HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

LIVESTOCK &

GBT Angus— 21st Century Farming in Saskatchewan

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Trevor and Cheryl Branvold raise registered Angus cattle on a farm near Wawota, Saskatchewan that’s been in Cheryl’s family since it was settled in 1888. “Some of my family came here from Ireland and ran a general store in Wapella, which was then the closest town—the last place where the train tracks went,” says Cheryl. The family settled here and started farming.

“Our kids are the 6th generation of our family to be on our farm. Over the years it was a mixed farm with grain and cattle. My great uncles were on this farm before us, and my mom and dad have a different place nearby,” she says.

“My great uncles were getting older and ready to retire from farming, and after Trevor and I got married we moved here to take over this farm. Trevor already had a herd of cattle so we came here with some of his own cows and some of the cattle we were leasing from his mom and step-father,” she says.

“We’ve been here since 2003,” says Trevor. “I grew up at Kisbey, Saskatchewan, where my mom and step-father had a farm with grain and cattle.” After he fi nished school he came back and stayed at the farm at Kisbey during the winter months to calve the cows. He also worked at a grain farm for a while, near Wawota, and that’s how he met Cheryl. A Holistic Transition

“Our neighbor down the road is Ralph Corcoran, a Holistic Management Certifi ed Educator,” says Cheryl. “He invited us to take the course he taught. He was gathering together some local couples that might be interested, and asked us to join them. We took the course from him in 2010. Our farm operation was already moving that direction with spring and summer calving (no longer calving in late winter) and rotation grazing,” she says.

“The course Ralph taught set us up with more knowledge of what Holistic Management entailed,” says Trevor. “I was already interested; a seminar that I’d gone to seemed to make sense, telling about some things I thought we could adopt into our program. From there I used the internet and YouTube to start educating myself about using cover crops, etc. But before we went to the Holistic Management course, it seemed like we were the only ones trying to do things like this, except for maybe our neighbor Ralph,” he says. “It seemed like we were out here on our own. I didn’t realize there were a lot more people out there who’d been doing this for a lot of years, with good success stories. After taking that course things snowballed from there, and now it seems like I can’t get enough information. Holistic Management helps satisfy my need for knowledge.” He and Cheryl had already started to try to improve their soil and pastures with bale grazing. “We adopted that practice as soon as we went out on our own, because we’d bought an old tractor and loader that would do the job to get the cattle fed, but it became a daunting task in tough winters with a lot of snow—trying to feed the cattle every day. So we jumped on the chance to start either swath grazing or bale grazing instead of hauling feed out to the cows,” says Trevor. They soon started seeing the other benefi ts, with added fertility, and more lasting benefi ts to the land. “There was also some savings in equipment costs and diesel fuel. So now we’ve been trying to fi nd ways to bale graze in all our pastures, with not only our cow-calf pairs, but also the cows in the fall after we weaned the calves. We’d have bales set out Cheryl, Carter, Trevor, and Brett Branvold in the fall for them, and also for our sale bulls,” he says. Not having to feed the hay frees up more time to spend time with their two boys, going to their hockey games in the winter. It also frees up more time in the summer because they are not out there making hay all day in the tractor. “We purchase most of our feed now because we’d seen that our hay land was depleting and we had to add fertility to it. We got away from making our own hay and sitting in a tractor all summer,” Trevor says. Now they are trying to transition into raising more of their own feed again, but in a system where it stays in the fi eld as a summer crop, or CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

grazing a cover crop. That way the nutrients stay there and are not taken somewhere else when a crop is harvested and hauled away. “We want to do whatever we can do to keep the fertility and not mine it off our land,” he says.

“We don’t want to be sitting in a tractor for hours and hours,” says Cheryl. “We discussed this with some of the people at our Holistic Management conference recently. This is not our idea of enjoyable ranching or farming. Some people enjoy that, but we don’t want to do it. I feel it takes a lot to wrap your mind around this, when all your neighbors are out there putting up their own feed, especially on a year like this when hay is a little bit scarce and expensive,” she says.

“There’s a bit of stress when you think about the fact you are grazing all your feed—on land that would have been hay ground—and everyone else is making feed for winter. You just have to stick to your guns and make sure you stick to your plan. We want to continue to do things the way we’ve chosen to do them, to improve the quality of our land over time. Holistic Management does help with quality of life, with the people that make up your family unit. We decided to make sure this is always our priority,” Cheryl says. Growing Awareness

Enjoyable Farming

Considering quality of life in farming is also critical to farm sustainability. “We have two boys and hopefully they will decide to stay here and ranch, as well,” says Trevor. “We see that we need to improve the land, for them, and leave it in better shape than it was. Otherwise farming is just a continuous battle. I think there are some better ways around this problem so you don’t always have to be on a faster and faster treadmill,” he says.

