HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

LIVESTOCK &

The Miller Ranch— Improving Soils and Pastures with Cattle

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS Learning to Work with Mother Nature

Holistic Management has made a huge difference in ranch sustainability for Ken and Bonnie Miller on their ranch in south central North Dakota near Fort Rice. Miller’s management strategies and soil improvements led to his being nominated for and receiving the 2017 Leopold Conservation

Award for North Dakota.

The Miller Ranch was nominated by the Morton

County Soil Conservation

District, stating: “The Miller

Ranch truly embodies the diversity North Dakota carries in its agricultural portfolio. From livestock to crops, from grazing to gardening, from dryland to irrigation, from commodity marketing to direct marketing and from family to agricultural advocacy, the Millers display and share it all confidently, yet humbly, with a land ethic that runs through and through.” “Anyone can be nominated for the award,” says Ken. “This award is being presented now in more and more states to honor the farmers and ranchers who do an exceptional job of caring for the land. It strives to build bridges between agriculture, government, environmental organizations and industry.

“As producers we have to tell our story, about how we are trying to regenerate the land. We need to show people some of the good things farmers and ranchers are doing and how we are being good stewards and role models. This award opened some doors for us—to go to Washington D.C. and visit with our congressmen about the farm bill, conservation practices that worked on our place, etc. Hopefully this helps enlighten congressmen about what we are doing and what farmers

and ranchers have been able to do to improve soil heath. It was an honor and humbling experience to win the award.” Ken says Holistic Management helped point him in the right direction about 30 years ago. “I went through the training with Allan Savory in the mid-1980s in Albuquerque. The way we were ranching/farming before that was not sustainable. Like most producers, we were always told we had to get bigger and bigger and more efficient so I was renting all the land around us that I could. We were getting bigger and bigger and going broke faster and faster! Back then we were still tilling, and had a lot of erosion. We were farming very fragile soils and I knew there had to be a better way, to manage the land.” he says. “Then I had the opportunity to go to the five-day extensive Holistic Resource Management course in Albuquerque. I was very grateful for a scholarship I received from our local soil conservation district and thankful that I went. It totally changed the way I ranch; my thought process is very different now. The holistic approach changes how you think,” says Miller. You realize that any decision or action you make affects the Ken Miller whole ranch. If you use herbicides to spray to kill a certain weed, you realize that you are also killing some good plants. The same with pouring the livestock with insecticides; you kill many good insects, too. Whatever action you do, you need to think how that action will affect everything else. The important thing is to work with Mother Nature instead of trying to fight nature,” he says. “Back then, we calved in February and March and at the training course they asked me why we calved during the coldest part of the year. I said, ‘Everybody does.’ That’s the way we did it, partly to get the calving done before we were busy getting our crops planted. Now we calve in June and it makes life so simple, and the cattle more profitable,” Miller says.

Holistic Management has also been very helpful in setting goals. “You have to know where you are going. You also need to decide how you want your soil to look. This was one of the things that made me change. We were taught in that class that we should always have a written goal. I had never really put plans on paper. My goals now have probably changed a lot since that time; now we want to manage the land in a regenerative way to make it better than when we took it over. We want to build soil health to make healthier plants, healthier animals, healthier people, and be profitable while enjoying what we do. Quality of life is part of the equation!” Often farmers and ranchers spend most of their time chasing production, trying to get bigger and bigger and produce more and more.

“When I was renting all that land I was basically spinning my wheels. Being bigger, you have to hire someone, and it just gets overwhelming. You are always putting out fires and never catch up. Now we are trying to make things real again, and work with Nature,” says Ken.

“At first we just practiced these methods on the rangeland, using higher stock density, and saw some benefits up to a certain point. Now we are much more intensive and starting to see improvement/ changes again. It has made a big difference. Last year’s drought gave us the opportunity to test some of our practices. In the past when we were still doing seasonlong grazing, a drought like that would have really set us back and we would have had to destock or buy feed, but now we are able to keep going. We had to make a few little changes but we are still running the same numbers,” he says.

There are always challenges, so a person has to be flexible. “You have to be able to plan, and re-plan. When you see different things happen, you need to be able to adjust. This is how Holistic Management really helps,” says Ken.

