AoR 56: Beth & Maurice Robinette, Practicing and Promoting Holistic Management

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>> Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I’m your host Tip Hudson, Range and Livestock Specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.

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My guests today on the Art of Range are Morris and Beth Robinette. They’re a father daughter team who ranch in Eastern Washington, actually not far west of Spokane. Spokane is the second largest city in the state. I’ve known them for some time. They’ve applied more thought and planning to making a ranch work in what many people would consider to be a pretty challenging physical environment than most people I know and have, I think, something to show for it. Morris and Beth, welcome.

>> Hey, thanks for having us on. Big fan of the pod.

>> Thanks.

>> Yeah. I’ve really enjoyed listening too. I think I’ve listened to most of them now. They’re great.

>> Good. Good. Morris you’ve been ranching here for, for a while. Can you tell a bit about the history of the ranch and what your pathway was to continuing in this instead of other possible careers? And then, and then Beth, you do the same thing.

>> Sure. Well, thanks for having us on. Hope we can contribute something to the, to the cause here, as you put it, the conservation. So the Lazy R started off in 1937 when my grandpa, after bouncing around several places at Eastern Washington, landed on this, this spot and started milking cows. He had about 20 cows and 3 kids. And, so they did, they did pretty well, good enough to sustain themselves, anyway, through the depression and into the beginning of the war. Milk prices were pretty good during the war. So they did pretty good. Both my dad and my uncle went into the Air Force and spent their time there, got out in 45. And, then my dad took over, he took over the place in 46 or 47, I think, and got rid of the milk cows and switched to beef in about 50. And, so I was born in 51. And, so we were beef cows. My mom was a school teacher. So there was always full time steady income which helped keep the ranch going. Likewise with my grandma, my grandma was a professional cook at the nearby, the disabled, developmentally disabled hospital. And, so she also had a steady income. And, it’s always been a good steady income helping the, helping the ranch out. Anyway, I grew up here raising cows. My folks didn’t encourage me to get into ag at all. And, so I didn’t. I did my academic training in Rural sociology. Got a job in Butte Montana doing research for an energy development company. And, that worked out really good for a few years. But, then I kind of had a desire to come back to the ranch and economics and that business kind of shifted. And, so I came back here in 81, had saved up a little money, bought 20 heifers and proceeded to chase cows, been doing it ever since.

>> I guess I’ll hop in here. Yeah. I also was not encouraged to choose agriculture as my vocation. And, I wasn’t really interested in it growing up either. I don’t think I had a full realization of like just what it meant to grow up on a cattle ranch and how kind of unique that was. As a kid it seemed like something that was just happening in the background. As I’ve grown up, kind of realized just what an immense privilege and kind of incredible lifestyle that I had growing up. But, I was, I was really into theater and poetry and creative writing in high school. I never felt like I, I didn’t feel like I fit in with the click of of FFA kids. I felt much more at home with the weird drama kids. And, when I went to college, actually the first, the first class that I took was an interdisciplinary class that combined, was all about food and agriculture, but it was kind of a combination of an ecology and science class, social justice class and a critical collective inquiry class. And, it was co-taught by three professors, but all through the lens of food. And, that class combined with the experience of not living on the ranch for the first time in my life, living in a dorm room and eating in a cafeteria and kind of getting this really startling contrast to the way I had grown up really helped me appreciate just how, kind of how special that experience of growing up on the ranch was. And, helped me realize that I had a pretty tremendous opportunity to come home and take over management. And, and so I spent kind of a weird circuitous journey through my academic studies. I ended up getting really interested in business and marketing and how that applied to agriculture and specifically sustainable agriculture and ended up kind of focusing on that for my undergrad. And, then actually family circumstances sort of forced, forced me back to the ranch earlier than I would’ve anticipated. I moved home with my now husband to take care of my grandma who has pretty advanced Alzheimer’s and needed a full time caretaker. So I ended up coming back right after college to move in with her and take care of her and got more and more involved in the ranch. And, now I can imagine doing anything else.

>> I like that story. I think Malcolm Gladwell would say that most good stories are circuitous like that. Since this is range podcast, I think it would be interesting for listeners to hear a little bit about the physical environment that you’re ranching in. You have a combination of irrigated ground and essentially native range land and some dry forest. Would either of you like to describe the, those characteristics of the ranch and your grass base?