“We want our kids to see that it can be enjoyable and profitable,” Cheryl says. “It’s no fun to think Mom and Dad sure hate what they do, so that’s not what I want to do! And we don’t want the boys to begrudge this farm because Mom and Dad can’t ever get away to do anything. So we’ve tried to make it possible to enjoy and love what we do. There are always some difficult times, and times when you can’t go and do what you want to do, but we want to have it set up so that most of the time we enjoy the farming and the kids can also take part in it and enjoy it, as well,” she explains. Then it may be something that they will want to continue with after they grow up.

“With a lot of young people today, their parents or grandparents have proved to them that it was too hard or too risky,” says Trevor. The younger generation doesn’t want to have to work that hard or so constantly.

“They may be forced off the farm, or have no interest in it because things are done in certain ways—and they believe that’s the only way it can be done—and they don’t want to be a part of it. This is very sad,” he says.

Cheryl thinks that part of what keeps the farm exciting and fun is that their family is constantly motivated to improve. “If we didn’t have that

motivation and drive to be improving our land and our soil (with some goals), and just going out day to day doing whatever we needed to do to feed the cows or whatever, it would become boring over time. Then a person would lose interest. It’s crucial to have the motivation,” she says. “It helps us to see and know that we are rebuilding this land, especially when it’s been in my family for as long as it has been. The first people who owned this land were my family, so it seems right that we should go back and repair it, and make it better for the next generation, so it can stay in the family.” Cheryl and Trevor also learned that having a learning community is another key component of having a good quality of life and keeping inspired about doing what you are doing. There can be fun and excitement in trying new things and creating innovations to keep improving the land—and realizing there are some options you might not have thought about earlier—especially when you have others with whom you can discuss these ideas. “We are a little bit of an island, on our own, in amongst traditional farms. We don’t have the advantage of having everyone else around us doing the same things we are. But we still have technology that enables us to keep educating ourselves. We can watch Gabe Brown or other educators on YouTube and see some other people who are relatively close to us (not half a world away) doing The Branvolds work to graze as much of the year as possible using things that are inspiring. Then we bale and swath grazing. They also practice winter weaning with their don’t feel like it’s such a huge leap older calves. and such a risk to try these things, because there is a community of like-minded people out there. You just have to keep yourself involved in that community and keep yourself educated and motivated,” Cheryl says. Trevor and Cheryl see the Holistic Management community like a big support group. “It’s a big motivator to go to these seminars with likeminded people,” says Trevor. “This reassures you that you are not the only person that does things this way or enjoys doing things this way. It’s inspiring to interconnect with other producers who are on the same level, and being able to share ideas,” he says. Cheryl says they recently sat down together and did their grazing plan for this year and will be putting in cover crops once the ground is ready this spring. “We will transition some grain land that my parents have been farming. We are trying to grow our land base,” she says. Trevor says that the more he hears about nutrient-dense food, such as required by high-level athletes who need really healthy fuel for their bodies, he feels that this idea has spilled over into the general public. There is more interest in what farmers are doing in growing the food. “Holistic Management is definitely a whole system and it helps us see how the ability to produce food for people can have such an impact on their health and their performance (if they are athletes),” he says. “Treating the land in a more responsible manner and looking at the whole system and how it affects the people you sell your product to seems to be a growing realization among more and more farmers, almost becoming a tidal wave. We are realizing how all of this fits together.

For me this is very reassuring and we feel we are doing the right thing. When people in cities are becoming cheerleaders for organic production, and starting to know what regenerative agriculture is about, this is encouraging. More people are realizing the effect this can have on soil health and how it affects their health,” he says.

“Up until the last few years I always kind of questioned whether we were going down the right path. We’ve seen lots of benefits for ourselves, but we were not sure how that equates to the long term/longevity of not only our ranch but also society as a whole. Now it seems more blatant; the more I read and search things out, the more I realize that the public, and the people who are not on farms, are starting to understand (sometimes even more fully than some of the people in agriculture) how important it is to look after things properly,” he says.

