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Dry Creek Farm and Ranch— Regenerating Soil in South Dakota

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Shawn Freeland did not grow up on a ranch, but he always liked cattle. “I knew, from the time I was about four or five years old, that I wanted to ranch, but I didn’t have an opportunity for quite a while,” he says. He rode bulls in high school rodeos and worked on a ranch owned by the father of a good friend.

“I went to the sale barn with my buddy one day when I was 19 years old, and saw 10 cows that I liked, and bought them--and didn’t even have a place to keep them. That was the start of it all. I bought the cows on faith; I didn’t have any money. I wrote a bad check and ran to town and started looking for a banker! I was lucky to find a good banker right away, and I took those cows to my friend’s dad’s place. His dad didn’t even know about it either.”

Freeland found a place to keep his cows, kept riding bulls in rodeos through high school and at amateur rodeos. He had a pro-rodeo card but didn’t rodeo professionally; he quit when he was still at his best, partly because he realized he had to choose between the cows or the rodeo, and he wanted to keep the cows. His main work at that time was as a land surveyor.

Surveying Blizzards and Droughts

The ranch he is on now is near Caputa, South Dakota. Shawn and his wife, Kristy, bought the 2,500-acre ranch with Forest Service permit for summer grazing in 2005. Even though it was a dream come true to have a ranch, some of the land had been overgrazed and abused for many years by a series of absentee owners. “It was a struggle when we first got here. It was a diverse place with some irrigated ground, a couple of creeks, and a lot of grassland,” he says.

“At that point, we started ranching the way our neighbors were— calving in January and February and putting up hay all summer. We fed hay all winter to cows that were confined, and then hauled all the manure out. We kept trying to accumulate more land and get bigger and bigger, thinking that would help; my goal was to have 600 cows.”

Calving that time of year when weather was bad and the cows were confined made it very challenging. “I got really good at doctoring calves and diagnosing sick ones—and treating them for scours, pneumonia, diphtheria, etc. Whatever disease they got, I had a bottle in my cabinet for treating it!”

Shawn also never seemed to have enough time to spend with Kristy and their daughters, Riley and Ryan, and the financial picture was also very frustrating—with high equipment costs and veterinary costs.

After a few years of winter calving, they changed their calving date to later in the spring, which enabled them to calve anywhere on the ranch instead of right down on the creek bottom near their house, on contaminated ground. “Our problems with sick calves went away, and we started working with Nature instead of trying to put a square peg in a round hole,” he says.

“We went through several bad winters, including the Atlas blizzard (a rapidly developing blizzard with 70 mile per hour winds and three feet of snow that left ranchers unprepared in October 2013), and this was also a game-changer for us. Atlas was the driving force to enter the SDARL (South Dakota Ag and Rural Leadership). After hearing what the newspapers and community were saying about the cattle losses after the storm, I knew I needed a better voice. SDARL was a tool to get that,” he says.

After the Atlas blizzard, there was criticism about ranchers in the newspapers; the townspeople in nearby Rapid City didn’t understand the challenges of agriculture and taking care of livestock. “Even in our own community, people didn’t understand what happened and thought we should have had our cattle in barns,” he says.

It was a heartbreaking tragedy with the cattle losses, but the saving grace was better cattle prices the next year. Then their area went through an extreme drought in 2016 and 2017. “We were just about up to the 600 cows we wanted. I had gone through a SD Grasslands Coalition grazing school and figured out some things holistically—and had started down that road. Then when everything was so dry we decided to graze one of our pivots instead of putting up hay. So we had some triticale to graze, but ended up selling some of the cows and leasing some out because we were still short of pasture,” says Shawn.

Agricultural Leadership & Education

These challenges gave them an opportunity to step back and look at what they might do differently. “It also gave me time to travel and go to seminars and workshops. It was like going back to school,” Shawn says. This gave him more confidence to ask questions and learn as much as he could.

“I’d been recruited earlier, to go into the SDARL leadership program, and turned it down the first time, but was then recruited again in 2013 for the 2014–2015 class and decided to do it. This is an 18-month course and you go to meetings around the state once a month and work with different agricultural and legislative issues. You also go to Washington D.C. the first year and then a two-week international trip the second year,” he says.