>> Yeah. I’ll give it a shot and Beth can jump in some place. So we lived in Eastern Washington. We look at about 15 inches of annual precipitation. Most of it comes in the Winter. We just had a huge big rainstorm. There’s no snow on the ground right now, which it’s January 22nd, and that’s extremely unusual. We usually always have a foot, 18 inches, maybe 2 feet of snow this time of year. So this is a very strange year. But, I’m coming to think that strange years are the normal anymore. Anyway, so the area we live in is called the Channeled Scablands. And, it was, the geography was formed by the Ice Age floods. And, that was multiple occasion of ice dam, a glacial ice dam in Libby Montana that dammed up the Clark Fork River all the way back to, I don’t know, Anaconda, something like that. And, then the dam would break and all that water would drain. And, it came over the top of the ranch. And, estimates are that, that when it came over my place, it was 400 feet deep and 60 miles an hour. I don’t know how they come up with those numbers. But, it’s pretty impressive. Anyway, that had a huge effect on the typography. We’re primarily basalt here. And, then that gauged, when that water came by, it gauged channels. So the channels then collected topsoil over a year, of the years, thousands of years actually, and became extremely fertile. But, then they’re surrounded by these relative uplands that are just almost bare rock with quite a bit of Ponderosa Pine growing through the rock areas. So we have some really highly productive meadows and some really low production trees and rocks. So we’ve kind of figured out how to manage all that. And, then I have another 50 acres of irrigated ground that just kind of helps plug in the shortages. I guess that one way of putting it. We hayed that ground for years and years and years. And, then we quit haying it probably, oh it’s been maybe 20 years ago now, no not quite, 15, and just graze it now. So yeah, I’ll hand it over to Beth from that point.

>> Yeah. I’d say that’s a pretty, pretty accurate description. It’s about, about 2/3rds of the ranch is these basalt cliffs that are pretty, pretty low productivity, maybe more of what you think of in terms of like Central Washington. And, then we have these sub-irrigated low end meadows that are just incredibly rich deep soil and very high productivity. So we’re kind of managing a non-brittle and brittle environment side by side. It’s kind of a wild contrast. But, I’m very glad we have the sub-irrigated meadows.

>> Yeah. It’s pretty but not easy to deal with. You also have some non-natural barriers on the ranch. Not many people have a freeway going right.

>> Yeah. We also have Interstate 90 going through the middle of the ranch which is another interesting management factor to take into consideration.

>> Yeah a couple of times, a couple of times a year we move the herd from one side to the other. And, I have two stock trailers. And, we move about 160 head in about 4 or 5 hours. So my cows load well.

>> At some point, you must have made the shift, Morris, from selling calves to selling pounds of beef and doing direct marketing. When did, when did that shift occur and why?

>> Well, we’ve always, from as long as I can remember, we’ve always had a few butcher beef around. And, usually half a dozen. And, then for, from 81 when I started here until about 96, we were very conventional, you know, as conventional as can be. I mean, and then in 96 we switched to ballistic management. And, gradually, probably, it had a lot to do, switching to the total direct marketing had a lot to do with Beth coming home and taking over the marketing part of it. So it was probably, when we went to full sales was probably, what?

>> I think 2012. I, so I came home in 2010. And, the last year of my undergrad I had really kind of focused on this direct marketing effort and how to. It was pretty clear that the ranch was not going to be financially successful unless we could get a more premium price for our product. And, not just to, not just to make more money but also have the certainty of being able to set our prices based off of our cost of production instead of taking whatever the market was offering, which is sometimes great and sometimes not. So that was sort of the driver behind the direct marketing. And, the other piece of that was we were, you know, my dad had, was really kind of pioneering holistic management practices in the region. And, we were doing all of these incredible things with how we were managing the cattle on the land and not receiving any kind of a premium for that product. And, I went to school at Western Washington University. So I lived in Bellingham which, you know, has a pretty hip farm to table scene and grass fed beef was like a big thing. And, I was like Dad, you know, there’s, people are paying out the nose for this stuff and we’re kind of just selling it on the commodity market. So what would it look like if we, you know, again you kind of mentioned, we’re just 16 miles from Downtown Spokane. We have like a big urban market that we could capture. And, so I started really thinking about how we could do that, do more of a direct sales program. So when I moved home, we kind of started that effort, transitioning from selling cows on the commodity market to doing a grass fed and finished beef program. So that meant that first we had to hold over a year of calves, which obviously has some economic implications. But, so it was kind of a gradual shift over a couple of years. But, I think, by 2012, we were doing 100% direct to consumer sales.

