Essays
Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero
Ranching the Holistic Resource Management way is good for the land
July 18, 2007
“Stay put, old man, I will get the gate this time,” said rancher Joe Maddox to Malcolm Beck. Mr. Beck was the first major popularizer of organic gardening in Texas. He started the famed compost company Gardenville in San Antonio (he later sold the company). Compost became big business in San Antonio and Austin – today every nursery in the area sells bulk compost. Mr. Beck nowadays travels the world speaking about compost and organic gardening.
“I’ll beat you to the gate, big boy,” Beck answered, and the race of the two senior citizens was on. We were touring the Holistic Management® International West Ranch (HMI) demonstration ranch (known as the David West Station for Holistic Management) south of Ozona that Maddox manages. I had been opening the gates, but Beck had told me to stay put at the last gate and taken a turn. Maddox won the foot race. Both men were laughing at their silliness as they returned to the truck.
We had been touring the ranch in a “4-wheel drive golf cart,” but the batteries had gotten low, so we switched to a pickup. The electric golf cart was so quiet we kept coming up beside the white-tailed deer on the ranch without spooking them. Maddox had asked Steve Nelle, a biologist in the San Angelo office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service and I to join the tour. The quiet cart allowed constant conversation about the changes in the vegetation on the West Station since HMI had been given the ranch in 2001.
Nelle is a superb botanist. He is well known as a speaker at landowner and range management meetings. He serves on the board of directors of the Texas Riparian Association, which encourages landowners to preserve and improve the watersheds of Texas. The Texas Section of the Society for Range Management recognized Nelle with their Outstanding Achievement Award. He is on the board of directors of the Texas Brigades, a group that runs a state-wide wildlife-focused leadership development program for high school youth.
The West Station is a 12,000 acre property. The Maddoxes run a mixed herd of cattle and sheep among a healthy population of deer, turkey, javelina and other species and share their knowledge of Holistic Management® with schoolchildren and ranchers during field trips and field days.
In 2002, when Holistic Management® International assumed management of the ranch, approximately 68% of the soil was bare, with 70% of that soil capped with a hard crust, and 40% of the grasses dead or dying. Drought had been a factor. By late 2005, the bare soil had decreased by over 30% and soil capping had decreased by almost 50%. Lastly, dead or dying plants had decreased dramatically, from 50% to 5%.
This year, with 22 inches of rain since April 1st, the only bare ground was where rock was at the surface. 1000 ewes and their lambs, along with 150 cattle that are moved from paddock to paddock using the Holistic Management planned grazing method. Paddocks vary in size from 125 to 1300 acres, so grazing periods vary from 3 to 14 days according to range conditions. This allows for 180-day recovery periods. The herd visits each paddock only twice a year. The vegetation is monitored to document range conditions.
Nelle and I had created a plant inventory list in 2002, and he has added to it in intervening years. On this visit we added another 20 species to the list, which now totals over 250 species. Mrs. Peggy Maddox runs a number of transect lines each year top record the changes that occur to the landscape as a result of the grazing regime.
Mrs. Maddox also hosts school tours from Ozona and Eldorado each year. She served as the gifted and talented teacher in the Sweetwater Middle School for many years before the Maddoxes were asked to manage the West Ranch. They had managed the TUF Ranch south of Colorado City until the absentee landowners finally sold it. The Sibley Nature Center helped her create a native plant garden at the Sweetwater Elementary School in the 1990s and helped the Maddoxes give ranch tours at the TUF Ranch for over a decade.
The Tuff Ranch practiced Holistic Management principles. Over that decade I saw “ice cream” (the most nutritious) grasses increase exponentially. Texas Bluegrass, for example, had increased from a handful of plants in one draw, to one of the most common species in many draws.
As we bounced along the two-track ranch road, Nelle commented, “The diversity of the plants on the West Station is astounding. I was and still am a skeptic of some of the tenets of Holistic Resource Management, but I am determined to keep an open mind. What I admire about HRM practitioners is that they are passionate about the health of the land and about understanding complex ecological relationships. They are observant and monitor their land.”
Nelle pointed out the window and said, “This pasture has many patches of Sideoats Grama (an ice cream grass that livestock relish), and the pasture across the fence belonging to the neighbor appears to have no sideoats. When I see such improvement in grazing conditions I am impressed.”
“I am frustrated by the fact that few ranchers will come to our field days. We are proving that this is a more profitable way to ranch. Many ranchers stick with the traditional methods of ranching because our method is more labor intensive and requires planning,” Maddox shook his head and sighed. “People find it hard to change.”
“I remember how this ranch looked when you moved here, Joe,” Beck commented “There was so much bare ground and the major grasses were the short buffalo grass and curly mesquite grass. We have seen pastures full of sideoats, cane bluestem, southwestern bristlegrass, and others that were three and four feet tall. Even in a paddock that the stock just left there is still plenty of grass left over.”
Maddox responded, “Grass needs to be grazed, but it should not been grazed continuously for months on end. When a pasture is continuously grazed the best grasses get eaten first, and get eaten every time they try to grow and never set seed.”
“Look at the 3-awn,” I said. “It is one of the grasses that dominate when the land is overgrazed. Here it is dying because it is not grazed. The livestock don’t like it very much, and they have plenty of better grasses to eat. The center of a grass clump dies out when it is not grazed.”
“It was always an uphill battle for me as I promoted organic gardening and farming methods. We pioneers are thought to be “way out.” Educating folks about doing something different than what they are used to doing is a lifelong challenge,” Beck said, as we rolled up to another gate.
Related: Check out the photoessay of the trip.