposition down there, and then those riparian zones just absolutely bounce back.

>> The other thing that I've seen in riparian zones in the Pacific Northwest is that a lot of them have some large grass species that tend to get kind of wolf-like reed canary grass. And if those are left with no disturbance, either fire or grazing or whatever, they outcompete the other stuff that ought to be there, including some of the riparian obligate species like the sedges and the rushes. And you see the sedges and rushes come back in places where animals are suppressing the reed canary grass. Otherwise, it becomes dominant by virtue of its vertical structure and really aggressive growth form, and everything else just sort of goes by the wayside.

>> Kind of has to give way. Yeah, totally. You know, that's the other thing you mentioned. You were talking about the bison research and the patching is created by the bison and the increased for diversity in kind of severely grazed areas. That was a big thing that we saw in these slopes as well that would've been dominated by Pardus fescue, like probably 90% of the biomass on those slopes that it hadn't been grazed for a long, long time. Was this Pardus fescue bunch grass mostly dead in centers and very, very few forbs. And one thing that we noticed or observed and measured with our transects was, and just I wouldn't say profusion of new forbs, but lots of forbs would come in and supplement that bunch grass based plant community, and other grasses too would start to show up as well. But the big thing that you'd notice would be the forb density. You know, lots of wedges and all the different kinds of wildflowers. Suddenly you'd have this profusion of stuff that you wouldn't see before. Again, I said profusion. Probably an exaggeration, but --

>> Well, some places I think it's not. Especially if, you know, if the non-disturbance has gone on for long enough, like decades where the grasses really, really are dominant. And I've seen that in multiple places in Washington state and Oregon where the dominant tall and mid-grasses have totally taken over and there's almost no wildflowers at all. And in several places we've implemented fall and winter grazing and maintained the pattern of fall and winter grazing exclusively for, you know, five to 10 years. And after three to five years there was a pretty -- I would definitely say that it constituted a profusion of wildflowers coming back into that because they were no longer suppressed and seed could get to the ground. You know, where previously you've got a thatch layer that prevents any seed from getting anywhere. Then without fire or grazing, that thatch layer is quite persistent.

>> Yeah, definitely. But if you can get it down onto the sole surface, and a lot of that above ground or the standing thatch really consumed and returned as dung in urine and get a lot of hoof action again, it doesn't have to be, you know, highly agitated herbivores running around, just those cattle walking up there and filling their bellies over the course of three days. Creates a lot of disturbance, a lot in the hoof track, basically on every square inch and all that old decadent stuff, which is quite brittle, you know, tends to get knocked onto the soil surface or consumed. And yeah, that creates, in my experience, lots of microsites for germination of all kinds of stuff including lots of wildflowers. And so that's been wonderful to see that kind of response.

>> I think people hear the term disturbance and think of it as soil disturbance, compaction, erosion possibilities. But this is reminding me of a concept I haven't thought about in a long time. I think from riparian ecology actually in college. The distinction between what was called a pulse disturbance versus oppressed disturbance. You know, oppressed disturbance might be something like a poorly built gravel road adjacent to a stream, and you've got constant infusion of sediment from the road into the stream. And it fundamentally changes the nature of the stream because of this constant sedimentation. Compared to a pulse disturbance, which might be something like a wildfire that causes, you know, quite a bit of ash and sediment moving into a stream for a short period of time in the aftermath of the fire. But then that heals up and it goes away. And it doesn't have -- it has an effect, but it doesn't have a long-term effect that changes the nature of the stream. And it seems that grazing is pretty similar as a disturbance, as would be fire. If you have fire every year that's going to cause some problems and dramatically change permanently the type of plant community. But if you get a little bit of fire every once in a while, it tends to be beneficial. You know, going back to medicine, nearly everything's like that, you know? Plant secondary compounds that are beneficial to animals and really, really, really small doses, and in fact, they seek them out as Dr. Provenza would say. You know, if you have that present at higher levels, just like any kind of a medicine, it's harmful. These disturbances are beneficial as long as the dosage is right. But when the dosage is too much, then it has a different effect.