>> Wow. Yeah that takes a whole set of different skills than, than just animal husbandry. And, I say just animal husbandry as if it’s a small thing. But, it is a different set of skills to try to find the market yourself and connect with those consumers and prepare a flow of product. How do you manage? So maybe what are, what are some of the customers that you are relying upon now or that are relying upon you I should say?

>> Yeah. So really my direct marketing strategy was to take the, the same model that we always had on the ranch but just transition more of, more of our production in that direction. So we sell, I would say like 85% to 90% of our product goes in custom beef sales of halves and quarters that go to direct consumers. So we’re just selling to families. I don’t do farmers markets. I don’t really do much, much USDA product. I look at, what we, what we send USDA is marketing expense more than anything because not everybody is ready to buy a side of beef without having a chance to try the product first. But, I think, you know, one of the advantages that I, that I had coming back is that, you know, I’m 30 years younger than most of the ranchers in this area. And, so even though I’m not like a website designer or anything like that, I had, I knew enough, I was internet literate enough to like build a website. And, I knew that people needed to be able to pay with a credit card and, you know, not be, just like some things to make. They don’t seem that revolutionary now. But, at the time, it was like no one, even the people that were doing halves in beef sales maybe didn’t have like a very aesthetically pleasing website and you still had to pay with a check or with cash. So a few of those little convenience things definitely helped give us an edge. And, then we just really focused on customer retention trying to keep the same, the same folks coming back year to year because I actually don’t like selling my product that much. I don’t like going out and hustling. I just, I, right now, the way that our marketing system kind of works is I have an email list. There’s an email that goes out once a year that says beef deposits are open. Usually, in about five or six weeks we sell out. So our customers have to put a $250 deposit down to reserve their beef. And, then that books them a sport for our Summer harvest. And, then we have a, actually the same mobile butcher, custom butcher that we’ve worked with since the 80s is still the same family business that we work with for our, for our direct sales today. And, so they come out about every week or every other week throughout the Summer and they harvest five to eight beef at a time. And, then customers pick their beef up directly from the butcher and I invoice them the balance of whatever they owe after the, after the deposit.

>> To what extent is food service a viable option for, you know, for operations of your size? Is it too difficult to be able to supply something regularly or is it just not worth the hassle? Seems like that would be a good steady income.

>> Yeah. You know, I, we have worked with restaurants in the past. I definitely dabbled in that. Until actually, up until this year, Gonzaga University was a customer of ours. We were supplying their dinning services. Obviously COVID has been super disruptive in that sense. So I think that’s probably a relationship that’s coming to an end, which I actually feel fine about. But, the, there’s quite a few challenges to me for working with more of those institutional or food service type businesses. One is that it’s really hard to build relationships because there’s really high turnover. So once, you know, you might have a chef that you create a great relationship with. But, they may only stay two or three years and then you have to start over from scratch with a new chef. And, you now, we’re just a two person, or you know, we have a little bit of part time help. We’re a two and a half person outfit. So I don’t have a bunch of time to chase, chase my customers around. And, then the other challenge of that is that not very many restaurants are set up to do whole animal utilization. That really takes a special skill set to make that work in a restaurant concept. And, while there is quite a burgeoning food scene in Spokane, there isn’t a whole ton of, there aren’t a lot of chefs that are willing to do that. Then so the whole, then you have to get into inventory management and figuring out how to part out, you know, your beef and get the right cuts moved to the right places. And, I would much rather sell animals in the quantities I have to kill them in. So for that reason, doing the half and quarter beefs, that’s just worked way better for us. And, then processing is another bottleneck. There’s a couple USDA slaughter facilities, but they’re all a two plus hour drive from us compared to my mobile butcher who comes and kills on farms. So I don’t have to do anything other than get out of bed and make myself a cup of coffee in the morning. So the yeah, there’s a lot of reasons why, for our business, the custom beef just works, works a lot better.

>> So you harvest animals when it works for your workflow on the ranch.

>> Yeah. Exactly.

>> Yeah.

>> I was just thinking that, you now, finances can generate a lot of conflict within families and within industries. And, livestock associations have gotten wrapped around the axial over this feeling, I think, on the part of ranchers that they should be capturing more of the retail dollar. You know, this seems like a pretty good option. How, do you think it’s reasonable for the average commercial rancher to do some direct marketing? Should they start with part of their herd. I realize there’s no such thing as an average. There was a farmer here in Ellensburg who said he’s been ranching here for 75 years and he’s still waiting for an average one. I think that applies to people even more than environments. Nevertheless, you know, we do have a lot of the ranching industry in the United States is, you know, family owner operators that have just enough animals to make a bit of a living at it. You know, for those people, do you think it’s reasonable for them to look at direct marketing as a way to capture more of the retail? Is it worth their time and trying to learn new skills?