“This taught me that I could set my place up and leave—and didn’t have to be there all the time. I had to hire a kid to do chores while I was gone, and have him calve for me; it was a 58-day commitment to be gone. The cattle had to be able to take care of themselves a little better.

“All of these things—the blizzard, the drought, the grazing schools, etc. helped drive us down this different path, and it’s amazing to me how many doors have opened to help us go different directions than how we started. It’s a whole different world that I didn’t know existed!”

The school introduced him to Holistic Management and regenerative agriculture practices. With help from SD Grazing Coalition mentors and others, he and Kristy began experimenting on their ranch with different ways of managing the land and cattle.

“I am now on the SD Soil Health Coalition board and recently gave a talk about it. I used to think that Holistic Management meant that I had to save owls and tie myself to a tree!”

Making the Most of Irrigated Pasture

With Holistic Management Shawn learned to look beyond the basics of production to investing in the soil to improve production and profit. “I look at everything differently now and try to ask myself what the consequences will be if I do this, or this,” says Shawn. “It’s easier to look at the whole picture. Even if we now have to roll out a bale of hay, we try to figure out what the hay is and where it’s going to go and whether it will help us in other ways besides just trying to feed a cow.

“We sold our haying equipment and currently we plant cover crops on our irrigated land, on the pivots. We graze those through the winter as our winter feed source, but we also try to plant Ta biannual so we have some triticale or rye coming on. We also plant something like oats and peas that will grow early, but it also has multiple species of plants in it. This gives us an option; if we have to put it up as hay we can do that, or just leave it and drill another crop into it. We usually plant a cool season or winter biannual in with the warm season forages to stockpile for grazing,” he says.

One pivot he planted back to a diverse, primarily native grass mix containing grasses, legumes and forbs. “It’s nice to see all the wildflowers in that mix. The goal is to sell grass-finished beef off these pivots. It’s taken awhile to get it set up, but we have the grass on that pivot and the next one is set up to plant grass in June. We will get those going and keep moving forward.

“In my mind there is no quicker way to build soil than with a perennial grass mix, even if we have to rotate it sometimes—which I don’t plan to do. If we wanted to plant something else in the future, however, at least we are building soil right now. I love the idea of it; there are so many options. I can calve on these pastures, or stockpile them for later grazing, or put up hay on them, or grow a seed crop on them, depending on which plants decide to go to seed that year,” he says.

Stacking Enterprises

Shawn and Kristy are also starting to stack multiple enterprises. Besides selling weaned calves, they have begun selling grass-finished beef to consumers. “We have our second batch of cattle that will be yearlings this spring. Our goal is to eventually not have to sell anything at a sale barn; we want to be able to direct market everything we raise,” says Shawn.

They have been selecting genetics that will do the job. They started with Angus, but now have one bull that is half Angus and half Aberdeen Angus (the older style smaller, traditional Angus). “He is a true character and thinks he is pretty big!”

“We are still in the process of getting the cows downsized; some of the cattle are too big. The past four years we’ve been slowly trying to frame them down, using smaller-framed bulls. We had a decent direct marketing program for corn-finished beef before we decided to quit that and go to grass-finished. So now we need to get a completely different customer base, and make sure that whoever buys from us has a good eating experience. We don’t want to just say we have grass-finished beef; it has to be good. We are very particular in what we sell. So far we haven’t sold a lot of grass-finished beef, but we make sure that we get a taste of them before we send them out.”

Shawn and Kristy no longer feel they need to have 600 cows; a smaller number can make them as much money without as much cost. The ideal number fluctuates, depending on what the land will support. “It was wet last year and we had a lot of pasture so we kept all the heifer calves. I tell people that we will probably stick to having between 300 and 400 cows, but it just depends on what the land will let us do. We are not afraid to

Dry Creek Farm and Ranch

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 destock and get rid of some of them if we need to, and in the past that cover crop also. We had a guy come out last spring and cut a maze for us (on 10 acres of a 150-acre field) while the cover crop was only a couple inches tall, and we kept it mowed all summer,” he says.