Cheryl says they are hoping that as they change over more land and regenerate some different pieces they may start finishing grass-fat beef to direct market rather than just backgrounding the calves. “This is something we’d like to do, just because we eat our own beef and we know how good it is. The grass-fattened animal is the meat we want to consume and want our customers to enjoy. The genetics of our cattle are now at that point where they are ready, so we just need to get our land base and our management system prepared for doing this as well,” she says.

“Nutrient-dense food is a bit of a tag line for us: healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people. This is our goal.” Winter Weaning

Trevor and Cheryl have been raising purebred Aberdeen Angus ever since they were married. Trevor’s family had commercial cattle when he was growing up, and he became interested in Angus at an early age. Trevor and his mom and step father established the herd together, but Trevor was the one who wanted to get into the purebred business and calved the first bunch of purebred Angus cows in 1993 when he was 16 years old.

“Before that it was mixed breed commercial cows, but I didn’t have much to do with that part of it. It wasn’t until we got the purebreds that I started getting involved in the cattle side of things on my parents’ farm,” he says.

When his family started the purebred program they named it GBT Angus. The G stands for Gerry (Trevor’s stepfather who passed away last year), the B for Betty (Trevor’s mother who remains interested in the cattle and is often a helper at branding and moving cattle), and T for Trevor.

“When Cheryl and I got married we took our herd of purebred cows and brought them up here to Wawota to her family farm in 2003,” he says.

“Currently we run about 150 pair and market two-year-old bulls. We calve in May and June so we hold those bull calves over and sell them in March just before they turn two. Our winters are cold and at first we battled early calving 25 years ago, but Holistic Management showed us that we don’t have to do it that way,” says Trevor.

“We switched to May–June calving and this year weaned our calves in

February. We are still trying to figure out what the best timing would be for weaning, because it’s still extremely cold weather, and the cows are still nursing calves when it’s cold.” One of the things they had to get away from was winter calving, since it’s hard on newborns in this weather. The older calves, however, do very well wintering with their mothers. “This year we tried a new thing for us, providing a creep area for those calves. It’s not for feeding grain, but an area where they can get away from the cows and eat higher quality hay. Often for the cows we utilize a straw-based ration and grain pellets, and the calves do better with higher quality protein,” he says. “We can also bed them in the creep area during severe weather if we have to, but we have enough bush around that they generally have adequate shelter. It’s clean out there and they can go off with their mothers into the bush,” he says. The creep area they used this year was the home corral that the cattle come into for water and pellets. “We just put a creep gate in the gateway into one of our pens—a pen that is about 200 feet by about 350 feet in size. We put the hay bales and bedding in there for the calves and it worked very well. The calves can come and go as they wish. The other benefit was that when we wanted to wean them, we just closed the gate when we fed the hay to the calves, and they were all in there. The calves didn’t know anything different until they wanted to go back to their mothers and the gate was closed,” he says. This was very stress-free The Branvolds sell their two-year bulls via online auction and have found it weaning; the calves were in a reduces the stress for them and the bulls. familiar place with familiar feed, and hadn’t been stressed by being sorted. The cows were nearby, right through the fence. This was just a different way of fence-line weaning and it worked very well. Online Sales The 22-month old bulls are sold in March. “We used to have a live auction sale, but now we sell them online,” says Trevor. “We utilize online bidding sites to host the bidding, and this is where we place all the bull lots for people to view ahead of time. On those sites we have our introduction and description of every bull. We keep updating all the information on weights, scrotal measurements, and any other pertinent information,” says Trevor. “We just call it a private treaty sale but the online bidding makes it more fair for everyone to have a chance at a bull they want. We post videos on each bull and a link people can click on to see what the bull looks like as he moves. This is better than just a photo,” he says. It’s easier for buyers to bid on the bulls at home and not have to travel to a sale that time of year with possible bad weather and bad roads. “We’ve had really good luck selling our bulls this way and it’s a low-stress way of doing it—for us and the bulls. We don’t pen the bulls; they are just out in their paddock with a bale of hay, and we don’t have the added expense of preparing a sale facility or hiring an auctioneer or ring men, or paying someone to haul our bulls to an auction site,” says Trevor. CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

“This type of sale is cost-saving and we can pass that saving along to our customers. We don’t necessarily need to get as much for a bull as someone does who conducts a live sale. This is our 6th year doing it this way and it seems to be well-received by our customers,” he says.