>> Yeah but, I think that, it’s so dependent on what the individual farmer ranch, like what their desired outcomes are. You know, for our family, like, I just happen to have a skill set that, I’m really interested in marketing. I’m a pretty decent photographer, I’m a pretty decent writer. I have a good sense for how to tell a story about our product. And, if those weren’t things that came naturally to me, I would probably find a different way to sell my beef. But, that said, I’ve learned a ton of skills that I did not know. And, you can learn anything off of YouTube. I definitely spend, have spent quite a bit of time like learning how to build websites and, you know, search engine optimization, and all kinds of things that I’m not deeply passionate about but are just part of running a business. So yeah, I think, especially if you’re close to an urban center and there’s a processing outlet that makes sense, it’s definitely been, the direct marketing program has been a really important stabilizing force for our business. Like I mentioned earlier, just being able to set a cost based, or a price based off of our cost production and not just what the market’s doing at whatever day we decide to take our calves to market, there’s definitely advantages to it. But, I also don’t think, I don’t think it’s necessarily an infinitely scalable model because there’s also, at least for the way that we’re selling our beef, there’s only so many people out there that want to buy a whole side if beef. You know? Like there are enough people like that in Spokane. And, there’s definitely some customer education that we do to help kind of pave the way for that in terms of whole animal utilization and how to cook all the different cuts, which just means that is super foreign to most people, the way our food system works. Like you, a lot of people basically just know how to cook ground beef and steaks. And, then grass fed beef is a whole like takes kind of a whole another level of skill to really yield a product that is delicious and tender and an enjoyable eating experience. So yeah, I guess it’s, it’s just super dependent on the individual.

>> I’d add, I’d add though, if somebody does consider moving this direction is to take baby steps. Don’t commit your whole program to it in case something does go wrong. And, it is a learning curve. And, you know, just like anything in agriculture, take it easy as you get into it in case something does go wrong, you’re not sinking the ship.

>> Take five and see if you can.

>> Exactly.

>> Sell it to your neighbors.

>> Yep.

>> You mentioned grass finishing. I assume most of that occurs on the ranch. I know just enough about meat signs to be dangerous talking about it. But, I think I understand there’s a big difference between raising animals out to a slaughter weight on pasture and finishing animals that have, you know, meat that’s of a quality you would like to eat. There’s a difference between reaching a slaughter weight and finishing cattle. How do you, how do you finish cattle assuming that they’re done on the ranch there?

>> That’s definitely, definitely an art and a science. And, we’re always trying to kind of refine, refine out product. And, we’ve certainly made some bad grass fed beef. So it’s not like, yeah, it’s not like you can just turn the cows loose and you’re going to get a great grass finished product. So luckily creating or, I mean, I would say luckily creating a high quality grass fed product really fits in with a lot of our other management goals and ethics in terms of just like aligning our operations with natural cycles and really trying to maximize ecological benefit and efficiency of our, of our mother cows. So we, so we do cow, calves, or finish. Everything happens here on the ranch. A big part of that, well one because, like many people who are in cow calf, we’re very sentimental about our cows. And, I can’t imagine us ever really going to a stalker operation, because we just love our mama cows. But, it also really allows us to have control of the genetics so that we can make sure that we’re creating a product that, at the very end of the life cycle it is truly finished and a high quality grass fed beef. So we’ve moved to a smaller, smaller cow size, moved, bred really, for the last ten years or so, we’ve bred in quite a bit of like Aberdeen Angus or Lowline Angus genetics to bring out frame size down, also helps us minimize our Winter feed inputs. And, I think, there’s lots of good evidence why a smaller cow is just a more, more efficient cow. And, yeah, I think we don’t have it all figured out. We’re definitely always trying to get things keyed in. But, but the goal is to create both like the most ecologically sound product and also a product that is really delightful to the end consumer. I don’t know if you want to say anything else about that, Dad.

