Slim Buttes Buffalo Ranch— Adapting Enterprises to Fit the Land

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Slim Buttes Buffalo Ranch is in the northwest corner of South Dakota, 30 miles from the Montana border and 50 miles from North Dakota. Owned and operated by Sandy and Jacki Limpert and their son Brodie, this ranch is mostly grassland pasture.

Sandy has lived here all his life and is the third generation on the ranch. His great uncle, Lawrence Oliver, put the home place together, starting in 1910 and raised sheep. In 1935, Sandy’s father, A.W. Limpert, and uncle, John Limpert, came to live on the ranch with Lawrence and his wife Mary. A.W. and John’s father had passed away and their Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Mary decided to raise the boys. These two brothers grew up on the ranch and helped Lawrence raise sheep and eventually some cattle. In 1955, A.W. married Kay Welch and they had five children with Sandy being the oldest boy.

The ranch continued to grow and in 1970 Sandy’s parents purchased the ranch from Lawrence. In 1985, Sandy married Jacki Johnson. That same year, Sandy’s father passed away and Sandy and Jacki purchased the ranch from Kay (Sandy’s mother) and the rest of the family. At that point in time it was 7,000 acres of pasture with 400 cattle and 350 sheep plus 1,200 acres of farm ground and hayfields.

“Jacki and I have been running it since 1985 and have expanded it considerably,” says Sandy. In 1989 they purchased an additional 7,000 acres that bordered the ranch to the north and expanded the operation to 400 cows and 1,200 sheep.

“We ran sheep and cattle until 1990, when we started transitioning to bison. We had decided we could not continue to operate the ranch with the sheep, cattle, farming and a custom haying business,” he explains.

“We had always been fighting the weather with traditional livestock. We lambed the ewes through the sheds through the winter and then started calving heifers in March and then the main cow herd would start calving. We were always fighting bad weather to save the lambs and calves. With the sheep, predators were also a problem. We live along a range of hills called the Slim Buttes and the coyote population is huge. Today there are no sheep anywhere near here because a person just can’t win that battle,” he says.

He and Jacki realized that some management changes were needed to address the huge work load and make the ranch more manageable. The ranch had a strong land base, so they began to explore their options for using the land.

Getting Started with Bison

Sandy and Jacki began looking at bison because they were both interested in them and the land was suited to this hardy animal. “I had two bison when I was in high school in the mid-1970s and really enjoyed them,” says Sandy. “We never built any fences that would hold them, however, and they just roamed the whole county. My dad got tired of them and told me to either get rid of them or he was going to shoot them. We finally got them in, but they were wild. We butchered those.”

Then in the late 1980s Sandy and Jacki started looking at maybe raising bison instead of cattle and sheep. “Financially, we were not getting ahead, and the weather was a big challenge. After my dad passed away the rest of the family left the ranch and did other things so it was just Jacki and myself doing it all. We were working from daylight till dark and not getting ahead. We started researching the bison industry and market and whether we could actually make a living raising bison. At first we didn’t think it would work, but the more we looked this business, the more

“We started touring the few bison ranches we knew of and really got excited about it. We decided to sell the sheep and start buying buffalo. Our plan was to run 200 bison cows and keep running the rest of the operation the way we had been. We kept raising cattle while the bison were coming into production. When we started buying them, it immediately became evident that they were a lot less work than cattle, and required less feed, especially in the winter.

“Like most wildlife, their metabolism slows down in the winter and they don’t need as many calories as cattle do, to survive. They are much more hardy. Cattle and sheep need additional calories and protein all winter long. We’ve bred the

Sandy and Jacki purchased a few more bison each year and, eventually sold the last of the cattle. “Once we started into this business we could tell it would probably work, even though the market for bison wasn’t very strong back then. The hanging carcasses were bringing about $1.85 per pound, yet the meat production seemed sustainable even at that level. So we just kept buying a few bison each year to replace the cull cows we sold,” Sandy says.

