Stewards of the Grasslands: Canadian Ranchers in Their Own Words 303123264X, 9783031232640

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Dana Reiter

Stewards of the Grasslands Canadian Ranchers in Their Own Words

Stewards of the Grasslands

Dana Reiter

Stewards of the Grasslands Canadian Ranchers in Their Own Words

Dana Reiter Departments of Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences University of British Columbia Kelowna, BC, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-23264-0    ISBN 978-3-031-23265-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge my deepest gratitude to the many people who supported my work on this book, beginning with the Liber Ero Fellowship program for their generous support of this research project. I would like to thank the staff of the Alberta Conservation Association, BC Cattlemen’s Association, Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation, the South of the Divide Conservation Action Program Inc. (SODCAP Inc.), and the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association who suggested ranchers to be interviewed for the book. I greatly appreciate the graciousness and generosity of the ranchers themselves who invited me into their homes and shared their history and grassland management expertise with me; Gord and Colin Adams, Phil Adams, Ken and Nora Balog, Michael Burgess, Warren Burles, Katelyn Durec, Kelcy Elford, Doug and Erika Fossen, Doug and Colleen Gillespie, Thomas and Felicity Hagan, Scott Hainsworth, Doug and Anita Jensen, Jody Larson, John Ross, Kirk Thompson and Jerrilynn Marshall, and David and Susan Zirnhelt. I would like to thank the Grasslands Conservation Council of BC and the World Wildlife Fund for granting permission to use their maps and the following for the use of their photos: Doug Fossen, Michael Burgess, Ian Routley, Katelyn Durec, birds of Canada/animalia.bio, Doug Jensen, Colin Starkevich, Warren Burles, Richard Klafki, Adam Moltzahn, Thomas Hagan, Doug Collicutt, NatureNorth.com. I also appreciate the sage advice, guidance, kindness, and goodwill of my two Liber Ero postdoctoral research supervisors, Dr Lael Parrott of the University of British Columbia and Dr Jeremy Pittman of the University of Waterloo. I would also like to thank my publisher, Zachary Romano of Springer Press, who was very supportive and helpful.

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It was such a great pleasure to meet all these wonderful ranching families, and it was heartwarming to experience their generosity of spirit in sharing their histories and knowledge so openly with me, and by extension, everyone who reads this book. I dedicate this book to my father, Ed Twarowski, who I can never thank enough for all he, and my mother, Anita, did, to provide me with a fabulous childhood on our farm.

Acknowledgments

Contents

1 Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Wallace Stegner Understood������������������������������������������������������������    1 Grasslands����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5 Remaining Grasslands in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba����������������������������������������������������������   10 Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) and the Multiple Species at Risk (MULTISAR) Programs��������������   12 2 In Their Own Words����������������������������������������������������������������������   19 Circle Y Ranch ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   19 Bar 7 Ranch��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   30 Bar 15 Ranch Limited����������������������������������������������������������������������   38 Shelly and Jody Larson��������������������������������������������������������������������   46 3 Building a Country������������������������������������������������������������������������   55 Milk River Cattle Company Limited ����������������������������������������������   55 Circle A Ranch��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   73 Elford Ranch������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   80 Dry Coulee Jensen Ranch����������������������������������������������������������������   87 4 Contemplating the Future ������������������������������������������������������������   99 Cabin Creek Ranch/Burles Cattle����������������������������������������������������   99 Maple Coulee Ranch������������������������������������������������������������������������  106 Kenora Ranching�����������������������������������������������������������������������������  118 5 Building a Dream ��������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 D&S Zirnhelt Ranch������������������������������������������������������������������������  127 Flying T Ranch��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  138 6 Always Innovating�������������������������������������������������������������������������  143 Hagan Valley Ranch ������������������������������������������������������������������������  143 G&B Farms Ltd ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  155 HHH Ranch��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  161 7 Conclusion��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  169 Glossary��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  173 Selected Bibliography����������������������������������������������������������������������������  179 Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  181 vii

About the Author

Dana Reiter  is a Liber Ero Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. She is interested in the intersection of sustainability, community engagement, and technological, social, and behavioral change; the human dimension of environmental and conservation issues; and how we can collaborate across sectors and work inclusively with people, nature, cultures, industry, and economies. All of the author royalties of this book will be donated to the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association Foundation which supports youth, environment, and research within the Canadian beef industry.

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Introduction

Wallace Stegner Understood Years ago I was very moved while reading the Pulitzer Prize winning American writer Wallace Stegner’s novel Wolf Willow (1966), where he reflected on a few years of his childhood spent on a farm in Southern Saskatchewan. He wrote that “the sensuous little savage that I once was is still intact inside me,” to describe the very innocence of a child, especially the formative years of 5–12, that he says may imprint a person for life. Returning to that land in old age, he reflected that “the years of experience I have loaded upon my savage have not altered him.” After living for years in the USA, upon return to Saskatchewan, he stated that “if I am native to anything, I am native to this.” Stegner said that when he needs to return to the womb of safety, this is the place that his well-conditioned unconscious returns, like an old horse heading for the barn. He wrote: “I may not know who I am but I know exactly where I am from. I can say to myself that a good part of my private and social character, the kinds of scenery and weather and people and humor I respond to, the prejudices I wear like dishonorable scars, the affections that sometimes waken me from middle-aged sleep with a rush of undiminished love, the virtues I respect and the weaknesses I condemn, the code I try to live by, the special ways I fail at it and the kinds of shame I feel when I do, the models and heroes I follow, the colors and shapes that evoke my deepest pleasure, the way I adjudicate between personal desire and personal responsibility, have been in good part scored into me by that little womb-village and the lovely, lonely exposed prairie of the homestead. However anachronistic I may be, I am a product of that Canadian earth, and in nothing quite so much as in the contrast between what I knew through the pores and what I was officially taught.” I also grew up on a farm in Southern Saskatchewan and, through years of national and international travel, have always felt that my childhood on that “land of living skies” landscape is central to my being. My childhood memories are always bathed in endless blue skies with brilliant white clouds and hawks soaring, shrieking on the thermals over boundless golden wheat fields. Or the wild purple and dark blue indigo storm clouds gathering and the wildly loud thunder and lightning of a raucous thunderstorm. The nights laying on the shed roof under a blanket of stars, watching meteor showers, or undulating red, green, and gold northern lights leaving us breathless. I spent countless summer hours with my uncle fishing for perch in an old, leaky rowboat with my fishing line tied to a stick, and we always caught our limit and enjoyed the succulent fresh fish often over an open fire and relaxing days ice fishing in our shack, sheltered from the wind, and playing pond hockey by moonlight and bonfire.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7_1

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I ate the best garden-fresh meals of my life in the middle of a field in the back of our pick-up truck at harvest, my mom laying out a blanket to serve the feast on as my dad and I, ­covered in dirt and engine oil, kept a watchful eye on the weather and my little brother playing in the bed of the wheat truck. One day, my brothers and I were called into the house to find a young man we didn’t know sitting at the kitchen table. He was a biologist and had found endangered Burrowing owls in our horse pasture. My parents agreed to let them monitor the owls, and they set up a bright yellow sign at the entrance to our farm that said “Operation Burrowing Owl” with a picture of the owl and below, “Twarowski Farm.” It was exciting for us, and he walked us around the native prairie grass in the pasture where I often rode my horses bareback with only a halter and lead shank tied at the sides to use as reins and would canter under trees and grab overhead branches to swing off the horse and onto the ground. My brother had a treehouse in the thatch of woods, and we often spent many lazy hours rafting on the pond there. The biologist told us that the Burrowing owls nested underground in native grassland, often in burrows vacated by squirrels, badgers, and prairie dogs. He explained that as more and more grassland was broken up and planted to crops like wheat, the owls were losing their habitat and were now listed as an endangered species. We learned that Nature Saskatchewan’s Operation Burrowing Owl program was initiated to protect Burrowing owl habitat from cultivation, monitor population changes, and increase awareness of the owl and that we were now a part of this program. It was another exciting and enriching element to my childhood, and one that I, like Wallace Stegner, have circled back to all these many years later. I left Saskatchewan after high school and lived in British Columbia and abroad for many years, returning to the farm for short visits over various holidays. I always felt a bit of tension lift and a peacefulness that came with the familiarity of my childhood landscapes. Driving through the prairies in the rain with a half-dozen majestic red-­tailed hawks lining the fence posts along the road or flying in from Australia and being delighted by the fabulous dancing northern lights on the drive to the farm at night from the airport, it was always a special feeling to return home. But it was fairly recently, after I returned to live in a tiny remote village in Saskatchewan for a few years, where my grandparents had ran a General Store that my uncle and his family now run, and where my mom had retired to, that I became aware; or an old primal memory was awakened within me, of how much the prairies form my personal ecology. The rural prairie landscapes to me are iconic Canadiana, like how I cannot think of the ocean without thinking of whales, dolphins, starfish, etc., the cultural makeup of that landscape. The vast prairie grasslands, waving and whispering in the breeze, is oceanic in its limitless vista of gold, green, brown, red, and purple grasses broken only by the equally boundless skyline above. When I think of Canada, I think of prairie and wheat fields; it was the foundation of my childhood, along with hunting in the deep woods of Central Saskatchewan with my uncle, waiting and watching for moose, elk, or deer to step out of the mist and take my breath away with their wild beauty and yet provide the year’s meat for his wife and five athletic sons. During those recent years back in Saskatchewan, I was often called upon to help family and friends who had had an equipment failure in a field and needed a ride, help to move equipment, or assistance in loading an elk or cutting up a moose. Immersed again in that rural prairie lifestyle, I felt that we were an essential part of what built this nation, providing safe, local, bountiful food for the country and contributing to the national economy, as well as the increasing fragile, yet equally important, local, rural economies. The importance of our export economy aside, Canada depends on the health and productivity of our agricultural sector, which is safeguarded and nurtured by those who manage these landscapes. I recognized that the people managing these agricultural lands did so with integrity even as they continue to face increasing challenges associated with climate change. I once again saw firsthand how the people on the land were tasked to ensure agricultural production could meet the needs of a growing population in an environmentally sustainable manner, while also remaining eco-

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nomically viable for the land managers and contributing to biodiversity ­conservation, ensuring that the range was viable for years to come and wildlife populations healthy to harvest. So when I had an opportunity to embark upon a PhD, I developed a research project that explored how rural land managers could most effectively use computerized Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) to make informed decisions, backed by current science, to manage for the impacts of climate change. To gain an understanding of what works best for the land managers, I went out to the field and asked them to share their experiences with these tools. I used their real-world experiences with these EDSS to develop a set of recommendations to improve the use and continued uptake of the tools by rural land managers. Upon obtaining my PhD, I then developed a postdoctoral research project to better understand the connection between cattle ranchers managing their range for optimal and sustainable economic viability and how those carefully managed, healthy grasslands provided habitat for so many species at risk of extinction. Recognizing the valuable role ranchers play as stewards of these critically endangered grasslands, and the species at risk that reside in that habitat, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) introduced the Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) initiative in 2015. SARPAL provides financial incentives and rewards to those who manage their range in ways which conserved habitat for species at risk. Similar to my PhD research, I wanted to know how the ranchers themselves felt about the SARPAL program and how it might be improved to entice more ranchers to participate in the valuable initiative. After interviewing ranchers participating in the program in Saskatchewan, I was able to prepare a report identifying ways to improve the program, from the perspectives of the ranchers who participated in it. A clear message that arose from that research is that ranchers felt that the general Canadian public did not know the critical role they played, as private landowners and managers, in protecting and conserving habitat for so many species at risk that utilize grasslands. I decided to expand my research to interview ranchers in British Columbia, Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan about their experiences with the SARPAL program and a similar program, Multiple Species at Risk (MULTISAR), and that is how this research project developed into this book. As I spoke with ranchers across these four provinces, I came to understand how they shared a genuine passion for careful management of the grasslands. They were doing their best to hold steady against the ever increasing and encroaching threats of extreme weather resulting from climate change, such as more severe droughts and floods, and the endless drive to break the land and plow up the last remaining native grassland to accommodate urban growth and sprawl or to cultivate crops such as wheat or canola. Stewards of the Grasslands: Canadian Ranchers in their Own Words began from my deep-rooted, Wallace Stegner style, identity with the prairie landscape, ecology, and people, grew into a research project, and has ended up as a collection of interviews with cattle ranchers from across four provinces. This book is not intended as an academic review of literature by experts in the field of range ecology; it is, instead, meant to first and foremost feature and showcase the insights and expertise so generously shared with me through the interviews with these ranchers. Academic literature is important, but I also feel, as in this book, that there is as much value in sharing the knowledge of experts from the field; people that have lived on the land, often for generations, and managed it carefully so that it might sustain them for generations to come. As grassland conservation gains international attention, it is important to bring the voices of the private landowners and managers of this ecosystem into the discussion to provide more context and an intimate perspective from those that possess valuable local knowledge and real-world expertise. As these productive landscapes face increasingly perilous threats such as development, economic pressures, and extreme weather events, it is the ranchers that live on and manage these native grasslands who are passionate about conserving them. As I undertook these interviews, I came to understand the depth of attachment and dedication these ranchers have for the grasslands. They are conservationists at heart, as they not only understand that their livelihood is

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dependent on the health of the ecosystem they manage but they also have a deep connection to the land, nurtured oftentimes for many generations. Many of them grew up on this land; as children they rode horses on the range with their grandparents and watched Greater Sage Grouse, now fast disappearing, strut their fabulous mating dance amidst the scent of sagebrush on the lek (an area where they stage their mating rituals), inflating and deflating their two yellow throat sacs to make a popping sound. That is the kind of magic they long for their own children to get to experience. My hope is that when you read these interviews, you can feel the palpable passion they have to preserve these last remaining grasslands, their pride and honor in being good stewards of this precious, iconic, fast fading Canadian landscape. When I was interviewing them, I was struck by their sense of “keep calm and steady on” long view of the world and their vocation. They were not planning for the next season but for the next few generations. None of these ranchers told me that their plan was to get in, make some improvements, and sell for a profit in a few years; on the contrary, virtually all of them expressed a desire to never leave the land. I could sense the romance, mystery, and adventure of the challenge they were committed to undertake, some many years ago now, and others just starting out, knowing it will be a tremendous amount of work and oftentimes uncertain and one that not many of their fellow citizens would sign up for, but realizing that to be one of the few Canadian cattlemen, stewards of the grasslands, was their calling and contribution to our national character. This book aspires to be about them, their experiences, sharing their knowledge to assist younger ranchers, and the realities of their lives, their view of the world, and their contributions to the food security of the nation and the economy. Their vocation maintains a way of life that is a crucial foundation of our nation’s history, and it plays an integral role in the conservation of our last remaining grasslands. Much of the land they graze and carefully caretake for us is leased government land, and they realize, and want all Canadians to as well, that carefully managing our grasslands is also conserving critical habitat for many species at risk of extinction. They undertake this stewardship, this careful management, for the benefit of all Canadians who desire to have a thriving wildlife population for our own children to enjoy well into the future. Finally, this book is about the experiences, knowledge sharing, and aspirations of cattle ranchers in four Canadian provinces. I acknowledge that cattle production is a complex matter with many arguments for both the detrimental environmental impact and the positive environmental impact, carbon emissions and carbon sequestration, and the nuanced realities of cattle production practices around the world. Those arguments have been made in numerous books and academic papers and that is not the gap in the current literature on cattle production that I am seeking to fill. The ranchers I talked with expressed a desire to share their stories so that the general Canadian public could have a better understanding of what they do, how they do it, and why. In their own words, they situate their operations within the global context of beef production. They also wanted to share their well-­earned knowledge with a new generation of ranchers, to highlight their role in grassland stewardship, strategies for adaptation and mitigation to drought, and their role in conserving habitat for species at risk. That is an important, and I feel, integral part of the conversation about cattle ranching in Canada, and that is the story I present here. It is also a story that all of the ranchers I interviewed felt was very important, vastly underreported, and one that they wished to be shared with the Canadian public, whether they be consumers, conservationists, academics, ranchers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or industry organizations. I will provide some information on grasslands and species at risk and the SARPAL and MULTISAR programs, but this book is first and foremost an opportunity to hear what the ranchers have to say, in their own words.

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Frenchman River Valley, Saskatchewan. (Photo credit: Dana Reiter)

Grasslands In Canada, grasslands are an iconic landscape. It is breathtaking to consider that there were once 30–60 million bison roaming the North America grasslands, from Mexico to Canada. Imagine herds so vast it would take many days to pass them. Alongside this image is that of the First Nations people that relied on buffalo for almost all of their needs: food, clothing, shelter, and tools. They utilized virtually every part of these massive animals; the meat was eaten and dried for pemmican; skin used to make tipis, moccasins, and clothing; fur for robes and blankets; sinew for bowstrings and laces; brains used to tan hides; horns and bones for spoons; and cups and tools for digging and working the hides. It also take my breath away to consider how the bison were driven virtually extinct by colonial settlers in the 1880s. Bison had become an economic commodity, their hides and meat were sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the introduction of the rifle made the hunt much more efficient. The eradication of the buffalo was further escalated through tragic and disturbing colonial policies such as an indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo in order to starve Indigenous communities into assimilation. The colonial settlers also introduced infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles that devastated the Indigenous population which had not yet developed immunity. Next came the reserves, the government then encouraged, or forced, the starving and diseased Indigenous communities off of their

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traditional territories and onto an area of designated land where they could live and take up farming, with the government offering to protect them and provide food aid in times of famine. The reserves were presented as a way to help the Indigenous communities adapt to the loss of buffalo and to learn how to farm; yet often the lands they were granted were not suitable for farming. Treaties were negotiated verbally through translators and what was then written in English and signed by the First Nation leader was often not what had been agreed upon verbally. This is simply a few sentences to provide a glancing overview of the history of First Nation peoples and their relation to the grasslands, but that is not the purpose of this book. The historical record of First Nation peoples in Canada is a vital and integral element of the Canadian narrative, our founding story as it were. James Daschuk’s book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life is an excellent resource to gain a more thorough understanding of this period of history on the prairies. I also suggest consulting literature that provides Indigenous perspectives in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of our nation’s history. Returning to this glance at that history, we find the Indigenous population decimated and dispossessed; their traditional way of life had been almost completely eradicated, along with the buffalo; and as they no longer occupied their traditional territory, the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway advanced, as did plans to court European immigrants to settle and farm these vast, newly unoccupied lands. Indeed, when these settlers started farming, the first financial compensation for many came through the collection of buffalo bones which were sold for fertilizer. I had actually forgotten that fact, and as I struggled to remember what I knew about buffalo bones after that mass slaughter, I asked the Saskatchewan rancher Michael Burgess, featured here, what they had been used for, and he immediately educated me. I later looked it up and was amazed and distraught yet again at the historical pictures of men standing by mountains of buffalo bones. Another rancher I interviewed, John Ross from Alberta, reminded me that as the buffalo were decimated, it was a handful of ranchers who gathered a few of what was left to save the species from extinction. I’ll conclude this section with the acknowledgment of the First Nation peoples as an integral element to native grassland health and viability. They followed the buffalo and lit occasional fires to improve their hunt. Fire started by lightning, or lit deliberately by Indigenous people, is a natural component of healthy and viable grassland ecosystems. It reduces the leaf litter—old and dry grass which accumulates over time—while heating the soil which stimulates microbial activity. After a fire, the grassland is regenerated and thrives with healthy fresh grasses and flowers, and bison will return to graze this vibrant new growth. Fire is part of a healthy grassland soil cycle along with climate and grazing. Historically, as these masses of bison grazed, they disturbed the land with their hooves, mixing up the soil and marking it with little half-moon dents, and fertilizing it with urine and manure, attracting hordes of insects to their dung and birds to feast on those insects. All of this is critical to the health of the grassland ecosystem, and the ranchers interviewed here will explain this cycle with great depth and eloquence. Indigenous peoples struggled with the environmental constraints of the reserves that were designated to them, but some of them had cattle and many of our immigrant ancestors raised cattle on the grasslands, and their grazing kept the landscape healthy and viable after the bison had gone.

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Fall gather on the Circle Y Ranch. (Photo credit: Michael Burgess)

It has become understood that grazing is critical to grassland health and viability, and in the absence of the bison, cattle have become essential to managing the health of the prairie ecosystem. Carefully managed cattle grazing in grasslands keeps the ecosystem healthy. As the ranchers explain in this book, the keyword in that statement is “carefully.” If the grazing and range management is not done well and carefully, for example, by overgrazing, the grasslands will be degraded. If managed thoughtfully and carefully, the hoof action of the cattle disturbs the soil, increasing water infiltration and creating a seedbed for plants, and their manure adds organic matter to the soil. In turn, many birds eat the seeds, bugs, beetles, larvae and worms associated with the manure. The ranchers interviewed here will explain in detail how integral cattle grazing is in order to maintain a healthy grassland ecosystem. Indeed, the careful management of their range by cattle ranchers has kept our

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remaining grasslands intact and healthy. Most of the native grasslands have been broken up and plowed to farm crops such as wheat or canola, but the cattle ranchers have played a critical role in conserving what is left of this range, even as they face extraordinary market pressure to plow and cultivate rather than maintain the grasslands intact. Healthy grasslands also contribute to species at risk habitat conservation; in Canada, the grasslands provide critical habitat for more than 60 species at risk. Some Saskatchewan ranchers will recall here how the Grasslands National Park was developed in that province to conserve the grasslands and the habitat they provide for many species at risk of extinction. The government bought the land from the ranchers, created the Park, and did not allow cattle to graze the parkland, thinking that the cattle grazing would be detrimental to grassland health and ruin habitat for species at risk. After a few years, the Park’s staff noticed that the endangered species they were attempting to provide critical grassland habitat for had deserted the park and could be found in the surrounding grasslands owned by the ranchers who were grazing cattle on their range. I spoke with the Park’s staff range ecologists who confirmed this management policy and explained how it evolved over time. They came to realize that grazing kept the grasslands healthy and provided suitable habitat for the species that the Park was concerned about. Once they acknowledged this reality, the Park developed a plan to allow neighboring ranchers to have their cattle graze the grasslands in the Park to restore the health and viability of the landscape and to provide healthy habitat for species at risk to return to. It would take time to restore the ecosystem through grazing, and their cattle weren’t happy having to graze unhealthy grasslands, but with the ranchers’ concern for, and commitment to grassland health and viability, they were flexible and innovative and made the arrangement work. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assesses the status of wild species native to Canada or that have moved into Canada without human intervention and have been present in Canada for at least 50 years, considered to be at risk of extinction. They designate the species extinct (X), no longer in existence; extirpated (XT), no longer existing in the wild in Canada but may be found elsewhere; endangered (E), species facing imminent extirpation or extinction; threatened (T), species likely to become endangered if limiting factors are not reversed; special concern (SC), species that may become threatened or endangered because of a combination of biological characteristics and identified threats; not at risk (NAR), species that have been evaluated and found to be not at risk of extinction at the current time; and data deficient (DD), designated when there is insufficient data available to assess the species. A startling example of the urgent need to protect grassland habitat was documented in the North American Bird Conservation Initiative report titled “State of Canada’s Birds 2019” which asserted that grassland birds in the Prairies were most at risk and that we have lost nearly 60% of our grassland birds in Canada since 1970. Conservation of these endangered species is important to Canadian society; recent polling found that the overwhelming majority of Canadians support the federal government’s efforts to recover species at risk. Globally, native grasslands have been in drastic decline due to urban development, fragmentation, and conversion for agriculture. A paper published in 2016 in the academic journal Science identified temperate grassland as the ecosystem with the greatest land use pressures. In 2008, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared temperate grasslands the world’s most endangered ecosystem. Temperate grasslands are areas of open grassland with very few trees, where there is not enough precipitation to support forests, and are known as prairies in North America, veldts and savannahs in Africa, rangelands in Australia, steppes in Asia, and cerrados and llanos in South America. The IUCN states that only 4.5% of these grasslands are formally protected, endangering the

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survival of wild ungulates and many species at risk that live in that habitat. This statistic underscores the immense role that ranchers play, as private landowners and managers, in voluntarily protecting and conserving grasslands. As Aldo Leopold, the renowned American conservationist, once stated in an essay collection of his work, The River of the Mother of God: and other Essays (1992), “conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.” Degradation of this ecosystem also contributes to soil erosion; intact and healthy grasslands are more resilient against drought while also preventing flood runoff and soil erosion from heavy rains. In an ecosystem that is created by a lack of water, grasslands are integral to the facilitation of water seepage into the ground and the containment of water during floods. Further, when native grasslands are plowed and converted to crops, stored carbon is released, adding to global carbon emissions, a leading cause of climate change. Left intact, grasslands sequester carbon, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it belowground in their deep and extensive root systems. Recognizing the urgent need to improve the level of conservation and protection of temperate grasslands, the IUCN formed a Temperate Grasslands Specialist Group and launched a Temperate Grasslands Conservation Initiative in 2008. This initiative developed a global strategy and regional approaches to protect and conserve grasslands around the world. Three types of grasslands (tall grass, short grass, and mixed grass) once covered a large range of the interior of North America; the current situation is much different. The World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 2021 Plowprint Report stated that across the US and Canadian Great Plains, approximately 2.6 million acres of grassland were plowed up in 2019 to convert to agricultural crop production. In Canada, it is estimated that almost 75% of our native grasslands have been lost due to urban development and conversion for agriculture. In 2021, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a dire warning that there is an urgent need to protect carbon storing ecosystems, such as the grasslands, to reduce the devastating impacts of climate change. As awareness grows with regard to the urgency to conserve the last remaining grasslands, several North American initiatives have been developed, such as the Central Grasslands Roadmap, the JV8 Conservation Initiative, the Natural Resources Conservation Service Great Plains Framework, and the Northern Great Plains program at the World Wildlife Fund. In 2021, Canada’s Weston Family Foundation recognized the fragile state of our grasslands as they awarded $25 million dollars to five organizations working on grassland conservation efforts across the three prairie provinces. The Weston Family Prairie Grasslands Initiative (PGI) is a five-year collaboration to conserve this landscape. They granted nearly $25 million to the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Foundation, Ducks Unlimited Canada, Nature Conservancy of Canada, Grasslands National Park (Parks Canada), and the Meewasin Valley Authority. These organizations contribute additional funding and in-kind donations for a total of $70 million, one of the largest conservation efforts in Canadian history. The initiative strives to conserve habitat for species at risk, expand grassland protection, enable wildlife movement, and, ultimately, increase long-term ecological and economic stability in this landscape. Well-managed, intact, and productive grasslands are a public good, a benefit to society at large, as they are naturally designed to capture carbon. The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA) notes that beef production in Canada utilizes 21 million hectares of agricultural land, of which 93% is pasture and forage land, and that Canadian grasslands, preserved through the efforts of ranchers, can store up to 200 tons of carbon per hectare. A 2019 report prepared by the CCA cites research from the University of Alberta asserting that if valued at $15 CAD per ton, carbon stored in prairie grasslands alone would be valued at $4.3 billion and that over $11  billion has been lost in the

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Parkland region in Canada due to conversion to cropland and industrial and urban development. Further, the Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association (CFGA) states that there used to be 141.5 million acres of prairie grasslands across Western Canada and that now, only 26 million acres remain. The CFGA note that risks from grassland loss include water quality concerns, a steep decline in grassland birds due to habitat loss, and depleted community resiliency around weather events such as flood and drought. They state that grasslands need more attention and urgency and that there is a need to support a producer-valued system that promotes the retention and enhancement of existing grasslands.

 emaining Grasslands in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, R and Manitoba Remaining grasslands in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan as of 2019 are shown in bright green. The brown illustrates what has been converted to cropland. Dark green are forests, and blue are wetlands (Map 1.1). Remaining grasslands of British Columbia as of 2015 are shown in bright green. The brown illustrates grasslands that have been converted to other uses. Dark green are forests and blue are wetlands (Map 1.2).

Map 1.1  Image adapted from the Plowprint Report developed by the World Wildlife Fund. Used by permission. Remaining Canadian grasslands as of 2019 are shown in bright green. The brown illustrates what has been converted to cropland. Dark green are forests and blue are wetlands

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11

Map 1.2  Provided and used by permission of the Grasslands Conservation Council of British Columbia. Remaining Canadian grasslands as of 2019 are shown in bright green. The brown illustrates what has been converted to other uses. Dark green are forests and blue are wetlands. (Source: Esri, Maxar, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AeroGRID, IGN, and the GIS User Community, Esri, HERE, Garmin, (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, and the GIS user community)

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 pecies at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) and the Multiple S Species at Risk (MULTISAR) Programs For this book, I conducted interviews with 16 ranchers from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, most of whom participated in the Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) or the Multiple Species at Risk (MULTISAR) initiatives. The size of the initiatives and the program delivery options varied in each province. In 2015, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) introduced the Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) initiative. Recognizing the valuable role ranchers play as stewards of these critically endangered grasslands, and the species at risk of extinction that reside in that habitat, SARPAL provides financial incentives and rewards to those who manage their range in ways which conserve habitat for species at risk. In 2004, the Multiple Species at Risk (MULTISAR) initiative was offered to ranchers in Alberta to support their grassland management practices that conserve habitat for many species at risk. This initiative was funded by ECCC, the Government of Canada Habitat Stewardship Program for Species at Risk, the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, the Alberta Fish and Wildlife Species at Risk program, and the Alberta Conservation Association. MULTISAR partnered with ranchers and the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, Alberta Beef Producers, the Prairie Conservation Forum, Alberta Conservation Association, Cows and Fish, Alberta Environment and Parks, and Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. In Manitoba, the Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation (MHHC) manages SARPAL for the Manitoba Beef Producers (MBP). ECCC granted funding to provide information and incentives to cattle producers that enhance grasslands with the goal of improving rangeland productivity and conserving habitat for species at risk. They are focused on native mixed-grass prairie in Southwestern Manitoba, located in the Poverty Plains, Blind Souris River Valley, Lyleton Grasslands, Belleview, and Maple Lake regions. Species at risk in these grasslands include the Ferruginous hawk, Burrowing owl, Baird’s sparrow, Sprague’s pipit, Chestnut-collared longspur, and Loggerhead shrike. The projects consider changes to grazing operations that would conserve species at risk habitat while also benefitting ranchers. They offer cost-shared funding for beneficial management practices (BMPs) and management services for projects that conserve species at risk habitat while also improving pasture and cattle productivity. The program provides funds for fencing that supports rotational grazing, establishment of additional paddocks to alleviate grazing pressure on native grasslands, management of invasive plants encroaching on grasslands, watering systems designed to improve cattle distribution, and native grassland establishment. Cost-shared incentives and management services are available through a 10-year agreement. Ranchers can access a maximum of $10,000 per quarter section and a maximum of $50,000 per landowner. In Saskatchewan, ECCC developed a Multi-­species Action Plan which focused on 13 at-risk species, and the South of the Divide Conservation Action Program Inc. (SODCAP Inc.) was created as a partnership between stakeholders and government to implement actions relating to the South of the Divide Multi-Species Action Plan. The Plan covers the following nine extirpated, endangered, or threatened species: Black-footed ferret, Burrowing owl, Eastern yellow-bellied racer, Greater sagegrouse, Prairie loggerhead shrike, Mormon metalmark, Mountain plover, Sprague’s pipit, and Swift fox. It also includes management considerations for four species of special concern for which management plans have been prepared: Black-tailed prairie dog, Long-billed curlew, McCown’s longspur, and Northern leopard frog (boreal/prairie populations). The Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association (SSGA) received SARPAL funding and with SODCAP Inc. developed six different SARPAL programming options for producers who are managing critical or important habitat in Southwestern Saskatchewan, specifically in the Milk River Watershed of the South of the Divide region. The pro-

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gram options are Results Based Conservation Agreements, Habitat Management Agreements, Habitat Restoration Agreements, Grass Banking initiatives, Niche Product Branding initiatives, and Term Conservation Easements. Briefly, in Results Based Conservation Agreements, producers would sign agreements that identify specific results or habitat characteristics that need to be achieved to provide optimal habitat; and payments are triggered when results are met. Habitat Management Agreements are tailored to each producer’s operation and the particular critical or important habitat that they are managing. The agreements are based on an evaluation of each ranch, focused planning exercises, the producer’s objectives and resources, habitat conservation goals, and any other relevant circumstances. Producers may be funded up to 100% of the costs for implementing their agreements on lands that qualify. Management activities that are beneficial to both the producer and species at risk are identified and included as part of each agreement. There are no requirements to meet specific habitat targets; however, producers must implement the management activities. For Habitat Restoration Agreements, potential qualifying sites for habitat restoration are identified. These include land that is currently cultivated, or was previously cultivated (i.e., tame grass), and locations near existing candidate critical habitat for species at risk. Producers agree to prepare the seedbed and perform necessary weed control, seed the field with a mix of native grass, rest the reseeded area for up to 2 years, and maintain the site in perennial cover for 21 years. Producers work with a SODCAP Inc. agrologist to implement a grazing plan, and 100% of the reseeding costs are covered. The Grass Banking initiatives allow ranchers to graze on Grasslands National Park (GNP) land at a reduced fee in exchange for tangible conservation benefits on the private ranch. Producers work with GNP and SODCAP Inc. staff to implement the program. Niche Product Branding initiatives assist producers in marketing beef raised in environments that support species at risk habitat. Producers that have signed any of the conservation agreements are exploring marketing their beef as being sourced from lands that provide habitat for species at risk under a “Prairie Provide” brand. Finally, in Term Conservation Easements, producers sign easements to protect land for a specific length of time, rather than in perpetuity, as is currently the case. In Alberta, MULTISAR is a voluntary collaborative habitat stewardship project delivered in the Milk River and South Saskatchewan Watersheds. The project, as with SARPAL, relies on listening, learning, and developing long-term relationships with landowners built on mutual trust and respect. Species at risk identified in the watersheds include Sprague’s pipit, Plains spadefoot toad, Chestnutcollared longspur, Short-­eared owl, Bull snake, Sharp-tailed grouse, Prairie rattlesnake, Swift fox, Long-billed curlew, Prairie falcon, Short-horned lizard, Northern leopard frog, and many others. Through the MULTISAR program, ranchers are provided with either a detailed Habitat Conservation Strategy (HCS) or a Species at Risk Conservation Plan (SARC). Habitat Conservation Strategies provide detailed assessments of the range (plant communities, health of those communities, carrying capacities), wildlife (locations, species list, and associated habitat types), and riparian assessment (plant communities and health of those communities), located on the ranch. Point counts are completed for wildlife surveys and habitat measurements include litter (lbs/acre, ungrazed residue from the previous year’s growth), Robel pole heights, percentage of bare ground, weeds, range health, and plant community composition (percentage of forbs, grass, and shrubs). Landowners receive a report detailing wildlife species found and maps of their property illustrating plant communities, range sites (loamy, overflow, etc.), weed locations, poisonous plant locations, wildlife locations, and range health. A collaborative team consisting of the landholder, biologist, and agrologist discuss what the MULTISAR team has compiled to consider actions that may be beneficial to both the rancher’s operation and the wildlife habitat that occurs on their land. Funding to support the landowner-­driven projects is cost shared between the landowner and funding of MULTISAR

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received from the Environment and Climate Change Canada, Alberta Environment and Parks, Alberta Conservation Association, and industry partners. Examples of projects funded include wildlife friendly fencing, portable electric fencing, upland water developments, portable watering units, hawk poles, and native grass reseeding. Their Species at Risk Conservation Plans are more rapid assessments of the range through a ranchwide visual habitat assessment carried out by MULTISAR biologists. They then provide recommendations for beneficial management practices (BMPs) adapted for the land and the ranch. These are summarized in a report, along with a variety of supporting information and maps. The rancher then can decide which BMPs they may want to implement. In BC, ECCC provided funding to the BC Cattlemen’s Association (BCCA) to deliver the SARPAL program in the Thompson-Nicola, South Okanagan, and Kootenay regions. Native grasslands constitute less than 1% of BC’s land base yet provide habitat for more than 30% of its species at risk. Species at risk identified in the program are Tiger salamander, Yellow-breasted chat, Badger, Painted turtle, Lewis’s woodpecker, and Spadefoot toad. SARPAL consults closely with ranchers to identify their management needs and ways in which to conserve species at risk habitat; and they fund planning, materials, and project costs. Examples of projects funded include the protection of wildlife trees through an installation of cattle rubbing posts to prevent the pushing over of known nesting trees, riparian fencing to manage cattle access to the riparian corridor, and riparian restoration and replanting of diminished plants such as wild rose or willow shrubs in the riparian zone. They will also consider funding other projects as identified in consultation with ranchers that benefit species at risk and conserve habitat. When interviewing the ranchers in all four provinces, every rancher noted overall satisfaction with the SARPAL and MULTISAR programs. They especially appreciated that the programs had local delivery agents managing the programs; the managers lived in the region and were often ranchers themselves as opposed to having a program manager residing in Ottawa or even a major city in their respective provinces. These local managers knew the realities of the landscape that the ranchers utilized and could be flexible knowing that drought, market, or other issues may occur and affect the ranchers’ management decisions. They could develop long-­term relationships with the program managers based on mutual trust and respect through open and honest communications. The ranchers felt reassured that the program delivery agents lived in their region and that there was a strong possibility that they would be able to deal with the same agent for the foreseeable future, as there may not be as much staff turnover as might occur in organizations based in large metropolitan centers. Ranchers are running complex businesses and often do not have time to seek out programs offering support, and many expressed their appreciation of having been contacted by program management who offered to explain the opportunities available through the program over a coffee and would even assist with completing the paperwork as required. Further, as ranchers manage their range for the long term, they appreciated not being required to make substantial changes to their operations in order to qualify for SARPAL or MULTISAR. The programs were flexible, and each project they decided to implement was agreed upon through extensive consultation and was, ultimately, the decision of the rancher. To qualify for the program, they would have to have been managing their grasslands very well already and would only have to make subtle changes to their range management. The ranchers often said that these programs offered them support to implement changes that they had planned to do eventually, but with the support offered through these programs, they could implement these management decisions much sooner than they would have if they had had to fund the improvements on their own. This allowed for improved grassland and species at risk habitat conservation actions to be implemented much earlier and have greater impact and also accelerated improvements to their business management. Finally, the ranchers appreciated that they were being recognized and rewarded for their thoughtful and careful stewardship of the nation’s last remaining grasslands. Through the interviews, they

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expressed a desire, and an urgency, to educate the Canadian public about the reality of the integral importance of careful grassland stewardship and the role that they, as ranchers, play in its conservation. They also shared a desire to help younger, newer ranchers learn from their experiences, often gained over many generations of range management. They acknowledged how hard it is to get into ranching as a livelihood these days, with extremely high land prices and competing interests for the land from developers and crop producers, and they wanted to share their knowledge to help give new ranchers access to information they had gained over years of experience. The ranchers I interviewed wanted to educate new, young ranchers on how careful grass management can alleviate the worst of drought and flood. They felt that by sharing this information, they might give these new ranchers some tools to survive and, hopefully, thrive for a long-­term viable future in the business, a business where a lack of such knowledge might lead to poor decisions that may result in a cascading series of unfortunate and costly events that would be that much harder, if even possible, to recover from. These landscapes are both ecosystems and social systems. It is important to understand the economic contribution of grasslands to human health, food security, the economy, and water conservation. As you will find through these interviews, Canadian ranchers also value the natural beauty of the landscape; the gentle, and, sometimes, not so gentle, rhythms of life lived so close on the land; the meaning and emotions attached to their vocation; and the deep appreciation and sense of place of the grasslands they have made home. Although the loss of native grassland is a global challenge, its impacts and the adaptation to it are local. When considering ways to meet this challenge, it is important to take into account the perspectives of the ranchers who manage these grasslands, often for generations, in careful ways in which to mitigate the effects of drought and ensure adequate feed is available for their cattle. The scientific community concerned with the conservation of the imperiled grasslands and the species at risk that reside within that fragile landscape must acknowledge the integral value of the local expertise that ranchers have derived from living and working directly on these landscapes, often for generations. Their insight, as presented here in their own words, will educate young and new ranchers and contribute valuable knowledge to academia and those in policy development about ways in which they can conserve our last remaining grasslands and mitigate the risk and effects of drought. The ranchers suggested for interviews were recognized for innovative grassland management practices and recommended to me by the Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation (MHHC), the South of the Divide Conservation Action Program Inc. (SODCAP Inc.) in Saskatchewan, the Alberta Conservation Association (ACA), and the BC Cattlemen’s Association (BCCA). There is great value in reading about these ranchers’ personal philosophies regarding their career choice and the various ways in which they manage their range in different grassland ecosystems in each province. Living on the land that they must manage to secure a viable livelihood for their families requires that they pay very close attention to many multitudes of details about their range, and they combine this awareness with scientific, local, and traditional knowledge gleaned from workshops, books, online videos, personal experience, family journals, industry associations, rangeland ecologists, and conversations with their families and neighbors. The insight shared from ranchers in these four provinces provides both a valuable overview of grassland management in Canada and a thoughtfully personal, in-depth view of how best to manage this fragile ecosystem. I had requested five interviews in each province, but, in the end, was able to conduct five in Manitoba, four in Saskatchewan, five in Alberta, and two in BC. I had never met the majority of the ranchers interviewed, and I was only able to meet with them once due to my schedule and the constraints of travel. Imagine the generosity of spirit they showed in inviting a stranger into their home in the midst of their very busy ranching lives and sharing the history of their ranch, their region, their families, their range management practices, and their thoughts on the beef production industry. I

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credit their kindness and openness toward me to three elements: (1) being the type of people they are, open, adventurous, curious, and generous; (2) the excellent and admirable work of the SARPAL and MULTISAR program delivery agents who introduced them to me, they have built relationships of trust with these managers and indeed consider many of them to be family friends; and (3) their passion for their vocation and the desire to share their stories with Canadians of all walks of life, to educate the populace on what they do and how they do it. They were excited to have the opportunity to inform and educate the general Canadian public about the integral role that ranchers play in conserving grasslands and critical habitat for species at risk, providing careful stewardship of a common good, while contributing to the national economy as well as the often fragile, local economy keeping schools, businesses, and rural communities alive and providing safe food for the nation. Well for me, I ranch, so it’s easy to say, but Canada, if you want the land to stay in its native state, you need to contribute to that. And supporting ranchers, at the same time, contributes to the local economy. So, you probably win both wars politically. And you don’t need to bring in a manager, you’ve got experienced managers on the land already, with generations of experience with this sensitive grassland, this fragile ecosystem, and there’s just so little of it left. Jody Larson, Saskatchewan

The following four sections feature the interviews with ranchers. I have divided them into groups based on broad themes of shared experiences from across the four provinces. The interviews provide tenets of practical grassland management along with rich histories of family, ranch life, and regional development. Between each section, I provide a brief introduction to one of the species at risk that rely on healthy grassland habitat for survival.

1 Introduction

Introducing Lewis’s Woodpecker Melanerpes lewis Status: Threatened Range: British Columbia

Photo credit: Ian Routley

When you read about Lewis’s woodpecker, most reports note that they are an unusual bird within the woodpecker family. Their coloring is unique and distinctive; it has a silvery-gray collar and a dark greenish-black back that is often described as oily and glistening, along with a pink belly and a red face. Although it climbs trees like a woodpecker, it seldom actually pecks into them to feed on wood-boring insects and instead forages on the bark and will perch atop a dead tree scanning for flying insects and then swoops out to catch them midair. The final trait that is always mentioned is that they don’t fly as much like a woodpecker, in an up and down pattern through intermittently flapping their wings and then gliding, but more like a crow, by continually flapping their wings and pursuing a straight line. They are most often silent, but occasionally will emit a low churring note. In Canada, they are distributed in drier parts of the Southern Interior of BC and found most abundantly in BC’s Okanagan Valley. They reside in old cottonwood stands in riparian areas and near grasslands, agricultural fields, and recently burned conifer forests. They breed in these areas and nest in cavities in large-diameter trees that may be living, decaying, or dead. They excavate new nest cavities in the tree or utilize abandoned or natural holes and prefer to nest in black cottonwood or ponderosa pine. They hatch 4–6 eggs in the early summer and both parents incubate the eggs, except at night when the male sits on the eggs and the female sleeps in a sepa-

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rate cavity. Lewis’s woodpecker couples often bond for life. Their diet is comprised mainly of flying insects, and they rely on berries, fruits, and nuts, such as acorns, at the end of summer and into the fall and winter, storing nuts in cracks in dead snags. The species was discovered on the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806 and named for Meriwether Lewis, and now, all these years later, there is estimated to be less than 1000 of these birds left in Canada. The greatest threats to the species are habitat loss and degradation, losing grasslands and large nesting and roosting trees to agricultural and urban development, and the removal of dead trees. In the Okanagan vineyards, the use of pesticides to reduce insects is detrimental to their habitat, and the netting used to protect the crops may be a further source of mortality. Conserving their habitat is the best way to support Lewis’s woodpecker, particularly nest sites. Actions such as the maintenance of brush and undergrowth which provide seed and berry food sources, decreasing the use of insecticides to support insect populations, and maintaining dying or dead standing trees, especially soft, large diameter snags, will all contribute to the survival of these threatened species. SARPAL is actively supporting ranchers who engage in such conservation actions, and one of the ranchers interviewed in the following chapter will explain how they are conserving this critical habitat.

2

In Their Own Words

Following a Passion I remember a kid in high school said that I was the only one that did what I said I was going to do; I said I was going to be a rancher in my high school yearbook and that’s what I was. These four ranchers’ stories share a common theme of a lifelong dream to ranch.

Circle Y Ranch Saskatchewan Michael Burgess Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T I’ve been ranching my whole life. The Circle Y Ranch started in 1937 with my grandfather, Richard Fergus Burgess, RF. He’d been out here as a younger man and was working on the construction of the medical building at the University of Saskatchewan, putting up lathe for the plasterers, and he really fell in love with the west. He was out here with my grandmother when they were first married, and up into her 90s, she could still remember the street address of the little house they lived in Saskatoon. My grandfather had to leave the west and go back east; he was the only one of the boys that was really a farmer, so when his father took sick, he went back to Southern Ontario. But he always had a love for the west, and he was a great entrepreneur. He would find a business that was failing and find a good person to run it, get it turned around, and sell it to them; and he had liveries and a butcher shop, a cattle market, a creamery, and a clover seed business, and he had a sawmill up in the Ottawa Valley in a little place called McDonald’s Corner. My mom and dad, when they got married, they were going to go up there to run the sawmill, but they came west on a honeymoon headed for the west coast, and they came by the ranch and then made it as far as the Stampede in Calgary. They kind of got talking then and decided, you know, they had a good man on this sawmill down east, and grandpa needed help here on the ranch. So this is in 1947, and they decided to make their home here on the Circle Y. So that is how I became a cowboy and not a logger. My grandfather never lived here very much; he had a ­manager on the ranch, Charlie McLean; his sons and grandsons are in Alberta; they’re cattle buyers and cattle feeders now, but he worked for my grandfather in the 1930s; and some of the Andersons from the Fir Mountain area were some of the early cowboys on the ranch. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7_2

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I know dad said, years later, that they went into the Lands branch in 1937, and the director of the Lands branch at the time was so happy when my grandfather walked in there because this ranch was vacant, and there wasn’t a lot of money coming into the government coffers on leased land back then. So many people had left because of the 1930s, and there was a house and a barn on this property, sitting on leased land, and they thought it was just going to disappear board by board. And so when grandpa got it, there was a two-story house and a shed-type barn that was 48 feet wide and 210 feet long, built by R.A. Wright. He was a fellow from Iowa who came up and farmed on the Soo Line and was involved in the Stock Growers and had this ranch down here in the Big Muddy. They say that when he went back to Iowa—the 1930s chased him out of Saskatchewan too—he was managing a hotel in Iowa, and when people stopped to visit him, they said he was really proud of the picture he had on the wall of his office, of them selling horses to the Russian government off this ranch in 1919. Horses resupply after the war. So, it’s a bit of a storied history. Like my dad, his aunt and uncle were coming up through Carlisle Coulee in 1938 with all these ruffled clay hills, and they came up by the border. They had a mounted horse patrol on the border and Doug Minor was the last mounted horse patrol, he rode this section of the border here, and he wrote in his diary that he met the Burgess family coming out to the ranch in Carlisle Coulee. We are in the Big Muddy Badlands and adjacent to Valley County, which was the last lawless county in the USA, so all the outlaws came up, and we’re just a few miles from the Jones and Nelson Gang and Sam Kelly caves up the road a little ways; and Huntley Coulee, which is in the Willowbunch Trail, runs right through our yard basically. That’s where Sitting Bull went down on his way back to the States to surrender. And so it’s a storied area, great for kids for imagination and stuff growing up, great place to grow up, and fast forward here to, well after I married, my wife wrote a book about the Big Muddy Badlands (The Big Muddy Badlands: Past to Present, by Tamela J. Burgess); she illustrated it herself and built herself her Old Porch Gallery here to show her art. She researched and developed this history to share; she tells the tourists this story, close to two hours long, about the history of the valley and the outlaws and everything. So our kids got to meet people from all over the world, basically stopping in to our yard. My wife’s from a ranching family on the Montana side of the border. Tammy, when we got married 41 years ago, she only moved four miles house-to-house from Montana, USA, to Saskatchewan. Their ranch came right to the border and our place was two miles from the border; we didn’t know each other then, but we knew people in common. I’d heard of her dad, I thought he was some old bachelor, and I didn’t realize it was eight kids down there a couple miles away. So getting back to the ranching aspect of it, I guess I remember a kid in high school said that I was the only one that did what I said I was going to do; I said in my high school yearbook that I was going to be a rancher, and that’s what I was. I’ve always wanted to be a rancher, and now I’m the third generation on the ranch. I took four winters of livestock production at Olds College to get my diploma, instead of the regular two years, because we were busy on the ranch. We had always run stocker and feeder cattle; we hadn’t run a cow herd from my grandpa’s days right through my dad’s management of the place, and so we were always shipping cattle in the fall and bringing cattle in. After I got to take over the management of it, I developed a cow herd; it’s not less work than the yearlings by any means, but it’s work mostly at home instead of on the road buying cattle and trucking and everything. We moved off the ranch for schooling when my sister was six years old, and there was no bus out of here; the road back then was just a prairie trail. My sister took her first year of school by correspondence; my dad taught her here, and they would go up to the country school every once in a while, when they could make it, to get her lessons corrected. Mom had grown up in towns in Ontario, so she wanted us to get out to get a few music lessons and be in boy scouts and that. When we shipped cattle

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out of here, we shipped them on the train and they went around up to Moose Jaw and then headed east, so Moose Jaw was kind of the logical place to go to get to a bigger center. We moved there in 1956 when I was a year old, to get my sister to school, and then we stayed there until I wrote my last high school exam. We were home to the ranch every summer, my dad was probably one of the first commuters in Saskatchewan because he’d be down to the ranch and come into Moose Jaw on the weekends, maybe curl with the church league on Saturday night, go to church, and do some business Monday morning. He’d go back and forth if he had to pick up supplies for the ranch or haul cattle in or get feed, back and forth. So, I got to see it, it wasn’t that I was stuck here on the ranch and wanted to get away. I was out and saw both worlds. I was involved in the boy scouts and made some good friends in there and enjoyed all that and the camping and all. They would give me a piece of rope and I would tie their knots in church, or braid it, to keep me quiet. Anyway, I guess it was because I had the choice, and it was my choice to ranch. I’ve got one older sister and she was a good hand on the ranch, but she went through Teachers College and taught school and married a farmer about a hundred and fifty miles away. She’d be home for roundups and stuff like that, but she wasn’t involved in the day-to-day operations of the ranch after she got married, and we grew up riding horses; we were both in the 4H Horse Club. Horses have always been a part of our life. I team roped one year, the year before I met my wife, and then the next spring, my horse was all tested so I could cross the border with her, but I was laying in the hospital with a badly broken leg. That was summer time, and Tammy and I were really going together, and the next spring we got married, and the ranch kind of took over. So that was kind of the end of my team roping career that way. Then we rode with our kids, and Tammy and the two younger ones rode in a drill team. Tammy coached kind of a youth drill team; it was mostly girls, but when they were short of girls, my son got pressed into service to the drill team. It is kind of like the RCMP’s Musical Ride, and they practiced and served a grand entry or a program at a few rodeos around here for a summer or two, and we did a little bit of team penning back in BSC (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy). We had a bunch of dry cows that weren’t worth anything to sell, and so we were hanging onto them and waiting for the market to recover. We had them in a little pasture at Big Beaver, so we’d go up once or twice a week and trail them into the arena in town and use them. Team penning’s where you sort three out of the pack and you have to bring them down and put them into a little 10 x 10 pen at the other end of the arena; it’s hard. Well, it was fun for the few times we did it, but cows aren’t your best choice, they have a mind of their own, usually they use yearlings, but it was just making our own entertainment, I guess. But back to my grandfather, he bought another 20 sections, and the government wouldn’t transfer the lease; it was the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) government, and they figured grandpa had enough. It’s the Big Beaver Grazing Co-op now, that’s what they formed, and even though grandpa didn’t get the ranch, he did not really hold a grudge. They didn’t have enough cattle to stock it, so he said, I’ll put cattle in, and he paid to put cattle in there and save his own grass. He said, so we’ll have old grass, but it’ll pay in the long run; he figured he had the opportunity to use more of their grass and rest ours. So he bought the assets, the cattle, and they paid him back for what was on the place I guess, other than the livestock, and John Schmidt, the hired man, came. I knew him better than my grandpa because my grandpa died when I was pretty young, but I just grew up with John. My grandpa left John enough money for when he retired and they built a little house in Big Beaver, so John had a place to live. It was different back then, like, well, it didn’t use to be that the government had to take care of everybody. Churches and families did that, and the community. Then John left it to me and I moved it out of town; we had a chance to sell the lot for $1,000 if the house was off it. So I’d moved the house out, and then I didn’t get it on a foundation, so Tammy tore it down

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and made her art gallery from it, John Schmidt’s house. We never had a post office box in Big Beaver until well after we were married because John just picked it up for us and we could stop at any time of the day or night. It was sitting on top of his old Philco television that was so snowy you couldn’t watch anyways, but he’d pick up our mail; that was his job still, to pick up the mail.  ell me about your operation T We’re a cow calf operation, we calve a little bit later, that’s becoming more of the norm, but we turn our bulls out the middle of July. We start calving the last week or so of April and try to get most of them out onto the grass pretty quick. We keep our heifers and purebred cows in close so we can get them tagged up, but as soon as they’re born and tagged, they’re out on the grass, and the main herd calves are out on the grass. And then we try to get the calves shipped in pretty good time in the fall, so our cows can regain condition because I do quite a bit of winter grazing here. I’ve got cows in the hills yet this winter. It doesn’t always work; last year we fought through February to get them home through the deep snow, and this year, as in some years, they probably could stay there almost ‘till they’ve calved, we’ve done that, but they are coming home here in the next few weeks now. Other than what we cut for hay and a few old fields, out of the 20,000 acres, there’s probably 19,000 of it or more that’s native grass; see, this land was never homesteaded. Where the homesteads

Tippy in the badlands. (Photo credit: Michael Burgess)

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were, they were required to break up land to prove up on their homesteads, and it wasn’t the right thing to do. I was just reading a thing from the States this morning about, well at the hundredth meridian or something, the land west of there, the man was, well, he wasn’t in charge, but he recommended that not be homesteaded because it didn’t get enough rain in the160 acres, so it wouldn’t support a family unit. But they went ahead and homesteaded into Montana as late as 1918, and we were well into the 1920s here. There was some in the 1940s just over here, just the last little bit in the south that was homesteaded. It was a quarantine at the border when they used to bring the cattle up from the States. They would have to dump them in there for so many days and then get them out of there after they proved they weren’t sick or something, and then when they closed the quarantine, they opened that last land up for homestead. That’s just up on the bench and the other side of us here. But this here is cattle grazing land. I was at a conference a few years ago and listened to an agronomy economics professor, and we were talking about the grasslands, and he said just imagine if instead of breaking up, you know, 10 acres a year for four years, or whatever it was to prove up a homestead, if you had to fence it and dig a well and raise cattle. Because they pushed the wheat mentality on Saskatchewan, they gave, you know, the crow rate; they shipped wheat out real cheap. And the quota system was even to promote the breaking of land, because you could sell three bushels of wheat, as a quota opened up, as long as I’ve cultivated three bushels to the acre of cultivated land. So you might have some land that might not even grow three bushels, but you can sell three bushels that grew on your good land, on that, so they would encourage the breaking of marginal land. Even government policies… they said you should be improving your native grass by breaking it up and seeding tame grass, which was no improvement, but that was government policy at one time.  ell me about your range management T My priority in my range management is grass management. My grandfather told my dad, and my dad told me, that if you have old grass, you’ll have new grass. Our priority has never been to maximize our production or our numbers of cattle; our priority has always been to make sure we had grass for the cattle that we had. Dad said that on the good years, you’ve got more grass than cattle, and on the bad years, you got more cattle than grass. He was pretty proud that in the 1980s, we may be cut back on numbers, but there was never a year we didn’t run cattle; and yet there was government pastures, supposedly professionally managed; in those years, they’d say, “Oh we can’t take cattle this year,” you know, it was too dry, and the people that relied on putting cattle in there had to find alternate pastures. So there was a lot of cattle in the 1980s that went to Manitoba or farther north to grass because the south was dried out; but like I said, we cut back and some of those pastures; well, maybe we’re short of water, but we could run cattle. We manage the range to conserve native grass; well, our ranch is pretty much all native grass anyway. We’ve got one bigger native pasture up in the north with good shelter and there’s springs, and it’s up along the shore of the Big Muddy Lake; that’s our winter range. The cows spend a lot of the winter up there and it’s good; we don’t have to bring them in, you know, burn diesel fuel, and run machinery to feed them and possibly buy hay, because we’re chronically short of hay in this country. We’re not bad this year, but we seem like we’re short more years than we have a surplus in this country. We’ve broke some of the old tame hay fields up to plant some cereal crops for green feed forages. Basically, we have three summer pastures that we’ve been trying to use once every three years, and we use them hard. We’ll feed mineral in the brush patches or the juniper patches, and we try to use them hard and then they get two full years of rest. So that’s been interesting now to see the response to the grass from one year to the next. Like they always talk about this grass needs so many days of rest, but in this dry country, that’s got to be extended because some years you’re lucky to have 30 days growing season, so your rest isn’t really doing anything else for you. We’ve tried it that way, and we’d rather graze more days than run more cattle for fewer days I guess.

