LOCAL PRODUCT SPOTLIGHTS

Whose Home On The Range?
Part 2
The Great Taste Of Sustainable Ranching

In July, we ran an article discussing the complex issue of cattle on New Mexico public lands.

One rancher who is working hard to restore the previously overgrazed rangeland now under his stewardship is Nat Mitchell of Reunion Ranch, near Roy, New Mexico.

Nat is a member of the New Mexico Livestock Co-op, an organization that helps meat producers in the state with marketing, distribution and buying grain. Nat’s grazing land includes 1,900 acres of Forest Service Land, and a section of New Mexico State land.

Nat has several herds of cattle, which he rotates through small pastures. Nat’s “Holistic Resource Management,” places a big herd in a relatively small pasture for a short time and then takes them off that pasture for a long time until the pasture has recovered.

After the cattle are taken off the pasture, Nat goes into the area and puts flags on a number of the plants that have been grazed. This allows him to monitor the regrowth of plants that have been eaten, and track their recovery.

This kind of monitoring is time consuming, but is the only way to get a real picture of what is happening on the land. Under his Holistic Resource Management Plan, Nat “has seen big changes in the landscape. Grasses are coming in that we hadn’t seen before. It’s very gratifying.”

Reunion Ranch is also a home to a diverse wildlife community. Because of its location there are no elk or deer but a big population of antelope and plenty of birds, coyotes and foxes. Nat doesn’t mind the coyotes — we just let them be — we don’t have any real problems.”

There are no streams on the ranch, so Nat has wells that bring water up for the cattle (and wildlife) in the pastures — “It means a lot of pipelines,” Nat says. “We use windmills and submersible pumps.”

Every fall, the ranch conducts an ADA survey to determine how many Animal Days per Acre the various pastures will support, and plans the rotation of the herds based on this information.

This fall’s survey is likely to be lean. The ongoing drought has meant slow growth for the grasses.

Above and Beyond Organic

Nat’s cattle operation is certified organic by the New Mexico Organic Commodities Commission.

But his sustainable practices go much farther than those required for organic certification. Joran Viers, Director of the NMOCC, explains that the state and federal regulations “cover forage area inputs and what the animals are fed, but don’t really address the question of range management.”

Under the proposed National Organic Standards, ruminants must have access to pasture, and under current New Mexico standards “the majority of nutrition has to come from living plant material from pasture which must not be eliminated by overgrazing.”

Joran points out that just as building a healthy soil is of primary importance to growing plant crops, “rangeland health is a primary condition for animal health.”

“Still,” he adds, “if someone with very degraded pasture wanted certification, the way things stand right now we’d probably have to grant it. But we’d probably put language into the certification mandating pasture improvement.”

The kind of work that Nat Mitchell and other organic ranchers in the state are putting in to improve their rangeland is not an outgrowth of regulation, but of their understanding of the practices that are necessary to engage in sustainable ranching — ranching that will improve biodiversity, and actually restore the land they are tending.

Many times these practices carry a price tag, in terms of the extra work to monitor the pastures, to move the cattle, pump water, etc. As a consumer, you have an opportunity to support this groundbreaking work by “voting with your fork.”

If you choose to buy beef — look for beef from Reunion Ranch at the Co-op. By creating a market for ranchers who care for the land, other ranchers can be encouraged to adopt these sustainable practices.