>> Well one of the, one of the factors that helps us is because we harvest every two weeks during the Summer. And, we usually start about mid July, we also Summer calves. So we’re harvesting about the same time we’re calving. We put the herd in the coral, and then when we sort off those to be butchered, we sort off the very best steers and a few heifers, those that are in the coral at the time. That gives us the cream of the crop. And, by the time we start in July by the time we finish in September, that’s another eight weeks of growth that you can put on that bottom, that bottom steer that you looked at that first week. So that gives us a little more quality control. And, we can get them as bi and as fat as possible. So that’s a, that’s a real plus to the operation.

>> I like the idea that, Beth, your skill sets are complimentary and have enabled some of that to happen. I really feel like we don’t recognize the extent to which having people who think differently is useful in a variety of context. I recall hearing Temple Grandin talking at, I think, the Society for Range Management Conference several years ago, she was the keynote speaker on the opening day. And, she was describing how she sees and feels the world, sees things in images, makes different associations from images rather than words inside her head. And, she was describing some consulting work she had been doing recently in California and was talking with, I think actually, tech executives about the importance of having people who think differently than you do. And, the example she gave was the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in Japan a few years ago. She said here you have a culture that is almost defined by the tsunami. And yet, they build a nuclear reactor that has the backup systems below sea level. And, you know, the number of things that are wrong with that picture are, is large. You know, first you have nuclear engineers who think pretty linearly and you have the Japanese culture which are typically, maybe stereotypically, you know, doesn’t ask for help. And, so you can go all the way through the construction of a nuclear power plant and not see this glaring error in the, you know, the resiliency of this backup system. And, I think it’s accurate that we can run some of those same risks in agriculture when we don’t have people with a variety of skill sets and ways of thinking that are, that are involved. And, I actually think right now is a good time for young people to be interested in ranching. You have done some work, you know, really promoting sustainable ranching with, you know, nontraditional ranching audiences. Can you talk a bit about the Cowgirl School that you’ve done for some time?

>> Yeah. I would love to, I would, there’s nothing I’d rather talk about than Cowgirl Camp. So Cowgirl Camp is an educational program that we run on the ranch. It’s a five day intensive course for women that are interested in getting started in regenerative agriculture and raising livestock. I co-teach it with a dear friend of mine, Sandy Matheson, who actually went to host and management training with my dad back in the mid 90s. That’s how she and I got connected. But, she’s also a multi-generation woman rancher. Part of what is so special about what we’re doing with Cowgirl Camp is just as you were saying, bringing a diversity of mindsets and experiences and exposing them to the world of ranching, which can be kind of intimidating to get into and also has lots of economic barriers that are maybe outside of the scope of this conversation, but definitely merit discussion. But, I really think of our, I think of how we look at grassland ecosystem health the way that I was trained to think about it, you really look at the community of plants. And, typically diversity is seen as a really positive indicator of resiliency. So you want to have plants that are different species, different ages, different classes. You want to have a mix of forbs and grasses and shrubs and trees. And, that’s what really creates a resilient dynamic system. And, I really applied that same lens to looking at our human managers. And, what we see is not a ton of, not a ton of diversity. We see, you know, mostly older white men. And, I don’t see that as an indicator as a resilient dynamic system. So part of the work we’re really trying to do, through Cowgirl Camp, is create a little crack in that, just in as we would in a pasture, try to create the conditions for what we want to have to grow, what our desirable plants are. So too with Cowgirl Camp, we’re really trying to create this nursery for a more diverse group of managers to start to germinate. So Sandy and I kind of have gone on this adventure of creating a curriculum that’s really focused on women and creating an environment where they feel welcomed and celebrated. And, it’s just a really fun exciting way to kind of get your feet wet in the, in the world of ranching. So we teach a lot of the holistic management curriculum. They learn how to make a grazing plant. First of all, most importantly, they learn how to make the holistic context so that, you know, defining your quality of life and the future resource base, what you want the environment in your community to look like in the future. How to make management decisions that are socially, economically, and environmentally sound and well vetted, and how to make a grazing plan, how to do ecological monitoring. And, we also teach a lot of the technical skills. So they learn low stress livestock handling. Some of the women that come have like literally never seen a cow in real life up close before. So they get a chance to move some sheep around in my yard, understand flight zones and how to apply pressure. My dad does a little fence building boot camp. So they all get stretch some barbwire fence and learn how to use some of the common tools. Yeah. And, we just get like, every year it’s just an incredible group of women that come from all kinds of different backgrounds. But, they’re all really interested in this question of how, how do we feed our communities and how do we, how do we do that in a way that really shows care for the land and care for the animals, and care for each other?