This change was a bit daunting at first for some of the ranchers who are not computer literate but the online sale has proved to be a good option for them. If they are interested they can always find a friend or family member who can help them with the computer aspect or do the bidding at a neighbor’s place who has a computer.

“It’s been interesting, because some of our customers who don’t use computers (and despise computers) are still following with us because they’ve bought our bulls in the past. They often comment how interesting or fun it was, doing it this way, and it was easier than they thought it would be.”

The other enterprise the Branvolds started 3 years ago is custom grazing. “We needed to do something with all the extra grass we have, now that we’ve been implementing a different grazing strategy. We custom graze about 400 yearlings from May until October but they are generally in different pastures than our purebred cows and calves,” Trevor says.

Grazing Strategies

“We move our cattle daily if we can, but we have some pastures with a lot of bush. About 60% of our land is tame pasture and the rest is native, with a lot of bush. We have some areas that we can’t have high stocking densities without doing a lot of clearing for fence lines or developing new water sites in those locations,” he says. These pastures are part of the rotation, however, as the cattle are moved around.

“We do try to keep our numbers quite high in each pasture, even in those larger areas, so we can have a better impact on the land with a bunch of cattle on those sites. Often these are big enough paddocks however that the cattle have to be on them for a week or two at a time. The grazing there is not as controlled as the other areas of tame grass where we can move the cattle every day or every two days,” says Trevor.

“We try to leave more residue than we graze. In our country it seems like it’s better to leave more residue behind. Our goal is to leave at least 50% residue after grazing, on the daily moves. The fences are all high tensile and poly wire, just single strand, and it works very well,” he says.

“The custom-grazed yearlings are kept separate in their own rotations but we run our own yearlings with our cow herd. The only cattle that have their own pasture are the sale bulls. The rest of our yearlings—the steers that didn’t make bulls, and any feeder heifers or replacement heifers that we own—are run with the cow herd. We try to keep them grouped up as much as possible for more impact, with fewer groups to look after and move,” he says.

Cheryl says that all the cows are bred together in multi-sire groups. “We rarely AI and if we do, it’s usually to our own bulls. We use them

for breeding our cows and heifers, but we also draw semen on all of our herd sires so that we can AI with them as well--in the event that there are too many females for that bull to physically breed. This also ensures a planned mating if we specifically want one cow bred to a specific bull (as we run multi sire pastures). We have had disappointment in the past with AI sires that don’t meet our standards-especially with feet and leg structure. It’s much better for us to see them in person in order to put the trust in them to add their genetics to our herd, and we generally just AI to our own herdsires,” she says. The biggest reason that the custom-graze cattle are kept separate from their own cattle is for biosecurity and disease prevention. “This is especially important because we are selling purebreds and want to be sure they are healthy,” Trevor says. “You don’t always know the health history of the custom-graze animals. Last year we brought in some cattle that were just another rancher’s herd, but usually they are purchased cattle from an auction market, and there’s risk for sickness. We try to keep that risk away from our herd,” he says. To help them enhance their grazing Trevor and Cheryl have spent the past two years making many improvements in the pastures, installing a lot of shallow pipelines for summer grazing. “I bought a couple of 300 gallon poly tanks and welded skids on them for ease of moving them around,” says Trevor. “We just have riser pipes along the pipeline, every 200 meters, so that any of our cattle on the tame pastures that we’ve developed don’t have to walk more than about 300 meters to fresh water. As we move them along into new pasture, we move the water trough as well,” The Branvolds have worked hard to improve their grazing he says. practices—leaving at least 50% residue and working on It can all be done at once, short graze periods. moving the cattle and moving the troughs. “It’s not a daunting task that way and seems to work very well. By the time we take our poly wire down and let the cattle into the next paddock we can move the water trough and put up the next day’s poly wire, and it takes minimal extra time to do it,” he says. Family Friendly Farming Trevor and Cheryl have two boys—Brett (13) and Carter (10). They are a lot of help on the farm and enjoy working with the cattle. “Recently Trevor was away, hauling some equipment, and we had to get the bulls run through to get some weights on them and scrotal measurements, in preparation for the bull sale—to make sure they are capable and ready to breed. It was a holiday week and the kids didn’t have school, and had a friend from town staying here visiting. The three boys got to help bring the bulls in, weigh them and do the scrotal measurements! It was a little bit of an education for the town friend, but the boys were good help,” Cheryl says. Both boys are involved with hockey, and both of them—and Trevor— like to motocross race. “Once hockey season ends, we start into the motocross. We go a lot of weekends doing that, in the fair weather months. To be gone on those weekends we try to set things up with our

cow herd so we can have two days off and do what we love to do, and then get back and work hard for five days so we can go do it again,” she says.