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There’s some places the grass and moisture climbs where if you don’t use it during the growing season, it’s probably not very nutritious, but this grass cures off. We have winterfat and there’s a fair abundance of it, especially up in the north end where we don’t graze during the early season, and winterfat is high in protein, pushing close to 14% protein. So it doesn’t take very much of that for the cattle to eat to supplement their protein. So we would rather run fewer cattle for more days on grass and then have more cattle and have to bring them in to feed them and concentrate them up. They took some of our winterfat to Swift Current to reproduce it for native prairie reseeding, but that’s the trouble with scientifically or mechanically trying to reproduce native prairie, which is the biodiversity of it, with getting the forbs and all. There’s some of these plants you just can’t go out and find so easily all the time, like your purple prairie clover, and same with winterfat and rabbit bush and sage. They’re all very similar to the layman, like you can yank them out and you get a look and think well, it’s all sage, but there’s some winterfat in there. Well, probably the best way to win in this business is to be a low-cost producer, but you can’t be a low-cost producer at the expense of your production of your livestock. By grazing out, we sell lighter calves earlier, but our cows go out grazing; if we waited longer to try and get more weight on the calves, well, if winter closed in, we’d probably start feeding them cows, and feed them for the winter. They wouldn’t be dried up and gaining up in the hills. We have a lot of natural advantages on this ranch though, just with the shelter. If this ranch was all flat, we would probably be best to run more cattle and windbreaks and feed the cows all winter, because they couldn’t stay out there. I nnovation: Big Muddy Bossy Bloomer We’ve been here a long time, but we were kind of always early adapters, and dad wasn’t afraid to try something, like, well, they started liquid cattle supplements. Now you have trucks come around to deliver to the tanks. So we had tanks and he got jugs of concentrate in and a semi load of molasses and we mixed our own. Now I use a canola meal and salt mixture and I’ve been using this for a few years, taking supplement up to the cows; it’s a bypass protein so you don’t have to feed it everyday, but we put that out every 3–4 days just loose in tubs and they eat it. I’ve been doing this for quite a few years now and a couple of years ago a guy from the Sask. Stock Growers asked me if I’d heard about their canola pellet experiment, and I said oh, well, I’ve been doing that for years, do I get royalties on this? He didn’t know me so well, and he got kind of flustered, but I’ve told guys, and I have guys in Alberta trying it this winter. I called it Big Muddy Bossy Bloomer just kind of as a joke. It’s similar to a product in the States that they call Forage Pro, well it is and it isn’t, theirs has synthetic proteins, but it works similar. So anyway, this year the study came out about how well this worked. They said they’ve got it made into pellets where I just add salt and put it out free choice, and it’s kind of self-limiting to a point. And so I said, well it’s kind of nice to have my ideas validated by their research because I’ve been doing this for years. I had one guy went to the Co-op and asked for Big Muddy Bossy Bloomer, and when I first started I was getting it made in Weyburn, but they don’t have a mill there anymore, and he went and asked, and it was in the Co-op system as Big Muddy Bossy Bloomer! He just about fell over. Now, it’s called Burgess 24% protein out at Master Feeds. I don’t get a percentage; I probably don’t even get it cheaper. But I can buy a ton of it for about the price of 400 pounds of lick tubs. So we’re early adapters. We had solar panel pumps in our dugouts in 2000, 20 years ago, we were doing that, and there’s probably guys before us, but we’ve done that. We’ll try different vaccines and newer livestock health for the cattle, and we were already into rotational grazing early on.  here did you learn this range management? W I learned this from my grandpa and my dad but also at Olds College. Now the range and pasture, it can vary so much, you know within areas, different areas require different management, but I always said going to college is just to teach you how to learn certain things. You know there’s a multitude of good articles out there, and I was involved with the Saskatchewan Stock Growers and the Prairie Conservation

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Mama cow. (Photo credit: Michael Burgess)

Action Plan (PCAP). My friend said he liked going to a lot of these meetings because there’s people with their master’s degree in range management that willingly share their education. He says he gets their education for free, you know, they’re listening and he’s put a lot of that to use with what he’s learned. Nowadays you use the Internet, you can go on LinkedIn and learn about regenerative agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and grass management, there’s YouTube videos, there’s all sorts of stuff. Species at risk I guess I first started hearing about species at risk when I was a director on the Saskatchewan Stock Grower’s board from 2000 to 2008, and I was a representative on PCAP (Prairie Conservation Action Plan), and then I chaired it; I think from 2005 to 2008. So it would be sometime in there it started to become more prominent. I had issues with some of them, like the prairie dogs, their northern range just happens to stick into Canada, and they make them endangered, but yet they have prairie dog hunts in the States. The Yucca moth is dependent on the Yucca plant, but we just happen to be at the northern end of the range, and that is why they’re rare in Canada, but yet they’re a noxious weed in most of the states in the States. So it’s this kind of thing that gets a rancher’s backup thinking about it. Then, well, I guess people have come to embrace the Grasslands National Park. I haven’t had very much to do with that, we kind of heard about the fight to start with, but when it first came out, they’re tearing all the fence, telephone and power lines out of the park to make it natural again, and they’re excluding the cattle to save habitat for species at risk, and now they’re paying to put fences back up in the park and bringing cattle back in to save habitat for species at risk. Well it reminds me of that old saying, you know, I’m from the government; I’m here to help. I used to go to Crown land stakeholder forums and meetings, and there would be two or three of us that were ranchers that were on our land, and then there’d be the government people from the Lands branch, and there’d be 20 other people from different organizations wanting to use this land that the ranchers were paying the taxes and the lease on. They were all out there to protect it from the rancher, and that was the reason they still had the healthy land the way it was, because of the ranchers. Just like the Grasslands National Park, they had to save it from the rancher, and then they suddenly realized that they didn’t have the wildlife or the species at risk anymore; they were vacating the park lands and staying on the ranch lands. A lot of the government policy from the homestead days was fragmenting the land. In that country that was out there, there was the Matador, the Turkey Track Ranch, and the N Bar; those were big

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ranches in there. The bad winters in 1905 or something broke some of those up, broke them period I guess, but the homesteaders came in and so the bigger blocks of land got broken. You see it throughout the Grasslands National Park as well, those old broke patches, they are spending millions of dollars to try and get rid of Crested Wheat grass fields, and probably there’s some Caragana rows around some of the old homestead farms out in that country that were there at one time. SARPAL Regarding the SARPAL program, well I was one of a few that started the Rancher Stewardship Alliance (RSA), and so with this SODCAP Inc. and SARPAL coming in, the government didn’t really want to deal with individuals; they’d rather deal with an organization, and so we started this organization. We went to a couple of our Stock Growers zone meetings and we explained our program, and we didn’t ask for any money, but we said we would like your support, ranchers with native prairie, whether it’s leased or deeded. I remember we were in Glentworth at a meeting and a lot of the ranchers from the south thought this was a good idea, and so all of a sudden, we were sort of representing a couple hundred thousand acres of native prairie. I think there was probably 25,000 or 80,000 acres there from us at the RSA alone. It was the management of it, because it doesn’t matter who owns it, it’s the management, and the Crown lease is included in that. So we were looking at that, and actually some of these protocols for this SARPAL program were developed through workshops done through our Ranchers Stewardship Alliance to set up for the endangered Sprague’s Pipit protocols. So it’s just been a natural progression, and when the opportunity came up to be an active participant in it, well, we’re a great believer in results-based programs, and this fit; we didn’t have to make big changes. It seems like a program where you pay people to make big changes is only as good as the next one that they pay you to change again. Anyway, we said if these (conserving species at risk and their habitat) have an economic value to society, what is it, and we’ll produce it, you know, we’re producers. It doesn’t seem like the government feels like it gets enough gratitude for what they do and they want to say that they’ve converted people. The SARPAL program sent a survey around, an economist was doing an evaluation of it, and they were talking about how much does it cost you to do this, and how much cash to do that, and I almost felt guilty about answering them, because, well, I’ve just been doing it. I’m the world’s worst recordkeeper. I look at the ground, you know, like you can input all you want into the computer and numbers and stuff, but if you don’t look and see what’s happening out there, well, it’s of little use. What I liked the most about SARPAL was getting the reward for what we’re doing. It would be nice if there was enough there to entice more producers into it, you know, being as it was a sort of a pilot project, we were limited to the number of participants we had and the acres we could enroll. I think as it goes along it’s kind of a lead by example thing, where some people that might not be doing it may say, “Hey, they’re getting a reward for doing that. You know, if I did this instead of running as usual, start to do some rotational grazing or something, maybe I could get the funding too.” With a bit of rotation, you can increase your carrying capacity without degrading your grass. If you’re growing more grass, and again if you’ve got old grass, if you’ve chewed your pasture off every year, when you get old grass, there you usually grow some to trap even the limited amount of snow; it makes some snowbanks and starts to capture some moisture. Some of the litter is on the grass and then the patchiness of some old grass standing holds it too. But if it’s chewed right off and bared down, it will likely stay that way. These ranches, they all have their own little ecozones within them, like we’ve got bull pastures that you’ve got to use in the spring to keep your bulls contained. Quite often, they’re slightly abused, generally not large areas, but they also make Burrowing owl habitat generally, because they’re shorter grasses. Then up in the west side of the ranch on this place where we’ve changed it up a little bit with some cross fencing, it always used to have tall grass up there and was more of a bird habitat, and down in some of their more eroded areas, the grass is shorter again. The endangered Loggerhead shrikes like

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patchiness because they like open air for the chicks maybe, but they also want nesting grass of a certain height. It’s not an all-or-nothing sort of thing where you take it all or take none of it. So each one has its own ecozone that’s a healthy ranch. You don’t want all BurrowingoOwl habitat, that’s for sure. And for some of the birds, like, we use the range in the dormant season up in the north where cows are now, but they’re out of there through the nesting season. So they’re not disturbing any of the nests, like the Sprague’s pipit nests. In our area, we’re not Sage-grouse country because we’re too rough; they don’t like the structure, the hills and the stuff around them. We’re not Swift fox country either, again because we’re too rough; they like long rolling hills. Over in that Fife Lake country, I was reading an old book of an early homesteading family there, and they were talking about how they always had to put the harness in the wagon box at night when they were on the trail because the Kit fox, which is the Swift fox, would come and chew the harness for the salt. That would have been in their early 1900s. The incentives for SARPAL were fine for me. What I was involved with, it seemed like it was a fairly adequate payment for what we were doing. We didn’t have to change too much, so it was pretty nice. But I think most of what you would have had to change would have been a benefit to you anyway; I mean, to change for SARPAL would not be a detriment to your ranch. And it’s nice to get some outside validation when they monitor your range. So, with SARPAL, I think if this program carried on, people would see it’s viable, even if they do have to make some changes to try to fit into it. As it was on a short term to start, it kind of had to be targeted to ranches that already fit the program. It’s been good to reward people for doing the right thing, managing native grass very well. I think if SARPAL carried on it could make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat because once people say, hey, he got $10,000 just for having his grass a little better, he didn’t run cows in there continuously, or he rotated some, well, sign me up. We didn’t have to change our numbers, but we maybe ran a few less per acre, but I see neighbors that just put some cattle in every pasture all summer, and there’s no science to it, to hold them off ‘till it grows, or get this pasture up and get some regrowth and leave some growth in there and stuff. So, you know, if there’s an opportunity, some people never will take advantage of it, but other people I think would see it, if word gets around. But in the beginning, mind you, this program was looking to work with people that would work with them.  upport from the government, the general public, and the beef production industry S The government could support ranchers best by just getting out of our way. If they want to keep regulating the species at risk, if they figure, there’s a value to them, then if we’re producing, you know, providing the habitat for them and managing the best way for them, then support ranchers. If we’re providing the service, we should be rewarded. The other day I saw this picture on LinkedIn and they’re saying oh, isn’t this beautiful these elk eating this ranchers hay, and I said, yeah beautiful, if it’s not your hay. But the species at risk, if there’s a social benefit to having them, then support the people managing their habitat. Like, what’s the value of these Sage-­Grouse to you? Reminds me, I once took the Lake Alma Saskatchewan Saddle Up group out on a trail ride out through the ranch. We rode up through here and around, and there’s a big flat there by the Three Sisters range, well, we came by there and then we’re going to ride up through the Badlands and on toward home. And this one guy said, “Well, there is land out here that could be broke.” You know, I felt like saying if you wanted to ride in the summer fallow you ‘coulda just stayed home. As for the general public, well I’d like them to respect the landowners’ rights to have a closed gate and not allow visitors, with the biosecurity it’s more important all the time. Also, in Saskatchewan, we can’t charge for hunting like they do in the States, with the lease and stuff, and I’m not an advocate really for paid hunting, we have houses here we rent out to hunters. But I asked some friends that had shot a big elk on the ranch here what it would cost down in the States for that, and it was like over $10,000 they pay to shoot an elk off of private land. But again, I also understand the importance of hunting for those that need that meat, with lower incomes, young families, and such.

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So in the beef production industry, they have verified sustainable production and you can work with different labels, and I think a lot of people are finding what fits for them. We’re still pretty much raising for the commodity market, we’re too many to market our production farm gate sort of thing, and it’s a lot of work. Anybody that does it hats off to them that can market any volume of production. But I hope we’re getting ahead on our health, our vaccinations, and stuff; more people are becoming aware of the health concerns. There’s a lot more emphasis on more natural beef, but I don’t think the grass fed beef; well, it isn’t going to feed the multitudes. There’s some nice programs and there’s a market for it, and there’s people that can supply that market, but I think we’re never going to replace the production that we get through the feedlots on the grass-fed cattle. It would be such a shift in production to the amount of grass it would take to finish the cattle that we do. Going back to LinkedIn, I read an article about when it comes to pounds of quality protein compared to anything; cattle are as efficient as any of them really. When it comes back down to the quality of protein that’s available for human consumption, they talk about grain and stuff, but humans can only eat so much corn. The quality of protein that cattle produce is excellent, and I think the population is growing and they’re going to demand the protein. I think there’s a way to meet that demand and also retain food security. But consider Namibia is now exporting meat to the USA. The Americans talk about their COOL (Country of Origin Labeling), but it’s a logistical nightmare. They don’t want to have an identification program similar to Canada. I think Brazil, I was just reading, has an individual animal ID program now similar to the Canadian one. The Americans still think that their paper trail of birth records and sales receipts are sufficient. I was just having an argument with a fellow, I said; well tell me about this state-of-the-art system you have. Well, we have birth records and brand inspection, and I said, well some places in the States, brands are registered by county, Texas, and half of Nebraska doesn’t brand, and it depends on which side of the river you’re on if you have to use brand inspection or not, and there’s whole states that don’t use brand inspectors. There’s places, well, all over, but mainly the Eastern side, where there’s backyard beef; people have got five or ten cows. So they’ve got lots of different programs that you can use, if you qualify, from their grass feds and all naturals and the things that they do for traceability. But is a four hundred pound calf shipped out of Canada in the fall that goes to graze wheat pastures and then onto the Flint Hills and then into a feedlot and processed in the States; is that not a product of the USA?  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Regarding the future of the ranch, well, I have a daughter and a son that are both sort of ranching with me, and I hope we can carry on. We’re at the point where we’re renewing our leases and we can renew for another 33 years, and I want to get my daughter and my son on the leases with me, so, it’s a sort of a continuous flow, and they’re ranching with me. You know, the young people, I was probably the same way; you always think you know more than your dad did, but the older you get, the smarter you realize your parents were. I got my dad this old Leaning Tree poster, it’s cartoonish with a kind of knobby kneed, bow-­legged old rancher and his old pickup with gate wire kind of across the top, all patched together, and he says, “Well, this ranch put my son through college, and now he’s back here telling me how to run it.” So that’s the plan, to stay in the family, and hopefully our ranch is passed on, just carried on. My dad lived here ‘till the last six months of his life, and even his last two weeks in the hospital, I’d go up to visit them, Tammy was there full-­time, and he’d say, “Well you better get home, you got your chores to do, and you got to get that load of cattle sold.” He was told he had 12–24 hours to live, and he kind of hung around for two weeks, and he was still worried about the cattle and the ranch. He’d ask, did I get that load shipped, and I said no dad, that’s not for a couple more weeks, you know. He was ranching until the end, and he had his mind too, because, like, one day I took him out for a drive, and as we drove along the fence line, he said about three poles up there’s a post with a staple out, and sure enough, there was. He was laying in the hospital, and he wasn’t talking very much there at the end, but we were sitting around and visiting and talking about the different old horses on the ranch we remembered and some

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of the hired men and stuff, and I was telling this story about this Goldie horse that laid down on this girl in the slough. I asked dad was it Connie that Goldie lay down on, and he said, no, it was Sharon; that’s about all he could get out. He was dry, he wasn’t having anything to eat for quite a while and nothing to drink really, and here he remembered, oh yeah, it was Sharon. Connie was riding with her, but he had his mind right to the end. In the wintertime we background our cattle; well, we used to background them all, a whole bunch of cattle, but now we keep our heifer calves and sell our steer calves in the fall. We keep the heifer calves, actually bought a few more this year, and we’re feeding them for the winter and got a feed bunk along here, and it kind of blows in with this bale processor, but doesn’t all go in, some gets pushed out. So we usually go out after a coffee in the afternoon with the pitchforks, and it wasn’t heavy work, but you just had to kind of go along 300 feet and throw this back in. And dad really liked doing that. He’d go over and do the short bunk by the bulls, and he’d have them so he could scratch them all with his pitch fork and he just loved to get out there after coffee and do it. Some days in the winter time that might be the only time he was out was after coffee. He felt bad when mom was bad; he was looking after her, of course, for that sundowners just time of day, when things start to get bad. Well, I’d have coffee with them, then I’d go out and start in the bunk, and mom would have them doing things, getting the box, so she could pack up to go move home, you know, like your married for 70 years, but, well, things like that. So he’d stay and look after her and then he come walking out. Well, I’d be walking down from the end of the bunk and he’d say “I was just helping your mom,” but he really wanted to be out there along the bunk; he loved that in his later years. He would take you in his little Nissan Pathfinder, it’s pretty nimble around the ranch and easy to get in and out of and he’d load up 50 pound bags of mineral and haul it out and put out the minerals. He’d go every couple days and make sure the solar water pumps were working, and if something was wrong, I maybe had to swing by and fix it, but he checked them. He missed it and I really miss that kind of stuff. Final thoughts? Well, maybe for newer or younger ranchers, we always want to support them, and we won the 2014 Environmental Stewardship Award; there’s a video on our website about it, www.circleyranch.ca, so maybe that’s a resource for people, maybe younger ranchers. I don’t make that category anymore; matter of fact, I’m headed for a knee replacement. I guess I wish I’d been a little more careful on motorcycles moving cattle. I ran into the back of a steer when I broke my knee. That time I set the bike up and rode it back to the truck and loaded it up and got in the truck and I knew there was nobody home here and I had to get somewhere. So when I got to Coronach, the doctor didn’t think it was broke because there was nothing broke above the knee and nothing broke below the knee, but the x-ray showed it was all broke in the knee and I heard him tell the x-ray technician; I’ve never seen a knee broke that bad. Broke my foot too, five bones in my heel. But then again, there are so many good memories. Like, I remember my grandfather, he traveled a lot of these hills, we use, you know, four-wheel drives, big tires and stuff, and he went around a lot of that stuff in an old car. You come across parts of that old car on the range. My dad told stories about how you’d see grandpa down on the shore of Big Muddy Lake, and it’s just all rocks, like it’s like cobblestone and then bigger rocks, and he’d be out there in that old car. They were up at the Castle Butte Ranch, my grandfather owned that at one time, and he saw something out on the flats. On the Big Muddy bottom, here there’s quite a bit of alkali and soft spots; well, they get out there and here it was a horse that had died or something, but grandpa thought he’d better go check, and he ends up getting stuck out there and had to get the car pulled out. But anyway, in the end, I love this life, like the flexible hours, you know, sometimes you can work from early morning till dark, and sometimes you can work from dark to almost early morning, depending on what’s going on. But you’re your own boss. I’m happy on the ranch. I don’t know, I just plug away, I do what I can do, and I know it’ll be there tomorrow to do if I don’t get it done today. We’re contented here.

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Bar 7 Ranch British Columbia Doug and Erika Fossen Combined Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T Our company name is Fossen Air Limited, and we call it the Bar 7 Ranch. My mom and dad, Ed and Louise Fossen, bought this homeplace in 1976. I grew up on this ranch, and I’ve just always liked it here, and I’ve always liked cattle and livestock and felt that if I could make a living at it, that’s what I’d like to do. Erika grew up on a mixed farm, a few cows, but mostly grain, in northern Alberta, and we both took Agriculture at Olds College. We met there and then moved back here; I’ve always felt that it’s a beautiful spot to raise kids. We are the second generation on the ranch, with our girls being the third, and we slowly added on to it over the years. We bought 300 acres in 1989, and then in 2006, we bought some more land, and in 2017, we bought our last piece of land. So now we’re about 2,300 acres of deeded land, and we also run our cattle on government range in the summer from May to October.  ell me about your operation and the priority in your range management T We’re a commercial cow-calf ranch. We have Hereford and Angus cross cows, so we breed our black cows to Hereford bulls and our Hereford cows to black bulls, and we calve out about 350 mother cows. We produce our own feed on the ranch; we farm probably about 200 acres that we irrigate with some hand lines and now some irrigation center pivots. So we produce all our own feed; we just buy a little bit of feed barley if we need barley for the calves; that’s the only thing we buy. So yeah, we’ve got about 350 cows, and this year we had 40 replacement heifers that we keep for our own herd and 19 or so bulls. In this area, we are a pretty fragile environment, so our priority in our range management is to hit it once and graze it basically once a year. We rotate, we’re always trying to change our rotations to graze different areas at a different time of year. We do our rotational grazing to conserve native grass. We’re a bit limited as we use our south-facing grasslands that green up early in the spring, and then we go back into higher elevation timberland in the summer. So there’s a limit, like you can’t kick them onto the top of the mountain in May because there would be no grass up there, and then by the time they came back to your spring pasture, it would be all burnt off and dead. So we’re sort of stuck in a rotation, but we also try to manage it much as we can based on the terrain and what we have to work with. We used to have four separate government range permits and we joined them all together, so now our annual amount of use is in the whole area. We can move more cows to certain areas if we want to graze heavier in one area and rest another area. We’ve been able to do some ecosystem restoration with burns and stuff and be able to rest certain pastures and graze other areas just based on the year and cattle numbers and where we want to move them. We’ve always done some chemical weed control because we fight with some really nasty weeds like spotted knapweed and sulfur cinquefoil and leafy spurge in this area. We don’t have natural predators for them here so we have to use some chemical. We found that if we can spray a little bit in those areas and get the weeds under control, then with management, you can maintain that for a long time, and grass has a chance. But some of these are really bad; like knapweed, it has a toxin that will kill grass and makes it, so the bunch grass just doesn’t have a chance to even get going. We’re always trying to use less chemical, but it’s another tool that we use to improve our grassland. Another thing we’ve done on our ranch is that we do quite a bit of logging in our forested area, and without that, we wouldn’t have as much grass as we do. When you log that 600 or 700 acres of land,

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you get way more grass there, and it kind of takes the pressure off of the grassland, so that’s another way, along with our forage production for feed, that we’ve been able to rest those fragile grasslands by having enough feed in the spring. We don’t have to turn cows out early with our irrigation and crop production, and then we also have enough grass in the summer with our forested area because we’ve logged them and opened up more area. We have areas where it was just dark and dingy, and the whole canopy was just pretty much dark. And then when we took out maybe 40% of the trees or so, the sunlight was able to get in. We were just looking at an area over there and said to each other, look at the grass now, with the sunlight coming in the grass grows, and then the cows go in there, and it’s just like this cyclical great thing for the ecosystem. Our management style also protects and conserves species at risk through this SARPAL program now. But we’ve always tried for limited impact with our grazing and just managing for wildlife and supplying water and salt and good grass. I think that’s why ranching is such a good thing for the environment, because when we’re managing it well for cattle, it benefits all species, including those at risk.  here did you learn how to manage this way? W We learned range management through Agriculture college and we took Agriculture business. It’s just time too, and we’ve met a lot of people and have a lot of contacts in the industry through going to Cattleman’s conventions, and we enjoy conferences and meeting people. Our annual Cattlemen’s convention is very good. There’s a local Farm Advisory board and they’ve been doing demonstrations, like the other day they had a little clinic on doing deep soil pits, looking at your soil and what you have in it. So we’ve been doing lots of those kind things; they’re very helpful.  ow much of your range is native grassland? H Out of our private land, probably of 2,300 acres, we have about 600 acres of timbered, rough grazing land, so that’s native, but it’s forested; and we have probably 150 acres of old hay fields that we just graze now, and then about 200 acres of irrigated land. So that would leave about 1,500 acres of native grassland. This area is unique because the south-facing slopes here are actual grassland that has never been cleared, and I think a lot of people don’t know that. All the north slopes that you can see over there are all naturally forested, but all these slopes along the south side have always been open grassland. Actually, the most endangered ecosystem in BC (British Colombia) is grassland because of the encroachment of towns and crops. We are quite proud of our native grassland here. And cattle grazing is so important in keeping it healthy. With the bunch grass, cattle stepping on it is the best thing for it. I’ve seen pictures of old bunch grass that’s been chewed off, and if it isn’t punched down by cattle, it will stay stagnant, but if it gets beaten with cow hooves, it’s much better for it. We get a bit frustrated in this area because land values are so high, it’s hard to buy more land to add to our ranch, and when land does get bought, it’s usually somebody who just wants to hunt on it or exclude livestock. They don’t want to do anything with it, and that’s really hard on the whole ecosystem. We’ve got an area, it’s the Johnson Creek Park that’s been part of our range grazing area since this ranch was first started in about 1890. They put in a park in the 1960s, and now they want to fence the cattle out of part of the park on the top, and it’s just so shortsighted by the Park, because they want to fence off this 30 acres and exclude it from the thousands of acres that are managed around it. It’s really frustrating that our government still thinks that excluding livestock and kicking ranchers out of those areas is the best way to manage it, even though it’s been managed like that since 1890, and that’s why that area is there and is in good health, because it’s been grazed a couple times a year. The Parks people held meetings over the last 20 years, but I wouldn’t really call it consulting. I go to a meeting and say that I don’t think it’s a good idea; it’s just more fences impacting wildlife. Our

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cows are just going through grazing like they would and then moving on, but adding another triangle of fence to keep that area safe…from what? Our ranch probably uses about a hundred kilometers of fence; all our ranges are fenced into pastures and our homeplace. We have about 35 different pastures that we rotate cows through, so we know where important fences are needed, and we know what needs to be fenced. So sometimes it’s kind of frustrating because we get these Parks people who want to put up fence that’s not needed. We’re already replacing 4 kilometers of fence a year, and if you did that at the current prices of 17 dollars a meter, that’s about $100,000.00 worth of fencing a year. Yet we still get this pressure from people who don’t understand livestock, and that’s where the SARPAL program was good.  hen did you first start hearing about species at risk? W We first started hearing about species at risk through the BC Cattlemen’s Association. I sat on their environmental stewardship committee probably five years ago, but I was on it for about seven years. That’s where we first heard about the SARPAL program and that there was some funding available. But we’ve always been interested in the environment, and knowing what’s on our ranch, we know we have Badgers and Tiger salamanders. We have a video of me talking to a Badger on the range and the Badger is listening and turning his head; it’s really cool. They’re bold and they don’t run away from you, and when they go down their hole, they’re always facing you. The Tiger salamanders have a real funny round, round face, and they’re kind of black and dark green mottled; they live in the grasslands and then they go back to our watering dugouts to breed in the spring. We have them over there on our ranch, and we found some right here, and we have Lewis’s woodpecker. Our range in Midway has lots of rattlesnakes, and we’ve seen lots, you hear them first, and then your horse will tell you not to go there. We have biologists come out to do studies, and on one range, they circled on a map where they want to protect rattlesnakes. There’s rattlesnake dens there, and it was interesting that the biologists recommend not herding cattle by the rattlesnake dens. But when we’re herding cattle, the cattle go where they want to go; we’re not in Saskatchewan. We would like to be in Saskatchewan where it’s maybe a little flatter, but when we’re chasing cows across rock blocks, there’s pretty well one option; it’s where they can walk and that’s it. Now it’s a little scary with the species at risk in that you have these biologists that actually don’t understand how we’re managing our ranges, and they don’t understand that the reason those rattlesnake dens are there is because it’s been cattle range for a hundred years. There’s also other issues, like quad access and highway access that’s killing way more rattlesnakes than a cow herd ever does walking by. I think they need to start looking at that if they’re serious about conservation. They maybe need to stop looking at ranchers and start looking at the highway corridors, the recreational ATV (all terrain vehicle) use, and those sort of things, which are going to be a harder sell because the general public wants to go drive a quad around and run over rattlesnakes. But they tend to pick on us because we’re an easy target and we do things for them. But in the whole scheme of things, I don’t think the ranches and the cows are the problem. It was interesting; a couple of months ago, we had some gold miners that are doing some drilling on our property, and in order for them to get permission to come in and drill, they had to allow an archaeological assessment and a biologist on our property. So because we wanted to let those gold miners on, we were forced to let an archaeological assessment and a biologist come on our property, and that kind of, sort of, bullying, it’s frustrating. Because it’s not like that archaeological research is for our benefit, and they didn’t come and talk to us; it’s just what the government wants. It’s just one of those things that we have to tolerate in order to make a few dollars to keep going.

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SARPAL We’re always looking at new programs and new ideas and technology that that we can use, and SARPAL helped us manage our range. What we did with SARPAL allowed us to actually keep our hayfield separate from the cottonwood trees, because before, the fence was almost nonexistent, and we also put in a water trough. SARPAL gave us sort of a free rein and said, here’s the budget, what do you want to do? And we said, well, we need two kilometers of fence here, that was important, and we’re going to fence out these cottonwoods, and we put our time and labor into it and built it, and it’s really helped us out. So it was a good program that way; SARPAL consulted with us and asked us what we wanted to do. Our new fence is helping the Lewis’s woodpecker because we’re keeping their cottonwoods protected, but it also is very functional for us. It works perfect because the hayfield’s on the one side, and our grazing is on the other side. The SARPAL program consulted with us and was a help. We had a terrible old fence that was in a poor location and it was getting beat up by wildlife, and we just couldn’t maintain it. So it was just a great little opportunity to build some new fence and help us with our management that we just couldn’t afford at that time. It was an opportunity we felt we should take advantage of. We always feel that these programs, if nobody takes advantage of it, then they won’t offer the program anymore. We also feel that it’s in your best interest to use money that is offered to you, especially if I don’t have to make major changes to my management that may not be best for me in the long run. So if people want to help us out, we will totally accept it, because we just feel that it’s there for a reason, and we want to be progressive ranchers and use what’s available rather than not. SARPAL was a good program because it actually paid for our labor to build the fence too. The Environmental Farm Plan is great but it pays for 60% of the project, and SARPAL pays for 100% of the project. We rarely get paid for our time so that was really nice. We love the SARPAL program. We liked that the program was delivered through the BC Cattlemen’s Association (BCCA) and we knew them well; that was great. They e-mailed us about SARPAL and we probably wouldn’t have even read that information had it not come through the BCCA, so that was good. But I think Saskatchewan and Alberta got a lot more funding for SARPAL, so that’s disappointing to us. Saskatchewan and Alberta seem to appreciate their ranchers a little more than in BC. The only downside to the program is that we used up all the money available to us; there is a cap on how much money we could access. We have more projects we’d like to do, and I think there is money, but our ranch is capped; we’ve used what is available for us right now. We would say if there’s still money available; maybe take the cap off for people who want to use it, because if it’s just sitting there, then that’s kind of disappointing. Also, they could expand the species at risk; like in our area, it was just for the Lewis’s woodpecker and the Yellow-breasted chat, a bird down in the Okanagan. So it was very narrow; they could expand to include salamanders and Badgers and whatever species at risk that are on your ranch. SARPAL might also consider an option like this program through the Cattlemen’s Association where we had fenced off a riparian area, and then for a couple of years, we were paid so much an acre to maintain that, and that’s definitely an option if we could get some sort of maintenance funding. A fence does take maintenance and there’s always costs with keeping it operating. I think especially if that land was ever sold to somebody else; if we build a riparian area and we built the fence and we manage it, if that land was sold, the next owner could possibly turn it into a horse pasture, that creek riparian area. So if there was something that could go on with that property and say, no, you get paid a thousand dollars a year to maintain that riparian corridor, maybe that would be a good incentive that could pass it on to a future owner that didn’t have our idea of what proper management is. Through the Environmental Farm Plan (EFP), we got some funding to put our first irrigation center pivot in eight years ago, in 2012. Since then we’ve put in three more pivots, and because of that, we’ve

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been able to increase our production on a smaller amount of acreage. We’re cutting less acreage so we were able to maximize our production but reduce the amount of grassland that’s being farmed, so that’s been a real win-win. We’re using less water and less power, and it’s just made us more efficient. It’s 100% cut out our labor and probably cut our power bill by 70%, because we used to have to run our one pump for 73 days straight, and now we run it maybe 2–3 days a week. It’s so efficient on the water that, well, I mean, you’re only running it two days out of the week. It’s just so efficient; it’s like 24 hours time to get 50 acres watered instead of 3 weeks. So yeah, center-pivot irrigation systems have been a real bonus. And when you’re looking at new technology that’s more expensive, you wonder whether it’s worthwhile, but if you can get that little bit of help to push you into it, then you can realize how good it is, and then you start investing more in that. When mom and dad first bought this place, we ran about 60 cows, and so as we’re building our cow herd up, and we’ve bought more land, it’s always a challenge to start managing it well for the numbers and still get the results in grass growth. In 1975, the highway wasn’t even fenced out, you know, so the cows just went below, because we have land below the highway there down into the canyon and up here. They just roamed around, so, you know, as time goes on, definitely tools are needed to keep the public safe and to maximize our grassland, to really be able to give it a full year of rest, and we have to have fences in place to do that. Also, it takes a lot of water to look after our cow herd if they’re in an intense location, and we have little springs of water and water sources all over the ranch. But every time we develop a new one, it’s a lot of investment to get all our water troughs going. I don’t know how many we have right now. When we find one, we put in a ring or a culvert to keep it, and then bury it down to a trough and put a float on it, so they can drink out of a trough at a remote location without wrecking the spring. We’ve done that, but it costs money. We’ve also done a couple of projects back here where we haven’t fenced off a creek, but we’ve supplied off-site watering, and that really made a difference when it got really dry in the fall because the cows used to walk up and down the creek looking for water, but now they can walk to a water trough and have clean water, so that was another SARPAL option, to do a trough rather than fencing in that location. Grassland can’t be grazed without access to water. We do think SARPAL will make it a difference in the protection of species at risk and their habitat, I think it really points out what species are getting low. Sometimes we’re so used to all the wildlife on our properties that we don’t even know that they could be at risk. So I think it helps us to see what’s out there and enlightens people and gives us a little bit more knowledge around it, which is awesome. But really, we love the SARPAL program, it’s just fantastic. People may not understand that, in this area, if we said our ranch is worth $10 million, and it generates only about $450 thousand worth of gross income a year, well, if people want us to stay in this area and appreciate that how we manage the grasslands helps this environment, we need outside support, like SARPAL and the Environmental Farm Plan; those kinds of programs are necessary for us to keep going. Otherwise, it would be very easy for us to subdivide or not even subdivide, just sell off part of the 20 lots that we owned, and just let it go to acreage and unmanaged grassland. It takes some effort to keep native grassland unbroken.  upport from the beef production industry, government, and the public S Regarding the beef production industry, well, maybe more money trickling down to ranchers instead of the other end, the retailers. This fall we got about $1,200.00 for our calf, and in 2015, we got $1,800.00. It varies, but for our heifers, we’re only getting $900.00. So it’s difficult to continue to pay a quarter million for a tractor and not get paid for the only income you’re gonna get. So more money trickling down to us would be good. And hopefully local processing can be improved, where we can sell our beef locally. I think that’s always a struggle, there’s a lot of government regulations, and

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there’s just not enough capacity in BC to look after our cattle. Like this, the coronavirus pandemic showed, where one plant in Alberta shuts down and our whole industry is crippled and we get hurt by that, and then they just bring in cattle and beef from Europe or Australia or wherever else; so, it’s a little flawed. I also hope that we can promote our Canadian beef cattle. We sort of get blended in with the dairy cattle, the dairy has their subsidies, and yet all their cattle get ground up and added to our production. I think there should be a separation between our beef product, because I think it is better than older dairy cows, but that might just be my opinion. Regarding government support, well, one thing that’s been on my mind lately is that there’s a lot of property in our area that is now owned by retired people or people who are using it as their own hunting reserves, and it’s not producing agriculture. I don’t care what kind of agriculture it’s producing, but it should be in production. I think if those people can afford to buy million dollar properties and not use them for agriculture, they should pay huge taxes on that property. I think that unmanaged, unmaintained land creates headaches for us, management issues. We have to go get cows out of areas where the fences are falling down, but there’s a pile of grass in there, and you have a nasty neighbor that thinks that they should be able to just recreate on that property. So I think government could really up their taxes on people who aren’t ranching. If there was an incentive like that, then maybe they would be more interested in doing leases where you could graze, and they’d be required to maybe maintain the fence and pay us to bring cattle in there. At least, it would be grazing down the land, producing with agricultural land, and making a product like we do. And we’d like the Canadian public to trust that we are making the best product we can for them. I think that we’re kind of making headway in that area, but we’d appreciate consumer belief in us I guess. I think there’s a lot of misinformation about the cattle industry. I think they think that we’re ranching on land that could be used for something else, and in some cases, ok, our productive farm land, maybe it could grow some vegetables or something, but I think most people don’t understand that for 99% of our land, really, cattle is the only thing that can go out there and utilize it.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Regarding the future of our ranch, well, we’ve got three girls and I hope that someday one of them will be interested in coming back and ranching. We just really hope to pass it on because we’re second- and third-generation farming and ranching, and it’s all both of us have ever wanted to do. That was our goal and what we aspired to do, so we would love to pass it on to our children. And hopefully we can carry on, like my mom and dad live on the ranch here, and this is kind of their retirement. They’ve got their home and they keep busy with the yard and grandkids, so hopefully we can do a similar thing when we get older, and just keep it going and keep, well, not really expanding, but just keeping it viable is the thing. Hopefully, we can be large enough that we can afford to buy the machinery we need and make a living. We love to ride our five horses and use them on our ranch. In this area, well, we do know ranchers who don’t ride, but it’s pretty hard to move cattle in the trees without horses and dogs. We’re a little scared right now because when we ride now we have five riders, but we’re worried, we’re going to start losing girls here fairly soon when they go off to college. But anyway, we love to ride as a family, and it’s work, but also we really enjoy it when girls are helping out with the cattle; they’re very capable. Even yesterday my hired man and I were in Midway and trying to catch some cows along the highway, and I texted the girls as they were just finishing school and I got them to stop and help us get them into the trailer because we couldn’t quite get them loaded up without them, but they stopped and rescued us on the side of the road. We’ve done a bit of roping and a little bit of clinics, and I’m the leader of the local ranch horse 4-H club. We also enjoy having town kids come, and we teach them how to chase cattle and work with horses and a get a little look at the cattle industry.

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Photo credit: Doug Fossen

Final thoughts? To end, well, we think it’s just a nice, awesome life. We’ve always felt that if I had to go get a job to support our ranch, then I would just go get a job and not have the headaches of the ranch. So we’ve always just worked full-time on the ranch, and we’re thankful that we were able to do that. And we acknowledge the blessing of being generational and having family there to support you and working with them and everything. On our ranch, every generation has put their assets and time into it, and in every successful ranch that can keep going, you can’t buy out the last generation, like, that’s just not possible. There’s not enough money to say well; we’re going to pay you what it’s worth. So you have to have that commitment toward just keeping it going and have everybody actually stay here and live here. We don’t take a lot of expensive holidays or have a lot of extra toys that we spend money on because every dime has to go back into the ranch to keep it viable and to keep moving ahead. But we enjoy it, we love it, like, nothing makes us more happy than going out and seeing the land doing really good, or the grass thriving, or healthy cattle on the land, and we get real, real joy out of that, so that also adds to our life because you get joy out of seeing improvements. That’s the main thing. It’s offensive to us to hear the public thinks we’re abusing the land or our cattle, it’s the opposite, we just love it. In BC, we have our government range, we have a license to put our cattle out there, so the only thing we’re entitled to is to use some of the grass, and we manage it so carefully, like it’s ours; and it’s been the same range that I’ve been walking on for 44 years. But it’s a little bit frustrating because we have timber companies and we have recreational users that can go out and do what they want to do on that land too, so we manage it how we want to see it managed, and then somebody else comes in and changes everything. So it’s a different challenge then if it was all our private land and we could just

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tell everybody to get off. We are thankful for our private land. But in BC, that is a real challenge for sure, working on the government ranges. And as you see more people coming from the cities whose idea of fun is spinning their tires and their vehicle is ripping things up, it’s hard. Like fire danger, we had to try and explain it to one person, we said it would be like our grassland is the same as if someone came to the side of your house in town, on your lawn, and spray painted the whole thing, or did something to the lawn, or the side of your house, and they just didn’t get it. They don’t understand that we love that a hill doesn’t have a track through it. We tried to explain to him, and finally, it was like this real moment that they had just never thought of it that way at all. I think people who live in a city, like, if they have their lot, they probably look at their house and their porch, and they don’t really look at the neighbors and say, I have go over there and clean up the neighbor’s place, and I’m gonna spray those weeds. Whereas our vision is so much bigger as ranchers, we look at the whole landscape. When I look up on a hillside and if I see something, a track up there, I go, well, did I make that track or did somebody else make that track? I think that’s a big difference, of how we just look at a large landscape, and we’re trying to make it the best that it can be, and that’s different for a lot of people who have only looked at their city lot. Well anyway, to finish, I think it’s great that you’re doing this research because we’re certainly not gonna write this up. We appreciate the chance to get our opinion out there and for people to show some interest in what we’re doing. There can be a lot of negativity around our industry, and we appreciate being able to share our reality. We just really love this life.

Photo credit: Doug Fossen

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Bar 15 Ranch Limited Alberta Katelyn Durec Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T Our family ranch is the Bar 15 Ranch Limited. This ranch was purchased by my grandparents Wes and Dix Alm in 1956. The land was once a part of the very large 44 Ranch, which had its headquarters located over the hill to the north of us. The once large 44 was split into smaller pieces, which then became several smaller family ranches, ours included. With our ranch, Wes also purchased the cook house; the large problem with this was that it was located over the ridge from the land he just bought. With the help of a few D2 cats, they managed to skid the cook house over the ridge, apparently, as the story is told, the first time they got it halfway over the hill some cables broke releasing it and it slid all the way back to the bottom. They did eventually get it back over the hill and into what is now our yard, where it still sits today. It has since been added onto and after years of hauling water and using an outhouse, a big kitchen and bathroom were added on. That was just the beginning; after purchasing a sawmill, Wes continued as a builder and added a hip roof barn, corrals, and eventually a shop and some out buildings; their vision would eventually be complete. My grandmother had multiple sclerosis and passed away too young in 1995. Though she left us too early, I like to think she left bits of herself behind; her loving heart and amazing smile live on in her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Wes lived in the middle house in our yard until 2017 and passed away in 2019 at the age of 94. Wes started importing purebred Simmental heifers into Canada in 1972, and from those heifers grew a herd of pure bred Simmental cattle, those cows were continued on with my aunt and uncle, Anne and Quinten Stevick, and the impact of those original heifers can still be seen in today’s Simmental cattle in Canada. After he retired from daily ranch work, he took up wood working and bought and sold some driving horses. His legacy is built lovingly into every building on our ranch, and his eye and passion for horses will never be forgotten. Though not with us anymore, their vision was truly incredible, and their hard work and dedication will never be forgotten or taken for granted. I imagine they are together once again in heaven, riding side by side! My dad, Glen Alm, was born and raised here on the Bar 15 Ranch. He spent many years clipping cattle for shows and working for Wes. Dad became an excellent steer wrestler, and in 1982, he went on to compete in the Canadian Finals Rodeo. In 1986, he married my mom Donna, and for a couple years, they would live on the ranch helping when they could while working off ranch. In 1988, my sister was born, and they joined Wes in the ranching operation full-time. My parents could be the definition of adapting to circumstance; they have rolled with every punch and always changed and shifted to make everything work. From 1997 to 2000, they had a ranch vacation business and hosted people from around the world here showing them the life of working ranchers. The business came on like a tidal wave, and after a few years of a revolving door of amazing people, they decided that their family and ranch needed tending to and stopped doing ranch vacations. In 2003, the beef industry got shook to the core when BSE collapsed our worlds; things got so tough for ranchers, so many people didn’t make it through to the other side of that. I can’t imagine the strength it took for mom and dad to try and persist in ranching through such terrible times. But they came out the other side a few less cows and both with a couple outside jobs, never

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giving up on this way of life and the desire to raise their children on this ranch. The respect I hold for them because of their resilience is overwhelming; I’m so proud to be their daughter. Today my dad is our MD councilor, and my mom is our church pastor. They are still integral pillars that hold our ranch up and together. They are also new grandparents to our son Kelby, and to say they are doting is an understatement. My sister Karli Rae is the scholar of the family; she went to university and graduated with honors and a Master’s degree in child psychology. She works in the school system helping to support students and teachers in need. Karli is an amazing cowgirl, and though she’s not here day to day, we appreciate her help when she can. Karli is an integral part of our family and our ranch, and our home always feels complete when she’s home for a visit. I was born in 1991, and I’m certain I came out with a cowboy hat on my head and a rope in my hands. Outside was always my favorite place, and most often I was in the barn with my horses. Most people have an occupation that they came to decide on as a young adult, while I have an occupation that I have wanted for as long as I can remember. I always wanted three things, red cows, good dogs, and great horses. And I have been blessed exponentially to have all of those things. I always knew that this life would never be easy, never be 8–5 or always be in desirable conditions, but if I have learned anything from the past 10 years, it’s that on my worst days I still wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. When I wanted to come home, I was prepared to do whatever it took to make it work here, to be able to do all the work I needed on my own. That was my goal when I came home; I said to myself if I can’t do this on my own, then I can’t fathom being here. If I can’t do everything that I need to do, this won’t work, because my parents aren’t going to be here forever, I had to prove to myself and to them that I was capable and competent. The first two years was really a test to myself just to see how capable I could be. I learned a lot, everything from oil changes to fences to calving; rain or shine it all had to get done. I have been truly blessed to have a couple amazing horses and an absolutely outstanding dog come into my life. They have helped me accomplish so many things in terms of cattle handling, pasture management, and herd health. I’m a female, I don’t have the brute strength of a man, so I learned to be creative and inventive; it was really an interesting test of self-perseverance. Because I needed an outside income for myself, I picked up a few seasonal jobs. I calved 700 cows for a neighbor for a couple springs. I also managed a grazing allotment west of our place and was responsible for 1,100 head of cattle in 10,000 acres of forestry for four years. I now work for an amazing friend as a veterinary technician (which is what I went to college for). A lot of times I was like, what are you doing? You’re insane, your nuts, I can’t do this, but with some amazing support from my family, everything that once seemed impossible became possible. What I found out was that you’re capable of way more than you could ever imagine, attitude is everything, and what you can accomplish is a direct reflection of how hard you are willing to work to achieve it.

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Photo credit: Katelyn Durec

I met my husband in 2017; we were set up by a 90-year-old lady that was a mutual friend. She had him drive her out to see my new cabin, made half a circle in my cabin, and then insisted that my parents take her for a drive, leaving him at my house to wait for their return. He helped me put my horses away and cleaned the barn. The rest is history. Luke was the man that could keep up and was always encouraging and supportive. He’s an incredible worker, builder, horse trainer, and now rancher. We got married in 2019 and work side by side everyday to try and reach our goals and build our dreams. This past spring in 2021 we welcomed our son, Kelby Dixon, the light of our lives, into this world. It has been an absolute privilege to raise our child here on this ranch and in this lifestyle so far.

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Photo credit: Katelyn Durec

 ell me about your operation T My parents, my husband, and I run the ranch all together now; we all work together to make it work, and we all have outside full-time-ish jobs. My husband is here the most, and he rides our horses everyday out of the facilities that we’re building, and he does the bulk of the manual labor. My husband was a long-haul truck driver, so having him home full-time has been just phenomenal, and he’s young and strong, and he’s a builder; he comes from a whole line of carpenters back home in Slovakia. He built the new barn and the arena next to it, so that one day we might be able to train horses out of it. We purchased a sawmill, so we’ve cut all the lumber for the barn, arena, and the ranch corral repairs. We log, haul, and saw, then we build. We’re strictly a cow-calf operation, we just have mother cows and raise the calves from birth to weaning, seven months old, and then we sell and ship them to a feedlot. We feed our mother cows over the winter. We keep a few replacement heifers in a really minor feeding operation until they’re old enough to breed. Our ranch is about 90% native grasses. There are a few old hay fields but we don’t hay them anymore, they’re strictly grazing land, but they’re considered non-native because they’ve been broke at some point in its life, but it’s all grazing land. This land wasn’t made to be plowed; there’s land that was made to be plowed and this isn’t it. We’ve plowed land here and it’s not farm land; it doesn’t grow anything. It grows native grass; that’s the best thing you can grow here is native grass. We don’t lease any land; we’re 100% deeded here. We have some forestry allotments just five minutes west of here, but that’s only from June until September.  hat is your priority in your range management? W Taking care of the grass. The grassland is what provides us with our living and so it’s all about the grass, we watch the grass. We try not to overgraze anything and we’re out there watching and making sure that we’re doing the right things at the right times and rotating through fields properly. The

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b­ iggest money you make on your ranch is on grasslands, so that’s what we focus on taking care of our grasslands, and keeping them productive and inhabited by as many different species as we can. The more diverse the grasslands are, the more productive they are for us. So we never want to do anything to damage that habitat for anything else; that’s our main focus with the grass.  here did you learn this management? W We learn new things everyday about our native grass, it’s not like cropland where there’s 300 years of experience breaking and seeding and growing and they’re doing scientific studies on how to make better canola and better corn; we have the same grass year after year. So it’s not really scientific; we can only learn from what we have done in the past. What has worked and what has not worked. There are some amazing organizations out there that help to provide us with some research on native grasslands, and they are amazing resources for ranchers. MULTISAR, OMWC (Old Man Watershed Council), Cows and Fish, and the ACA are the ones I have worked with the most. They provide us with a variety of information, everything from grass to species; they’re such a huge resource in our ability to continue growing and continue getting better at what we do. I’ve learned a lot over the last few years, I’m extremely lucky in that respect, I’m the third generation here, and like my grandfather said, the grass is our profit, so we have to take care of it. People talk about sustainability now in ranching, and my generation has got really good at marketing sustainability; we have a pretty good marketing campaign around it. But in my opinion, if you want to talk about sustainability, you’d better talk to my mom and dad and my grandfather, because they’ve been the ones that have sustained everything. They’ve sustained us through drought and BSE and the dirty 1930s. They’ve survived so many things, and if you have a ranch to come home to now, then the last generation sustained it. So I’m extremely lucky that I have had such incredible role models, and they know so much about the grass and the grazing and our land, I mean we’ve been here for sixty some years, and so they’ve seen what to do and what not to do. My job is to learn as much as I possibly can from their experience so that I have that information going forward and so that I can continue to grow and get better and use the new ideas with some respect as to what we know for sure about our land. Species at risk Well my grandpa and my dad always knew, we didn’t have fancy terms for it, but they always knew what was coming and going; but I guess involvement in conserving species at risk for us really started when we had a program with the Calgary Zoo with the Northern leopard frogs. We had a frog pond here that was naturally created by a beaver dam and a flood, and it still exists today. I don’t know if they do it anymore but they used to come and suck the eggs off the pond and then hatch them and rehabitat them to different places in Alberta. With their help, we did a water project that helped us gain a sustainable winter waterer that capped a natural spring head helping to preserve the integrity of the spring by putting in a trough to water cows and keep the cows out of the spring head itself. Sustainable water sources have always been a number one priority for us. So that’s when we really started learning about species at risk. My Auntie Anne has also taught me a lot about species at risk and types of grasses. She worked for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, doing field work for them with ranchers. She and my neighbor took me to the Southern Alberta Grazing School for Women. All the conservation groups were there, and with speaking to a couple of them, it opened a door of communication that would lead to some amazing help with some of my water and grazing projects. Through the years, we have worked with a couple different organizations on some water projects and grazing projects. The work that MULTISAR, Cows and Fish, ACA, Old Man Watershed Council, and other organizations like them

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do is so essential in providing information and guidance to us as we all work together to protect the grasslands of Alberta and the species that live there. We also do allow some hunting, I think that hunters can be essential in helping to control the population numbers of deer and elk for us. As long as they are respectful of our grass, our land, and our way of life, we’ll allow some hunting. MULTISAR and Cows and Fish My dad has always done those water projects when we have the funds to do them, but MULTISAR just made it possible for us to do more than we probably ever could have and help us do a better job. They’ve just been phenomenal to work with. They’re so accommodating and helpful and you know they want to help us as much as we want help, so it’s a win-win situation really. Some of the science and research is over my head, but what draws me to these programs are the people running them, and it’s just an extraordinary group of people. MULTISAR and Cows and Fish, the people that work with these programs are just truly incredible. The best thing about those programs is that I’m working with good people and their research is great; they genuinely care about us as people, and our success in the ranching industry and our continued sustainability in the ranching industry. They’re not just here for what they need, they’re here for what we need too, so I think that’s what draws me most to both of those groups, Cows and Fish and MULTISAR. MULTISAR didn’t change the way we manage our range, but it sure enhanced how we can move cattle and how we can move water to the other end of the field or fence a field in half now with a razor grazer system. So it hasn’t changed it, but it sure has enhanced our ability to do it better. We’re not managing to protect species at risk, but we’re protecting them with our general management style, especially when and how we go into the creeks and the swampy areas. We’ve done a few projects where we can keep the cattle off of high-risk areas, where we fence them out of those areas during high-risk seasons, and through management it’s pretty easy to keep the species at risk in mind and conserve their habitat. I really like these programs where they’ll help me out with a solar watering system or help me with an electric fence, because those are things that I could go buy for myself, but it’s not high on the list because of the expense; so with them helping me, it allows these projects to happen sooner than I might have be able to do them on my own. I think those are really successful programs because they’re actually maintaining what MULTISAR is, it’s there to help us, to be better managers of the grassland, creating space for species at risk to thrive, and so that it is here in 300 years and we’re still grazing cattle on it.  upport from the beef production industry, the general public, and the government S Our beef production industry is made up of really great people, passionate people, and people who work so hard toward us becoming a sustainable industry. I hope that we can continue to grow together in all aspects of beef production, to continue on that path to sustainable beef production. The general public, well, I wish people would understand that our way of ranching keeps these grasslands healthy and conserves species at risk; I wish they could see how much pride and love we have for our stock. They should see us struggling to do the best for our cattle and the work that it takes to get that beef to a grocery store for their consumption. Sometimes I feel like they can’t see what we are really doing for the Facebook fog that they see us through. My hope is that they people can come to see the incredible industry that we have here in Canadian beef production. There’s a lot of things that the government could do to support our industry; they could endorse Canadian product; they make it pretty easy to import foreign beef and pretty easy to export our good Canadian beef. They need to be proud of this amazing beef we produce. The Canadian beef industry is at the forefront of traceability, sustainability, and animal care, and not many government officials

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ever acknowledge that or are proud of it. We, as Canadians, produce a superb product in beef, and yet we don’t always even eat our own product. That has to change from the top. Farmers and ranchers feed the world, yet our generations are becoming so removed from food production that people think our food comes from the grocery store; this has to change. The government could help this happen. Respect for ranchers One of the things that I’ve found the most in this journey that I seem to be on is that people don’t know the value of the rancher, we’re not educated, we don’t have a PhD, we don’t have a Master’s degree, but some of the smartest ranchers are my next door neighbors, and some only have a grade 12 education. This is the school of hard knocks; this isn’t, if you get an F, you can redo the paper, if you get an F, you might be losing the whole place. You have to grow and inform yourself and learn. This is selfdirected learning as you go, because you either learn or you move off your property; there’s no two ways about it. So the ranchers need to be valued for their opinions, and their knowledge has to be valued; scientists and researchers should be asking them questions. Ranchers have lived off this land for hundreds of years; they have watched the ebb and flow of deer, elk, moose, bears, cougars, and, well, all species. They have seen cycles of drought and flood, snow, and rain; they plan their life around the seasons and all that they bring. They have so much knowledge of these lands; their information is essential in the survival of our native grasslands. So value the ranchers, and not my generation, but the older generations, the generations that have sustained these grasslands for us. They are so valuable and yet so undervalued, in my opinion. I think the only way that my generation is going to be successful in ranching is to learn from their mistakes, to learn from what they’ve learned, so that we’re not repeating their mistakes. It’s great to have bigger, better, and newer ideas, but sometimes what’s been working is the best idea out there. We need to be a little more respectful, listen a little better, and talk about our new ideas with a little more respect to the past.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W My hope is that my great-great grandchildren will be here doing this and getting to live this lifestyle. I hope that we can continue doing it. You know, that’s always the rancher’s hope that we can be successful enough to pay the bills every year. I hope that we can continue to make it better and improve our management and improve our cow herd and our genetics and such, so that my kids get to grow up here learning to love and value the grasslands, the livestock, and this amazing place we call home. I’d like to never lose sight of the value a good saddle horse brings to our operation, though a quad can be helpful sometimes, I have never had a hill too steep, rocky, or bushy or a cow to tough, wild, or flighty that a well broke horse couldn’t handle. Our horses are always waiting for our next adventure, and when you get back to the barn after a good days work with your horse, there is no sound more satisfying than the slow munch of your horse eating some much deserved oats. I hope that the value of a good border collie never fades, that they continue to be the best hired man and constant companion, and that they will continue to serve such an amazing purpose for the rancher. I would like that, as we learn and grow, we will be ever mindful of those that came before us that set us on this path as ranchers, that we will continue to pay homage to the vision that they once dreamed of and to the legacy that they entrusted to us. I want us to continue to honor them as we move forward, paying respect to their hard-earned knowledge. What I hope for is a long future of ranching with my family.

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Final thoughts? I’ve been so blessed, to be honest with you; there have been people come into my life when I needed them the most, their stories are inspiring, and their courage is striking. It’s those people that surround me, that light a fire in my soul, and that make my passion for ranching smolder. I’m so grateful for every high and low this life has handed me so far. Ranching is harder and more demanding that I ever could have imagined or even explain, but it’s the most rewarding experience I have ever had. It’s been a learning curve; I keep learning and growing and changing as a human, and this place just keeps shaping me and growing me to be a better person, a kinder and more forgiving person. It’s the most amazing place; it’s not just a ranch. It’s been a lifetime of memories and goodness that we have here. We have a lot of fun, I mean even on the coldest days when you don’t want to go outside and you’re in the middle of calving; every day is an adventure here and every day is fun. We laugh, we cry, we fight, and we push forward. I think one of the greatest parts about living here is that I can throw a rock and hit my parent’s house; getting to know them as an adult and work with them has been the experience of a lifetime. Family is important to us, and getting to spend that quality time with my parents and them getting to spend quality time with my husband, my son, and I is so special. We’re really lucky that we get along, don’t get me wrong, we have our days when we don’t agree. But together we are stronger. We don’t do this for the money; we do it because ranching is in our blood, it’s a passion that burns in your heart; that pushes us forward through the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s this land that is so familiar that it brings peace to your heart. It’s being together, having people to lean on, to pick you up when you’re down, and to celebrate the great days with. Ranching isn’t just a job, it’s a way of living, it’s the backbone of our country, and it’s a privilege to be part of feeding the world.

Our family. (Photo credit: Katelyn Durec)

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Shelly and Jody Larson Jody Larson Interview Saskatchewan  ell me about the history of your ranch T I’m a fifth-generation rancher. I started buying cattle myself when I was 16, in 1989, and I bought my first land in ’97, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Our family sold the big homeplace to the Grasslands National Park in 1984, I would have been only 11, so I didn’t have any say in it. That place was over 50 square miles. But we kept another place that’s approximately 15 square miles away, located partway between Val Marie and Mankota, on the Continental Divide. My sister and I purchased it from our dad, so that’s the place we were on, my wife and I.  Then in 2010, we bought another property halfway between here and our Mankota land. We didn’t name our ranch; it’s listed as Shelly and Jody Larson. I’m more familiar with ranching, I don’t like farming and I don’t like living in the city, and I went to college, so I got a bit of a taste of that. For me it just makes sense. My wife is from a farm/ranch place here that was adjacent to ours, although we didn’t know it at the time. My family had land that was 30 miles apart, and we lived on the eastern place that we still have now, and she lived adjacent to the western place, which my family sold to the Park. We went to different schools and different school divisions even though we were only 30 miles apart, because of the Divide. I went to Mankota and she went to Val Marie, Val Marie was in the Swift Current division, and Mankota was in the Moose Jaw division.  hat do you like most about ranching? W Brandings are really fun, you know, they’re a job at times, but that’s something where everybody kind of comes together. It’s always in late May right to the first of July, and usually, if somebody’s branding that day then that group, they all show up to help get that person’s cattle done, you know, they ear-tag them and brand them and needle them. It depends on the size of branding, if you’re doing seven or eight hundred in a day, you might break three or four times for a beer and you might have to move, go to a different set of corrals, there might be two or three hundred in one place and four hundred in another place, and if that’s the case, they’ll feed everybody in between somewhere. But, for the most part, everybody has a meal at the end at home, and it’s good to get together. And then you do it for the next, and then the next ranch that needs to brand, you might have five, six, or eight days in a row in, and a couple days off, or two days branding, then a day off. There are times when everybody’s irrigating or they’re doing something that they have to get done; for example, we might start out at a branding with three of us, like me and my boys, and then one of them takes off and goes and does something that we have to do here, and that happens with every outfit. And you get to figuring out what everybody likes to do, what they’re good at, and what’s easy for them, and most of the time, you tag them with those types of jobs, because you’re paying for that vaccine, and most importantly you want everybody safe, to know what they’re doing and to be comfortable doing it.  hat is the priority in your range management? W The priority for our range management is to make sure we always have grass. You need to make sure your cows have enough to be healthy, and you kind of know just by looking at it, if you don’t see anything else around, wildlife, then you’re in trouble. We run a cow-calf operation, 300 cows on 30 quarter sections of native grass lease and 15 quarters of titled tame grass. We have 70% or 75% native grass because some of those quarters that are titled aren’t entirely broke. The tame is what we use for

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either early spring grazing, like calving, when that crested wheat starts, and then to grow winter feed. Depending on the type of land, like up top on the Divide, where the grass is there, it’s a little sandier there and it rains more; you can probably take half and leave half. In the river valley where the sage grows, we try to maybe only take one-third. With that being said, it doesn’t mean you can’t take it all one year and then not touch it the next year or the year after. It just varies on how much water is available, which goes back to spring runoff, or some years you might just get a little bit of a downpour, it might only be an inch of rain, but it comes quick enough and fills everything. Well, then you might move over and just get a different impact on the grass. I’ve been taught that the grass that grows where the sage grows is just hardier; it has more value. It’s been said that the grass where the cactus grows and the sage is the equivalent in August to creep feeding with oats; it’s just that valuable. But there isn’t much of it, so you need to have lots of acres, but you really put weight on cattle, and that’s how it was learned. If you have cattle in two, three, four, or five different pastures, and they’re there for the same amount of days, you just look at them and go, wow, these cattle are green, or these cattle are really fat, and you look to see what’s different. You might say, oh there’s spring-loaded waterholes here or, oh, there’s 25 acres of old tame grass that grows in this one pasture where somebody tried to break it a hundred years ago. We still keep track of all that, for management, for the purpose of trying to keep your head above water. You know, that’s totally what it is; there’s no margins in cattle. Ranching is a long-term plan, grass is like any renewable, you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re a fisherman or a lumberjack, you’re not going to take it all. If you take it all, you’re going to starve later. I think there’s people in every industry that overdid it and learned the hard way. When we’re managing land, we manage that land for us, and once you kind of have it going the way you want, you just keep it that way as best you can, unless you have a fire that burns you out, and even if you do, if you had good root mass, you’re fine, next year you’ll be fine, you’ll grow whatever you left. That’s one of the theories that were in those books, from my great-grandfather, you’ll grow whatever you left, and not just him, lots of the old-timers passed this on. And this is the same with animals, like with cattle, if you get them in a pattern and they’ve got good grass and good water, and the timing is right, you can get by, you don’t have to feed as much because you get more days of grazing. Your fence can be way inferior to what you would need if you didn’t have good grass and water, because they’re content. And when it’s time to come home, it’s not a big job. One person can take lots of cows a long way if they know where they’re going. You create those patterns. I don’t know if it was always done intentionally, but once people figured out that you can do that, it made sense. When I was younger we did everything with horses and I remember coming home, it would be 27 miles with cows, and the last 10 miles, we didn’t chase them. We just loaded the horses, and the next morning, they’d be home, as long as they had a guiding fence. And once they had done that two or three times, you know, there’s nothing to it. So we manage our range to conserve native grass by just monitoring basically and then try to do a half to a third leave. I have area that the water doesn’t hold as good because it’s sandier, so I know I have to use it early. But if I ever had a year where it rains late, like last year, I’ll go to there to have a different impact. It’s not often in August you have a downpour and it fills everything, but if I get that, I will move into there, because normally the impact is in springtime, in that area where the water doesn’t hold. Whereas if I have an area where the water holds year-­round, lots of times in spring and fall, in the shoulder seasons, you’re always using that during calving and shipping. So I will rest that when I can if I get that goofy year, but for the most part, it just goes by the amount of grass. You want little moon shapes all over the place (from their hooves), and they eat little patches out, and that’s good, but when you start to see they’re getting too big or the cows are walking too far from water to

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get to good grass, then it’s just time to move, or you won’t have anything left for next year. I’ve heard whatever you leave, you’ll grow that next year for sure. Even if it doesn’t rain again, just based on snow, because we’re on the Divide; whatever you leave, that’s what you’ll grow. Species at risk I first started hearing about species at risk when the Grasslands Park came in. But, I think it’s different, like if you were here, let’s just say in the 1920s or 1930s specifically, when I would say that a plant or an animal wouldn’t be a priority. Your priority is to eat and not die. And as time went on and it started to rain and things got good, everybody had more money. Then I think people started to think outside of the box. I think it went over a hump, so that people were stable and then started to look for bigger revenue and they cultivated more. It wasn’t necessarily about feeding their group here; it would be how much money can I make, and can I buy more land, and do these things. And then I think it came to a point where somebody looked back and went, okay; this native grass here is what it used to look like, and I saw these things, these species that were there, and they’re obviously not there anymore. And you know, for the most part, most of the old cowboys were very aware of what was there, they didn’t know scientific names or anything, but they had a real deep understanding; and that’s why they get a bit sour when any type of environmental group acts like they are the only experts; the old timers take it kind of personal. Take, for example, the Grasslands National Park, where Canada bought, and I work for Parks Canada, they bought land, and on those lands are species at risk that are nowhere else. Someone who works in the department may interpret that as, we saved these lands, and not even think about why. They don’t consider that it may be because somebody else, somewhere else, wiped those species out. So most of the time the old cowboys were actually kind of like scientists. They would try stuff and say, you know back in 1963 that didn’t work worth a crap, so I’m not doing that anymore. Well, it’s like 2010 when gophers just disappeared, you just didn’t see any, and the year before that you might drive ten miles down the highway and hit ten of them not even paying attention, they were thicker than hair on a dog that year. Well, the groundwater came up, we had such a heavy winter and runoff, and you’d look into a gopher hole and you can see the water is six inches from the top of the soil. So scientists are saying it must be the plague, well, no, it just happened they got drowned out, and they’re going to come back; well they’re back right now. But there are cycles, like they overpopulate, and then they have a tough winter, and then they starve. Whereas if you kind of controlled the ones that are there, usually they’ll even out; it’s when they get out of hand when they become a problem. The way I manage my range protects and conserves species at risk and their habitat, as I’ve hit all my SARPAL targets. I didn’t really do anything different, just practicing holistic rangeland management. I could maybe run more cows on it and still have it generally healthy, but usually your impact is on your riparian areas, and then you have to have better fence, so all of a sudden it takes more work too, and then basically it would have negative impacts. So it’ll start with your riparian areas, then it’ll be next to your riparian areas, because they’re going for water, especially when it’s hot, like July and August, they’ll start to push the sides of those waterholes in, because it’s just too much use. So there’s so many different variables and you try to make the choices that work. I manage for security, you have to be able to keep your numbers up, you can’t plan or pay if your numbers continue to decrease, so if you misuse it, then you have to decrease, plan, and change, and it buggers up all your payment schedules, whether you have lease taxes, operating, land payments or equipment payments, and cattle, if you buy cattle. Well that’s like overgrazing, because the next year you go out and there’s nothing there and you have to go buy some feed; it just doesn’t make sense, it just multiplies, it snowballs.