>> I like that. I’m reminded of an experience I had several years ago, not long after I started with WSU where a colleague of mine, Tom Brannon, had just retired and was looking for someone to take over range and forest horseback tours that he did with high school vocational ag students. And, you know, you would think that, that particular subset of high school would be people that had some experience, you know, being out in the middle of nowhere on the land. And, you know, we would, we would do some teaching about food cycles and forestry practices and basic ecology. But, nearly without exception, by far the most significant part of that experience for students was just being in nature, horseback, where they could observe for hours, essentially uninterrupted, what’s going on in that natural world and just take it in. and, I was shocked at how many of these students really truly had never done that. And, it effects how you see the world and the things that you value. And, I’m really encouraged that we seem to live in a time where people are paying a little bit more attention to how their food is raised and are, and we also live in a country where many people have enough disposable income to use their dollars to also influence that. And, so I, I like what you’re doing because I feel like the story of regenerative agriculture needs to be told more broadly. And, that people that are not familiar with agriculture who have an interest in agriculture should have the ability to learn about that. And, you know, in particular, range and pasture based beef production is, you know, nearly by definition one of the most sustainable agricultural pursuits that’s out there. I just picked up the new book, it’s a, not real new, but a new book by Courtney White who is a, one of the founders of the Quivira Coalition called, the title of the book is Grass, Soil, Hope a Journey Through Carbon Country. And, the forward of the book is written by Michael Pollan. And, many people will be familiar with that author for his best selling book Omnivore’s Dilemma. But, in the, in the prologue, Michael Pollan points out that, that there’s this widespread pessimism about agricultural and about human engagement with nature in genera because we have this idea that it’s a zero sum game. That, he says for us to arrest whatever we need or want from nature, food, energy, pleasure, means that nature must be diminished. More of us, more for us means less for it. And, examples of this trade off are depressingly easy to find. But, it goes on to say thee are counter examples that point to a way out of that dismal math. And, he goes on to talk about grass farming where you truly can add to the planet and not just rearrange some things because of the nature of photosynthesis and how livestock utilize that. And, I think, involving people, even people who don’t intend to be involved in agriculture, in what you guys are doing is extremely important. Maybe we’ll segue here to another question. You’ve been doing what could be called holistic management for a long time. And, I think a lot of people, especially in the traditional range community see this as just a grazing method. Holistic management would be synonymous in their minds with short duration, high intensity grazing. But I’ve, I’ve heard several times you guys talking about making decisions, looking at multiple spheres of, you know, decisions based in deciding how to do and what to do. Can you talk a bit about, what I think I understand as, a decision making framework rather than a grazing method?

>> Take it Beth.

>> Well, I think some of the some of the things I was alluding to about defining quality of life and defining the future resource base, I think that’s really the secret sauce of holistic management. And, we get so caught up in like the how, like we’re supposed to move the cows, like get the cows bunched together and move them around and that’s holistic management. But, that’s really just a means of production. That’s a technique you can use to get a certain outcome. But, it’s not really holistic management. So the way that I think of holistic management is really, how can we, how can we frame our management in a way that’s proactive, that’s thoughtful, that has an end result in mind that’s really far into the future like beyond our own lifetimes? Because we, we are managing ecosystems. Right? We are part of ecosystems. We’re not just, we’re not some outside force. We are part of nature. And, we can, through our, through our decisions, influence what our ecosystems around us look like. So sometimes those are, those are very concrete things like I want to have more forage or I want to reduce fire reduction in our, in our forestland. And, sometimes those are, those are more amorphous things like thinking about I want to have, you know, I want to have a community that where people are really connected and show care for each other. Education is a huge part of our family’s holistic context, having and making sure that members of our family and members of our community have the opportunity to pursue education. Those are all management objectives that we are, that we’re working towards. And, anytime we make a management decision, holistic management has kind of a framework of these, these seven testing guidelines that are really just a series of questions to breakdown various complex management decisions to simpler little bite size pieces. So you think about cause and effect. Is this management decision addressing a root cause of the problem or is this addressing a symptom? There’s some financial questions in there about gross profit margin and, or gross profit and marginal gross margin analysis and looking at which enterprises kind of contribute the most to your bottom line or give you the most bang for your buck. You think about where the energy or the money is coming from to do, to execute any management decision and how it’s used. Is it used in a way that’s going to be like sort of an addictive thing where we’re going to have to use more, more and more inputs every time we face this problem? Or again, kind of going back to that root cause, can we, can we use this money or energy in a way that’s really going to be a one time intervention that we’ll sort of shift the dynamics of what we’re managing? Thinking about how are impact, how our management decisions impact the people around us in our community. It’s really just, and finally, like is this, is this management decision moving us towards the future resource base that we desire? So is this helping us create the kind of world that we want to live in. And, I think that, that’s such a powerful way to approach any major management decision more than is this going to make me money or not or is this the way we’ve done things in the past? Or is this going against like what the cultural norms are? Which are sort of the reactive ways that a lot of people make management decisions. We’re really trying to ground our management in a more holistic way, which is where the whole idea of holistic management comes from.