“This year, some of our pasture land that is near the river was flooded so we were unable to use those acres. We usually run about 100 pairs in that pasture, but this year the lake came up and we had to move the cattle out of there. This may actually prove to be a benefit because we are running higher stock densities on the irrigated pastures. In the past we ran about 80 head on those pastures, but this year we added 100 more. We did take out some of the heifers, however, so we are running about 150 pair on those small irrigated pastures. This will be another learning curve but I know it’s going to make a bigger beneficial change with the higher stock density.”

Coming into this year looked like it would be another extreme drought; there was no snow, and April and May were very dry. “We had some timely rains in June and July and grew a tremendous amount of grass, but then August was very dry again. It is amazing how much resilience the range pastures have when you can let them rest and give them enough recovery time, with cattle spending just a short time in each pasture. It makes a big difference on a drought year, and on a normal year it’s amazing how fast it recovers,” he says. You capture every bit of water when you have good grass cover—and it’s not just short stubble or bare ground that lets the water run off.

“The one disadvantage to capturing all that water and not having it run off is that it no longer collects as much in our ponds and dugouts. We’ve always used dugouts for stock water and fenced them off to keep them cleaner (using solar panels to pump the water out for the cattle), but last year two of those dugouts dried up and were just mud holes because of the drought. We were not getting any runoff anymore! In the past, the runoff would fill them. But now they never overflow, even on the years we had more than 100 inches of snow and lots of snow melt, because the ground soaks it up and not much water is running off,” he says. The deep ravines that were washed deeper with every run-off episode are now filling in. The water no longer runs down those gullies as much. “The lesser runoff and the herd impact (creating divots where grass starts growing) has healed those gullies. You can heal the land a lot quicker with cattle,” he says. Improving the Soil Ken’s goal is to improve the soil, and one of his most successful practices is bale grazing. “The fields I’m bale grazing were originally poor crop land that was seeded back to a mixture of grasses 35 years ago. The problem when we seeded them was that the soil lacked The Miller family won the 2017 Leopold Award for North Dakota for their nutrients and there was quite efforts to improve soil and land health. a bit of bare ground,” he says. By strategically placing bales, he improves the soil by adding plant matter plus nutrients from the cattle manure and urine. He takes clippings from some of these pastures to measure production. “When we first started, we had more than three times the production right around the bale than in portions of the pasture where we didn’t bale graze. There’s about a 20-foot circle where you have practically no production the first year because the litter is so thick. By fall you have some annual weeds coming through that, and then the next year you have really good grass. I figure that we are more than doubling the production. Plus we cut winter feeding costs. The first four winters, I burned less than 100 gallons of diesel fuel in my tractor, to feed 100 pairs,” says Miller. Using bale grazing to improve the soil is a learning process; it’s not just simply putting bales out there. “I am actually going to make some changes now in how we do it. We were at a tour recently where one of our neighbors (about 60 miles away) also does bale grazing. One of the speakers there was saying that sometimes we are putting too much nitrogen in those areas. He said that anywhere between 400 and 500 pounds of nitrogen had been applied on that field, at that density—with bales only 30 feet apart. In some instances we need to spread out that application, maybe unrolling the hay bales so they cover more area and not so much in one spot,” he says. “The issue I have with that strategy is that when I set out all that hay I don’t want to unroll it all. There might be more spoilage or the wind might blow it away before the cattle eat it, because we get tremendous wind in our area. I don’t want it all unrolled, but I probably could unroll a week’s supply, once a week. I’d have to spend the money to take a tractor down there once a week and just unroll the hay for that week, to spread the CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

nutrients out farther. I think I will try some of that this winter,” Ken says.

“I didn’t realize there would be that many nutrients in one area and that we could be overloading the system. We were watching where we were bale grazing to make sure we weren’t in a riparian area or runoff zone (to leach nitrogen into the water), but little things like this make you think,” he says.

There might be some areas of poor soil and sparse vegetation where you might need to give it that much nitrogen at first, and then a person could back off and roll the bales out more. “That was our thought at first, to put the bales on the very poorest ground and the hillsides, but this speaker said you should be putting the bales on your best ground because you are getting the most production there,” Ken says. Each pasture is different and may require different strategies.

