by Dr. Barry Dunn

One of the fun and provocative books of recent years is Robert Fulghum's "All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten:  Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things".  Mr. Fulghum takes the complex and sophisticated world around us and through a series of short, true-life stories, reduces it down to some simple truths, most of which we had all learned by the time we were in kindergarten.  Things like "share everything", "play fair", "clean up your own mess", "put things back where you found them", and "when you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together".  Pretty good advice!

Certainly the world of ranching has grown to be a very sophisticated and complicated business.  Investments of land, labor, and capital into this business are extremely high.  The market place is a roller coaster that makes the amusement park version pale by comparison.  And even though we have been on it before, it remains a wild ride!  Mother Nature continually fools us with snowstorms in April, as we wait impatiently for tulips, Pasqueflowers, and enough grass to free us from feeding hay.  But are there simple truths about ranching, like Mr. Fulghum's about life, that sometimes get lost in the busy and increasingly complex world around us?  Perhaps!  I humbly offer a few that I have learned, sometimes forget, but always return to:

Leave the land that has been placed in your care, in better condition than when you began managing it.  This stewardship ethic was first communicated to me as my brothers and I rode across the prairie with our grandfather in his Chevy pickup.  We were along to open and shut gates, and in retrospect, to serve as an audience for an old rancher who was trying to communicate his core values to three little boys.  He explained why he built cross fences, developed watering facilities, planted trees, and inter-seeded native warm season grasses in go-back fields.  He taught us about the life of a burrowing owl and the importance of what I have now come to know as the water cycle to his ranching operation.  We are also instructed on the practical aspects of ranching, like to always close the gate behind you (which could be a metaphor in itself).

Take half and leave half of each year's pasture growth.  This research-tested rule of thumb is a highly worthwhile guideline to manage plants.  The importance of root reserves adequate for a plant to survive the winter and vigorous growth the next year is indisputable.  Conservative stocking rates allows roots to penetrate more deeply making plants more competitive, drought resistance, winter tolerant and productive over the long haul.

Never graze the same pasture at the same time two years in a row.  This simple concept can be one of the building blocks of most rotational grazing systems.  It builds in seasonal changes of use.  It stimulates diversity by giving both warm and cool season plants periods of rest to assure vigor and high levels of production.

Calve to grass.  Comparing survey data from the late 1970's to data from the 1990's, South Dakota ranchers have moved their beginning calving dates from late April to early March.  However, recent research reports from SDSU and the University of Nebraska show calving in May or June to be very competitive production systems when compared to traditional March calving.  While many factors must be considered when determining a beginning calving date, matching your cows nutritional needs and production schedule to the availability of green grass can lower feed costs and reduce the exposure of newborn calves to winter weather.

Cows are lazy.  How much money, time, and energy have been spent trying to move cows around the prairie?  Fencing, water developments, moving salt and minerals, pasture rotations of all sorts and designs, herding and now even fire are all cowboy schemes to address when must be a law of nature.  Cows are lazy!  They spot graze and overgraze if they aren't forced to move around.  Perhaps we should select for cows and bulls that have some ambition and like to move around.  The reality is that reasonable inputs of labor and facilities are necessary to efficiently and effectively harvest grass with cows.

Manage is a verb.  While ranchers are often the victim of many things, including policy decisions and big business, ranchers also make choices.  And with choice comes responsibility.  Stocking rates, stock densities, time of calving, investment levels, and all of their consequences, both positive and negative fall to the manager.

Perhaps we can collectively build and share a list of things that have some basic truths that perhaps all of us have learned, but sometimes forget.  Please send or e-mail me your thoughts and ideas about the prairie, pastures, livestock and the business that we base our lives on.  We can write a book!

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May 2001

According to engineers, the strongest geometric form is the triangle.  A triangle is the basic shape of the trusses in the roof of most homes and buildings and many bridges.  I became aware of the amazing strength of a triangle as I helped my son Tommy with his 7^th grade science bridge building project.  He designed a bridge and built a model of it out of balsa wood.  The bridge weighed 25 grams.  It was about a foot long.  During the strength test, it supported a bucket with 50lbs of sand hanging from its center.  This simple little model bridge, designed with triangles as its basic form, supported 4,400 times it’s own weight!