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SARPAL I joined the SARPAL program just to afford to manage properly. Margins are tightening up all the time, they still are, in fact, and I don’t even think SARPAL’s cutting it. I mean, I joined because it’s something, a help, but I planned on managing that way anyway. But there’s a lot of days where it’s inviting to do things that I wasn’t normally taught to do, because, well, for example, you take a few years ago, we had five of the wettest years on record, in a row, so it’s pretty inviting to just double your numbers, and you could. But when you’re taught something, and then all of a sudden, you have one bad year and you’re out there in August and you look at the waterhole, and it’s solid mud, and then you have to think, ok, now where am I going to put these cattle, am I gonna go two months early into the fall grazing, because there is spring-loaded water there, and so I need to think about it for a minute. And you remember, well, there’s probably a reason why we run one-third, or two-thirds, or whatever. So the reason I got into SARPAL is just to allow myself a bit of room, so that would take the place of, you know, I would say another 25% more animals, easily, and I didn’t have to change any management really. That’s the deal, I just said if you guys want to come and have a look at my range, I mean, we’ve been hitting those targets for a hundred years. But there are some negative consequences about having species at risk or species at risk habitat. Part of it is that you have folks who don’t live there, who have no idea what you’re talking about, even though they may have studied it, deciding your fate. And so you’re not allowed to buy land from the province, for example, and make them titled, even though your intent would have not necessarily have been to break it. You’re not allowed to anyway because you have environmental liens on it created for the SARA protection by people that live nowhere near, that are not like you. So now once you reveal that, well, I have that habitat, you know, some landowners don’t want to reveal that information, and that’s kind of how it got that way. But when you think about SARPAL or SODCAP Inc. or whatever, they’re trying to recognize that the reason the habitat for the species at risk is still there is because it was always there and because the rangeland practices were always there. So instead of saying we want you to do something different, they’re saying we will give you something to compensate you, for being the way you already are. However, it’s mainly for not being who you could be, because the margins are tight, right, which would drive you to, well, if you put a cultivator in the ground you could make eight, ten times the money on that land, although it doesn’t mean you’re going to clear that much money as you’ve got more overhead. The problem is that most people on earth understand that a farmer or rancher creates food, as does a fisherman, but they don’t understand the difference between the two; that is a big misconception. The rancher conserves native grassland; the farmer breaks it up. The incentives SARPAL offered were good, but I would say they’re 25% or 30% percent off on their numbers. Trying to compare a living in ranching compared to a living in anything else, well, most other things I should say, I’m not whining, I’m just stating, that if I would have chosen to do something different, I think I could have done it with more success and less work. And I don’t have a problem with that, but if you’re telling me that you really do want this to be native grass, then recognize what could be done to influence the economy, food, and the way of life, while at the same time leaving it in its natural state, because it’s already in that state. Whereas if you want me to buy it from Saskatchewan, break it, farm it, and quadruple the money in the local economy because I bought some fertilizer, I bought some fuel, I bought tires, I bought a tractor; well, I really recognize a lot of different jobs from that same quarter of land. So economically I was way better off, I was way better to Canada for that, I turned a lot more money over, banking, and everything, but that’s not what I want to do. If you want to recognize those who are doing what you want them to do already, conserving endangered grassland as critical habitat for species at risk of extinction, recognize them, make it so that it’s equal to farming.

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If I have an area in its native state, and it’s healthy, just on an ecosystem, like a rangeland health level, it checks off all the boxes; that should be just worth X before you even start. And if X isn’t enough to sustain, well then pretty soon it’ll be broken; it’ll be easy. So if I have 30 quarters of X and you recognize that not only are they native, but they’re healthy, because there are lizards there in the badlands part, there’s pipits in the tall grass and sandy areas; well then you’re sustaining a species or a few species at risk. And that’s worth X, and if Z is what you need to live, and X of it is looked after just by those who believe in that, then now my place only has to make Y, to make it to Z. Whereas right now you’re trying to make all of that, A through Z, has to be made through that cow. I was happy with SARPAL; it was good deal. There just isn’t enough money in our industry. As a Canadian, we can spend millions of dollars saying to Canada that we’re going to save or protect and preserve these natural places and the culture in them, and yet we don’t seem to be able to find the money to supplement, or do what SARPAL is trying to do, for the people that are keeping the land in its native state. Like right now, SARPAL has run out of funding and I am no longer able to access those funds, and I am no longer in SARPAL. Which makes us all more vulnerable to having to push the margins in our range management. Why are the NGOs working to conserve grasslands and not the government? Because clearly the government, which owns a lot of this leased land, does not truly value conservation and the environment like they do the economy. I don’t need government oversight, but if they want conservation, they should financially support us; we’ve been managing these grasslands for generations.  ublic perception of ranching P Well for me, I ranch, so it’s easy to say, but Canada, if you want the land to stay in its native state, you need to contribute to that. And supporting ranchers, at the same time, contributes to the local economy. So you probably win both wars politically. And you don’t need to bring in a manager, you’ve got experienced managers on the land already, with generations of experience with this sensitive grassland, this fragile ecosystem, and there’s just so little of it left. The other thing is the meat that we grow. There’s nothing that angers me more than commercials that are talking about plant-based protein. I’m not a dietician or anything like that, but my point is that you have people that have never eaten meat, and won’t eat meat, and have no idea about what role it played in all of mankind. Whether you’re an Inuit eating a fish or you’re a First Nations person eating buffalo, or whatever it might be, the plant-based protein people have no concept of what it does, and they still have some sort of a right, in their mind, to downplay what meat really is in diet, compared to some kind of vegetable. They might live in downtown Toronto and they have a degree and that, and they are determined that a veggie burger is the way to go, but to me, a burger is meat. I think it goes back to why it seems so hard to make Canada commit money to cattlemen; I don’t know, maybe if it were bison, raised on native ground, they might think that they’re going to be healthier, versus a cow raised on native ground? I don’t get that. I like vegetables, don’t get me wrong, but it’s called a salad. We’ve learned over the years that grassland needs to be grazed to be healthy, it needs to be grazed, by bison, a horse or a cow or something, and most cowboys don’t care, you know, if they had to raise something different they’d probably get it figured out. So the bottom line is environmentalists are so blind when it comes to; is it a moose, an elk, a buffalo, or a cow? It still makes an impact on the grass, and it is part of the ecosystem, and their presence is part of somebody else’s livelihood for diet. Secondly, they have not even thought about what a buffalo was for Indigenous people for 10,000 years, and they were already here, and there was probably some sort of methane that came from them, but compared to the ratio of grass area, and the carbon monoxide eaten up by that grass, there’s no comparison about what was healthier. Do we want to live on a high protein grass that’s grown from a

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machine, that has a carbon footprint, that is, let’s just say a thousand times worse than a thousand buffalo, or do we want to live on what was here long before you talk about it wanting it to be in that state. It was in that state for 10, 000 years; they didn’t screw that up, we screwed that up. And then to turn around say well, I don’t think we need cows, even though their body, as a whole, in the universe, is the same body that was here before, like the bison, just in a different skin; and that part angers me. So that’s where I talked about the difference between farming and ranching. Ranchers farm to raise feed for three months. Farmers farm to make money. Sure they’re growing feed, but it doesn’t matter if that basket of lentils is going to feed five people or ten people, but rather if it is worth $10 or $15. I have no problem with that, but don’t turn it around, publicly, and start blaming the cow; like an elk doesn’t emit methane? Or a moose? Are we really going to have this conversation? Anyway, that is a story that’s being told from one side. It’s kind of like folks that complain about construction or forestry or whatever; they should not be allowed to live in a wooden house. But you have to understand, not just what part of the economy, but what part of food and comfort that we ask for, that somebody delivers to us, and then you turn around and kick him for it? The Canadian public could support our industry by recognizing that it costs money to keep land in its native state, to not be as productive, as economical, as it would have been to just have a farm. So recognizing that if they want native species, that they need native area, period. So anyone who has native area and it’s healthy, there needs to be a contribution; otherwise don’t talk about species at risk. The problem is they’ll contribute it to, for example, Parks Canada, maybe in Southern Saskatchewan, you might have 350 miles in Parks Canada, but around Parks Canada, you might have 2,500 or 3,500 miles, ten times as much. It’s all one habitat, and it’s all native. So they’re injecting X amount of dollars as part of ECCC to Parks Canada for the development of representative regions in their natural state. But not thinking about, that around that natural state is ten times as much native prairie. How do we recognize those lands in their native state, that’s around and adjacent to the Park, which together then becomes a management unit, or expanded habitat for species of risk, which, in a sense, for species at risk, even though there’s 3500 miles, it’s still not large enough to sustain large numbers. Like the 350 miles, for example, let’s use Sage grouse or Prairie dogs because they’re at their northern extent, so you might only have six or eight townships in the whole country of Canada that houses those species at risk right now, but historically there might have been a hundred townships. So if you say, of that hundred townships, historically, that had that habitat for species at risk, 50 townships are still in their native state. Within that 50 townships, there’s a half-a-­dozen townships that are part of a national park that are protected, but we failed to look at the other 46 townships, and that’s what the South of the Divide is right? SODCAP (Inc.) and SARPAL have recognized that the species at risk are already there. The management practices are already there. Recognize that and skip the middle people and inject some money into those who know they have native grass and know they have species at risk, they know they hit specific targets, and know that they could be part of that expanded habitat. The ranchers are already managing these grasslands well, so you don’t need to insert a middle man and fund the rancher who’s already managing the landscape for you. Then what that does is, you’re not restricting anything, you’re actually taking that funding and, if that’s what you believe in, and not only that, you haven’t actually changed anything, so the economy is still ticking. And you’re eating food that’s come off of native grass. So your chemicals and preservatives, well, you’re just gonna have less of that and more natural food. And how people who are, supposedly, environmentalist or naturalists don’t understand that; even though it’s not a buffalo, it works on the same principles. I ndustry and Government support My thoughts on the beef production industry, well, I think some of it’s starting to happen. And I don’t think there’s going to be a way of getting around being part of it; we keep such detailed records now

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anyway. I think it’s kind of like being involved with SARPAL, with the species at risk stuff. You are allowing people into your operation to look at, well, here’s what you do, and here’s what you have, and here’s what we’ll measure, and then in return, you’re able to manage it properly just because you have a little extra income. I guess the government could support us the same way and fund programs like SARPAL because that’s a smarter use of our money, it goes back into the economy, and it’s better than taking land out of production. If we manage land that is in its native state, identified as critical habitat, and that hosts several species at risk, why are NGOs looking for funding for us? In other words, if the prairie region is as endangered as people say, and ranchers are the stewards of the grasslands, as they say, why is the funding not comparable to other parts of the agricultural community, like farming? In our region, all the endangered species are in the grasslands, the carefully managed and grazed grasslands; they are not somewhere else. I do think SARPAL could make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat because if it’s not paying people, they are just not gonna be able to do it. So, for example, I may run it similar, but if I know that I don’t have that revenue, I’m pretty well forced to run it a little bit heavier. It changes the impact, maybe not every year, but on drought years is when you will really see it. And that’s when, well, once the bird is gone, just use a bird as an example, when it’s gone, it’s gone, it doesn’t come back. So there’s that, and then there’s the other thing, which is that there’s other uses for the land, and so even though there’s restrictions on the lands that are in native state, not all of them, but what happens then is they get fragmented. It only takes one quarter within six or eight or ten, to screw up the fact that it’s not a unit anymore. It does not operate as a unit. They don’t migrate like a unit. It’s got this one chunk in it that’s broken. That’s what will happen, that’s what you see when you look at a topo (topographic) map, or even Google Earth, when you look at it, and you just go, man, there was a really nice chunk of native in there, three quarters, and now it’s fragmented. It disrupts everything for wildlife, changes just the way they look at it, the way they act. Like if you’re going to school and there’s a big mean dog that sits on the corner, well, you’re gonna change how you go to school, right, you may have to walk three blocks the other way.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch W The future of my ranch, well, I’m hoping that I could give it to the kids debt-free. And if I can do that, I think it’s a step forward. I want to try to influence them to never borrow a cent on that dirt. And then I think they can afford to manage it, maybe conservatively or in a way that gives them security. I would allow them to borrow on equipment or cattle or anything that can be moved off the land but not on the dirt itself. Final thoughts? Well, I suppose we’re in a good region as far as the native grass, to represent the old cowboy culture. Author's note: Before the interview I enjoyed a visit at the really wonderful local museum in Val Marie where I saw the worn cowboy hats of Jody’s dad, grandpa, and great-grandfather on display. I interviewed him in his office where the walls displayed many, many really great pictures of his family ranching over the years. Also, it’s where that habitat is. It all goes together. And unless Canada realizes it, they can put as many trillions of dollars as they want in to the Park, but if they don’t represent the surrounding region, they’ll lose habitat. The habitat was here before Parks. The habitat was, and is here, in its native state partially because it’s too rough to farm and, I mean, that’s really what saved it; it’s just a practical thing. Parks didn’t save it. Originally, no one broke it, and the ranchers here used it because it was too hard to farm. There’s little chunks in the middle that were flat, but were just too far from everywhere because, ok, it might have been flat, but it was surrounded by badlands or river valley, too hard to get to, but the bottom line is it still exists.

2  In Their Own Words

Introducing the Greater Sage-Grouse Urophasianus Subspecies Centrocercus urophasianus urophasianus Status: Endangered Range: Alberta, Saskatchewan

Photo credit: birds of Canada/animalia.bio

Greater Sage-Grouse are the largest grouse in Canada and get its name, shelter, and food from sagebrush plants. They primarily consume the stems, buds, leaves, and flowers of sagebrush plants, as well as insects. They are brownish-gray on their back and sides, with a mottled white chest, dark belly, and long-pointed tail feathers; this coloring allows them to blend in with their grassland environment. Males are much larger and have whiter chests than the females, along with yellow combs above their eyes and black throats. They also have air sacs in their chests which they inflate, causing yellow skin to protrude beyond the puffy white feathers of the neck and upper breast. They only inflate these sacs during their spectacular courtship displays which take place in the same locations, known as leks, each year over many years, if the habitat remains intact and suitable. Each spring, males gather at their lek in the morning and evening and will fight rival males to maintain their chosen spot within the lek. They strut around fanning their spiky tail feathers, raising their white collars and inflating and deflating their air sacs in their chests, which make booming and popping sounds as they deflate. The sights and sounds carry across the prairie and draw in female grouse roaming the countryside. Females visit a lek for up to three days to mate and then move a few kilometers away to prepare a nest on the ground, typically under a sagebrush plant, where they lay and incubate 6–10 eggs.

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A few decades ago, they would gather in groups of up to 70, or even more, to dance on the lek, using the same spot for decades, when the habitat remained in optimal conditions. That must have been an extraordinary sight to witness, and some of the ranchers in this book remember those scenes from their childhood. Now, however, their numbers have drastically declined due to habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and disturbance through development—particularly oil and gas extraction (they avoid areas with too much light and noise), climate, disease, and predation from foxes, raccoons, birds of prey, and skunks. It is estimated that their population has decreased by an estimated 80% over the last 30 years. The Governments of Canada and Alberta have funded a captive breeding program at the Calgary Zoo to assist with the recovery of the species. Eggs were collected from a few failed nests to establish a captive breeding population with which to augment the wild population. In 2018, 66 captive-hatched chicks were reared at the Calgary Zoo and released into the wild in the Grasslands National Park in Southern Saskatchewan and also at a site in Southern Alberta. This was the first sage grouse release of its kind in Canada, and the program is ongoing. If you would like to support the conservation of our Greater Sage-Grouse, you can learn more about the Calgary Zoo’s Centre for Conservation Research program. Working in partnership with ranchers, government, researchers, and conservation organizations, together we can make a difference!

3

Building a Country

Our ranch was incorporated in January of 1905 in the Northwest Territories before Alberta was a province. These four ranchers’ stories share a common theme of having been established in the early 1900s.

Milk River Cattle Company Limited Alberta John Ross Interview  ell me about the history of your ranch T Well, I may just take you full circle and start at Lake of the Woods. I’m building a place there, on the Lake. It’s a huge lake down in the corner of Manitoba, Ontario, and Michigan. There are over 14,000 islands on the lake. It’ll be a place to go to relax. We can fly our Beechcraft Bonanza there in about 4 hours so it is very accessible for us. We’re building on land that my great grandfather, Walter Ross, bought in the 1800s, and it’s been in the family ever since then. His father, Alexander Ross, immigrated to the United States from Scotland, then moved to Saint-Chrysostome, Quebec, where Walter was born. My great-­grandfather was quite a guy. He started raising cattle at a very early age along with a partner, because there was a huge demand for meat, when they were building the initial lines of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) across Canada. Walter ended up getting a fever that put him in the hospital. When he got out, his partner had sold all the cattle and taken all the money; so he was broke. He ended up working on harvest crews and boarded a riverboat. The story my father told me was that he got in a card game where he ended up winning a guy’s job, or so the story goes. So he made his way down to Texas where he started working on the IGNR (International Great Northern Railway). I don’t know how long he was there, but when he left the job, he was given an engraved gold watch. My brother, Dave, has that watch. He then traveled back up to Canada where he became the foreman to build three legs of the CPR around Lake Superior. There is still a little town named Rossport, which is located on the north shore of Lake Superior east of Thunder Bay. When he retired from the railway, he received another engraved gold watch from his men. I still have that gold watch.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7_3

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He married Grace Graham from Rat Portage, ON, which was later named Kenora, after the first two letters of the three towns in the area, Keewaten, Norman, and Rat Portage. Together they were raising two boys and a little girl. Unfortunately, the little girl passed away at an early age. Walter partnered up with several other investors and created the Rainy River Navigation Company, which he managed. They built the SS Keenora, which was a very large steamship that hauled around 55 passengers in cabins as well as lumber and supplies up and down Lake of the Woods. The SS Keenora is a part of the area’s history and is now resting in the Marine Museum in Selkirk, MB. Sometime after this, his wife contracted tuberculosis (it was called consumption back in the day) and unfortunately passed away leaving Walter with his two boys, George Graham and John (Jack) Alexander Ross. He had some friends that he’d made while working on the railway who were interested in venturing west to raise cattle. Together they purchased 400 head of Shorthorn Heifers, loaded them on the railway and transported them to Medicine Hat, AB. It was as far as the railway had been built at the time. After wintering there, they trailed the cattle to Raley, Alberta, which is near Magrath. They set up the Brown Ranching Company and eventually bought more land south of the McIntyre Ranch. Eventually the land was sold, and in 1908, they trailed 3000 head up to land by Gleichen, Alberta. The next year was a very bad winter, which killed half of the cattle and scattered the rest as far south as the Marias Valley in Montana. It took two years to gather them all up, as everyone’s cattle we all mixed together. They’d send out the Northwest Mounted Police Officers to be there when they got big bunches of these cattle together, and each ranch had to send their men to trail home their animals. There weren’t any fences or anything back then, so they had to stay and help sort all the cattle into different ranch herds. The Northwest Mounted Police were there to preserve some sort of order. The ranch by Gleichen was sold mainly because of the harsh winters. They had lost half of their cattle in just a couple of years. Things weren’t so good. My great-grandfather, Walter, then trailed the rest of their cattle down by Bow Island. He formed a partnership with Jim Wallace and they created the Wallace and Ross outfit. They acquired 13 townships of land, in the lower corners of Alberta and Saskatchewan, which they ran successfully for a while. At one point, they were running cattle on almost 500,000 acres until they ran into another bad winter. They lost a lot more cattle and I believe the price dropped in half at the same time. That was the end of the partnership. My grandfather, George Ross, was running the ranch then, and they split everything right down the middle, right down to the frying pans. George ran his half in Alberta for several years and in the meantime bought up several ranches to the west. The bank eventually was stuck with Jim Wallace’s portion and wanted George to run it, but he turned them down, saying that it was entirely too much for him to run. George continued to trade ranches until he bought the Deer Creek Ranch, which is just west of us. James Phillips owned the Milk River Cattle Company, which was about 80,000 acres and is the place we are on now. After another bad winter around 1920, George was able to by James out. He ran the two ranches together into the 1940s, when they sold the Deer Creek to Gilchrist’s, and finished paying for the Milk River ranch. Currently, our ranch is at 62,000 acres; it’s the smallest we’ve ever been.

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The Remuda 1926 Ross Ranch round-up. (Photo credit: John Ross)

There’s quite a bit of history and my great-­grandfather did a phenomenal job, and my grandfather is another example of how the pioneers took big chances and persevered. They got around to meetings and made deals, when at times it was just really tough to survive. My grandfather, George, earned his pilot’s license in Newport News, Virginia. He traveled down to the States before World War I, because he couldn’t train up here. He also earned his Hydro-Aeroplane License. I still have it and it is Number 50 in the USA. So he was a real pioneer in aviation too. He flew overseas in World War I after his brother, Major Jack Ross, was killed in action during the Somme Offensive. When he returned, he started Lethbridge Air Services and Ranchers Air. Eventually my uncle, Stub Ross, would start Time Air. Time Air was a lot more successful in the long run. Our ranch now is the Milk River Cattle Company Limited. It was incorporated in January of 1905 in the Northwest Territories before Alberta was a province. Alberta didn’t become a province until September of 1905, so it’s been around for a bit. I’m a fourth-generation cattle rancher after my great-grandfather started in 1885, and then my grandfather, George, took over, and eventually Dad and his other brother George Jr. ran everything. My father, Jack, and his brother, George, purchased the Lost River Ranch, which is east of here. They also ran another ranch by the Cypress Hills, called the Flying R.  Together all three ranches total 283,000 acres, which was small compared to what Walter did when he had about half a million acres. Wallace and Ross had 13 townships in size, with 7 townships in Saskatchewan and 6 in Alberta. Several ranches were purchased to the West as people went broke or moved on. I’ve never seen a map of exactly what they ranched, but it was big. They had some really hard times back then. The winters were way worse back then. There were winters where you could go into them with 2000–3000 head and be lucky to have 1000 head in the spring. We lost some cows here a few years ago. About 25 head were sheltering in a draw in the coulees, during a heavy spring snowstorm. They were buried and died,

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but this is nothing compared to what used to happen in my great-grandfather’s and grandfather’s times. This ranch has great natural shelter, with thick brush and deep coulees that let the cattle get out of the storms, but things can still happen. The Milk River runs right through the middle of us and is a great asset to this ranch. We are about two and a half townships in size, with a mix of deeded and leased land. I ranched with my brother, Dave, for a while, but then after Dad passed away, I bought him out, and our oldest boy, Darren, took over his lease. I grew up on this ranch and continue to live in the house that my grandfather built back in 1939. It is still a rock-­solid house. I grew up here, and right from a little boy, I always wanted to ranch. Not everybody is cut out for this life, but I love it. We have two sons, Darren and Ryan, and while Darren took to the ranch at a young age, Ryan never really did. Having hay fever didn’t help. Ryan is currently working in Lethbridge and plays lead guitar for a rock band. It’s always great to have Ryan come over and play some of the songs they’ve written. I far prefer the ranch life and being out at the ranch. I don’t like being in the city; it drives me nuts after a while. I call it, “my switch going off.” I can take it for a while, but then I have to get home. My wife, Kathy, who was in investment banking in Calgary has gotten even worse than me. She’s not from a ranching background and originally grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and that area. It’s not always easy for people to come out and live on a ranch a long ways from town. There is definitely an adjustment period. You have to rely on yourself for everything, especially when things go wrong. Darren’s wife, Lanae, is about the same way, but not everyone can adapt. We are very lucky. Ranching was always my main interest. This is not an easy life. We have no control over a lot of our costs, the price we get for our cattle or the weather. City people don’t understand all the decisions that have to be made. To them, it looks easy. They don’t see how we pick cattle, change our field rotations, and plan depending on the weather. We always need to keep extra grass in case of a drought. There are years when you have lots of hay and no extra cost except for putting it up, and then there are years where you are short and can easily spend $100,000 on hay. Depending on cattle prices, it can be worth it to buy the hay, or you might have to drastically cut your herd. You always have to protect the grass you have, and every year is different. It’s like a double-­edged sword that can cut you twice as deep on the bad years with high expenses and low cattle prices. Covid-19 was a huge worry for us when the two largest processing plants were down, because if they aren’t processing the animals out of the feedlots when they are ready to go, the feedlots are too full, and we have no place to ship our cattle. The cattle on feed still have to be fed and become overfat, and then they don’t grade properly and the price drops. It doesn’t take long to get into trouble, but it can take a long time to get out of it. My dad, myself, and my sons were all expected to take another career out of school, before we started ranching. This is just in case things don’t work out. It never hurts to have the extra education in something you’re interested in anyways. My grandfather told my dad that when he left school he would have to ride a horse everyday for two years, no matter the weather. Dad took mechanics and welding at SAIT and Mount Royal College, but then true to his word, my dad spent two years riding when he returned to the ranch. I took Architectural Technology at SAIT, and Darren took Civil Engineering. His AutoCAD training has become a real asset for how we do things on the ranch now. It’s always good to learn something else and you meet great people and make good contacts for the rest of your life. But no matter what, I’ve always want to ranch; it definitely isn’t for everybody. There can be some pretty tough days and a lot of really hard work. When it’s 40 below and you’re thawing out a water trough or working with cattle or machinery when it’s 40 above. You can be fighting heat and bugs, or frostbite. You can be doing plumbing, carpentry, wiring, welding, mechanicing, or whatever else comes up in a day. Some days you never get to do what you wanted to because so many other things pop up that need to get done.

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Now I’m building a place on some island property on the Lake of the Woods in Ontario that my great-grandfather had purchased when he lived there back in the late 1800s. My grandfather kept a boat there at one time to get away and go fishing, but my dad never used it. It actually feels pretty good to go back to where my great-­grandfather started his family and travel the lake that he lived and worked on in his youth.  istory of airplane use on the ranch H My grandfather earned his pilot’s license before World War 1 and eventually flew overseas at the end of World War I. When he returned, he bought an airplane; it was a Curtis Jenny I think. He used it to fly and check cattle on the ranch. It was also a handy tool to fly between ranches and get into town quickly, especially compared to the other modes of transportation of the day. He started a couple of little airlines, Lethbridge Air Service and Rancher’s Air. He was written up in many newspapers and was referred to as the Flying Rancher. All three of my grandfather’s sons, George Ross Jr., my dad (Jack), and Stub, all earned their pilot’s licenses as well. Dad went to Vancouver to obtain his and he trained in a small Stinson as there was no place to train near home. Uncle Stub eventually went on to start Time Air in Lethbridge. He had really bad hay fever so he left the ranch and was bought out by his two older brothers. Time Air became a real success story. I obtained my license in 1978, when I was 18. I started training with the Lethbridge Flying Club when I was 17 and still going to school in Lethbridge. I’ve now been flying for 44 years. Dad had flown several different aircraft over the years including Stinsons, Piper SuperCubs, Callairs, and a Tiger Moth, and eventually he purchased a brand new 1959 Cessna 182B. All were flown to check fields, grass, and cattle. I flew the Cessna 182 for a long time, but then eventually bought a beautiful 1959 Piper SuperCub PA-18A. The SuperCub is the perfect aircraft for the ranch as it can fly really slow and it makes it a lot easier to check cattle with it. It also has the big tundra tires on it, so we can land on the prairie as needed. I then bought a Beechcraft Bonanza and with a heavy heart sold Dad’s beloved Cessna 182. We keep both aircraft at the ranch and use them for picking up parts and trips, checking cattle, picking up people, and doing some chores. I can fly to the other end of the ranch and drop off salt for the cattle, open a gate, or fix fence and get there in a few minutes instead of wasting half a day driving out to do a simple job. We check fields before and after a ride, to see where the cattle are and if we missed anything; and it can be done in minutes instead of hours. I can fly to Lethbridge in half an hour instead of driving for almost two hours. I can use the Bonanza to fly from the ranch to Kenora, ON in about 4 hours instead of 18 hours of driving, or there about. A lot of ranchers and farmers in the area used to fly, but there aren’t too many anymore. It has gotten too expensive if you don’t use the aircraft all the time. Our son, Darren, earned his pilot’s license in May of 2009; in fact he had his pilot’s license before he had his full, nongraduated, driver’s license. Tomorrow, the SuperCub needs to go in for its annual inspection, so Darren will fly the Cub and I’ll fly in with the Bonanza and pick him up. After that I’ll head in for a Milk River Watershed Council meeting, and from then, I need to go to a United Conservative Party (UCP) Annual  General Meeting (AGM). The aircraft help make this all possible.  anchers brought in electricity and telephone service to their land themselves R I’m also on another board for EQUS Rural Electrification Association (REA). The REAs brought electricity into rural Alberta when Calgary Power didn’t see the profit in it. Ernest Manning saw what was happening in the USA with the formation of electrical coops and allowed the same thing to happen here. The farmers and ranchers got together and formed their own REAs in the 1940s and started planting poles and stringing wires. We were finally energized here in 1954. It wasn’t the big companies that

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brought power to rural Alberta; it was the farmers and ranchers who took it upon themselves to do it. The same thing happened with the telephone. The farmers and ranchers formed telephone coops and again ran the poles and wires to people’s houses and started party lines. Eventually all the telephone coops were bought out by AGT (Alberta Government Telephones), which later became Telus. But there are still REAs in the province and our EQUS REA is the largest member-­owned utility in Canada. We extend up past Edmonton, then right down to the Montana border and from Medicine Hat over to the other side of Fort MacLeod. We’re supplying electricity to farms and ranches at a lower price most of the time than you’ll get from the IOUs (Investor-­Owned Utilities). We can actually build a power line for about half of what the IOUs can do. We don’t subcontract hardly anything out, and we hire all our own staff. We started from nothing, when we amalgamated seven little REAs together to form South Alta REA Ltd.; we hired our own office staff and our own lineman. We bought our own poles, transformers, wire, and equipment and set up our initial offices and started from scratch. The story I like to tell is when we first set up the office, we didn’t have any furniture, so someone brought in a card table, we unpacked the computer, and we used the empty box from the monitor for the chair and put the computer and stuff on the table. And that was how we started our first office. In about 2010, we merged South Alta REA with Central Alberta REA and formed EQUS. EQUS now has 110 employees with offices and staff in Stony Plain, Innisfail, Claresholm, and Medicine Hat. Out here no one else is going to do it for you, or they’ll charge the livin’ crap out of you if they do, so you learn to do things yourself. Find a way to work together and get the job done.  anchers working together R We still work together. When it’s branding time, we still go around to the roping brandings that we have in the area here and we go help our neighbors and they come to us. We drink some of their beer and eat some of their food and they come here and do the same thing and everybody visits. The same thing happens if there’s a fire or prairie fire or something. Most of us are on the fire department. I was the Deputy Fire Chief for our volunteer fire department for 25 years and just recently gave that up and our son, Darren, took over. It turned out the Fire Chief didn’t like his job, so Darren’s now the Fire Chief. So yeah, we do everything on our own and when there’s a fire we get together and fight it. We actually got together and built a whole bunch of water tanks that we can either put on trailers or lift onto the back of trucks, and we can go right into the coulees where the big trucks can’t get into, and we can fight fires where the big equipment can’t. We know what we need out here compared to someone coming out, not familiar with this land. Here’s a story, a couple years ago, there was a big fire and they brought in a water bomber and some professional crews. The professional crews just thought we were bunch of hacks from the volunteer fire department. Well, they brought out their hoses laid them in the grass and the wind changed and it went back and burned up all their hoses. Then the big water bomber came in and dropped water, and, actually, where it hit was okay, but it was such a hot fire and the wind was blowing so hard here that they had trouble climbing back out of the river bottom. They only made one pass which fanned the flames and actually made it worse, not better. We went back in and put out the fire out. Oh, it was a bad one, but you get in and catch the edges and work toward the center and get her out, and then you stick around for a day or so, putting our hot spots and flare ups and make sure she’s not gonna light back up again. When there was a big thunder storm and a lot of lightning, I used to take the boys and drive up on top of the hill here. We’d watch for a lightning strike and fire so we could it early to reduce the damage to the grasslands. But now it’s handy, we built Darren’s house up on top of the hill there, so he can look around and he can see everything because that’s about where I used to go to watch. You learn to do things yourself out here.

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 he Milk River T The Milk River is actually a very artificial river. It would dry up most years, but they divert about 25% of the water out of the St. Mary’s River over to the Milk River, which is allowed because of the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. They divert it out and run it through these huge inverted siphons, two pipes, 8 feet in diameter that go down back over to the St. Mary’s and up the other side. Then there’s a 27-mile-long ditch with five drop structures to get it down to the right level. It was all built on the American side of the border and I think it was completed in 1915. It’s over a hundred years old and it’s crumbling. It needs a couple hundred million dollars to really fix it up. They were looking at replacing Drop Structure 2 and then Drop 5 catastrophically failed this year. They had to repair the damage the water did and then completely replace both Drop Structures, plus they repaired Drop 1. I was amazed at how good a job the Americans did and how fast they did it. They were buying gravel and concrete from Canada to bring it down because it was easier and cheaper to get across the line to do the work. They’ve known for a long time the diversion needed repair but there was no money, until it failed, and then you have to fix it and do something. In the meantime, we probably lost a couple million dollars worth of crops in Canada here because of the lack of water; some towns like Milk River, Coutts, Sweetgrass, and Montana were in danger of running out of water. The American crops were probably worse off than ours, and they had a few towns that were in danger of running out of water too. The diversion is very important to our part of the world, and most people don’t realize it.  ell me about your operation T We run basically a cow-calf operation and then we background the calves and sell them as long yearlings. When I first started here, we were selling 2-year-old steers. It was a bigger animal, and we’d winter them on the grass for one more year, but the way the grading system is now you could never sell 2-year-old steers anymore. They’d be too old for the SRM regulations and wouldn’t work into the current grading system. So we switched to selling yearlings. We run just about a thousand cows. Out of the calves that we brand, we keep about 150 replacements heifers and sell the rest. About 850 cows calve out every year. We hang onto the replacements for another year before we breed them, so they are bigger and more mature when they have their first calf. It’s much easier calving this way with a large herd. You always have some dry and cull cows, which we ship, and rotate the replacements into the herd. All the sorting is done by eye. You look at the cattle and determine their quality and health. It takes a little time to learn how to do that quickly. Dad taught me; and I’ve shown Darren. Now I trust him more than I trust myself. We’ve also started AIing (artificial insemination) some of our biggest heifer calves. We’ll sort them off and put them on different feed throughout the summer and winter until they calve out in the spring. The remaining heifers are kept away from any bulls for another year, in order to allow them to mature a little more on their own, before we breed them. We’ve been turning our bulls out to the cows about mid-June. We do most of our calving in April and May. Hopefully the grass is starting to green up which makes the cows milk better. We calve almost all of our cows out on the prairie, which helps reduce diseases, especially scours. We’ll ride and bring in bunches of about 300 to brand in the first part of June. Our main brandings use horses to rope the calves and then we’ll flat-ass them and brand and vaccinate them. I think it’s easier on the calves and much faster. We’ve started giving Meloxicam to all the calves as it helps reduce the pain and swelling from the branding process. I also think it helps them to mother-up faster afterward, because the calves aren’t so sick from the branding. All of our ranch work is done on horseback, except the haying, which I’m glad of. We don’t breed our own horses; we just buy them. I used to play around with breaking horses a little bit when I was younger, but then you just realize the amount of time it takes to do it right. You can

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get somebody that likes to do it and does it all the time and then you can pick up a decent horse from them, and away you go. We have probably about a dozen horses on the place, and then the hired people usually own their own horses. We try to maintain at least two hired people on the ranch all the time. During the summer, we are also putting up about 800–1000 tons of hay, which we use to background the calves and feed the bulls and the horses throughout the winter. We don’t use implants on the ranch. We were certified hormone-free by the European Union and are a member of the Verified Beef Plus program. This gives us some flexibility to who can buy our cattle in the fall. We are currently selling our yearling steers and heifers by video auction in August and then shipping them in September. We generally wean the calves in November and put them in feedlots for the winter. Everything gets a shot of Draxxin when they go into the feedlots. This has drastically reduced our death-loss and treating during the winter. We rarely have to give another antibiotic during the winter anymore. When the calves don’t get sick, we don’t have to give them any extra drugs and they gain better. It’s a win for us and the cattle too.  hat is your priority in your range management? W Pretty much 100% of our ranch is native grass; it’s all been maintained as native grass the whole time. We’ve just got some hay fields down along the bottom close to the buildings here, and our main yards, but everything else is native grass. Our priority is maintaining healthy grass, and there’s a lot more to it than most people understand. Just because you’ve got some grass there, that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy. You maintain it by putting the right number of animals on it and not overgrazing it, and you never overgraze it because if you ever overgraze; you’ll never get it back. If you under graze it, it’s as bad as overgrazing it, because you get the thatch that lays over the ground and the new prairie grass won’t come up through that, but weeds will, so you’ll have thistles and all kinds of stuff come through, which will then out compete the native prairie grasses.

John Ross riding Doc. (Photo credit: John Ross)

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Especially now with Downy Brome; and Japanese Brome is another bad one; they will take over. So if you undergraze, you can lose it too. We just went through three years of drought, and we cut our herd back because some of the fields were getting too close to being overgrazed. We changed our grazing rotation on the ranch because they were eating off the summer fields too much. So we started running the cattle through different areas of the ranch in different stages and giving the summer fields more of a break. We keep records of everything, but it’s pretty much in your head. You can sit there and figure out what the fields can do, and, you know, the size of the fields and, but you always have to be adjusting to the moisture and the temperature. Every year is different. You can have wet springs, but they’re too cool and the early cold grasses won’t grow, or you can have no moisture and high temperatures and the grass won’t grow. I was saying to Darren the other day; there’s always ways to still improve. You know, maybe if we added a fence here and we’ve got a watering hole in here, we could use this grass better and then we can save this over here. We’ve got a couple of projects on the go right now, and since we bought our own 320 Cat HighHoe, once we’ve got the right approvals, we can go in and dig our own dugouts and put them in places that we really need them. We’ll put in electric fence initially to see if that field is going to work the way that it should, and then if it’s working properly, then we can eventually put in a permanent barbed wire fence. Of course, the fencing has changed over the years too, although some of the experts still have a lot to learn. Like for antelope movement, they want to put all the fences 18 inches off the ground, but with antelope, they don’t have to be, you want them 18 inches off the ground, but just in places they use regularly, so the antelope can go under the fence in those areas. We can see the antelope going back and forth in some areas, so we can just pull the wires up for two or three posts and put a piece of plastic PVC pipe on it in that area so it doesn’t scrape their back up, and they’ll go back and forth, they’ll know exactly where that is. Antelope can also migrate a long ways; that’s another thing that I’ve learned. They’ll come from Montana and will migrate all the way up to Brooks and come back again, and they get to know the routes that they can take and the routes that can’t take.  here did you learn your range management? W I learned to manage our grass from dad. Mostly just driving and riding the fields and just looking at it. Getting out and seeing if you have a healthy stand of grass or a bunch of old grass underneath where the thatch is too thick. Looking for some of the other grasses; the mix between Blue Grama and fescues and spear grasses and all that, so you’ve got a nice healthy mix. I will say that it takes a lot of trust for a rancher to let researchers on your land, because we’ve had a lot of bad experiences with other groups and many one-sided government initiatives. Most of these initiatives involve a top-down approach instead of a more holistic and grassroots approach. There is a group called Cows and Fish that wanted to broaden their studies out of the Foothills. Greg Hale met with me and said that all the information they’d gather wouldn’t be released unless I would say it was okay to do so. I wanted to see how our ranch stacks up against different places, like with the Foothills. So they analyzed the habitat along the river and other riparian habitats. They analyzed trisects on our ranch and then on the Writing-On-Stone Park to compare. And 9 out of 10 of our trisects were healthier than the Park. I knew our ranch was in good shape, so it gave me some confidence in working with a grassroots organization and I really liked the story they told. Other times, you get these people that come in and want to take a picture. They’ll find a little narrow spot on the riverbank where the cows go down to drink, and they take a picture of that, and they try to make it look like the whole river bottom is degraded like that. Well, it’s not, it’s that one little spot, and it’s there for access. Well, these people at the Cows and Fish weren’t doing that; they were looking at different areas where there’s cutbanks, where it was sloped in, and so that kind of gave me

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a little bit of confidence that there are some good people out there doing some good work. Not everyone is, and my dad dealt with quite a few over his years as well. He had a few fights with some of them and their one-sided opinions. The last thing he wanted to hear is that someone wanted to come out and do some form of a protection project. We evolved some more about 15, maybe closer to 20 years ago now. The ACA, Alberta Conservation Association, along with the Alberta Government, was watching as the Federal Endangered Species Act was being enacted. Part of the Act stated that if the provinces did a good job of maintaining a species, it would keep the Feds out. They were starting MULTISAR, Multiple Species at Risk, at that time, and we turned out to be ranch number 1. They had a big town hall to try to get this whole MULTISAR thing going, and I was booked at another meeting and couldn’t attend. Brad Downey, from the ACA, contacted me after the meeting. Basically, the meeting didn’t go very well because ranchers don’t trust people that come in, trying to tell us what to do on our land. I talked to Brad and I liked the concept. In the first place, it was optional, and that it was trying to keep the federal people out. It’s bad enough to deal at the provincial level, but as soon as you go to a federal level, it gets really stupid. We started working with a core group of some really good people with what I thought were the right intensions. We had a few meetings, trying to come up with some plans of how we could work together. They had some different ideas that we didn’t like, so we worked on it and made modifications to the initial program. They offered to pay 100% of projects like water wells and stuff like that, and I said, well, I don’t think that was a good thing because if something is given to you, you don’t appreciate it the same as if you have some skin in the game. We decided on a 50–50 contribution. We also took their, like about seven or eight-page legalese agreement, and we cut it down to a page and a half, something that you could actually understand. Too much legalese like that can be a disincentive to participate in any program. This all took about a year and a half, maybe two. MULTISAR brought in some really good people and spend two years analyzing our ranch. They brought biologists and rangeland ecologists and looked at the birds and mammals. They sampled the soil and grass, and they looked at the makeup of which grasses should be growing on a certain type of soil on the ranch. We had Clare Tannis and his wife doing much of the analysis. He is the guy that actually wrote the book that all these ecologists read when they take their courses at university. They mapped the whole ranch using different classifications of poor, good, and healthy with problems, healthy, and very healthy, I think. The poor areas were identified as needing attention, and they actually had to break the healthy into two groups of healthy and very healthy because so much of the ranch was healthy. This identified areas that were absolutely perfect and other areas that was still very good. Some of the areas around dugouts for example were rated poor, because the cattle mill around there more when they’re drinking, and so they graze it off too much, which makes a huge impact on the ground. When they unveiled this report after a couple of years, we brought a bunch of people to the ranch for a tour. We have some coulees up here with some poor types of soil, and so we went into this one draw, and I’d think, God, why are we going here? The grass is crap, it’s mostly bare ground with a whole bunch of Greasewood and Sage on it, but when we looked at the map, they produced; it was listed healthy. It was healthy because that is the best that that ground could grow; that’s what should be there in that kind of soil. So I learned that it doesn’t all have to be 3- foot-high grass everywhere up to your knees, because not all the soil can do that. I also realized that they understood the difference. As we were sitting there and the group was talking about the grasses and everything they were seeing on the tour, the bird biologist said he could have told us that the whole area was healthy. I asked him how he knew, and he said I can hear Sprague’s pipit and they’re only in very healthy range. So I learned about a bunch of these different indicator species and how they relate to the soils and the

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grasses. We’ve been doing the same things with our Milk River Watershed Council when we do our State of the Watershed reports. We have a list of indicator species and how they’re doing in areas, and other information. Wildlife on the ranch We have a wide variety of game animals on the place. We have whitetail and mule deer, antelope, elk, pheasants, Hungarian partridge, and Sharp-­tailed grouse. We even have a moose season, it’s not a big one, but we do have a moose season. There are lots of coyotes around all the time, and the odd person tells me they’ve spotted a wolf. I personally haven’t seen one on the ranch, but it’s not impossible. We have quite a few bull snakes and I’m starting to see more prairie rattlesnakes around. With the massive increase in the gopher population, they have lots to eat, but the raptors eat a lot more gophers than the snakes will ever eat. We see Bald eagles, Golden eagles, Feruginous hawks, Swainson’s hawks, and many other hawk species. We even spot the odd cougar and, a little more often, bobcat. It probably won’t be long before we have bears too; they’re on their way. There’s a pile of bears in the Foothills and in the mountains and they’re moving back onto the prairies. They have a big bear problem by Cardston, and people have seen bears by Milk River. I think there’s just a lot more of them out there than people think there is. I chair the Milk River Watershed Council, for about maybe eight years now, and we’ve had people come in a talk about the return of the Prairie grizzly. Species at risk People have told me they’ve seen wolves, I haven’t actually seen a wolf here myself, but I have seen them other places. I’m glad we don’t have wolves, but we used to at one time. Dad told me they used to have a terrible time with the wolves killing cattle, and also killing horses. I don’t think it was here on this place, I think it was when they owned the Deer Creek ranch west of here, but they’d hamstring the horses. A bunch of wolves came into the corrals and took down all the horses in one pen. Dad went down in the morning and the back quarters of some of them were eaten out while they were still alive. He had to shoot all those horses. So he really detested wolves, especially after that. But that’s what wolves do. Wolves aren’t like they like to show on Disney. Then there are the special interest groups who want to release animals back onto the land. They released Swift fox here in the 1980s and 1990s, and it absolutely annihilated the upland game bird population: the pheasants, Sharp-tailed grouse, partridge, and the Sage grouse. They attacked the hens on the nest and ate all the eggs; it especially wiped out the partridge. I’m just now starting to see some larger numbers of partridge and you rarely see a fox anymore. You have to consider the balance; they think, oh, it was here a long time ago, but everything had rebalanced now. So when you release something like wolves back in or you reintroduce the Swift fox back in, then some of the other populations like the Sage grouse, which are already endangered, get hammered. Then another group wants to use the Federal Endangered Species Act to save the Sage grouse, which is on the northern fringe of its range anyway. We don’t have the sage up here like they have in Montana; this is not real Sage grouse country. If you go down across the line where they have a lot more Sage grouse, they’ve got sage that’s 3 and 4 feet high. The Sage grouse is actually a very stupid bird, and it really needs to have all this cover; otherwise, they’ll just stand out there and get picked off. If you go someplace that has very short sage, like here, the birds just don’t have enough cover. I’m not sure when I first started hearing about species at risk, but it was long before MULTISAR and Cows and Fish. Back in the day my dad knew about what was out there, but he didn’t trust anyone, especially government or special interest groups, so he’d keep that to himself. A good friend of ours here had Burrowing owls on his place so mentioned it to some conservation guys, I couldn’t tell you exactly who. But they came out and put stakes all the way around the area where they were and put

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up a little rope in order to keep everything out. Well, Burrowing owls like to sit on high spots, so they stood on the stakes. This made them a prime target for the raptors in the area and the hawks just picked them all off. They wiped out the whole colony. Our friend said I’ll never ever report anything to these idiots again; they would have been fine if I hadn’t said anything. Unfortunately, there are lots of similar stories. We’re always learning stuff. When I started on the Watershed Council board, I was talking to a researcher who was telling me about a study she had done where they put these little trackers on rattlesnakes. She found that a snake actually travels out so many feet a day on a radial away from their hibernaculum; that’s where they winter. She said if the transmitter quit, they could say, well it’s been about three days, it’ll be this far along the radial, and sure enough, they can go find it. So most people don’t understand that and think they are saving the snake by moving it, but they’ve killed the snake, because now when the snake tries to travel back to the hibernaculum, they can’t find it, and they die. We’re starting to see more rattlesnakes again out here. I’ve seen quite a few this year. The cattle and most horses don’t worry too much about them. The snakes we have here are mostly prairie rattlesnakes, so they’re not really that poisonous. So even if you get bit, you’re going to get sick, but it probably won’t kill you, unless you’re allergic to the venom. I’ve seen dogs who have been bitten, and they all survived. But they still scare the crap out of you, everytime. That never goes away. I’ve got a picture of a Bull snake constricting a gopher that was just out in the hayfield out here this year, and we’ve got a 7-foot snakeskin from a bull snake. Darren’s found two shed snake skins that are about 7 feet long, 1 is in in our scale house over here where we weigh the cattle. MULTISAR and SARPAL We hosted Robin Bloom, who is the Senior Program Advisor from the Agriculture Sector of ECCC (Environment and Climate Change Canada) at the ranch with the thought of bringing SARPAL, Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Land, to Alberta. He brought a group of people with him which were from the federal species at risk board for ECCC. I talked to the group and pointed out the short comings of the Federal Endangered Species Act as opposed to the holistic approach we are doing with the help of MULTISAR. I was pretty blunt with them, but in the end, I think they appreciated the difference. I thought it was fantastic to hear directly from them and I hope they felt the same about our operation. They went on to tour another MULTISAR site later that day. They were thinking of doing a pilot project with SARPAL in the county of Forty Mile but ranchers are very leery of working with any government, especially the Federal Government, so nobody wants to do it. I told them I’d sign our place up in a heartbeat if it was offered to me. When I first got into MULTISAR people thought I was nuts, and I caught some flak at the beginning. But then after a few years and a bunch of projects completed, some of the neighbors wanted to know what I thought about it. I’d tell them it’s a great program and it’s really helped me out, and now there’s more trust and interest growing in the area. We’ve mapped the place and every five years we’re going to do a reassessment. I’m due for my third reassessment here in another year or so, and we can judge our progress. We have been seeing some changes, like in areas that have been undergrazed we’re seeing an influx of Downy Brome moving in. So we got permission, with the help of MULTISAR, to build a dugout out there, and we’re hoping to do that this fall. We also got some Ward mobile electric fencing units, again with the help of MULTISAR, so we can move cattle around strategically and do some early grazing on the Downy Brome areas. This way we can try to control the Downy Brome without the need for chemicals. Dow Chemical does have a spray, which we tested on the ranch and it worked great, but then they dropped it, so Pfizer’s now doing some tests here on Downy Brome to make sure it’s not affecting the prairie grass, only the weeds. A greener way of doing it is if we put cattle on the affected areas first thing in the spring, forcing them to graze it early because that’s when Downy

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Brome starts heading out, but if you wait too long, it goes to seed and the cycle carries on. But if you graze them early, probably about halfway through May with a real hard graze, and do that for a few years in a row, then hopefully we can get it under control and prove that that works. The problem with a lot of the environmentalists is that they want changes made, but at somebody else’s cost. A friend told me recently that if they want us to raise Burrowing owls and paid us to do it, then we’ll have so many Burrowing owls out there that you won’t believe it. My discussion with species at risk people is that they want to use a penalty system, which is exactly backward to what they should do. It doesn’t work and it forces you to not want them anywhere near your ranch instead of actually benefitting from their help. That’s where SARPAL works so well because you want to have them on your place, and it rewards you for good management. We’ve managed the land and maintained the habitat in a way so that species at risk thrive here, so reward us; don’t penalize us. Currently about 75% of all endangered species live along the southern part of Alberta. That is in no small part, due to the management of cattle ranchers. The problem with most NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) is they usually have such a narrow focus. They’re protecting ducks or they want Swift fox, but instead, you need a holistic approach to it. You can’t just pick one species and try to fix that alone, just like you’re not going to bring the buffalo back out here and make the prairie better, it just won’t happen, there’s no way. There has to be a holistic approach that works on the land and understands that one species works with every other species. A perfect example is the reintroduction of the Swift fox. They annihilated all the game birds and the Sage grouse. Now the government is pouring millions of dollars into Sage grouse recovery. I don’t worry at all about the MULTISAR people coming out and inspecting our ranch. Once a ranch reassessment has been completed, we sit down with the lease inspector and different people who undertook the assessment and look at the summary of what they found. We can identify potential improvements that could be done in these areas. That’s where we highlighted the problem with the Downy Brome at the east end of the ranch. We knew there was no way we can spray it out there, so we decided to graze it. We know we’ll need water, and MULTISAR helped us to get permission to dig a dugout. Then we need something to hold the cattle and we decided on a temporary fence instead of a permanent fence, so we got the electric fencing system Range Ward. It’s been a good partnership, and now there’s several ranches all around me here that have gotten into MULTISAR, and there’s a bunch of other ones that want to get in now. But the problem now is that MULTISAR doesn’t have the funding to grow the program like they could. Ranchers should be rewarded for doing the right thing and for our careful environmental stewardship, instead of being penalized. I think programs like SARPAL, Cows & Fish, and MULTISAR are already making a difference to species at risk and their habitat. It would be great to see them broaden and extend their programs. The general public tends to believe information from them as being more credible than it does from the ranchers. I don’t think you can find better groups that are doing more for the environment. On the other hand, there are other NGOs that the public support, but they’re actually much more detrimental. They’re getting funded with millions of dollars from the private sector and then buy up land thinking they’re doing conservation. To me there must be an alternative agenda to these groups, which breeds mistrust from the ranching community. I do think they should extend SARPAL. It’s a smart use of limited federal funds, and it’s an optional program, so ranchers don’t have to opt in until they feel comfortable. If you maintain the right kind of habitat, you either get your lease reduced or you get a payment to maintain that habitat. If you don’t maintain the habitat, you will lose money. The habitat can be identified for different species across the ranch. This is a much more holistic approach which aids multiple species and habitats. So it’s a great benefit program and it’s optional, which goes a long way to gaining trust from the ranching community.

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One of the ideas that MULTISAR is trying to roll out, and some ranchers are really skeptical about it, is to take damaged prairie, rehabilitate it and rent it out like the community pasture system started to do, but failed. They want to find some land that’s damaged, pick it up, and rehabilitate it. You just wouldn’t believe the effort they put into rehabilitating some of this land; it’s absolutely insane. They get college students that are learning and want to make a difference, to volunteer. The students put in just massive hours picking weeds, spraying, seeding, and doing assessments, which is good training for them. Then when the land gets back to a healthy state MULTISAR rents it out using a short-term lease, to young people just getting into cattle. They can only use that land for 3 years, and then if they want to continue in the cattle business, they have to purchase their own grass somewhere else, which in turn opens the lease for the next young person to get started. Proper grazing is the best way to make that land healthier in the long run. Now, when the young rancher moves on, they have a better knowledge of healthy grazing practices. I think the idea has promise. You don’t make money by abusing cattle, or the land; you’re just shooting yourself in the foot, reloading and shooting yourself again. You treat both the livestock and the land the best you possibly can, and it will pay you back in the long run. If you overgraze your grass, then you can’t carry as many cattle; thus, you can’t make a living. I was in a meeting when they were setting up the satellite grass insurance program. They were using satellite imagery, I think it was infrared B, but I could stand corrected on that, to determine when the grass was turning green and growing. They were doing field surveys and to coordinate the ground data with the imagery from the satellites and then calculate from the satellite image how much grass was growing. From that it can be determined whether you had a good grass year or bad grass year. Insurance payouts would follow the results of the imagery, to compensate for the lack of grass in bad years. One guy was in the meeting and said he didn’t get a payout because his land showed up as being green and growing, but it was only weeds that grew which his cattle couldn’t eat. I thought, you idiot, you just told everybody in the room you’re the worst grass manager, and you probably shouldn’t get any assistance. I don’t think these programs should support ranchers who do a poor job, but give the money to people that are doing the right job and help them to maintain a healthy prairie. Then if the other ranchers want to earn the rewards, they will need to improve their management to the point they can opt in to the programs. Incentives work! Unfortunately, most programs are done totally backward. They give money for this project or that project to try to make bad managers better, but do nothing to help the ones that are doing it right, to keep up their efforts. Instead there are limitations and penalties placed on the operations doing a good job, who have good environments for endangered species. This is where the Endangered Species Act truly fails. It uses penalties to enforce its mandate and not incentives.  attle grazing keeps the grasslands healthy and conserves habitat for species at risk C The thing is, there’re so many groups out there that want to make it look like the ranchers are the evil ones. They want to make it look like, oh we’ve got to take this land away and preserve it, but in reality if you take that land and don’t do anything with it, you destroy it. We have a Natural Area over here where they haven’t grazed that range in years, and there’s so much old thatch that’s laying over and covering the ground that it’s stopping the native prairie grass from growing. Now the wildlife that they want to preserve and the plants they wanted to preserve in there are suffering. If you look at the prairie around the Natural Area, where cattle are grazing, there’s tons of Horned toads, deer, antelope, and birds. But the Natural Area land hasn’t been grazed. The people in charge of it are the experts, they go to school, but they only know what’s in that book, and they’re only tested by what’s in that book; they don’t really know what’s going on. When we’re working on the range assessments with MULTISAR, I told some of the ecologists that your studies are all well and good, but by the time they see the prob-

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lem, it’s too late. As a grass and ranch owner, it is my job to avoid any issues, before they become big problems. Dealing with drought is a case in point. We’re trying to encourage good management with all groups, like the Transboundary Grasslands project. Basically, we’re getting a lot of the different environmental groups but also ranchers from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana, so it’s truly a transboundary effort. It shouldn’t make a difference how the environment is managed just because there is an artificial boundary there. We can work together across the boundaries. We’re working with groups like the World Wildlife Federation and a bunch of these other groups; I can’t think of all the names right off the bat, but it seems to be getting better. They are gaining a better understanding of the view from the ranchers’ side of the fence. I’m also seeing a change in the ads on TV, they’re starting to understand that the rancher is an integral part, that we have an integral role in keeping the grasslands healthy. That’s why habitat is here now, and it’s healthy. It’s not here because of the environmentalists. It’s here because the ranchers preserved it and kept it this way. So that’s why they need to realize that those wanting to take any land away and preserve it are not actually preserving healthy grasslands. The ranchers are preserving healthy grasslands through carefully managed grazing, often over many generations. The NCC, Nature Conservancy of Canada, is actually coming around and starting to figure it out. When we first started doing the Transboundary Grasslands project, they were more of an issue, but now they’re acknowledging more of the rancher side, the grassroots side. Everybody, whether you’re from Saskatchewan, Montana, or Alberta, you know what? We’re on the same chunk of grass basically, and just because you’re on the other side of a border, it shouldn’t be treated a whole lot different. It helps when you’re working with people that know this land locally. We had a lease inspector here that kind of started out to be a bit of a pain, but he learned over time. Terry became an asset to us, but now he’s retired, and we have this girl from the foothills that’s taken his position. She’s used to seeing grass at up to your knees or taller, all of the time, and has no idea what our native prairie grass is supposed to look like. So we’re starting all over again. Another example is when Canada first opened up the west. They didn’t want the speculators buying up land and hanging on to it, waiting to resell it to make a bunch of money. So they said if you homestead this land, you have to stock it with cattle. The problem is the government didn’t know how many cattle should have been on there, so their stocking rates were usually three and four times higher than they should have been, and a lot of this land was overgrazed. The real problem came when the rancher wanted to reduce his herd; the government could take the land away from them. So you were forced to stock at their rates; otherwise, they thought that you were trying to speculate on the land and you could lose it. The ranchers were figuring out what the land could do and what wasn’t working. They knew they had an issue. There was a ranch along the river, I think it was the blacktail that my grandfather bought, and he wrote a letter to the provincial government saying that he’d purchased this property and the lease had been severely overgrazed. He wanted to rest it for 2 years. The government wrote back and gave him permission to rest it for 2 years, but he still had to pay the lease on it. They weren’t going to give them a break in order to let the land recover. I still have that letter in my possession. My grandfather had already purchased the ranch, so he was forced to pay for land that he didn’t use for the next 2 years, before restocking it. He then worked through the Western Stock Growers to try to get stocking rates brought into proper alignment with what the grass could do in the different areas. So that’s how we’ve ended up with the AUM, Animal Unit Months, to measure stocking rates. The stocking rate depends on what the area can grow. It is still adjusted by the rancher on a yearly basis depending on rainfall and drought conditions. The stocking rate on this ranch is about 45 acres per unit per year. So in order to keep a cow and calf, which is considered one unit, for a whole year, you need 45 acres of land. If you go east toward

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Lost River, their rate is 65 acres per unit. You can’t stock those ranches the same as you can stock here; and I can’t stock here like you can stock the Foothills. Then a drought comes in and all of a sudden, even though this is rated at 45 acres; it might actually be closer to 200 acres/unit because the grass isn’t growing. Now, we always try to keep extra grass and we try to keep fields with extra grass, so we can change our rotation when we need to. We do that kind of thing in order that we don’t overgraze the fields and give them time to recover. We know sooner or later it’s going to happen. It just drives me crazy when some guys use their place as hard as they can in the good years, and then when it a drought starts, they want government assistance to bail them out. That is poor management. Most people will reduce their stocking rate or even get rid of their herd entirely, so they don’t damage the land. We’re focused on maintaining healthy environment out here, and when carefully grazed, this is the best use of the grassland. Most of the public doesn’t know that grasslands sequester 3–5 times as much carbon dioxide as rainforest. When a cow goes and grazes the grass, the root actually traps the CO2 and then bundle shoots a new root when the leaf is coming up. So it’s pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, pushing it into the root, and then when it gets grazed off, that root traps the CO2 into the ground. It’s way more efficient. Also, grasslands are the most endangered ecosystem in the entire world. They’re extremely endangered because most people that see a flat piece of land want to plow it up, even if it’s not good soil for crops, like down here; our topsoil is so thin and so easily blown away. They plowed a bunch of land up around here and it makes me sick; they never should have plowed that up. Then they complain about the lack of production and the rocks. This land should have remained native prairie and cattle ranching land. I appreciate government support like MULTISAR and SARPAL, and maybe they could consider some further incentives, like getting paid for sequestering carbon. Setting up a proper market for that would go a long way. Another idea is to give longer-term leases to the ranchers who are doing a better job. Expand SARPAL so they can reduce your lease fee to support good conservation of land and endangered species. We actually have some land that is considered arable. I pay a higher tax rate on it, than nonarable land. The governments are almost forcing us to plow it up instead of encouraging conservation of the grasslands; I brought this up at a meeting with Transboundary Grasslands Partnership.  ow government could support beef producers H The government could support our industry by better and more consistently funding some of the grassroots efforts that are really making a difference. Reduce funding for the special interest groups and adopt a more holistic approach when it comes to conservation. Work on environmental goods and services and pay for what the rancher is actually doing for the environment. There was a government initiative in the 1970s, when we were setting up community pastures. The government took 20 sections off the south end of our ranch, which used to be over 80,000 acres, and made a community pasture out of it. Pinhorn is a community pasture over here, and Sage Creek is a community pasture that was taken off the north end of Lost River Ranch. The idea was that they were going to get a whole bunch of young people to go in there and stay in for a few years and then go out and buy their place. But what actually happened was that people got in it and never got out. The people in the community pastures then used that as an excuse, to plow their grass up at home and create new farmland. The formation of community pastures actually caused the destruction of more grass. Then the other result is that if someone had an animal with tuberculosis or something, now you have mixed that animal with 20 or 30 other people’s cattle and then they’d get distributed back out and infect the whole area. That’s what happened up by Suffield where one guy brought an animal in from Mexico, and all of a sudden, people couldn’t sell their cattle. I think community pastures are an absolutely disaster. I would like to see them privatized and run by individual ranchers instead of a group.