>> Thinking about every aspect of the operation and all of the possible decisions that could be made. Our mutual friend, Don Nelson, who was a beef specialist at WSU for many, many years, recently passed away like to say, you know, what is the best possible outcome and what is the worst possible outcome? And, what decisions would lead you to those various end points and weigh them against each other? As I said, you’ve been doing this for some time. Can you give an example of, you know, where that thinking and planning has led you in terms of how you’ve managed, in particular, these pretty starkly different environments of the irrigated or sub-irrigated pasture alongside a pretty dry brittle range land?

>> Well, one of the things we’ve done is we use extensive electric fence. And, these meadows are about 100 acres. We’ve got 2 of them. And, that 200 acres proves 80% of the forage for the ranch. The other, the other 80% of the ranch provides about 20% of the forage, and that’s trees and meadows. So over the last, well I don’t know, well 10 or 15 years, we’ve designed the meadows with permanent cross fences, electric hot, electric cross fences with a centralized hub area that has access gates on each corner that has access to the different padlocks. So that gives us a ton of control. And, so if we want to graze a particular area very intensely, we can come off the permanent single wire hot wire with temporary poly wire and step in posts. So we have tremendous flexibility in how we want to graze a particular part of a meadow or all the meadow. And, that infrastructure design has really helped get the, I call it optimizing ecosystem processes. And, the few, we’re in the Soil Carbon Challenge with Peter Donovan out of Enterprise. And, we’ve had our second, second assessment on his test plots. And, we’ve tripled our soil organic mineral on those test plots. So we’re pretty, pretty happy with that. And, some of the test plots we were up 8%, or 9%, 10% some organic matter. So we probably have really close to optimal levels there. And, then, and then we’ve taken some of the, to a lesser extent, some of the same technology out in through the trees and are able to concentrate the grazing areas there. So I guess the, their infrastructure has really been one of, one of the big, one of the big pluses. And, then and in developing that slowly to see what works, and actually, I think we’re about ready to redo one of the whole, one of the meadows extensively because the original design is not working out as good as it could.

>> Yeah. And, I think it’s really not a one size fits all approach. Like the, the two, well I would say there’s more than two ecosystem types. Because we’re in kind of a, we’re in an ecotone in this area. So it’s kind of where, to where two ecosystems mash up together. And, if you go 20 miles in one direction you’ll be in more like an Alpine environment and if you go 20 miles in another direction, you’re in the high desert. So you know, you just can’t say like oh this many thousand pounds of beef per acre or this mob grazing technique is always going to be appropriate across the whole ranch. And, it also doesn’t always make economic sense. I mean, it would be a good use of our time to have intensive cross fencing in our Ponderosa Pine forest because, you know, you’re adding.

>> There’s nothing there to eat.

>> Yeah. You’re adding like a couple hours of grazing maybe and putting in like $1,000 worth of infrastructure to do that. Doesn’t, doesn’t always make sense, but. But I do think like it, what, the approach we have taken is prioritizing, getting the most productive parts of the ranch functioning as well as we can and then kind of moving down that priority list and paying more attention to the low productivity areas as we kind of maximize those high productivity areas.

>> Yeah. In regard to those high productivity areas, you guys have done some experimentation with what’s sometimes called mob grazing, you know, which is an effort both to optimize the animal’s consumption but also maybe maximize the soil health by increasing, in theory, how much gets trampled versus what gets eaten. How would you describe your experience with that? Was it worth the effort? You know, there’s always this, this tension where, in economics, marginal revenue is meeting marginal cost. You know, is additional cost, both in terms of time and infrastructure, to try to make that happen worth what you, what you’re getting back from it?