“It was so wet last year, with a cold spring, however, that we weren’t sure the crop was even going to make it. It just sat there and didn’t grow until August and then shot up and was over six-feet tall.”

“We put it on Facebook and the word spread quickly. We had about 800 people go through our maze and pumpkin patch and we only opened it for five days. There were only a few days of nice weather that people could come; it was either rain or a blizzard or windy. But they came on the good days and it was a great project,” he says.

The goal is to make this an ongoing educational project, so people will learn more about where their food comes from. “We are still discussing ideas about this. We put up posters, and also have school buses bringing kids out here. They can come out for a few hours and have lunch here, and we can do some little demonstrations,” Shawn says.

“We had our bee guy come and give a two-hour presentation on bees and hives. We’d like to have a day each week that will be an educational experience for people to show them where their food comes from and why it is important to know that.

“Now we’ve scaled down the pumpkin patch and only planted about five acres of pumpkins and have a 10-acre maze in the cover crop. We also have some other things like a corn pit the kids could jump in, and a hay pile. I think we will do that again this year. It took a lot of money to get it going and we are definitely going to need to do it again to hopefully recoup some of that.”

Expanding Opportunities

“We used to AI all of our cows and heifers every year and I was sure that we had the best cattle around. The cows were bred in a short time and grouped up so they could calve in a hurry and the calves would be uniform and all the same size when we took them to the sale barn. They did look really good; I always got a pat on the back when we took them to the sale barn and people would say they were really nice cattle, but it took too much effort and cost to get there; the costs ate up any profit.

“When we first sold some cattle to reduce numbers, the first batch were some heifers we’d grazed on the triticale. Kristy commented later that she could see I was really depressed for about three weeks after selling those yearlings. They were the first thing that had to go, in the drought. We got rid of most of those, and it was hard to part with them because they looked so beautiful and were all the same.

“Once we got through that, I realized that I needed to look at them as just cows. Now when I walk through the herd and look at cows, I can see the sire number on their ear tags and know that they had a great sire, but I can view them as just cows. A good cow for me now is just any cow that doesn’t take a lot of feed and brings me a calf every year,” he explains.

Agritourism Options

Now with the focus on just raising cattle that will finish well on grass, Shawn and Kristy are also starting an agritourism enterprise with a pumpkin patch, maze and a sunflower field. “We planted some rye to outcompete some of the weeds and get away from having to use herbicides, and then decided to roll the rye down and no-till some pumpkins into the rye. It was only about 13 acres, to start with,” says Shawn. They decided to take it in steps, in a five-year plan on their place, and a pumpkin patch was the beginning of that.

“Then we ended up putting a maze into our warm-season, full-season

Shawn notes that his wife and daughters are a lot of help on the ranch, though the two girls, Riley 17 and Ryan 15, are very busy with many of their own projects. Kristy homeschools the girls and they help on the ranch when they can. Shawn knows he and Kristy can leave the ranch and that the girls can handle the chores and he doesn’t need any hired help. “We don’t have a feed wagon or a feedlot like we used to have, so the chores are easier and I don’t worry about the girls crashing anything,” says Shawn. “They simply need to roll up some fence. It is priceless to be able to be with and work with your family.”

Shawn notes that when he and Kristy first started their ranching venture it would take Shawn six hours to get through his chores if nothing went wrong. The ranch was the driving force, yet there was no relationship with the land or livestock or family. It was just a rat race.

“We thought we were making money, but then when we went to the Ranching for Profit school and figured out our margins, we realized we could have done the same thing with 200 cows instead of 600,” says

Shawn. “This is definitely a better road, and it takes quite a transition. It’s not always easy and I have a tendency to do everything all the way once I decide to do it.

“Our five-year-plan on the agritourism is to expand on it. We don’t use our calving barn anymore so we hope to turn that into an event barn. We may host weddings, but mainly hope to have a farm-to-table program where we can hire some chefs to come out and prepare some food,” he says. We are only about 12 minutes away from Rapid City, which is the second-largest city in South Dakota.” This will give an opportunity to educate a lot of people about agriculture and where their food comes from.

