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Rafter W Ranch— Surviving Droughts & Pandemics

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Lance and Lisa Wheeler started ranching on a small scale 16 years ago. They had been living in Elizabeth, Colorado and discovered Joel Salatin’s writings. “This generated a paradigm shift in our thinking about how to manage the land in other ways besides the conventional methods,” Lance says.

“We kept reading Salatin’s books and articles and then in 2014 we bought a larger piece of property near Simla, Colorado, and then some additional property next to it in 2016, and we moved there.”

In 2018 they went to their first Holistic Management course. Lance and son, Brett, took the Whole Farm Land Management course at Sunfire Ranch in 2018 with Cindy Dvergsten. “I love Cindy, because she asks hard questions and is willing to challenge your thinking,” Lance says.

Lance and Lisa had been navigating their own way in terms of rotational grazing and management intensive grazing while reading books on the subject, then the Holistic Management education really solidified that process. “It’s a decision-making process, and not just rotational grazing and moving electric fence; it involves the way you make good, solid decisions about where you are and when you should or shouldn’t be there. This is what got us to where we are today,” Lance explains.

“The other learning experience, for us, was to look at things as a whole and more than just the sum of their parts, in a view of holism. We had not been taking everything into account, like our wildlife and the other things that live here with us besides the animals we put on the land. We now try to manage for the benefit of the larger whole.”

Drought & Progress

It is with that focus on continued learning that Wheelers have been able to make progress even with the drought that has been part of the landscape in recent years. One step in that educational journey was going through an Audubon certification program a few years ago. Now they are much more aware of their bird populations as well as where the cattle and sheep are grazing. “We now have some antelope, which we did not have here in earlier years. I was talking with my Holistic Management educator about that a couple years ago and she likened it to what I would call a “Field of Dreams” concept-- if you build it, they will come. If you create the right conditions, they will come,” Lance says.

With the recent drought, they pulled their cattle off the range pastures earlier than they ever have, in the interests of maintaining plant health and, hopefully, some additional diversity as spring moves forward this year.

“It has been a learning curve for us, but we also realize that if a person is not making mistakes—not failing at something—they may not be trying quite hard enough. We are trying some different things each year, to see what works and does well, and what doesn’t, and then move forward from that lesson. This has been very helpful in the Holistic Management decision-making process, to assess these things, to know if we are moving in the right direction, and if we are not, we try to figure out why. Then we can make informed decisions,” he says.

“It’s been an interesting journey for us. We make mistakes and get frustrated occasionally with some things over time, but it’s still all positive. We are seeing a lot more grass species and diversity showing up, so we realize our efforts are yielding some results, and that’s always encouraging.

“We are still in a pretty severe drought, so we have no cattle on pasture right now. We are feeding hay, and committed to keeping all of them off pasture until the end of June. That way we can monitor forage growth through April, May and June and see where we are. We had some snow in March, so we are grateful for that.”

Low Maintenance Animals

Lance and Lisa now have a meat-finishing and direct-marketing operation. “Our herd of cows consists of mixed breeds,” says Lance. “This is part of my experimentation; we have some Angus cows, some crossbreds that we got from a grass-fed genetic program west of us, and now we’ve also acquired some Dexter cows. I like the Dexter cattle, even though they are smaller.

“With the finishing program, we are comparing our end product, based on the animals’ genetic profile. So far, the smaller cows are producing really high-quality fattened meat on grass. Our larger cows—the Angus— are more difficult to do this with on their purebred offspring; we have to work quite a bit harder to get that same quality, especially if the forages are challenging, like last year. It was really difficult to get those purebred Angus yearlings to fatten. So we bought a Dexter bull and we’re going to raise an F1 cross out of the Angus cows and see how that turns out,” Lance explains. This will hopefully produce animals with a more moderate frame size (not as large as the Angus) and a genetic profile that will work

Rafter W Ranch

better for grass finishing.

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“We also have some Katahdin sheep, which are hair sheep and just a meat breed,” Lance says. “We wanted a good-quality meat sheep and to not have to deal with shearing and wool, and these sheep produce very nice quality lambs. We’ve tried the meat and enjoyed it, and this breed seems to be well suited for where we are and what we are doing.

