16 minute read
SAM RYERSON
Holistically-designed vineyards to be able to function on 8 inches of rain/year.
system. When the Paicines staff did a baseline monitoring they found no living organisms in the soil. The first year they planted cover crops and broadcast the seeds. The plants that grew had a relative feed value of 88. They then ran cattle and sheep and are working on planting perennial plants near the sprinklers in these fields. They have a total of 68 acres they are rehabilitating and have created 98 paddocks. Last winter they planted 20 species. This year they have planted 40 species. Their relative feed value was in the low 100s. In order to control the animals they have built electric fencing over top of the sprinkler system. They are now up to a relative feed value of 230 with their most recent cover crop.
The new vineyard on Paicines which is still being developed in phases has been designed as a no-till system. A conventional vineyard often has 25 tractor passes per year. With previous vineyard trials that have incorporated sheep as a biological tool for the vineyard there has been a 90% reduction in irrigation use and a 1,260 pound/acre yield increase with superior quality of grape as well as a $450 reduction of expenses because of reduced input needs. Kelly uses a Holistic Design process that looks at creating opportunities by increasing diversity and paying attention to management.
The new vine support system in this vineyard works to get the vines out of the heat and frost zones that are closer to the ground while allowing the sheep to help with pruning the suckers. The vine supports were placed in the direction of the wind to make sure that vines were not blown across the supports. This system also creates more shade for the soil organisms and other wildlife. Kelly also plans to plant other plants among the grape vines to attract pollinators and also hummingbirds, which would protect the grapes against other birds that are more interested in the grapes. They have already seen more green growing plants throughout the summer and not just near the dripline. All the varieties of grapes have been selected for drought hardiness.
While the cost of this system is $1,000–1,200 more per acre than a VSP (vertical shoot position) system, Kelly believes that the extra cost of developing the vineyard this way will pay for itself in two years. Irrigation is raised up and the hope is that once the soil fertility is increased the vineyard can be farmed dryland on 8 inches of rain/year. There will be no need to run electric fencing to protect the vines from the sheep because of the design. The cover crops that have done well so far are mustards, horehound, dove weed, and milkweed.
The new 25-acre vineyard was placed on a north facing slope as the best place to grow perennials on that landscape. When they planted the new vines they put an application of compost and then ran 6 ADA (animal days per acre) of cattle and sheep. After they planted the cover crops, they were able to run 67 ADA. They were giving the sheep about ¼ acre paddocks.
The biggest challenge at the vineyard has been ground squirrels attacking the young vines. However, they are working with attracting more raptors to the area by setting up kestrel boxes. Mel Preston from Point Blue Conservation Science also talked about all the birds that have been attracted by the farm management practices at Paicines.
I continue to be inspired by this passionate community of innovators who come together to share ideas and encourage each other. I look forward to continuing that conversation at the REGENERATE Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico on October 31–November 2nd (a collaboration with HMI, The Quivira Coalition, and the American Grassfed Association). Be sure to arrive on October 30th to attend the evening Holistic Management reception as a kick off to the conference. I look forward to seeing you there!
Ann Adams, Kathy Webster (TomKat Ranch Foundation), Abbey Smith (Jefferson Center for Holistic Management)
Holistic Thinking at the Scale of a Wolf
BY SAM RYERSON
These are reflections on three years I spent managing ranches in wolf country in western New Mexico, and some ways in which our work involved holistic thinking in practice. Running ranches in the presence of large predators is really complicated—emotionally, practically, politically, and financially. For the last twelve years, I have worked on ranches across the West—most of them range-based ranches in big wild country, many of them holistically managed, all of them home to predators. Everywhere, sooner or later, we lost livestock to predation. Every loss like that was fraught. Usually, predators were not the biggest practical challenges we faced. Predators are complex, we were mostly just lucky, and there’s a lot more to say than this.
The Mexican gray wolf was introduced to the Blue Range Recovery Area in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona in 1998. The project brought great hope to some environmentalists, and dismay to many local residents and ranchers. I went to work there in 2010, to manage the ranches a new owner was putting together, between the Arizona state line near Springerville and the Gila Wilderness. It was conflicted country, even before the wolves. It was complicated. It looked like an opportunity. Ranching in Harmony
One of the new owner’s goals in buying these ranches and hiring me to run them was building a model for profitable ranching in harmony with the ecology of the area. He said, “People are part of the ecology now.” This meant investing in the local economy, coexisting with predators, and rebuilding communities where the kids would want to stay. He brought on as consultants two long-time Holistic Management practitioners and educators, Jim Howell and Zachary Jones, to help him define a holistic context and begin his strategic, land and grazing planning, and who helped hire me.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3
The whole under management was big and broad and challenging, and kept growing as we added new land bases to the operation. By the time I left, we had five different ranches under management, comprising over 300,000 acres, with additional leased enterprises, running more than a thousand mother cows and thousands of yearlings.