They had been buying all their replacement heifers, since they used a terminal cross for beef production rather than keeping any heifers. “So over a period of years as we gradually grew the bison herd we let the cattle herd dwindle down and sold the last of them in about 1997. We have not regretted this decision at all,” Sandy says.

The bison industry is still small but started growing dramatically in the late 1990s. “No one was paying much attention to marketing; we all thought that all we had to do was produce the product and someone would buy it. Then that whole market crashed. The North American Bison Co-op had a lot of meat in freezers that they couldn’t sell. Then 2002 was a tremendously dry year. The banks quit loaning money on the bison industry just like they quit on a lot of farmers and ranchers. It was a perfect storm for the bison industry; we had a lot of meat that we couldn’t sell and the breeding market fell through the floor,” Sandy says.

“We had to travel 400 miles east to get hay because our part of the country never even greened up that spring. It was the worst of the worst. That crash got rid of a lot of bison producers. On the flip side, the meat then the market has done nothing but go up or stay steady. Today the price is about $3.80 hanging, so from 30 years ago at $1.85 it has more than doubled. The past 15 years the price has been really strong,” says Sandy.

Business Model Adaptation

Sandy and Jacki have done a number of things to make their efforts sustainable. “Early on, while we were still raising cattle, I knew I didn’t want to be at the mercy of people buying my calves. So we built a small feedlot and after that we didn’t sell anything off the ranch (including bison) that wasn’t either finished or breeding stock that has been performance tested on grass and feed to other producers,” he says.

With all the farm land returned to grass production and the sheep and cattle gone, Sandy and Jacki now use the feedlot to finish their excess bison. This has worked very well. In 1997, they leased an additional 4,500 acres of grass to use for backgrounding young bison bulls which are later finished in their feedlot.

Diligent culling has produced bison herd sires and mother cows that consistently produce some of the finest animals in the region. From the calf crop each year, they select the top end bull calves as herd sire prospects. When the bull calves are yearlings, Sandy and Jacki offer the best of them for sale through private treaty at the ranch.

Sandy doesn’t think he’d be ranching today if he hadn’t made the switch to bison. But with improved profits, they’ve been able to expand their ranch from 10,000 acres to 40,000 acres over the last 30 years.

got cheaper and more people started eating it because it was cheap. They discovered they liked it.”

Also, about that time Ted Turner started building his restaurant chain, called Ted’s Montana Grill. His restaurants served bison and more people became familiar with it. “He’d been selling all his meat to the Co-op and they’d just been putting it in freezers. So he opened up about 45 or 50 restaurants and sold his meat through them. When you think about what that did—with more people having a good experience eating bison meat in all of those restaurants for several years—before long there was a shortage of bison meat again. The price rose again,” Sandy says.

“Our marketers who ran the Co-op told us that if we ever got above $2.50 hanging it would be the end. They didn’t know what they were talking about, because now the consumers demand this product. In their mind it is a healthy food, and more people are wanting to eat healthy, especially in today’s world.

“For a while, however, we found ourselves over-supplying because we had no market but it was partly because no one had spent any money on marketing. After 2002–2003, we realized that we had to spend some time and money marketing our product. Fast-forward to today and the supply is about perfect to meet the demand. The demand continues to grow but the numbers of bison are staying just about the same.”

“We built a sale barn in the late 1990s and started having auctions to sell breeding stock to other bison producers, but when the market crashed in 2002 we quit having sales and started

With Holistic Management, the Limperts work to provide 90 days of recovery within the 33 paddocks they have. They also try to take only about 30% of the forage so that they continue to improve soil health and range productivity.

Not very many people are jumping into the bison industry because most folks don’t want to deal with bison. It’s a lot of work to get set up to handle these animals. “Thirty-some years ago I never would have imagined that we would just be raising bison, but these animals have been really good to us. There was the downturn in 2002-2003 but ever since through their growing process, and this in itself sells animals,” he explains.