This is part of the balance and mix that creates a great quality of life. “In past generations people often thought that if they had cattle they couldn’t go anywhere and that they had to always stay home and take care of the cattle. If you live your life like that, in this day and age, I think you will come to begrudge that this is what you do for a living. We try to find a way to manage things so that we have a balance,” says Cheryl.

With the grazing operation they usually move cattle every day and sometimes twice a day, but there is also some flexibility. “We want to be flexible enough to be able to do the other things that we love to do, too. We love to tend to our cattle and be ranchers; this is our livelihood and our passion, but it’s good to be able to have fun, too.”

When they were first married, Cheryl worked Making time for family outings—including the Branvolds’ passion for motocross racing—is key to a good quality of life at GBT Angus.

off the farm as a veterinary technician for 10 years. “I also worked another job for quite a few years, as well as, in an interior decorating business. We finally got to the point that we realized we could possibly afford for me to work from home, and get back to what I had trained for, as a veterinary technician. We were improving things enough that we I could work at home rather than work for somebody else,” she says.

“This is my second winter at home. I quit working off the farm and slowly transitioned into working here, helping move the custom yearlings that we graze in the summer. I had left the veterinary industry and for 4 years just worked in interior design and furniture sales, and I needed to get back to what I was passionate about. I am very passionate about our farm and trying to improve it—taking what Holistic Management is about and putting those ideas to work here. I wanted to be able to commit to it wholeheartedly,” says Cheryl.

From the Board Chair

BY WALTER LYNN

Dirt to Soil—One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture

By Gabe Brown Published by Chelsea Green

Gabe Brown’s new book, Dirt to Soil, just became available in October 2018 and it is a pleasure to write this review. The ten chapters of this book reinforce why Gabe is such an apostle to help a reader implement regenerative agriculture on their farm or ranch, regardless of size. Dirt to Soil helps us understand the Browns and what has driven the family to be one of the USA’s most resilient agricultural producers.

Gabe shares his story about the changes in his life to become a world advocate for the agriculture he believes in so strongly. Plato has a quote—“Necessity is the mother of invention.” Gabe had four consecutive years of adversity, 1995–1998, which created a financial hardship that strained Gabe’s family and banking relationships. It was those challenges that helped Gabe dig deeper and learn the farming practices and philosophy he has today.

Gabe and his family’s philosophy is—“We believe that the quality of the food we raise depends on the quality of the soil on which it is grown or raised. Our belief is that if we have healthy soil it will provide for clean air, clean water, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people. Our soils are much more resilient than they once were. They now harbor billions of life forms that in fact ‘feed the food’ we raise. Soils that are biologically active produce foods that are higher in vitamin and mineral content and when we eat these foods, these vitamins and minerals are passed on to us. These soils are also able to store more carbon and water which has a positive impact on the environment.”

In the Brown family journey, Gabe was touched by some very special people that fostered change to their operation including Canadian Holistic Management International Certified Educator, Don Campbell. In the winter of 1997–1998 Don made a statement that was like a light bulb going off in Gabe’s head. Don said, “If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make major changes, change the way you see things.” This was a key to how Gabe’s family started digging their way out of the hole they were in and to develop a multigenerational business, which now includes 17 enterprises.

For example, Gabe articulates why he changed their bull seedstock enterprise. Calving was not in sync with nature. Listening to industry experts, the ranch was always working cattle--vaccinating, worming, doctoring, ear tagging, hauling, and artificially inseminating. Then there were registration papers, photographing the animals, developing the sales catalog, and marketing the bulls. With all these tasks, Gabe stepped back and realized how many tasks were taking him away from what he enjoyed—his family. This precipitated him to change their beef production model.

When Gabe shares his story it encourages the reader to think about all the tasks that do not have to be done when a farm or ranch mimics nature. A reader can make similar changes in their life to have a more holistically managed lifestyle. The Brown family has freed themselves from those tasks to focus on better family and community relationships, profit per acre versus yield, and a phenomenal land resource.

I highly recommend this book for your winter reading list. It prods one to think differently and consider a paradigm shift towards a freer and more meaningful life.

To learn more about Dirt to Soil, visit Chelsea Green at: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/dirt-to-soil/