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Sand’s in the Air

Recently I toured the Sand Ranch in Forbes North Dakota. I started the day by checking cows looking them over for any health problems.  Then Melanie (the new August intern) and I took off for North Dakota. As we arrived we registered and paid our dues for the dinner that was going to be provided! We all piled on to flatbed trailers and fixed our keasters on some good ole hay benches. One of the first things I noticed was the use of permanent two strand high tensile wire fence. They used to have 16 pastures that encompassed 2300 acres. This high tensile wire plus poly wire have turned 16 into 65 pastures in just four years. This then allows them to experiment and have such a cushion of grass. For instance, if they wanted to try using grazing weed control in a certain pasture that has a lot of wormwood they can graze it heavily. If it does not work out then they have 64 other pastures to go into. Their average pasture size is forty acres. Then they use poly wire to make those into twenty acre paddocks. Another advantage to doing this is to use a high intensity stock grazing.  They had three to four herds and combined them all into one herd. By doing this they have seen a large amount of native grasses come back into their pastures along with a vast amount of diversity. 

tank
Cody explaining the water situation. You can see the blue calf water tank in the background."It should of been lower”Cody explained. It was the fabricators first ever calf water tank. The prototype!

Another thing I found very interesting is a twelve foot tire tank with a curb stop floatation device in it. They also had calf water fabricated to allow calves to water. They found that a problem created by this high intensity style of grazing was the capacity of the water tanks for the calves as well as the cows.

Cody and Deanna talked a lot on improving the quality of life, being able to spend time with their family and not letting the ranch run their lives. One of the things that they have done is to put up little to no hay for the winter. Instead they stock pile grass on pasture. They hit the corn fields in the winter and then in the early spring they have grass stockpiled to use before the growing season. Not having to spend so much time haying has allowed the growth of another business, a custom saddle making business.

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The familys saddle shop. A great way to improve the quality of life in my opinion.

On the tour we stopped by crop land that the family has owned for only four years. The ground was very mismanaged when they purchased it. The effects of tillage and no cover crop usage caused the top soil on these hills to sluff away, so they have been bale grazing the hills to try and return the top soil and allow grass to grow there.

bale grazing
Bale grazing on the hill to help improve soil health in that area.

It was a wonderful experience to me to see people thinking out side of the box that I feel a lot of people get stuck into. A special thanks to Cody and Deanna Sand for allowing the tour on their place. It gave me a lot of ideas and confidence to go out and try some of these practices out when I manage or own my own ranch.

Till next post “Watch your top knot” Readers.

 

Sam Newell

 

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Coming Home–Kajsa Perman White

Coming Home

As I teenager I could not wait to get away from small town rural ranch life and experience what the world had to offer. I had a bad case of wanderlust and I count that a blessing.  In the last decade I’ve spent time in a handful of different cities, states and countries. I’ve traveled abroad, learned another language, met celebrities, worked in the corporate world, fell in love and married a man with an accent. To my teenage ears that would have sounded like a dream.  In many ways it has been my dream fulfilled.

I wrote my dad a letter once as a teenager and in it I said, “no matter where life takes me Rock Hills Ranch will always be my home.” At the time I didn’t realize what a rare thing it is for a person to always have a childhood home to go back to. My children get to walk the same dirt paths I walked to the chicken house to pick eggs, skin their knees on the gravel roads I played on, catch bugs and pick wildflowers on the same hillsides I did the same, and swing in the tree swing that was put up when I was a child. We don’t get to relive our childhood but I have the unique pleasure of seeing my childhood through adult eyes with my children.

This summer we had the fortunate opportunity to spend a month back at the ranch with our whole family. I noticed myself teaching my offspring many of the same life lessons in similar ways my parents taught me. Ranch life affords a unique setting for education. We had in-depth discussions on life cycles when we had to remove a dead chicken from the coop, an easy and natural conversation about gender identity when my eldest wanted to know the difference between the male and female donkeys, and a couple of conversations about how we care for and protect our family and those we love as we watched baby birds being pushed out of their nest, a doe protecting her fawn and a mother cat teaching her kittens to hunt.  They both squealed with delight as they dug for potatoes, my daughter gorged herself eating peas straight from the garden and they learned both biology and fine motor skills picking eggs every day. They understand where food comes from, and starting to value our connection as caretakers of both plants and animals.