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 upport from the beef production industry S All in all, there are some really good initiatives happening, like McDonald’s initiative. We don’t use hormone implants in our cattle. I don’t feel the implants do much to help cattle on the prairie. I don’t have anything against the guys that use implants, but we choose not to use them. It’s a misnomer that the hormones are a big problem in the beef industry. The hormone is estrogen and there is very little estrogen in beef. Even if the estrogen level doubles in a cut of beef after using estrogen, a serving of peas exposes you to hundred times more estrogen. Soy milk is even worse. I’ve heard a serving of soy milk contains 10,000 times the amount of estrogen as you would find in a serving of beef. But the public perception is out there that all these hormones are terrible things in cattle and then they go and drink their soy milk. There is a market out there, and if city people are willing to pay extra for cattle that don’t have hormones, well, then let them pay; their paying for nothing, but let them pay. I’m willing to feed into that market if they want to pay for it. Our ranch was certified hormone-free by the European Union, probably over 10 years ago, and we sold cattle to Europe for several years. We earned a little premium, not huge, but it was for something we were already doing and it didn’t cost us anything. We sent our cattle to a certified feedlot and packing plant and they were boxed and then they were sent to Europe, and oh, did they ever love our beef, they couldn’t get enough of it over there; and then the red tape became a problem and killed the whole thing. McDonald’s started a pilot project supporting verified sustainable beef production. It looked at a whole bunch of processes in your operation. It wasn’t just hormones, it looked at how do you handle your antibiotics? How do you handle the cattle? Do you have an environmental farm plan? What are you doing to improve in all these different areas? McDonald’s did that on their own, which I really respect them for, trying to improve the livestock business. I think it has been merged into Canadian beef industry and the Verified Beef Program. They’ve been doing some really good stuff. I look at what A&W is doing and they are supporting and promoting all the misnomers about the cattle industry to gain market share. They want to say their beef has no hormones and steroids, but the hormones are not a problem, and there never were any steroids. It’s illegal to put steroids into cattle, and there never has been, so to say there’s no steroids and hormones in there is a misrepresentation of the facts.  upport from the Canadian general public S The public should support our industry through money being paid to the ranchers doing a good job. They should support programs like SARPAL and MULTISAR that are doing endangered species programming the right way, not the federal species at risk act. Support grassroots industry, like some of the stuff we’re doing with the Watershed Councils, doing things with clean water, give us more money to test water, and track where there’s actually source problems. We did a thing with fecal coliforms here with the Milk River Watershed Council a while ago because they kept shutting down the beach at Writing-on-Stone Park because they would find high fecal coliform counts when they tested at certain times of the year. Right away the environmentalists and the newspapers said it was from cattle ranching upstream. They found it convenient to blame the ranchers. I met our Alberta Agriculture Minister at a meeting and we were talking about some of this environmental stuff that’s going on. He had been on a tour and told me he didn’t want to see what’s happening in California ever happen here. I was talking to him about shutting down the beaches and I said I didn’t think it was the cattle, but you know, what if it is? We need to find out what’s causing this. So a short time later, I found out they were setting up a DNA lab at the research station in Lethbridge. This was in March and they were setting up a lab and hired Dr. Lisa Tymensen to obtain and test water samples from the Milk River. The Milk River Watershed Council and Dr. Tymensen identified several locations to test in order to try to pinpoint what was causing the high fecal coliform counts.

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Identifying high fecal coliform counts is a shotgun approach, when it is only a few forms of E. coli that actually cause problems in people. We analyzed samples up and down the river and we found that it wasn’t cumulative; so it doesn’t just keep getting worse and worse and worse. The levels varied, there were areas where it gets a little higher and then gets lower, and we started looking into factors and found out statistically, with all the information that we found that cattle couldn’t contribute much more than 20% of the total fecal coliforms. We were looking at sewage from towns to determine the cause of the problem. I was amazed to find that Dr. Tymensen could detect the difference between grass-fed cattle, dairy cattle, and feedlot cattle in her fecal coliform tests. They can really narrow it down; they can tell a coyote from a dog and a beaver from a muskrat. The DNA testing was really precise; it was absolutely phenomenal. We found two things that were causing the problem with the beach at Writing-on-Stone Park. One was that there was probably 50% of the fecal coliforms that didn’t match up with anything, and they are actually a naturalized fecal coliform living in the sand. That is probably way more prevalent than most people had thought. The fecal coliforms then bloom when it gets warm in the spring just when everybody wants to go to a beach. The other thing was, just around the corner from where they were testing was a huge wall of swallows. They were around 8% of the fecal coliforms that were tested and were a massive contributor to the high counts. Another problem we identified was the way the government was testing. They had to have three high tests in a row, and so they would do a test that would be high. They’d wait a week and do another test which would also be high, but usually not as high, and by the third test, it was still above the level, so they would issue a warning for the beach at Writing-On-Stone Park, but by this time the really high counts were long past. The government has since changed the way that they’re testing for fecal coliforms and now when they get a high fecal coliform count they do an added test for E. coli 157. It’s a more expensive test so it is only done when they get a high count. So even though the environmentalists blamed the cattle for the problem, it wasn’t the cattle. If we hadn’t done the further research, instead of just thinking we knew the answer, then we wouldn’t have discovered the real problem, changed the system, and then made the beach safer. We never guessed that swallows around the corner were a major contributor and that the sand already contains a naturalized colony.  eturn to Lake of the Woods R Our property on Lake of the Woods has been in our family since the late 1800s. I’d been there once with dad and I loved it. Then after dad passed, my wife Kathy and I flew over to Thunder Bay to visit some of her family. On our way back, we decided to land the Bonanza in Kenora and check it out. We hired a water taxi to take us out to the south end of Wolf Island where our property is and we were both in awe of the beauty of it. There’s a big sand beach that the public uses all the time and beautiful burr oak and white pine. So now we’re building a place there. We’ve built a boat house with a steam sauna in it and then the main Lake House. It is completely off-grid. When I served on the REA boards, I picked up a few ideas. We installed a CHP, Combined Heat and Power, unit that creates most of the electricity and the heat for the place. We also use solar panels on the roof of the boat house for added electrical capacity and 10 big Rolls batteries. I have a background in architectural technology too, so it’s an interesting project to undertake. We can fly over there in about 4 hours, so it’s pretty handy. There are 14,500 islands on that huge lake, and they have some great fishing there, muskellunge, small mouth bass and walleye, and much more. The plan is try to use it year-­round. It’s a beautiful piece of property and it’s been in the family for over a hundred years, so it’s about time we took advantage of it and my great-grandfather’s forward thinking.

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 hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Well, I sure hope it carries on, but that will be out of my hands. Darren’s doing a phenomenal job, and for the most part, he almost doesn’t need me anymore. He loves being out here and Lanae loves it as well. They’re busy raising their kids, William and Miranda, and running to school, hockey, gymnastics, dance, and more. When the grandkids grow up, I sure hope one or both of them decide that they want to carry this on. I’m trying to do the proper planning so that when I finally pass it all on, I don’t leave them with a burden, which would force them to sell it. One of the things that destroys a lot of ranches is when couples get divorced, and then it either splits the ranch or they have to sell all or part of the ranch to pay for the settlement. It’s broken up almost all the big ranches over time, but I think we are on a good solid footing with Darren and Lanae leading the ranch into the future. In the end, anyway, we don’t want to see anybody plow it up; we don’t want it to go to anybody that’s gonna destroy it. We love it the way it is, this is our home; we live here, we work here, we raise our kids here. Final thoughts? I’m just happy seeing the place still healthy and viable. I’ve been through a couple of really bad droughts and been able to survive them with the help of dad’s advice. Terry Hood, our former lease inspector, said after we survived the last big drought, that I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been telling people they should deal with the drought in the same way we did with our ranch. Moving the cattle, changing rotation, dropping cattle numbers, and working with the environment as it was, was challenging, and then we faced may rebuilding years. But it was nice that even the government recognized the job we did. You have to recover from so many things, whether its weather, or low cattle prices, or disease, like BSE; you find a way to carry on. I am incredibly proud of our other son, Ryan. He works really hard at everything he does. He was great help on the ranch and I really missed him when he left, but I understand this life isn’t for everybody. He still comes back and helps us at branding time, but I understand that he needed to move on and follow his heart. He’s such a good, solid guy and I’ll always try to help him in any way I can. But, you know, having a son that’s taking over and extending our time with this ranch and our tradition of cattle ranching is what I really hoped for. It was good when dad ran it, and then I’ve added my changes over the last few years. So hopefully I’m going to make a few more improvements and put Darren in the best position I can in order for him and his family to carry on. You have to love working with cows, even though some of them are a little more miserable than others. For the most part, you find so much humor in some of the stuff that cattle do. But in the end, you love the life and you’re working with somebody else that’s fallen in love with the life too. I imagine it’s the same with so many businesses. If you have a hardware store, you’d like to see your kids take it over, and you’ve worked your whole life to build it up. There’s a huge amount of pride in it all. For us, we enjoy being on the land, well, some days more than others, but we have choices, and we choose to ranch.

Circle A Ranch Manitoba Phil Adams Interview  ell me about the history of your ranch T We started out as a grain farm. My granddad, my mom’s dad, came from Ontario in 1907 and bought another half and this half in the spring of 1908. He was an elderly man when he got married and he retired in 1929. He held on to it for 30 years, and in 1959, mom and dad moved on to it when they got

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married. So for 30 years, he had the opportunity to sell and he didn’t, so that’s why we’re here. I started farming in 1988; Circle A Ranch, that’s our brand. We had a lot of the farm sowed down to alfalfa and crops already, and we were in livestock more than grain, and then in about 2000, we put our last crop in, and it’s been sowed down almost since then. We had a pretty small farm, we grain farmed 600 acres, and I like livestock, always did, I’d rather have cows and horses. My mom’s dad was a farmer but my dad’s dad was a horseman and I guess that’s where I got my love of stock from. We still use horses with the cattle. Back in the day I rode bareback horses and saddle bronc at rodeo, and my dad had some horses around and my grandpa was a horseman. My wife and I had a small PMU (Pregnant Mare Urine) operation and had some cows. A small grain farm is pretty tough though, the equipment was old and small and wore out, and it’s tough to replace. So in about 1998, I took a holistic management course and it made it sound feasible that you could make a living off the grass. Around here every small farm at one time had a few cows, but now there’s very few guys around here with cattle and the guys who do have more cattle than they used to, and there’s very few mixed farms left. We run a cow-calf ranch, but some years, I like to grass my cattle through to September; some years, financially, I can’t get there, but if we don’t grass our own, we grass some custom yearlings. We just rented a little more pasture this year and we’re trying to figure out whether we’re going to buy some more cows or put yearlings on it, just what we’re going to do with it, but we just rented it in the last week or so.  hat is your priority in your range management? W My priority in my range management is to keep the ground covered, and trying to promote a diversity of species is a big thing for me; also my kids are fourth generation on the farm and that’s important to me. Getting the next generation interested in it is the thing. Our son is very interested and our daughter is not quite as interested in it, but you know, she’s only 16. Enticing the next generation, to make it fun, well, some days it isn’t so much fun. You encourage your kids and try to raise them that they’ll become independent and make their own way, but we do have a family ranch and we got the opportunity to ranch because of mom and dad. So, somehow, we’ll figure out a way for our son Justin, if this is what he wants. My range management is to keep the ground covered, but my dad’s theory was, if when the snow came, if there was any grass left out there, you made a mistake in your grazing. Back then a lot of people were saying you had to have it cleaned off. So when we took the holistic management course, we learned to plan grazing and keep the grass. Our grass is probably half and half, tame and mixed. With that course we realized that we have some sour ground here, Foxtail Barley is a big issue still. For quite a while, I was always trying to figure out if there was a better time to graze that, maybe graze it earlier and get rid of it, or do I mow it, or should I spray it? I’m not a fan of spray, I’m not against it, but I’m not a fan of it because I know it takes out a lot of the species if you spray it. And then I was visiting with some people one day and they said well, what’s your goal and I said, well it’s to get rid of the Foxtail, and they said what’s your real goal? I said well, to get something else to grow. They said we’ll concentrate on what’s got to grow there and forget about the Foxtail and it’ll go away. You manage for what you want. Forget about the problem and manage for what you want and it will take you in that direction, and it is all better. So you’re just talking and listening and learning and getting education. Justin’s pretty young and I think he gets it. He went to agricultural college, so he’s got a different twist on things too, which is good. Anyway, I manage my range to conserve native grass. Some of our native, we have 360 acres of native in the bush, a big ravine pasture, so what we do is that we’ll graze everything on the prairie first and then about the end of August or the first part of September, we take the cow herd out there and put them in the bush just for the fall. And I don’t know, but this fall there sure seemed to be a lot more deer

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out there, then where it’s continually grazed, but we’ll take a big bunch of cows up there. We never stock it heavy enough that we get a browse line on the trees. They’re in there, they trample a little bit in the bush, and it’s a good time for them to be out there. Actually, they were there when we had that snowstorm in October this year, so that was a good time to be there; we were fortunate. But at home here, about three days is about the longest we ever stay on a piece so we’re moving them all the time, whether it’s native or tame, we don’t stay on it. I try and manage the range to protect and conserve species at risk and their habitat as well because, well, for example, I’d really like to see the Burrowing owls back. But the way we manage now, well, Burrowing owls like grass that’s been overgrazed, that’s the habitat they like, a short grass. So the way we graze now we have at least 60 days or longer rest periods, so we have quite a bit of regrowth before they go back. We thought with the paddock that we had the owl release site on; we were going to rotate through it a little more often to keep it overgrazed. So, I dunno, with the Burrowing owl, it’s a bit of a dilemma. We don’t have large leased areas that were community pastures out here, so with our smaller ranges, we just have to concentrate on managing the grass, it’s all we can do, and hope that the wildlife will fit in there. A healthy range will provide habitat for species that need it, and we conserve it. But a rancher here who’s been in a managed grazing program through the Conservation District for quite a few years, he made the statement one time; he said it only works when it’s raining. If it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t work. But it’s the exact opposite. If you manage your grass, it works in a drought because you can manage the time your cattle are on there, and you know how many days of grass you’ve got, and when you’re going to run out of grass, and you watch your regrowth and you slow your moves down or speed your moves up. This year, we were dry this spring until late June or early July and just when you wanted to start haying, it started to rain and we had grass, not like we had grass other years, but we had grass. So I manage for the grass. If you manage for the grass, your cattle do well because you’re managing for the grass and it’s also managing for habitat, and I’m hoping that the species will come and stay. But, you know, we’ll have some kind of birds, and the next year, well, like two years ago, we had our yearlings over at Fred’s and I can’t even tell you what the little brown birds were, but there were just literally hundreds of them in around the yearlings, and there were these little green grasshoppers, and as the yearlings moved, the grasshoppers moved, and those birds were just picking them off. I have a picture on my phone of about a dozen of those birds sitting on the wire on the fence. Why we had so many two years before and then very few this year, I don’t know. So, it varies, you know, but if you manage the grass for what you want, well, I’m hoping I’m making habitat for everything. Species at risk My dad was always a big fan of the outdoors and hunting and fishing and it just tormented him when they pushed trees down to create farmland, and I don’t know, I guess he probably just kind of put that bug in your head that wildlife is important, there’s only so much left, and only so much native land left. I’ve always been concerned about species at risk and protecting their habitat. When I was a kid, we had a quarter beside us, and on our farm we always had Burrowing owls, and then back in the 1970s maybe, I was pretty young; there were some kids from the University of Manitoba would come out and do research on that. I just have always been interested, and then also through the Conservation District in town here, and my friend Tom was involved in conservation with the Manitoba Habitat Heritage. We were also a Burrowing owl release site here through the Conservation District a few years ago. We have a half section just north of here and we had some wet years that flooded the burrows so they’ve kind of relocated their program over to the West Souris river, kind of consolidated it a bit. We did have, about three or four years ago, we had a wild Burrowing owl come through. I was just going down to move the cows and I saw a little bird fly up out of a burrow, or a badger or skunk

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hole or something, and I thought geez, that looks familiar. So it landed out in the pasture and I went over to see if I could get it up again, and I couldn’t. I talked to a lady who’s been working with the Burrowing owl program with the Conservation District, and she came out and we set up a camera on a pole. It was a wild bird and it was here for maybe two weeks and then something got it, or it moved on or something, but it was only a single bird. It was pretty neat, honestly, to see that that they’re still around. When I was a kid, my dad would pile us all in the car on a Sunday night to drive down to the pasture and check the cows and he’d be kind of excited to see the Burrowing owls. It was kind of a family thing, always kind of nice, interesting, if you saw them. We didn’t have much for red foxes left in this country, and in the last few years, they’ve really made a comeback. I don’t know why, I think maybe everything goes in cycles; anyway, it’s nice to see. We’ve got a vixen that has had pups in the same spot close to here the last few years. Funny, when we had other neighbors back when we had the Burrowing owl release site, they used to call me the owl farmer. It was sarcastic, but I kinda enjoyed it, I kinda took pride in it. A lot of people are skeptical and maybe worried, through disinformation and misunderstanding. I laughed because those owls aren’t going to nest on his cultivated land anyway; he’s got nothing to worry about. But people learn as they go, we’ve been at this 20 years now, and I’ve made a ton of mistakes, and will continue to make a ton of mistakes. It’s helpful they’re offering things like these workshops, and when you go to them, you talk to people with the same interests. It’s interesting. I was gonna put some hawk poles up so I investigated that with the Conservation District and found the hawks are a little hard on songbirds, that’s the problem. So we do have some trees on some land, old yard sites, and every summer, there is a hawk there, and when you go there, it’ll be screaming at you. In the end, I figured we probably have enough trees for them, and I was told that they’re kind of lazy, you know, they don’t want to build new nests they tell me. But I felt really good about being a Burrowing owl release site and even though it got too wet and it just didn’t work out anymore, well, they put a pipe in and they have a couple buckets they put in the ground and make a nest in that, and they’re still there, and every summer when I’m over there I’m checking them, looking for pellets…you never know. Like I said, when we were kids my dad liked those owls and we saw them lots and we all had a 22 in our hands and he always said—don’t be shooting owls, you can shoot gophers, but not those owls. So yeah, it would be nice to have them back. SARPAL So it was easy for me to join the SARPAL program when it was offered, and it was great to get free fencing. Everything we have is in paddocks and I was always looking for a program to help us put in a water system, I thought maybe the Conservation District, or Growing Forward, they used to have programs. Then my brother got involved in the SARPAL program over in Pipestone, and one day, Tom just came to me and said well, I think you could qualify for the SARPAL program. Our fencing was old and shot and SARPAL helped us get new fence and a watering system; it was a good fit for us. Beyond that, I think it’s an important program. I think if we don’t do something, a lot of this is going to disappear, you know, it’s going to be under the plow. I do believe that, under management, the native grasses and forages and legumes can come back, because there’s a seed bank that’s been there for a million years, but it won’t be the same. It’ll never be the same once it’s been plowed, and of it all, that probably concerns me the most. When you look at land values around here, the grain land values? Cattlemen cannot even come close to competing. The grassland is going to end because if people can get a plow into it, they’re gonna, and if you don’t have some kind of a program to save it, it’s just going to be gone, it will be too late. Everyone’s talking about the rainforest in Brazil, but in the last century and a half here, all of

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the native grassland, well, say 70% of it, is gone, you know, and nobody even thinks of it. We’re the breadbasket of the world; it’s where your food comes from. So I’m happy with SARPAL; it’s important. I don’t have any issues with the program. I mean, we needed new fencing and a water system for the last few years, so SARPAL was great. The incentives they offered to get involved, fence and water system, were exactly what we’d been looking for. I can’t complain. We were probably eligible because we have a lot of land in Conservation Agreements, so it can’t be broke. But the Conservation Agreements don’t pay a lot of money and it’s in perpetuity. So you don’t know where you’re going to be in 10, 20, or 30 years, so unless you really want your land to stay in grass; a lot of guys are not really comfortable. If they want guys to sign up to that program with Habitat Heritage, they’re going to have to up the ante because land is expensive; my dad used to say they’re not making anymore of it. And a lot of guys are pretty independent, you know, and they don’t want to sign anything that limits them, and they don’t want anybody else making any decisions on their property for them. I guess it depends on how committed you are to it, like, there’s people that don’t want buttons in your cows because they think they can track their cows to people that will set aside land and give it to programs to be left unused, so there’s all sides of it. SARPAL changed the way I managed my range, well the piece that’s in the program, because we had a season-long grazing system to start with and now it’s in paddocks and they get moved, and we have a water system; we have water stations they go to now instead of drinking out of the dugout. At any time, they’re only on 10% of the pasture, so that 90% of it is being rested. We had a well over there and then a pipeline out from the well and we put in a dugout to back up the well. On some land we use mining tires in the summertime for a water troughs, and over there, on one half, the trough had a lot of big green frogs with black spots on them. They might be Leopard frogs, which are endangered, but I don’t know. I told Tom about them. They were there in the water trough all the time over there, so we put these boards in there so they can get in the water troughs and they’re not stuck in; they walk out on the boards. I do think SARPAL will make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitats. We’re such a small property down here in a grain-­growing area, but I’m hoping that we can make a difference. But, you know, in that Pipestone area and along the West Souris river where there are bigger ranges of native grass, if you can get guys to sign onto these things, and get more management on the grass, I think it’s gotta make a difference; it’s going to have to make a difference.  he beef production industry and public awareness and education T Regarding the beef production industry, well I am a firm believer in grass-based beef. I used to be antihormone, but I’m not anymore because I think there are benefits and disadvantages to it, but I thought about it, and I think the benefits of implants maybe cut your carbon footprint a bit, you know, because you get more production, and I think they’ve done enough science on it. Over 20 years now, I’ve been reading about this grass-­fed beef, and it’s been really interesting. I just haven’t had the energy to be able to put it together because you have to market it yourself and I’m not in marketing, and other people don’t have the time. Well, I think the industry spent so much time battling the hormone implant thing saying it’s safe, but in the end, I think that it’s a choice, it’s a consumer’s choice. If a consumer doesn’t want their beef implanted, you shouldn’t have to tell him not to worry, you can eat this, it’s safe. You could tell him that we’ve got implant beef but it’s good for the environment because we’ve got a smaller carbon footprint and we’re raising more beef on fewer pounds of feed and water and all that; but if you want this, we have this. If the safety of your food is a concern of yours, it should be easier knowing there’s a choice. Some of the producers, traditionally, gotta go to a certain weight on grass and then they go into a feedlot and they are grain finished, and they have not been real friendly to the grass finished guys that

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want to do that, and it’s the same, it shouldn’t be that one’s better than the other. It should be either or, because eventually, it’s up to the consumer. You’ve got the A&W plant-based burger thing that they were all up in arms about, and I kept saying it’s a marketing thing, and now they were just out there promoting the Mama Burger. You don’t even hear about the plant based one anymore. They had one of the A&W guys at one of their beef producers meeting here just a while ago, and he said the idea is that if we have a group of five people come in and one’s a vegan or vegetarian, they’re going to look around and see that there’s nothing there for them to eat and they’ll go to different restaurant. This way we’ve got an option, we still sell four burgers and one plant based. We spend a lot of time worrying about the wrong things, you know, it shouldn’t be an either/or thing, and if there’s a percentage of people that are vegetarian or vegan or whatever, I don’t know that there’s a lot of energy we need to be spending trying to convert them back to beef. They’re either going to eat beef, or not, it’s their choice. We’ve just got to keep moving our products and promoting the good that comes out of our products, you know the side effects, the benefits from our products for the wildlife and for the habitat, and the carbon and the greenhouse gasses. So, yeah, we produce greenhouse gases, everything does, but I’ve sat and done the math on our operation here and we are a net importer of carbon. There is nothing about an urban lifestyle that isn’t an exporter of carbon. You cannot reduce, recycle, and reuse enough; you’re still going to be putting carbon into the atmosphere. Tom told me one time he was at a family dinner in the city and somebody said to him, knowing he’s in the environmental side of things, and she said, you know Tom, we have to quit eating so much beef because it’s bad for the environment. He didn’t say anything and the conversation went on and then she said, and you know, we have to do something to save the grasslands. I said to Tom, did you say anything? Explain the connection? She didn’t make the connection that it’s all tied together. I think people like to feel good about where their food came from that they’re eating, so I think it would be a story that would be well received if the general public knew about it. And it’s not made up, it’s not some Hollywood actor talking about stealing the calf’s milk or whatever; that was recently in the news. I think education is huge and Gordon will tell you about the beef producers. He talked about how we have to get this story out and the guy said well, we got it out in the Cattlemen’s magazine. Yeah, the Cattlemen know this already. It’s gotta be in Maclean’s or whatever the Canadian public reads, those magazines, that’s where it needs to be. They had some articles about SARPAL in the local papers, so probably a percentage of people in town know about it, but not very many. And government could promote the message, even down to our local government here, there’s six councilors, and maybe two of them in agriculture, one is a retired farmer and I guess a couple other ones that are farming, one guy is a rancher, but just the level of understanding is … well, if you don’t know, you don’t know, and I don’t know how you educate people on that. And the carbon tax, they charge us, but the people that are sequestering carbon are not getting paid for it, but I understand the Beef Producer’s Association is working on that. I think in Southern Alberta or Southern Saskatchewan, there’s a study going on, because you have to be able to measure it. I think too, that if enough people that are disconnected from agriculture understood the connection between your food and the environment, well they should learn about the benefits of ranching. Plant-based protein/beef is crops. The ingredients in beef is beef. They take a cellulose product and turn it into protein and somehow we ranchers get the bad rap.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W When I think of the future of my ranch, well hopefully, hopefully, one or both of my kids find a place here. Miranda, well, she’s only 16, and she rides her horse and stuff, but she’s not very interested in the stock, and Justin sure seems to be, but they’re young. He went over to Australia, and I

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told him I’d get a job driving a combine with air-conditioning, but he went over there and he was going to work with stock. He picked bales for six weeks, and now he’s working at a feedlot. He’s enjoying it, and he’s got his insurance paid up till the first day of April, and he was just telling his mom the other night that he can see why people come and stay a whole year. So now his mother’s getting nervous; he might be thinking about staying longer! His cousin went over for three months and stayed all year. It’s a great education for them, get some experience, see a different part of the world, and work with cattle. Well, my hope is that that my family will keep it going. It’s been a struggle. We were in a PMU contract until ten years ago and lost that contract, and it’s hard to start over later in life. You know, you’re kind of like you’re in your 20s again with nothing, and that’s been a struggle. So I keep trying to figure out the best path forward to be able to pass it onto my kids and have it be a little more lucrative for them. I don’t want them to feel stuck here, but, you know, even if they’re not interested, it could still be here for them to come back to, or if they go and do something else, when we don’t need it anymore, they can have a bit of an income of it, renting it or something like that. Justin seems to get that about the generational thing, Miranda not as much right now, but she’s younger. She likes being outside on her horse, but, well, at her age I don’t know how important that is, land is…well, like a shoe store, it’s not that important, but it seems like it’s different when it’s land. Right across the road here, a guy from Quebec bought the property; he doesn’t even live in the house. He owns a farm in France and one in Ottawa, and he bought this farm here, seven quarters, the house is worth well over a million dollars, and they built it and he doesn’t live in it. He comes out the long weekend in May, and they sow it and the neighbor combines it….and he’s looking for another farm. There’s no community there. Final thoughts? The Conservation District here was a big thing, and I was a big fan of the Conservation District, and now it’s the Watershed Board because conservation doesn’t seem to be the focus anymore as much as watersheds, and getting water off the land, well, if we did things right we’d get the water in the land, we wouldn’t have to worry about getting rid of it. That’s something I didn’t mention, the water infiltration on our land. I do the little water infiltration test and see what we can put in the ground, and it’s amazing how much goes in compared to when we first started. You’d have a little tube full of water and come back in half an hour and there’d be that much out of the top of it, but now you fill the threeinch tube full of water and you come back in 15 min and it’s all gone. We talked about the trouble with White Water Lake here overflowing and covering that agricultural land and they want to drain it, and yet we don’t talk about the top of the hill. It’s always we’ve got to ditch and drain, but there’s so many components to know, really. Intensive land use is having an impact. So again, think about unbroken grassland, which is why, if you have native grass, it helps guard against drought because it’s unbroken and you have a reservoir of roots growing down and you’re carbon sequestering and you’ve got organic matter, and the more organic matter you have, the more porous your soils are and the more water can go in. And it’s not any farmers’ fault, it’s been an evolution over a hundred years of agriculture, that’s just where Ag’s gone, and that’s what they know. They’ve been raised and taught and learned and that’s how they farm. I’m 58 now and I am so excited about agriculture. I’m so excited with this regeneration agriculture and everything. It looks like there’s some guys around here, in the southeast, sowing polycrops, my brother’s done some polycrops. We’ve tried a little piece, so I am excited. That’s part of the reason we quit grain farming because we were growing some big crops of grain, but we were just dumping more and more fertilizer on it and I just didn’t think that looked right. So I am excited about regenerative agriculture, my son is still trying to wrap his head around all that stuff, but I’m hoping over time he’ll learn more about it.

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Kids, well, I have this on the fridge here; it’s been up there a long time: We can talk all day about the environment and about clean food, but if our farms are not fun, not profitable, or are too much work—our children won’t want them, and we’re spitting in the wind. Romancing the next generation is the ultimate test of sustainability. ~Joel Salitin.

There’s a little note on the back in green ink here, a friend sent me this, it says “you got room on your fridge for this?” But yeah, the kids ride horses and fish and hunt, and we do have a good lifestyle. Every once in a while, I check the pictures on my phone, here’s one of a bunch of little brown birds lined up on the fence, another one of one on the ground, and one on the wire, here’s one where you can see our hay bales and how healthy it looks in the grass between them, but you look at the grain guys land across the way and it’s all sour soil. When we first got on this land, ours was also sour, the range was white, but now you can see in this picture how lush it is these days, with proper management you learn over time. I don’t know why I took a lot of these pictures; I just liked the look of things I guess. Here’s one of us working the cattle, even a cow pie here with alfalfa growing out of it must have made me think of the cycle I guess. Here’s us bringing the cows home from the hills a couple falls ago. Here’s a sunset in the smoke from the wildfires as I was moving cows to a different paddock. Springtime picture of new calves born out in the pasture. Well, I have a lot of pictures I guess that I haven’t looked at. I will say this, one of the best things in life is getting up first thing in the morning and going out to move your cows and listening to the Meadowlarks. And we have a lek where the Sage grouse dance down at the south end of our place here. I go out there the end of May, first part of June; take my coffee, first thing in the morning; and watch them dance; there’s nothing better. I’ve done that for years. Every spring they’re there. Some mornings there’ll be six or eight of them, and other mornings, there will be 25 of them. That’s what I enjoy, kind of the small things I guess. Here’s a video where you can hear this sparrow I like, well, the cows are loud here ‘cause they know they’re about to be moved when they see me, but you can still hear the sparrow…that to me is pretty cool.

Elford Ranch Saskatchewan Kelcy Elford Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T I have been ranching a lifetime. I grew up ranching and bought my first piece of range when I was 19 years old. I’m a fourth-generation family rancher on Elford Ranch. The land I bought was separate from where I grew up. My great-­grandfather, Russell, came out from Ontario in either 1912 or 1913 and homesteaded south of McCord. His father immigrated from England, and he started working for a gentleman in Manitoba. He and his wife came, they were quite young; I believe, if memory serves me right, they were 17 and 15. He came for the promise of your own land, if you could break and stone, I believe it was 40 acres in the first year, then the quarter would belong to you; and then over time, they accumulated more land. The ranch wasn’t very big as far as ranches go in this day and time. They had 10 kids, and the youngest son, my grandpa, George, stayed to help Russell, and then George’s son, Mark, my dad, stayed on to take over from grandpa. 1989 was our first big expansion,

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and that’s the ranch I currently work with dad up here; we’re partners in it, up at Old Wives. There was another five quarters bought in the 1990s, and then in 1999, my brother and I purchased another piece of native grass. Then, in 2005, we purchased a ranch from the Government of Canada when they were expanding their holdings in the Grasslands National Park, and that one is right on the US border. In 2011, my wife and I moved up here with our daughter, Riata, and our son, Luke came the next year. We bought where we live now in 2015 and still hold the ranch up in the hills. I ranched with my brother for several years, and as he’d gone to university, he decided to work for the government of Saskatchewan as a livestock specialist. He’s currently working with drainage issues in regard to intensive livestock operations.  ell me about your operation T We ran a cow-calf operation, but when we moved up in 2011, where our ranch is, right up on top of the Missouri Coteau, we’d never had a problem with summer water up there, but when we went to drill a well, and put in some off-site watering areas, that well actually went dry, and we had some really hard winters. So we made a decision to divest the cow herd and move to a summer program. Take some summer cattle, whether it be pairs or grass cattle, and manage it that way, so we’re getting back to the cow-calf, but for a little while, we needed to find a place with water, and that’s what led us to buying this land down here in Caron, where we actually live. In this business the unknown variables can beat you up once in a while, but you know, the thing that is the most important about people that make their living on the range is that they’re resilient people. If you don’t have the will to fight during the hard times, there’s no way you’re going to appreciate the good times. And be conservative through those times so that you’ve got enough on the other end. We’re coming off of three of the driest summers that we’ve had up here since we’ve owned this ranch, since 1989, and, of course, I bought it from dad in 2011. And we prepared during the wet years when lots of guys were upping their numbers, when there was lots of rain and lots of grass, and last summer people were selling cattle because they didn’t have the grass. This SARPAL program rewards you for good management, and you don’t get as good of a reward if you don’t manage well enough. So even through the dry years, we hit the top reward every time, and that’s the reason we did, because we prepared for the dry years.  ell me about your range management T The priority in our range management is to run enough cows that you can on a dry year, and that is leaving the litter on the ground, but not leaving too much litter so that you actually set the grass back. So my first priority is to take care of the range, make sure that we don’t go onto the grass too early, and make sure that there’s a rest period for every piece that we’re using. Also, to make sure that if there’s any invasive species, that we’re addressing those and getting rid of them as soon as possible. Up here at the ranch, it’s 2700 acres, and of that 2700 acres about 2560 is native grass. With native grass, you want to make sure that you’ve given it enough time to grow to set seed, and you don’t want to get on it too early. You want to make sure that there’s 900 pounds of litter everywhere, litter is the dead grass that’s left behind, and that grass, it might not have much of a food value, but it’ll hold moisture and keep the ground cool, and it’ll help the new grass grow. We manage our range to conserve the native grass. We conserve it by leaving enough there, and that sounds like a contradiction in itself. But, for example, if your skin is bare, it will get hot quickly, but if you cover it with something, it will stay cool. It’s no different than that, native grass. And so, if it’s chewed off right to the ground and exposed it’s very, very, vulnerable, and it’s critical to leave enough shelter so that it has the ability to grow.

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What we’ve learned through studies is that what’s on top of the ground is what’s underneath. The longer those roots go, the farther they can get into the moisture that they need to keep growing, and it helps you in times of drought; it helps retain moisture. That’s how we conserve it. We make sure that there’s enough left for the next year and adjust our stocking rates accordingly if we need to. The last two years, we’ve cut our numbers back 30% just to make sure that that there was enough grass for the next year, because if you hurt it one year, it’s seven years getting it back. And so, economics, of course, are important; it has to pay, otherwise people wouldn’t do it. But if you abuse one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world one time, you’re not weeks getting back, not months… but years; and that’s with minimal use, bringing it back to where it should be. Whereas if you’re respectful of that land, it’ll provide for you every year, even on the dry ones. The unknown variables in this business can be crippling, but they can be very rewarding too, so you have to be able to be willing to take the risk to reap the reward and you have to be willing to take the loss to enjoy the game. Probably the most important part, that a lot of people don’t appreciate, is the fact that raising beef is secondary to what we do. People that run cows and own rangeland, manage grass; that’s our crop, that’s our responsibility, and if we don’t take care of it, it doesn’t take care of us.  here did you learn how to manage your range? W I believe that my lineage has always tried to take care of the land. But I also believe that education over time, and personal experience, is important, when you’ve seen the benefits of your management. I remember my dad talking about 1988 because that was a terrible dry year, there was very little grass left on one piece of property that he’d always had, and after it started raining, it had been dry for two or three years, I’ve never seen that land short of grass from that point on, because it took so long to get it back; then you understand the value of keeping it in good shape. Looking after the grasslands, our range, is always our priority, and I learned by watching and listening to some of the best managers. I took a course at the Western Grazing Conference in the spring of 2010 or 2011, and I got introduced to a fellow named Don Campbell. He puts on a holistic management course and it’s all about leaving proper litter and only biting plants once; so there’s the education from people that have experienced it and try to do this sort of a thing. I’m not saying that we manage everything on a holistic level but we sure enough try to, and of course there’s trial and error, you know, what works and what doesn’t. When they opened the Grasslands National Park up to be grazed, my neighbors got the contract for yearlings. Parks had made three different fields and there had to be so much hillside, there had to be so much creek, and there had to be so much hardpan. And I mean, I remember riding those lands as a kid and there wasn’t any grass on the hardpan then, there still isn’t even grass on the hardpan today, and that was after letting it sit for forever. But there was plenty of grass on the side hills and along the creeks. And so, you know, they could have just asked the guys that have been doing it, the local ranchers, how it was going to work, and we’d have told them, but bureaucracy beat us out. I grew up next to the Grasslands National Park, we actually put a bid in on what I know as the Lockhart place; it had Rock Creek, Rice Creek, and Horse Creek running right through the middle of it. There’s 24 sections in a block, so 24 miles by 24 miles, and at the time, it was on fair market value, the value was $250,000.00, that’s what we put the bid in on; and the Canadian government paid $900,000.00 of tax dollars, of our money for it. And then they let that land sit for generations, and ultimately, it hurt the land, not helped it. This land is meant to be used, it needs to be used respectfully, but it’s meant to be used. Now they’ve asked ranchers to graze their cattle in the park to help conserve species at risk and keep their habitat healthy. And if there’s nothing else that comes out of our visit today, people should know that you need to leave the people on the land that are taking care of it. The idea of buying land in perpetuity for protection is very, very short sighted. Leaving the people here that are managing these

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grasslands and making our living on it, we have a vested interest in taking care of it, and you want to take care of it. The idea that we’re trying to abuse grass is so far out, that it’s inconceivable to us to even think like that. Species at risk I won’t say that I started hearing about species at risk specifically, but I believe it was in 1992 or 1991 that they released the first Swift fox back into the Grasslands National Park, and I was there that day. They let them go with tracking collars and then they sent a fellow to track them, and if there was one that didn’t survive the winter, they’d go and retrieve the collar and retrieve the animal if they could. And one ended up on our property, 15 miles north of where it was released, so I guess that was my first exposure to species at risk. And then over the years, you hear things that are on the endangered list, and I would question that because, well Burrowing owls are on the endangered list, well, we had lots of them. Swift fox is on the endangered list and we’d see them every now and again, but they’re nocturnal. They might not be up by Saskatoon but in our area they were there, and different things like Leopard frogs, they might not see them in some spots, but we had them. Animals range in habitats that they’re comfortable living on, and just because they’re not everywhere doesn’t mean that they’re not there. Protecting species at risk habitat is just good range management. You know, all things play together; if things are managed properly, then it makes the homes for everything. Up in the Coteau, it’s called pot and kettle country, and so there’s not necessarily big streams of water, but there’s a slough at the bottom of pretty well every hill on our place. During the wet years of 2012, 2013, and 2014, we had species of ducks that I’ve never seen before. Well now the sloughs have dried up and we don’t have as many waterfowl birds, but it’ll rain again and the ducks will come back. But the reason they come back is because there’s adequate spots for them to nest in the tall grass, and good food, and cover from predators. We’ve got lots of songbirds up there, and for the exact same reason, animals are there because the range is healthy. But I guess when I see things like the emergency order for the Sage grouse down in the southwest corner of this province, I don’t necessarily agree with that type of initiative to protect species; because that’s the northern range of the Sage grouse, most of their range is down into Wyoming. So to say that we’re not doing what’s right because those animals aren’t there, that’s not right. I became concerned and I got involved with the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association in 2006, I bought my life membership, and I’ll be Chair, if the Board allows it, in June of 2020. Through the Stock Growers, we realized that this was a concern and we’ve lobbied the government to understand that we’re doing our job, and that’s why the species are there. They need to be talking to producers about proper management practices such as leaving enough litter and providing the habitat so that livestock and species at risk could coexist, and we need to be debunking some of the studies. I remember one of the first studies that was done out of the University of Winnipeg on the Grasslands National Park, they were studying songbirds. So they study the songbirds that were nesting in the Park, and then the neighboring community pastures. What these students would do is they would go out and walk everyday, and I saw them walk. We’d watch them go, they walk out and they find a nest and they put a flag up, and everyday they walk out, find a nest and put a flag up. And in the Park, you know, all those eggs hatched and everything was fine. And in the community pasture, all of, or most of the nests were crushed, and their conclusion was that livestock are harmful to the songbirds. But what they didn’t figure in is that livestock are curious animals. As soon as they saw the flag, they walked to the flag and stepped on the nest. So who was putting the species in danger? The cows, without those flags, if they sense something’s there, they’re not going to go there. So inadvertently if we’re doing our job and just leaving them be, they’ll, the species at risk, will be there.

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SARPAL The SARPAL program was an initiative that Saskatchewan Stock Growers spearheaded, and being involved on the board, I wanted to support it, but, of course, there’s a financial benefit, and this goes back to the economics of it. One of the biggest things that’s missed on all these studies on proper management practices from outside of a ranching perspective is that they don’t take the economics into play. And for those of us that are trying to make a living, that’s a big part. It’s got to be economically viable. So when there’s an opportunity to see reward for the initiatives that we’re taking, without having to change much in our operation, or anything at all, it makes sense. We can see, this is what we’re doing, is there any changes that we need to make? If not, what targets do we need to hit? If we’re hitting those targets, what’s the benefit to us? And one of the things that I really appreciate about the SARPAL program is that when we get pushback from certain groups, ENGOs (environmental nongovernmental organizations) saying you guys don’t know what you’re doing, the SARPAL program provides the data to say, yes, we do. And here’s why, and here’s how, and here’s the people that are doing it; go talk to them. So that would be the first reason that I would want to be involved. The second is, of course, there’s an economic benefit and it places value on our careful range management practices, as it should. It’s an opportunity for people that have been taking care of one of the most fragile ecosystems in all of Canada to be rewarded for what they’ve been doing already. Just because you don’t change anything doesn’t mean you’re not doing it, right? Because our land wouldn’t qualify for SARPAL if we had badly managed it. So we’re just getting recognized and rewarded for good management. And you know, we live in a time of instant news, but not necessarily correct news. You can take a picture of one portion of one thing, and it not be the truth. If you take a picture in the spring of a spot where your calving is, that’s a 10 or 20 acre piece that, yeah, it’s going to take a little bit more pressure than where those cattle are going to be for the summer, and you say that—this is what these guys are doing—that’s an inaccurate statement. You have to qualify to even be eligible to do SARPAL, and because it’s our business, we’re not going to change everything for a minor amount of money. SARPAL changed the way I managed my rangeland very little. It did teach me how to gauge how much litter we have left on the ground and how to get an assessment of the health of our range earlier on. I won’t say it changed our practices really, we just became more aware of some things, like when we need to rotate the cattle to different grazing, or how much litter was left, or if there was too much left. One of the things about the SARPAL program is the boots on the ground were there twice in a year, as the contract states. They came and checked the health of the range in the spring and in the fall, and you needed to hit your targets to reap the rewards. So learning from them on how they take those assessments is a good tool to add to the toolbox. The other thing is, I am 100% sure that SARPAL will make a difference in the conservation of species at risk, it will, it already has. What I like the least about SARPAL is that I wasn’t able to get in on it at the beginning. It ran for five years and I didn’t get to be involved until year three, and it sounds like the next round of funding, which we hope that we’re approved for, is targeted in a certain area. I never have agreed with that and I’ve pushed it pretty hard on the Stock Grower’s level because it is funded through us. I don’t agree with some of the limitations that they’re putting in, that they want it to be focused in certain areas, like we’ve got a lot of acres covered in the Grasslands Park and in the southwest. We work with the South of the Divide Conservation Action Program (SODCAP Inc.), but that limits us in Saskatchewan to a certain area. The Missouri Coteau is one of the hidden gems of Saskatchewan when you look at it; it’s as critical as the Great Sandhills or the Plains of the Southwest, the Frenchman River Valley, all that area. And I take issue when we can reward some producers in one area, but not other producers in other areas that are doing the same thing, just because of our limitations on where we can fund these projects. So it

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looks like in the next round of funding, if there is one, that I’m ineligible. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to change my management practices at all, we will continue to take care of the range as we always have, but it’s disappointing that they target one area and leave another area not able to reap the benefit. So that is an incentive of the program that could be improved, not targeting only specific areas. And longer terms would be helpful. You know, there’s so many opportunities in this country, and we are being taxed for existing at the moment. I’m referring to the carbon tax. When you look at what grasslands sequester, you’re charging me for something that I contribute. I know that NCC (Nature Conservancy of Canada), two or three years ago, their budget was 500 million dollars. Now their budget has been doubled to a billion dollars for the purpose of purchasing land, and when NCC purchases land, they purchase it in perpetuity. And typically, they don’t want to leave people on the land to manage it, for whatever reason. So when I look at the money that’s available for NCC to buy our land, with our own money, then I take offense to that. Because you could go, here’s the people, the ranchers, that are being a benefit to all of Canada by what they’re contributing, not only in species at risk preservation but also in carbon sequestration, and taking care of lands that haven’t been broke. This is native grass. This is one of the last places in North America that we’ve got a large chunk of it, and we can benefit them economically, but only if they’re doing their job as ranchers. So when I see the money that could be available for initiatives like ours, through organizations like the Saskatchewan Stock Growers, we could set a precedent Canada-wide. And you don’t have to do it through an organization like NCC that bills themselves as private and gets federal dollars for the purpose of purchasing, when we can use organizations across this country, like the Stock Growers, to protect the lands that we hold dear, that are our livelihood.  upport from the public and government S I’d like the Canadian general public to support initiatives like SARPAL as much as they support initiatives like NCC. Because who’s really being a benefit to this country? When you sit down and look at it, you know, support us, support the fact that that we’re not out wrecking the land, we’re here to help it. We’re the best environmentalists that there is in this country because if we don’t take care of the environment, it won’t take care of us. Same with the government at all levels. On the local level, the bureaucrats or the MLAs, to the ministers, to the premier, up to the federal bureaucrats, and then federal ministers, I want them all to hear the same message. That what we’re doing is the best job that we can every time. That we are contributing to the economy. That we are sequestering carbon. That we’re taking care of some of the most fragile ecosystems, providing the habitat that there is for the species that they want to see on this land for the next generation; and we’re doing it because we love the land. Beef is secondary to what we do. We manage grass. We are the environmentalist that they need to turn to when it comes to understanding how we keep this land viable for the next generation and for the next ten generations.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Regarding the future of my ranch, well, what we do, we do for the next generation. If my kids so choose to carry on all we’ve been doing, great, if not, they don’t have to. It’s a lifestyle really. There are very few ranches that, if you don’t have some sort of other income like a gravel pit, or oil wells, or gas wells, or access to irrigation, well, you’re not going to get rich in this business; but you’ll make a living. We could break our grassland and make a lot more money a lot faster, but we don’t want to, that’s not our priority. So support from the beef industry is helpful because I would like to see that the ranch can be economically viable for the next generation.

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When I bought with my brother in 1999, we could pay for land with production. It’s hard to get started as a young producer now, and so this SARPAL tool ties directly into that. If you’re hitting your targets and not abusing the land just to make your land payment, and you can be recognized for the effort, the economic value just for your practices, well, there’s a tool there that will help young producers that are just getting going to be successful. And that’s what I’d like to see because we have an aging population in this industry. It’s not that people don’t want to be involved, but my generation, well, I bought in 1999 and BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) happened in 2003, and virtually, my generation left the industry. There’s very few, well, I’m not the young generation anymore, I’m 40 years old. But the young generation that wants to get after it, maybe in their 20s, they’re having a hard time grabbing hold and getting it done, because it takes a lot of capital, and it takes the willingness to have a job off farm just to buy the groceries while you make your big land payments. So having people recognize that programs like SARPAL are contributing, not just to the benefit of species that are struggling, and we’re creating habitat for them; but it’s also contributing to the economic value of this country. You’re letting people, the next generation, take care of that land as it should be taken care of, not just to make sure that they can stay alive, to make the payment. My first ten years all I made was equity; but we do it because we love it. Final thoughts? I’ve always wanted to ranch, well, you know, every little kid’s dream was to be a cowboy, but, you know, being a cowboy and a rancher are two different things. I’ve had the opportunity to ride some really good horses, and some poor ones, and have had some opportunity to gain a skill that is not practiced as much as it used to be. You know, through that process, through the long days on a horse, and through the long days of taking care of cattle on the range, and watching what happens in synergy with nature, you know, there’s a place in my heart for grass and cattle; it’s what I enjoy doing the most. I rodeoed a bit, my dad and I roped together years ago, and I team roped a little bit and bulldogged a very little bit. We still ranch rope, which is a different style, it’s the Vaquero style of roping, and we competed at some of the highest levels of that. We still enter those ongoing, we were in Stettler two weeks ago roping. It’s a nice benefit. They have the Canadian Ranch Roping Association and the president lives not far from Moose Jaw here, and they’ve held the finals in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and different people hold different events. The Pro-Am has been in Vermillion the last two or three years and we’ve gone up to that. The biggest one was in is in Santa Ynez, California, and there was a group of us went down to that. My kids have started, Luke started to rope, and Riata has a little bit too, they’ll be ten and eight at the end of April. Katherin, my wife, was born in Swift Current and I met her in Red Deer. We’ll have been married 13 years this year on September 1. Well, she came down to the homeplace in the spring of 2007, and you know, the first day she was down, we put in a good 10 hours on a horse, and she didn’t get the truck and leave, so I thought that was a good sign. She’d rode a little bit in high school, but she handles cattle very naturally. Some people it comes easy to, and other people not so easy. So we’ve been able to ride quite a bit together, and we work cattle, her and I, by ourselves, without having a lot of extra help. I credit anything and everything to having her. What I like most about ranching is the quiet, and there’s value in working the land and seeing a task to completion and watching what you’re doing work. There’s quiet satisfaction and value in the subtle little things in life. It’s hard to explain, you know, in the spring when the first crocuses poke through or when you’re riding and it’s the cool of the morning or the cool of the evening and the cattle are settled and you’ve got a good dog and a good horse. It’s a job that you can do with your family; it teaches you some of the values of hard work. It’s not an easy life, but it’s a good life.

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To close, well, there’s a fellow, I believe he was in the States, he wrote this, and it’s the first thing that came to my mind, was how it feels like to be a cattleman sometimes. It’s called “the Cattlemen’s Creed,” and it goes: We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, have done the impossible for the ungrateful. and we have done so much, with so little, for so long, that all we’re left with is contempt.

I say this because this business can beat you up and you’re at the mercy of markets and not just local markets but world markets, you know, you have to have a burning desire to do this work. You have to have a want to protect the habitat that you’re given to protect, and it’s okay to value money, but that shouldn’t be your biggest value if you’re going to ranch, because it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is giving your kids an opportunity and giving them the character that that only comes from being raised on the land. And understanding that once in a while, you’re going to get beat up in this business. But also understanding that the rewards are well worth it, if you do the hard work. You know, I got to ride our range with my grandpa, I got to ride with my dad, I got to ride with my brother, and now I get to ride with my kids. And so the Cattlemen’s Creed ties into the fact that there’s a bunch of rules and regulations forced down upon us that we don’t deserve, and initiatives like SARPAL are what we do deserve. Things like this contribute for years to come so that my kids will be able to tell the same story, that they can ride with their kids. You know, there’s one spot that I can stand up on top of our place, and I don’t see a building, I don’t see a light, and all I see is grass.

Dry Coulee Jensen Ranch Alberta The Combined Interview of Doug and Anita Jensen  ell me the history of your ranch T Doug: We are Dry Coulee Jensen Ranch, my grandfather, Niels Jensen, homesteaded this place in 1904. That yellow two-story house over there was his house, that’s the house my dad, Gordon, was raised in, I was raised there, and now our youngest son, Clayton, lives in it; that house is over 100 years old. I’m the third generation on the ranch, and my son will be the fourth. I have four kids, and my youngest son, Clayton, is going to be the one that ends up staying here, by the looks of it anyway. I was raised riding horses and working with cattle. My older brother, Ken, broke horses for other people for extra money, and when I was 11, I started breaking horses with him. When I was 17, I left home to start my career as a ranch cowboy. I started out in Saskatchewan but soon came back to Alberta to work on the riding crew for the Knight Ranch on the Milk River Ridge. I spent two years there on a horse most everyday. At 19, I went to school and became a farrier and tried my hand later that year at guiding tourists on horseback. The following year, I was in the interior of BC riding for the famous Gang Ranch. I had ten horses in my string and not one of them didn’t try to buck me off almost daily. We moved the cattle from valley to valley, branding as we went. We lived in a different log cabin every few weeks as we moved farther into the back country. I loved the country but the pay was $600 a month working sunrise to sunset seven days a week, not quite what I was getting paid in Alberta. I then went back to the Bar K2 Ranch, a sister ranch to the Knight Ranch. In the spring of 1982, I was hired as Assistant Manager on the Suffield PFRA (Prairie Farm Rehabilitation

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Administration) lease north of Medicine Hat, Alberta, on the military training base. Most of the pastures had the South Saskatchewan River as a boundary, a beautiful country to ride in. I moved back home to the family place in 1983, my dad wasn’t getting any younger, so I took over managing the Barnwell Grazing lease, which our family has run since 1970. Besides riding lease, I calved for Deseret Ranch each spring and weaned in the Falls. I shoed horses and broke a few colts in the area as well. Anita and I got hitched in August 1983 here at the homeplace with me and my two groomsmen riding up to the hitching line for our hitching. I must have stuck because we’re still hitched. I started raising purebred Gelbvieh cattle and slowly building a herd until BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) took the wings out from underneath me. BSE actually made me change a whole lot of things because two years after BSE, I was selling bulls for less than what I had into them. So after two years of doing that we decided, we had to do something, and we now run a cow-calf operation, and I got a job in town as the agricultural foreman for the Municipal District (MD) of Taber. I do that and I run the lease for the Barnwell Grazing Association; that’s my two occupations.  hat is your priority in your range management? W To make sure that I leave at least 50% of grass at the end of the year for carry over and to make sure that I have lots of water. I also do a lot of things to make sure that the wildlife has a home and people aren’t down there harassing them. No grass, no cows; no water, no cows. If you have a dry winter and the grass isn’t coming good, like it was this spring, then the cows have to come out later. Normally my cows would have come out today, but I’m letting them stay in a little longer now because we went out later. Last year we had a hailstorm come through here, well this year too, but we had a hailstorm come through last year on August 6 and it actually trimmed all the grass on the pasture right to the ground. You went up on top of the hill and you could see every gopher hole and every cactus for a mile, which is something that I’ve never, ever seen before. Luckily, at that point, I still had one pasture on the river bottom that didn’t get hit, and then I had another one that got hit with about 50% hail. So I stayed on the river bottom for a while and we had two inches of rain that came with the hail so everything started greening up in a hurry, and we moved the cows around fast, every week to a different pasture, so they had something to eat. Then we went out early, but it turns out we didn’t go out early enough because on September 30 last year, we had a snowstorm that came in, and the snow was over two and a half feet deep on the level, wet, heavy snow. So the only thing the cows could eat was up on top of hills that the wind had blown clear, but I couldn’t even get the cows to the corrals because the snow was too deep to get them there. We went out last year on October 6, I believe, but we had to actually hire a bobcat and a payloader to come and clean the corrals out because there was six feet of snow in the corrals, and it was really wet, heavy snow. My horses had quite a time just getting between the hills. I had to wait to find a trail the cows had made to get to the next hill. If I went anywhere where the cows hadn’t made a trail, the horse would bog down in the snow. Lots of years we’ve had snow but we’ve never had that much snow before at that time, that early. Some days I wonder about my sanity doing this.  here did you learn this? W I learned that through trial and error, but also a lot of the stuff I picked up from other people that are associates, other ranches that I worked for, and my dad and grandpa, but things have changed since then. Like, we started running the Barnwell Grazing Association in 1970, so it’s been a few years, and when we started running, it had three ponds on it and it was one big pasture. Now, today, it has 8 pastures and has 11 ponds and it has 2 wetlands that I’ve made and has water tanks for water. All the watering systems I’ve put in have all worked, I suppose because I’m out there everyday to see where everything is and how it all fits together.