“We had a small feedlot below our house a few years ago. We tore all

Menoken Farm— Government Funded Farm Demonstrating Healthy Farming Methods

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

The Menoken Farm, located just east of Bismarck, North Dakota was established in 2009 with the purpose of combining natural resource education and systems approach conservation. Many workshops and tours are held here, drawing people from all over the United States and around the world. It is owned and operated by Burleigh County Soil Conservation District (SCD) with additional financial and technical support provided by the Nonpoint Source Pollution Control Program through the North Dakota Department of Health/Water Quality Division, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).

After identifying a number of resource concerns on the farm, the past 10 years of work has focused on providing a number of basic building blocks to improve soil health. These include the goals of providing soil armor, minimal soil disturbance, plant diversity, continual live plant/root and livestock integration. The systems approach management enhances erosion protection, sunlight harvest, plant diversity, carbon, pollinators, beneficial insects, wildlife, salinity control, livestock forage and other key factors.

The staff at Menoken Farm includes Jay Fuhrer (lead educator), a soil health specialist employed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service; Cindy Makedonski (event planner), district clerk for Burleigh County SCD; Darrell Oswald, a district technician with Burleigh County SCD, and the Menoken Farm manager; Chad Thorson (educator/trainer), a district technician with the Burleigh County SCD; Nolan Swenson (educator/trainer) a district technician with the Burleigh County SCD and who is also the urban conservationist and Tim Salter (groundskeeper).

“The Menoken Farm was created by the board of supervisors of the Burleigh SCD in 2009,” says Darrell. “The farm is named after the town of Menoken which is just west of the farm location. Jay Fuhrer was the District Conservationist at the time and is currently the Soil Health Specialist for the state of North Dakota and lead educator at the Menoken Farm. We are very fortunate to have him on our staff.”

Holistic Approach

A holistic approach was part of this concept from the very beginning. “The systems approach management that we use entails holistic thought processes and enhances all the things we are looking for to improve the current agricultural production model,” says Darrell. “At the time the farm the feed bunks out and sold them, and now that area is a garden. We hope to expand it this year and can pick some produce from the garden and use some of the beef from our place to fix some nice meals for people; we can help educate them about food, using the barn as a place to serve the food. We’ve done some no-till potatoes, and we hope to have some kids come out next year and learn about potatoes. We can roll the hay back and pick up the potatoes. Our goal is to be able to sell everything off the place through direct marketing and try to educate people about their food. I know that if I hadn’t switched to holistic thinking and management I would never have had the time nor the ideas to do the agritourism, and I think that over time this will be a wonderful thing.” was created in 2009, our supervisors had taken courses in Holistic Resource Management, and we also had an employee at that time, Josh Dukart, who had been sponsored by the SCD to become a holistic educator.”

The goal has been to help move agriculture away from the typical monoculture cropping and high inputs that are so much a part of current systems that are not economically or ecologically sustainable. “Putting more carbon back into the system than what you are taking out is the answer,” says Darrell. “It doesn’t matter what kind of system a person is running, as long as more is being put back than what is taken out. That is how you farm forever. The holistic approach, looking at how one thing can affect all things, and the decision-making processes that go along with it, all plays into this.”

Multiple Projects

The Menoken Farm advances soil health through innovation and education, so they use different cropping sequences, with 10 different fields. “We don’t do research; this is a demonstration farm, with long term soil monitoring,” Darrell explains. “The cropping systems are based on no-till seeding, high crop diversity and rotations with cover crop combinations—seeded whenever the time window allows. We also use some season-long cover crops as well.

“We use rotational perennials for five years, as part of the crop rotation, and then those fields go back to annual cropping. The grazing system is managed with short livestock exposure periods followed by long recovery periods. The livestock are also rotated through the season-long cover crops, the spring and fall season cover crops, and the crop residues the same way.

“If you look at the soil health principles, livestock integration is one of the five basic principles because grazing animals have played a synergistic role in ecosystems since the beginning of time. People tend to have forgotten that fundamental fact in production agriculture.

“We usually try to multi-species graze, but this year we are not—just because it didn’t work out with the timeline to do it. We usually graze sheep and cattle together, and also have chickens—broilers and laying hens. We’ve had both hair sheep and wool sheep as well.

