Making a Living Mimicking Nature

• Buffers for water quality in ditches and streams

• Personnel abilities to effectively manage grass

• Undesired plant species management

• Upcoming or past weather

• Irrigation efficiency

• Stock water availability and herding them out of the sensitive habitat of the creeks, all 50 miles of them. We couldn’t keep up.

For the answer on many of these grazing adaptations, we could turn to nature to see how wild animals would have grazed in similar situations. Invariably, though, there are practical and logistical considerations involved in planned grazing. Both, nature and logistics, are what turned us to the holistic standpoint of adaptive planned grazing (APG) rather than simply rotational grazing.

Although compared to their previous condition, we had improved the riparian areas on our range during the first five years we managed the allotment, we couldn’t seem to get the further improvements we desired. We seemed stuck at “good enough.” It was good enough for our agency partners. They were happy. But we were not.

Then wolves entered the picture. From a handful of reintroduced Canadian imports, our wolf numbers in Central Idaho mountains skyrocketed to an estimated 1,500 in a few short years. There were unlimited wild elk and deer populations to feast on…and thousands of range cattle like ours.

In 2014 we ended up losing 14 head to wolves.

Caryl and I brought the cattle home smarting moving “virtual” grazing cells, planning our grazing to maximize our beeves’ productivity and that of the wild grasslands they walk on. We call it inherding, a coined word putting intentional and intensive together with herding. Wolves no longer bother us, and riparian areas are regenerating at a rate that surprises even my ecologist wife, who has worked on these rangelands for over 30 years.

Inherding posed a real challenge for us to rediscover the lost arts of herding on extensive ranges, but now, we know we can never go back. Even on dry ranges, our beeves have doubled in daily gain. The beef we harvest directly from the range is our best tasting beef. Our carrying capacity has increased—all because we adopted a mimic—that of the small wild bison herds that ranged through our mountains.

Nature is complex. Our thinking must be multi layered to reflect the complexities of the systems we manage.

Our headquarters ranch is covered with snow now. It’s January, and the quiet of winter has settled in. I can look out my office window and see a windrow of hay as dusk creeps over our big valley. There is a long black line of Angus beeves grazing the green, spread out for them on a foot of fresh white.

The work of feeding is a pleasure for my seven daughters and me. Occasionally, the west wind howls and we need to take them to shelter along the brush, but most days, we plan where they will eat and lay down for that day.

Adaptive planned grazing on the range is really centered around holistic planning, where the Elizingas practice inherding and let the cows decide what to eat that day. Animal and land productivity has increased on this 70 square miles of wide open and wild Idaho mountain wilderness.

Inherding on the Range

We didn’t really think about adapting that paradigm to our extensive rangeland summer pastures until nature came in with a roar. Or a howl, rather.

It was wolves. They recolonized our 70 square mile mountain grazing lands about five years after we started pasturing livestock up there. Before wolves, we simply let the cattle disperse on their own, following green up as it gained elevation with the onset of spring. There’s 4000 feet of elevation relief in our grazeable area, and it supplied our cows with green grass until late July. After July, unfortunately, our cows found riparian areas to their liking. We responded by riding horseback from that rough summer on the range. We were ready to quit. But then inspiration came from a series of CM Russell paintings from the early 1900s, documenting cowboys living on the range with their cattle.

Herding them. Keeping them safe from predators. Taking them to the best grass.

And so, we brought adaptive planned grazing to the range. Now, ADP has us living with the cattle full time, controlling their progress across wild range landscapes. On horseback, we essentially are a moving grazing cell across the high country. Just like we consider a multitude of factors on the home ranch in designing location, timing, and size of cells, we now use horseback riders to create

It seems like work to some folks when we hand fork off eight tons of summer sunshine each day, but the real workers are there on the ground. The 500 busy black-hided employees of mine begin the process of decomposition and decay and insert it into the ground. Meanwhile they handily put on an average daily gain of two pounds a day, even in winter on hay.

But there is so much more. I just can’t see it.

Because under their feet, beneath the snow and ice, is a teeming plethora of soil biota still slowly moving, living, waiting for their potential to be unleashed when the sun crosses into the Northern Hemisphere and the harvest of sunlight will begin.

And the living soil sponge will once again imbibe all the nutrition our beeves provide for it, and a grassland will erupt in verdant green from a once dormant soil.

I never get tired of it. Happy Trails.

Glenn Elzinga can be reached at: glenn@ alderspring.com