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There’s been a lot of changes in 51 years. We changed to rotational grazing and resting grass. When we first started out, they just let them out there and the cows went out and either hung out on the river where they drank water and grazed it to the ground or else they hung around whichever pond and grazed it to the ground. And so now it’s well grazed and everything’s grazed equally and you’ve got some leftover for dry years too. So, yeah, we made some changes over the years with our range management. When we started at Barnwell Grazing, like I said, it was one pasture, and we decided that for grazing purposes, we’d be better off to have more pasture. So the first thing we did, depending on what we could afford, we divided it so we had three pastures, and by doing that, that allowed us to rotate our cows around. Then we could actually run more cows because they’re utilizing more of it. Then we had to get water onto the rest of it, so we started building dugouts in places that are low spots that naturally, in the springtime, have good runoff. Then we started cross fencing as we got more dugouts, and the tire tanks are one of the last things that we put in, as far as water is concerned. We put those in because we have irrigation water out here, so we have tire tanks, and that’s a guaranteed water source. Probably 30 years ago, we also put a pipeline in to put water into two different ponds. My dad said why don’t we take and drag a ditch from that pond and go over to the east by about a mile, there’s a big old dry lake there, and we can make that into a lake. My dad had flood irrigated his whole life, so rather than have a surveyor come out, we had one of our board members come out with a big tractor with a ditcher on it, and my dad said just follow me, and he walked and zigzagged around, turned the water on it, and I’ve got a lake out there. It’s about a 20 acre marsh, which we call Jensen Lake, and then we planted trees around it, but the deer keep eating those. When my dad was younger, this wasn’t a lease, it was just bald-headed prairie, and they would let their milk cows out in the morning after they’ve been milked. He would have to go on horse through the coulee that we have behind our place and go get their cows and bring them home to milk. He started doing that when he was 4 years old and he’s 95 now. Leafy Spurge When the river floods, we get leafy spurge. I’ve got two major river flats that are huge, and when it floods sometimes, it will actually cover the river flats so all the seeds from upstream come on us. I’ve been fighting leafy spurge for years and years. We can’t run sheep or goats out here to eat it unless you have somebody there with a gun and a good dog because of the coyotes. Just this morning when I was moving cows, I had six coyotes come off the lake, six of them in one bunch. They do a goat program on the Waldron Ranch in the foothills up by Pincher Creek, they’ll never eradicate it, but that’s the best way to weaken it. Spraying is a wonderful thing too, but it’s a never-­ending battle because you can never, ever get rid of it all. Leafy spurge is such that the roots will go down there forever, and when it goes to seed, it pops the seed. If you have one plant here this year and you didn’t see that plant and you didn’t take care of that plant, the next year when you come back, it’ll be a big patch. Spurge take all the moisture and everything and the grass can’t compete with it. You have to spray it and you have to take care of it, and we’ve been spraying for lots of years. I used to spray everything with a sprayer on the back of the tractor, I had buster booms on, I used to spray it that way across the river flats and we also have a quad that has a tank and we spot spray the river flats. Every second year, we have a plane come in and he sprays about 90 acres. Species at risk I’ve heard about species at risk and their habitat my whole life, they were always talking about ground owls, and I’ve seen only a couple in my entire life. But we also have rattlesnakes and Sharp-tailed grouse here, and we try to keep people away from them because they’re very few and far between. We don’t have any antelope on the pasture, but we do have mule deer and whitetail among everything else, and lots of coyotes. We had a partnership with the ACA, the Alberta Conservation Association, I think

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it was three years ago, they went and they did a study out there. They had all their crew go out and they counted every kind of grasshopper and birds, every different species that we had, and they had a big, thick book at the end, and we told them about all of our grazing practices. Then they came back and had a meeting with myself and our board of directors, and they pointed out that there were three places on the pasture that had heavier grazing than the rest, but the rest of it was in excellent condition. And then I explained to them that one of those heavily grazed areas used to be a sheep camp and so it’s never recovered from back in the dirty 1930s. The other two were water holes, so it’s a bit unavoidable to not have cows grazing there because the cows hang out in the corners wanting to get home. The ACA wasn’t our first project, we’ve had guys from the research station come out and do programs with the grasshoppers and stuff, they’ve done a bunch of different studies. The ACA helped pay for two and a half miles of material for fencing to stop people from driving all over the fragile prairie grass and wildlife habitat, so I was happy to get fencing through the ACA. They also put a hawk pole up a year ago and a big storm come through this summer and knocked down the hawk’s trees, I’ve seen them sit on the pole since then, but they haven’t nested on it yet.  eeping the grasslands healthy K In Alberta, there is only so much native grassland left. In my lifetime, I’ve seen lots of it broken up and plowed to become farmland, but once it’s farmed, it will never be native grass again. In our area, if someone thinks they can purchase grassland and get irrigation water on the land, the value goes up by at least four times if not more. Grazing cattle using rotational grazing keeps the grasslands healthy. Ranchers have been the stewards of the land forever. They also provide good habitat for wildlife and even species at risk. City people don’t realize how much pride ranchers take in being stewards of their lands. It’s their livelihood and what brings happiness in their lives.  hallenges of managing a grazing lease C We have a road going right through the middle of our pasture that goes down to the gravel pit, so everybody believes that, well, it’s Crown land, but some of its MD, so it’s actually private land, but the public thought that they had the right to be out there climbing up and down the hills with quads and motor bikes. I spend a lot of time being out there making sure that people aren’t doing that. Two years ago, there was a fire ban in the MD of Taber so I went out and put up great big signs on the gate saying no access, fire ban in effect, stay out. I’m out there checking cows and I’m riding up on the river hill and I looked down on to one of my flats and I saw a great big bonfire in the trees. I ride down there and there’s a bunch of people camping and they had a bonfire going that was as big as a riding lawnmower. I said, did you guys not see the signs coming through? Of course, they never see the signs, it’s 4 × 4, it’s on a Texas gate that most people will slow down a little bit to go across, but… some of the things you have to put up with all the time. Last weekend, I was out there till dark on Saturday night and on Sunday I got a phone call from one of the neighbors who said that he was taking a drive out on the pasture and did I know that I had some fences cut? So I went out there and saw that they had took fencing pliers and cut down the fences and then they drove into the pasture, just a couple hundred yards into it and drove back out, and they did this in the middle of night. I have no idea why. I was just lucky they didn’t cut the fence where the cows were, or my cows would have been all over the countryside. I’ve been battling that for 50 years. Before we fenced it, we had people coming in and building a paintball course; they put tree forts up in the trees and everything else. I wasn’t in that pasture at that particular time because my cows rotate, and when I came down, I found this thing, and I started inquiring and I found out who it is. Everybody thinks they have the right to do it, they say it’s government land, but they were on private land. I get the police involved and they talk to them, but

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that’s as far as it goes. My boys and I finally tore it down and burned it when there was snow, to be safe. We don’t always keep people off, if there’s cows in that pasture, I don’t particularly favor you being out there wandering around, but we have signs up and people are supposed to phone and ask for permission. Tomorrow night they’ll start turning Pheasants loose; I have two sites out here for Pheasant Fest. The ACA has a Pheasant Fest in Taber every year, and that’s the payback that we do for the ACA, we let him have Pheasant Fest out here, and we have for years and years; we supplied two sites for them. We made a staging area for them and a walk-through gate. With the fences being built, we have it so that it’s locked up and nobody can get into it except on foot access. I’ve actually had more people that have said it was the best thing that I’ve ever done. There are those that are against it, the same guys that never ask permission and drove all over it and built fires that they weren’t supposed to. But they all have the same opportunities as anybody else, if they want to enjoy it, they can come out and they can walk around it too. There’s no place on that whole pasture you can’t access within a mile and a half of the road. Plant-based beef The thing that’s bothering me right now is all these restaurants going to plant-based burgers and charging more for the burger that’s a plant. Things like that really, really bother me. Why do you try to imitate beef when you can just eat beef instead? If someone wants to be a vegetarian, fine, go ahead and be a vegetarian; just don’t try and make the rest of us believe that that’s the way to go.  imes are changing T When I was a kid, there were a lot more rural people than there are now; in this area, most farmers only had a quarter or two quarters of irrigated farmland. Now it’s to the point that unless you’re really big, you may as well get out. Everybody plans that their kids are going to stay home and farm but most of them have moved on. When we initially started running this lease, most of the guys only ran about ten cows out there, and there was maybe 30 of them. One neighbor used to lead his cows out to the lease one at a time with the tractor. He’d make ten trips in the daytime and then bring his calves out in stock racks in the back of his truck; that’s long gone. Now the kids can’t afford to buy mom and dad out, and if they don’t actually pass it onto the kid, then the kid has to go to town and get a job. Lots of people sell out because they can’t afford to buy the equipment anymore, at least they have the money then, but it’s no longer farmland, often, it gets divided up into acreages. I’ve always had to have a job off the ranch to be able to afford to keep going, I take that money and put it back into the place. I get home at a quarter after five from working for the county and I go out and crawl on a horse and go until it’s too dark for me to see; then I get up and do it all over again the next day. In calving season, Anita will go drive her bus in the morning and then do checks all day and then I’ll come home after work and calve all night. If she needs help pulling a calf, she can call our son, he’s a mechanic but he works only ten minutes away. With me, I’m all over the MD so I could be 60 miles on the other side of Taber and couldn’t get here in time.  he value of dogs T In my life, I’ve had some phenomenal horses and I’ve had some phenomenal dogs. Like the cows I moved this morning, I moved that field out by myself, it’s only a section field I was moving out of, but I took one dog with me and anytime the cows get out of line, I just put the dog on them and things get right back to normal. I had to ship some bulls here earlier this week and the guy that was going to haul them up for me wanted to get to the auction mart as soon as he could. I got home from work at a quar-

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ter after five and saddled a horse. The bulls were on a half section field and I rode as hard as I could to the other end because that’s where they always were at nighttime, and they weren’t there. So I came back, and when I came to the coulee, I saw them. I started bringing them over to the corral, and they were fighting and carrying on, as bulls do. When they got around the end of the coulee, I put my dog on them. I’ve used the dog on them enough that they knew exactly where the corral was and they lined up straight for that corral in a single line, because they knew if they got out of line, they were getting their heels bit. A good dog is as good as two other cowboys most times. We raise pups all the time, our Red Heeler female has one batch a year and we breed her to an Australian Shepherd; that way you get the best of both breeds. I ’ve ridden horses all my life, I’d love to hear some of your stories on the range I was raised on a horse and always enjoyed ranching; it just came natural. We still ranch with horses, I was on a horse all morning moving cows, I had bulls to move out of the way and another five hundred head of cows to move to another pasture so they can go home next week. I have a few stories alright; I spent a number of years working on ranches before I came back home. I’ve had a lot of injuries, but I’ve always managed to crawl back on the horse and get home. I had my left leg broken by three different horses three years in a row out there. I managed to get back on the horse, but getting on and off to open and close the gates was the tough part. I can’t even imagine, please tell me more The first time I had my ankle broken, I was checking cows on Poncho on Stevens Flat on the lease and I was just galloping along in a rainstorm and he slipped and he went end over end twice. On his first time through he hit me between the shoulder blades with his butt and knocked the wind out of me, and my leg was still in in the stirrup, and then I actually felt it break on the second time around. I kicked free on the second time around and he got up and he should have just left me there, but he came back. I had a truck and trailer on the west side of the pasture; I was three and a half miles away from it. I got up and took my slicker off and I walked over to him and put the slicker on the back of the saddle and rode to the trailer and then I drove home. I had a standard truck and my left leg was broken, so it was really hard to try to use the clutch and shift. I’m shifting with my right leg and the road was really muddy and I thought please don’t go in the ditch, please don’t go in the ditch; this was long before cellphones. I drove home and I didn’t want to get out of the truck so I’m in the yard honking the horn, and Anita didn’t know it was me and came out angry at all the honking like “what do you want?” I said can you take me to the hospital? They put a cast on me, and then two days later, I was back on a horse out there checking cows again; no one else is doing it for me. The second time, we roped a cow that was on the flight in the springtime and we needed to get her in to pull a calf out of her, and the horse lost her footing and came down on me. I was wearing winter boots because it was really blizzardy out, and I took the weight of the horse on my leg when she came down. The third time I was on a colt and I was coming home from checking cows, and all day long as I was riding along, every time my chink chaps would blow in the wind he’d shy from it. So on the way home, I thought you dirty little so and so, I’m going to make you put in some miles here. There’s a laneway that went from the pasture over a mile and then down a half mile and on top of the coulee, so I was running him to get the piss and vinegar out of him. Well, he hit a rock and he went end over end and he dropped me on top of a dry coulee and I just happened to be really lucky that time because it was right at the crossing, because there’s only a couple of places you can get across the coulee, this is a big, deep coulee, like a big canyon. And when he went down, his butt end hit me right between the shoulder blades and knocked the wind out of me so bad I was crawling around on the ground for a couple of minutes trying to get my breath again. My glasses had gone flying and the saddle left a bruise right across the top of my belt. He took off running, went out in the field, and went way around,

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and by the time he came back, I had got my wind again and he ran right up to where I was, because I was at the crossing; I caught him and got back on and I came home. There’s been two or three times I should have been dead. I was leading some work horses across a ditch on the pasture and I was riding this big bald face colt called Boyd. They didn’t want to come across the ditch and so I dallied up and they pulled back and I had them tailed together and Boyd flipped me upside down in the irrigation ditch. The water is only about three feet deep, but he came right upside down and landed on top of me in the ditch. So I was pinned and I can’t swim at the best of times, I could stand up in three feet of water, but I was pinned under the horse under the water. Finally, I managed to kick enough and get the horse off of me. He was just floating there. Once I got out of the ditch, I had to hold his head out of the water so he wouldn’t drown. He was a good horse; all our kids learned to ride on Boyd. My saddle squeaked the rest of the summer. I remember, I used to cowboy for Deseret Ranch, I worked there on and off, mostly calving and weaning, for over ten years; they were the biggest cow-calf operation in Alberta. My brother had been the operations manager up there forever; he’s been there for 42 years. During branding time, one season I had a horse go down on me and break some of my ribs on the left side. I still flat assed calves for half a day and then it got hurting really bad and so they took pity on me and let me have my turn at roping. Another guy came along and he didn’t let go of his calf and he got his rope underneath the tail of mine as we were dragging calves to the fire. I was actually trying to take a figure eight out of my rope, and he bucked me off on my head and I landed down on my face, so my eye swelled closed. I got on a horse the next day and I went out to chase cows again. I was supposed to be out there for the week because I used to go out for a week at a time to work out there, but I came home and went to the doctor and yeah, I had broken ribs.  ow. I’ve ridden horses and broken some bones and I would never have made it home W Well, I broke a lot of bones over the years and I feel it now. Our pasture is right full of badger holes and gopher holes, and this year, there were places where our grass was up to my stirrups, so if I’m trying to rope a cow to doctor them, my horses, as good as they are, they still can’t see every hole. Most of them are agile enough that when they hit a set of holes, they pick themselves back up before they go end over end, but that’s the end result if they don’t pick themselves back up, it happens really fast. But you can’t sit there and be scared or you’ll never get anything done, the cows still need to be doctored. But as I’m getting older, I’m getting smarter. Now besides my main corrals, I have three sets of doctoring corrals that I’ve built. In my younger days, I used to rope and doctor anything and everything by myself, whether it’s a bull or a cow or whatever, and I’ve had some interesting instances from doing that. But as you get older you start thinking, now, maybe, I shouldn’t be doing that as much, and you start actually getting a little smarter and building some corrals, so you can actually run cattle in to doctor. The calves, you still rope them because that’s just part of it; it’s ranching. In the winter, we had always fed with a team of horses up until, I guess dad was 88, and he had a fall off the back of the truck and got wrecked. At that point, he couldn’t harness horses anymore. I was only using the team on the weekend because I’m gone working in the daytime. But before dad’s wreck, he’d have the horses harnessed every night when I pulled up in the yard after I got off of work and I got on the wagon and went up and did all the chores. Back when the kids were all home, the kids would come and they’d drive the horses, they were all raised driving horses, and those are the memories that our kids have, including our daughter. We’ve had a lot of wrecks with teams too, runaways. We used to break heavy horse colts all the time for ourselves, and other people would bring theirs over for us to break in the wintertime because we were feeding everyday. One time we were bedding the corral and dad was on the wagon and I was off cutting the strings on the small square bales. The one colt rubbed his bridle off and I look up in time to see dad and the team going by; they took off! We had a great big pile of main sprinkler pipe

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up on the fence, and they went right over top of it and bent the pipe, went through the fence, then run through the next fence into where the big ditch is. Dad jumped off before they hit that ditch and flipped the wagon upside down and broke the singletrees and stuff on it. We got them home and patched everything up and went and fed again the next day. Another time, one of the kids was getting up on the wagon and the signal to the horses to move ahead was to “get up” and dad was standing on the end of the wagon to help the kids up and he said “get up here” and the team went and he came off and broke his wrist. He had his first cast at 70, but it didn’t slow him down; he wouldn’t quit.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W I’m hoping that my son will carry on after I’m not here, I’m not ready to give up yet though. I’m done with the county in five years and I can get my government pension that will hopefully pull me through, but that’s the reason I’ve kept holding on to all this out here is so that when I retire I have something to do that I enjoy doing. Even now we bring dad out from the nursing home and go drive the range and he’ll be checking everything out and saying, boy the grass is sure good this year. My dad taught me to work and helped raise our kids as he worked beside them.  our cowboying history is so interesting to me, any final stories to end? Y To end, well, there’s a few stories I’ve racked up. I’ve kept a journal all my life; I think I was born a hundred years too late. I left home when I turned 17 and went working for ranches, and that’s what I did for quite a few years until I met this young lady here and decided I’d better come home; besides, dad was getting old enough that he said, if one of you don’t come home, I’m going to sell the place because I can’t keep going. So it was my turn and I came home; dad was 58 then, and he still kept going until he was 88. I’ve experienced some things that, probably, most people haven’t. I mentioned at the beginning I worked for the Deseret Ranch for a number of years and calved for them, and I went out and worked on the Gang Ranch in BC. It was a big, wild place when I was there, I was the jigger boss; that was second in command to the cow boss. I’ve tried roping bears, I’ve had wolves follow us in the trees as we were coming into camp at night; they’re after the dogs. I’ve had to save my dogs lives a number of times over the years when a pack of six coyotes will come in and want your dog. I was out on Suffield when it was the biggest PFRA lease in the province, and when I was there, there were 800 head of wild horses. That’s where they have the training for the British army, and the Canadian army kind of runs it and the British army trained something like 7000–9000 people there every year. The Canadian army colonel wanted the wild horses gone, so what we used to do for entertainment, when we weren’t chasing cows and checking on cows, is we’d go round up wild horses. On the Knight ranch one time after calving season, we were riding through all the fields where the cows and calves were and we were pulling out all the dries (cows that don’t have a calf on them). We’d take all the dries out of a field and put them into a field that didn’t have anything in it, and then we go to the next one and we’d do that and we just kept doing that day after day until we had all the dries taken out of the fields where the cows and calves were. We had them all together in one field and me and my brother Ken, we’re moving them to a different part of the ranch called the Kirkcaldy. We could see a huge rain storm was coming, and it was like a black wall, just as black as could be with lots of lightning. We had all these cows and we were going through other fields that had cows in them and we were holding our cows against the fence and we said, we’re going to get wet. When it actually hit us, within probably, I would say two minutes from the time that it hit us, we were soaked right through, there was water sloshing in our boots. We held the cows up, but there was lightning striking all the way around us, and we actually watched it hit two of the haystacks in the wintering field and burn them up. We had a couple hundred head of cows sitting here and we can’t let them go because if you

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let them go they’re going to get all mixed up with the others and there goes all the work you’ve done. That’s one of the worst storms I’ve been caught in, but we didn’t get struck by lightning, and we made it to the Kirkcaldy. Final thoughts? We’ve had some good times, even with all the broken bones and all the things that have happened, I wouldn’t trade any of it. Especially once you get into the last half of September and October and I’m checking cows and I’ll be three or four miles away from where the horse pasture is where I park my truck. I’ll check cows until I can’t see anymore, and then, coming in there’s coyotes howling right beside you and all around; it’s wonderful. The crickets are chirping and, well, you just can’t beat it. I see lots of deer; sometimes moose and even elk will come through along the river. Anita: On a Saturday, he might come home and not want lunch because he found some chokecherry bushes or cactus berries. Our four kids will come home and help on cattle entry days, pulling the bulls off the cows, and, of course, round up. It’s been the best place and way of life to raise a family.

Doug Jensen riding Sassy. (Photo credit: Doug Jensen)

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Introducing the Swift Fox

Vulpes velox Status: Threatened Range: Alberta, Saskatchewan

Photo credit: Colin Starkevich

The classification of the Swift fox as a threatened species is actually good news, well, better than it was anyway. They had earlier disappeared from the prairies, last sighted in 1938 and declared extirpated from Canada by 1978. They were decimated due to loss of grasslands through development, habitat fragmentation, and through ingesting the poison used to kill other predators, like coyotes and wolves, or eating the carcasses of those animals that had been poisoned. Then the Wildlife Preservation Canada (WPC) organization facilitated stakeholder introductions and funded the conservation recovery work led by various individuals and organizations, including the Calgary Zoo’s Centre for Conservation Research, Cochrane Ecological Institute, University of Calgary, and Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of BC. This Canadian Swift Fox Recovery Team developed one of Canada’s most successful species reintroductions. In 1983, they released the first captive-­raised Swift foxes along the Alberta–Saskatchewan border and the Milk River Ridge areas. Some of those foxes survived, and between 1983 and 1997, they released over 900 animals. The success of this program can be attributed to the collaborative efforts between conservation organizations, government, ranchers, university researchers, provincial and national parks and land conservancies, and the ongoing support from landowners.

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COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife Canada) downgraded their status from endangered to threatened in 2009. The main threats to this fragile population today are habitat loss and fragmentation, predation by coyotes and Golden eagles, and vehicle collisions. Their habitat is short- and mixed-grass prairies, and they prefer to den on hills near water bodies. They den underground for protection against predators and in which to rear their pups. They are the size of a large housecat and eat grasshoppers, birds, small mammals, and dead animals. Its fur is pale, yellowish-red with a gray stripe down its back to its black-tipped tail. Its underside is lighter in color, and it has black patches on both sides of its muzzle. They blend into the prairie grasslands so well and move so swiftly (hence its name)—they can run faster than 60 km/hr—and this, along with the fact that they are mainly nocturnal, is why many ranchers I interviewed noted that they really could not be sure if they have Swift foxes on their land, as they are simply so hard to spot. If you would like to support the conservation of our Swift fox, you can learn more about the Calgary Zoo’s Centre for Conservation Research program. Also, the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is a national land conservation organization that lists the Swift fox as one of the species that you can support through symbolical adoption through their Gifts of Canadian Nature gift-giving program. Your gift will support conservation of Swift fox habitat. Both organizations offer a tax receipt for your donation. This is a conservation success story we want to build on!

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Contemplating the Future

People get older and you can’t do as much as you used to, and it’s a physical occupation, so even though it’s not what it was, it’s still physical. These three ranchers’ stories share a common theme of contemplating the succession of the ranch, considering innovative ways to keep the ranch intact and the grasslands unbroken.

Cabin Creek Ranch/Burles Cattle Warren Burles Alberta  ell me about your ranch T My grandad came here with his older brother from Utah in 1900, and he had a quarter section, and I think at that time you could file on a quarter right beside you too, so we had a half section. The older brother had heard of these Porcupine Hills, so they came up together. We’re at the top of Cabin Creek up here, and then my grandad, Percy, was down here, right here actually; his house was in that circle there. When the Frank Slide came down in 1903, Percy heard the rumble but had no idea what it was; a rider came by the next day and told him about it. Today my brother lives 5 miles south of here. My parents called it the Cabin Creek Ranch because we’re on Cabin Creek, and in the old days, there were cabins up and down the creek, as there were settlers on every quarter section. Earlier it was a mixed farm at times too, and now it’s a corporation which is called Burles Cattle, and I’m the third generation. My dad said as a child, he was always waking up to music: George singing, Lou playing violin, Daisy on piano. Dad played piano and guitar by ear and he sang with a beautiful tenor voice. The neighbors could hear him singing on the tractor across the river. My sister Gillian sang this “Cowboy Lullaby” song she wrote with two of my sisters, after our dad passed, https://youtu.be/mAGH6TXheDs. He was a volunteer weather observer for the federal government for 50 years. He recorded cloud cover daily and whenever it rained or snowed, he measured how much. When he passed away at 96 years old, it was warm and windy with no precipitation. Earlier in the day he was singing “You Are My Sunshine.” He was connected to nature. He noted animal tracks, waited for Badgers and Ruffled grouse, tracked the location of the sun rising over Tanner Butte as seasons came and went. In the spring he brought

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7_4

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home pussy willows, crocuses, shooting stars, and yellow bells. He had a deep connection to the Porcupine Hills and the ranch. At Cabin Creek Ranch, mom had meals on the table punctually at 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock, and when we came home from school, we could always count on homemade cookies and cakes with 4 o’clock tea. Along with cooking and gardening and raising six children, mom wrote. She typed up stories and sold them to the Family Herald and Chatelaine, and co-wrote Cowley: 60 Years a Village. She wrote Cabin Creek Ranch: 100 Years on the Homestead about her experiences with chickens and pigs, and she wrote about her adventures: the time the house burned down and the time she went into labor in a blizzard and gave birth to me at a neighbor’s house in Cowley. At the age of 70, after 16 years of correspondence courses, she received her degree, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Waterloo. I’m the very fortunate owner of ranch lands, really due to my parents Bob and Mary-Jo Burles. In 1977, I went north to work at the Hudson’s Bay Company as a store manager for them, and I stayed up north 38 years. I came home, back to the ranch, in 2015. But all those years I was involved in it, I would come home every holiday and work here, and in the early years, I put my money into the place. My younger brother, who is a year younger than I am, Mark, stayed here the whole time and ran the place.  ell me about your range management T We sell yearlings, so we have cows and then we sell the yearlings the next year after. I would say half of our range is native grass, and the priority in our range management, well, my parents used to talk about, basically, you grow grass. Grass through the cows provides your revenue; that’s your capital; that’s everything; it’s your principal. So, I would say grow grass, and then set your cattle according to your grass and manage around keeping your pastures in good shape…not always easy. The grass will provide you with your income, so if you look after that, then your income will look after itself. Besides, I take an Indigenous Canadian attitude in that we don’t really own this land, we’re stewards of it. That’s the way I see it, and I try to look after it and be decent about it, and I think it’ll all work out. I mean why chew your grass to nothing; why would you do that? I think you just have to live with your income; if you have a miserable income, well you’re going to have to live poor, but don’t milk the cow dry, ‘cause that won’t pay. Besides, it’s such a great lifestyle; I like the ranching business because it’s pretty healthy; if you do it right, it’s a pretty healthy lifestyle. You should enjoy yourself when you ride across your pasture on a horse, or by foot, or by Honda— enjoy it. When I was a store manager, you could tell the person who really put the effort into their department; you could see if they did and it made a big difference; it would have a kind of sparkle. They took some pride in it, and then the people who didn’t give a damn, they would just get by. Basically, they were lucky that they didn’t have strong competition. Whether it be the produce department or the menswear, or whatever, you basically had to give a damn, like a real damn. So, we rotate our cattle around according to the grass, and I just am out there every day watching and looking, you know—your best friend is your shadow, or the farmer’s footprint, just be there. So, back to the grass, well, the best thing for native grassland is to be grazed. There was a guy, years and years ago, around here; his name escapes me now, but he’d heard of this Alan Savory that wrote a book on how grazing is needed for healthy grassland. This Savory came from, at the time, Rhodesia, probably one of the few places in the world where you could still see it, where you could see the huge herds moving and the lions and the hyenas on the outside and the herd milling on the inside, and then the grazers defecating, urinating, tearing the ground up and moving, and the predators came with them. That kind of idea of grassland health then came to North America. And Bud Williams, a cattle handler from Texas I believe, he wound up in northern Alberta, a big feedlot up there, and

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slowly but surely, he replaced the male staff with female staff because they were quieter—they handled cattle quietly. Like the best hockey players, the best just know—it’s the same with cattle handling; you’re just trying to be in position. There’s a guy over here called Hugh Lynch-­Staunton, and I’m talking to him 5 years ago or so, and he was telling me that he thinks that we’re just beginning to really learn agriculture, you know, with the science and the ability to move knowledge around. Then in the same sentence he said, there was another big place there, and they were bringing some of this modern stuff in, and they had an old hired man there and he’s watching him, and he says to the kid who’s maybe 40, you know, you’re doing things now just the way your grandfather used to do. So, a lot of this has been known, and kind of got lost, you know, and comes back. But you can see it; like we had a couple patches here; they’re kind of open now, but this little hillside was part of the yard. It was seldom, seldom grazed, but it only got so good and then it stopped; it didn’t continue to improve and it just stopped, maybe backed up. So yeah, grasslands need to be grazed to be healthy; these grasslands and these animals, they came together. Another thing, I think it came from Savory maybe, but somewhere in that whole conversation was that sometimes we used to put horses in the yard here to graze rather than have a lawn mower. But they will go to the same area repetitively and graze it, so the grass gets to be like an inch high and they’ll graze it down. They chomp it down to nothing and they’ll be there again the next day to finish it off again, and that destroys the root of that plant over time, over three or four chewings, bites. It really destroys it, and there could be good grass over there that they don’t like, there not ‘gonna eat it. They’ll come back here and chew this again, until they have to eat that. So that’s where these paddocks come in and herding rotation. The cow doesn’t eat where it wants to eat; the cells or paddocks kind of nudge the critter to both where and what it’s going to eat, however you do that, through proper salt, or watering or herding, or rotating through small pastures. I learned that from my parents and, well, over time I suppose. My parents talked about the importance of healthy grass, but I read about it to reinforce it too, and then MULTISAR, and, well, I think you tend to hang around like-­minded people a little bit anyways. But I’m all for diversity as well; they say for a company, if you have diversity in management and on the board, then you’re better off. I know my dad read every day, and every night he sat in his chair and read, or he had his notebook with his pencil scratching numbers around; he was a well-read guy, and I think a lot of ranchers are like that, quietly, but they keep learning. Like we have a lot of brush by Cabin Creek that goats would eat, so we’re thinking, we might get them yet. And on the Waldron, they had a huge problem with Leafy Spurge I believe it was, and they got a deal cut with the Hutterites to run sheep out there, and they really got a good handle on the problem. The weeds are still there, but nothing in the volume there used to be; it used to be just huge yellow pastures, and the sheep have backed it up and they’ll continue to back it up. So, this is not a zero-sum game; you can pass the puck to people willing to help you. There’s no more talented people in our community then those Hutterites; any agricultural skill you need, they pretty much have it. I think too that a lot of young people go and take agriculture courses, but I think they’d be very well advised to take business courses too, because this is a business. I really try to keep that in my head—if it’s a viable business, you’re okay, but if it isn’t, we’re finished anyway. Loving it won’t get you through it; you’re done. And, for me, to remember that wisdom’s everywhere, you don’t always know who’s got it—it’s everywhere. Species at risk I first started hearing about species at risk, probably as soon as I came back in 2015 because we have a neighbor up here who had a MULTISAR sign up and I kept looking at that sign. I looked at it for 1 or 2 years, and then one day, I took a picture with my cell phone and I called them maybe a year later. So, I wanted in and the program put me on hold for a while, and then I think maybe in 2017 or 2018,

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they came out here and chatted with us and asked if we wanted to participate, and we jumped in. We always knew the big guys, the magpie, hawk, Bald eagle, and the Golden eagle, but there’s always other little birds that we don’t know what they are; they’re just little birds, lots of different birds, and just lots of frogs and salamanders and stuff. So, the MULTISAR guys know about them, and as we’re hanging around them, we learn about this stuff too. And they remind us to be gentleman or gentle people I guess, persons, about it all. You know, if they’re helping us out with this stuff, giving us some money for this or that, to be a gentleman. If a hunter wants to hunt or a fisherman wants to fish, let them, give them access, be a gentleman about it. It’s not just all for us, it’s a bigger world than us. Most of these hunters are probably better with firearms than I am, almost guaranteed, and they’re respectful and courteous; heck I enjoy chatting with them—people of different backgrounds know different things. MULTISAR didn’t change the way we manage our range at all, but I think it’s opened my eyes to things. Hopefully people see these signs on the ranches and start to get curious and ask. Especially with species at risk, that can make everybody nervous. Like, we’ve heard some rumor where somewhere in Oregon they’re going to shut everything down for this one kind of owl. But it’s a new era, and that’s the other great thing; the world has changed with equipment and stuff. We went to a grazing seminar a few years ago put on by some Alberta conservation organization down by Waterton, and there were two or three women there; they were running ranches. They are running  their parent’s ranches and so will be the new generation of managers. So that just opens a whole door to new thinking, you know? MULTISAR I joined MULTISAR just to learn things really, hang around different people, get a different perspective on things. They gave me a huge opportunity to learn, and talk to people who know stuff, like these agronomists. To me, to most of us, you know, grass is pretty much grass to a great degree. But these folks they know it in-depth and they’re willing to chat with you about it, and then they come back in 5 years and re-evaluate your pastures. This neighbor I was talking about, he said they came back for a visit, and he’s been on the program for quite a few years, and he said he was embarrassed at one of the results, but it is good on him to be embarrassed—that’s a good thing; I’ve been embarrassed myself more than just a few times over the years. Anyway, he said he didn’t put any cattle on that field that next year. So, that’s good, the educational component, an outside look at what you’re doing. I do think MULTISAR will make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat; I believe so just by word of mouth even, just by being out there and being good neighbors. What I like the most about MULTISAR is probably the learning, and they’re all fine, knowledgeable folks too. This last year, maybe 2 years ago now, they had a dinner in Lethbridge, and we went down there and I knew a trapper who had lost a leg in an accident, so I was sitting with him, and the head of the Alberta Trappers Association came and sat with us, and he was a great guy and had some great stories. He was a big gregarious, happy guy, and it was a great afternoon all in all. Anyway, I have no issues with the MULTISAR program, no problems with them at all; and I understand if things don’t quite work out. Like this last year, and it still could work out, but the old corrals were put up whenever, and they’re huge, huge, and it costs a lot of money and labor to maintain a set of corrals. They’re good when they’re first set up, but as the decades go by, they’re beginning to deteriorate, and I just figured we didn’t need those huge corrals anymore; they could be much smaller. It’s a different operation now; we don’t have work horses anymore like grandpa Percy had, which was the reason he built them. So, I said to the MULTISAR guys, well what would you do if we got off the creek, if we abandon the creek and fence it off; and they said well, we’ll give you some fencing panels.

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Okay, so now we’re off the creek, and we, through another MULTISAR program, planted a bunch of willows poplars and saskatoons. The cattle and horses, over 120 years, they’ve flattened the creek. So, the creek is like a couple of inches deep there and 20-ft wide, and it’s been a couple of years now and the creek is getting back into a channel. It’s a little less spread out and less likely to freeze down on the first cold snap. MULTISAR has provided us with a solar water unit and a Razer Grazer portable electric fence. Some people don’t believe; I talk to everybody about MULTISAR, and most people can’t believe that it’s without handcuffs or restrictions on it. On top of that, these guys are wide open, because I talked to them a couple years ago and I mentioned the corrals to them; and then they said well, let’s think about it. Then we got it done. Another time I was going on about liners, some of our dugouts, they leak, and that wasn’t on their program. But they said, well, you know, you look into it and you bring it to us and we’ll see; so they’re wide open. Whatever your brain comes up with, they’re game to discuss it with you. So, you’re only limited by your intellect and your imagination, not by them.  houghts on the beef production industry T I think the beef production industry is pretty good the way it is actually; they’re already way better than they used to be. They’re more mindful of not overloading the liners, and that trickles back to the rancher not to overload the trucks that bring the cattle to market, and to get in there with the medicines, you know, to take care of them. It’s not nearly as rough a business as it was 40 years ago when I left. I think our cattle, the herd, the cattle are better by large, and you don’t see bad feet as much anymore. So, I think the whole business is coming up anyways. But then on the other side of it, Canada thistle is much more here now than it used to be, but you need the government and the knowledge it brings with it to help you deal with that, because just muscle won’t do it. You need some knowledge, when do you attack it, how do you attack it, and you need some motivation to tackle it because it’s going to be a big job. It’s a tough one, but they say you can train cattle to eat it as well. We have a pasture up here with Dalmatian toadflax, and the lease manager from Pincher Creek has you do this yearly report, and it asks what are you doing to fight the weed? So, it keeps it in the front of your mind, and have you made any progress? After 4 or 5 years, I can honestly say yes, the first few years, it was a stalemate at best. I vote but I’m not overly political, but I guess the Canadian government could support our industry by giving the Agricultural Ministry a higher profile than it does, put a high-profile person in there and push it, and then let the Minister go. I think that’s the best thing you could do, and the person doesn’t necessarily have to have an agricultural background either, like Jim Patterson would be a better Agricultural Minister than me, so, get those kind of people. The Canadian public could support our industry by shopping locally—we all should. There’s a small engine mechanic in Cowley, and I should take my stuff there. If we want local business, we better support it, and buy Canadian beef if you can, we’ve all got the money to do it, so just do it.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W It’s a business this ranch, and it’s just still ticking along, rolling along. Right now, in our business, we’re doing a butterfly; my brother and I are splitting up. So, that’s always a part of it too. The same neighbor I was talking about, years ago they’d always say that this guy’s going to buy up the whole country, and my neighbor would tell me, well, that’ll never happen he said, because they’re going to split up. And splitting up doesn’t have to end your life. You can have a great small business too, you know; you just have to run it differently. So if you have to run a smaller operation, you’ll do about as

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well as your mindset says you will do. And people get older, and you can’t do as much as you used to, and it’s a physical occupation, so even though if it’s not what it was, it’s still physical. There’s always fencing to be done and rugged areas to get around; it’s always a physical job. So yeah, that’s what I see as the future of our ranch; we’ll divide it and we’ll just keep going on. My brother has a son who will work with him on his end of it and on my end, we’ll see. The way I see the world, well we could partner with people. We have neighbors who have a son, you know, a young son, or a daughter for that matter—it wouldn’t matter—we could partner with them. So, then I got the land, but they got the steam and the energy, and that way I could stay here longer if I had a young person coming by, because as you get older, they can help you out. It’s not a zero-sum game. I mean, that’s what life’s about, you know passing the puck, like the great Gretzky. You’ll never find a better player than him or Bobby Orr; look at how many assists those guys got; they passed the puck all the time, give and go, give and go. I was reading a great story about Steve Nash, that Canadian basketball player, amazing guy, great guy. I learned that often when he got the ball, he’d pass it to the guy having a tough game; he says, I have to keep him in the game. I talk about athletics a lot because the analogies fit; they really do work. So, pass the puck, I think that’s the key. Final thoughts? To end, I guess, well, I would say going back to the future of these places, I’d say to people that taking agricultural courses is great, but don’t write off the business courses. I never took any, but I just worked for older people and I picked up my business skills there. I would like to meet Jack Ma from China; he’s got his thinking cap on right and he could come here and help me, just his insights. So, don’t limit yourself. I read about a rancher years ago that got in economic trouble, and he wound up with a business guy the bank sent him to help him out, and he said that was the greatest thing. That guy wasn’t from an agricultural background, but he questioned everything, and he just had new ways of thinking. Another thing I think is important is that you have to know your history. I think we don’t know our history well enough, I certainly don’t. But I know my roots with Percy and those guys, my grandparents and my parents, how much they cared and how hard they worked, much harder than I do, with a much lesser standard of living too, and most every cent went back in to reinvestment. Few of us would do that today. So, when we take it over, we’ve already got infrastructure, like a garage that doesn’t look like much, but that’s a building that’s already built, you know, and all the corrals were up, the fences were up, and they had to dig the post holes by hand, one by one, crushing work. No running water, and they had to cut a massive amount of wood just to get through the winter. So, I’d say know your history, be appreciative of what you’ve got. So be appreciative and realize how fortunate you really are. If you were running a shoe store in New York City or Montreal, nobody gives a hoot about you, nobody; there are no subsidies of any kind, or at least very few, there’s no MULTISAR to come along and give your pastures a real professional evaluation. And you’ve got competition from China; it’s tough, but likely it’s not as tough as that, because you’ve got your parent’s legacy wealth. Anyways, we’ve got Beyond Beef and those kind of companies coming at us. I tried a Beyond hamburger a couple years back and it was Ok, but a hamburger or hotdog smothered in condiments and served by a fast-food chain is basically tasteless anyways, so let me see them take on a sirloin steak or a ribeye. The climate change crowd has the cattle industry right in its sights, so stay informed, stay involved, and vote. Well, we’re all tied together really, and most people are good, most people are honest, keep going, be of good cheer, and I would say have a good attitude. Remember, you love ranching, ok, but these are businesses and so you’ve got to get that part of it right, and whatever your income is, you’ve got

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to live down to that income and then go from there. I guess to end, I’ll tell you about this buffalo skull here. Way back my dad told me that his father had found five good buffalo skulls in a wallow and he put them in the creek to clean them up. And then a flood came up and washed them all away. So, 3 or 4 years ago, I was hunting weeds down in the creek bottom, and I turn around and there coming out of the creek bank is that buffalo skull; that has to be one of those five buffalo skulls, and it had probably been washed away maybe in 1920 or something. Dad had told me that story a bunch of times, and it was great to find that skull. Reminds me of when I was a kid; my granddad lived in Lethbridge; I think he would have been well into his 80s, when I was just a kid, 7 or 8 or something. He’d had a wife and nine kids. Anyway, he told me that somewhere around here, at night, when he first came here, one of our Indigenous citizens came riding by on a horse. He was by himself and he just had a pair of leggings on I think, and my granddad said this guy was just a magnificent-looking man. So, that stays with me, and when he was telling the story, he was way back in time, looking back. He said the man rode by to water his horse. That one little story, it really opened my eyes about how to see people, and it affected me and my way through life. That older generation was so tough, so much tougher than us, to make it through the dirty 30s. So few actually made it, say there’s a rancher on every quarter section maybe, on average, 1 of the 15 actually made it, such a high failure rate. Such tenacity, and you need some arrogance and some pomposity too; otherwise life would just kick the piss right out of you. And some ego too, so you think you can get through it. Another thing that happened up north is that sometimes we’d have a bad deal with someone and I would say, you know, I’ll never deal with that son of a gun again; invariably, I was dealing with that son of a gun again. Eventually, maybe I need that guy to fix my furnace or something, so I would always be back to that guy’s door; we were all tied together, and then the second gig would go well, or the tenth would go well. I’d end up thinking maybe he got me on that one, but the next one would go okay. I remember my dad telling me to pay your own way, run a straight ship and everything, and I went through business that way, don’t cheat, pay people, and know that we’ve got lots of challenges coming our way, but we’re all tied together whether we know it or not.

Bob Burles on Cabin Creek with a bore drill in 1991. (Photo credit: Warren Burles)

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Maple Coulee Ranch Saskatchewan Doug and Colleen Gillespie Combined Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T I’ve been ranching all my life, and I’m a third-­generation rancher. We moved onto this land in 1990; we moved off the Park land (when Grasslands National Park was established) and left down there and moved up here. This is a family ranch; Colleen and I and our son, we’re a partnership in the company. Our other son told me when he was 12 years old that we work too hard for what we got out of it and there’s a better way to make a living. And I’ll tell you what, he’s making a hell of a living; he does chiropractic work for horses; before that he shod horses all his life. He lives in Stephenville, Texas, but he goes all over the United States. He works with all horses, barrel racers, reining, cutting, Thoroughbred race horses, show jumping horses—he’s a busy man. I was raised as a rancher; I really didn’t know anything else, and I never wanted to do anything else from the time I was little, that’s all I could ever see myself doing. The biggest waste of my life I felt were those years I spent in school; I couldn’t see any point to it. Of course it’s not a waste, but when you’re young, you can get thinking like that. They never taught me anything there that was going to help me raise cows.  ell me about your operation T We run a cow-calf operation here and what I like the most about ranching is just the freedom—you’re your own boss. I mean, it’s healthy, and the air’s clear, and you’re creating something; there’s newborn calves and you work with nature. There’s many ways of doing it; I always looked at it to do it as close to natural as you can, spend as little money as you can, so you don’t need to make near as much. These guys that try to maximize the income, well…the bottom line is all that matters; the difference is, if you don’t put anything in, you don’t need very much out of it to come out ahead. But when you have large inputs, then you’ve got to have a pretty sharp pencil; you’ve got to be very careful. But if you can graze and not spend an awful lot of money on hauling feed, building feed, and things like that, then you’re better off; and the cows, they really, really do a good job of harvesting it free of charge. This land here, ¾ of it is native grass, our old place we sold to the Park was 96% native, that back there was a lot leased, and here we don’t lease so much. This land, it won’t grow crops; they tried it in the teens, in the 20s, and the 30s; and they starved out. With these new farming methods, there’s a little bit more of it that could produce some, but it won’t really grow crops for human consumption, but the cattle can turn it into protein for humans. That’s the big thing that you can’t get the public to understand—you see on TV, oh, these cows take so much when they could be raising grain; well you can’t raise grain here. You look at them grazing a lot of the cattle up north in the trees; well now they want to talk about the environment; you’re going to tear all those trees down and seed it. Here we have the cows and the trees and the wildlife and everything living within the same environment, so you work together to the benefit of everyone. How much of this land that you’ve seen when you came in here can you farm? There’s no normal equipment that I want to be driving around on it. This place is special; sure, you drive all the way here, and it’s all flat as far as you can see, and then all the sudden it dips and opens up into this valley and coulees. Colleen: A friend of ours brought us out here, and all the way out here Doug’s going “there’s nothing around here I want,” and Brian turned around and winked at me, and I thought, oh, there’s something coming. And sure enough, you drive along all that flat land and then all of the sudden you enter into these rolling coulees…this place.

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 ell me about your range management T I believe in leaving 40% of the grass behind as cover, and to replenish it for next year and let it put away for next year. Up here it’s a little different than how we used to operate down there. There we’d start early one place and graze late and then start early in the same stuff and graze late the next time. Here there’s a combination of tame grass and native grass, so we graze the tame grass early and then use the native grass late, so it has a chance to go to seed and grow. Before we moved up here, I’d never grazed tame grass so it was a totally new concept. Lots of guys said oh, you’ve got to graze it bare, graze it bare. But I wasn’t long in figuring out that you treat it an awful lot like you treat native grass and it will look after you. You can abuse it more than you can native grass and get away with it, but you know, I found that in a dry spring if the old grass is that high, the new grass is that high, and if the old grass is that high, that’s how high the new grass is. Leaving some allows protection from the wind and frost, and it traps snow; there’s a saying where I was always taught the more old grass you’ve got, the more new grass you’ve got—and that applies right across the board. To explain it further, I never thought about it until you get up here and see these farmers; some of them, they’re cutting this crop high or using these stripper headers; and they’ve got a big height’s double they leave behind, and they seed in that so it’s protected from the late frosts and the wind and so it doesn’t dry out, and they’ll grow some great crops there, where it’s protected from the heat. And then these June frosts that freeze everything, it doesn’t freeze in there because it’s held the heat and then it doesn’t dry out. So that applies to the grass too, and the more old grass you’ve got, the more new grass you’ve got—no matter how you look at it. So our priority in our range management is all about paying close attention to the grass. I have a good example that I use to show people. I have a little patch that’s been in tame grass since we came. It’s a little patch that was on top of the hill and it’s close to the house, and so it was constantly abused. It was easy to throw something in there for 2 days or for a week and then get them out. So, it was constantly being used, and I never let it get ahead. It was only, I don’t know, 50 acres, but just something that was easy to sort cows out of, and easy to throw the bulls in there when you picked them up for a little while. Easy to throw the heifers in there before they went to the other field, or just put the horses in there when you had to have them out of the way someplace else. So, you constantly abused it and it was tame grass. So, some of these dry years through from 2003 to 2007 and then along here in 2012 or 2013 and in the mid-1990s that outside the fence, the grass was twice as high as it was inside. That was a real example, if you ever doubted anything, just watch what was happening there by that abuse. It was such a small piece of land, but I showed many people, that’s what abuse does. Two of these dry years in a row, the most recent yet, I never had anything on it at all, and it still didn’t amount to anything because there was no protection, there was no stuff stirred up in the soil. The old boy always told me that if you got that much above ground, you stored the equal amount below ground. Now, I don’t know; there’s probably people that have done studies to prove that, but for us there was no research done on that; they just knew from what happened. I can’t say how my ancestors or those other old timers figured that out; well, it was just from observation, not from research. Down there where we were at, in the river breaks and along the river, we’ve ran there in the wintertime; there’s protection. The grass down there, it doesn’t grow very much of it, but it is very good grass. So up on top, where it’s windy and the snow blows, we use that in the summertime, and in the spring, and when it turned cold, they headed for the breaks, out of the wind. And it didn’t snow as much, generally, and as the snow built up on top and they couldn’t get anything to eat, they headed for the breaks. Grandpa and uncle Lloyd always told two stories that were very interesting. They bred Suffolk Punch workhorses. They had two bunches of them and they ran two studs, and one bunch ran over on Otter Creek and Breed Creek, and that’s in real good winter country, and on the east side, they ran out up on top. And the horses that ran over there in the breaks, they always wintered better. Come spring they were stronger and better, and there was more grass, visibly, that you could see. And over there on

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the east side, it was never as good, and the horses just didn’t winter as well—the grass wasn’t as accessible. So, where the horses wintered way better, we divided that field in half. We always put the horses over on the west side. We never fed the horses in the winter time; they went out and ranged on their own. They’ve been there since 1913 or whatever. They fed the horses in 1996 and 1997, 2003 and 2004, and 2010 and 2011. The horses wintered on their own and done alright, except those few really bad years. They ran 40 or 50, plus the young ones, so maybe 20 to 30 mares, and then the young ones, and then when they were three, they’d break them. Me, I ran a few mares and we broke colts, but then I kind of quit because I found that I could buy these colts and yearlings cheaper than I could raise them, and then they didn’t get any legs cut off or anything. They might do that after you got them, but by then they’d got through the two worst years of that, you know, suckling colt and yearling years. I think I adapted well to a new place; I managed the grass. I’ve got a saying, when I came in to this country, it looked to me like grass was managed to keep it as bare as you could, and I said I’d like to change that trend. So by using the tame with the native, we try to stay off the native ‘till after the first of September, even after the first of October if we could stretch the tame, and so then the birds, they can have their little ones and they’re not disturbed, and we go off of it in early May, mid-May at the latest, and then they’re off it all summer; basically, we run a few yearlings in one field up here a little bit, and then use it in the fall and winter and early spring. We manage the tame grass by the number of cows, because you need to cut the cowherd back if it’s not raining enough. So, when you move to the native grass, if you’ve overused the tame grass, you’ve got too many cows for what the conditions are at the time, so you could cut back that way and try to maintain the native grass by using it that way, a shorter time; it’s my fall back. So, it’s longer or shorter, and the thing about this is the neighbors keep telling me I got too much grass, and when it’s dry they want to rent some. No, I say, it’s fine, I never have to go scrambling to find what I need. Yet! I don’t want to brag, and never say never. I’ve found that when you’re moving to the native grass and if you’re moving there 2 weeks or a month earlier, that tells me that it was damn dry. Maybe you should look at cutting the cowherd back 10%, or if you’re not going to cut it back, then feed them extra days, because it just takes money to replenish feed…just! That’s varying degrees depending on what the year is, but you can do that; you can’t just go rent some grass somewhere else to stretch it. The only way to stretch your grass is with feed, and money does that, but that’s a different kind of management. And the native grass is richer; it’s better for the cattle; they like it especially after it cures, and the tame grass, after it quits growing, it loses an awful lot of its feed value. The native grass, it cures up; it’s got an awful lot of feed value and the roots store nutrition for future growth. You’ll see there’s quite a difference in the native grass, and the years where it stays really wet on into the fall, often near August, things dry up, things cure. But I’ve seen it, especially if we’ve had a little later start, it will stay green way later in the fall, and if it hasn’t cured and it freezes, the native grass won’t have near as much kick in it as the years that it cures up in August and early September before it freezes. So this native grass, it loses a lot of its value too if it doesn’t cure on its own, if it freezes before it’s cured.  here did you learn to manage this way? W I learned all of this; well, it evolved over the years, or, well, from mom and dad, but a lot of it was experience, trial and error, hard knocks is a pretty good teacher. That’s one thing that so many of these people that run livestock…well, the first June it’s dry, and they’re in a major crisis, what do I do now? Well, if you’re out of grass in June, on the first year of a drought, you’ve been living way too close to the edge. They don’t learn, they don’t cut their cows down, they’re running as many cows as when it’s wet, or their running the maximum cows that they can handle when it’s wet with no thought. And they don’t start selling off when it starts to get dry; you need to start reducing your herd way early, you know, at the first sign of it, maybe not the first, but that fall, because it runs in cycles and it can go 4

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and 5 and 6 years going. And there’s no money feeding cows 12 months a year. I don’t see the grass management here that I had seen where I come from, but it’s more tame grass, and they always use it up this year thinking there’s going to be more next year. That isn’t always the case. That’s just living too close to the edge, and then so many cry out for government assistance; well, do some planning ahead, look after yourself a little bit. That’s one thing about this country; when we moved up here, there was us and one other outfit with cattle anywhere near here; you get northeast of here, there was some, but most of these are first-generation cattlemen, the biggest portion of them around here, absolutely. They seeded back a lot of this poorer farmland, and for lack of a better term, they use wasteland. I don’t think any of it’s wasted; some of it does some things better than others. They broke it then because the grain was 5 and 6 dollars a bushel, and it’s still 5 and 6 dollars a bushel. So, gas was two bits a gallon then and now it’s a dollar and a quarter a liter, so it paid a lot better. We found here we could run a lot more cows per quarter here than we did where we came from. I always thought it rained so much more here, but after living here this long, it’s not the rain as much; I’ve come to the conclusion it’s the temperature. It’s a lot hotter down there than it is here, so things dry out, and its better ground here, like that better topsoil. And it does get more rain, but not as much as I always give it credit for, after going back and forth. The heat is probably one of the biggest differences, and if it’s windy and it’s 90 above or windy and 75 or 80 above, it’s quite a bit of difference on the amount of moisture it’s dragging out of the ground. Species at risk I first started hearing about species at risk I suppose 30 years ago. It’s become very prominent in the last 10 years. Well the Sage hens and then, a big deal, all the Prairie dogs are endangered—that’s ridiculous. But anyway, we won’t get into that because, well sure, the Prairie sage hens and things like that, you betcha. But the Prairie dogs? Americans have tried to eliminate them for 150 years, and they haven’t come close to it, and if they can’t eliminate them, nobody can. There’s a Prairie dog town on where we used to live, 9 miles from anywhere. So, humans didn’t trifle with it, they weren’t shot, it wasn’t poisoned, it was as natural as it could be, and they fluctuate. When I was a kid, it was a tiny, tiny thing; and by the 1970s, it covered pretty near a quarter section; and by, say, close to 1990, it was down, they got a disease I assume and died off; and by 2008 or 2010, it was bigger, bigger than it ever was. Quit trifling with it. They’re putting out flea poison around those dog towns, and they’re killing all the good bugs and things like that. And this is supposed to be natural; it’s so far from natural. Now with species at risk, is that the way to manage species at risk, start trifling with nature? You’re supposed to be helping nature not trifling with it. Look at Grasslands National Park, for example; you can show people…5 years after we left, we went down there, and I went for a ride down there, back then before they started grazing it. I rode through that ten sections where Colleen and I used to live. I took a guy down there; he wanted to see the Turkey Track Ranch trail, so we took him down there and showed him. We rode all the way across there. We were out there for quite a few hours and all the way across that; all we saw was one jackrabbit, one scraggly old mule deer buck, no birds, no songbirds, no nothing. You get out of there and on the range that had been grazed, and you start seeing rabbits and coyotes and birds. And now they’ve wizened up, asked ranchers to graze in the Park, but they still think they know better. Like this guy that did this Prairie dog study, he’s got all kinds of references, not one; I went through it, and I got 54 pages of BS; not one of the references is from anybody that has any experience from the area. Not one single reference from the guys that live in there. They think we’re not “educated.” But how do you tell a bureaucrat anything? The only thing they’re interested in is job security and finding where their next dollar is coming from. Now, that’s unfair; they’re not all that way, but way too many of them are. There are some that are very good in there that are dedicated to their work, but too many of them are dedicated to sundown and a paycheck.

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When I was growing up, we didn’t talk about species at risk, but we were looking after things. When we left our old ranch, there were lots of Sage hens there because they lived with the cows and everything. There’s no Sage hens there now that the Park’s been looking after it, and they didn’t allow cows in back then. But when we left, there was lots of them. And now that they introduced grazing in the Park, the birds are coming back to the Park. We told them, but they didn’t listen because they are “educated.” In about 1982 or ‘83 the Minister to do with Parks Canada, he came out here and met with us. I was still fighting the Park, and I said, there’s no need for a Park, we’re looking after it. Well, he said, there’s no guarantee. Well, I said, you can’t break this up. And he said you never say never. I said, look at this; they tried it in the teens and the 20s. Well, he said, there’s concern that it will be overgrazed. I said, there’s a simple solution to that. He said, what’s that? I said if you eliminate the lease and taxes, I’ll cut the cowherd in half in the morning. He said, you know, that sounds like a reasonable idea, and I said it’ll be way better for me because I’ll have less work. I’ll have half as many cows and twice as much grass; the cattle will be bigger and then you can cut the expenses down; I don’t need the income, everybody gets what they want. And I said if you build some roads in this country, nobody’s going to complain about that, because there were no roads. So, nobody’s ever kept them from coming to visit it, not at that time anyway. He went back to Ottawa and within about 3 weeks, he was gone. So, he was not in line with the thinking of the time, so, you know where that went. Well, he was using common sense, but it was a different train of thought. And then when you start dealing with the Park, the clowns that came in there, depending on who they were talking to, they changed their story. They caused a lot of dissension and things like that. You know, we fought the Parks that damn hard, and I was one of the first ones to leave. Why was that? Well a few things, but mostly you can’t ranch alone. And I could see where, eventually, I thought we’d have to leave it, and so rather than be the last one out, I was going to be one of the first ones. It’s easier to move at 40 than it is at 70. So, we’re really pleased; the boys are pleased with the move, and it’s been good to us, and we really enjoyed it. We got into this community up here, and it’s different in a lot of ways than from where we come from; there’s some things I miss from down there, but overall the move here was very good. But, by and large, of course, I don’t look back; that was a decision we made, so it was going to be good no matter what, and so we made the most of it. And, yeah, we got a nice spot. You drive through miles of nothing, all flat, and all of the sudden you get here, and holy shit, it takes your breath away. There’s an old girl that we knew really well up there in Wetaskiwin, and she was really outspoken. They came down here, their daughter was barrel racing at the Swift Current Stampede, and she wanted to come and see the place, she’d heard so much about it. So, I was busy; we must have been roping in the rodeo that day; anyway, Colleen drove them out here to see it, and she’s talking away and they’re driving along and we get to our place, and she shouts “Holy *&^%!” Ha, ha, ha! But it does, it just kind of takes your breath away when you’re not expecting it. Yeah, that was me too when Brian come around there; when he drove me here the first time, I pretty much reacted the same way. It’s beautiful in the winter time, but you can imagine what it looks like in the summer time. We came here first about the end of January, and there was not as much snow as there is now, so I mean probably the worst possible time to look at it, you know, and still, it just took your breath away. Colleen: There’s lots and lots of Snowy owls around here; you’ll drive by a line of them on the fence posts; they’re so pretty, and lots of hawks. Doug: But we’re really pleased with the move, and it’s been good for us. Where we lived there on the Frenchman, we were 37 miles from Val Marie and 39 from Mankota, and the kids went to school at Val Marie. Back in the day, in those towns, there were two stores, a lumber yard, and two car dealerships. We lived right where the Frenchman makes a bend—that’s where we lived when we got married. Back in those days, we had no power, no telephone, no running water, nothing like that. We lived in a 10 × 24-foot trailer, propane stove, propane heater and lights. In the winter, you just had to stay alive.