We planned our stocking and grazing to respond to our holistic context. We reckoned that wolves were also part of the landscape, whether we liked it or not. We started buying local late-bred, moderate-framed young cows and weaned heifer calves to build a resident herd on the first ranch. We bought thin, light yearlings and weaned calves the next spring when we acquired another higher-elevation summer place and turned out about 3,000 of them. We conceived long-term land plans, based on investing in high-volume stock water infrastructure, to maximize our ability to manage grazing timing and intensity. We tried to keep all the cattle on each ranch (at least 500 cows or 1,000 yearlings) in one pasture at a time. We rode horses everywhere and lived in cow camps near the cattle. Sometimes we lived in tents. We tried to drift across the land to heal the land, to respond to natural cycles as they ebbed and flowed like tides, to prepare for rain and drought and fire and wolves. Moving cows and calves to new grass at the head of a canyon in the summer range.
Training Cattle
We wanted to become productive members of the community. We hired local cowboys who knew the landscape and wanted to work with us, and old friends of mine from Montana. We hired local contractors to lay pipelines and renovate houses. Most of the land was Forest Service land. We worked with the local district offices to meet their protocols and priorities
and our own goals. We wanted to cooperate with the wolf re-introduction program and their Interagency Field Team instead of fighting them. We worked with the non-profit group Defenders of Wildlife, who sponsored a “range rider” for us to hire. I joined the board of the Mexican Wolf/ Livestock Coexistence Council and with an environmentalist from Tucson drafted a working plan for the group on my kitchen table. I kept holistic grazing planning charts for each ranch on my desk and updated them daily, or at least whenever I was home. I kept a daily log of observations on cattle location, behavior, and wolf presence for our partnership with Defenders of Wildlife. We planned our grazing use according to pasture moves, but because most of the pastures were so large, we intentionally located Elk calf carcass killed by wolves, about 1 mile from the cows above. cattle within pastures. We used the topography of canyons and ridges, water points, salt, supplement, and daily riding to move cattle where we wanted. We were managing for the complex variables involved with grazing livestock on big wild landscapes. We were always watching the cattle, and watching for wolves. We realized we could better manage cattle than wolves, but by staying vigilant and flexible and keeping our options open, we could respond to the wolves.
A wolf has a big range. Our land base on each individual ranch was not as big as a wolf pack’s territory, but big enough that we were able to begin to operate at the scale of a wolf, in terms of space and time. We planned our cows’ calving season to occur later in the spring in May and June to coincide with the elk calving season, when an alternate source of prey would be available for the wolves. We timed our breeding season to begin in late July, when the Southwestern monsoon usually brings warmseason grass growth.
We rode through all the cattle as often as possible, whether or not we needed to move them, to monitor their health and watch for predators. We trained them to stand calmly, or trail out and move quietly as a herd. We conditioned them to our stock dogs. When we found the cattle unusually flighty or nervous, we thought we might have predators around. We did all this to try to prevent problems with wolves, but mostly, to manage the cattle the best ways we could. We were trying to plan at the scale of a wolf, adapting according to a sense of place and time.
Sometimes it didn’t work. We lost cattle. Sometimes they just disappeared. Sometimes we just found a little black hair in some coyote scat. Sometimes a cow showed up after a while away in the brush, gaunted-up, and tight-bagged and balling for her calf, and never came in with a calf again. We sold those dry cows in the fall. Early in our first summer with the cows in the high country, a dry summer after a dry spring, a
black bear killed two of our calves and some of the neighbors’ to the north. I could see the signs of a bear kill on the freshest carcass—trauma to the neck and back, and the hide peeled back—but there were also wolf tracks nearby. I called the USDA Wildlife Services trapper, and he came out and confirmed a bear depredation, and trapped the bear that night. They shot the bear the next morning. I would rather not have trapped the bear, but I thought I was being a good neighbor.
Coyotes killed some newborn calves every spring. We faced the typical challenges that new, growing enterprises might face anywhere. Cowboys came and went; bowed up and quit or I fired them. The largest wildfire in New Mexico history burned through most of the pasture our yearling steers were in one spring (we didn’t lose any cattle). We found our herd
contaminated by two Bovine Viral Diarrhea persistently infected cows and lost about 15% of our expected calf crop to abortions one spring. We gathered a stray remnant bull belonging to the previous owner from a neighbor on one of the new northern ranches, tested him, found him positive for trichomoniasis, and had that herd placed under quarantine by the New Mexico Livestock Board. There were a lot of complications beyond our control.
Sometimes we had problems with wolves. At the same time that spring we lost all those calves to BVD abortions, we started to see a lot of wolf sign near the cattle. One day we found a calf carcass that looked like a wolf kill. Wildlife Services confirmed it. We filed the paperwork for compensation. Two days later, we found another dead calf, and sign of a wolf kill, a couple of miles to the west. We gathered all the cows and calves out of that pasture, brought them up the canyon to the headquarters, tested them all for BVD, vaccinated them, culled the PI-positives, branded the calves, moved them west across the big basin, and then into the higher country. We had no more wolf trouble that year. We made plans, tested them, adjusted and re-planned. Sometimes we were wrong but we also found some good practical solutions to complicated challenges.