>> Yeah. Absolutely. And definitely, all comes back to that pulse disturbance. I like that. That's what it is. It's a pulse. And that pulse followed by adequate recovery, depending on your environment, creates a totally different landscape than if the disturbance never happens. And in my experience, more biodiverse, more vigorous, more healthy plant communities result if this is done consistently well through time. And, you know, grazing is absolutely -- grazing is the only tool that you can actually do that will create those conditions with and generate financial profit at the same time. Flyers cost a lot of money to go out and implement and do. They're expensive --

>> Well, everything else costs a lot of money.

>> Everything else. Yeah.

>> Maybe this is a good full circle way to segue to a conclusion here.

>> Yeah.

>> I feel like -- maybe this is just the small world that I'm in, but I feel like there's a growing acceptance of using grazing as a pulse disturbance that's beneficial. We fairly readily admit or say that most rangeland and grassland, and even Trevor land ecosystems are disturbance-driven. Meaning that they require some disturbance for them to remain healthy, to cycle nutrients and to maintain that patchiness where you've got a mosaic of different cereal stages of plant communities. But I think the frequency and severity of wildfires around the West and even beyond the West recently is making us rethink particularly fine fuels management in a whole different way. And to some degree, I feel like the reaction to grazing that says, we just shouldn't do it, is a reaction to the way grazing was done, you know, 100 years ago, 150 years ago. And by and large, that's not the case. But to your point, if you look at all these other possible treatments for landscapes, herbicide to control invasive broadleaf plants, invasive forbs and invasive annual grasses, and sometimes even shrubs. There's not enough money to do that across except in a very targeted fashion, you know, to essentially be an intervention that set the new trajectory to plant succession. Same thing with fire, you know, it's beneficial. And we have, I think we see a proliferation now of at least efforts to do prescribed fire associations and rangeland fire protection associations where landowners are working with, you know, some of the big agencies that are responsible for fire control. But there again, particularly in the West and in States where liability is on the person who lit the prescribed fire, it's too risky for people to burn off rangelands. And in some places they probably shouldn't. And that leaves a very small number of possible treatments, I'm going to use the word treatments instead of tool.

>> Instead of tool?

>> Yeah. Because I think it is a treatment. And the term tool seems to imply that the tool will always have the same effect. And this whole conversation has been about that grazing has variable effects depending on how we vary all of the factors involved in grazing. And so --

>> Yeah, that's the only treatment that can be done at scale and generate revenue at the same time.

>> Right. It can be done flexibly.

>> Yeah. It can be done highly flexibly. And it can be done everywhere at the end of the day, you know. It's greater and lesser elements of adversity depending on your environment to get it done. We'll see around water distribution, but I haven't been anywhere yet that it isn't viable to get a cow there and make it work. But yeah, those cows, they generate revenue in the process of doing the landscape conservation and rehabilitation. And hopefully that awareness continues to grow and becomes great more, more and more accepted. I definitely feel like the environment has changed since early in my career in the early90s which was right on the heels of cattle free by '93 stuff. And so it actually feels a lot different now.

>> I agree.

>> Than it did 30 years ago working with, you know, we run on five forest permits and two BLM winter permits on our Western Colorado operation. And all of our agency range columns that we work with are -- at the end of the day, a lot easier to work with now than they were 30 years ago.

>> A little more open-minded.

>> They're more open-minded, they understand we need to have flexibility. If we're consistently doing a good job up there, they realize that we're the ones that are intimate with those landscapes, and yeah. We have to sit down and do all our planning with them every year, but they start to defer to us when we get the results and get the conservation, the landscape goals, targets achieved. And so yeah it's not an adverse relationship at all. Honestly, it's a really good mutual partnership with those guys.