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Anyway, we never really thought about species at risk; like, I don’t think anybody ever realized that’s what we were doing; we just did it because it always worked. If you asked them why they did it, they’d say, well, I don’t know; it worked; there was no explanation. They went into it now and studied it and can say this works because of this, or because of that, but the overall plan worked, and so that’s how it’s been run. Before the ranchers came, the buffalo handled it that way, they grazed it off and then they come back when it regrew, and so they migrated basically; they were here in the summer, and in the fall they moved south. The antelope was the best example because they came and went when it turned tough; they go south, and the tougher it got, the further south they’d go. They went to the south of the Missouri (Coteau) and down there where it was easy, and then they’d work their way back here when the water went out, and they’d summer up in the grassland up here. And the Sage hens kind of migrate too, if it gets too tough up here and they have no food; they move south where it’s easier, down onto the Milk (river basin) and onto the Missouri. SARPAL I joined the SARPAL program because it was promoting the good things that I believe in. I can’t say that I even understand a lot of what they’re saying, but I know it’s the right thing to do, because of the results it’s given. I couldn’t write a report and tell you why, but I know it does. And I didn’t have to change anything, nothing at all; that’s the best part about it. Like, you know when they started talking about how the land stores up the carbon, getting these carbon credits and things like that; when they first came out with this, they said well, if you had planted all this farmland to grass, and it stored it up we’d pay you. But none of these credits were going to go to the people that had been practicing this; it was going to be the new people. And I remember I said one day at one of these things, well, then any grass we got, we should go home and tear it up, seed it back, and we’d get credits too—they howled. So, we should get credit for what we’ve done and continue to do. The “johnny-come-­lately” shouldn’t get it all; most of them are gold diggers that didn’t practice it really. I couldn’t qualify for SARPAL if I hadn’t been managing the right way this whole time. I guess SARPAL provides an incentive, but I don’t think it really was an incentive because I don’t think anybody was going to change what they were doing. But, you’ve got to recognize it makes it easier to do what you’re doing. It wasn’t an incentive to change; it made it easier. Somebody couldn’t dangle a carrot out there that maybe was going to give you more money to do something different that wasn’t going to be good for the environment. So, this is a way to help people that are doing the right thing; it’s an incentive to keep on doing it, but I think more so than keep on doing it, to make it easier to do it. And it might incentivize some other guy to manage better. What I like the most about the SARPAL program is the incentive that it creates, and it helps assure we can manage right. I think it’s probably the best incentive for the next generation, because the next generation always can do better than the older one, once they spend a few years at it; so, it keeps them doing what’s right. Now survival sometimes gets people having to go down the wrong road, and, you know, desperation makes for bad decisions. Desperation causes some terrible, terrible decisions to be made, whether your banking or whatever it is. You think of some of the things that are done at banks, some of these chemical companies, and some of these order buyers and things like that, I view them as predatory lenders. You sign your life away and they bail you out, but they don’t bail you out. Yeah, that’s one thing I learned a long, long time ago; if you’re in trouble, take your loss and start over again because your first loss is your cheapest one. Our youngest boy has a saying—when you start throwing the dirt over your head, quit digging; in fact, he said, when you get to your knees, quit digging. I think SARPAL could help the next generation try to stay on the straight and narrow. I mean, yeah, it’s good for the environment, but it’s for the good of Canada too supposedly, so why should the ranchers have to eat all the cost? And we’ve never been hungry or anything, but, you know, for the hours we put it in, the investment we’ve got, we don’t get paid very well. And what gets me is the money they dump into NCC (Nature Conservancy of Canada) and Ducks Unlimited, and they have an agenda, and

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so much of it is an American agenda. There is so much American money, so many of these groups are funded by Americans with self-interest in it, and I have nothing against the Americans, my God; I am so happy they live next to us instead of China or Russia, North Korea or Venezuela. So, I don’t want to complain about the Americans. I’m not complaining about what we get out of it. I’ve been well fed and don’t look like I ever missed a meal, but if you’re going to put money somewhere, you know, if they can keep us on the land, sending our kids to the local small-town school and contributing to the local economy, I support that. I don’t know, some of these kids eventually come back, but I think that they’re sick of pinching pennies all the time. You live like a pauper and die rich, or you retire rich, like you sell this place for a pile of money, but, what, you can’t eat money. So, I just keep on going here. We cut it back, so I can handle the work and I get to get outside and go to work every day; if I retired, well, I don’t know what I’d do. I know a rancher over in the country where Colleen was raised and he has two boys and they bought dad out, dad retired, and one son went to be a lawyer. He said the ranch ain’t gonna pay for the rent, so, he went to be a lawyer. He′s getting the ranch paid for by it, and then he’s going to become a full-time rancher. And that’s how I paid for this place, I was working off the place; it wouldn’t pay for itself. I think SARPAL will make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat, if they handle it right and put the right incentives in and don’t get too many stupid kinks in it that take away from what is meant to be. That’s where it’s so important to get people with their feet on the ground, so they’re not there self-serving and just interested in doling out the dollar; they’re there for the right reasons. The ranchers are there for the right reasons, and they support the local business community buying feed and supplies. The people in charge have to use common sense and good judgment. Now, they have to make a living too, but it has to be done right. You can’t regulate it, I hate regulations, they are somewhat necessary, but the more regulations you’ve got, the more ways there are it seems to break them. So, everything needs to be done for the right reason, and with the right kind of dedication, it will make a real difference. The teachers I had when I went to school, they went to be a teacher and they got paid, so many of them go to get paid and then they become a teacher; not that they can’t do a good job, but all too often that’s not the case. Anyway, SARPAL didn’t change how I managed my range; I was doing it already, but it did give me a little extra. It’s not going to make me rich, but it certainly makes things a little nicer, or gives me an extra dollar to do something that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. What I don’t like about the SARPAL program is the Federal government is too far removed. But I’ll tell you this, it’s the truth; when I started in the cow politics with the Stock Growers, I didn’t have a great opinion of a lot of politicians, but you know, the more politicians I dealt with, by and large, the more I thought of them; they’re trying their best—it’s just that in most cases their hands are tied. This SARPAL program, they hired local guys to deliver it, and that’s great, but you still gotta deal with too many people with not enough understanding at the higher level. The government has given five and a half million dollars to the NCC, and that’s a bureaucracy within itself. How much of that goes into other costs, and not to protecting the land that is conserving habitat, but yet they’re spending money to buy the land. There’s no need to buy the land that’s being well managed already! So, they say, well, they might tear it up. Come on, all of this is leased lands; it’s written there; you cannot break any of it or they’ll take it away from me, and we don’t want to break it…the safeguards are in place. All we need is for them to help us make it go even better than it is. Like I said, if you at least get rid of the lease and taxes, they could have more grass because the expenses would be less, maybe that’s extreme, not practical, but that’s an example. There was a rumor that there was three quarters of land near Regina, around the Qu’Appelle Valley up there. It was untouched grassland in prime shape and it was up for sale, but it was going to a farmer and it was breakable, so they’re going to tear it up. So, NCC (the Nature Conservancy of Canada) was approached to buy it, and they refused because it wasn’t big enough. Well, they’re in an area where there is no grassland; prime grassland, that is where the money should be spent. But instead they go

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down to Wideview and buy that, where it was never going to be tore up. They don’t manage it well; it never was that badly abused as long as it was owned before NCC got it, and it is now overgrazed. NCC didn’t need to purchase it; if a program like SARPAL was around, they could have encouraged the present and future owners to manage it better. But I know that area; that’s right next to where I was raised; the grass was always good there; it was well looked after. Three quarters in a place where there is no native grass and they would not go and buy that three quarters. I’m sure someone bought it and broke it. NCC’s doing it for the wrong reasons; ranchers are doing it for the right reasons. Anything they do, and I don’t say everything they do, is bad, but even when what they do is good, it has a monetary reason, or not the right reasons. And so, when it’s not being done for the right reasons, even if it’s somebody that gets in this, like we said, if it’s SARPAL and they never done a good before, and good comes out of it, OK, but it’s too bad if they had to be bought to do it, that they didn’t have the incentive to do it for the right reasons. Now, I mean, maybe the end justifies the means sometimes. But the big thing is they’ve got to quit dumping this money, our taxpayer money, into special interest groups and things like that, and put it to the grassroots, to the ranchers who are already managing it; that’s the place where it should be. SARPAL has good incentives and their financial incentives are important. I’ve never seen anybody in agriculture that socked it away; they’ll do something to improve something. Like they’ll take the money and build a better water hole. Well, the deer and everything benefit from that, if we get a drought and there’s better water there; they don’t pull out and leave and put more pressure on someplace else—they stay where there’s good water. That’s key to real good sustainability, to all the birds and animals, to have a good, clean water supply. That’s what makes the cattle better off, a good, clean supply of water, and the wildlife and everything does well with that too. In this country its water that’s key. The government has a lot of programs that are outside of SARPAL that help with the water issue; there’s some very, very good programs, but every time they get something pretty good, some idiot changes the rules. And so you’ve got to be a lawyer to figure out what the rules are to take advantage of it because it had to be done yesterday or you had to get it approved before you do it. It used to be if it was good, and you got it done, and that made sense; you got to do it, but now you’ve got to jump through hoops for it, and it’s up to you to do the research. But the thing is, when they get a good program and everybody gets to know it, leave it in place, keep it going. But they’ve always got a little hitch, like one program where it had to be you couldn’t build a new one; you had to clean out an existing one or some stupid thing; now, what’s the difference? Too many people with too much say, with too little knowledge about what’s going on. Ok sure, programs may need a little nip and tuck, and you definitely gotta watch the freeloaders who take advantage of the system, but that’s where you have good people in place to say hey, that’s not what it’s meant for; stay within the rules. But there has to be good judgment, and I guess maybe most of these people, they want it cut and dried and don’t want anybody to make any judgment calls. Anyway, what’s good for our cows is good for the range and all the wildlife on it. Especially the Sage hens; they like to eat insects in the cow patties—I’ve really seen that work, and people cannot believe the pheasants they see here. If it was cold, you’d see, when you come down that hill, that feed yard up there is full of pheasants. A couple days ago, our dog Badger caught this pheasant getting off the ground, and so he ran down the hill and he stopped to set it down here at the bottom of the hill, and the pheasant must have been playing dead, and when he started to relax, the pheasant was gone, and it was good. He was flying and pumping, but when Badger grabbed him, he must have not fought; he just went limp and Badger carried him for maybe 300 yards, and he set that pheasant down and he was gone. Poor old Badger was going to have a fresh dinner.  upport from the beef production industry, the government, and the general public S I’d like the beef production industry to inform the public of the good things we do. I don’t know; maybe you’d prefer to go buy a veggie burger, and Colleen bought one; one time, she said it was dis-

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gusting and have you read what’s in them? It’s even more disgusting. Like, we had to quit using paper bags; we were destroying the environment so they started plastic; now they want us to use paper bags again. Come on, put some thought into this and use the old common sense; I know it’s not as common as it used to be, but preach common sense. I’ve been told, come on man, quit using that term, but it can’t be preached enough. Like our beef, it should sell itself, the good quality beef should sell itself, and there’s truth to that. I’d like all levels of government to think about turning these programs over to be run by the stock growers and like producer run organizations that have an understanding; too much of government starts with politics; it’s run from the top down instead of the bottom up. And even that research I mentioned earlier, the Prairie dog guy, his references were a study out of northern Mexico; now that really applies to Saskatchewan doesn’t it? I mean not that they’re not educated and don’t have some knowledge, but I don’t think they have enough local knowledge, local expertise. The stock growers took a group out through Miles Anderson’s ranch, and they were from out of Ontario; they were with the government, bureaucrats, and one politician, but mostly bureaucrats, and they could not, absolutely could not, visualize it. If you go by his ranch, if you take a tour down there and go clear down to the US border and across, we were gone for hours and never saw anything except a few old abandoned yard sites. So they learn, but as soon as they understand the problem, they shift those guys to another place, and you’ve got some other inexperienced person in charge that doesn’t know. I say come out and talk to the people on the ground. We have a major, major problem with east versus west, and the center of the universe is Toronto; I’m led to believe, with Quebec playing a big part in it, and it’s a different world out here. It’s about like me trying to understand, and what goes on in French Quebec, I have no idea at all. I spent awhile on the plane going to Texas with this East Indian guy, and his dad was a farmer in India. He showed me pictures of plowing with a water buffalo and he couldn’t wait to go back. He was flying to give a talk in Calgary at the university and he’s in his early 40s, and I was telling him about living here and showed him some pictures of us here, and he said, oh I envy you; I’m in Dallas, Texas. I suppose he came over to make money and go back there very, very rich. He was sending the money home to dad and buying up land. He’s likely to go back and end up being a land baron, but you have to come over here with an education, and bottom line, he can’t wait to get home to mom and dad soon enough. It was nice to learn a bit from each other and share what was common. Well, the general public just doesn’t realize the good that ranchers are doing, and they view us as abusing the system; that’s been the perception since the beginning of time. You will not believe how many people I run into, so many of these environmentalists say how mean we are to our cattle; well, they don’t survive and make you money if you starve them or abuse them. I mean how many scrawny or overweight people are very productive? You need that balance to properly survive and get ahead. And it really disturbs me that they want this offshore beef; well, you have no idea how they are raised in Brazil, well any place; you know south of the Rio Grande, from there on down, money buys you any kind of service you want. And think about the safety of food handling? Here, we can’t handle too much of an unsanitary environment; we haven’t built up an immunity to that crap. Now, sanitary for a hospital and sanitary for food is a different thing, but I guess I’m saying people should appreciate Canadian beef. Education is the most important thing. They talk about sustainability; well, I think we’ve proved that we’re pretty sustainable. We survived everything you could throw at us, from trying to starve us out in the 30s to everything else, you know; I think we’re quite sustainable. In the 1980s when they were talking about this Park, my uncle had moved down there in 1913, and in 1985, he said this country looks far more natural now than it did in the 1920s and 1930s. When he went down there, there was some ranchers, but there was a farmer up on the hill to the east of him 2 miles, and they didn’t have any land broke there. In that Township it was the first land that was broke, the only land that was ever broken. Because in 1985 or 1986, we had the best oat crop you’ve ever seen, and there was hail storms everywhere. This was like a 120 bushel oat crops. So we talked

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dad into going into town to get some hail insurance just to cover us. So, we went in there, and the hail insurance was absolutely out of this world, because there was no other land that had ever been insured in that Township. Now, that’s 36 sections, and, well, they’ve been there since 1913, and in 120 years, there’s been 2 or 3 major hailstorms went through there; one time in the 1930s, and in 1940, something or other mom tells about, then the one Donnie went through in 2000. So, they’ve had three wipeout hail storms in 120 years; but, see, he didn’t get hail insurance because it was the highest rates that they put on anything, because there had never been an acre of land, never been a crop insured in that Township…and we did get that crop off.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Well, I don’t know; my great uncle always said that if he won the lottery, he’d just keep on ranching until it was all gone. But no, I don’t think there’s any chance of the boys coming back. So, I don’t know; it’ll likely be sold in a chunk or broke up eventually. I’m going to try to be pretty particular where it goes; money isn’t going to be the prime concern. We’ve got a young kid that stays here and works for the neighbors. He came here and we helped him get through school, and I don’t know; he’s sure got a big interest; he’s 21 years old. We’ve got neighbors down here that have some boys that are really interested. But the other boy, managing with him around here, he’s got a job at the neighbors, but he’s got things set up so he can handle it if we want to go somewhere. He doesn’t make it so we can stay here, but he sure makes it a lot easier to stay here—it’s sweet. We can just pick up and go for 2 days, and we were gone at Christmas time for a week, but we weren’t feeding cows yet; he just had to open water holes and look after the calves and stuff. He’s really interested. He’s a town kid, he’d never seen a cow before he came here when he was 11 years old, and when he came, well I’ll tell you there was no stopping him. He’d ride all day and be so sore he couldn’t walk the next day, but he’d just get back on. So, yeah, I said if you’ve got that much interest, I’ll try do what we can for him. He’s come a long way; he’s starting to know cows, works cattle very, very well, and he works with the horses very well, and so he’s taken on a big interest. Author's note: When I interviewed them, the house was full of family pictures and pictures of so many kids they’d taken in and helped over the years that became like family. I was impressed by a large glass cabinet absolutely full of rows of fancy, big belt buckles won from the family’s rodeo days. When I remarked on them, Doug laughed and said since I grew up riding horses and competing, I’d probably like all the saddles they’d won more. Final thoughts? When I think back, all the memories are very, very good. But I guess it was a pretty big disappointment when that Park started coming; that was one of the bigger downer days that I remember. They had hearings to do with the Park and you presented briefs, and I was very enthused and I wrote; I wasn’t much of a writer, but I wrote up this brief and went and gave it. And the people that were giving briefs in favor of it, the moderators really seem to favor them, and the guys that were against it, they grilled you. And of course I wasn’t very old at that time, and so it didn’t pan out very well, and I left there really, really down and just thinking that’s it, we’re done. And I remember Colleen saying we’ll be alright, but that was one of the biggest downer days that I ever remembered, you know, because that was all I’d ever known. Like I said, when we decided one day we were going, now, I don’t know if we hadn’t found this place, I think we still would have went, but when we found this place, it made it easy. If we hadn’t found this place, we might’ve had a lot of looking back over our shoulder. But we found it, so it was easy to just look ahead and not look back. And Colleen and the kids were so gung ho about going; well the youngest one when we left there, he wasn’t very happy, but he changed his mind, and now he’d be the hardest one to get back there. We can’t even get him to take a tour back there. This son lives in Estevan, he went down there as a carpenter, and of course when the oil patch went south, it wasn’t

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long and he didn’t have a job. And so he went to shoeing horses and doing anything he could find, and he worked as a ranch hand. I talked to him on the phone one day, and he said I went to school for 4 years to be a carpenter and now I shoe horses, and I just said you’re damn lucky you had something to turn to; most of the people don’t have any fall back. But other than that, I don’t know; that was a very cloudy, bad day, that one. I remember that I would have been about 23 or 24 at the time. My dad didn’t say much but mother wasn’t happy; it was her place we were on; that was mom’s ancestors that settled there; and so that’s what went to the Park. She did say one thing, that it should be maintained and looked after pretty well, which turned out not to be true, but now, maybe better. All these rules to graze in the Park now, they make it like so many of these problems are insurmountable, but they’re not if you’ve got people in the know. Like my brother worked with the buffalo in the Park down there. This buffalo got out and they couldn’t do anything with it; they can’t get him back. He got it back by himself, but he just said stay the hell away, leave me alone, and I’ll do it. And so he took his time and he worked, lots of patience and understanding of how to handle livestock, animals, and he succeeded. I asked him what’s different about handling buffalo, and he said it’s the same thing mother taught us all our life about handling cattle, except you’ve got to be a little slower, because when you’re handling cattle, you can make a bit of mistake and you can recover and you can kind of push them. You don’t force buffalo; you can’t make them do what you want them to do. And so by positioning and patience, you can win out because they don’t naturally want to come up to you. Their natural way is to move away from you, so if you position yourself in the right spot, they’re going to move away. And so he got him in. He’s got quite a story to tell about buffalo and the Park; I can tell in 5 minutes what would take him 2 hours to tell it. The winters of 2010–2011 and 2012–2013 were two really, really bad winters, so it would either be in the spring of 2013 or the spring of 2011 that there was a bunch of these buffalo out of the Park and they’d worked 15 miles away from the outside Park fence. They were over by where we were raised, and just south of where my brother was still living. I think maybe they got chased over there by Parks using helicopters; they spent a pile of money and got nothing done. So, they get over there, and there was a corral there that the neighbors had used and it was in a natural, easy to corral position. So, Donnie went around there with a four-wheeler, just him and his dog, and they run them down there and into that corral and they shut the gate. And then the Parks people came flying in there with trucks and trailers and stuff and scared them, and they broke loose. So, the Parks guys said they can’t do it, and they’re just going to have to tranquilize them to catch them, and Donnie said you can’t do that; you can’t get close enough to do it, so they said well, we’ll have to shoot them. Donnie said I can get them in, and they said no you can’t, and he spent 2 hours or more talking with the experts and the people in charge, and, finally, his persistence won and they gave up; I guess maybe to humor him. Well, what do you charge they asked? He said $250; well, so after they spent all that money already, they said Ok. But Donnie said he had one condition, none of you come anywhere near; you just leave me alone. So, finally they agreed that one of the Parks guys would come along on a motorbike behind him, but he had to stay back. Ok, so Donnie moved them 12 or 15 miles along but couldn’t cross Big Breed as the water was too deep, so he said, we’re done, we can’t get across; he said, I’ll come back in the morning and we’ll get them. It was getting dark, so they went home. In the morning, he got them across and into the gates when this nincompoop came roaring up there on the bike and turned the last one back. So, the guy said, well, we can just shoot that one, and Donnie said, leave it alone. So, the next day, or the day after that, he came back, and it was an old bull, and Donnie opened the gate and went around it with the pickup and worked it up, and it went through the gate, and he got them all in there. When he was done, this guy come up to him and said, I want to shake your hand. What for, Donnie said. Well you accomplished the impossible. Donnie said it wasn’t impossible, and the guy said you accomplished the

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impossible. Donnie said if it would have been impossible, I couldn’t have done it. The guy said from what I know it was the impossible. Donnie said well, patience, but knowledge too, got it done. So, I dunno, maybe that expert learned, but I don’t think he appreciated just what it took. That’s all it is, just the appreciation of what it takes to do this, and patience, patience, and patience. He said you can’t force them to do anything, and time never ever meant anything to Donnie; he’s got the temperament to do those kind of jobs that need to be done like that. He went to buffalo handling school in Alberta before they’d hire him at the Park there, and when he came home, I asked him what they taught him. He said pretty much the same thing our mother’s been telling us since we were little kids about chasing cows; he said, the same damn thing. So…final thoughts, well, for me, educating the public is important, and that can’t come from the bottom up because most of us are not equipped knowledge wise or education wise on how to do this. That’s where we need help kind of from the top down, or people like you that’s in the middle or whatever, that can put this stuff together and explain our experiences. People like you can really help the situation, and you’ve developed a feeling for this side of it. You had a feeling for the other side before you started your research, but now you have an understanding. Now you’ve heard our side, you’ll have even more of an understanding about what we’re dealing with. It’s hard to believe the things we hear from people in the city. When BSE came around, there was all this talk of food security, you know, keep our cattle safe so we have food; otherwise where are you going to get your beef from? This lady in the city said, well, that’s no problem, I get my beef from the store. Well, how stupid can you be? Colleen’s sister, who works at a university, said to her, well, where does it come from, how does it work before it gets to the store? The lady said, oh it comes in a refrigerated truck. It’s hard to believe that an educated person could be that naïve. I’ve seen the kids at the Regina Agribition, and they’re watching them milking the dairy cows, and these school kids say, well now that I see where that milk comes from, I’m never going to drink milk again. Parents should take more interest in showing their kids where their food comes from. Kids nowadays are two and three generations removed from a farm and have no connection to farm life. Anyway, I’m not sure the next generation down realizes the value of this, that the success of agriculture, whether it’s grain or beef, so much of it is tied to getting some sense out there to the public. I have a saying, I don’t know if I heard it somewhere, but the biggest problem in the food industry in Canada and North America is that they’ve never been hungry. You talk to Europeans; you’d have to be my age and older, but they know what it’s like to go hungry. Especially in Germany and Poland and places like that that went through the Second World War. I really never stopped to think about it much, but there were a couple of incidents that really made me think more deeply about it. I talked to a lady who immigrated here after the war, and she was going through some challenging times, but she told us one time, it can’t be as bad here as where I come from; she said, here I have enough to eat every day. And all these factory farms are driving out family farms. Where our oldest boy went to college in Kansas, he went on a rodeo scholarship; the second college he went to was in Western Kansas, and it was very much like here. They had all kinds of water down there, but now they haul their drinking water for miles because it is so polluted from the fertilizer and the spray; they irrigate everything with groundwater and these pivots. I told my kids our water is just really good; look after it. My son’s friend, that boy from Kansas, said, when I was a kid and my dad was a kid, we just drank out of the ground, and now you don’t dare drink it out of the ground. Like the lakes near these manufacturing places, they always ate the fish from them, but now you don’t dare. Well, in the end, I guess we’ve come away from when we sold the longhorn bull for a washing machine. We went on a spending spree this fall; I mean, all our money is all in this place, so we sold a quarter of land for, I guess, what the market price is, but it’s absolutely out of, well, it’s nuts. And so we went and bought ourselves a new house. If you come back in about 6 months, you can visit us in the kitchen of our new house.

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Kenora Ranching Alberta Ken and Nora Balog Combined Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T I’ve been ranching my whole life, and our family has been here since 1912. It started with my dad’s uncle Les, and then my mom and dad moved here in 1938 or 1939, and now I ranch it. There was a short time when it didn’t belong to the family, but then we bought it back. But it was first established here and my dad expanded it; he bought a block of lease land from another local rancher. I’m the fourth generation on the ranch. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do, but I don’t have any regrets. In high school I was interested in chemistry and physics, and I wanted to go to Texas A&M to get my degree in animal science to be a vet. But then I was more needed at home; we were relying on hired help, but it’s hard to get good hired help, so I ended up coming back home. Nora actually came out here as hired help, and she never left. She’s from a farming family; they had some cattle too, in Saskatchewan, and her dad still has seven Clydesdales at 80. He made his own harness and showed his horses, and a couple of his horses made it on some Budweiser hitches.  ell me about your range management T We run a cow-calf operation and seed some grain to raise feed, but we’ve rented out quite a lot of our farmland now; we’re trying to work on retirement mode these days. My priority in my range management is not to overgraze and to keep an equal balance. We graze the tame grass in the spring and keep the cows around home here for as long as we can, using a combination of early spring tame grasses and native grass. I would say 70–75% of our ranch is native grass. We don’t have flat country here; our land is hilly so not all of it is suitable for farming, so the majority of it is native grass. However, back in the old days, they just broke up as much land as they could, and some of it was not really suitable for farming. So, what we’ve done with that is we put it into hay, and then we’ll use it for springtime grazing as well. But, currently, a lot of our hay and spring pasture is worked up because it gets root bound, and then we’ll seed it for feed, barley, and green feed, oats, and barley. We’ll do that, and then we’ll put it back into grass again, so you have much better species of grass now, more suited for the climate and environment here. The intention is to not to keep farming it, but to put it back into grass where we need to break up the roots and then re-establish; we find that that works the best. Most of the breeding of our cows is done at home here, and then we don’t put our cattle out on their summer rangeland down on the border until the 1st of July. We watch the numbers quite carefully, and we have to pay attention to the size of our cattle also, and calving day, because calves born earlier get bigger, and we don’t keep the cows down on their summer pasture very long. Generally, they’re out the 1st of October, so 1st of July to the 1st of October, they’re in there, and that keeps the grass healthy. We try to preserve as much grass as we can, but Mother Nature is kind of tough on us sometimes; the weather patterns are not the same as they used to be back in the old days. So you just have to pay attention to what you have and try to make it better. Not everybody’s ranching operation is the same, your environment is not the same, your resources, your herd size is not the same. We run 1400 to 1600 pound cows, and others run 1100 to 1200 pound cows, so that’s going to make a difference on how long you graze on a pasture because it goes by animal unit weight, and the weight they usually average is 1100–1200 pounds. Our summer pasture is on leased land, we don’t lease much now, it’s mostly our own, but, so you have a certain number of animal unit months for a pasture. I think this year, or the last few years, we have been running down to 70–75% of that number of what we’re allowed. We’re giving the calves time to grow as well because a calf that comes off the grass is at 700 pounds or 650 or whatever they are, depending on

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when you’re calving. We used to calve in February, but we moved it to March now and we’ll be back to February next spring. We pay close attention to the genetics of our cattle also; we were mostly a purebred herd, but now we are part commercial. I call our cattle a glorified commercial herd. We’ve been raising purebred since 1942; in essence, we haven’t quit, but we’re looking for a more efficient herd. But we’ve got geriatric cows—they’re big babies and they want to be fed as soon as the snow comes, so the last 2 days, they’ve been eating on bales; they don’t want to go look for it. They could go out and graze, but they don’t want to. We were fortunate to have the feed on hand here; this year we have gotten more green feed than we’ve ever had. We were dry this year, on about year 5 of a drought; the previous 4 years were extremely dry, but this spring we got seven and a half inches of rain, so that really got our green feed going. Other breeds do it also; there’s genetic testing for feed efficiency now, so we run basically Herefords, and we select bulls that are highly efficient on feed, so taking the least number of pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef, we select our bulls that way. We still do it the old way too—visually the bull has to meet our requirements, and then we start looking at the numbers. Plus the bulls to pick from are getting less, because less breeders means less animals out there to pick from. The last 4 years is the only time we’ve been running pretty much straight Hereford bulls. But when our kids were in 4H, we got into AI (artificial insemination), we bred some of our Hereford cows to Maine Anjou bulls, and that worked extremely well. We raised some phenomenal show steers and the kids did very well at the show. Our Lethbridge show could have anywhere from 250 to 300 calves competing, and our kids have won in the past. I would like to get back to that; we do have a couple black cows left, from that same genetics, and they produce absolutely phenomenal calves.  here did you learn to manage this way? W You figure it out through experience; it’s quite a learning experience really; Nora’s done the women’s grazing schools two or three times and was a guest speaker at one. We attended a conference last year which was a good time because you got to see a lot of old friends you hadn’t seen in a long time. Our provincial representative for endangered species retired and went back to teaching at the college in Lethbridge, and he suggested bringing the fourth year environmental degree class out to meet landowners like us; they come out to our ranch, to get our view on how they feel the kids should approach them. So, they don’t just walk up and say, “Hey, I’m going to do the study on your land and you don’t get to say anything.” They wanted them to come in and say, “Hi, my name is Bob,” and Nora said, well sometimes I’d like you to take your sunglasses off when you meet somebody, or politely take your hat off when you meet somebody, because there’s lots of kids that don’t do those things; she told them those are just courtesy things that ranchers like to see. We had an old rancher tell us; we went out to his place and bought a bull from him, and he said, “When I shake your hand, I want it to mean something, so you shake my hand with a little importance and urgency.” He said that means you care; don’t do it like a limp noodle. But we’ve helped the college in that program three or four times now. I like to meet those kids because I want to know what their names are, where they’re from, why they’re in that program, and what they hope to do with it once they graduate. It’s like hunters wanting on my land, if you’re local people or a family member that’s fine; otherwise, if you’re out of the area, you come talk to me, and you’re going to be measured quite quickly on how you talk to us, and then we’ll decide whether you’ll be allowed on. Species at risk I first started hearing about species at risk when I started working with the ACA (Alberta Conservation Association) about 10–15 years ago. I knew a guy that worked with them, had known him for a year or so, and one day we were driving around looking at the lease land and I had an idea; I said, would

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you like to cost share water troughs to keep the cows out of the creek? He said if you’re willing to do that, we’ll pay for it. We knew we had endangered Northern leopard frogs in the creek; they’ve been there long as I can remember, since I was little kid; I thought they were just a frog, no big deal. But when he told me they’re on the endangered species list, I looked on the Internet and read that their habitat has shrunk so much. So, I thought a water trough would keep the cows off their habitat and the ACA could partner with us to get it, and they said oh no, we’ll buy it for you. It’s too rough and sandy, hard rock as well, to fence the creek off, so the water trough works great, and the cows like to hear the water running in the trough. We’re also doing a water trough project in a pasture down at the border. To get proper pasture rotation in this one larger pasture, well, we had a dugout in a smaller pasture, so we put this bigger water trough in the fence line between the two pastures, and we push water about a hundred yards, lifting it about 20–25 ft so we can water on both sides. Then we put another trough in a pasture we call Section 7, and we pump out of a big dam in dugout, and that one we got through the Milk River watershed, and we use it down on the creek. We were one of a handful of ranchers to work with them on habitat protection back then, and once a few projects got done and it got established, well, there’s now a waiting list to get into MULTISAR. We’ve had our entire operation assessed by MULTISAR, every acre. We put up three nesting poles for Ferruginous hawks, and our daughter worked with the ACA doing a study on Northern leopard frogs one spring, counting frogs. They took an egg mass from our lease and took it to Pothole Creek at Magrath, and from there they multiplied enough to take them back to Waterton and reestablished them there, and they all started from here. MULTISAR puts cameras on two of the hawk pole nests so we get to watch them lay the eggs and then the hatch and feeding. We put the three poles up, and we had a great time doing it. Actually, the poles are put up in conjunction with the ACA and AltaLink. AltaLink has a program where they provide the poles, the platform, the equipment, and the manpower to set them up. We had a nest on the cliff bank in the lease for probably 40 plus years, and now it’s taken over by Golden eagles; Nora has taken a lot of wildlife photos on the ranch over the years, and she has made them into beautiful books. We also use biological control of weeds on our summer grazing pastures, and that’s kind of been taken over by other people. We have problems with Toadflax, Leafy Spurge, and Houndstongue, so we work with the ACA, MULTISAR, and the county of Warner to put different kinds of bugs out, depending on the weed, so we can avoid spraying. Also, we have oil wells and pipelines down on our summer grazing pastures, and the information we get from the environmental assessment identifies all the grass species, plants, and animal populations, and we use that ­information for reclamation. We’re just in the process of dealing with a problem with Downy Brome and Cheatgrass that reseeded itself, and it’s spread out past the right of way; this was back in 1995. We made them go back and readdress that, so it took a long time and they didn’t do things quite like I figured they should, but maybe the outcome will be okay. They just reseeded it this fall and they have to fence it so the cows don’t walk on it. MULTISAR We joined MULTISAR because we like the people; we call them our ACA kids because they’re the same ages as our kids; they’re like our family, and they treat us like family and make us feel included throughout the year. Like I had the idea to get bugs to help with the weeds, but I didn’t know where to go, so I asked the ACA and they did it. Our daughter went to college with some of the people we work with now, so it’s kind of a what-goes-around-comes-around situation. We’ve really enjoyed learning from these programs; we’ve learned a lot from them, like getting environmental assessments done; that was a great help in our grazing management. The young guy who was the lead on it, he’s absolutely amazing on native grasses and plants, and we learned a lot.

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There’s a multitude of things we like about MULTISAR; it’s so much information and we share a back-and-forth; we talk about what’s going on and what we see. Like, we were out there and he asked how come there’s not much grass up on the hilltop; he thought it had to be overgrazing, but I said no, it’s not overgrazing. It’s been dry for a while and the sun can be a lot more intense in some areas, and we’ve noticed that some of those places have a tendency to dry out a little more, and it’s not because there’s not as much thatch on top, not because the cows are overgrazing; it’s because we’re not getting the moisture like we used to, to get the growth. At the end of September last year, we had 2 ft of wet snow and some of our cows got trapped down on the border. It took us 4.5 hours to dig in and out with a tractor to bring them feed. Then we couldn’t convince them to leave; we couldn’t bring them the regular way, so we ended up using two pick-up trucks, a tractor, two motorbikes, and a quad to get them out. So after we got them out, I took a tour around there, and the temperatures had warmed up and the native grass was starting to grow up there. So, we’ve had a little bit of moisture here this fall, so the native grass is starting to grow, but some winters we don’t get a lot of snow. Some winters we get lots of snow and we get good run off and we’ll get that grass coming, but it seems like July is the month that really beats us up; we just don’t get the moisture like we used to. A spring near here has dried up and we’re on a water line right now from the Milk River, which is just getting water back now after the aqueduct failure. The Milk River is vital for the towns of Milk River, Coutts, and Sweet Grass. We have a well that’s not all that deep; I think it’s somewhere around 50–75 ft deep, and we pump water about 35 miles through a water line to 32 farms and ranches out here—that’s our water supply. We like that MULTISAR is staffed with local people; we talk about what we need, and we can do as much or as little as we want. When I first started working with the ACA, I told them that when you start working with somebody, you can’t really tell them what they need to do; you can ask them—it has to be done in the proper manner. You can’t order people, you just make a suggestion, and depending on how they react, you will be able to tell if you can work with them or not. We’ve had people in the area say you can’t work with them (MULTISAR) because they’re going to take your land away if you have endangered species, so don’t tell them; don’t say a word. But, no, that’s not how it works; they will work with you. We’ve done hawk poles, frog studies, animal fencing—we did that last year, two miles of it, eighteen inches from the ground, it’s a wire with no barb on it so the antelope can go under. We didn’t put it on outside fencing; well, we did on one spot, but we did it on fences between pastures in case the calves decide they want to crawl back and forth, but so far we haven’t had that. They arranged a bunch of volunteers to come together and do that fencing; we had an accountant from Calgary and another in the energy industry, and they camped out at Milk River and they put up 2 miles of fence in 2.5 hours. They took the bottom barbed wire off, had the smooth wire all laid out, and used electric staple guns. We were invited to join them and we did; we were the first producers to do that. They were astonished because some of these people had volunteered more than once, and they were just thrilled to meet us, and I said, well, we wanted to come here to meet you people too, and to kind of promote our industry, what we’re doing. That was a great day; we brought cookies and drinks for them. When we did our first MULTISAR assessment, they gave us some recommendations, ideas of things we could change, and within 2 years we had it all done. They said they’ve never encountered anybody get it done that fast, but it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t difficult; it was things that we’d already partially started, so we just finished it off because of the project. It’s good to have another set of eyes though, but also, we don’t have to take their advice; if it’s something we don’t think is necessary or has to be done, we don’t do it; if you do agree, then you go ahead and do it. I can’t really say there’s anything we don’t like about MULTISAR because anything that we’ve done, it’s all been positive.

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They’ve invited us to banquets with them, and we’ve enjoyed meeting all the other people from the program from other areas. In 2013, we got the Prairie Conservation Award for Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and at that time we were only the second actual grassroots producer that had won it. They had the banquet in Red Deer that year, and there were maybe 400 people there. I thanked the guys at the ACA for the help they’ve given us, but when I started talking about the few things that we had done, with every thought, you had all these people just clapping and cheering, applauding us. I froze; I was just so overwhelmed. I did not expect that because, really, we didn’t think we did all that much; we didn’t change really anything at all, not much. We just kind of improved things that we recognized with the help of people from the ACA, and more lately, MULTISAR. We live in the Milk River watershed which has 70% of the endangered species in all of Canada, so it’s nice to be recognized for what we do. Like the Ferruginous hawk is endangered, but we’ve seen 12 hawks leave the nest from our 3 poles. And cattle grazing is the best way to keep the grasslands healthy, except for fire, which is not an option. We have had three big fires in my lifetime. The last time we had a bad fire with horrific winds, firemen from several communities were here to help. People from the area brought their own trucks and hoses to help fight fire. I got trapped trying to save bales in a neighbor’s hay field. The wind switched and I got trapped in the fire. I knew where I was in the field, and the only option I had was to drive through the fire. The flames were as high as the fourwheel-drive tractor. I could feel the heat through the glass. Luckily, when I got through the flames, I was on the other side of the fire. MULTISAR didn’t change the way I managed my land, but putting the watering systems in was an improvement. Once I realized the endangered species we had down on the creek, we got the two water troughs through MULTISAR, we put one by the creek and another higher up to get the cows grazing in a circular pattern, to better utilize the grass and get better rotational grazing; that was actually a big help. They’ve offered to fence our Section 7 pasture so that the dam and dugout could be close to the middle, and if we cross-line fenced it, we’d have that as a central point where we could just let them in from different areas. We’ve been working on an Environmental Farm Plan since the 1970s, when we were farming lots, and we had a problem with alkali on farmland then, so we worked with the Southern Alberta Dryland Salinity Association to identify where the water is actually coming from. We’ve done some drilling and identified the recharge area, and we seeded those recharge areas to grass, like variegated alfalfa to try and eliminate them. So we’ve been at this for 40 or 50 years, and we always tell the ACA and MULTISAR that if those Leopard frogs are there without us doing anything for them, then that means we must be doing something right, and they agree, and we’ve got more variety of species out here now. I think MULTISAR will make a difference for species at risk; working with them has made us a lot more aware of species at risk and their habitat needs. And the Sharp tailed grouse prairie chickens, there used to be thousands around here and I don’t know what happened years ago, but they just disappeared. But now, the last few years we have them coming back, I have seen many in the last 5  years; there can be 10, 20, or 30 of them. We have more Ferruginous hawks on our land because we put up the poles to bring them back. East of us they planted sage to try and bring back the Sage grouse. There’s been a big increase in antelope here as well in the last few years. We’ve had some neighbors put up hawk poles as well; we said we would introduce them to the right people to help as well; we’re happy to help.  eed for support from the public and government N The Canadian public could support our industry by learning more about what we do. Like the hormones given to steers in spring or fall, they’re not there forever; they last a short time just to help them grow

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better. The implants ranchers are using, the amount of estrogen in there is nanograms; a woman’s body produces more estrogen in one day than that implant. One cabbage will have more estrogen in it than what you put in a hormone growth implant. The public doesn’t understand that if there’s a bad storm, your cows will be eating well before you will, same with calving season, and that can last weeks. I think cattlemen, maybe we need to do a better job promoting our industry. We just get all wrapped up with our work; we’re doing a good job, but we think we should get a little more respect from the public. We should get it out there so that they understand what we’re really doing; the press likes to print a lot of things that are negative because negativity sells papers, and anything positive…not so much. Maybe the public can get a better education, and we could be respected for what we do. We’re careful and we’ve had an extensive vaccination program, and now that our son is a vet, we asked him if there was anything we should change, and he said no, just keep doing what you’re doing; unless there’s an identifiable problem we have to address. So, we haven’t really changed anything; we make sure we follow his protocols as he recommends because that’s what he does for a living, so we stick to what he suggests. Our other son is an agronomist, so he helps us with the different seeds for forages, he helps us get what we need, he has a lot of knowledge of all forages. So, we’re careful with what we do and how we manage our ranch. The Canadian government could support us through funding the ACA, MULTISAR, and those kind of programs to keep them going. They could also get the word out about the good we’re doing, showing what the government is putting money into and what the outcomes are of these programs, to show the positives of what we do, and stand by the producers when there’s an outbreak, like something like pandemic or an outbreak in cattle.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W We’re not sure right now about the future of our ranch; we’re looking at retirement and we have one daughter that would like to come back; they would have had a house here already, but the company her husband worked for in Milk River went bankrupt, so they moved to Lethbridge for work. But when we need help, they’re here every other weekend, or whenever they can. But it’s complicated to work it out, and now there’s too much work to manage what we have. We’d planned to sell some land gradually, but with all this history, it’s hard to just walk away. So, for the short term, I don’t think we’re willing to give it up quite yet, but we’ll see how the next calving run goes and what Mother Nature does to us. But it’s hard when you get older; neither one of us can take the cold as well as we used to, and the heat as well as we used to. It’s really hard work, but we calve later now and have a heated calving barn; we could handle 25 calving at one time and we can get the calves dried off, and we have places to put them if we had to do a C-section. We have seven places to check for them calving; there’s too much space for cameras; you have to physically go and look; you can’t just put a camera up. But you have to make that work; it doesn’t happen by itself. So, in essence, we’re just maintaining and monitoring, and just managing what we have to. Even though our daughter just loves it here and would be here in a minute, she just loves working on cattle with me, and she knows cattle really well, but I tell her that I don’t really suggest anybody coming back home right now. Just the way things are, our community is dying; the school is downsizing; they’re going to probably shut the high school down and put it and the elementary school in trailers, which does not sound appealing to me. I don’t think my grandkids are going to get a good enough education; it could be all that distance learning and that doesn’t always work for all kids. That’s why we need to get the word out about our industry to urban populations to support us out here. They have many misconceptions, like the use of hormones and antibiotics in cattle; the cattle are not given antibiotics daily, only when they are sick.

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Final thoughts? Well, we’re kind of going toward retirement now, like, we used to use horses, but now the body’s broken down, so we use motorbikes and quads; I call them my Japanese horses because they make the best horses in the world, and you don’t have to feed them. When my dad was still alive, we had a couple of outstanding mares, and we could do anything with them, but when they were gone, I didn’t go and buy any more to replace them; we went on to motorbikes. Then our son-in-law bought a quad and dropped that off and said we can use it whenever we want; the only thing is we get to put the parts on when needed, so that’s what we did and then he sold it to us. Now we have two quads and five motorbikes, not all run, but most of them do. The thing is you’re always fixing them, or we used to be feeding the horses. But, you know, if you want to get a good horse nowadays, you’ve got to pay some money for it, and if you want to make a horse good, you’ve got to use it a lot, and we just have too much work to do—we can’t do it. We like the quads and bikes; we can move them quicker, but there are certainly times that we could use a good old saddle horse; it can’t be beat. Like down in the creek, it is much more diverse, a lot of coulees and draws, its brutal and tricky. Next door to us is the 117 Hall, which is a Community Hall. It was two halls brought together back in the day, in the 1930s for social gatherings, and when Nora came here, we still had dances and parties there; it’s right next door. The land was my grandfather’s and he donated 5 acres to the community. We had dances there until our youngest daughter was about 4 or 5. That was really nice, a lot of fun. We also have the Whoop Up Trail on our land; it runs from Fort Benton, Montana up to Fort Whoop Up in Lethbridge. It was the oxen trail that they used to send freight up off the Missouri River to Fort Whoop Up, also called the Whiskey Trail; it comes right through our pasture. They still do trail rides on it, sometimes with covered wagons; they come across the border and we help them if they need help, get stuck or whatever. Like it was too steep in the creek for the horses to pull the wagons up, so we had to pull the wagons up the trail with trucks. We enjoyed a very nice meal with them over at a neighbor’s place; he has a spring there where they would graze the cattle to the spring to get water; way back when there were no fences, local ranchers used to graze their cattle at that spring too. This was a Hungarian settlement; my mom came from Hungary; she was 8 when she came here with her brother and then there were two more kids, so four all together. Her dad, my grandpa, came from Hungary and worked on ranches and then moved to Milk River and had the shoe shop there. Grandpa Balog came to Canada when he was 16 and worked in the coal mines for 7 years or so. My dad tells the story about how when grandpa Balog was going to get married; it was an arranged marriage, and they were doing the planning for the wedding, and one of the parents or grandfather, I can’t remember, went across the river at night, and he drowned. My dad got married because the bridge was out, and he was tired of courting from a distance, so he moved the wedding date way up; he said, “I’m gonna marry that Stirling girl.” And now us, well, we’re the most proud of our four kids and eight grandkids; we’ve won some awards for our stewardship, but that’s just us doing our work and managing things the way we think they should be managed, but that plaque on the wall doesn’t mean as much as time with our family or the time of those people that helped us get those plaques. It’s people and being with others and the lifestyle we like. Feeding cows is what I like the most about ranching; we both get a lot of enjoyment from the cows, helping them calve, and newborn calves are always a joy. It’s a beautiful spot and we just love it out here.

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Introducing the American Badger jeffersonii Subspecies—Western Population Taxidea taxus jeffersonii Status: Endangered Range: British Columbia

Photo credit: Richard Klafki

The American badger is part of the weasel family, a group of carnivorous, small-to-medium-­ sized mammals. Their bodies are ideally shaped for digging, both for burrows and for prey; they are short and sturdy, with wide heads, and their forefeet are much larger and have much larger claws (for digging), than their hindfeet. Badgers are very distinctive looking, their head has alternating black and white bands, a white strip closest to their eyes followed by a black strip, black from their nose up over their head with a white stripe running through that from their nose to their shoulders, dark legs, and mottled body hair of mixed reddish-brown colors. They are solitary and only spend time together to mate and when their babies are dependent upon their mothers. They live in dens with underground tunnel networks and chambers for sleeping in the dry southern valleys of BC in grasslands, or open forests of Douglas fir or ponderosa pine in the Cariboo, Thompson, Nicola/Similkameen, and Okanagan/Boundary regions. They eat rodents, mainly gophers, mice, and voles, but are opportunistic and also eat birds, eggs, and reptiles. Badgers are most active at dusk and night and they also engage in periods of torpor, where they decrease their metabolism to conserve energy during the coldest months. They breed in July and August, and the females will experience delayed implantation of the fetus until February as they gain weight during the summer to develop the fetus; they give birth to one to five kits in late March and early April when food sources are more plentiful. In 2021, COSEWIC estimated the Western population at only 150–245 mature individuals. Their population is threatened by habitat loss through urban development for housing and industry, open land conversion to cultivation agriculture, orchards, vineyards, and road building; many die each year attempting to cross roads, highways, and railway lines. As American badgers may travel long distances if needed, much of their habitat loss is driven by permanent

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changes to the landscape and which negatively affect safe movement within key connective corridors to their range. In the 2021 COSEWIC status report for an American badger recovery strategy, they assert the need to manage human-caused threats, reduce habitat loss, and improve habitat connectivity. They note that the recovery measures proposed are not expected to negatively affect any other species at risk and will, in fact, benefit several other species with similar habitat needs. The jeffersonii Badger Recovery Team, with representatives from federal and provincial governments, ranching and farming industries, First Nations, conservation organizations, and researchers, has developed an action plan for conserving badgers in British Columbia. They have created badger habitat management guidelines and management guidelines for ranchers and farmers, so they can conserve badger populations without substantially decreasing the productivity of their operations.

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Building a Dream

When we first moved out here we lived in a tent, we were anxious to come here. These two ranchers’ stories share a common theme of starting from nothing, the 1st was a homesteader and the 2nd are a very young couple just starting out.

D&S Zirnhelt Ranch British Columbia David and Susan Zirnhelt Combined Interview  ell me about the history of your ranch T This is the Zirnhelt ranch, although there are a couple of those. I have a cousin that has one, so our official name is D and S, for David and Susan, the D&S Zirnhelt Ranch. My dad and his family came to this country in 1928, and some of them stayed in ranching and some didn’t. My dad didn’t, because he had hay fever, so he went into developing a number of businesses, including a general store, which he started with a barrel of gas, a bag of peanuts, and a box of chocolate bars, and he built it up from there. It was interesting that he had hay fever, so he didn’t cowboy and didn’t put up hay; he didn’t take to ranching that way, but he still had it in his mind that he wanted land. I think that came from the fact that my grandfather was here 20 years, but through the depression and wars and so on, he never did end up owning a place. His loyalty to a woman rancher here, who had been widowed, was well documented. He helped her and he said he would stick with her, and he died young, 67 years old, and never reclaimed his place as a ranching landowner. My dad bought this place in 1941 on a whim from fellows from Europe who thought, now, 1941, the war, that the world was going to end. They were from Austria and the world was going to end and so they came out here to hide out for a while, and who knows where they went after that. But my dad bought it and turned it over to my uncle and aunt who ranched it as tenants for a while and then bought it. This was the only piece of 650 acres that remained in the family and my dad wanted to sell it; I think he needed some cash. It was isolated, but it been a family holiday place, so it was dear to our hearts, and I was just graduating from university and I took out a loan, and my brother and I bought out my dad, and then, eventually,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7_5

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I bought out my brother. Then we started to assemble land, the original pieces that were in the original ranch. We have two ranches here now, two families as part of the back-to-the-land movement; let‘s go out and sink our roots and develop our own place. There was an opportunity here, so we did that. We had a viable partnership for 20 some years and built the place, and then we divided it because of ­succession needs, to pass it on, each a piece, or a half, to our own families. So, we split the ranch and went our different ways; the partner stayed with a more conventional ranch, cow calf, and we went into direct marketing and started to cut down on the number of days of actually feeding hay or silage. We reduced the feeding time significantly, by about 30%, which went right to the bottom line, and then we developed a direct market beef business and got up to about 25 head and then the abattoir closed. So here we are waiting to see what the next step is. Tent life There were no buildings, no fences, no roads when we first came here, just a hay field. This was the late 1960s and we were aware of pending environmental erosion. Silent Spring had been written, by Rachel Carson, and there was a rising environmental consciousness in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Wendell Berry was well into his publishing. Part of it too was that I grew up in 150 Mile House, and although my dad was a merchant, I spent a lot of my time across the road on the ranch that my grandfather had managed. I spent my time on a horse or out in the bush, and I had a really happy childhood and wanted that as a place to raise kids. And that’s really what our next generation is doing, our kids—they moved home, I think, because they had the freedom of doing whatever they wanted to do; they had a lake, wilderness, and unlimited horseback riding. When we first moved out here, we lived in a tent; we were anxious to come here. We commuted from Vancouver to pull out a few logs. Our original plan was to take what was then, virtually a roofless cabin that had been built here in about 1918, somewhere in and around the First World War, and there’d been nobody living here since the early 1920s, and we were going to rehabilitate this old log cabin. But once you start taking the roof off, you find that you’ve got rotten logs, so we saved the six hand-hewn squared timbered logs and put them into a new cabin. We commuted from Vancouver for about a year-and-a-­half, getting our logs ready. And when we had a little bit of cash in the bank, it was $5000, in 1974; we said—we’re out of here. We came up here with a 7-month-old baby and set up a wall tent with a heater in it and had a raft to cross the lake, to bring in building materials and our first apple trees. We gardened and put up a couple greenhouses, and we could only access our land by water then. For the first 3 years, we came across the lake and used canoes and boats and rafts. We once hauled some square bales of hay in here, a ton of it at a time, on a raft, and bringing it in about 10 o’clock at night the motor quit, and we poled; we just had poles, not paddles, and we poled for the half a mile across the lake, poled the hay in here to store it for winter. We were determined with our milk cow and our first breeding heifers, to be begin to live the ranch life. Susan grew up in Vancouver and was very brave when she came out here with our firstborn; he was 7 months old. She was featured in a book about politician’s wives; it’s called Women of Brave Mettle, and she’s known for being the only person the author heard of who had canned tomatoes on a campfire. She cooked a turkey on the campfire, and it was so frosty that year the Thanksgiving dishes were freezing to the table, but we had a heater in the tent we were living in, one of those trapper’s tents, a wall tent. Still though, it was 25 years before we got an indoor toilet. Yes, it was quite a learning curve all around. Once when I was late stuck in the bush, it would be Susan’s first time killing a chicken, because she couldn’t wait any longer to cook supper. Her father said she’d need a milk cow out here, and it arrived by raft the day she got home from the hospital with

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a newborn, and she had to learn how to milk it right away because I had to go to a regional district meeting (rural local government). She learned how to make butter, yogurt, cream, and cottage cheese; that Guernsey cow provided a lot of food for the family; lots of buttermilk pancakes were served for breakfast here. We started out hunting for meat, but we weren’t big on guns and decided we had enough without hunting, so our place was a sanctuary for game. We had wild meat and fish and we had a very small footprint, so we could have lived like early settlers. There was something about being a little bit bigger though; you’re wanting to be able to travel a little bit and needing things, and so I found myself arguing with myself about how much development is enough development. While we had a plan to respect the biodiversity here, we still got caught up in developing land. I thought about the balance of the Western world and going from the place of virtual hunter-­gathering to a place with somewhat industrialized production and clearing land to make some trees. I think we found it, the balance. There were various necessities, and Susan said some of it was a little too hard for a city girl; there had to be concessions made; we did need some cash. There was one point in the early 1980s, which was a time of recession, of which we were unaware because we had a sawmill cutting wood and groups of people would come and barter. We traded lumber for things like a wagon, livestock, fencing; we built miles of log fence. Cabin life We were 6 months in the tent and then into the cabin with no electricity and no running water for the first few years, but then we built a road. It was 2 miles of road, built for about $2500; a fellow with a big D8 Cat did it, and it was rough, but once we could get equipment in, then we had a local gold miner come down with his backhoe on tracks, and he put in over a thousand feet of pipeline for us. Then we had gravity water which we put into the cabin, so we had cold running water for 20 years— just the big pot on the stove, or the reservoir on the wood stove. Then we got more sophisticated with a coil system in a Pioneer Maid wood burning cookstove, which is airtight, and was made by the Hutterites. So, we had some technology but never power, and then the neighbors wanted power and we had applied for a telephone, and the power was offered to us. If we collaborated, the six of us on this road, it was doable for us financially; so, we logged the right-­of-­way and put power in and that changed everything. We were on the verge of advancing the off-grid power system, but when the power is brought to your door, and the neighbors needed us, we did it because it was the right thing to do, work with the neighbors, and put in hydro, and we haven’t looked back since. We were in that cabin for about 25 years and raised three children. But we put an addition on and the addition was bigger than the original cabin. So, then we had, you know, 700 square feet and two stories, so we had bedrooms for the children after that, but it was tight. Just like a lot of the original settlers had, and it was really close to the lake. We had a bar of soap tied to a tree branch by the lake for many years for bathing. We had to be above high water, and the higher up you get, you get a little view. But we’re on an alluvial fan which slopes gently downhill, and the back of the main field here is 26 feet higher than where the house was. Then it became time, because I’d had a career in politics, so I was away a lot, and my wife had a little inheritance from her mother, and I had an income and Susan was working; she had her income; we decided to go for it and build a family home. We went with a local log building company, Pioneer Log Homes, quite famous in this area, and they built it here, right on the lake. This was sort of state of the art of log building by one of the leading companies, and we’re very proud of it, although my wife says we would not build log again. If our boys had been building timber frame, we would have done a timber frame home because there’s more places to hang pictures. It’s a matter of taste, but I’d always wanted a log home, and it’s beautiful and fits the landscape here.

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Logging Logging was always part of the way that the ranchers have paid for their land around here, because it’s work you could do, and profit to be made. Logging pieces that we bought was an important part of our employment, and we used that money to develop land, and the woodlots have always been profit centers. We had one woodlot in our partnership, and now our boys, who are in the timber business, in that they construct net zero energy timber frame buildings, they have a woodlot also with that same partner. So that’s 3000 acres of pretty good timber growing country that provides a significant revenue; it’s always been profitable, and it probably will remain profitable. So those two boys are adding significant value, and the other son just moved back from Canmore, Alberta, where he was managing an office for an engineering firm, and he‘s the lead timber specialist. He gets to engineer interesting things like swings, and these mountaintop promenades that cantilever out over cliffs, and all the toys that are made out of wood for adventure, you know, adventure experiences. He also does buildings, like arenas and those where they want clear spans, so he does that, and he’s working from home now with the blessing of the owners of the company. The bridge To clear our road now, we have five pieces that will move snow, that can plow, a truck plow, a tractor plow, and bulldozers. The neighbor has a grader because we have all the woodlot roads to keep open, and there’s a bigger bulldozer available. We had to put all that heavy equipment on our bridge 1 year because this valley floods, and still does, and you don’t want to dam it up because you’re looking for a washout, so we let it flood. Our first bridge was 150 feet long and three spans, and they were just large logs, which meant they could float, and the water came up right to the logs. So, we parked the skidders, which are logging equipment, a bulldozer, great big breaking discs, a dump truck, and a logging truck all on this bridge to keep it from floating away. Then for a week or two, we’d commute by boat to get out. We’d see the water rising and keep measuring it, and before it got too deep to drive through, we would take a vehicle to the other side and would commute the mile to the bridge from here and then boat across, and sometimes boat directly from here. We did that for 2 weeks this year. The new bridge floods on both sides of it. It’s high, but the water has to go around and it was over the top of the fence posts. Family Our sons still live close by; the other end of the ranch is 5 miles away; we are a long, spread out ranch, which most of the BC ranches are, in long and narrow valleys, so one son lives there with his wife and two boys. Another son, who will probably inherit this building, commutes from Williams Lake; he has family there. He commutes here as he’s in charge of the sawmill part; they make the timbers here. The other son is about 8 miles up the valley, and they bought a wonderful south-facing lakefront piece, and they have their dream home, their beautiful timber frame building. My brother also lives close by, when the ranch sold from my aunt and uncle to some land developers; he bought a piece of it. He bought 65 acres which was the back 40 of the south part of the ranch. He bought that as a retirement home; he’s a retired consulting biologist now, and they have a beautiful bed and breakfast and a little hobby farm. Susan was a teacher and taught in several places, Williams Lake and Big Lake, but most of her career, 20 years of it, she taught at Likely, which is further out than here and it’s an hour commute. Fortunately, she was able to work 4 days a week, but it was up and meet the bus, which is over half an hour away, at 7 o’clock in the morning. I’d be up earlier in the morning to plow the road to get out, and sometimes we couldn’t do it. In the early days, we didn’t have equipment that would start easily, so we were snowed in a few times. One time we took her car, which was a little Volkswagen Rabbit,

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on the back of a sled with a four-horse team of heavy horses, and took it out to the highway and backed up to a snowbank and unloaded her car, and she drove to work. Heavy horses We used to plow with a five-horse team of Belgians. We were in the business of training Belgians and using them for logging and farming, and we trained teams—we trained as many as five or six teams a year, which is an old family tradition. My grandfather used to raise and train horses by the dozens, and that’s one way of adding value and getting a little bit of cash, if you’re putting up 2000 tons of hay, loose hay, with huge crews. I have to say a lot of the Aboriginal people were quite excellent hands with horses, and they were the mainstay of ranching labor for years. They would take the horses and sort of give them the work that was the training. We would harness nine horses during haying time, one spare, and there are always colts coming through. Basically, the more work you have, the better trained the horses are, so we stuck it out with horses for quite a few years and then we just got too big. With the weather here and the distances, we had to go to our hay fields, and the fact that there weren’t barns and pastures, if we got a rainstorm, we’d have to bring the horses home, and, you know, that wasn’t easy. So then slowly we got into smaller equipment to start with, smaller tractors and mixed the horses and tractors, and then got into bigger tractors, in the 60-horsepower range. My son built this round pen here; he took training as a big game guide, and because of his horsemanship skills that he learned here on the ranch, he got into helping train, and we say “breaking,” but training pack horses, and breeding and training them and getting them started. So, he needed to contain a large stallion, and some horses that would buck just about that high, so that’s about a seven-anda-half-foot round pen. And that’s not unusual here, you know in the days when people had big draft horses. That was his break from academia; after 7 years of university, he went and took this course because he knew the fellow that was operating it was kind of in his last years, and it was up in the Dease Lake area, and so he just sort of took a break. I think he still had some thesis writing to do, but the wilderness training was for his head. Now we try to do a trip a year. We don’t always make it; this year we were busy and they’re busy, but we might even go out yet this year. We did one family trip with the women on foot and the young men all leading a pack horse and carrying a pack, and I had a saddle horse that I could share with the 4-year-old who came, and two babies were in backpacks. Grandma had to practice hiking, train; I think we did about 13 kilometers a day. I think that was about 9 years ago now. But I go with the boys, they like to do a pack trip, and the boys’ stags have invariably been in the mountains.  hat wildlife do you encounter on those trips? W We’ve seen a few wolves around here, our ranch, not many, just fleeting—they’re rare. Bears we see, we would see cougars, lynx, and bobcats about equally I think, not very often, and maybe more cougars. But when we go on pack trips, we go west of the Fraser. We could pack here but it rains and you want to get away from the rain, and the brush is heavy. So, we go onto the grasslands and the open mountains, the coastal mountains that are just beautiful terrain. Over 90% of the grasslands are in natural condition, which means they can evolve into a late seral stage of development. It is such an asset here that we can go out into the grassland parks and never see anybody. Another memorable trip, I did a little bit of work before I went into politics, assisting some of the native bands in planning. As a family we had a working holiday where I was doing a reconnaissance study for moving an Indian village; they wanted to move it and I was sort of a planning consultant. We took five horses and a wagon and our kids and a few hangers-on, a few hitchhikers from the band who needed a ride home. We made a 2-day trip into this isolated village, and they didn’t want a road in there; they wanted to stay a dry community, and they wanted to rebuild and relocate because the community had expanded beyond the reserve boundaries. Also, it was a wet meadow and so you had

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things like outhouses flooding at the school, and there was no power. Yet, they wanted some amenities and they wanted to not have an unhealthy village, so we went in, and we had the distinction of being the only advisor type people working for Aboriginal people that had gone in, since the 1930s, gone in under our own steam; everybody else had flown in or on a helicopter. We went in with our five horses, our whole family, and that was an amazing experience. It was a 2-day trip, but it took us a week because the truck broke down near Quesnel, and we had to find shelter for all of our horses and get a new engine in the truck. Well, that was interesting because our wagon also broke down at a place called Women’s Bridge where there is no bridge across the creek. When some of our party arrived in the village by foot to get a drill so we could rebuild the wagon, the women said “oh we knew where you broke down”; it was uncanny how they knew where we were going to break down. Well, they know the roads, but it’s more than that; it‘s kind of intuition, a feeling, and they know the land so intimately. Our guide was the band manager, and he had never been overland so he came along on the trip. There are 10,000 miles of wagon road in this Chilcotin plain, and he knew, just because he knew, his grandmother was from that village and he’d never been there, but he could tell us what was what, and which road to take. It was quite amazing. He was our rifleman because it was grizzly country. The fish, the big salmon, go up in the mountains and are in these little streams, rivulets, spring salmon; they can be 50 pounds and grizzlies eat them. Our youngest son was four or five at the time; it was quite the trip; it was a pretty special time. So, I think some of our work off the ranch has enriched us. Range management Our operation is a cow-calf operation and our range is what we call bush range here. It’s out in the bush and crown range, a rented range, not what we mob graze ourselves. So, we use both private land grazing and public land grazing. The public land grazing is always following the logging because this is just solid timber country, and while there are a few swamps and swampy areas that provide sedges, you know, for grazing, they are also in riparian areas that you don’t want the cattle hanging out in. The roadways, the landings, and the open areas where trees have been planted for quite a few years have a stand of forage, grass on it, and so that’s where the cattle are from the first of July to about the end of September; but in the spring and in the fall and early winter, we graze on private, lower-elevation land. That’s how we’re able to extend the grazing, and we have been practicing intensive management on the private land, where we move them every day or so depending on the season. We are using them to beneficially impact the regrowth of the brush, keep the brush down and the grass fairly healthy. That’s a bit of an experiment too, because this country would be burnt over and it would be kind of a grassland for a while, and then the trees would come in again, and that’s partly because of the amount of rainfall we have, which is 22 inches, although often we have more than that; the dry belt here is 10 to 14 inches of rain. We also move cattle to keep the soil healthy; we have to watch, because there’s lots of water here and the soil can be sodden and then you get pugging, or compaction. During the rainy season and the spring, we keep them on higher, rockier, poorer class soils that are well drained. The further they get away from home, the more susceptible they are to predators. The primary one is the wolf, and in this area, the natural food for wolves are moose, and the moose are in decline, partly because of habitat, partly because of access for hunters; we’re not sure why, but probably wolves too. But the wolves here now have a taste for cattle, and now they come and drift through the private land, although for years they did and they didn’t bother us, but now there are plenty of cattle and they have developed a taste for them. These days we run at 50 (we have 80 head as of this fall); when we split the ranch, we had 70; and we selected very hard for animals that could keep their body condition late into the fall and to the early winter so that they could feed themselves. We stockpile; we don’t graze the grass; we leave

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it standing so it’s available for another time. Our target is a hundred head and we’re on our way to doing that. We have a basic herd that’s pretty hardy and it’s quite mixed, all British breeds; we’ve been through some Simmental and Charolais, but they’re too big; we‘re looking, for us, at a smaller cow, 1000 to 1100 pounds. Our priority in our range management is that we want our cattle as fat as can be, and the cows as big as we can get them. But we have to make sure that we don’t impact the fisheries. The fisheries here is a huge thing that we can affect if our cattle aren’t managed right. So, we want distribution, but we want the cattle to stay together so they can fight off the predators, and, you know, outliers can be attacked; in fact, we think the one cow that didn‘t come home this year was an outlier. She’d never just be right with the herd; she’d always be off somewhere, which is great; she’d climb the side of mountains to eat, but, vulnerable. And I think the Western range management, in North America, has been to distribute the cattle to keep them from impacting areas. But our understanding of the buffalo and herding animals, and how they move through the landscape and let it rest and recover, I think we are making sure that, to the extent we can manage, we will let the range recover. So, I think to have a gentle footprint—that’s the priority.  ative grass management N We don’t have a lot of native grassland here, but we participate with ranches and collaborate with ranches that do have it. I have a quite a lot of background in grassland, and I was asked to be on the board of directors of the Grasslands Conservation Council of BC.  I got my formal exposure to it through land use planning because we had a lot of conflicts between logging and hunting and ranching and recreation and so on, and when I was part of the government, we were leaders in creating regional land use plans. And in this region, the Cariboo, we had some of the first benchmark grassland areas that were identified, and then they became the subject of some kind of level of protection, because they were threatened, and we knew that about a third of the endangered species were on grasslands. But that was part of a larger community, and I’d say two-thirds of the ranching operations in the Cariboo have native grasslands. The native grasses are pine grass essentially and then some fescues, but we don’t really have, on our range, grassland management objectives. If there’s grass it’s really to stop erosion, but that’s just the way it is here. It’s on a long rotation between fire and forest, in between is a grassy period, and so in our private land management, we kind of replicate ecological succession. But we treat it annually, and we use cows to trim the brush, keep it open, and encourage more grass and forb-based ecology.  host ranch with Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops A We’ve been learning as we go along, and we’re voracious readers, and we’ve attended a lot of events. Through our local Cattleman’s Association and the local university, we’ve developed some extension programs and applied research programs that amplify our learning. As a Cattleman’s organization, we asked our local university to have an Old’s College-type program here that had its foundation in experiential learning, and our ranch would be part of that. We’ve partnered with Thompson Rivers University as a host ranch; there are some 30 host ranches here, and students can come look around and see if they like what we’re doing. They had asked to come and stay for a period of time, and we would undertake to help audit what skills they’ve developed, so they develop a resume and they can identify skill gaps, because we don‘t think in 2 years in the diploma program that people are then really ready to completely run a place. But they will have the business fundamentals, and that’s really key, and then they have the conceptual pasture range management, livestock husbandry, some stockmanship skills, and experience with looking at the feasibility of different enterprises, strawberries, or anything. They might look at a dozen diversified operations through their year and a half, a dozen

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enterprises, and then put together a plan. So, we help we help the students because we really want to advance the learning of the next generation. Career in government I was in Cabinet for ten years, two years as Agriculture Minister, four years as Minister of Forests, and a couple years in Trade and Economic Development, regional development, and then a short period as Aboriginal Affairs Minister. These were all, with the exception of the Aboriginal portfolio, dirt ministries, in that they had to do with industry, and ranching was one of them. So, I came to know a little bit about range because in British Columbia, range, meaning the grasslands, are part of the forest, and the Forest Ministry. The Range Act is administered by the Ministry of Forests, so I got to know a little bit about the bigger picture, policy. I think my roots died out a little bit in those ten years and I had to come back and re-root. I’m pretty sure I was the only minister who still used an outhouse at home. My aunt lived all her life on the ranch here without indoor plumbing, other than running water, and she said if she didn’t milk a cow and go out for wood and go out to the outhouse, they wouldn’t have been able to save a neighboring resort, some of which burned down. But because she was outside so much in the winter, she saw the flames, and the neighbors got together and went over and saved some of the resort. That was always her excuse. I don’t know what Susan’s excuse was, except that we couldn’t have gravity for our septic, and we were not going to be dependent on power way out here to pump it. So then when we built this house, we moved it up in elevation about 6 feet which gave us grade to contour to a leach field; it took so many truckloads of rock. I think if I was to do my career again, I would study agrology and agronomy. But I somehow grew up as a farmer and rancher at heart. I like the rough and readiness of the horseback lifestyle. It was part of my upbringing, part of the freedom, part of the mobility, and I really think that when you’re interested in something, you read about it and you go looking for experiences. When we had draft horses, we would run clinics, so clinics and pasture walks and learning from others is something that we lost. We’re spread out; we’re a long ways away from some of our neighbors. We say people are neighbors and they’re 120 miles away. So, we work with the community of interest and I do attend a lot of conferences, now virtually, due to Covid, but I’ve gone to conferences in Indianapolis and gone and visited innovative land use people down in Arizona and places on holidays. Although that’s a busman’s holiday and Susan doesn’t want to go to bull sales on our holiday and doesn’t want to go in to visit other grazers, but I do get to look at some of those things. Species at risk We have our Environmental Farm Plan, which is pretty much the same across western Canada I think. There is an aspect to it where you can do a biodiversity plan, which looks at the ranch and its environs, Crown Land, and neighbors, and sees what the balance of habitats are there. This biodiversity plan basically sets for us an objective of introducing more biodiversity on to, essentially, the lands that have been cleared and plowed in the past and turned into forage crops. So, you would see adding trees in places strategically, and allowing the brush to be a part of the system, and there’s reasons for doing that, pollinators, for example. I think the objectives of SARPAL remain our objectives here, and fortunately, because we’re surrounded by a lot of Crown land; that’s in the land use plan. It’s not critical that we protect all the original habitat here, for example, these places are linear, meaning long and narrow, but this valley, if you’re looking at it, will remain essentially the same view scape because logging is restricted near the waterways. So, we have biodiversity just on the borders of every piece of private land we have; however, we did plan for the corridor along the lake and rivers to be left with some protection for the wildlife. So, the wildlife can get to water, and they can move up and down the corridor without being seen, and they have protection from predators.