Bull prospects are put through a rigorous feed trial their first year, making it easier to select only the best animals to be sold for herd sire prospects. The young bulls are performance tested, with the data on weaning weights, weight gains on grass, and weight gains on feed being used as the criteria for selection.

“There are still many bison producers who think that a bison is a bison, the whole grazing season. Water developments were crucial to make this work. “By creating so many different pastures, we realized we needed a lot more water. We started on a plan of adding big tire tanks in each pasture. The pastures are anywhere from 500 to 700 acres, depending on the lay of the land, and every pasture now has five tire tanks. Across the whole ranch we have put in more than 30 miles of pipeline and 190 tire tanks. When there are five tire tanks and at last one reservoir in each pasture, water is never an issue.” a cattle and sheep outfit I don’t think the ranch could support the two families. We have taken the ranch from about 10,000 acres (when I took it over) to more than 40,000 acres now. We could never have achieved that growth raising sheep and cattle because there is not enough market to do that. With bison, however, between the meat sales and the feedlot—selling all of our meat animals to Rapid City, South Dakota or Brush, Colorado, to Bob Dineen, the Founder and President of Rocky Mountain Natural Meats—we have a great market,” Sandy says. They process about 60% of all the bison meat in North America.

The ranch runs 1,600 mother cows and 100 herd bulls all in one big herd. “When we put them in one of those pastures they are never hanging around the tire tanks because they don’t have to go very far to water. They just wander by and take a drink, and we never see those tanks drained down,” he says. The bison don’t beat out the areas around the tanks because they have plenty of water in various locations, and they are only in that pasture for a few days.

“It is so easy to manage them, and the bison are so easy on the pastures. Our NRCS guy thought we were nuts when we wanted to put that many tanks in each pasture, but I’ve never regretted it. We did all the work ourselves; we do most of the work on everything ourselves, and it’s been quite an experience. We are not finished; we just leased another place where we plan to put in a waterline project this summer. It is so crucial in each pasture to have plenty of water and then graze it and move on. This has been the key, for us,” he says.

“These bison are so contented and happy. To move them, I simply go out with a pickup and some cake because the cows are all trained to come to the pickup. I honk the horn and they come. They know the routine. I open the gate and honk the horn and I can move that whole herd by myself in 15 minutes. They are ready to go to fresh pasture even though there is a lot of good grass left where they are.

The conversion of the ranch to bison created a more profitable and lower labor-input operation than what the ranch had seen for several decades. It took a little work to make the fences more secure for bison, but it wasn’t that hard. “We had some good fences already, and we just went around them and welded extensions on the short steel posts. We mostly had sheep fence to begin with so it wasn’t very tall, but it was woven wire on the bottom with two strands of barbed wire on the top. We just added one more barbed wire to make it taller,” Sandy explains.

If bison are not crowded or upset, and have adequate room, they generally don’t press the fences. “If you keep them happy they are much easier to contain because they are not wanting to go somewhere else.” Good pasture management gives them exceptionally good grass through

“Kirk Gadzia told me that it’s like putting out a buffet. If you put out a buffet every Monday morning it will get pretty rank by the end of the week. There is still food there but your favorite things are gone. When these cows are going to fresh pasture nearly every day, a lot of times I don’t even need to cake them because they are simply eager to come through the gate to go to fresh pasture. They just drop their heads and start grazing.

“They are very easy to manage this way, and now we are seeing many warm-season grasses coming in. Our side of the fence has bluestem all up and down the creeks and swales, and on the neighbor ’s side of the fence where they continuous graze yearling cattle, and have grazed this way for 100 years, you can’t see any bluestem. It was eyeopening to me, to find that we now have bluestem galore on our side just because of the way we graze.

“We are working with nature instead of against nature. I don’t know how we got off track in this country, grazing the wrong way. We were taught the wrong way, in school,” he says.

Thanks to the success of their own operation, the Limperts envision the bison industry as a way for ranches with good grass to not only survive, but to excel in agriculture. Currently, Slim Buttes is home to 1,600 mother cows and produces enough grass to grow out some additional bulls and heifers which are then finished in the feedlot.

