Balanced Stewardship of the Land to Save the Prairie

If you spend any time at all on the prairie, someone is going to hurl that quote by Willa Cather at you, about how anyone can love a mountain, but it takes a soul to love a prairie. It’s normally offered with both apology and pride: “Look, we know the prairie is subtle, but we’re the kind of people who can appreciate subtle things.” The thing about being subtle is that it’s easy to be undervalued, and for a great deal of the grassland, that means converting prairie to commodity farming and losing thousands of acres of quietly crucial prairie ecosystem. The prairie needs preservation, which is how The Nature Conservancy ended up partnering with a rancher to run a historic ranch in eastern Colorado. Going Way Back Fox Ranch sits on Colorado’s eastern border next to Kansas and Nebraska, on a corner of the prairie that looks nothing like the flat expanse that you may have seen out your car window as you pass through middle America’s miles of grassland. Here you’ll find canyons, dunes, sagebrush, cottonwood trees that sound like a river when the wind rushes through them, pronghorns, box turtles, rattlesnakes, burrowing owls, and entire prairie dog cities. The Fox has been a ranch in one form or another since settlers first arrived in Yuma County in the late 19th century, but in 2000, the ranch was acquired by a different kind of owner: The Nature Conservancy. Before visiting Fox Ranch, my understanding of the role of cattle in conservation was tied to my first job, working for the Forest Service. At 15, I joined the Job Corps with the hopes of getting to work for the Okanogan Gazette as a photojournalist. Instead, I was brought to the ranger station and assigned to trail after a couple of young ornithologists studying goshawk habitat. We would hike for hours to the most remote parts of the national forest, only to find a cow standing in the middle of a stream, defecating. The ecologists I was assisting complained about the relationship that ranchers had with the National Forests, lamenting the fact that a domestic animal would be allowed to damage the environment they were so deeply invested in. My two take-aways from time with the Goshawk crew were that I needed my work to involve being outside in the world, and that cattle are an ecological disaster whose presence needs active conservation efforts to mitigate. And I’m not alone in feeling uneasy about animal agriculture. When we’re talking about farming animals as a large commercial industry, we’re talking about one of our world’s biggest ecological issues. Animal agriculture uses 83% of the world’s farmland and contributes over 50% of all agricultural emissions. Cattle are a driving factor in climate change, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to include them in conservation, or ways to bring the carbon hoofprint down to a more reasonable size. Cattle are a large part of the conservation plan at Fox Ranch. Forty minutes on a sandy road from anywhere, we find a place singing to balance, to abundance, and to the idea that the undomesticated can exist, even thrive, alongside a cultivated human and bovine existence. Perhaps that’s where Cather’s prairie soul truly dwells – in the possibility of those working to balance the land. Underappreciation Leading to Loss Tyler Smith, the conservationist at Fox Ranch, is a true lover of the prairie and an advocate for the role cattle can play in conservation. A native of Colorado, Smith came back from the East Coast for the big skies and the grass. “I think our grasslands are so underappreciated,” Smith said as we stared over the edge of a canyon, “and one of the most endangered terrestrial ecosystems on the planet, because they’re flat, they’re easy to convert into agriculture.” At that moment we were looking at a grassland that was decidedly not flat; beyond the canyon, an immense sea of grasses lapped at the Arickaree River’s cottonwood tree border. Below us, burrowing owls and prairie dogs peeked out from their holes, using rock features as protection. The Fox’s geography is an outlier in the region, and part of the reason it’s stayed prairie is that it would be almost impossible to convert it to farmland. However, Smith is generally right about the ease of conversion to commodity farming. If you’ve ever flown over plains country and seen circular patterns in fields, then you’ve seen what the conversion of grassland to center-pivot ag looks like. Monocrop farming impacts soil health through tilling and fertilizer practices, and pollinators through pesticides and loss of diverse habitat. We pay a hefty environmental price to separate ourselves so deeply from our food chain, to create whole food systems that don’t contribute positively to our ecosystem and instead compromise the survival of its elements. Fox Ranch is an experiment in braiding conservation and cattle together, balancing what’s best for the land with what’s best for ranchers and their community. And it’s working. The ranch hosts eight species of fish on the Arickaree River, and conservation work has helped to keep what Smith calls “woody encroachment” at