Ranching Around Predators
Jesse moving cows and calves to new grass within a large pasture.
Holistic thinking helped us manage the emotional challenges of ranching around predators by remembering the broader context we were working toward and finding we always had choices. It felt good to have choices. We tried not to get upset about losing individual animals. When human-habituated wolves got too close, we would shoot at them, aiming just under them to scare them off. Most of us carried guns most of the time. Guns also gave us options, even though none of us ever shot a wolf.
It felt good to feel like we had options. We didn’t always test all our decisions according to a holistic framework. Sometimes we just had to make decisions and live by them. Sometimes the framework was, as my employer said, “Make a f---ing decision, then correct, correct, correct!” But having a grazing plan in place helped ensure that we had alternate pasture options when we ran into trouble with wolves or wildfires or erratic rainfall. Operating on a larger-scale land base meant that we could usually move cattle far enough to make a difference. That was a luxury. Making grazing plans and following them meant that we might have grass where we needed to go, when we needed to go. We would also know when we might be about to run out of options; out of grass or water.
The worst financial losses from predators are not necessarily the death losses. Depredations are more emotionally and politically complicated, but declines in livestock performance related to stress from the presence of wolves, or management changes to respond to them are usually more expensive. These variables are impossible to quantify and more difficult to plan for. I don’t know exactly how the breed-up and weight gain of our cattle was affected by the presence of wolves. We could see when cattle were stressed from the presence of wolves or bears from the way they scattered through pastures overnight, or their behavior toward our dogs in the morning. Then we gathered them and drove them to a nice meadow or some water and held them until they settled and started to graze or nurse or chew their cud or bed down. Stressed cattle do not breed or gain weight very well. We tried to manage cattle to keep them happy, to meet their basic needs, and to promote their own thriftiness. Their performance improved every year, in terms of conception rate, weaning weight, yearling gain, and death or stray loss. Conception rates in our original herd of mother cows reached about 85%. The calves, most of them May and June calves, weighed just over 500 pounds when we weaned in November. That
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5
last summer, our yearlings gained 290 pounds over the season, and we lost about 1%. In general, we lost between 2% and 4% of our live calves before weaning during those years in that country. I thought those were acceptable numbers, given what we had to work with and the country we were working in.
Predators undoubtedly got some of them, and more than we could definitively confirm. We lost more cattle to bears and coyotes than we did to wolves. It was rough country, not good easy cow country and the bigger
We lost more cattle to bears and coyotes than we did to wolves. It was rough country, not good easy cow country and the bigger challenges to our success were broader environmental conditions, broader than the challenges posed by wolves: disease, drought, regulatory restrictions, market prices, and personnel.
challenges to our success were broader environmental conditions, broader than the challenges posed by wolves: disease, drought, regulatory restrictions, market prices, and personnel.
The wolves themselves were challenged by the same conditions. They were victims of political decisions and fights occurring far away from their home range. They also faced complications beyond their control. Their gene pool was limited, some of them had been raised in captivity, the Field Team trapped and vaccinated most of them once a year, fixed many with radio collars, fed them frozen meat near their dens: many of the wolves were very habituated to humans.
We saw that the best livestock management practices we could follow to suit that landscape might also be the best ones to manage cattle in the presence of wolves. The politics playing out in Reserve and Albuquerque and Washington, D.C. were beyond our control, too. We could recognize that the Coexistence Council was formed as a political gesture toward reconciliation.
The members of the council—a group of ranchers, community leaders and environmentalists—recognized that an informal but holistic approach would be necessary to find common ground and move forward with a fair program to protect wolves and compensate ranchers. We agreed on healthy landscapes, sustainable wolf populations, and resilient local communities. We agreed on a compensation program to cover the increased cost of managing livestock in the presence of wolves, not only the death losses and to incentivize livestock management strategies that might reduce conflict. We weren’t always talking in holistic terms, but when we were working well, we were thinking holistically.
As for me, I left that country at the end of 2013. My wife at the time and I decided to pursue our own holistic goal, and look for our own place to lease. Soon enough we found a new group of partners and some new range in southern New Mexico. I don’t know much about the current situation in the Gila. I don’t miss the politics and many of those other challenges, but I miss the kind of country that’s big enough and wild enough to hold a wolf; the community, the people, and the ways we worked. I keep in mind my lessons from the wolf country, trying to keep myself open to possibilities; planning, monitoring, and re-planning; staying vigilant and flexible; practical and holistic.
Wolf tracks coming and going along a trail between headquarters and the summer pastures.
Sam Ryerson runs cattle and manages ranches with his partners in New Mexico. He can be reached at: 505-220-3440 or sam.ryerson@yahoo.com.
