Livestock is the ultimate tool for restoring soil productivity, says a North Dakota cattle produce.
When Gene Goven started farming near Turtle Lakes, N.D., in 1967, he raised cattle the conventional way, putting up hay every summer and grazing them all season in a single pasture, guided solely by the calendar. But he found that it didn’t make sense.
As a bachelor farmer until 1974, his budget for food and spending money often stood at $5 a month.
“Conventional thinking didn’t make the place pay. I’d use the same spring pasture every year. The summer pasture, I’d graze it until November,” he said in a presentation at the recent Western Canadian Holistic Management conference in Brandon.
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“There would be nothing left, but I’d leave them in there a little longer because the calendar said it wasn’t time yet.”
Three years later, he switched to a four-pasture, twice-over grazing strategy, which helped add a few more pounds of beef per acre.
“Something again just didn’t feel quite right,” he said, adding that his thinking changed as he realized he couldn’t raise any more beef than he had grass for them to graze.
“I said to myself at the time, ‘I can’t just be a cowboy, I’ve got to be a grass manager first.’ But these days I’m not even a grass manager anymore. All I do is manage diversity for soil health.”
In the early 1980s, Goven and his wife Marcy decided to put their farming ideals to paper, a move that has helped them chart a course toward making their farm profitable and sustainable.
They attended Allan Savory’s holistic management course in 1985 in Bismarck, N.D., which inspired them to switch to zero tillage while diversifying into time-controlled prescribed livestock grazing to reap benefits across the whole operation.
Identifying goals and weak links such as rain and snow moisture runoff helped Goven restore and enhance his land’s natural diversity and water retention capacity to the point where people now pay to visit his ranch, which is as much as tourist attraction and bird watching destination as it is a mixed beef and cropland operation.
“We see now that wildlife is only a byproduct of soil health and so is everything else we do,” he said.
Four years ago, a party of bird watchers spotted 112 species of songbirds in three hours in less than half a kilometre.
Experts used to tell Goven that he had to do trenching and use a deep tiller to stop the runoff. Others suggested burning off the old bottom to let the new grass grow up.
“They told us that we were crazy, that we had to do mechanical things,” he said.
“I’m not in favour of burning, which is a carbon release.”
Less than 175 millimetres of rain fell from 1988-89. Then the drought broke with 100 mm of rain in 40 minutes.
Goven remembers feeling annoyed to see there was no water in his sloughs and potholes.
“We did not have any runoff. The neighbours had all kinds of water, even fences washed out,” he said.
Later, water gradually began filling up the low spots.
“Eleven days later, we quit hauling water.”
The experience taught him a lot about how landscape hydrology works, with almost everything happening underground and surface flow only part of the picture.
“That’s what keeps the land green,” he said.
Goven has noticed that sloughs and potholes on his land that once covered the fences every spring often now remain stable through most of the summer and tend to stay much clearer.
According to the Holistic Management International website, Goven’s land absorbs rainfall at the rate of 160 mm per hour. In comparison, neighbouring rangeland sucks up only 20 mm per hour.
“Now an inch (25 mm) of rain will filter in 18-24 inches (45 to 60 centimetres), rather than just a little bit into the surface and then evaporate.”
A rest and recovery strategy is important for keeping the soil covered. When the temperature is 37 to 43 C, like it was last summer in parts of North Dakota, bare soil can reach 54 C, which sterilizes it.
He did simple experiments during the heat wave and found that his pasture soil temperature was barely 26 C on even the hottest days.
“At that point, if you have any moisture in the soil, none of it is available for plant growth. It’s all lost through evaporation and transpiration.”
One test of pasture health Goven uses is to pick up a handful of surface duff and pour a drop of water on it. If the water disappears in the blink of an eye, then it’s perfect. If it beads up and stays there for minutes at a time, the farmer has a problem.
“A landscape like that actually sheds water, rather than absorbing it. You’ve got to manage that surface layer for diversity and soil health enhancement.”
By understanding the different root depths of plant species, a rancher can see how gaps in the soil use underneath can open the land up to invasive species such as buck brush and leafy spurge.
As an example, he showed how pasture management on his farm has held back a Canada thistle infestation on his neighbour’s land at the fence line.
Farmers often complain that snowmelt is not a significant source of moisture because it can’t penetrate the frozen ground and just runs off or fills up potholes, he said.
One early spring day, he was asked by a researcher to collect soil samples. On wildlife preserve land that hadn’t been grazed for 18 years, Goven couldn’t get the shovel in. But on zero-till cropland and in his pasture, the shovel slid in easily.
“If anyone tells me that snowmelt just runs off, I tell them it’s just a symptom of management.”
He typically grazes 36 cow-calf days per acre, with 80 rest days per cycle, a strategy that has increased his stocking rate by 230 percent. Last year he obtained 72 pounds of gain per calf per acre, and 18 lb. for the cows.
“That’s 90 lb. of beef per acre in a drought year. We would have been at 24 if we had kept our old management.”
In comparison, the official recommendation for season-long grazing in his area is 21 cow-calf days in an average good year, or about 40 lb. of beef per acre.
For his cropland, he first tried introducing diversity by planting peas and oats together and combining them together as a backgrounding feed for calves. He later threw lentils into the mix.
“All of a sudden we had a 27 percent increase in the bottom line,” he said.
Recent studies have shown that as many as seven to 10 crop types can be grown together in “cocktails” to quickly increase soil health, he
added.