>> I think there's several dynamics there that are probably significant. One is that the current crop of, I'll call them, range professionals, have seen the effects of decades and decades of trying to do, I guess what riparian would call pristine paradigm management, you know, where we just don't touch it and walk away, I feel like a broken record. I said this 100 times, it's automatically going to revert to some ecological nirvana. And we have seen that it doesn't do that. And now we're scrambling for treatments to try to direct the condition and the species composition, some of these plant communities that have gone downhill. I think the other thing that's occurring is that you see a lot more practitioners. And by practitioners I mean, people that are managing livestock in intentional ways and are paying attention to try to make it beneficial. I feel like I said this recently, and I don't know whether it was on a recording or not. But there have been multiple attempts, you know, with sociological research in the last, say, 20 years to identify what are the common denominators in ranches that consistently have high quality landscapes, that have healthy riparian zones, healthy fish populations, healthy wildlife, healthy uplands. And in nearly every case, whether riparian or upland or whatever, you know, the target metric was that was being used to measure effectiveness, the answer was, you've got to have a manager who's paying attention and who's thinking and who has some landscape goal in mind, and is evaluating literally every single decision every single day on whether or not it's moving in that direction or not. And I think there's a lot more of those people that have, I guess, fewer hard hang-ups about what ought not to be done. And for a long time, one of those hard hang-ups was just don't let a cow on it, you know. Not letting a cow on it was considered to be the ultimate good. Therefore, whatever results from that must automatically be good. So now we have this tautology, we've got a circular argument that says, you know, if we do that, whatever results is good. So, I guess temple mustard and cheatgrass is good. I'm being cynical, but I am encouraged by those two things. I do think that there's a bit of a changing of a guard happening right now both in the ranching community and in the agency and policy community. And I think we're far enough away from some of the destructive grazing patterns of the past that people are seeing the benefits of grazing in places that have been managed well for several decades. And maybe that looks better than some of the places that haven't been managed at all. That's not to say we need to have a cow on every square inch on the earth. But, you know, in the places where that could be done and could be done beneficially and has a benefit to the local people and local economies that might be a good thing.

>> Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Cow generates revenue. Does conservation. She can do conservation at scale. And it's a beautiful thing, you know, if it's done right. A friend of mine that works for the Nature Conservancy made a comment at a conference I was at within last fall. He said, you know, "Range land produce food through well managed herbivory. Is the only non-extractive form of food production that exists on this planet." If you think about that, I mean, you say this all the time, we can have our cake and eat it too. We can do conservation scale, we can generate profit, and we can produce food, and it can all be synergized in a way that makes everything better through time. And isn't extractive to the environment. We don't have to spray any herbicides or pesticides or chemical fertilizers, and we don't have to change the plant community. It's on these largely native plant communities that we can produce food from. The only way to do that through ranching, through harvesting those landscapes with live stocking. So I think that it seems like an obvious message, but it definitely is not the message that's ingrained within the masses. You know, there's just so much anti-herbivory rhetoric out -- anti-cow rhetoric, especially out there. But those of us that are in these industries, the producers and the agency personnel and the scientists are all coming around, I think, to this recognition that indeed, well-managed livestock is an enormously beneficial tool for conservation and for food production and keeping people on the land. And so I think that's eventually going to diffuse into the population as well, into the narrative that's out there --

>> Yeah. We're not going to save the world by plowing rangelands to plant soybeans.

>> Exactly.

>> For crying out loud.

>> Not a good option?

>> No.

>> Well, thank you for what you're doing. I'll issue a disclaimer that I don't have firsthand knowledge of the results of your management on the ranches that are managed through Grasslands LLC. But yeah, there is nothing but good that can come from applying this kind of thinking to how we graze wild open spaces. So thanks for visiting with me today and I really appreciate your time.

>> You bet, Tip. It's been a good conversation. Thank you.

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