bay through efforts to remove eastern red cedar before it establishes itself on grassland. They have also seen sand bluestem, a native grass that signifies soil health, bounce back through careful grazing practices. The 350 calf/cow pairs that live at the Fox are constantly being shifted over its 14,700 acres; in fact, Smith tells me, they never graze in the same place twice in the same year. The Historic Role of a Ruminant The Great Plains, which the Fox is a part of, are in a deep relationship with ruminant grazing animals, first with the bison, and for the last few hundred years with cattle. If you want to preserve grassland, you need grazing animals. Ruminants convert grass into fertilizer, providing the nutrients plants need in order to grow. They also create habitat and food for the insects who feed animals like wild turkeys and prairie chickens. On my trip out to Colorado, I stopped at the Wind River Reservation to meet Jason and Patti Baldes, who the poet Chris La Tray introduced as the “Indian power couple” bringing buffalo back to native lands for their respective tribes. Their experiences with rematriarching buffalo are moving on emotional and ecological levels, stories of tribal members reconnecting with who they are along with the ways plants and insects flourish in buffalo wallows. In his book In the Country of the Kaw, James Locklear explained the relationship between bison and the shortgrass prairie: “Elegant is not a word that springs to mind when contemplating a bison, but there was a profound ecological elegance in the relationship between bison and shortgrass prairie. I wonder if there is another place on Earth where the grazer and the grazed were so well fitted to one another.” Patti took me through her own experiences of the elegant symbiotic nature of a buffalo and their habitat, the way their sharp hooves aerate the soil, the way their beards spread seeds. I, a vegan since my days with the Forest Service nearly thirty years ago, may seem to have very different feelings about the role animals and humans play in the food system than the Baldeses, but we overlap in our beliefs that creating a sustainable food and ecosystem is paramount to combating the polycrisis. Though cattle are not as beneficial to the prairie ecosystem as bison, they help preserve the prairie by providing an economic benefit to the ranching community in Yuma County, Colorado, in ways that bison wouldn’t be able to. Because cattle are incompatible land users with center-pivot agriculture, their presence as an economic driver keeps prairie from going under the plow to become a monoculture farming entity. In my brief stint with the Forest Service, I learned about the plants and small animals that make up a successful goshawk ecosystem. Most of my time was spent looking for habitat, trailing the grad students and professional ecologists that made up the goshawk team through the Okanogan wilderness. I learned to love the art of observation, of understanding the ways a wildflower could indicate the food source for a foodsource of a hawk. Green Energy Isn’t Always for the Birds With birds and their habitat being at the pivotal to of my environmental awakening, it was hard not to fall in love with the greater prairie chicken. They’re elaborately costumed in stripes and bright colors, and their mating ritual includes making booming noises with their wings. So, when their numbers started to fall, the Nature Conservancy stepped in to figure out why, and what to do about it. Fox Ranch is prime prairie chicken land, so naturally, they became a priority. Smith explained that most of the issue is a loss of their habitats; prairie chickens are ground nesters, so habitat conversion to monocrop farming has been a major contributor to their downfall. But another surprising problem has been Colorado’s push for green energy. Wind and solar farms are constructed out on the eastern plains, and they need utility lines to connect the power they generate to the people who use it. “Utility lines are really great places for raptors to perch, and raptors are probably the number one predator of prairie chickens,” Smith said. “Prairie chickens didn’t have high things that they lived around, and now they have all these utility lines and these really high posts for raptors to find them and prey on them.” Here is where cattle become prairie chicken heroes. Nathan Andrews, who runs the ranching side of Fox Ranch, has found a way to feed his herd without exposing the prairie chicken. When cattle bring a patch of grass down to around 14 inches, Andrews moves the cattle on to the next plot, leaving the perfect amount of cover to protect prairie chickens from hawks and other predators. This system has worked incredibly well for restoring the prairie chicken population to the ranch. “It’s not necessarily uncommon to be out there, especially in the winter, and flush out 20 to 50 prairie chickens at once, which is basically unheard of,” Smith said. “One of our staff entered it into one of those nature apps. And it rejected it because it didn’t believe that she counted 48 birds.” “If It’s Good for the Bird, It’s