“We have some chickens as layers, and sell eggs. During spring and summer we also raise some pastured poultry and sell whole chickens. We raise about 600 of those each year.”

In their area the Wheelers don’t have much problem with predators. “We occasionally lose a chicken, because we have owls and hawks as well as coyotes, but we have pretty ‘good’ coyotes here,” says Lance. “They haven’t bothered our sheep, possibly because they have plenty of natural food. One of our neighbors sent us an article last year from Oregon State University Extension Service about coyote populations, and how to gauge whether you have a good population or a bad one. There are coyotes everywhere, but if your local coyotes aren’t bothering you, it pays to not bother them.” If you kill off the ‘good’ ones, they might be replaced by some that are more predatory on livestock.

“The coyotes here are ever-present. We hear them all the time, but they don’t bother our animals; they help keep other wildlife populations (mice, rodents, etc.) in check.”

Educating Consumers

The Wheelers direct market their meat through their website and via the internet and Facebook. “As our operation has grown, word of mouth has also been a factor and many people learn about us that way,” says Lance. “There are also some search platforms like Eat Wild where people look for more natural food products and may find us that way.

“Our ranch is connected with the Weston A. Price Foundation locally, which is group of more traditional-food-oriented people interested in traditional cooking. We try to sell the whole animal and do as much noseto-tail marketing as we possibly can. The Weston A. Price people are really good for this; they like a lot of the organ meats and other products from the whole animal. We make an effort to minimize any waste that might ordinarily be discarded when an animal is butchered, and if possible, any waste is composted.”.

Lance would also like to facilitate a broader context or a coalition of people to help educate the public a bit more about the food choices they make, and that where they purchase that food really matters, in a broader way.

“It’s not just that it’s healthy food, but they will know what that animal was doing while it was living, and how it was raised—and why it matters that the soil and landscape where it was raised was managed well. We hope to help people understand that they are participating in the healing of the land when they purchase from us,” he says.

“I think something like this would lend benefit to a lot of producers—for the public to have some additional information, to make really intentional buying decisions.”

The pandemic last year revealed that we need more local food supply in every community. “Many people couldn’t find meat in the grocery store and got on Google to see where they could find some, and they found not just us, but producers all over Colorado who are doing some amazing things and providing amazing food. Until the pandemic, most consumers never even knew those producers were there,” he says.

“We’ve met some great families who found us this way. We acquired a number of new customers who wanted to get out of town a little bit and were willing to drive all the way out to our ranch for a day and stroll around to visit cows and chickens see how they are raised.

“When a family makes a trip out here to our place, we try to give them a pleasant experience. We put them in an RTV and take a drive around and give them a ranch tour. If there are deer or antelope around, they enjoy seeing the wildlife. We also have a guard llama that roams around with the sheep, and they seem to enjoy that, too. It’s been a lot of fun to give these tours; to see the enjoyment that they get from it.”

Lance and Lisa plan to continue with their production and marketing systems and simply fine-tune what they are doing. “The biggest challenge going forward, because of where we are in Colorado, is going to be access to additional land,” says Lance. “Besides the ranch we are on, we also lease some additional property, but presently there is a lot of land changing hands, and it is very high priced. Much of it is being subdivided for home construction, and it’s hard to compete with that. So land access, especially to lease anything of reasonable size, is becoming a greater challenge.”

The ranch they are on is about 1,000 acres, but since it is rangeland it won’t run very many animals per acre. “We have been leasing another 200 acres but some of it was recently sold and subdivided. I would love to apply what we have learned thus far to larger areas of pastureland, but this goal is becoming a bigger challenge, to find more space,” he says.

“This year, especially with the drought, I think we’re going to just concentrate on what we have right now. We did sell off some cattle and haven’t raised as many sheep this year as we have in the past, because of the drought. We won’t expand until we are confident that we have consistent land access and enough rain/snow to facilitate it.”

Despite the challenges of land access and drought, the Wheelers continue to enjoy living their dream of running a ranch, raising good food for their family and their community. As demand for locally grown, regeneratively raised food continues to grow, the Wheelers are positioned to tap into that market through their growing business.