Western Range Managers Find New Ways of Beefing Up Their Income

Chuck Milner tried to make it ranching on his own, running cattle on his family’s land on the Oklahoma prairie.

Four years ago, he threw in the towel.

Now, as a range manager at the Black Kettle National Grasslands, Milner is trying to help others keep their ranches in the family--and in the black.

“Whatever we’re doing, we need to do something different. I don’t care if it’s on public lands or private lands as well,” said Milner, who led a seminar Feb. 3 at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering on securing ranching’s future. “What I was doing wasn’t working economically or ecologically.”

Across the West, the always hardscrabble life of the family rancher is tougher than ever. Beef prices are low, inheritance taxes are high, environmental regulations add costs and the push to sell out to real estate developers is intense.

“We’ve got a lot of pressures that threaten our business and our way of life,” said John Dofflemyer, a fifth-generation rancher from Lemon Cove, Calif., who attended the seminar because he’s not willing to give up yet.

According to Ben Alexander of the Sonoran Institute, there has been no new net income added in farming or ranching in the Rocky Mountain region in the last 30 years, even as the rest of the economy has boomed. In Montana, small-scale ranchers earn as much through government subsidies as through beef sales, and the scenario is similar around the West.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope.

“There are opportunities to create new income where we haven’t before and to tap into new markets,” said Alexander, the author of a book called “The New Frontiers of Ranching.” “Ranchers have always diversified--you grew some grain, maybe your wife worked in town--but what’s interesting now is the number of ways people are diversifying that are nontraditional.”

Take Will Holder and his wife, Jan, who eight years ago decided to return to the family’s ranch near Upper Eagle Creek, Ariz.

“We went there thinking all we had to do was work harder to make the ranch profitable,” said Jan Holder. “It took us a year to figure out that we could work ourselves to the bone and never make a profit.”

So the Holders decided to raise organic beef, which sells for as much as $20 a pound in some upscale markets. Now they run their own company, Ervin’s Natural Beef, buying meat from half a dozen ranchers and selling it to resorts, restaurants and health food stores.

It’s a win-win situation, the Holders say. They estimate the ranchers get about 25% more per pound than through ordinary distributors. There is less damage done to the environment because they avoid pesticides and chemicals. And they have a waiting list of customers for the product.

A group of ranchers in Texas’ eastern panhandle have gone for a different niche: bird-watchers.

The Canadian, Texas, Chamber of Commerce created an association that organizes tours on ranchland to see the rare lesser prairie chicken and other birds. The ranchers earn as much as $10,000 a year with minimal effort, and get an incentive to take care of the birds.

Program director Remelle Farrar said the system has also increased cooperation between local wildlife groups and the ranchers.

“We think the conservation efforts and the ability to work together is more important than the individual dollars,” Farrar said.

Other ranchers have tried to change their own management practices rather than look for outside income.

For the Malpai Borderlands Group in southern Arizona and New Mexico, that has meant an experiment in “grass banking.” In dry years, ranchers are allowed to rest their land and graze their cattle on nearby Gray Ranch, which is owned by a nonprofit foundation. In exchange, they sell the group conservation easements on their land, limiting its future sale to developers.

“It’s going to take all this energy and all these possible tools . . . so that people have an incentive to preserve this land and what makes this the West,” said Gregg Simonds, who used to run the 200,000-acre Deseret Ranch and is putting together a rangeland institute to share similar ideas.

For Milner, just talking with other ranchers about solutions is exciting enough. At Black Kettle, he has tried moving cattle from field to field more often and he allows more intensive grazing in the winter, when plants are dormant, rather than on young grasses in spring. Each section of the prairie is evaluated every year, and the plan is adjusted.

“I feel kind of giddy, like a kid, because I learn lots of new things every day,” he said. “Before, I spent so much time driving a truck and pouring out feed that I was never able to look around at the big picture. It’s kind of fun.”

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The Sonoran Institute:

https://www.sonoran.org

Ervin’s Natural Beef: https://www.ervins.com

The Western Folklife Center, organizer of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering: https://www.westernfolklife.org