“We grass 200 to 300 heifers and 100 bulls. The ranch also sells about 35 bulls as breeding stock each year. We also sell 100 to 200 heifers each year for breeding.”

One of the benefits of bison is their longevity. The cows will calve well into their 20s. “We preg-test them every fall, and if they are ever open we get rid of them. By doing this, we have a very fertile herd. We always wean a 95 to 96% calf crop and these cows do it on a fraction of the feed in the winter, compared with what our cattle needed. In nature, the bison didn’t have to calve at such a high percentage, but when they are managed you can get 18 to 22 calves from one cow,” Sandy says.

“I am 60 years old, and the heifer calves we are keeping right now as herd replacements will still be here when I am in my 80’s. So we don’t need to keep very many replacement heifers. I remember when we had cattle, we bought all of our replacement heifers, and every year by the time we got our calves sold and bought the heifers we needed, there wasn’t much money left to operate on. It was a vicious cycle. We bred Black Angus cows to Charolais bulls so we didn’t keep replacements. It was always a terminal cross.

“In the 1980’s we were raising 600-pound calves and thought we were doing well. We calved in March and put a lot of feed in them to get that 600-pound calf, but we were beating the neighbors on calf weights! This is what we were taught, to try to maximize production, even though it might cost too much to raise those big calves.

“My beef neighbors look at our bison and laugh. We wean off 450 to 500-pound calves and the neighbors think that’s pretty small. The bison market crashed in 2002 and that’s all they can remember, and they think these animals are still worth that low price. Our national association likes to promote growth and herd expansion but I like it just the way it is right now. We have good numbers and a good, strong market, and everybody in our industry is making money. The cow-calf bison folks are making money, the feeders are making money and the processors are making money; everything is in good balance. I don’t know why people always think we need to change a good thing,” he says.

Currently there are not a lot of people getting into this industry because it is very capital intensive to get started. A cow bison is worth twice what a beef cow is worth, so a person has to borrow more money to buy the cows. Then that person has to build fences and corrals that will hold bison. “It’s a bit prohibitive for young guys to get started and this is a deterrent for a lot of folks. Once we got our herd going, however, we found we could pay ourselves very well by running our bison calves through the feedlot and selling them ready to butcher,” Sandy says.

“I remember back when we decided to get rid of the cattle, the main reason was that we had no control of our market. Our government has a cheap food policy and can import beef and keep the prices down. It doesn’t seem to matter if our own producers go broke. The government wants us to just barely make a living. Importing beef right now is really hurting our own producers.

“This is why I got rid of cattle; I had zero control. It didn’t matter how good a job I did raising cattle because I was still going to have to take the price the buyers give me, and more often than not it was less than what it cost to produce them. That was 30 years ago and I don’t know how some guys have hung on this long with everything we have to buy being higher priced. A pickup costs $60,000, haying machinery is more expensive, feed costs have gone up, etc. yet calf prices are basically what they were when we got out. I wouldn’t still be on this ranch if I was still raising cattle and sheep. I think I would have lost it.

“Our son, when he came back from college, decided he wanted to try some beef cows. He bought some big 1,600-pound Angus fallcalving cows. He was feeding them through the winter and they were eating 60 pounds of hay a day, nursing their calves, and he was also caking them.

“After the first year, he told me this couldn’t work. He said that if he had to buy the hay to feed these cows, there would be nothing left after selling the calf crop. So after that first year he sold them and bought bison and has never looked back.”

Improving Production and Profit

The Limperts investment in continuing education has been a key factor in their ability to adapt and improved their production and profit. “About 14 years ago we started looking into Holistic Management. Our first class was with Ann Adams in Albuquerque, and this totally opened our eyes. I never believed something like this would work in our part of the country; I always thought it maybe worked somewhere else, in a better climate. Here on the northern plains we only get 15 inches of moisture each year, in generally the grass only grows about 90 days out of the year,” Sandy says.