>> Well, as I often tell people, the first answer I use is it depends. And, situations are different in different places. So we’ve probably for three years, we did a research project with WSU on some grazing techniques. And, we were running up to 100,000 pounds of beef per acre, maybe 150,000 pounds on some, at that, at some point. And, then doing soil samples and forage samples after the fact. Results were really kind of inconclusive on that study. I was expecting big, big dramatic impacts and it didn’t really happen. In hindsight, I think, part of the, part of the reason is that we were a little too intense. And, we probably grazed, grazed the residual grasses down too far and there wasn’t really anything left after we left for the soil microbes to advance cycling process through. On the other place, on the other hand, some of the other places we’ve done it we’ve had really good luck. That’s, so that was sort of soil type dependent and moisture dependent. All those things are impacts that are very complicated and require a lot of astute careful observation to figure out what’s going on. And, then the other is, in terms of does it really pay out? Before I got into that project, and I knew it was coming, I set up the infrastructure with lanes with gates the length of the field so it was really quite easy. It was really a matter of opening and shutting the gates, that’s, and my cows are so trained that, when they see me coming during the day, they know that they’re going to go get fresh groceries. So it, I had the infrastructure set up so that all I had to do was open and close gates and move maybe a quarter a mile hot wire, which is, you know, like a 15 minute job. So I had it, I had it set up ahead of time to minimize the amount of effort and be very efficient.

>> Before we quit, I want to go back to a couple of questions about involving the public, I guess, in what you’re doing. You know, for myself, as an academic whose work is mostly intangible, I highly value you people who, as I said, make the world go around producing food, conserving soil, generating ecosystem goods and services for the rest of us. And, I want to thank you for that. And, I also see that people need to know more about that. And, you know, one of the objectives of the grand funding for this podcast, which comes from the Western Center for Risk Management Education, to examine some of the ways to diversify revenue for the ranch. And, I’m curious if you’ve thought about some other ways to try to monetize some of these ecosystem goods and services with, you know, agri tourism, with, there’s a few possibilities out there? I’m just curious if you thought about it?

>> I’ve definitely chewed on that a bit? I think.

[ Inaudible ]

I think there’s tons of opportunity for us to do things like that. I’ve been thinking about giving some little canvas tents set up and just inviting more people out to. And, not even, I mean it would be great to obviously cover our cost and everything. But, I also feel pretty strongly that it’s just so important for people to have access nature and to the outdoors and like you were saying just really be present in, yeah in like large scale ecosystems. Like, obviously, parks are wonderful. But, to be in the in places that are a little more intact.

>> Natural.

>> Ecologically, yeah. I think that that’s something that we have the responsibility to do. And, so yeah, I think that’s something that you’re going to see in the next couple of years at the Lazy R is more opportunities to get folks out on the land and connected to those open spaces. Because I think it’s just, it’s so important for people’s hearts and souls to have that kind of connection.

>> Yeah. I’ve heard that in some places in China they have oxygen bars where the air quality’s so bad that you can go somewhere to pay to breathe some clean air. I’d like to think that we don’t get there. Nevertheless, I do think that people are willing to, should be willing and maybe should be even willing to pay to step away from their social media feed and just experience the real world for a little while. And, what better place to do that than, you know, a functioning cattle ranch that produces real food somewhere near an urban center?

>> Yeah. And, we have such amazing wildlife habitat here too. Like I know like what we do for money is the cows. But there’s just, it’s just such a beautiful place. It’s really special. So I want to share it with more people.

>> Well I can’t remember whether you guys have a website that people can go to if they want to learn more about the Lazy R?

>> Yeah. We do. It’s lazyrbeef.com. And, we also have a website for new Cowgirl Camp which is newcowgirlcamp.com. And, you can follow me on Instagram as well which is @lazyrranch.

>> Great. And, we’ll put those links in the show notes as well so that people don’t even have to make it this far into the audio to find it. Again, Beth and Morris, thank you for what you’re doing. I really do appreciate it and thank you for your time today.

>> Thanks for having us on Tip.

>> Yeah. Thanks, Tip

>> It’s been a pleasure.

>> Thank you for listening to the Art of Range podcast. You can subscribe to and review the show through iTunes or your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode. Just search for Art of Range. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode, send an email to show@artofrange.com. For articles and links to resources mentioned in the podcast, please see the show notes at artofrange.com. Listening to your feedback is important to the success of our mission, empowering rangeland managers. Please take a moment to fill out the brief survey at artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by CAHNRS Communications in the College of Agricultural Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by the Western Center For Risk Management Education through the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

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