Alderspring Ranch— Making a Living Mimicking Nature

BY GLENN ELZINGA

The ground fairly shook with the rumble of 350 head of elk stampeding away as I made my approach to my sample area in our south meadow. To my chagrin, they had been dining on the rich green that still grew in fits and starts on this late October day in our high valley of the Pahsimeroi in the remote mountains of Central Idaho.

They were nighttime thieves of my stockpile, meant for 550 head of hungry beeves that were cell grazing through my fall grass. And I think the wild ungulates knew it.

hand trowel, I knelt on the near-frozen sod and proceeded to find an opening in the thick and diverse sward of foot-tall pasture grass stockpile where I could sample the soil surface. I couldn’t find one, so I just tossed the trowel over my shoulder in a cowboy version of random plot generation for where I would dig a tennis-ball sized hole for a bulk density (BD) test.

I was following NRCS protocol for rocky soils, and my volcanic ash substrate was complete with fragments of volcanic bombs, both large and small that made the more common cylinder evaluation of BD difficult. After extricating the pebbles and rocks from my sample, I would return them to the hole, atop a layer of Saran wrap. Then, I would fill the hole with carefully measured out syringes of water to determine the volume in the grams/cubiccentimeter assessment that defined BD.

The last remote cow camp of the summer—the Big Hat Camp. Caryl, Glenn, and their daughters. At the end of summer, they’ll bring the cattle out on the 35-mile trail over four days to get back home to where still summer growing grass, 3,000 feet below them, awaits them.

Busted. Their cream-colored butts jostled up and down in cadence as they gracefully bounded away from me and Clyde, my border pup.

Stepping off the four-wheeler and grabbing a microbiologist and climate scientist. It turns out that water, not carbon is the key functional element in the maintenance of climate, and if we don’t maintain a “sponge” of water holding capable soil, built of organic materials founded on carbon, the water cycle and even life, is severely broken. Water then isn’t available for plants, and rather than being able to capture and store high rainfall events in the soil, water is lost through runoff and soil surface evaporation. A vicious cycle is started, often commencing desertification.

The clayey soil was very wet from the snowfall that cloaked the field just two days prior with three slushy inches. I struggled to remove the rocks from the clumpy ball of soil. I remember thinking that the soil was saturated.

Literally hundreds of tiny roots and even the occasional unidentified arthropod sluggishly made his or her way through the cold material. The clumpy sample refused to work through my 2 mm makeshift sieve (a French bread baguette pan that I filched from my then France living daughter that had exactly the right pore size—I wrongly thought that she’d never know). I had to carefully work it all by hand, breaking clods between my fingers.

But soon enough, I had my sample bagged, and like a cheap parlor magician pulling a tablecloth from under dishes, I handily yanked my Saran wrap from under the water in my hole in the field and started to load my sample gear on the waiting bike with border collie Clyde anxiously tensed and wagging for our journey to our next plot.

Less than a minute later, I came back for my trowel and pocketknife. And sank to my knees.

The water was gone.

I couldn’t believe it. That completely saturated, muddy, snow-soaked soil had room for more. In all my 27 years of ranching, I had never been interested in that dirt underfoot. And now, for the first time, this light bulb moment had my attention.

I just stared at the hole. Where did the water go? I felt that I could literally squeeze excess water from my sample. And then a phone conversation I had recently with soil expert Peter Donovan came to mind.

And that living sponge will accommodate more moisture than I could imagine. It’s why point that for the first time, we had excess grass to sell as pasture. And penciling it, I can finally, for the very first time, conceptualize making the marketing of pasture to cash flow.

Six Steps to Mimic Nature

How did this happen? What was the mechanism of change? How did our soil organic matter move from a 2.5 average to a 6.5 (7.3% on our best field) in 10 years, even while maintaining a partial hay operation? And more importantly, what happened to make the changes above ground in productivity and water savings?

These pigs are excitedly grazing four-foot tall cover crop ground on Alderspring this past August. In two days, after decimating their half acre grazing area, they will begin to extensively root, as radish and beets are found throughout along with some remnant quackgrass plants that used to dominate cover on this piece of pasture. The pigs will check that population with their aggressive rooting.

As October turned to November, and fall turned to winter, Caryl and I reflected on what transpired. And we came up with a list of six action items that we believe were game changers, the driving forces in creating a soil carbon sponge. But first, we found a common theme after we looked at the list. They all mimicked nature. Some of them followed current processes that we see happening in the wild country around Alderspring Ranch (there’s plenty of examples as only 3% of our county, the size of Connecticut is privately owned; the rest is a mix of federal and state land and is essentially wilderness mountain country).

“Why do you want to measure soil carbon, anyway, Glenn?” Peter asked.

“It’s because I want to know where I stand— where my ranch stands. I’ve done soil tests. My organic matter has greatly improved over 10 years under our management. I want to be able to speak the language of carbon sequestration in soils.”

“Glenn—let me tell you about a farmer I met at a conference one day. He said ‘Peter! How can I increase carbon in my soils?’ I told him what he needed to do was to take a railroad car full of coal to his farm and disk it in. His soil carbon would certainly increase.” Long pause. He wanted me to get it.

The Carbon/Water Connection

I got it, but not fully. Peter then proceeded to tell me about the soil carbon sponge, a term coined by Dr. Walter Jehne, and Australian

I sank to my knees as the realization sunk in. And everything started to make sense. My wife, Caryl and I had been observing radical changes in how we were able to manage our ranch, with exponentially increasing benefits just in the last three years. What we didn’t know was that the answer was underfoot—the soil carbon sponge was multiplying like crazy, and we were riding the vaunting exponential upswing of an S-curve as soil life ran amuck (I like puns).

It’s why our water pumping on our pivots had been slowly reducing.

It’s why our fields no longer burned up in the summer sun while we hay and weren’t irrigating. We no longer played catchup on dry fields once we got the bales off, a time period that in the past had cost us two weeks or more of growing.

It’s why our grass productivity had doubled in two ways: our stocking rates of our cattle per acre has increased twofold and our average daily gain (ADG) is up from 1.8 lbs a day to nearly three.

Overall ranch capacity has grown now to the

Others of our six mimic processes that are currently broken and hard to find in today’s world. Bison, for instance were an inhabitant of our rangelands. And their ecological position was important for us to reconstruct from historical record since nearly 400 head of Alderspring’s beef herd runs on 70 square miles of summer grass where the bison used to roam.

So here’s what we came up with:

1. Hire animals.

Sure, we have some ranch workers on the place, but our very best employees are our animals. Obviously, they are good at harvesting, and for the first 15 years we were ranching, their role was pretty uni-dimensional in that regard. Now, we realize that they are the nutrient cyclers—the drivers of life above and below ground. When we remove them from that role, we remove the cycle of decay and decomposition from our landscapes. Animals