October. Interested individuals and groups come from all over the world. “We recently had a group of ranchers from Chihuahua, Mexico and some farmers from Yorkshire, England,” says Darrell. “We also hosted a group of 60 producers from the northwest part of North Dakota. We had a garden workshop in mid-July that had 175 individuals attending one evening. The farm is always open to farmers, ranchers, gardeners—anyone who is interested in educating themselves about soil health; we have an open door policy.”

The farm is also used by district employees, supervisors, NRCS employees and extension people, no-till associations, and the general public. “What people learn here is soil health principles, carbon cycle, etc.,” says Darrell. “We have many soil function demonstrations with crop rotations, cover crops, grazing systems, gardening, etc.”

Darrell notes that SCD employees often help with the many tours. “Nolan Swenson, who is our urban conservationist, has really created more interest in the ‘urban’ side of Menoken Farm. He got into Holistic Management awhile back; we had him take a course taught by Josh Dukart, and Nolan become interested in the concepts. He was originally a mechanical engineer and we are successfully reprogramming and repurposing him to become an urban conservationist who understands the soil health principles.” Likewise, the Morton County Soil District just across the river has become a partner in many of the events and workshops.

“We started out with a limited number of livestock because we thought it was going to be dry. At that time it was very cool and dry. Then by early summer it was extremely wet, so we have lots of grass.

“The perennial forages we graze includes about 20 species. There are many grasses, legumes and flowering forbs in the mix. Not all of them express themselves very well because the cool season grasses tend to be dominant, but with the very short grazing periods followed by long recovery periods, all of the species occasionally have a chance to express themselves.”

“Each paddock is about a quarter of an acre so we are moving the cattle through fairly quickly, preferably once a day. They eat about half the forage and trample the rest and leave it for the soil biology to utilize.

“We buy these cattle in the spring, usually from a sale barn; we simply buy what we think might work for us. They are generally grazing on the farm from about mid-May until mid-October.

“We also make compost at the farm. We have static compost and compost that we turn, and now we are working at propagating a worm microbiome or worm juice to use, as one of the biologic agents we put onto our fields. We don’t use any synthetic fertilizers, so any cropland enhancement utilized is all biologic. We do have one field that serves as the ‘control’ and it is fertilized, but it’s mainly just for comparison.

“We also have a high-tunnel greenhouse and an outside garden, and we use all of the same principles in managing these gardens. The adage ‘healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people’ comes into play here, and the produce we raise is all donated to the Bismarck-Mandan food pantries.

“At the Menoken Farm we also have lots of windbreaks and an arboretum that serves as an information and education place—with examples for energy, wildlife, and forestry topics. The arboretum contains many species, and is all about information and education.”

Educational Goals

The farm hosts many groups, for soil health education. In 2019 there was more than 40 groups on the farm altogether mostly during May to

Menoken has recently revised their mission statement as they have reflected on the progress and evolution of the farm. “Obviously we want to reach as many people as possible and be as effective as possible,” says Darrell. “We talk about farming for future generations or farming forever.”

Darrell notes that a profitable livestock operation is part of that sustainable vision. “If we buy the cattle right and get good gains on them through the summer, they do make some money—in contrast to many livestock operations today that are not very profitable because they input themselves to death, just as they do on the annual cropping side. We struggle to quantify profit using the holistic model, however, because we focus on the soil health aspect and not so much the economics.

“We get a lot of questions about that at the Menoken Farm. We continue to try and improve our outreach and accuracy on the economics of a regenerative agricultural production model. The standard production model is based on yield, and pounds, whereas holistically we think in terms of profit per acre. People don’t connect with that or realize the difference, and that’s what makes it difficult. We need to put more emphasis on the economic side, and this will be part of the strategic plan going forward.

“I have had some tremendous mentors and we have been applying the practices learned from the Gabe Browns and Kenny Millers of the world on my own ranch for the past dozen years. It has made a great difference in our lives in many ways, including profitability. I have benefitted tremendously from my experiences on the Menoken Farm and I’ve picked up many helpful things and ideas and met a lot of great people. I haven’t managed the Menoken Farm for a long time but I have been associated with and worked for the SCD for 20 years. I just feel fortunate to be able to do what I am doing.”