Diversity is everywhere at Rock Hills Ranch. In nature, all living organisms have value and importance and must be present in order for the ecosystem to work. What a neat thing to watch my children grasp. A lot of the world’s most pressing problems could be solved if we as humans embraced that truth within our own race. Hard work, practical thinking, problem solving, manual labor, opportunities to practice patience and the need for teamwork are all principles available in abundance at RHR. There are so many more I could name but the bottom line is, I’m pretty confident in saying rural life provides hands on opportunities to learn all of life’s most important lessons.

The most overwhelming experience on the prairie is witnessing the fingerprints of our Creator. The beauty of the prairie grasses shimmering and moving like ocean waves in the wind, the delicate wildflowers staying intact despite the elements, the fiery oranges and soft pastels of the sunsets and the intricate bird songs all dug deep into our souls, deepening our appreciation for and recognition of an artistic and loving God. 

We had ample time at the ranch to talk about family values and what we want our children to remember and stick with them as they grow to be leaders, truth-seekers and caretakers of the next generation. We got bit by the country bug and are itching to keep living life off the fast track, more intentional and in touch with our natural world. We are back to our normal life in suburbia but we hope our new normal will include more dirt on our hands, sharper eyes and ears toward nature and a slower cadence to life.  My dreams for the future look a little different than those of my teen years. They have a striking resemblance to what I couldn’t wait to get away from 20 years ago — only with the addition of that handsome accented husband and some precious children in the picture. I may live 1200 miles from Rock Hills Ranch, but in my heart, it will always be home.

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Continuous Learning

In the past couple of weeks I have had the wonderful opportunity of attending a couple of workshops. The first one I attended was a range camp held near Fort Meade South Dakota. The camp is a workshop set up for the purpose of training Ag leaders  in range and natural resource management.  They covered topics such as range plant ID, soil health, production potential, stocking rates, range monitoring, USDA web soil survey training, and tours of local ranches and their practices. 

plant diversity
In this picture you can see a very great example of plant diversity in a pasture. When Lyle and Garnet first bought the place in the 1980’s There was very little of this lead plant you can see in the picture as a woody forb. But over the years by using a rotational grazing system it has become a lot more prevalent. Having a diverse plant community also helps with the health of the soil by the each individual plant can fixate different nutrients into the soil.

I came away from this experience getting into the mindset of being able to think of all of the factors that go into an operation.  

Looking at soil health (what types of soil you have), having a diverse plant community, controlling weeds with grazing, looking at your pastures and grazing them in range and natural resource management and stewardship of natural resources.  These were just some of the things that were covered during the camp.

I ‘ve wondered as a young rancher what would be the best and most efficient way of getting into owning my own ranch. After asking around and listening to a lot of different opinions I have come to the conclusion that it is best to start small. Owning a couple of cows and running with another rancher. That way you can get the snowball rolling instead of just jumping into owning a ranch.

Soils
This picture is a quick snapshot of the Rain fall simulator. They gave the demonstration at the range camp. The results on how much water was run off and how much was retained in the soil from the tilled ground and the native range was night and day. Look up some demonstrations on the Youtube.

 

The second workshop was a lecture by Gerald Fry. He is a bovine engineering specialist. I would encourage anyone to go check out his website. He primarily focuses on hormone function, correlated linear measurements, and indicators of butter fat content.  It is very interesting to now drive around on the ranch and look for these indicators of hormonal expression and indicators of a good cow.  He emphasized  line breeding and keeping a good line of genetics in your herd. Not to over cross your cattle. He was a pleasure to sit down with and pick his brain.

“Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.”― Coco Chane

 

The past couple of weeks have been very busy with moving cows, working calves, cutting hay and starting to get some bales on the ground. So busy I have not had a great opportunity to get emulsified into the stack of books and articles the family lent me

 to read and pick through. There is always something new to learn and ways of improving. I would invite everyone to be keeping your eyes open for workshops and camps throughout the summer no matter where you are in the world. It is always a great idea to get off of your operation and your own mindset and either learn something new or look at problems you are having from a different point of view.

 

Till next post “Watch your topknot “Readers.

 

Sam Newell