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I think SARPAL and programs like that have value, and they will make a difference for protecting species at risk. Species at risk are collective canaries in the coal mine I guess, but I think the whole idea of raising food sustainably is going to be with us as part of the marketing. I think there has been a shift in consciousness, largely urban I have to say, that is driving consumer demand. But I do think there’s an internal revolution in agriculture that will have people take pride in the diversity of the natural landscape and that bodes well for species at risk.  houghts on support from the public, government, and the beef production industry T The Canadian public could support our industry by getting to know somebody who produces their meat, and they may not meet them, but they can certainly search websites. I think as ranchers we all need our own website just to be out there, so there is a personal contact with somebody for whom you raised food. I really think that we can keep improving our act, not do any greenwashing, and have a path toward greater sustainability, and we can make that known by participating in events like going to fall fairs and working with marketing interests, retail outlets, and farmers markets—just keeping ourselves out there because the population is getting pretty urbanized and more and more ignorant of what goes on, on the land. Government could support our industry by taking a good look at setting objectives for food security, and linking them to land use policy, and, ultimately, I think credit for carbon, and other environmental goods and services, like species at risk. It’s a little hard to put metrics around some of it, but government should be doing the baseline research, with producers, on what land use practices result in the conservation of species, carbon, safe food and water, without making the farmer pay for it all. Regarding the beef production industry, well, I’d like to see us retain our cattle as long as we can and put as much of the maturing on them on grass and forage that’s raised properly, managed properly, rather than relying on the feedlot industry, because I think it has animal husbandry issues. I think animals didn’t evolve, cows didn’t evolve eating grain, and there’s all kinds of medical treatments we still have to give them if they’re confined. There’s a problem, so reduce the confinement period— that’s what I’d like to see.  he future of the ranch T We would be the fourth generation to enjoy the property in one way or another, and it is home, it’s our place, and we want to keep it that way. As we plan for succession, the boys will probably each own a piece of it, and they’ll have to collaborate to have a cattle operation. But, you know, what’s important is family staying together and working together in one way or another and then finding businesses that work. Right now, that’ll mean the next generation will probably have to do some scaling up. You could make a living with other livestock like pigs, turkeys, chickens, and adding value and direct marketing on a smaller land base, so they should do some of that. But with cattle you really do need an extensive land base, and the soil here is not adept at raising huge volumes of feed. But, you know, the future of our ranch is yet to be determined. For the near future, it’s going to be a place of learning, for our grandchildren to skill themselves in some of the enterprise management and the stewardship, and it’s a place for recreation and to live. But the future is in scaling up and in adding value back into the direct marketing; that’s the future; it’s diversified operations. And you know, the next generation doesn’t really need the cattle part, but the land is there, and there’ too much land for intensive agriculture. We’re not in the dryland grassland areas where you can do a better job of fattening the cattle. Fattening cattle is a little different than traditional methods when you’re in the wet belt. So, the future is, I think, in the direct market business as we rebuild or build local food systems; I think that’s the place. But once you’re here and once you’ve got a suite of equipment and a home base, you can run 200 head as easily as you can run 50 head. I think it’ll be big enough to carry

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an employee, for looking after things when people are away at their other jobs and give them the freedom to carry on with their other business. Final thoughts We’re proud of the fact that we are working together, sort of, the three sons and their wives and the grandchildren. We are often together and our grandchildren can’t wait to get together and have sleepovers or get involved. Right now they’re competing to see who can haul bales, who can rake the hay, and their biggest sport is that they all have lariats. They spend a lot of time trying to rope things, we’ll be treated to roping performances from time to time, and they make the games up, and it’s really quite wonderful. And, of course, each one has to have a different color lariat. Everybody, when they come of age, gets a lariat; we have them hanging around. I think we’re most proud of embracing innovation and investing time and money in things like silvopasture, where we can grow trees and pasture, and using the cattle, instead of heavy equipment, to bring about the management. The other thing, apart from being surrounded by family, is having them successfully diversify into other businesses, in this case the timber frame construction, which, from a cash flow point of view, dwarfs the ranch like 20 times over. I think the fact that we have said to them in growing up that there are physical skills, like being able to build fence, there are technical skills, like being able to understand reproduction and animal breeding and maybe diagnosing machinery issues, but then there’s the professional realm where you can bump it up a notch and have system impact. Help others or broadly affect others or engage in the bigger picture, that changes the sort of determinants of success of your own businesses, and they’ve done that. Two boys have Master’s degrees in forestry, business, economic development, and liberal studies, and the other one is an engineer. I think if I’d had my druthers I’d have built a bigger shop, with more equipment sooner. But you know, we were hanging our harness on trees for a long time, and we hardly have a barn; with all these horses, we don’t have a decent horse barn. But some of that was because of time; there were other things we were doing, and you can’t do all of those things and have a picture-perfect ranch. And we started with nothing. But now, our new hay barn is a beautiful timber frame building, and the boys are going on to build these for other people. I mean, they’re show pieces, and they’re built to last 400 years. The houses they build are built to last a very long time, and that’s making a contribution. I’m proud that they grew up with innovation being part of the way they approach business. I suppose, like our work with Thompson River University, it takes time, and patience, to train people to learn how to ranch, and we’re making a contribution. Each of our boys chose to stay home a year because I was away from home, but also to learn the yearly rounds, because it’s one thing when you’re a student going to school and in the winter you come home and have to do a little bit of work on the weekends. But to be there every day, when it’s -40 degrees, then there’s a realism and a rounding out of their education. But we really encourage them to be part of a larger community, whether it’s log builders or loggers or ranchers, or whatever, because we do need to learn from each other and not be afraid of exposing our mistakes and admitting to our ­mistakes—you learn by mistakes. The other thing is keeping an open door. We’ve had people come because we’ve invited them to come, and some of them keep coming back, but it’s been an enrichment for our children to have people from Germany, France, Japan, and other countries coming in here because we have an opendoor policy. It’s been a time out place for people who needed refuge every now and again. I’m swinging it less wide open at the moment due to Covid, but it’s also really nice to have your house to yourself for a while. After a few years, regardless of what help they do, there’s a ­dimension of work involved, having to change your household to accommodate different needs, diet; well, just different people do things differently. But it’s rewarding to see somebody who comes as a vegetarian, and when

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they see happy cows and happy pigs, they can change their mind. The food takes on a whole other dimension when you have a hands-on experience, and it’s in an environment like this. It hasn’t been without a few glitches, not many though. There was one family from south Tyrol, Austria, that came here, a young couple with two teenagers. The girl’s parents were really concerned about where she came from and what she came to, and then when we went there, they really welcomed us, when we traveled in that area. They took us everywhere when we visited; they were very kind to us. Another Italian girl ate meat here every day and was worried that when she went home she wouldn’t be able to afford to eat meat every day. There was a German fellow; he had all the right reasons for wanting to be here, and then he said he was a vegetarian. Susan just wrote back and said that just doesn’t fit with me, I am not prepared to cook for vegetarians, I’ve learned that doesn’t work and I just don’t try anymore. So, he said, so, if I will eat meat, can I come? We said sure, so he came and he would only eat the meat from our farm. He was an interesting guy. He arrived with bags full of music and he had to perform to get into music school; his grandfather taught him piano and then he went on to do other music as a teenager. He was here to devote himself to two things, one, blacksmithing, which his grandfather didn’t teach him, so he used our blacksmithing equipment, and he practiced his music. The school he wanted to get into was top level, something like Juilliard, and he really had to perform to get in. He practiced on Susan’s piano. She doesn’t like this story, but we put it in the horse trailer and took it to our sons place for a house concert. This fellow wanted to perform and he put on an incredible concert, but yes, the piano didn’t fare so well on the trip. It was definitely badly out of tune, but that’s not something you can’t fix, but, anyway she’s not letting it go on any more trips. One of our daughters in law is very musical, and she’s the one who’s pushed to have house concerts. We’ve had three outdoor concerts now down at our bunkhouse by the lake.  fitting tale to end an extraordinary story A So, here’s a story to finish. When we decided to get some heavy horses to help us on the land; I found out that my uncle had been one of the preeminent horse trainers in the region. I wasn’t really aware of how much training they had done because that wasn’t part of my upbringing. So, he offered to come and help us as we traveled around BC and Alberta looking at horses to buy, and we bought an old team. Then we had said we were going out to visit this ranch that was getting out of horses, meaning they had 50 head they’d send out to the meadows where Aboriginal peoples would put up hay, and they were getting out of horses and had quite a few for sale. He said it’s good manners; if you say you’re going to go and look at horses, you’ve got to go and look at horses. So, we went to look at horses. Even though we had already bought that one team, he said you can get some colts and you can replace the old team with young horses, and I’ll help you. We arrived out there and there was a big, high corral, obviously to contain a stallion. We met the seller and we drove on the prairie grasslands, but at first we could see no horses. We stopped in the middle of a field and got out of the truck. We still didn’t see any horses, and you could see for miles. So, the owner got some oats and laid them out in piles in a big circle about a hundred feet across, and then he started to call them. He called out, “horses,” and then a blue roan poked its head of the woods and came up over a hill, and then there were two blue roans, and then there was a black, and then there were two blacks. Then a sorrel, then two sorrels, and then two bays, and we were surrounded by horses thundering up to us, running in matched pairs together. They had been trained together in matched pairs and they stayed together for years, even out in the fields. We were surrounded by 50 horses and they were kicking, fighting and scattering, all for those oats. I learned then about teaming behavior and herd behavior. It was a wonderful thing to see. My uncle took me aside and said “I haven’t seen so many good horses together like this in years, buy all you can get and we’ll train them and you can sell them.” So, we ended up with seven; some were 4 years old, and some were 7 years;

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none of them had ever been trained. My uncle helped me and I had to learn his school of training. You had to be able to catch your horse first, and have good equipment and good harness; I started at the beginning learning from him. His son went on to become a leading cutting horse breeder and trainer. Anyway, it was a wonderful thing to see.

Flying T Ranch Manitoba Combined Interview of Kirk Thompson and Jerrilynn Marshall Author's note: Kirk and Jerrilynn were the youngest couple I interviewed, just starting out ranching, and with a new baby daughter as well. They were embarking on a great adventure that would take a lot of tenacity and faith.  ell me about your ranch T We bought our ranch in 2014 and have been slowing growing our operation. My grandpa farmed and had cows, and my dad ran cows and Jerrilynn’s great-grandpa and grandpa ranched as well. We decided to ranch because we like the freedom of being your own boss and we wanted Jerry to stay at home and raise a family. It’s a nice lifestyle for sure, and I really like cows, yeah, always have. I grew up on a cow-calf operation and rode saddle broncs at rodeo, here and a bit in Australia on holiday. Jerrilynn grew up on a farm with horses rodeoing, barrel racing, and roping and all that kind of stuff in high school. Her dad was part of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA). We like the idea of rodeoing as a family, because it’s one of the few sports you really can all do together at varying ages. We want our kids to learn how to work and spend quality time with us, like our little Cora here. On our ranch now, we buy calves in the fall, feed them for the winter, and graze them in the summer, and then we’ll sell them again in the fall and buy new ones again. That’s what we do. We’re not like a traditional cow-calf operation I guess; we’re a feeder/backgrounder operation.  hat is the priority in your range management? W The priority on our ranch is to maintain good health in the grass, so we always have grass, and for sure not to overgraze. We do rotational grazing to maintain our grass. We try and just maintain good grass and soil. Without healthy soil nothing grows, and you really can’t overgraze and expect that to work year after year. I learned this from working at community pastures where they didn’t rotate much from field to field, and then I worked for a private outfit that rotated lots. So, you saw the difference in grass from rotating, to the continuous grazing where the cows would graze where they like really hard and then they don’t graze in other spots at all, really. It’s hard on your grass in the places where they graze, and then also not good to not graze areas too, because if it’s left ungrazed, it’s not healthy either. So, I kind of learned as I went along. I’ve been thinking about how much flooding we’ve had around here. People don’t seem to understand that when we keep the grasslands intact, it is helpful with that. Like every piece of dirt that gets worked up and slowly gets built, more concrete everywhere, well, it seems like it’s a huge problem in Brandon, Winnipeg; you know, all the cities along the rivers, they flood and that has to have something to do with how much land has been broken and drained. Rotational grazing and resting grass is how we manage our range to conserve native grass. At least 75% of our ranch is native grass; there would be a little bit that would be tame grass, but it’s pretty well all native grass. We’re always moving them to give the grass a rest, and we try to not ever overgraze it because it seems like it’s harder to come back once you take too much.

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That also helps to protect and conserve species at risk and their habitat; if it’s good for the cows and healthy, it’s good for other species too. SARPAL recognizes and rewards us for managing the grass well. We try and manage our range the best we can for cattle and whatever else needs it, and we’ve just been continuing to try and grow, and we’re happy about that. We’re happy we joined SARPAL and we’re happy to work with the conservation people in future. SARPAL We first started hearing about species at risk 2 years ago, I guess, shortly after we bought a chunk of land, and then when we got involved in SARPAL and became concerned about protecting that habitat. We found, through SARPAL, that it all kind of works together, like you can protect the species and maintain the ecosystem and still have grass for your cows. It all kind of works together, I would say quite well; without being a burden on us, it just seemed like it would work. We joined SARPAL because they helped us to build cross fences—for sure that’s the main reason—it helped finance the fencing and it just made sense to us to join. It benefits us and the environment and everything. It was just good—it was really good. I don’t think there’s anything I don’t like about the SARPAL program. I’d say what we like the most about it is that they were great to go through the whole process with, super. They made it easy, I would say; it was very accommodating for sure. That is a big plus, well a huge plus, how well it’s organized and how helpful they were. We also liked the incentives to join, for helping us get fence and a water system; they helped us with a trough and a dugout. So yeah, that was great for us. I can’t think of any other incentives I’d like because, I guess, we’re just kind of getting into it, so I don’t know what changes I would want; we’re happy with it. SARPAL did change the way we managed our land though because now we have more fencing and we can move them around a lot more, rotate them. It for sure helped in the health of the grass and the health of the soil—there’s no doubt. SARPAL helped us fence much quicker and to more of a degree. It helped us just keep our pasture land in better condition, rather than letting it get run down and then trying to have to catch back up later. Letting rest on certain paddocks, that’s a big deal and gives the range a chance to grow back. I do think the SARPAL program will definitely make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat because we’re not changing their natural habitat, we’re protecting it long term, and SARPAL helps us do that.  upport from the public, government, and beef production industry S The industry, and maybe government, could support us through an educational campaign for the general public; like, you go on social media and you see these things, and people are just not aware and they think that beef and cattle are bad, so they’re gonna be vegetarians, and they think all this is cruelty to animals, and it’s not the case. They need education on what we do and how we do it. All we see is a negative story being told about ranching, but it’s not always the case. We take pride in the animals, you know, who we raised, right from the little ones, and you will have to do special things for them, if they’re sick or whatever, because you want to keep them alive and stress-free, right? You give them the best environment possible because you don’t want them to die. The public doesn’t seem to know that ranchers do take pride in it, to do the best they can and to not abuse these animals and it’s because we want to have the lifestyle. I don’t think anyone’s really in it for getting rich; they want to just make a living and enjoy your life. And giving us money for conservation keeps it circulating through the economy, because we’re going to then spend it on something in town, keeping local businesses and families going. I’d like the beef production industry to help young guys get started. I have friends that are all interested in cows, and it would be nice if it was a little easier, I would say, for young guys to start. I know

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it’s easy to say and hard to fix, but it would be a help. I think SARPAL and things like that help, for sure, to get young guys going, like, even if it is just a little help for fencing and stuff. It all goes a long ways to help young guys get started. Young guys are flocking to the grain side of things, the crop side of things, right, because it’s easier; you can take your winters off and you know, don’t have to feed cows in -40 degrees. And the beef business is going to continue to go on; people are still going to eat beef, but at some point older guys retiring will sell, and there’s got to be a younger person to buy that land because there’s some land that it’s not crop-able. And we don’t want that land broken anyway, the grassland, so that’s where I’d like to see the beef business go. Also, it would be nice to see in the beef business, if the consumer does want healthier meat, that there was some premium, or maybe a little more money paid into growing that healthier product. I think as well, there’s lots of land in Canada that can’t be used for anything else, so if there wasn’t cattle on it, there would be a lot of money lost in  local communities.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W The future, for us, well, we hope for just more of the same, like, hopefully we can grow some more and continue on the same, and leave it for the kids. We didn’t work so hard to get this land and improve our ranch to sell it. I’d hope my kids would ranch here if they wanted to. Final thoughts I guess, to end, my best stories are just the days that are rewarding. Days like shipping, you know, you work a whole year for one day of shipping your cattle and it’s a big day, but it’s a good day—there’s lots and lots that goes into it. I guess those are bigger days, in my mind anyways, or rewarding days, for all your work, and, I would say, that’s the day that I sure enjoy. Anyway, lots goes into it that you don’t get paid for until the end day, until that day. It’s risky, and until that day you don’t know how you really did. We just hope it works out. And then start again, and you learn every time so you can change a few things. And we get to take Cora, she’s just been part of our lifestyle and she goes with us and does everything, and it’s nice. She’s going to grow up and learn how to work, and the quality time that she gets to spend with us, and the animals, and she’s going to learn, you know, the cycle of life and all that. So, it’s part of the whole story of us, our ranch.

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Introducing the Northern Leopard Frog Lithobates pipiens Rocky Mountain population Status: Endangered Range: British Columbia

Photo credit: Adam Moltzahn

The Northern leopard frog is a medium to large frog that is brown or green with dark oval spots outlined with light halos on the head, back, and sides and dark elongated ovals, stripe-like, on its legs. It has a raised beige-colored fold of skin running from behind its eyes down each side of its back, and a white belly. The Rocky Mountain population of the Northern leopard frog occurs entirely in southeastern British Columbia. Ranchers here from other provinces have spoken about having Northern leopard frogs on their properties, but those are the Western Boreal/Prairie populations found in the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba; their status is of special concern. The Northern leopard frog uses three types of habitat during its lifecycle. They overwinter in cold bodies of water that do not freeze solid; breeding and larval life takes place in ponds, marshes, creeks, pools, streams and lakes; and they spend summers in moist upland meadows and native prairie. Females can deposit up to 7000 eggs, which they attach to submerged vegetation, and after about 2 weeks tadpoles emerge which metamorphose into frogs 2 to 3 months later. These small frogs then move into summer foraging habitat to feed on a variety of insects, and as they mature they will feed on spiders, ants, grasshoppers, beetles, flies, worms, and crickets.

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The Northern leopard frog is threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation through urban sprawl, road mortality, agricultural development, environmental contamination, chemical pollutants, drought, and emerging diseases such as chytridiomycosis, an infectious fungal disease. Recovery efforts include habitat enhancement, wetland restoration, seasonal road closures, and captive rearing reintroductions of the species to suitable habitat. A couple of the ranchers in Alberta allowed eggs from their properties to be gathered and used to reintroduce the population elsewhere. Frog surveys have indicated these releases are successful. To determine if a re-­ introduced population of Northern leopard frogs are surviving and breeding, visual and nocturnal calling surveys may be conducted. They capture, weigh, and measure frogs in visual encounter surveys, inspect them visually for disease, and swab the abdomen, groin, and thighs to lab test for chytridiomycosis. The frogs are then released. An example of a nocturnal calling survey (frogs are more active and call more readily after dark) would be to establish call stations along transects in each release site and have an observer estimate the number of calling male leopard frogs during three 3-minute intervals. Each 3-minute interval would be followed by a 1-minute break to record the data. Surveys would begin shortly after dusk and be conducted once a week for 3 months. The distinct Northern leopard frog call they are listening for does not carry very far and sounds like a low snore followed by several low grunts.

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The interesting thing about what’s going on right now is that we live in the information age, and there’s so many people wanting to tell you these great ideas and share their knowledge. These three ranchers share an excitement for technology and continuing education; they are all from Manitoba, and they have many communities in the region offering very valuable, practical, and, much appreciated, agricultural extension programs.

Hagan Valley Ranch Manitoba Thomas and Felicity Hagan Combined Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T Thomas: I come from an agricultural background. My grandfather came over from Ireland and was a farmer and my dad became a cowboy; he liked cows more, and that’s how it evolved into this. My brother ranches just down the road from my mom and dad. So, we’re third-­generation farmers and ranchers. Felicity’s from a farming background as well. Felicity: My father worked for a farmer back in England, and when we moved to Canada, he bought a farm. We sold the farm but always lived on an acreage with horses, and he’s now working for a farmer, so it’s always been a part of our life. Thomas and I were drawn to ranching for the lifestyle; definitely, we love raising our kids in this lifestyle—it’s amazing. We get to be around them 24/7 until they start school, and they learn how to go outside and do some work, like, anything from fencing to feeding chickens or whatever; it’s wonderful, very relaxed. Thomas: We put our land in easement so that it can never be broken, and financially, it enabled us to buy this place. We had done it on our original half section we bought when we were like 21 or 22 in 2007. It works great for what we’re doing because we know that this place is never going to be broken, and the next person that takes it on pretty much is forced to ranch. They could do it with horses or goats or sheep or something, but they can’t rip it up and grow canola. That’s the point. But again, there was financial incentive for us to do that, and we don’t lie about any of that stuff. We used that money as a down payment on the land to buy this place.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7_6

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 ell me about your range management T We run a cow-calf operation, and a yearling operation as well. We raise bred heifers as well, so we’re into a little bit of everything here. Pretty much all of our range is native grass; there’s maybe 200 acres out of 3200 that isn’t native. Our priority in our range management is to grow more grass because it makes us more money. That’s what took us back to soil health, because if we take care of that, we grow more grass, our stocking rate goes up, and we have the ability to make more money. So yeah, we really need to take care of the grass. We manage our range to conserve native grass. We are working our way toward what’s called ultrahigh-stock-density grazing, and right now we are at one-day moves. The most moves we’ve ever done in a day is four, and so, for somebody who doesn’t quite understand that, the best way to think of that is you try to get the animals in—how would I put that—the tighter you get your cattle in a group, the stock density goes up. And once you get over 200,000 pounds per acre, which is just the amount that the cattle weigh, so let’s say 200 cows that weigh a thousand pounds each, on 1 acre, is 200,000 pounds per acre, and when you get them in that tight of a group, it essentially looks like they’re in a pen. Something happens then; it changes the way they graze, and the way their hoof action disturbs the land, breaks the soil cap, and punches old grass or unused grass and dung, and distributes the nutrients they put in there; they start to cycle nutrients, and something really major happens. And when they leave and you give it adequate rest, be that 30 to 90 days, and depending on how much rain you get and what type of a system you live in, well, the microbiology goes crazy; and we know now that when the microbiology goes crazy, it produces grass. We know that they want sugar, the grass will give them sugar, and then they, I don’t need to explain the entire system, but, that that’s how we do it. So, we put them in as tight of groups as we can and give the range adequate rest. We have permanent fencing on 3200 acres, the entire place, and we have 53 permanent paddocks, and it’s all set up to be cross fenced with temporary fences. That’s what SARPAL helped us with, some permanent paddocks, and then they bought us some of these reels so we can split the permanent paddocks up again. That was their big thing. And then we have water that we can get to all the paddocks. We planned the water very well, so you can water multiple paddocks, like probably six paddocks off of some dugouts, and then you’re always moving the cattle around, so you build alleys to and from the water sources. We use a computer system to keep track of our grazing chart. We do our grazing plan every spring usually, and kind of throughout the winter. We sit down and plan where our animals are going throughout the year, what paddocks they’re going on, and for how long they’re going. So, basically, we have built up an inventory of 5 years I would say, roughly, of doing these grazing plan models. We can see what each paddock is like when it was grazed, what time of year, how long it was grazed for, how many animals grazed on it, and how it handled it. We can look at it at the end of the year, or in the spring, and say, hey that one needed more rest. So, we will mark that and change it on our grazing plan. We try not to graze every paddock the exact same time every year, to give it some variety. One of the important things about that chart is that it allows you to measure how you’ve managed, or manage. It gives you the ability to look at the numbers and say, okay, our grazing system is improving, by considering the amount of grazing days we’re getting; and people will ask us, so how much is it improving? Well, this way, we know. So, we’re starting to see; we have 30 animal units per acre—an animal unit is a thousand pounds—so, that one acre provides enough feed for 30,000-pound cows annually, and we’re seeing that rise up to around 44 to 50 now. So, we’re seeing a measurable difference and we see that through these grazing charts, because you can go back 5 years ago and see where we were then, and where we are now. That’s production. Any business that can up production and not up the cost a month to get it, that is a no-brainer.

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And when we’re doing these ultrahigh-density grazes, what’s interesting is that in the fall, when we’re moving four times a day, and we’re taking the entire plant once it’s went dormant, we’re getting 120 animal units per acre. So we’re tripling, or if you use the old number of 30, we’re quadrupling our old stocking rate. So, you can look at that a number of ways. That’s like buying three more ranches the exact same size as yours, but never paying for them, let alone paying the taxes. I mean, it’s just amazing. So, that’s what the fencing does for you. And you really do have to see it to believe it, the grazing; when it’s done intensively, because if you don’t quite get there intensively, like say you move your cows every 5 days, it makes a difference but…you don’t hit a…it’s like, when you get to 200,000 pounds an acre, it’s like hitting an on-ramp to the interstate. Like you’re going 40 miles an hour, and then you hit this on-ramp where you’re able to go 120, and that’s what we’re seeing. We’re just getting there now, and it’s taken us this long to start to believe it, but that’s the incredible part. Felicity: But it is scary. It’s a different way of grazing, and suddenly, you’re taking the whole plan. You wonder, what if we have a drought next year, will it come back? What if it doesn’t work; then we’ve lost grazing that land for next year. So, it’s a commitment and it is scary, but it’s working. And what helped us is doing test plots with this grazing plan. We said, ok, we’re only going to put 80 acres into it, so if something goes drastically wrong, we’re going to be okay next year. And then again, just having a little faith in nature, like, knowing we’re not going to screw it up in 1 year, or the 20 days we’re going to be on that acre. We’re not going to screw it up; it’s been self-sustaining for hundreds of thousands of years, so just have a little faith in nature.

Thomas on his gelding Biscuit. (Photo credit: Thomas Hagan)

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 here did you learn this? W Thomas: We learned about the importance of grass through talking to people and then taking courses being offered by grazing experts and the research centers. We took a 6-day holistic management course that kind of got us in the door a bit. We were already focused on managing our grass at that point, and we just kept going to hear experts and learn more. I might go to 10 workshops or seminars a year—some might just be an afternoon; some a couple days—but they are all valuable. We’re very lucky, we have a lot of great workshops around here; we’re kind of a hub for that and a lot of people travel here to come to these courses, and a lot of times those guys will comment, “man, you’re lucky.” Pipestone offers a lot of courses; Brandon has tons, Miniota, Virden, as well; and we live in the middle of all that. There might be a 2-day course offered in the afternoons, and I think nothing of doing chores in the ­morning and heading to the course for the afternoon. You’ll go there and see people from Meadow Lake, and they’ve driven 8 hours and rented a hotel room; it’s a big deal for them. I think you will find that there’s not as many people putting on these courses in other provinces. We are lucky, and we have a guy in Shoal Lake, with Ducks Unlimited; that is huge in organizing these things. I guess we do focus a lot on education. It’s kind of important to talk about; like, we’re not really innovators because we don’t really come up with any of these ideas. The interesting thing about what’s going on right now is that we live in the information age and there’s so many people wanting to tell you these great ideas and share their knowledge. So you just have to gather them all up, just research enough because, in ranching, we have to understand microbiology, just enough to grow grass, which is just simple soil life, how soil health works. And a little bit of the genetics, you kind of have to understand a simple breeding scheme, like “like” breeds “like”; you don’t have to have your Master’s in population genetics, but it’s good to read some population genetics books. As far as economics goes, like to run the ranch, there’s a lot of beef economists; those guys are out there and we’ve hooked up with several of them. I just started reading articles by a guy who works for Deseret Ranches, which is one of the biggest ranching companies in North America. He writes monthly articles about how to do it and how to make money. So, I just reached out to him and emailed him and he was really friendly, and lots of others too, because, it turns out, a lot of people, when you talk about their life’s work, they generally want to talk to you about it and are excited about it; they want to pass on what they know. So he helped us on the economics, and, next thing you know, he’s sitting at our kitchen table. He’s from Utah, and they brought him up overnight to put on a course in Pipestone, right down the road. He needed a place to stay while here, so he stayed with us. He gave us a computer program that’s probably worth $2000. He just transferred it over to a computer, and it’s been great for Felicity who does the numbers really good with this program. So it feels like you don’t have to be an innovator; you just have to research and look into things, because ranching right now, there’s so many moving parts. Again, you have to be a bit of a soil biologist to grow grass, you have to be a bit of an economist or businessman to run the business side of it, and maybe there’s a social aspect to it, dealing with people; there’s all these moving parts, and so you dive into each one of those and it branches off into five different areas, so you’ll learn that. It feels like you’re still that old farmer/rancher mentality that you’re jack of all trades, you know, but it’s changing, and it’s interesting. Felicity: It’s very hard to look at this as an actual business and look at each little thing as there’s different tasks within different things. He excels at different things and I excel at different things, and so we’re just grabbing a little knowledge from all these different areas. It’s not like you just need to make sure the cow is fed and then you fatten the calf and away we go; it’s so much more. Look at somebody that runs a shoe store. He doesn’t just need to know what shoes are all about; he needs to

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know how to manage employees, do some financing, how to market. It’s the exact same; maybe it’s a bigger picture here, so learning all of that and taking as much as you can to educate yourself helps you. Genetics Thomas: What I’ve been thinking about genetics is that we’re realizing that when you get into this grazing system and you’re managing your grass like this, first of all, you need an animal that does really well on forage, on grass. Which seems odd to people from the outside looking in, but a lot of cows these days are 7 months on dry feed, silage grain, and 5 months of the year on grass. So, a lot of their time isn’t actually on grass. Some cattle, especially people that are raising bulls, because it’s kind of gotten to be a lead and feed type of a program, well, they look really good…anyway, there’s lots of guys that raise bulls that are way better at that than we are obviously…but the point of it is when you study things like ­population genetics, you realize that form follows function. So, what you do is you put the function in front of them first, so our system is developed on grazing real grass 9 months of the year, which is a lot in Manitoba because we don’t have good winters. So, 9 months is what we’re trying to get to, basically January first and start up again April first, which we have never done yet. We’ve come really close, really close, with some supplement. So, you need an animal that can do that and gain weight and rebreed, because we know with a cow, her fertility is driven by her body condition, so she has to be able to put weight on in this system. They can all do it, but what they will do is, just like a deer in a bad year, they won’t rebreed; they’ll just take care of themselves first. And your conception rate has everything to do with being profitable in ranching because as your conception rates drop, the product you’re selling, which is calves or yearlings, goes down. So, you have the exact same expense but less product to sell, so you’re constantly looking at your conception rates. Am I spending the right amount to get them bred? You try to spend the least amount, but you’re trying to keep the conception rate high enough that it’s acceptable, optimum. So, the breeding program, where that comes in, is as you adapt your animal better to this system, she’s just going to perform better on less feed, which is less money. Now when you start reading about these programs that these guys are doing, they’ll close the herd down, no outside genetics brought in, and what they’ll do is they don’t try to cull the bottom out like we would traditionally do; they take the top and use it to rebreed with. So, they’ll find bulls, females, but mainly bulls because they spread far more genetic material that a female can, just mathematically speaking. So, they’ll find that bull that’s superior in that system. Can he go out and graze 8, 9, 10 months of the year, and then in the other 3 or 4 months of the year, live on not much and look good? Thrive essentially, not just survive but thrive, so that’s what we’re doing. That’s where the genetics are kind of leading us. There’s already people doing this; again, this is not my idea; none of these things are my idea. We can run a breeding program really well; I mean, if you look at the dog world, that’s a great way to look at it; you can make any dog you want. I mean a Chihuahua can breed with a Great Dane; they’re the same species; they’re just a breed within a species, but they’re totally different. And those all come from wild dogs, from coyotes, and wolves and foxes, and we bred those—humans did. We domesticated them and you can take them a long ways. You just look for traits that you like, and you find a male and a female that both have those traits and you breed them together, and then you keep carrying something on and you can get them to do something. So, the point of it is maybe we’re going in the wrong direction with cattle, and if we are, shouldn’t the direction always be driven by what’s most economically beneficial, because we’re trying to make money, and we’re trying to do it on grass. So that’s the system. And again, I’ll just touch on the race horse industry, another great way to look at it; form before function means when you have a breeding program like the Thoroughbred business, what they do is, let’s just say that every time you want to find out who is superior in the system you’re using, you put them in a competition. The competition

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in ranching is can you get bred year in, year out, from the time you’re 2 years old till the time you’re 10. Can you do that? Once you do that, you’ve proven you can perform. In the race horse industry, it’s racing. They put them on the track, and the stud that wins gets to breed all the mares, and the mares that he will breed will be all the mares that won the races. So, you’re constantly breeding faster and faster animals. The opposite of that would be, in the race horse industry, if they looked at the horse and said man, I think that’s the fastest one, and then somebody judged it and said this is the system for how you come up with the fastest horse, instead of just racing them. And that’s what’s kind of happened in the cattle business. We went to “look at this bull, I think that this bull, he’s what you need.” And it’s kind of like we’ve decided what a cow or bull should look like, and then we’ve just decided that that is the superior one due to its appearance rather than anything else. Well, that puts form before function. You’re looking at something and saying that’s what it should look like, and then putting it in the function and letting it go, when it should be form follows function. That’s how evolution has worked. Animals have evolved their form to fit a function in an ecosystem. That’s how it works. That’s how breeding systems will work for the next thousands of years, even if we’re gone. So that’s kind of a mouthful, and I probably didn’t explain it very well. But it’s basically just breeding a cow that really thrives in the system, and you would think, well, how far away can a cow get from that system? Well, it’s pretty impressive how far they can get away. I mean, again, just look at a Chihuahua. They’re not that old in the grand scheme of things and they don’t look anything like a wolf. Species at risk We first start hearing about species at risk through the  Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation (MHHC), and more again through SARPAL. We weren’t really concerned with protecting their habitat at first; it was just really a byproduct of what we’re doing. I mean, it turns out that when you manage in this style, you benefit everything from your cows to the birds to the rabbits to the snakes to the microbiology to, you know, everybody involved benefits. That’s the difference between biodiversity and a monoculture. That’s what we learned, and this grazing management is essential to biodiversity, right? So that’s what happens. We manage our ranch this way for cows and the healthy habitat for everything is just a byproduct. Our system, managing really intensively, well, when you leave a paddock, the cattle have essentially done their job, and that is to disturb it—that’s really what they’ve done. They’ve cycled some nutrients. They ate some grass. They’ve pooped it out and peed it out, back on the ground, fed life and soil. They’ve punched a bunch of old grass, residue. They punch that into the ground, and when they leave and you keep them off there, that’s where the magic happens. When I say that’s where the magic happens, one of the first things that happens is that they left a bunch of manure behind. Well the flies move in and they put their fly larvae in there. So then the birds come, because birds love that, and that’s what people that are managing really intensively with big herds are seeing. Flocks of cowbirds and birds of those kind are following the cows around because that’s how, generally, that’s how it works. Animals follow food and when there’s no food, they don’t live there. Go to a desert and see how many animals are there. They need food and water and shelter just like we do—they learned that quickly. So, the birds come in and then the birds poop out this high-nitrogen stuff, and then little shoots of grass start to come up, and the deer, they like that, or maybe the deer want to browse rather, and they come in, and they eat the willows that are there and then maybe the… well, every animal has the thing that they like. But as time goes on, the other flowers come up, and the bees come in and they start to pollinate them and the legumes, but the grass explodes from this disturbance. So, when you come back, especially in the rainy season or the growing season—if you come back 20 days later after you’ve disturbed these paddocks—they are green, lush green, and growing; they are thriving, exploding. It looks like you fertilized it. So, you’ve got to kind of envision all of this happening on a large scale.

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Like if you think about the African Serengeti when those buffalo, Cape buffalo, Water buffalo, whatever, they’re out there and they look like what our bison would have looked like here. It’s a great look, you know. They’ve got predators following them around and they have a rotation that they do. They essentially go to the most mineral-­rich soils to have their calves, and they eat that good grass and then they start their migration. So, what happens is all these animals that follow those grazers, they call the grazers a keystone species for a reason, because all these other animals have evolved to eat before them, after them, or on what they’ve left. So, these massive roaming herds, like at the Serengeti, I think that they find the zebra come in because horses like short little grass; they come in and nip the little regrowth—they love that—10 days later. Millions of birds are following them picking through the dung. The predators are obviously following them because that’s what they eat. They’re managing the breeding program so the weak and the sick are gone—they’re done; they’re not re-­breeding. And so, when you do this with your cows you just don’t save habitat for other animals, you create it, like you create their food source. But again, when you see these herds get into really tight groups and be managed really intensively, it’s far different than when you see 25 cows on a quarter section. That, to be honest, is just not getting it done. They’re going to overgraze, they’re going to keep habitat from growing for other animals, and they’re doing an okay job and not a great job. So, you kind of have to envision these tight little groups or envision what bison used to look like here, and what it looks like in the Serengeti—just look up a documentary. They’re just in a tight group and there’s millions of them. I think they calve in 35 days or something like that. It’s like a cycle and a half. You would think of them taking all year to calf, but not at all; their up and gone. It’s incredible. We plan these seasons and how many of us can get a calving season in that short period of time? Well, the species that are at risk are at risk because their habitat has been ruined. So, what we’re doing is bringing that back—we have to, through grazing. And it’s like how winterfat, that plant is essentially gone because of grazing practices, overgrazing and farming. And it’s in the latent seed bank. I think they know seeds can live something like 10,000 years. I’m not a soil scientist so don’t quote me on that one. But if you create the right environment for that plant, it will come up out of the latent seed bank and it will grow, so there’s probably winterfat in there that will come up if it’s intensively grazed enough, after enough years, but when you wipe that out, there might have been an entire species that just lived on winterfat. When you wipe out that food source, that’s how you make something go extinct. So, when you start bringing this stuff back, they start coming back, right? We are talking to a seed expert about trying to grow winterfat here again. We’d like to try it. We don’t know if it would grow this far east, but they definitely know it was in southwestern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta. That’s where the old timers settled when they trailed those cattle north—that’s what they followed, the winterfat. That’s why the Matador is where the Matador is; they landed there. I think that a lot of people in grazing management, and not holistic management people, but people that are looking at taking a really holistic approach to this, they’re realizing that, say you have one species, like a Burrowing owl and you say, well, they like grass that’s 6 inches tall, and then you try to graze it that way for that owl. Well, if you try to just be good for that one animal, you’re going to miss so many other beneficial animals. So, instead, just get the cows moving and give the land adequate rest and this stuff will happen, holistically—habitat for everything.  ou’ve won some awards for your management? Y We did win the TESA, The Environmental Stewardship Award, from the Manitoba Beef Producers, for just working with the environment on our ranch, and, just, the whole ranching operation. We won it for the way we graze. The Manitoba Beef Producers gave it out at their AGM (annual general meeting) and Meyers Norris Penny sponsors the award. Also, we’re in the Verified Beef Project in Manitoba, which is about traceability, tracking our cattle and being accountable for tracking which cattle on our

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ranch have antibiotics. I think in the last 5 years or so, people that had won this award were a part of that program as well. So that’s starting to become a bigger deal, the traceability of our livestock. SARPAL We joined the SARPAL program because they brought a lot to the table for us; it was a no-­brainer. We had more fencing plans and, ­financially, it was a huge help. For us it might have taken us 7 years to get all that fencing done, and the dugouts, and with SARPAL we got it all done in a year. It was huge. It took our grazing management from step “A” to step “F” already. That’s what we like the most about the SARPAL program. It fits us to a “T.” It’s exactly what we’re doing, you know, and honestly, we didn’t change anything at all. We were already going to do it. This just allowed us to do it all way faster, and then, just to top it off, the local SARPAL program manager is just so easy to deal with and willing to work with us and has become our family friend. The incentives in SARPAL were the fencing and dugouts for us. That’s what we were planning on doing anyway, so it was wonderful and it just sped up the process for us, and it was free. We could always use more fencing; we used their allotted amount, like their maximum amount; and we’re still talking about doing another 8 miles of fencing this year, cross fencing. That, for us, is huge because it lets us manage that grazing part more, and it just makes our life a lot easier, and you can manage it even better. We could spend the same SARPAL money we did the first time; we could do it again, easily. So, if they expand the program to offer more, we’d do more. The Environmental Farm Plan used to offer a lot of off-site watering systems and things like that, and they got a lot of people solar-powered watering systems, which is good, but the fencing is by far the most effective way to sequester carbon, if that’s what we’re after, if we’re really trying to manage for species at risk and build these healthy ecosystems. The fences work because then you can keep cattle in an area and you can keep cattle out of an area; water is also great in that sense. We talked about doing an above-­ground pipeline, so that we’d be able to pipe clean water to our animals wherever they are located. We have some dugouts that, depending on the year, sometimes they dry up and might be really muddy water. It’s not good to have to use that same dugout for too many paddocks at the same time. They might be on it for 2 weeks—that one water source, drinking out of it—so we need clean accessible water sources to prevent sickness. I think we might take our water for granted a bit here, because we can just dig a hole and get water. It’s not always great water, but when you get talking to some of these people that have hundred foot wells, they can’t move their cattle every day because they’re so far from water. Obviously, you pipe it to them. So clean water is very important. Another incentive they might offer is carbon sequestration. Measure how much carbon a person has living in the soil and pay them for that amount, but don’t just one-size-fits-all pay everybody, because some people have desertification of their land happening, their losing organic matter slowly, and then other people are working their tail off to sequester carbon. Those are both ends of the spectrum—both ends of the scale. So maybe you should reward the people that are really working their butt off to put the carbon in the ground and are really doing it, and it’s a thing that’s not that hard to measure, so why wouldn’t we? Support for that would incentivize other guys to change behavior, their range management as well. And if you really want to get somebody to do it, pay them for the carbon. I mean, it’s almost the ultimate economy. Anyway, that’s how it should work, especially if you’re taxing other industries. If you’re taking money from somebody and trying to get them to put less carbon out there, you should be paying money to the people that are pulling it in and storing it—it only makes sense. Ultimately, I think it’s going to be the biggest thing that changes it; if you really believe carbon is a problem and we need to pull it out of the air and store it in the soil, then it’s going to come down to ranchers that will be the ones to do it. SARPAL changed the way we managed our rangeland in that it made it easier and quicker to do what we had planned to do. It was going to be maybe 7 years to do this cross fencing and water, and

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with SARPAL we did it in 1 year. So, instantly we were able to make the changes we planned for. Our stock density went up, and we were able to essentially move them onto a piece of land and hold them in a tighter group, and keep them off of the grass for the right amount of time. So, any time you do that, you grow more grass. You get them in a smaller group and control the time they’re in there, and then give the range adequate rest—that’s how it’s done. So SARPAL allowed us to do it, do what we’d planned anyways, without imposing or changing our range management plans, which we appreciated. I think SARPAL will make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat if the ranchers manage it right. To play the devil’s advocate a bit, if you have a quarter section that you traditionally put 25 cows on—I use that because that’s a great example; a lot of people do that—if you put one cross fence on it, so you have 2 80-acre paddocks; that really doesn’t actually do anything, as far as grazing management goes. That’s kind of been proven. It’s a great start, and I guess that’s what you think of as, you’re planting a seed, the person starts to realize, hey if I just rotate a little bit, and then next thing you know, they have 4 paddocks, and next they have 8 and then 16, right, and then they start to make a difference. So, it’s kind of one of those things that a little bit is great, and I guess when you do a little bit, you’re planting a seed, and you’re hoping that it takes off, so I guess it still is a great thing to get people managing for the best results. Support from the beef production industry, the public, and government Regarding the beef production industry, well, I guess I would like to see more of what’s happening right now, and more science proving that some management practices are extremely beneficial for the environment, and probably essential, and I’d like to see hard science on that. Regarding the government and the general public supporting our industry, and our ranch and our community, well, I think they do support us and have done a fair bit in my eyes. Maybe we’re young and naive and don’t remember the old times or something, but so far we’ve been pretty happy. It seems like if you’re willing to put in the time and do some research, there’s something out there to help you, and there’s not a lot of other industries that can say that. My sister has a clothing store in Virden, and in that industry the government is not sticking their hand out all the time saying, here, go to a course on marketing or here, go to a course on setting up your store, merchandising, whatever—all of the things she needs to know how to do to run a successful business. We have that help now, so sometimes I feel like, jeez, they’re doing enough. I kind of like less government interference anyways, but maybe I’m wrong. Felicity: I think we’re lucky and if they want to offer financial support or educate us more, why not? We’re going to make use of it. And you know, do I think what we’re doing here can be beneficial to everybody? Yes, I do. If schools want to start bringing kids out, educating them on what we’re doing here, for sure, our door is always open. I’d say we’re really lucky how open everyone is in this industry, especially those that are trying to get into regenerative agriculture. Like, welcoming each other out to your ranches and being open to saying “yeah, I tried that; it didn’t work.” This is what happened, you know—don’t do that; try this instead. And the connections we’ve created in the last 3 years or so have been huge. We’re talking to a guy ranching south of Winnipeg who’s trying new things, some off the wall things; like he’s grazing cattails for the winter. So, he’s doing a little bit of that and you’re trying a little bit of this, and you guys talk about if it’s working or not. And that’s great because I think that also takes us leaps and bounds forward, because we don’t have to try each and every program out ourselves, so that’s been wonderful. Just meeting people, sharing, and absorbing as much knowledge as we can. Thomas: I guess if there’s anything that we’d want the government to do is just facilitate that. You don’t even need that much money, just get the speaker and give them a room and invite everybody for free. Let them come in, give them some lunch, and if the rancher doesn’t come to do it, that’s their

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own fault. That’s where I kind of sometimes worry about, when you hand money out to people for the wrong reasons; well I’m getting off on a tangent here, but it is taxpayer dollars, and our taxes do continue to go up, because we have all these programs. So, we have to be careful. On the one hand, we like to get money back, but on the other hand, we sure don’t like to give away 33% of the money that we make, and that hasn’t gone down in a long time and it’s not going to. So, I just think that every industry needs to take a good, long, hard look at what they think that they need to do privately and what does the government need to do? You know, maybe the government needs to facilitate this stuff more. Anyway, that is a bit of a tangent. I think the best use of money is if we can somehow figure out a way to quantify—which I think is carbon, and it may be something else—but if the goal is to do something good for the environment, like bring species at risk back, or have clean water, sequester carbon, all of these things that we know are great; let’s find a way to quantify that and pay people for that. Let there be a subsidy for that, or I don’t know if it’s a subsidy, but whatever you call it, pay people for performance. I think other industries have done that and that’s what we should do. I don’t think we should have this kind of shotgun spray effect where we hope we hit some of the right things. Anyway, I don’t know, I’m not in government and I don’t understand how it all works. I just hope that there’s some sort of way that you can get paid for these things, because, literally, if it’s a massive problem that we have all this extra carbon floating around which we pretty much know it is a problem, there’s very few people that can do anything about that, and we are one of them. Well, I’m not saying I should be paid to save the world, but at the same time, wouldn’t that be a good place to put money? To incentivize people to do it, you know. We have thousands and thousands of acres of grain land that are not pulling carbon, and that could be grasslands that aren’t being grazed and are pulling in a fraction of the amount of carbon that it could be. Let’s get this done. There are grasslands that are government owned that would pull in far more carbon if they were grazed properly, so pay guys like me. I’ll take a herd of a thousand cows over there and graze it. I think let’s get it done, close those gaps. I’d like to see science and the people on the ground work more closely together. There’s been a disconnect where one party always think they know more. Some ranchers complain about scientists making policy, ok, but don’t forget that we’ve relied on science. We love things like antibiotics and electricity, and all of these things that we all greatly benefit from. So, let’s get together more and find a way to get the science being done on people’s places that are already doing it, and are in a real-world scenario, and everybody benefits. It could be an income stream for a person. I mean, maybe a scientist pays a rancher $3 an acre to be there doing research or something. He’s building his career on our land, and how many times does he get the opportunity to have a steady place to come where he’s welcome? Hagan Valley Ranch as a scientific opportunity I think it’s a great opportunity to have researchers come out and study our range because it’s in the easement; it is well suited to be a long-term research project. It’s become one of my life goals at this point. I don’t want to do all of this stuff and have nobody measure it. I guess I feel very passionate about it, but more to the point that I see a lot of how fake meat is becoming a very viable product. Veganism is getting very strong, and I’m okay with not eating meat, but I think that the propaganda that they put out about cows being bad for the environment is not right. Cows can be good for the environment, not they are; cows that are run properly are good for the environment; cows that aren’t run properly are bad for the environment, just to touch on that. But we need to measure the benefits of how good can a cow be for the environment so that we can go out and say, hey guys listen, you have a carbon problem and we’re the only real answer. And that’s why I want the scientists to come and study our working ranch.

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I get a little frustrated. I love science and research. We’ve built most of what we’re doing around science. I’ve been to a lot of universities and listen to a lot of people, and I get a little bit frustrated that I don’t know why they won’t study real-life scenarios. When you have 3200 acres here, and I don’t think that’s massive in the grand scheme of things, there’s ranches that are way bigger than ours, but it’s a heck of a lot bigger than a 10-acre plot behind the university. So, not only is it a real-life scenario, but on the other side of that, it’s a unique scenario because we’re locked into this easement where I can’t break my range. I mean my grazing is going to change year to year because, you know, sometimes it doesn’t rain as much, and I keep my stocking rate a tick higher than it should be because we just need to make money, but it’s a pretty stable management style overall. And I know they like controlled studies, but I think we could control it enough that they could do a 10-year, 20-year, or let’s do a 30-year study to see, maybe, can we increase our organic matter 4%? I mean, I think it was previously thought that it took a hundred years to build an inch of topsoil. So, what if we could do it in ten? Wouldn’t that be great? I’m saying this because I know people that have, right? And there is science being done. At Texas A&M there’s a South African; he was just at Guelph, Richard Teague is his name, and he’s doing science on regenerative agriculture. He’s studying systems where people are really intensifying their grazing. Another thing to touch on is that a lot of times when we see studies on carbon sequestration, water infiltration, and all of the benefits that come with grazing, they’re not grazing them intensively enough, and that’s the problem, because nothing really happens when you do it at really low intensities. I shouldn’t say nothing, but it might take, maybe 200 years to do what nature would have done in about 10 years. When we think of the system that we’re mimicking, bison and wolves, and everyone’s heard of this, and they kind of get sick of hearing it, but it’s real. But you can’t study 25 cows on a quarter section for a year, and see what happened and think that that’s anywhere close to having three million bison come in and absolutely decimate an entire valley and then leave and not come back for a year and a half. Those aren’t the same system. So, it’s the details, and that’s what we want to be a part of; let’s study this thing when it’s really intense. We want to put 400 yearlings on half an acre for 3 hours, and then they won’t come back for 6 months. Well, let’s measure that, because there’s really something that’s going to happen there, you know, and that’s the difference in regenerative agriculture. What if we find out we can sequester, you know, three times the carbon in half the time? Well, then we should be funding people to put yearlings in groups of a thousand and put them on one acre for 2 hours, right? Because that’s the point. What if…well, that’s my spiel, because I hope it gets me a scientist—I would love that. What do you see as the future of your ranch? We’re excited to see the next 5 and 10 years because I think we’ve really started to put this whole thing together. It feels like it’s been 10 years just getting all this information, and we are putting it all into use, and we feel like we’re just about to jump on that on-ramp where instead of going 60 miles an hour, you’re able to go 120. So that would be great, and we have another generation that we’re hoping can take this even further, if they’re interested. So, if we can take it as far as we can, and they can do their part, if our kids are interested, we’d be very supportive of that, have them take over our ranch, or if they want to go start their own. We learn more every year, so who knows what we’ll know in 10 years. Hopefully we get good amounts of rain, and the grass grows like we think it can, and we’re thriving—the stocking rate increases. Hopefully there’s a scientist wandering around here taking soil samples…well, we’d just be living this lifestyle with our family, and maybe, if they wanted, the kids taking over the ranch eventually.

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Final thoughts Felicity: I know for us, this is the life we both love, the cattle and the cattle industry. Thomas has really fallen in love with the biology side, and I love the economic side. The whole business works great for us because we both like separate things, but then we love the whole industry as a whole too, and raising kids in this lifestyle is amazing. We’re so lucky. But we also made our own luck I guess. We worked hard and thought about it, and we don’t get to go on elaborate trips every year or take 3-week holidays throughout the summer, but that is what we’ve chosen. And every day we get to have the kids be a part of it, whether it’s him and I going out and taking down a wire and moving the cows that day, or helping brand some calves, or... all of it. And we love horses and rode as kids and still do, and now our kids have that opportunity as well. I rode horses in 4-H, showed heavy horses, did some barrel racing and pleasure riding. Thomas did steer wrestling and team roping, and we trained horses together for a couple of years, so horses are a big part of our life. We still use horses to ranch, we enjoy it, and they are useful, but sometimes it is more time-consuming to take horses to do some jobs. It can be a detriment time- wise, but lifestylewise, we balance it out. The other thing is that with us moving the cattle every day, or multiple times a day, we can be driving down the road, and they recognize your vehicle and they are at the gate ready to be moved. So sometimes you literally pull up, open the gate, and within 20 seconds, the whole herd is in the next paddock. So, by the time you ride out there and do all that, it’s way more time. But that’s the beauty of having that option; if it’s a crummy day, I’ll take the quad; if it’s a beautiful day, I’ll take a horse.

Thomas taking his son Rory for a ride on his homemade, horse-drawn, fencing sled. (Photo credit: Felicity Hagan)

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Thomas and Felicity Hagan with their son Rory and daughter Ryan. (Photo credit: the Hagans)

G&B Farms Ltd. Manitoba Gord (Father) and Colin (Son) Adams Combined Interview Tell me about the Hhstory of your ranch Colin: I started ranching in 2010, but he’s been ranching a lot longer. Gord: I grew up where Phil is, that’s my brother, and since I was a kid, I’ve always been around farming and ranching cattle, and both Phil and I used to be in the PMU (Pregnant Mare Urine) business. When I got married in 1985, I moved here. This is my father-in-law’s place, he was a grain farmer, and it was my wife Brenda’s grandpa’s place. The property has been in the family for generations, and our family has been in this area for generations as well. My grandpa Adams grew up south of here and west of Turtle Mountain, and they homesteaded there and then they moved to Deloraine; and my dad started ranching at my grandma’s place, where Phil lives now. Our place here used to be a grain farm, but now it’s only cattle and we sow some corn for feed and have some land in hay. I got into ranching because I just like working with livestock, always have. Then when Colin started in with us, he didn’t really want to grain farm, and we didn’t have that much grain land, and it was getting to be that we had to get bigger or get out, so Colin decided to run some cows. We had some cows here and we had the PMU mares still, and so we bought some more cows and then when the PMU thing blew up, and we were out of that. We got more cows and we just kept going from there.

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Colin: I had always wanted to be a rancher ever since I was a kid. I’ve been around livestock my whole life, mostly horses, but he had a few cows here when I was younger, and I just enjoyed watching them grow up and raising your own cattle. My dad rodeoed and I started with bucking horses in 2005 and I roped in high school and college. I won a college scholarship in Montana for rodeo that paid my full tuition and everything. I roped and rode broncs for 3 years and they trained us. It was fun and I liked to explore something different, get away from home, and free tuition and a bit of pay. I guess there’s just more opportunity down there, so it seemed like the thing to do. Gord: I rode broncs and team roped, but I didn’t do it to the level that Colin does. I stayed in Manitoba, did a bit in Saskatchewan, and we used to go down to North Dakota, but we didn’t go too far from home. I judge rodeos now. Tell me about your operation Colin: Our range is a mix, with quite a bit of native grass. We have seven quarters at Pipestone and most of it, other than 60 acres, is native. The rest of our range is a mix, some native here and there, and some around home here is tame grass. Some of the lease land has got some native grass, not a lot, but some of it is native, and then up in the hills, there’s quite a bit of bush. Gord: We run a cow-calf and backgrounder operation here, and we can run 25 cows to a quarter on our range. We do rotational grazing on pretty much all of our land other than one quarter up in the hills, which is a big priority for us, managing grass. We want to just kind of help the grass out, and it defends against drought. We do the twice-over grazing system of rotational grazing. I heard out west they might not rotational graze, but I always heard that the one thing the old guys did out there was to take half and leave half they called it; so they grazed half the grass and left half. They were rotational grazing sort of, but they did it in a different way maybe. We just went to South Dakota last weekend, and I was talking to a guy down there and they have areas that they might graze this year, and then they might leave it for a year and then they come back and graze it 2 years later, or you know, whatever. They have different ways of doing that kind of stuff, but it still sounds like everybody’s trying to rest their grass. That’s the big thing really—you gotta rest your grass. Colin: We’ve noticed that it has worked because the last couple of years have been on the drier side, compared to 2011 when it was really wet around here, and our grass held up a lot longer than some other guys that were just doing your conventional grazing where they didn’t rotate or rest their grass. They were off the land a lot sooner than we were. So rotational grazing works for us; lets us stay on the range longer. Gord: If you’ve only got a couple inches of grass, you’ve only got 2 inches of root and it can’t reach the water. That’s been proven; that’s one thing they teach you in the twice-over grazing workshop, is that whatever is above ground, there’s that much root below ground. We took some samples, and we dug down so we could see how much more root we had since we started on the system. It really helps to see the proof right there that it’s working. Colin: When we started, some of the older generation in cattle around that area there; they just couldn’t believe how much grass we were leaving behind—mind you that was back when it was raining a lot and there was lots of grass. Gord: They had a twice-over grazing tour one day and one of the places they stopped was our pasture. We had a spring paddock that we had just put the cattle on at the first of May, and then at the first of June, we got off it—that’s all it’s for—and we run a quite a lot of head on that small chunk for that month. But anyway, the one guy that was there, he said, you know, I really like this idea, but, he said it won’t work for me, and we asked why and he said, because if my dad sees that much grass out there, he’s going to cut it with the haybine; he’s not leaving it there! Colin: It took us a bit to get onto, but we’ve bought into it now.

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Gord: We’ve got spring paddocks that we use everywhere pretty much up in the mountains. We have five quarters in one spot there and we kind of mob graze it. We have a spring paddock that we go to in May and maybe into June a little bit. We just kind of watch it and see, and then the rest of the paddocks, we just rotate through them once through the season, and then they’re left. So then by the next year when you come around, there’s a good growth started, so it seems to be helping. There’s some pretty big clay hills up there that get pretty dry if you’re not careful. Where did you learn to manage like that? We learned to graze that way through different things, like there’s been a couple guys that put on some courses in this area—that helps—and just learning from other ranchers and other people, other producers. One of the courses we both took was Lee Manske twice-over grazing. He’s been studying grassland and grazing for probably close to 40 years now. He’s at Dickinson, North Dakota, at a university. There’s lots of different ideas out there. There’s Allan Savory’s mob grazing, and you know, there’s different ways and I don’t think any one way is wrong. It just suits different people, the way their operation is set up. Like the mob grazing is pretty tough if you’re far away from your pastures because cows move every day or every 2 days or whatever. So, for us twice-over seems to work good; like Pipestone’s 3/4 of an hour away from us, so it’s pretty tough to be there every day, and moving cows, well it would be a lot of running around. We’re still there once a week for sure and sometimes more often. Usually in the spring, we’re there quite often, and maybe later, in the fall, it might be every couple of weeks or something. Early on calves could get sick, but once they’re older, they’re usually pretty good. The thing about the twice over, you move them say 10 days the first time and then it’s double the next time, so the second round is a lot longer. It works good for us. We’ve noticed a difference in our weaning weights. The last 6 or 7 years, we weighed the calves going onto the grass, and we weighed them coming off of the grass to keep track of it. Colin: We used to check them when they’re calving out in the 60 acres on horseback. We’d ride out every couple hours and check them. But now we’re getting more head, so we ended up having to use the side by side. Gord: That and technology. Technology We have the computer system and it all goes in the side by side, so we can record all the data when the calves are born. Colin: I’m the younger generation, so this is nothing against his generation, but I’ve implemented a lot of technology. Now we have two tags and sex and birth weight and everything. I have the scale system where you swipe their RFID (radio frequency identification), so we kind of needed to buy the side by side for all that kind of stuff. If we have to bring a calf in, we put it in the calf sleigh and drag it behind the side by side, but we have used horses to pull the sleigh too, and as far as sorting and stuff, we still use horses. Our cows calve on grass, so they’re out there and they don’t get worked as much as some other places, so they’re kind of a little more rangy. I wouldn’t say there’s a lot; most of our cows are good, but the odd one will be kind of grumpy, the mama, when we need to deal with the calf, so we built this cage on the side by side to separate them. It protects you from the grumpy mama. And we lifted our hydraulic chute and put load cells under it. We just finished weighing calves yesterday because we’re getting ready to sell, so we sorted them and I have everything on my phone. I just log in. It’s a software program out of Texas. You just have a username and a password, and then you can log in, as long as you have an Internet connection. So, if we’re out treating a calf on the range, I can log in and record what I treated that calf for.