Good for the Herd” Burnidge, Smith’s predecessor at the Nature Conservancy, was one of the people who set up the Fox Ranch to be both a working ranch and a conservation property. In other parts of the West, The Nature Conservancy works with tribal leadership to re-establish buffalo on the prairie. But on the Fox, Burnidge explained why they chose cattle over the arguably ecologically superior bison. “No ranch is an island. And so if you need to have good community relations. And if you want to do that, finding a way to work with the local community, in a sense, culturally is very important,” Burnidge told me over the phone, explaining how they recognized the power of working with the local community instead of bringing in outsiders. The land that is now Fox Ranch was historically part of the regional hunting grounds for the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute tribes. Since the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and the subsequent relocation of those tribes, these lands have been under the stewardship of cattle ranchers, so that’s the community that the Nature Conservancy turned to. “We recognize that ruminant grazing is important, and practically speaking, going with cattle served a pragmatic need that is very difficult to do with bison,” Burnidge said. He explained that if you are in an area without an established tribal presence, you have to bring someone new into the community who is willing to become a part of the existing community. Since this is ranching country, it made sense to continue with the culture of cattle. “Everybody is deeply attached, from a cultural standpoint, to their livestock. And everybody cares about the health and well-being of their animals, whether they see them as a commodity product or as a relation,” Burnridge said. A Call for Prairie Heroes The Nature Conservancy put out an open call for proposals from ranchers, and that call was met with glossy pamphlets and pitches with charts and graphs. Amongst all of those professional pitches, there was one from a 21-year-old rancher and his dad. “Nathan and his dad put together one page; one-sided, 10-point font, half-inch margins, single-spaced. It described what they would do economically and ecologically, with actual rationale for why their management would improve ecological outcomes,” Burnidge said. “Now, there was more to come about what ecological outcomes we really wanted to see and how to fit the management to that, but, but with a single, one side of a piece of paper, they clearly stood out as really understanding what we were asking for and so we selected them.” Now in his 40s, Nathan Andrews is an interesting mix of frank, open rancher and cautious official Fox Ranch spokesman. He’s a seventh-generation rancher in eastern Colorado, and he is a part of the land in a way that’s hard for someone from elsewhere to fathom. Andrews sees himself as a steward of the land, and his philosophy is that this land is his livelihood, and so he’s going to make its health a priority. One example of that philosophy in practice is a small, bright-horned variety of native dung beetle. Andrews noticed that there didn’t seem to be enough of them on the ranch, which, according to him, is a concern that universities and grazing managers talk about a lot. Dung beetles do two important things: they eat fly larvae, which prevents flies from irritating cattle, and they tunnel through the cow pies and then down right underneath it into the soil, turning the manure into fertilizer. Andrews wasn’t happy with the number of dung beetles he saw on the ranch, and so, after researching, he found that the ivermectin they had been using for fly control and deworming kills dung beetles and can be active within manure for 150 days after application. The beetle-friendly medication costs around $3,000 a year more than the ivermectin, according to Andrews, but he felt like it was a worthy investment in the future health of the soil. “I’ve never done any dung beetle counts, but you go out into the riparian area and a six-hour-old cow pie will literally be moving with all the dung beetles that are in it. We kind of trust the process, that if we provide them a safe environment, their population will go as high as it can,” Andrews said. Observing and trusting the process is the overlapping part of the Venn diagram between conservation and cattle ranching. “I was raised that you always did the best that you could, and with the thought that you should always improve the land and not just take from it,” Andrews said. Burnidge puts it more bluntly. “They’re motivated to conserve their ranch, you know, just like I’m motivated to paint my house, right?” He acknowledged that the care for the land only carries conservation measures so far. “That doesn’t mean they’re thinking first and foremost about how to improve habitat for a given species. I think privately, most ranchers say they think of themselves as conservationists, often, and they try to do the right thing.” Of course, there’s always a trade-off between ecology and industry. The agreement with the Fox is part of how Andrew’s cattle operation stays affordable. “Conservationists like to say:’ If it’s good for the bird, meaning the wild bird, it’s good for the herd.’ If we think that more grass is generally better for everything, then that’s true. But I think the conservation person who says that discounts the potential costs of doing something that would be better for the bird and therefore better for the herd,” Burnidge said. There’s Always More Pieces of the Puzzle That balance, between economically viable and ecologically sound, can be uncomfortable. Yuma County is also home to some of the largest feedlots in the country. On my way into town to pick up supplies, I pass hundreds of cattle packed into small areas, what’s known as a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. Initially I’m thankful that the animals at the Fox don’t have to experience those conditions. Back at the ranch, I walked the trails across the canyons and prairie, daydreaming about the day that beef is a premium product, raised exclusively by preservationists who love beetles and prairie chickens. It turns out I didn’t understand that feedlots are part of what makes places like the Fox work. Calves are born and raised on grass until they’re six to 12 months old. At that point, they’re loaded up and taken to a feedlot, where they spend six months being fed grain and growing to the size and fat content expected by American beef consumers. “Feedlots are not a pleasant place to have a picnic, right?” Burnidge said. “I’ve just gotten to a point where I don’t think of them as the worst offender.” Though he points out that there are plenty of CAFOs that pollute the water or don’t prioritize animal safety, they are a tradeoff that helps make their conservation efforts possible. If we abolished the feedlot system overnight, Burnidge argues, there would be huge consequences for ranchers like Andrews. “Americans, for good or for ill, are now trained to the taste of corn fed beef, and there would be huge human disruptions in the consumer segment if we did that,” Burnidge warned. He also argues that it would be bad for conservation, because without cattle being economically viable, more grassland would go under the plow and be turned into monoculture commodity farming. “That is worse for water quality. It’s worse for air quality. It’s worse for greenhouse gases, and it’s certainly worse for wildlife, native plants,” Burnidge said. When data gets involved, things get even more complicated. According to Burnidge, beef that’s produced through the feedlot system has a lower greenhouse gas footprint per unit of production than grass-fed beef. That’s because the cattle grow faster in a feedlot, reaching marketable size in less time than their grass-fed counterparts. Dr. Sara Place, an expert in livestock systems sustainability at Colorado State University, agrees with him, though admits that it can be complicated to quantify as results depend on context. “For most analyses, yes, feedlot or grain-finished beef tends to have a lower greenhouse gas footprint per pound of beef than grass-finished,” Place told Daily Yonder in an email interview. Part of this is because grain-fed beef are ready for slaughter sooner than those that are grass-finished. But Place noted that feeding grain also lowers the methane amounts that are naturally emitted from ruminants like cattle. “The faster growth rate and decreased methane emissions combine to typically mean fewer emissions produced per steer, and more beef produced per animal,” according to Place, who pointed me towards a study that looks directly at greenhouse gas impact in the ways cattle are raised. She noted that things rapidly become too complex to effectively quantify when you start looking at the value of keeping land from going under the plow versus the greenhouse gas and other emissions caused by raising meat cattle. “That said, there’s reports from WWF and peer-reviewed publications that argue this case – keeping grass in grass and root side down is the most important thing to consider,” Place wrote. And when I’m standing out in the fields of the Fox, I feel like she’s right; this is the most important thing to consider, both ecologically and, for lack of a better term, spiritually. When I’m looking at a feedlot, it feels more like what happens when you’re trying to quantify something that feels deeply unquantifiable: what existing means to another creature. Like my time with the Forest Service, I was essentially a traveler through someone else’s life’s work. As a teenager, I left my goshawk job with an understanding that was formed only by the experience and wisdom of ecologists who had no economic skin in the game. This time, I headed home with a deep sense of gratitude that other people were working towards a future that contains a sustainable prairie ecosystem and an economically viable way of life. Burnidge put it perfectly. “The cow is how you harvest the grass and turn it into something of value economically, spiritually and nutritionally. There’s an ethical component to this as well, about how we produce protein for people that helps sustain ecological systems in rural communities as well.”