He also notes that Holistic Management principles completely transformed the whole ranch. “In the past 13 years we have attended several classes, including a few by Kirk Gadzia. Once you get your head wrapped around these ideas, it all makes so much sense, and it helped us make a lot of improvements. We used to have big pastures and graze continuously, like most ranchers did back then and still do—putting the herd in a pasture and leaving them all summer.”

“We cross-fenced the whole ranch into pastures that were each about one section in size. Right now we have 34 pastures. We have one big 8,000-acre pasture that we calve in, putting the cow herd in there for 60 days in the spring. You can’t really rotate the mother cows while they are calving because it’s better to just leave them alone. So we put them in that big pasture to calve and bring them out of it in mid to late May—to start rotating through the 33 smaller pastures,” he says.

This process gives every pasture a chance to recover and grow again before it is grazed again. Even in drought times, there are 33 pastures ahead of the herd when they start the grazing season--that are not being grazed. This gives these pastures a chance to grow a little (even if it’s dry) before they are grazed.

“Most years we rotate through pastures pretty fast in the spring when they are growing fast. We only want to take about 10% of the grass that’s there the first go-round, staying only three to five days in each pasture. Then by the time we get back to those pastures the grass has fully recovered and matured. Three days times 30 pastures is 90 days rest that each pasture has had. The first pastures we graze in the spring and early summer, you can’t even tell that they have been grazed because they rebound so quickly,” he says.

“We are also starting to see more warm-season grasses coming in and thriving because they don’t get continually eaten off. Continuous grazing is hard on any pasture. Back in the days when we had sheep—and sheep had been here for 100 years—the pastures were not in good shape. Sheep are really hard on a pasture because they eat so close to the ground.

“Everything we have learned has helped us change this. Today we run more animals here than we ever did before, yet we also leave more grass that we ever did before.

“It is an amazing system. I told my banker one day that all the financial institutions should demand that the young guys who are borrowing money have to go through some holistic training.

“A lot of folks are still calving in February, living with the calving cows, pulling calves, battling all the elements that we don’t have to deal with later in the year. I have neighbors in their 70s and 80s that have no way to bring their kids home to the ranch because their kids (or grandkids) don’t want to come home.

“It’s a sad state of affairs and I fear for the future of many small ranches. Jacki and I are just tickled that we are able to have our son and his kids here. He has two boys and two girls and those kids just love it. With the COVID pandemic, those kids were home-schooled this spring for nearly three months and it has really been good. That whole experience has been good for all of us here.”

Sandy says that Holistic Management has been the key to success for this ranch. “We took our son to these Holistic Management classes when he was about 17 years old. The younger generation gets it quickly. He wrapped his head around it immediately. If someone had taken me to one of those classes when I was 17, there is no way I would have believed it. Most of our neighbors still don’t believe in what we are doing, yet they see us continuing to expand, and leaving a lot of grass. It looks like we leave more grass than we utilize, and that’s in fact what we do. We typically utilize only about 30% of the grass, and this builds a good reserve in case of drought.” This gives flexibility; in extreme conditions there will still be some grass.

“One of the downsides with bison is lack of flexibility in marketing, however. With cattle, if things get bad, you can get some of them in during the middle of summer and haul them to a sale barn if you have to. It’s tough to do that with a herd of bison! So we try to keep our numbers lower than they need to be for the forage resources we have. Last winter was a relatively open winter and we fed the cows hay just 10 times. We don’t cake them in the winter because they don’t need the extra nutrition.

“They actually need to lose weight from fall until spring; this is the natural situation for all wildlife. They have adapted to these conditions. We are very enthusiastic about raising bison. They are fun to have, and it’s great to be able to make a decent living and pass this on to my grandkids.

“I know a guy on Kodiak Island who has some bison, where the big bears live. He used to have Hereford cattle and lost a lot of his calves to bears. After he started raising bison he very seldom loses one of them to bears. The mother cows are very protective of their calves. I have seen where bison have stomped coyotes into the dirt and they are dead.