“For winter feeding I usually put a week’s worth of hay out there— enough bales to last the cattle a week, and then move them to the next bunch of bales. I feed some high quality hay along with some rank, coarse hay,” he says. The cattle eat some of the poorer hay to add fiber to their diet to balance the good hay, and trample and bed on the rest. This puts more organic matter and carbon on the ground.

“Some people think that when it is very cold the calves won’t perform very well, wintered with their mothers on hay, but they do quite well. As we’ve been doing this, our weaning weights keep going up. Our cattle seem to be adjusting to this different type of management. This year, because we went through such a severe drought last summer, we weaned most of the steers in January (and a few of the heifers that we sold) and weaned the rest of the calves in March,” he says.

“When we weaned those calves in January, the steers weighed about 538 pounds when they were sold January 10th. When we first started this program, they probably weighed that in May. Now they are a lot bigger by

While winter conditions can be harsh in North Dakota, Ken has found that calves gain well and cows hold their conditions. With bale grazing, the cattle have good feed, bedding and shelter from the wind, and the soil fertility improves exponentially. Experimenting with Irrigated Pastures

Ken has one pivot of irrigated pasture that he has continued to experiment with as part of his grazing management. “I custom-graze 110 to 120 cattle and we run about 150 pairs of our own plus some replacement heifers and a few finishing animals. We have one pivot of irrigated ground that we graze; we often hay part of it and graze part of it, alternating those parts—and never hay any piece two years in a row,” says Ken. Every piece that is cut for hay gets some grazing for one or more years in between, to improve soil fertility with animal impact. The pivot has multiple small paddocks that are about seven acres each and Ken grazes about 80 pairs on each piece for one to three days.

Allan Savory came to their ranch last summer on a tour and suggested they could push their stock density higher. “He thought we could do a lot better, but we have to start somewhere! Our grass has improved a lot since we started. Originally we had some 40-acre paddocks and now we’ve split all of those down to 20 acres, so we have higher stock density and more herd effect. The cows graze each paddock for just a short time and then we give it a very long rest/recovery. This makes a tremendous difference,” says Ken.

Saving Winter Feed Costs

One of the highest input costs when raising cattle is winter feeding. Some ranchers are saving winter feed costs by wintering their summerborn calves with the cows and not weaning calves until spring. Miller has been bale grazing cow-calf pairs through winter for the past nine years. May, and they are the same type of cattle. So they are doing better and adjusting,” he explains.

The winter before last (2016–2017) was a challenge, however. “We had three blizzards in a row starting in November. We had 11 weeks’ supply of hay bales set out for the cattle, two miles from the yard, and it got snowed under. We didn’t have any other options for feeding, so I went ahead and moved the cattle down there. It took me about half a day or more to dig a path so they could get down there. I started with the tractor until it couldn’t get around anymore, and then got a snow-blower and a bobcat to finish blowing a path to where the bales were. Then I could blow away the snow around the bales so the cattle could get to the bales. Some places had four to five feet of snow and the bales were covered. Amazingly, the cows and calves made it through winter bale grazing in that deep snow,” says Ken.

Fortunately it quit snowing in January, but it never melted so there was a tremendous amount of snow all winter. “Then we didn’t get any rain that spring and it was extremely dry that summer,” he says.

Wintering calves with their mothers, even in a bad winter, has worked very well. There is no sickness, compared to weaning calves in the fall. The cattle graze as long as possible and then when the grass gets covered with snow they start bale grazing. “We usually graze through December and into the first part of January,” says Ken. “We used to feed five to five and half months out of the year, and now we are down to about four months of feeding (bale grazing), even in bad winters. A few years ago, with a nice winter, we fed for only 75 days of full feeding.”

This is a low-cost way of wintering cattle. “When I worked full time for the Soil Conservation District (I’m now retired), I set the bales out on weekends so I wouldn’t have to do it in the dark. I had to make ranching easier! I first set things up for bale grazing in four paddocks, and now I’m taking bales to fields two miles away. We only bale graze on fields that have been seeded back to grass; we don’t bale graze on native pastures because that would reduce the native species by changing the soil chemistry with all the extra nutrients,” he says.

“I have a month’s supply of bales set up in the fall and all I have to do is drive down once a week and open another paddock. If we have a really severe winter I can move the cattle home and finish bale grazing on a field closer to the yard, but generally I just move another week’s worth of bales out to the cattle each weekend, to feed on a different area,” he says. them longer because they don’t gain as fast,” he explains.