Could a ranch be that strong and that simple?  What would the three sides of a fundamental ranch triangle represent?  Certainly a ranch has more than three components.  But could it have only three fundamental principles that make it strong?  Perhaps!  After years of ranching, talking to ranchers and studying ranching, I would suggest that they are DIVERSITY, FLEXIBILITY, and SIMPLICITY.

SIMPLICITY.  As I studied the profitability of ranches in the Northern Great Plains over the last several years I was struck by how simple successful operations were.  They weren’t necessarily the ranches that applied the most technology.  They seemed to apply appropriate levels of technology based on an inherent sense of returns on investment.  They weren’t ranches with the most complex cattle management system.  They were ranches with straightforward management and clear, achievable goals.  And while they usually included extended family or employees, they seemed to have a realistic sense of the people carrying capacity of their operation as well as the livestock carrying capacity.

DIVERSITY.  The importance of ecological diversity is widely recognized and discussed.  Grasslands that have diverse plant and animal populations have improved long-term resiliency in the face of periodic drought, provides livestock with a smorgasbord of highly nutritious plants over the length of the growing season, and has improved water and mineral cycles.  Ranches that have applied the principles of diversity to livestock marketing benefit from improved cash flows, and reduce their risk in the marketplace.  Multiple species grazing and running multiple classes of livestock are also ways to increase diversity and add strength to a ranching operation.  For example, dedicating 25% of the carrying capacity of a ranch that has historically been a cow-calf outfit to yearlings can improve ranch profitability by decreasing labor requirements, and by taking advantage of the efficient and rapid gains of cattle in the “best” part of their growth curve.  While grazing sheep certainly presents many challenges, it also provides many opportunities.  Biological weed control and a market that is counter-cyclical to the cattle market, are just two of many ways they add diversity to a ranch or grazing operation.

FLEXIBILITY.  Scientific research of rangelands clearly shows that the best operational management decision in the face of a drought like we had last year is rapid de-stocking.  Again, running a portion of the carrying capacity of our ranches as yearlings allows for such a response.  Yearlings are very liquid are sought after by the large feedlots.  They also add financial flexibility by improving cash flow, and taking advantage of different markets.  From a grazing point of view, ranchers have successfully used “lead/follow” systems with yearlings and cows in grazing systems very successfully.  They also can reduce they total ranch requirement for harvested feed, because they can be purchased right in front of the grazing season.

These are just a few of my thoughts and ideas.  As you travel this summer either back and forth with a baler across an alfalfa field or up and down the highways and gravel roads of South Dakota, I would like to challenge you to think about ways to make a ranch both simple and strong.  Like a triangle!

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June 2001

In the journals from his extraordinary travels, the explorer Marco Polo wrote of his encounters with unicorns.  Unicorns?  We all know that unicorns only exist in fairy tales!  So what on earth was he referring to?  Based on the region in northern Africa where he made his sightings, experts speculate that Marco Polo was referring to what we now know of as a rhinoceros.  A rhinoceros is a four-legged mammal that has a single horn on its head, just like a unicorn.

Marco Polo’s unicorn is a great example of the power of mental models, often referred to as paradigms.  In the culture in which he had been raised, unicorns were an important part of stories and common in art.  When he came upon a strange looking four-legged animal with a horn on its head, he categorized it the best way he could, as a unicorn.  Our mental models have been constructed just as rigidly as his were.  We know that unicorns do not exist, but rhinoceroses do!

In the promotion of the principles of Integrated Resource Management (IRM), I have frequently spoken of the advantages that native warm season grasses add to a ranching operation.  They add diversity to pastures and can improve cattle performance during the hot part of the summer when cool season grasses become dormant.  A common response from audiences from Nebraska and the Dakotas to Wisconsin has been that “native grasses won’t grow here.”  That is an example of a powerful mental model!  By its very definition a native grass can grow in the country that it is “native” to.