“I highly recommend to anyone to take some classes in Holistic Management. I don’t know why it is so hard for people to change their minds, but maybe it’s because they’ve done something for so long.

“The more success stories like ours—and other people who have done what we’ve done—the better. There are ways to make it work. It’s all about the organic matter in the soil. For every 1% increase in organic matter, a cubic foot of soil will hold several more gallons of water. It’s not that we don’t get enough rain here, it’s that when we do get it, most of it runs down the creek and we don’t capture it. The more organic matter in the soil, the more water it can hold. By grazing the way we do, it will keep getting better over time. I know people who have done this longer than we have, and they say they have not reached the top yet. Everything keeps changing, and the more organic matter you have, the more organisms you have in the soil, the healthier it is, and the more water it will hold. It just all makes sense.

“If I was ever forced to go back to ranching the way I used to, I would not be ranching! I was working all the time and felt older then than I do today, because I just never could get caught up. We were always behind and I had no time for the kids. I would leave in the morning before they got up and they’d be in bed before I got in at night. That’s not a good way to live.”

Helping Farmers in the Northeast

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 particular farm. I have done that, in some capacity, with all eight farms that I have been working with in this program.

“The strengths I have developed through this program permeate into my non-direct whole farm planning work as well. Rather than sitting down with the farmer and saying we are going to do Holistic Management and some elemental farm planning, I make sure that I spent at least two meetings in which the farmers understand those principles and practices as the platform for whatever work we do.

“We develop a holistic goal, run through what the decision-testing questions, and how you create an action plan and monitor those actions. Then I spend some time just getting to know the farm and the farmer in what seems like a casual way—so I can glean what that farm, farmer or farm family values are, and find out what is important to them. I learn about their history, what their long-term goals are, the state of their business and where they feel the pinch points are.”

Stevie has worked with one farm on pricing and how their cost of production would change with an enterprise they are transitioning. With another farmer she helped her with land planning and market planning. Yet with other farms she helps them with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.

On the actual farming end of it, this can be a very important and helpful step for many farmers to realize there are some options and doors that can open. “We do have service providers in our area who are able to give some direct financial record-keeping analysis or help in creating marketing plans, developing products and enterprises and production techniques and efficiencies but there are not very many people in our area who can help the farmer focus on the whole farm in making decisions in alignment with your values,” says Stevie. “This is something that I have been driven more toward, with HMI and wholefarm planning—which is more than land planning or business planning.”

These conversations are intimate discussions and she has learned a lot of people skills while doing these one on one meetings. “I am not sure if this is something that can be taught through Holistic Management, but it is very necessary--to build trust with the people we work with—to provide individual assistance and not just cookie-cutter assistance,” says Stevie.

“It’s not just a business for them. It’s also someone’s life or legacy, their family members and relationships. It gets pretty intimate, very quickly. This is something that takes a certain amount of finesse and I am enjoying developing this skill.”

Improving Wildlife Habitat with Cattle

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11 covering 20 cows.

All of these changes have moved Rancho Tres Papalotes toward their vision of a sustainable and resilient ranch, providing not only employment and business for humans through a commercial ranch, but also an oasis of grassland in a critical grassland bird habitat for thousands of birds and other wildlife. In this way, Enrique and Carolina’s use of Holistic Management has enabled them to create a ripple effect that has spread across thousands of miles and to other lands that are on the flyway of

Enrique has been working hard to improve the herd genetics. The bulls are Angus and Hereford, and he focuses on keeping only the cows that perform, culling strictly. All cows are expected to have a calf each year and culls are sold at the sale barn. They aim for an average cow weight of 350-400 kg (772-882 pounds).

Enrique is proud that the cattle are now more docile than when he first started to manage the ranch as the cattle are moved more frequently and he has been working with his three employees on better livestock handling skills. With improved animal management and genetics, death losses have dropped to 5%. Birthing rates are now 75%. When Enrique started on the ranch birthing rates had been 50% with a continuous breeding program all year long. The breeding season is now three months long with each bull