Winters can be harsh in this part of the country. “We put in a winter tank for the pastures two miles from the yard, and a portable windbreak near the water tank so the cattle have shelter. I can move it to where the bales are, but if we have enough bales out there for a week’s feed those bales serve as a windbreak. The cattle lie around the bales, and we also have natural windbreaks—trees and ravines. If a storm is forecast, I haul some extra hay to the shelter area and the cows will stay there and use the extra feed,” he says.

“You can’t winter the calves with their mothers if you are calving really early in the year, like February. But calving in May/June, our cows don’t have to be in top shape through winter. Even if they’ve lost some body condition by the time we wean calves, they fatten up by calving time,” says Ken.

Weaning calves at a younger age, in late fall/winter weather, generally results in more sickness. “I prefer to just leave them on the cows and that way the calves learn from their mothers how to graze through the snow, etc. Calving in May/June limits a person to selling really light calves if you are marketing in November. But if you leave them on the cows and run them on grass the next year, to sell in August or September, they are a good weight and you don’t have much feed investment in that animal,” he says.

Wintering Calves = More Profit

Ken likes wintering calves with the cows because the calves learn from their mothers. The replacement heifers grow up to be very efficient cows. “We’ve cut all inputs; they don’t get any vaccinations, dewormers, etc. We’ve been doing it this way for about 10 years. They are adjusting, building their own immunities, and are a lot healthier. We used to give preweaning shots, etc. but we’ve eliminated all that. We do use a mineral program in the winter for a couple months, but that’s about the only supplementing,” Ken says.

“We wean the calves in late March. Since we don’t calve until late May/early June, the cows have adequate time to recover,” he says. When the calves are weaned, he feeds them separate from the cows for about a month, still bale grazing. He just trails the pairs home, and locks the calves in a large pen for about three days, adjacent to the cows through the fence in the next pen, leaving several older cows there with the calves as babysitters.

“After the three days I just move the calves to the north side of the trees and the cows go back down to the bale-grazing pasture again. It takes about three to four days and they forget about their calves. There is no stress to the calves, weaning at that age. They are about 10 months old and they don’t miss their mothers at all,” he says. Some have already been weaned by the cows.

“The calves go out to bale grazing again, on the north side of the yard. The cows do more bellowing than the calves, but only for a day or so.” He bands the bull calves in late November and eventually puts the calves back with the cows again so everything can be run as one herd. This saves time and labor. This is the only time the calves are put through a chute.

Ken often runs them as yearlings to sell in August or September if he has a lot of grass. Some years he’s sold them in June—depending on weather and the market. He’s been selecting for smaller-framed animals that are more efficient and he keeps some until two-year-olds, to finish on grass. “We finish a few for our family and relatives. It’s a healthy meat product with a much better flavor than grain-fed, but you have to keep

The bale grazing studies that Ken has participated in shows that there is as much as a 400% increase in productivity comparing bale grazing to conventional grazing. 190% Forage Increase with Bale Grazing It’s amazing how pasture production increases with bale grazing. “We are currently doing a study with the Extension Grasslands,” says Ken. “They are doing studies on four different ranches to measure the effects of bale grazing. They are taking clipping to measure forage production, and doing soil tests to track how the soil is improving.” “We marked where each bale was, putting a metal peg underneath so we can locate where they were. The first year of the study was fairly wet (the spring of 2016) and there was about 1.9 times (190%) more production where we bale grazed than where we didn’t. Last year, in the same area we’d bale grazed the year before, our production was about half because of the drought, but where we didn’t bale graze there was only about 19% of regular production. I could live with 50%, but 19% was really low. That’s what continuous grazing would have looked like. The bale grazing definitely makes a difference.” The 2018 winter there was very little snow, but some timely rains that spring in May and June. “We haven’t clipped it yet, but the production where we bale grazed looks phenomenal. The grass is taller than the 4-wheeler where we bale grazed three years ago. It increases production by almost double, and cuts inputs significantly—not having to start a tractor every day to feed the cows,” says Ken. Doing this study in four different locations has been interesting, and getting different results in how/where you set the bales. “The researchers are concerned about how much nutrients might leave the field, so you need to pay attention to where you bale graze. You don’t want the bales CONTINUED ON PAGE 14