Holistic Ranchers Try to Mimic Historical Conditions on Prairie

Preposterous as it may sound to the increasingly vocal critics of Western ranching, Susan Heyneman is a holistic cowgirl. That doesn’t mean that she sits around the chuck wagon eating bean sprouts and tofu. Holistic ranching is a new way of running cattle that adherents call a solution to the great Western debate over grazing.

“It’s a philosophy,” Heyneman says. “It makes you think.”

The philosophy, properly known as “holistic resource management” or HRM, holds that the prairie was healthiest before agriculture, when great herds of bison roamed there. As much as possible, HRM tries to make domestic cattle mimic the bison’s effect.

In five years, Susan and Jack Heyneman have doubled their livestock numbers, adding sheep as well as cattle, while improving the forage on their 3,000 acres of wind-swept range near Yellowstone National Park. They are among more than 5,000 ranchers in the United States who have taken classes to learn the experimental, labor-intensive method that is even endorsed by some government range experts.

HRM supporters say the new methods could become the basis for a compromise between environmentalists who want public lands to be “Cattle Free by ‘93” and ranchers scrambling to defend the status quo. One in five Western ranchers leases public range, and the Bureau of Land Management acknowledges that more than two-thirds of its 170 million acres of grazing land is in bad shape.

“I really feel like it’s the wave of the future and it’s picking up steam,” says Jim Dollerschell, a range conservationist for the Bureau of Land Management in Grand Junction, Colo.

In the arid American West, the reasoning goes, soils and grasses evolved in tandem with vast herds of grazing animals. The herds migrated in and out of an area quickly, eating intensively, trampling and fertilizing the plants and breaking up the soil. Holistic ranchers, with elaborate fencing and time controls, strive for the same effect.

That often means running more--not fewer--cattle, which puts holistic management at the center of the ranching debate. Although the new methods are drawing followers among some environmentalists and public range managers, critics insist what the range needs is rest.

Allan Savory, the iconoclastic botanist from Zimbabwe who brought holistic management to this country, likes to say North America is turning to desert faster than Africa.

“Most people believe that, if we leave it to nature, the grasslands will recover, and nature, to most people, means rest,” says Savory, whose Albuquerque-based Center for Holistic Resource Management teaches the new methods. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. If we were to truly leave it to nature, that would mean returning big herds of bison, pronghorns, deer, sheep, wolves and pack-hunting Indians.”

Most modern ranchers turn their livestock out to graze freely over large tracts of land, which he says allows the cattle to congregate around water and erode stream banks. The range, Savory says, is overgrazed in some places and under-grazed in others.

Grazing is only part of it. Those who attend the holistic resource management courses also learn to create goals for the landscape, the family and the community that are ecologically and economically sound. Critics say such vague and lofty goals make it impossible for HRM to “fail.”

Savory’s methods are not for the lazy. To get the desired “herd effect” for their ranges, the Heynemans and their neighbor, Bill MacKay, have divided parts of their ranches into small, pie-shaped enclosures where the cattle are rotated every three or four days around a central drinking trough.

“In 1984, things were a wreck,” MacKay says. Since then, he says, he has boosted his herd of cows and yearlings from 800 to 1,400--and reduced his debt from $700,000 to $60,000.

Up the road, rancher Eddie Miller, a lifelong friend of MacKay, shakes his head over what looks to him like his neighbor’s latest folly.

“The MacKays and the Heynemans are running more livestock on the same acres, but I don’t know how long they can do that,” Miller says. “It’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem.”