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Gord: I guess the other thing that we’ve done here is that 5 years ago, we got into the Verified Beef program, so everything we do is recorded. Colin: At that time Verified Beef had some funds. If we became a part of the program, they paid for, well, we use the scale system to pay and the government paid for over half I guess. So that’s how I got my scanner, and this, it kind of looks like an iPad, but you could plug the load cells into it and it’ll record weights, treatments. Well you can pretty much record anything you want on it. Species at risk Gord: I started thinking about species at risk and conserving their habitat about 3 or 4 years ago. I was on the Beef Producer Board, so I got some of that information through there and then Tom Moran—he helps us some here—and we had all our land signed up in the Habitat Heritage agreement so that it has to stay in grassland, and then they started the SARPAL program. Then we heard Christian Artuso; they call him “the bird guy.” we heard him talk at a couple of our meetings, so that’s where I learned about it first. But, you know, I think cattle guys have kind of always been doing that stuff. It’s just never gotten recognized. Cattle guys have always had habitat there for them, and we never really thought about it, and our grazing systems helps keep that habitat healthy. On our land at Pipestone, they did bird studies or bird counts there long before the SARPAL program, like 10 years ago. So, you learn more about it when these people that were with a university or conservation program, whatever, contact you to do studies on your land. And then once Christian came, he kind of got us into it a lot heavier. Colin: I learned about species at risk just following along with my dad, through him being on the Beef Producer Board and through Tom, with him helping us. He knows a bit and explains to me about some of the species at risk; especially when you’re out checking pasture, you notice all that stuff when you’re out there. But like my dad said, when we think about protecting and conserving species at risk and their habitat, it’s wrapped up in how we manage our grass to be the best for our cows, not grazing it right down to nothing; if it’s good for the cows, it’s good for other species. And we don’t touch trees; we try to keep it natural, we try to grow some here. Gord: Well, I think that’s like with any rotational grazing; I don’t know. You’d have to ask Christian, but I think that it helps the birds that like the different habitats, that like short grass or long grass or whatever—we provide it. Whether you’re mob grazing or twice-over grazing, you get different stages of grass. SARPAL We joined the SARPAL program because it helped pay to upgrade our fence; that would be one thing. That was a good incentive for us. The fence needed to be replaced, and for us to do seven quarters, well that ain’t happening in 1 year. Like on our own, it would be, you know, a little bit here and a little bit there. But then when you’ve got a program like SARPAL that can help the rancher and get it all done within a reasonable time, that helps. It’s kind of a win for both. It helps us, and it ensures that the wildlife’s going to have a place to stay, conserves that habitat. And we didn’t have to change anything, we were doing—that’s the best thing. We had to replace the fence anyway, so this was great that SARPAL helped us get it done, and we could do the program because we had managed our pasture well. There’s a lot of people, nowadays especially, that hear all these bad stories about cattle and the methane and all that, but nobody takes into account the carbon that’s sequestered in the grassland and the habitat we keep healthy for all wildlife. Christian, through Manitoba Beef Producers, made a video of our pasture last May. You can find it on their website. He explains coming over here to Canada and being a vegetarian because he was against beef, and then when he got studying the birds here, he found out that the habitat that was best

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for the birds was in our pastures that were grazed by cows and managed by us ranchers. He put 2 and 2 together and understood that if you lose this land, and nothing against the grain guys, but if it’s gets broken up, it’s lost, the birds aren’t going to be there, and they’ll lose that habitat for birds, for everything, forever, and it won’t come back. There’s not a lot of grassland left. The Guardians of the Grasslands video, by the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, it was done out in Alberta, it’s a really good video and it talks about how endangered the grassland is. Everybody talks about the rainforest disappearing, and nobody even recognizes that the grassland is the same way, and it’s an important, endangered ecosystem. I think SARPAL will make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat, for sure. I think it has to—it’s not detrimental; if it goes on, it will. But I don’t know how you’re going to be able to measure that. Like for the birds, because I’m not going to be here long enough to know if that species survived, unless that species, in the next 10 years, is gone. Twenty-five years from now, you might be able to tell, and it can’t hurt anything—that’s for sure. The alternative would definitely be harmful to species at risk. Christian can tell you that as soon as you cultivate the grasslands, they’re gone. He studied, in this area anyway, all the places where the grassland is and where the cultivated land is, and the birds don’t stay when the grassland’s been cultivated. Deer too, they have wildlife corridors they leave alone, and they get overgrown and you see the deer then move into the pasture with the cows for fresh grass. Nothing wants to eat old grass; it’s got to be rejuvenating to make it good; and all that old grass is a fire hazard as well. What I like the most about the SARPAL program is that they don’t put any constraints or anything on you. They don’t come in and say well, you can only do it this this way or that way. If they were against your system that you were using, I wouldn’t be in it. But they don’t do that in the SARPAL program; that’s not the goal they have in mind. I haven’t found anything I don’t like about the SARPAL program; I can’t think of anything against it. Actually, I was the producer on the board of directors for the Manitoba SARPAL program when we started to figure it out 3 years ago, and most of the program is in our area, this district, so I could give them my point of view. They consulted with local ranchers, and I don’t know—with the next round of SARPAL, I think there’s a few things that we might tweak— but I don’t think they had anything that anybody was really against. At our AGM last week, they talked about carbon sequestration in the grasslands, and they said the biggest problem with it is that right now, they don’t really have all the scientific facts as to how much it stores. I mean they have a pretty good idea, but it is not exact. It has to be science-based, but that might be something we could look at for the program in the future. The fencing they helped us with was a good incentive for us to get involved in it. Some other ranchers got help with water systems, like wells and dugouts. Colin: We got a solar-powered watering system through another program, but that would be something I’d be interested in because I like to keep my cattle from walking right into dugouts. It’s cleaner that way and it’s better for their feet, and on a hot day, they’re still going to want to go for a swim, but you know, you do what you can. So, there were a couple of options we were interested in, but at the time the fencing was our big concern. SARPAL is good, but I can’t say it changed the way I managed my rangeland. When you talk to Christian about that, it’s funny, because he says, and I would have never known this until I talked to him, but he said as far as the birds go, different species of birds have all different habitats and some birds like shorter grass and some like taller grass and some like the little shrubs to nest in. So, a range of habitats is probably the best you can get it, and that’s what we have. I think that Christian said there’s one or two pair of Burrowing owl left in this area, in the whole Blind Souris valley, so yeah, it’s important to help where we can. And people don’t realize that the beef industry is not a big huge money maker; it’s a lifestyle. In fact, you have a lot of years you wonder what you’re doing, but you’ve got to love what you’re doing I guess. It’s not a big money maker, so some of these deals like this that come along, like SARPAL,

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are a help. I saw a study at a meeting that the average 200 cow-calf guy makes $16,000 a year. They presented that at our AGM about 2 years ago. I’m not complaining, you know, but if there’s people out there that think we’re ranching and running cattle just to make a huge amount of dollars, that’s not good; it’s not right. There’s money to be made selling the land, but if we do that, the next guy will just break up the land and the grassland will be gone. That’s why we signed all of our grassland up in Habitat Heritage Agreements, so it can’t be broke or drained. It has to stay the way it is. We want to save it for future generations. When they gave out the TESA (The Environmental Stewardship Award) award this year, Thomas, who won it, he said the same thing; he’s just hoping to leave the land better than he got it for the next generation, whether it’s his family or someone else’s. Support from the government, the beef production industry, and the general Public Gord: As far as government goes, if we’re proven to help the birds and conserve habitat for species at risk, then they should support the ranchers doing that, keeping the grasslands unbroken and helping the species stick around. Also, I think the Verified Beef program will, in time, play a pretty big role in the beef production industry. I would like to see that, and I think it’s gonna happen either way, but people want to know where their food comes from and how its raised, and through the Verified Beef program, they can get that. Colin: I can log in here, search a calf, and I have everything I treated it for since the day it was born. So with the RFID government tag, they could make it so when you get a T-bone steak at the Co-op, you might be able to scan the bar code and know exactly what you’re eating. It benefits both of us if the consumer knows exactly what he’s eating. Gord: The public could be educated on our work. I saw something on Instagram the other morning with a very good picture of a hamburger and the caption said something about the new plant-based hamburger, and then on the bottom it says, our cows have been doing that for you since the beginning of time, because they eat grass and convert it into hamburger—plant based. They asked me to be on a panel at Ag Days and it was mostly producers that were there, but there were some city people there, and one guy wanted to know if beef was safe to eat. When it was my turn to answer I said, yeah, it is, we eat the same beef you do. I’m not going to feed my family something that’s going to harm them. Our cattle industry is well regulated and science based, and it’s a safe system. Colin: I’d like to remind the Canadian public that I have no problem if they don’t want beef in their diet, but if they do, then support us, the local producer, the same way I go to the local Co-op for something I need. We’re always stronger if everyone works together and supports each other, and it’s definitely good for the economy.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Colin: I’d like to get married and have kids and have them ranch this land. I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow (laughing), but that’s what I’d like for my future. Gord: Yeah, that was our plan, sort of, when we sat down and decided about entering the Habitat Heritage Agreement. I like that idea of leaving it the way it is right now, and he liked that idea. So, hopefully, the next generation, it’s there for them, and, hopefully, they think the same about it as well. When we discussed it before we did it, you know, we said we can only plan for these two generations; the other generation isn’t here. So, you just hope that that’s what they want when they get there, absolutely, but you can’t make any new grassland; it’s real long-term thinking. It’s kind of gotten to the point now, where I don’t know about all areas, but in this area I talked to a lot of people through being on the board, and everybody kind of says the same thing—you know, you’ve got to produce as much as you can with the land you have because expanding land now, it’s just unbelievable how much everything costs, and you just can’t do that. It costs three, four, five times

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what it used to be 20 years ago. So sure, I could sell and go to Arizona for the winter, but that isn’t going to help the next generation or the next generation after that. So, there’s very few people that want to do that—think like that. That’s one thing about the cattle industry; there’s very few people that don’t want to see the next generation take over. It’s kind of a different deal than some other parts of agriculture because; well, here’s an example; maybe 5 years ago, we bought a new baler and it was $20,000, and we were like 3 weeks making a decision whether we were going to get it for that price, which nowadays is nothing for a lot of people, urban people I suppose, who have that disposable money. I don’t think people in the city understand that part of our situation; I mean it’s not a huge, huge moneymaker. Colin: We’d also like to increase our numbers; right now we’d like more cows. Gord: Yeah, that, and I guess we have some plans for at home here, too. We’re planting some more trees for a windbreak here this spring, and trying to figure out a way of grazing longer in the year. We’re looking at intercropping with our corn to graze, is one of our plans. We have the portable windbreaks and move them around when we’re calving, but it’s not quite the same as your natural, and then you have to move them all the time. Final thoughts Colin: What I like most about ranching is watching your calves grow up; you start as a calf, get him to the weaning stage, and get him to the weight you’re kind of wanting. It’s just kind of nice watching them, and then your cow improvement plans, like how to improve the family and trying to improve that part of the herd; I like playing with that, thinking and planning. Gord: For me I like ranching as it let me be outdoors and I was never very good in school. I’d be looking out the window, and I couldn’t figure out why I was sitting in there if it was a nice day. So I just like being outside; I like the lifestyle; it seems kind of neat to see your calves grow and think about any improvements we want to do. Colin: We also like to ride horses when we sort cattle, and then if we’re treating something that needs treated, sick or whatever, we get to rope, so then we implement that in there too. We both enjoy it, riding horses, so we like that part too. I guess we like just going to check cows on a nice warm summer day on your horse…nothing beats that. Gord: Yeah, it’s nice and quiet.

HHH Ranch Manitoba Scott Hainsworth Interview  ell me the history of your ranch T Well, we’re looking at four generations on the land on both my mom and dad’s side. Mom came from a farming family, grain and cattle near Souris, and my dad’s from a grain and cattle family from Deloraine, about 35 minutes south of here. We actually farm right adjacent to where my mom grew up, and my uncle farms right down the road. I guess it would be just my mom and my uncle that came back to their farm roots; everybody else kind of went a different route. My dad’s two brother’s still farm on his family farm, and my grandpa’s 89 and he’s still out there. My mom has a log book of expenses on everything from my great grandpa’s farm back in like the early 1900s. So, there’s wages for the threshing crew, and what they went to town for. It’s kind of cool because all that stuff is in the town I live in now, so it’s kind of like retracing your roots, and they’re in there pretty deep. The coolest

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thing I read in there was that they had to take out a loan; I think it was like $126 over, like, 10 years, and it was for a piano, which would be the big centerpiece, and it’s actually still in my uncle’s house. So, our farm is a family operation; there’s myself and my two brothers. It was our dad’s, Michael’s, before. This operation is a third-­generation farm since we have kids coming through the ranks now; it’s our lifestyle; it’s something we have always been doing. I didn’t come back to it right off the hop. I went to school for a bit and my brothers went and worked on the rigs for a bit. Everybody kind of went away from it and then got back to it, you know. It’s in your blood. You can’t get away from it for too long. And now we’re all farming together. Some days are trying. Some days are good. It’s working with your family. But yeah, we’re making it work—that’s the main thing.  ell me about your operation T We’re a cow-calf operation and we sell some hay on the side, a bit of grain, and cattle. Our land is pretty light, sandy, so it’s more feasible for us to just run cows, and if we have a surplus of hay, we sell it, and try to make some cash money to upgrade some things because cows don’t always pay the bills. We’re calving right now, and it seems like there’s three stages of keeping them alive: birthing them is the easy part, then about a month later, you’re fighting scours or pneumonia, and then fighting pinkeye or foot rot. Our farm is a mix of tame and native grass. We have some land by Oak Lake, to the east of it, and it’s strictly all native. And then by Deleau, where dad’s farm is, it was crop land at one time, so it’s mainly forages and tame grass. We have a crown lease just north of Deleau that is native pasture.  ell me about your range management T Our priority in range management is to be profitable for one, and more grass and less diesel is kind of our mindset. We want to keep cows out longer. But really, the grass is number one for us. If we don’t have grass, we don’t have heavy calves to sell in the fall, so we don’t have profit. So, I think range management is crucial. On our native grass, we implement a twice-over graze where they come onto the grass on the first of June and are on their ‘till October 15. The cows only see a paddock of grass twice per year, and it gives that grass about a month-and-a-half’s rest. So, on the second pass, we’re looking at anywhere from 6 inches to a foot of grass, so we think that’s a good way for us to regulate our grass and protect what’s there and not mine it out. It’s kind of a newer way of doing things. Lots of guys are starting to convert to these forms of grass management. Nothing against my dad’s way of doing things, but it was to stock as many cows out there as you can, and some years we were feeding in August and that’s not profitable. I think producers are using education and tools provided to them to become more profitable, and this is a way to do so.  here did you learn this management style? W Actually, there’s a few guys around here that were very influential. There’s an office here in Reston, Critical Wildlife Habitat and MHHC (Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation). They brought a grazing strategist out of North Dakota, and they put on a lot of producer workshops and tours over the years. So, it showed us how you can maximize your pounds but also protect your grass and stockpile forage and things like that. There are a couple guys around here that were really influential. My brother and I went on one of these tours, and there was a lot of lights going off in both our heads; actually, when we started buying land, we would start fencing and cross fencing it in a way, so we could rotate cows on the twice-over system, and that’s basically what SARPAL ended up helping us do. They funded some of that. I think you really see by doing, right? So, if you see your parents struggling, or not profiting, you really lock that in your brain, and when you start doing it, you’re like, you know what, I’m going to try a different route to try and make a profit in a different way, and tweak things that didn’t work. We

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don’t touch those cows or need a bale or anything on those cows from June first to the middle of October, and then they come home and they go on to dry graze, like swath graze or corn or something. That’s why I always say more grass and less diesel. We’re not burning diesel, the cows are working, and we’re more hands-off I guess in that aspect, and I think doing good conservation practices and managing for rangeland species. But also, on my dad’s side, there’s a lot of topography, and in their grain land, the way the water runs; it would wash out, soil erosion from the water, so they ended up sowing that all down to hay and grass, and they cut that for forage, or hay now. So that was a practice. Those are things that I remember as a kid. As a kid too, we’d always be on the trike moving cows, and when I think about it now, it’s because we were rotating our grass. We were trying to stretch our grass out all the time to have more when they came into the paddocks. I always remember being a little kid and always asking questions of my dad and my grandpa, like, why are these fence lines so high? They said, well, actually there’s probably two or three fence lines below. At one time this country blew, wind, and that’s where all the sand and soil drifted into, so they put another fence up, and later another. That’s why all our field lines; our property lines are so high; there’s probably a fence or two there. Species at risk I can remember from when I was a kid, and I’m only 31 now, and I remember around our farm, it was all mixed cattle, all over. There was a section of native grass across the road at one time and now it’s gone. It’s crop now. After BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), all that was gone, and that’s only 15 or 20 years ago; I saw it in my generation. So, I think there’s a huge importance on keeping that range land around, because when it’s gone, it’s gone. I think by keeping a cow on the landscape, you’re probably saving a good hundred species, take that cow away and you’re left with one species, either corn, canola, soybeans, or whatever. Bottom line, if you want to keep endangered species and you want to keep grasslands, you gotta keep cows. And it’s natural. The cows graze the grasslands like the bison did before them, naturally. Species at risk wasn’t a topic in my dad’s generation. We were brought up to be avid sportsmen, appreciating the land, and I think what was really big for us was signing some easements and CAs (Conservation Agreements) on our land, because we really wanted that for my kids’ generation I guess; going away to school and this job with the Watershed District has taught me a lot about species at risk and how to maintain habitats. I think though a lot of people still have misconceptions where they think conservation programs, or any government programs, are going to take your land away or put restrictions on it, or your giving up your freedoms of being a property owner, and really, there isn’t any restrictions. They just want to keep what’s still there. We’ve also done some stuff with the Watershed District here. We did some hawk nest structures in the Blind Souris, and with work here, I’ve put up hawk poles in the District. We put one up a section away from ours on a neighbor’s, and we put one up on our property. We also worked with Xerces, they’re a pollinating company out of the States. Their goal is pollinator conservation. On our place we sowed some of that down. I think 70 acres of free forage seed. They also gave us native grass like forbs and flowers because we’ve got some sand hills, and we re-seeded some of our high-traffic areas where we could at least try and get some cover back onto them. That was kind of a neat project that we participated in. We also partnered with Duck’s Unlimited on a hay land forage program. Those hawk poles, well, they’re not the most fun to put up, but it’s rewarding to see something sitting on it. So, outside of SARPAL, there was the Xerces program, and we participate in a few of the Conservation District programs as well. I’m into it, and this is kind of my bread and butter, my work, my livelihood. So I feel a need to promote it, or show it on my own land as well. I want my kids to ask me why we did this, and then I can go into detail and say, well, this is why, and this is why, you know. I want this to stay, and you should probably be doing this down the road when you have your own

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property. I remember my mom’s dad, my grandpa, we were always planting shelter belt trees against wind, a thermal protection for the top soil. It’s sandy land, but where my uncle farms it now, on these two sections, there’s wind rows all the time, and I remember being a kid running them trees out of the boxes, they’d rent a planter to do all that stuff. SARPAL Like this SARPAL program, we signed on because there was an incentive to keep our land producing in its most natural, unaltered state. It’s the most profitable for us, having grass as the backbone of our operation. I think it’s good. It’ll keep our kids in cattle, but there was good incentive in it too, like, I think it paid $10,000 a quarter in this area, and that’s good, that’s a lot of money, a lot of improvement that would have been money out of my pocket and Chase’s pocket or Luke’s pocket you know, upgrading fencing and upgrading any utilities on those pastures. So, it was good, it was a good incentive. We were doing it anyways, but it also really enforces that we are doing the right thing and is really proving that it’s a good program to do. We signed a ten year agreement, so, we couldn’t really change anything discussed in the agreements. Our agreement was mainly just fencing, we wanted to upgrade some fencing, so that’s what we did, lots of cross fencing and that kind of stuff. I am happy. I have no complaints about the SARPAL program. It was easy to do. Carol works with SARPAL and works in this office with me, so for me, I can just poke my head out the door and talk to her, and we’ve done some programming with them in the past as well as with the Watershed District here. The original SARPAL that came out was through the Manitoba Beef Producers. They had most of the funding, and Manitoba Habitat administered their end, and then Manitoba Agriculture had some funding, and then the Watershed Districts had some funding and they administered projects. So, I’ve seen it from both the delivery standpoint and the producer’s standpoint. I think it’s a good deal for everybody, really great, no drawbacks at all. Well, that being said, they have a target area and their target area is tight, and native prairie is native prairie, so wherever you can find it, I think you should do programming with that landowner. But really, I think it was good. We’re a smaller operation and we qualified for it, and I know some guys that are really big operations and they qualified for it. And I think as long as you keep producers, large and small, eligible, as long as you’re doing the right thing, I think it should apply to you. I don’t think SARPAL changed how I managed my land. I think it kind of reinforced what we were already doing. Like I said, we were doing this twice-over on our own dime before, and managed our grass the way we thought we should, and so we were kind of tailored to SARPAL before it came out. But we were on that path before, and I think this just reinforced our management, recognized it was a healthy way to manage. With SARPAL we’re getting rewarded for doing the right thing, and so we keep doing the right thing. That’s what we thought we were doing. It’s an imaginary pat on the back is what it is, and reinforces that we need to keep doing what we’re doing. The wrong way to manage our land is overstocking it and having your grass deteriorate, and it’s sandy soil so it would blow away as well. We’ve realized what’s profitable and what’s the right method to maintain what we have. And really, society needs to know that at the end of the day, if you want to protect species at risk on the prairies, you’re going to have to eat the beef—it’s what keeps all this alive, because if you don’t have cattle…well, I think I said it earlier, take away a cow, there’s going to be one species here. If you have a cow, you have a hundred species. I don’t know the marketing tools to get that message out there, but yeah, it’s beef that’s keeping a lot of these lands from going under the plow. These are marginal lands, but they have endangered species and their habitat, and what’s left, well beef is keeping it that way. I enjoy what I do, but do I make a lot of money? Well, I’d be making a lot more money if we broke everything up and sowed beans and canola, but it’s not what we want—we’re here to raise cattle.

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They might consider some other incentives with SARPAL as well. Control of Leafy Spurge and shrub would be another good incentive to help producers keep pristine range land intact moving forward. I think that’s something organizations are steering toward now. I think SARPAL will make a difference in the protection and conservation of species at risk and their habitat. I think it’s going to help for sure. I think the thing that hurts SARPAL-oriented lands is that the assessment of it is so cheap; like, it’s not cropland. So it’s always cheap and easy to buy and it’s easy to break and turn into grainland. So, will it save it all? No. Does it help the guys that are out there on the landscape raising cattle? Yes, it helps their bottom line, but does it save it all? No. There’s some with big purchasing power that want this land, like the Investment Groups, or corporate farms that seem to be buying up large tracts of land. If I go to the bank to borrow money, I gotta beg, steal, and borrow to get enough to make some payments, but the guy that’s got 20,000 acres down the road, that’s nothing for him to flip a quarter and break it up. So, does SARPAL help guys? Yeah, I think it’s helping the guys like myself, or other guys that participated, but it doesn’t solve the problem. I don’t know if that’s the right way to explain it. Word of mouth is big; like, there was a guy that I think Carol ended up signing up to participate in SARPAL that knew nothing about it, but we were talking over a beer one day and I mentioned it, and then she got a couple phone calls and they signed up. That’s an easy referral, right? There’s you know, another 600 acres that’s signed up under that, and native grass saved, and some birds that are going to see another 10 or 20 years. For example, our land is right in between two priority areas, so I know across the road there’s Ferruginous hawk, Sprague’s pipit, and (Chestnut-collared) longspurs, and I know we always see Bobolink a lot on our place, Savannah sparrows and Red-headed woodpeckers too.  upport from the beef production industry, public education, and support from the S government What I would like to see happen in the beef production industry is to see more guys in it. I think that comes down to profitability. I don’t know what we’re at, probably 70%. So, say you’re selling $1200 calves; you’re only taking home maybe $400 by the time you pay all your bills. It’s hard to get people into it when the margins are so low. That’s why you’ve got to run 200, 300, or 400 cows to make enough. You’d also see a lot of poor land that’s gone to crop production, be taken out of crop production, and put back into livestock production, which it probably should be. I guess it’s more public education to buy beef, and there’s guys doing it, doing the grass-fed marketing thing, and they’re getting a little bit more, and there’s guys that do organic and they’re getting a little bit more. But, in the whole spectrum of it, yeah there needs to be more profitability for the guys doing it. But, it’s a hard sell when you’re going to the superstore and you want to feed your family for a budget or certain cost, and it’s hard to pay a little bit more, when, you know, you don’t have a little bit more. So, it’s a way of evolving public opinion. I don’t know how to do it, but it needs to be done. You’ve got to realize that ranchers in these small, rural communities, they’re paying taxes. They’ve got kids in school and enrollment in these small schools is low. They’re sitting on community boards here, you know; they support the local curling rink, and the hockey rink, and they’re going a million different miles. Well, I don’t know what the right answer is, but public opinion is important, for sure. It should probably start in your curriculum, I mean, when people tell me beef’s bad, so I think, well, why? How’d you come to that opinion? Were you educated to that opinion, or is it just kind of what you see in public opinion? Plant-based “meat,” you know, you’ve gone from 1 ingredient to 30 ingredients. Lobbying is a huge issue. The Cattlemen’s Association meetings and conferences are all good, but it’s the same core group of people right?

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Ninety percent of conservation programming is not with large grain farmers—it’s with mixed farm operations or beef producers, and they see that they can fit their conservation program into the working landscape. They have a need for it, and they see the value of having fresh water, healthy beef, intact grassland, and protected habitat. We have conservation working for us all around here, and you can go see birds and grasslands on the cattle range. You could put a spin on, you know, going to “Joe Blows,” where he has two sections of grass and you can bird watch for days out there and see endangered birds, like going to Riding Mountain National Park and see a hawk and a bear and a moose. I don’t know what the right spin on it is, but maybe we need one. Beef producers protect endangered species and their habitat and contribute to the economy, and we keep a lot of small communities alive. I think that message needs to get out to the public. Educating society starts at the base level, so the younger you can get people thinking about these issues, the better. I mean, you can ask my wife; we’re not getting rich—we’re acquiring assets that, you know, someday might be worth something. I don’t really want to sell them; I want to pass them down. I’d like government support on this, for our work. I think it needs to get traction. SARPAL’s federal money for the most part in this province, administered through Manitoba Beef, which is, I guess, our own lobby group for our own interest group, which is then administered through Manitoba Habitat, which is a Crown Corporation. So, I think the province “gets” it. Beef keeps these lands around and grasslands intact and conserving habitat for many species at risk.  hat do you see as the future of your ranch? W Well, we’re always trying to expand, more land, more cattle, more profitability; and in the last few years, we’ve taken our dad’s place out of the stone ages and got things into the 2000s equipment wise. So, that was a lot of funding. But at the end of the day, I want my kids to have something and appreciate the lifestyle that my wife and my brothers and their wives gave them, and what our parents raised us on. I want to hand that down, and I think that’s our legacy, instilling the ranching background and passing it along. Our kids are very young, three, two, and one, but I take them out and get them interested as much as I can, start them early, and see where it goes. You instill a lot in your kids to be a rancher; you’re jack-of-all-trades, master of none; and you’re instilling in those kids at a young age a work ethic, you know, working a 12- or 15-hour day, not that we’re working our kids like that, but they see it. Hopefully they take that to their jobs, their first jobs, and their careers along the way. We try and instill a good work ethic to our kids that they pass along and take to the workforce. Final thoughts This is our lifestyle; this is what we were raised doing and what we’re raising our families on. We want it to be here for the next generation, and this type of programming and support ensures that legacy.

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Introducing the Eastern Tiger Salamander: Prairie Population Ambystoma tigrinum Status: Endangered Range: Manitoba

Photo credit: Doug Collicutt, NatureNorth.com

Eastern tiger salamanders are mole salamanders which live in water as aquatic larvae in earlystage development that then change form in a process called metamorphosis, and live on land as adults. As adults they are dark-brown to grayish-­black color with numerous, large, irregular brown to yellow spots on the back and sides, a dark grey belly, small eyes, and blunt, rounded snouts that enable them to burrow underground. In Canada they are found in scattered locales in southeast Manitoba. They are found in woodlands and grasslands with fishless semi-­permanent or permanent pools, ponds, or streams for breeding and that hold water for at least the 3 to 7 months needed until metamorphosis. Eastern tiger salamander females can lay anywhere from 100 to 5000 eggs in a cluster of darkly pigmented eggs below the water on submerged twigs, weed stems, and other structures in ponds in mid-April, and juvenile salamanders leave the pond in mid-­August. They use their forelimbs to burrow underground tunnels into sandy soil which are used all year round for shelter. They overwinter underground below the frost line in burrows they have made or in existing mammal burrows. These are found in grasslands adjacent to breeding sites, and they eat tadpoles, insects, spiders, earthworms, voles, mice, frogs, and other salamanders. As they utilize two distinct habitats, water for breeding and juvenile development, and land for foraging and overwintering, they can indicate the health of both environments, being sensi-

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tive to environmental changes such as water and soil pollution. They also must contend with threats from both habitats, including predators such as fish, garter snakes, herons, and crows. When migrating to and from breeding ponds, they are susceptible to road mortality. The loss of both the terrestrial and aquatic habitats they require, along with degradation or loss of the migration routes between these habitats, threatens the survival of these species. Climate change and increased incidences of drought, urban development and the encroachment of roads, grassland conversion to crops, and habitat fragmentation in general have detrimental effects on the survival of this species. Pollution from road salt, herbicides, and chemicals used in agricultural are dangerous for salamanders as they absorb toxins through their skin. They are further threatened by emerging infectious diseases. You can support the conservation of Eastern tiger salamanders by watching for reptiles and amphibians that may be crossing roads, protecting water sources on your land, and volunteering with a local nature club or provincial park to participate in surveys or habitat stewardship work. Let’s work together so our children and grandchildren can enjoy the wonder of the Eastern tiger salamander!

7

Conclusion

In the Introduction to this book, I explained that I conducted these interviews as part of a postdoctoral research project funded through a Liber Ero postdoctoral fellowship program I undertook at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. I had read countless books and academic, peer-­reviewed journal articles about conserving the grasslands and their critical role in providing habitat for so many species at risk of extinction; and as I learned more about the role cattle grazing played in keeping these grasslands healthy, I felt my education lacked the expertise of the people managing this delicate ecosystem, the ranchers themselves. The value of documenting the perspective of ranchers managing these ranges was also acknowledged by the academic experts at the University of British Columbia and the management of the Liber Ero fellowship program, which provides financial support, training, and mentorship to scientists so that they might “conduct and communicate world-class research that informs conservation and management issues relevant to Canada.” Through my education I understood that carefully grazed grasslands are healthy grasslands, and beyond maintaining a sensitive ecosystem and providing critical habitat for species at risk, these wellmanaged ranges mitigated extreme weather events occurring more frequently in current times, such as drought and flood. Further, as the wicked challenge of climate change dominates headlines daily and globally, I appreciated that good land management by ranchers was making a substantial contribution to vitally important carbon storage in grasslands. To me, the missing piece of the puzzle was to record the management practices of the people on the land, who were clearly conserving a delicate and endangered habitat, while also raising families and making a living from that habitat at the same time. Coming from a rural background myself, I also understood the contribution these ranchers were making to our diminishing rural communities as many small towns and villages continue to lose residents for jobs in the cities, leaving schools closed and gas stations and clothing and grocery stores shuttered. Ranching contributes to that fragile local economy, as well as our national economy, while providing us with safe, healthy Canadian beef that we may feed our families with confidence. I felt that this was a vital perspective that needed to be recorded and presented to a wider audience—from the general Canadian public to  academics and decision and policy makers at all levels of government. The great value of this book was to present the expertise of the ranchers managing these rangelands, in their own words. Climate change is a complex global challenge, but it is also a critical local challenge; it requires both effective policies and actions on the global stage, as well as the local. Conservation of endangered ecosystems and habitat for species at risk requires the same comprehensive effort and will not be met by governmental policies and formally conserved areas alone, but

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requires the voluntary participation of private land owners and managers. Yet these landowners struggle to make a viable living from their ranches, which is why I outlined valuable programs like the Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL) and the Multiple Species at Risk (MULTISAR), which recruit private land managers to participate in their voluntary programs through financial incentives to increase conservation behavior. The interviews presented here provide an in-­depth exploration of endangered grassland management from the people who actually manage the land in order to sustain a viable business while also conserving critical habitat for many species at risk of extinction. It also presents the situation from four Canadian provinces, which require different management due to differing landscapes, yet, significantly, they all illustrate a similar foundational core of range management. I was impressed with how open the ranchers were to share with the general public, policy makers, and newer, younger ranchers just starting out, their well-earned knowledge of rangeland management and grassland stewardship; their strategies for adaptation and mitigation to drought; and how they contribute to the conservation of habitat for many species at risk. In these interviews the ranchers share their expertise generously and with little reservation, and throughout the challenges in rangeland management faced across four distinct provinces, their stories covered pretty much everything I had read in the academic literature. But this time I was hearing it from on the ground experts who utilized this knowledge to maintain a viable business, provide a comfortable living for their families, and contribute both to their communities and the nation through the common good of preserving habitat for species at risk, while engaging in the national economy and providing the nation, and the world, with safe and healthy beef to consume. It was also a narrative rich in personal history, delightful and moving anecdote, and, in some cases, helped to illustrate the history of our nation’s resilience, innovation, and advancement. This was a perspective I had found lacking in the academic literature, and one that I felt was paramount to the conversation. But as much as I appreciated interviewing and documenting this expertise, there was another level of urgency that permeated the project. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) produced a major report that warned that biodiversity is being lost, species extinction accelerating, and ecosystems deteriorating at a rate faster now than at any other point in human history. These are the headlines of our current times. As the Covid-19 pandemic struck, I had to stop travelling to ranches to conduct interviews. When the guidelines allowed it again, I brought my own chair, bundled up for the weather, and sat outside, somewhere sheltered from the wind, socially distanced with my tape recorder placed on a surface halfway between us, and interviewed these ranchers, so generous with their time and knowledge amidst such unprecedented and unsettling times. When the World Health Organization (WHO) issued an official report on SARS-CoV-2’s origins, they asserted that the destruction of natural ecosystems is breaking down the buffer zone that protects us from wildlife-borne viruses. The state of the world in our current times could not make it any more clear; there is a link between healthy ecosystems and healthy societies, and there is an urgent need for a global effort to “build back better.” Cattle ranching in a thoughtful, well-­managed way is a good example of striving to live, and make a viable living, in a way that conserves our critically endangered grasslands, and many of the species at risk of extinction that reside within this fragile ecosystem. This is another extremely important thread in the multifaceted storyline I am trying to knit together here, but again, as much as I acknowledge its importance, I return to the central premise of this work, that of the expertise shared here by these cattle ranchers from British Colombia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. I am struck, however, in this global context, by the ranchers’ culture of resilience and long-term thinking and planning and how we as a society might benefit from a similar mindset.

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I believe that recent catastrophic weather events and the string of dire warnings of biodiversity collapse and the cascading implications of climate change provided to us by such eminent global entities as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the aforementioned Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have had an impact on much of global society. It seems as though these topics dominate news headlines both locally and globally, and people are taking notice, talking around the kitchen table and as they harvest their gardens; recognizing that there is a need for a heightened awareness and for individual action to mitigate these risks and rise to meet these seemingly colossal challenges. I hope that by sharing these stories from ranchers across four Canadian provinces, it may add to the dialogue and illustrate a viable way of living that not only can we learn from, but that we can choose to support. The academic literature is clear; grasslands in Canada and around the world are in drastic decline. Well-managed cattle grazing practices are vital to maintaining healthy grasslands, and cattle ranchers, while also making a viable living on their ranches, are providing this service as a public good and have gone too long unrecognized for their careful efforts over many years, and often generations, on their ranges. These healthy grasslands maintained by ranchers also play a substantial role in contributing to climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration. Further, healthy grasslands provide critical habitat for many species at risk, so ranchers should be recognized for their role as species at risk conservationists. Programs like SARPAL and MULTISAR are providing that support and acknowledgement, as they reward private land managers and owners for voluntary actions that conserve grasslands. As one rancher noted, there is no need to pay a middle man to manage the grasslands; the ranchers are doing it already and have years of experience and expertise to offer, but they should be financially supported for their efforts. A final note on the success of the SARPAL and MULTISAR initiatives is how ranchers from every province appreciated the fact that these programs had local offices and managers— people who understood the realities of ranching in those particular environments and who understood that ranchers are predisposed to manage the grasslands carefully for long-term health and viability, but that this also has to intersect with a profit margin that enables them to make a living for them and their families. This book was always all about sharing the stories of the ranchers I interviewed. It was to acknowledge, celebrate, and share their expertise on grassland management to support successful ranching businesses, conserve grassland ecosystems, manage the range to alleviate both drought and flood, and conserve habitat for many species at risk. Sharing the stories of ranchers from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba provided a wealth of information about the history, challenges, and opportunities in grassland management across a variety of landscapes. I believe that each interview recorded here provides a lively, personal voice and perspective to a range of topics covered in grassland management academic literature. However, this time you get to hear it from the practitioners themselves, with the added color of anecdote, personal history, feeling, and passion. It was such a privilege for me to travel across some breathtaking landscapes across those four provinces and visit some extraordinary, often wildly remote properties, and to have the doors opened so generously to me, a stranger, with smiles and tea and baking and curious horses, dogs, cats, and, of course, cattle, nosing around. I trust the general public will have learned about the importance of wellmanaged cattle grazing to conserve the grasslands as a crucially endangered ecosystem and also as a vital habitat for many species at risk. Policy makers and all levels of government will read these stories and add this expertise into their academic library. New and young ranchers starting out will learn some valuable management practices that will hopefully save them from some potentially costly trialand-­error decisions.

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And that everyone will, like me, find themselves smiling on occasion on a walk or a drive recalling David’s story of standing in a deserted field and having two bay heavy horses come out of the woods to feed on oats, then a couple more roans, a couple more white horses, and a couple of chestnuts— horses who had been trained to work in tandem teams by color. I can picture that and it always brings a smile. Or Doug and Colleen’s story about bringing an old friend to see their new ranch and after driving across a flat field for a long way, rather bored, she shouted an expletive in surprise when all of the sudden the road dipped down into a wild landscape of gently rolling coulees, pretty much the same experience I had in driving there. It was kind of like entering Narnia, that wild landscape depicted in the Chronicle of Narnia children’s books by C. S. Lewis. It was breathtaking. You might recall John explaining how his great grandfather Walter was raising cattle when he was young, along with a partner, because there was a huge demand for meat, when they were building the initial lines of the CPR across Canada. Walter ended up getting a fever that put him in the hospital, and when he got out, his partner had sold all the cattle and taken all the money; so he was broke and had to start all over! You might also recall how the ranchers in Alberta brought in their own telephone lines and electricity to their remote ranches. I will never forget Doug explaining to me that mounting his horse in the middle of the range with a broken leg wasn’t so bad; it was having to dismount and mount again a few times to open up the gates between all the pastures as he tried to get home. Or Michael telling me about how his dad lived on the ranch until the last 6 months of his life, hauling out 50-pound bags of minerals and checking the solar watering panels. How he kept on about ranch business during his last 2 weeks in the hospital, Michael told me; “he was ranching until the end, and he had his mind too, because, like, one day I took him out for a drive and as we drove along the fence line he said about three poles up there’s a post with a staple out, and sure enough, there was.” Amazing. And Kelcy saying at the end of our interview, “You know, there’s one spot that I can stand up on top of our place, and I don’t see a building, I don’t see a light, and all I see is grass.”

Glossary

ACA (Alberta Conservation Association)  An organization whose mission is to “conserve, protect and enhance fish and wildlife populations and their habitats for Albertans to enjoy, value, and use.” Acre  A unit of land measurement equal to 4,840 square yards or 0.4047 hectare. Agricultural land  The land resource where agriculture takes place due to its ability to grow food products. AI (artificial insemination)  A common practice using collected semen to breed a cow, versus using a live bull to provide the breeding services. The semen is kept frozen and then a vet or AI technician deposits it in the cow at the proper time, depending on their ovulation cycle. AltaLink  Alberta’s largest regulated electricity transmission company. Alkali  Alkalinity is a measure of pH, or hydrogen ions, severely alkaline or sodic soil doesn’t absorb water. Animal Unit Month  The amount of forage required by one animal unit for one month. Backgrounding  After they are weaned, calves then over-wintered on a forage-based diet until their weight increases to about 408 kg/900 lbs. BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy)  A progressive neurological disorder of cattle that results from infection by an unusual transmissible agent called a prion that then damages the central nervous system of cattle. Calf sleigh  Used to transport a calf to a desired location. Canadian Cattlemen’s Association (CCA)  A nonprofit federation comprised of nine provincial member cattle associations which provide representation to a national, producer-led board of directors. They represent producers on issues of importance to the beef cattle industry. Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association (CFGA)  Represents Canadians who produce hay and forage products and works to develop the forage and grasslands industry. Carbon sequestration  The process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to reduce global climate change. Center-pivot irrigation systems  A method of irrigation in which equipment rotates around a pivot and range are watered with sprinklers. Central Grasslands Roadmap  A collaborative guide to increase conservation of North America’s Central Grasslands, which span across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Cheatgrass  Bromus tectorum also known as downy brome or drooping brome is an annual invasive grass with a shallow root system that absorbs much of the water and nutrients during the spring growing season depriving native plants of that moisture. It also dries out much earlier than native vegetation providing fuel for fires, and it grows back thicker after fire, increasing the probability of future wildfires.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7

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Chink chaps  A type of half-length leather horse riding chap that attach at the waist and stop just below the knee, with fringe on the sides and bottom. The name chinks may have descended from chinkaderos, which originally referred to the Spanish vaquero leg covering known as armitas, “little armor.” Conservation Agreement  The conservation contract is a voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and conservation organization that restricts the type and amount of development that may take place on portions of the landowner’s property in order to protect the landscape and the species that live there. For this, the landowner receives a tax receipt or cash payment. COOL (Country of Origin Labeling)  A US Department of Agriculture labeling law that requires retailers to provide their customers with information regarding the source of certain foods, including beef products. Co-operative Commonwealth Federation  A political coalition of progressive, socialist, and labor groups founded in Calgary in 1932. The CCF merged with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) to form the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961. Cow calf operation  A method of raising cattle in which a permanent herd of cows is kept by a rancher to produce and raise calves for later sale. Creep feeding  The practice of providing nursing calves with the opportunity to eat feed such as grain, hay, pasture or silage, or pasture, which the cows do not have access to. Cropland  Land used for the cultivation of crops, both temporary and permanent, and may include areas periodically left fallow or used as temporary pasture. Cross line fenced  When fences are built inside a larger fenced-in area to divide it into smaller pastures dedicated to either grazing livestock or growing forage. Cutbank  The eroding outside bank of a curve in a stream. Downy Brome  see the entry for Cheatgrass above. Ducks Unlimited Canada  A private, nonprofit organization with a mission to conserve, manage, and restore wetlands and their associated habitats. Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)  The department of the Government of Canada responsible for coordinating environmental policies and programs, and preserving and enhancing the natural environment and renewable resources. Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS)  Programs that combine community engagement in developing future scenarios with computer-based land use planning and modelling tools to assist natural resource managers and stakeholders to assess problems and select options for change. Feeder/ backgrounder  A growing program for feeder cattle (young cattle ready for lot feeding) from the time calves are weaned until they enter a feedlot to be finished on a high protein ration. Feedlots  A type of feeding operation to feed cattle to grow and gain important body fat and muscle over a period of three to five months; they focus on efficient growth and weight gain, reducing the need for cattle to forage for food. Foot rot in cattle  When the foot is injured through abrasions or frozen mud, dirt clods or stones, which allows bacteria to enter the foot and the infection to spread rapidly to the connective tissues, tendons, joints, and foot bones. It is characterized by swelling and lameness. Forbs  Herbaceous (not woody), broadleaf plants that are not grass-like. Although grasses are the most important forage source for herbivores, certain forb species provide nutritious food sources for them as well. Forbs also provide food and habitat to enhance invertebrate diversity by maintaining healthy pollinator communities. Grasslands National Park (Parks Canada)  A park in southwest Saskatchewan, close to the village of Val Marie, which was established in 1981 to preserve and present a representative portion of the Canadian mixed grass prairie ecosystem. Growing Forward  A program established by the governments of Canada and British Columbia that offered a suite of financial supports to the agricultural industry in British Columbia.

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Habitat Heritage Agreements  A program off­ered through the Manitoba Habitat Heritage Corporation (MHHC) to conserve wildlife habitat on private land through which landowners are compensated for preserving habitat on their land. Hawk poles  The ferruginous hawk (Buteo regalis) is an obligate grassland species that has suffered substantial range contraction and population declines in Alberta. The species breeds almost exclusively in grassland and prefers elevated nest sites, such as lone trees, large shrubs, or cliffs. As natural nesting sites declined, conservation groups introduced artificial nest poles consisting of a platform mounted about 2.5 m above the ground on a wooden pole where the hawk may build its nest. Hectares  A unit to measure land that is equal to 10,000 square meters, or approximately 2.5 acres. Heifer calves  A young female cow that has not borne a calf. Hounds tongue  Cynoglossum officinale is an invasive species and a noxious weed that is toxic to cattle, horses, goats, pigs, and deer. Hutterites  The Hutterian Brethren are a faith group stemming from the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century. They are a communal people, living on hundreds of scattered colonies throughout the prairies of northwestern North America. On average, fifteen families live and work on a colony, where they farm, raise livestock, and produce manufactured goods. International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)  Founded in 1948, the IUCN is a membership Union composed of both government and civil society organizations. It is comprised of more than 1,400 member organizations from over 160 countries, and is the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it. JV8 Conservation Initiative  A collaborative initiative comprised of eight Migratory Bird Joint Ventures, representing over 72 federal, state, provincial, nonprofit, and industry conservation partners from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Their goal is to stem grassland losses and the resulting negative impacts to migratory birds. They are implementing grassland conservation programs across 500 million acres and across multiple nations to reverse or stabilize the decline of bird populations in the central grasslands of North America. Keystone species  A plant or an animal species that is critical to the survival of the other species in an ecosystem; it is the organism that helps hold the system together. Late seral stage grassland  A term used to des­cribe the ecological condition (seral stage) of a grassland. The sets of species that the ecosystem passes through on the way to “climax” are known as “seral stages.” The beginning point of succession was bare ground, and the end point was a single, specific “climax” set of mostly perennial native species at equilibrium with their environment, present once all vestiges of human-imposed disturbance were gone. Livestock grazing intensity influences the seral stage of grassland communities. Early seral grasslands emerge after a disturbance such as fire or grazing and late stage seral is when the range has returned to the targeted desired plant community. Leafy spurge  Euphorbia esula is a noxious invasive plant species toxic to humans, livestock, and wildlife when consumed. Its spread is aided through its production of a chemical that stops other plants growing nearby. LinkedIn  A professional network on the internet for advertising your skills and developing career connections. Litter  Dead plant material on the ground which increases moisture retention and nutrient recycling while reducing evaporation and erosion. MHHC (Manitoba Habitat Heritage Cor­poration)  Established in 1986, the MHHC works to conserve fish and wildlife habitat in Manitoba. They offer programs such as voluntary agreements with landowners to conserve, restore, and enhance habitat on their property. Meewasin Valley Authority  A nonprofit organization based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with a mission to act as the steward of the South Saskatchewan River Valley. They strive to ensure a healthy and vibrant river valley, with a balance between human use and conservation and offer programs and projects in river valley development and conservation.

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Glossary

Milk River Watershed  A transboundary basin that spans the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada and the state of Montana in the United States. About 65% of the total area of the watershed lies within Montana, 24% within Saskatchewan, and 11% within Alberta. Mob grazing  A grazing system which involves grazing a large concentration of livestock in a small area for a short duration before allowing that area to regrow for longer; it is also known as ultrahigh density grazing. Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC)  Estab­lished in 1962, the NCC is the country’s largest national land conservation organization. They are a nonprofit organization, and they have helped to protect 15 million hectares across Canada. Natural Resources Conservation Service Great Plains Framework  A grassland conservation framework developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to work with landowners to conserve grasslands on private lands. Northern Great Plains program at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)  A program at the WWF that works with a number of organizations and agencies joining in partnerships to coordinate their grassland conservation work. They work with ranchers to conserve intact grasslands on privately owned and managed lands. Pasture and forage land  Pastures are large grassy fields where cattle graze on grass while forage lands provide grass and hay that are cut and dried for feed. Pinkeye  Infectious bovine kerato-conjunctivitis is a bacterial infection of the eye that causes inflammation and, in severe cases, temporary or permanent blindness. It may be mitigated by including face fly control and offering protection from the sunlight by providing adequately sized shade and allowing cattle to graze at night when face flies are not active. PMU  PMU stands for Pregnant Mares’ Urine, which is used in the pharmaceutical production of a hormone replacement drug for menopausal women. Polycrops  The practice of growing two or more crops at one time to harvest; cattle producers may seed polycrops for a winter feed source. Saskatchewan Prairie Conservation Action Plan (SK PCAP)  A partnership of 30 agencies and organizations representing producers, provincial and federal governments, industry, environmental nongovernment organizations, and research and educational institutions working towards prairie and species at risk conservation in Saskatchewan. Quad  A four-wheeled motorcycle all-terrain vehicle (ATV), also known as a light utility vehicle for off road use. Rancher Stewardship Alliance (RSA)  A grass­ roots organization led by ranchers dedicated to improving the quality of life for rural communities throughout the Northern Great Plains through collaborative conservation projects, rancher education events, and local community outreach. Razor grazer system  A portable solar powered electric fence trailer and reel system to facilitate temporary and mobile fencing needs on the range. Regenerative agriculture  A farming and grazing management practice that rebuilds soil organic matter and restores degraded soil biodiversity. It seeks to mitigate soil degradation and improve soil quality. This management style improves the water cycle and mitigates climate change through carbon drawdown. It may utilize techniques such as incorporating permaculture and organic farming practices, cover crops, composting, mobile animal shelters and crop rotation. Riparian areas  The green zone with increased moisture surrounding a river, wetland, stream, or lake. Rotational grazing  A system of range management that ensures that livestock are moved to new range in a rotation pattern to allow for the grass to sufficiently recover. SARA  The Species at Risk Act (SARA) was created to prevent wildlife species in Canada from disappearing, to provide for the recovery of wildlife species that are extirpated (no longer exist in the wild in Canada), endangered, or threatened as a result of human activity, and to manage species of special concern to prevent them from becoming endangered or threatened.

Glossary

177

Saskatchewan Stock Growers Foundation  The Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association (SSGA) launched the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Foundation in January 2020 as a federally registered charitable foundation and land trust to conserve agricultural lands, advance education, relieve poverty, and assist victims of disasters. Scours  Diarrhea in young calves often caused by bacteria, viruses, or protozoa. Scours causes dehydration in calves and is the leading cause of death in calves under one month of age. Side by side  An off-­road vehicle with a minimum of two seats positioned side-by-side and enclosed within a roll cage structure. They have four wheels and are operated by foot controls and a steering wheel. Southern Alberta Dryland Salinity Asso­ciation  Formed due to concern about the extent of salinity in the region and the possibility that salinity might increase in extent. They developed procedures for planning and implementing solutions to control and reduce dryland salinity. Species at risk  Species at risk of extinction are the plants and animals that may disappear unless human beings take action to help them. Steer calves  Young neutered male cattle primarily raised for beef. Stocker and feeder cattle  “Stockers” are weaned calves grazing pasture to enhance growth prior to finishing and slaughter, they are usually younger and weigh less than “feeders”, which are weaned calves grazing pasture and of sufficient weight and maturity to be placed on high-energy rations for finishing; they are generally older and weigh more than “stockers.” Suffield PFRA lease (Prairie Farm Reha­bilitation Administration)  The federal government founded the PFRA in 1935 during a long, severe drought to deal with the problems of soil erosion, soil conservation, and lack of water resources. The Suffield PFRA lease was a community pasture on Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Suffield, about 45 km northwest of Medicine Hat, Alberta. It was closed in 2014 and the Suffield pasture’s land reverted back to the control of the Department of National Defence. CFB Suffield is Canada’s largest military training area. Summer fallow  An agricultural practice when no crop is grown during a season when a crop might normally be grown, often utilized to build up soil moisture reserves. Sustainable agriculture  A system of agricultural management that integrates social, environmental, and economic interests. The system seeks to provide enough food for everyone, sustain economic benefit, and utilize farming methods that promote soil health and reduce reliance on fossil fuels for environmental sustainability. Tagged  Placing an ear tag in each cow is part of the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency (CCIA) cattle traceability system to trace individual animals through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. This ensures all cattle can be traced back to their farm of origin. Temperate Grasslands Conservation Initiative  The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) created the Temperate Grasslands Conservation Initiative (TGCI) to serve as a hub for international collaboration for the improved conservation and protection of the world’s indigenous temperate grasslands. Temperate Grasslands Specialist Group  In 1996 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) created the Grasslands Protected Areas Task Force, now known as a Specialist Group. The Specialist Group’s goal is to facilitate the establishment of new protected areas throughout the tropical, subtropical, and temperate grassland biomes. TESA (The Environmental Stewardship Award)  An award created in 1996 that recognizes a local producer who receives provincial recognition for going above and beyond standard industry conservation practices. These recipients progress as nominees for national recognition from the Canadian Cattlemen Association. The national TESA recipient is announced during the CCA semi-annual meeting at the Canadian Beef Industry Conference. Tire tanks  Recycled old machinery tires sealed to hold water and used to water livestock. As they are black they draw sunlight which leads to slower freezing in the winter and less algae in the summer. They can be used with many water sources including pressurized water lines, hydrants, gravity feed, and pond syphons.

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Glossary

Toadflax  Linaria vulgaris is a perennial plant with extensive creeping roots which has toxic ­chemical compounds poisonous to cattle, although cattle dislike both its taste and smell and avoid eating it. Tonne  A metric unit of mass equivalent to approximately 2,204.6 pounds. Tractor buster booms  A tractor attachment that enables operators to perform a wide range of functions like sawing and mulching. Trike  A three-wheeled off road motorcycle. Twice Over Grazing system  A method of pasture management developed by rangeland scientist Lee Manske of North Dakota State University. It involves having at least three pastures grazed in rotation twice each season. Rest periods between grazing allow plants to regrow and replenish root reserves. United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  Created by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988, the IPCC provides policymakers with regular scientific assessments on the implications and risks of climate change and provides options for adaptation and mitigation. Verified Beef Program Plus  A national on-­farm food safety program developed by the Canadian beef industry to support producers in meeting industry standards for animal care, on-farm food safety, environmental stewardship, and biosecurity. Wagon singletree  A bar in front of a wagon to be pulled by draft animals to balance the load. Weston Family Foundation  A charitable family foundation founded in the late 1950s focused on providing grant funding to organizations that support Healthy Aging and Healthy Ecosystems. Winterfat  A native grassland shrub, Kraschen­innikovia lanata, is a protein-rich forage for cattle which can survive both severe drought and extreme cold temperatures. World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 2021 Plowprint Report  The WWF prepared this report by utilizing data from the Canadian Annual Crop Inventory and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) from two years prior to its release date, to report on how many acres of grassland had been plowed-up, primarily to make way for row crop agriculture.

Selected Bibliography1

Introduction COSEWIC (2021) Canadian wildlife species at risk. Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Web site: https://species-­registry.canada.ca/index-­en.html#/documents?documentTypeId=33&sortBy=documentTypeSo rt&sortDirection=asc&pageSize=10. Accessed 1 Nov 2021 Fairlie S (2010) Meat: a benign extravagance. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction Herriot T (2009) Grass, sky, song: promise and peril in the world of grassland birds. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., Toronto Niman NH (2014) Defending beef: the case for sustainable meat production. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction Stegner W (1966) Wolf Willow. The Viking Press Inc., New York

Grasslands Borer ET, Seabloom EW, Gruner DS, Harpole WS, Hillebrand H, Lind EM, Adler PB, Alberti J, Anderson TM, Bakker JD, Biederman L, Blumenthal D, Brown CS, Brudvig LA, Buckley YM, Cadotte M, Chu C, Cleland EE, Crawley MJ et al (2014) Herbivores and nutrients control grassland plant diversity via light limitation. Nature 508(7497):517– 520. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13144 Brown G (2018) Dirt to soil: one family’s journey into regenerative agriculture. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction Codur A-M, Itzkan S, Moomaw W, Thidemann K, Harris J (2017) Hope below our feet: soil as a climate solution (Issue 4). http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/climate/ClimatePolicyBrief4.pdf Daschuk JW (2013) Clearing the plains: disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of aboriginal life. U of R Press, Regina Gayton D (1990) The wheatgrass mechanism: science and imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape. Fifth House Publishers, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Hiss T, Wilson EO (2021) Rescuing the planet: protecting half the land to heal the earth, 1st edn. Alfred A. Knopf, New York King T (2017) The inconvenient Indian: a curious account of native people in North America. Doubleday Canada, Toronto McKibben B (2006) The end of nature. Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York Monchalin L (2016) The colonial problem: an indigenous perspective on crime and injustice in Canada. University of Toronto Press, North York Ohlson K (2014) The soil will save us: how scientists, farmers, and foodies are healing the soil to save the Planet, Emmaus, PA Sala E (2020) The nature of nature: why we need the wild. National Geographic Partners, Washington, DC Savory A (2016) Holistic management handbook: regenerating your land and growing your profits. Island Press

The following sources provided much of the background information for this book.

1 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Reiter, Stewards of the Grasslands, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23265-7

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Selected Bibliography

Schwartz JD (2013) Cows save the planet: and other improbable ways of restoring soil to heal the Earth. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction Toensmeier E (2016) The carbon farming solution: a global toolkit of perennial crops and regenerative agriculture practices for climate change mitigation and food security. Chelsea Green Publishing, ProQuest Ebook Central, https:// ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=5149096.

Species at Risk American Badger jeffersonii subspecies (Taxidea taxus jeffersonii) Western population and Eastern population: recovery strategy proposed 2021 – Canada.ca Eastern tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum): COSEWIC assessment and status report 2013 – Canada.ca https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-­climate-­change/services/species-­risk-­education-­centre/fact-­sheets/greater-­ sage-­grouse.html https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-­climate-­change/services/species-­risk-­public-­registry/cosewic-­assessments-­ status-­reports/swift-­fox-­2021.html Lewis’s woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis): proposed recovery strategy 2016 – Canada.ca Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens), Rocky Mountain population: recovery strategy 2017 – Canada.ca

Videos Circle Y Ranch: http://www.circleyranch.ca/enviromental-­stewardship.html Manitoba Beef Producers: https://vimeo.com/388562868 The Guardians of the Grasslands: https://youtu.be/_CG4ROvCu0Y The Nature of Things: https://youtu.be/1d77rs_Ghs0

Index

A Alberta, 3, 6, 9–15, 19, 24, 30, 33, 35, 38, 42, 43, 53–73, 78, 86–96, 99, 100, 102, 117–119, 122, 130, 137, 141, 142, 149, 159, 170–172 B British Columbia, 3, 10–12, 17, 30, 125–138, 141, 169, 171 C Canada, 2–6, 8–10, 12, 14–18, 25, 28, 38, 42, 48–55, 60, 61, 66, 69, 81, 84, 85, 96, 97, 103, 110–112, 117, 122, 124, 134, 140, 143, 158, 167, 169, 171, 172 D Determination, 50, 61, 68, 72, 128, 135, 142 E Economy, 2, 4, 15, 16, 49–52, 85, 112, 139, 150, 160, 166, 169, 170 Education, 25, 44, 58, 74, 78, 79, 82, 114, 117, 123, 136, 139, 143, 146, 162, 165, 169 F Food safety, 77, 114 G Grasslands, 2–18, 23, 25, 26, 30–32, 34, 37, 41–44, 46, 48–54, 69, 70, 76–79, 81–85, 90, 96, 97, 99–101, 106, 109, 111, 112, 122, 125, 131–135, 137, 138, 140, 152, 157–160, 163, 166–171 H Habitat conservation, 8, 13, 14

I Innovation, 24, 136, 170 Interviews, 3, 4, 12, 14–16, 52, 169–172 M Manitoba, 3, 10–12, 15, 23, 55, 73–80, 122, 138–143, 147–149, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171 Multiple Species at Risk (MULTISAR), 3, 4, 12–18, 42, 43, 64–68, 70, 71, 101–104, 120–123, 170, 171 R Ranchers, 3, 4, 6–9, 12–16, 18–20, 25–29, 31–35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49–52, 54, 55, 57, 59–60, 63, 64, 66–71, 75, 78, 80, 82, 85, 86, 90, 96, 97, 99, 101, 103–106, 109, 111–114, 118–120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 134–136, 139, 141–143, 146, 150–152, 156–160, 165, 166, 169–172 Ranching, 4, 15, 19, 20, 28, 31, 35, 38, 42–47, 49, 51, 52, 56, 58, 67, 70, 71, 73, 78, 80, 84, 86, 92, 93, 100, 104, 106, 115, 118–127, 131, 133, 134, 138, 139, 143, 146–149, 151, 155, 160, 161, 166, 169–172 S Saskatchewan, 1–3, 5, 6, 8–13, 15, 16, 19–21, 23–25, 27, 32, 33, 46, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 69, 78, 80–88, 96, 106, 114, 118, 122, 141, 149, 156, 170, 171 Species at risk, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12–18, 25–27, 31–34, 42–43, 48–52, 65–67, 71, 75, 77, 82–85, 89, 90, 101, 102, 109–112, 119, 122, 126, 135, 139, 148, 150–152, 158–160, 163–166, 169–171 Species at Risk Partnerships on Agricultural Lands (SARPAL), 3, 4, 12–18, 26–27, 31–34, 48–52, 66–68, 70, 71, 76–78, 81, 84–87, 111–113, 134, 135, 139, 140, 144, 148, 150–151, 158–160, 162–166, 170, 171 Succession, 99, 128, 133, 135

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