Many farmers and ranchers remark to me that their pastures no longer have native grass.  Smooth bromegrass and Kentucky bluegrass have invaded so many pastures and are so grazing tolerant, that many feel that “native grasses won’t grow here.”  Sadly, we have all witnessed pastures in that condition, but as I have walked across pastures in South Dakota, it has become clear that while smooth bromegrass and bluegrass are powerful competitors, native grasses are still important components of most pastures.  It is very common this time of year to walk through pastures with knee-high mature bromegrass and bluegrass and see cattle eating native grasses down to the crowns of the plant.  The trouble is, it is our pattern of use of pastures that favors invaders like bluegrass and bromegrass and leads to the overuse of native species.  Ralph Cole, the retired NRCS Range Conservationist from Rapid City, often recommended grazing pastures that have been invaded with cool season grasses heavily in May, giving them a rest during June, July and August, and then grazing them again in the fall.  Even grazing a pasture with replacement heifers in late April and May, and then following them with cows and calves for the rest of the season can be a powerful strategy to fight the battle against these invaders.  Ralph’s idea was to let cattle harvest these grasses when they were at their nutritional peak.  He also wanted to take away the advantages provided brome and bluegrass by the annual spring deferment we give them.

Mental models are powerful drivers of our behavior.  Is a four-legged mammal with a horn on its head a rhinoceros or a unicorn?  Are bromegrass and bluegrass invaders or grasses to be used early in the spring to reduce our dependency on harvested feed?  One thing is for sure; native grasses grow here!

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August 2001

Cattle won’t eat!

Over the years I have been told by a variety of people that cattle won’t eat the following grasses and plants: little bluestem, prairie cordgrass, garrison creeping foxtail, reed canary grass, common reed, switchgrass, cheatgrass, most of the needlegrasses, thistles, and most of the other forbs. With plenty of examples across this state of pastures eaten down shorter than most lawns, it would appear that there are plenty of examples that cattle are very willing to eat EVERYTHING (except leafy spurge, cedar trees, bull thistles, and red threeawn). I have seen calves eat the blossoms off of flodman’s thistles. A veterinarian friend of mine had a case where cows poisoned themselves eating car batteries out of a rancher’s dump. They can practically eat a grove of trees if a fence is down. During the winter, cows grazing winter range will eat yucca plants. The fact is that cows will eat pine needles, which can cause what is known as pine needle abortion. So why are there so many examples of cattle not eating grasses that are so common in our pastures and rangelands?

I think one of the simplest and best answers is simply timing. Almost all grasses, forbs and trees are palatable to cattle at certain points of their life cycle. The problem is that we don’t always have cattle in pastures when some of the grasses are tasty to cattle. Or sometimes certain areas of pastures are simply unavailable during the time when the grasses that like to grow there are most palatable. So, if there are alternative grasses or forbs to eat, cattle will, leaving the impression that cattle don’t like certain grasses. A good example would be grasses that grow in wetland type areas, like garrison creeping foxtail and reed canary grass. Both are cool season grasses that like their "feet wet". So often during the spring when they are in their vegetative state and actually very palatable, it can just be too wet for cattle to get to the areas where they are growing. When it does dry up in July and August and cattle can physically get into the wetland areas, the plants are course and unpalatable.

Bunch grasses also can cause a problem. Little bluestem often appears from a distance not to be grazed, but up close it is usually clear that while cattle avoid the wolf plants, they are eating little bluestem.

Changing the season of use of a pasture either with rotating deferments or rotational grazing systems are our best tools at reducing the negative effects of cattle’s selectivity of diet. While yearlings may suffer some reduction in performance, cows and calves should be just fine. Trust me, cattle will eat switch grass, little bluestem, garrison creeping foxtail, reed canary grass, prairie cordgrass, and the needlegrasses! It is just a matter of timing.

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