A Different Philosophy of Ranching in Seneca, Oregon

by Peter Donovan

Jack Southworth is a fourth-generation rancher on a quest. He is a couple of decades younger than the average for his profession, and he uses words such as MINDSET and EMPOWER with ease. Together with his wife Teresa and three employees, he runs about 650 mother cows on a ranch near Seneca, Ore. (south of John Day) and on the nearby Malheur National Forest. The land, some of which was homesteaded by Southworth's grandfather, includes stands of ponderosa pine, sagebrush and grassland, and hay meadows along Silvies River.

When Jack and Teresa took over the ranch in 1977, it was free of debt. Three years later, after some land purchases, they were $1 million in the hole. As Jack remembers, "Here I was a graduate from the agricultural program at Oregon State, I'd taken general ag and lots of range classes, and I didn't have a clue how to run this ranch. And I grew up on it."

In 1984, teetering on the financial edge, Jack and Teresa took an introductory course in Holistic Resource Management (HRM) from ecologist Allan Savory in Albuquerque, New Mexico (see box). During last year's drought, Jack observed that ten years ago "we would have prayed for rain, sought government assistance, and blamed the environmentalists. Holistic Resource Management has made a profound difference in our approach to and success in operating a ranch."

HRM has been described as the management of process rather than events, and as the management of the parts for the benefit of the whole rather than just for the benefit of the parts.

Since taking the HRM course, the Southworths have built miles of fence. They have not increased their stocking rate. "We're simply trying to do a better job of controlling our livestock. It used to be that we'd severely overgraze some areas in order to force the cattle to graze the higher slopes."

"When I was growing up here, we didn't have any problem leaving our yearling steers a month at a time in a field during the growing season. Now we're trying to limit the period that a plant is exposed to grazing during the growing season to four to nine days. We want the grazing to occur quickly--and sometimes severely--but we want the plant to have lots of time to regrow without being rebitten."

Southworth's father, though no longer actively involved in the day-to-day operations, wasn't impressed. He called the new ideas "less-than-Savory" grazing, "holier-than-thou" management.

"That kind of attitude is a huge negative pull on you," Southworth says. "The man that I learned most of this ranching from thinks it's a big mistake, or thinks it's frivolous. That gnaws at you. I think we've overcome it, but it slows us down."

The Southworths have also changed their handling of their timber resources. "In the last hundred years, whenever our family got in a financial bind, we'd go cut our best trees. If we were managing our cow herd that way, that would mean that we'd always sell our best cows, and we'd keep our cancer eyes, our bad udders, our lame ones, and our low producers. And that's exactly what we've kept in our forest for the last hundred years."

"Now, thanks to the spotted owl and these environmental restrictions, our worst pine nets us money after we get it out of the woods. We're finally able to go into a stand of trees, and get out the cancer eyes and the poor doers, the old, the feeble, and the sickly, and leave the best trees behind, and it's really exciting. We're opening up the stand, we're going to be growing more grass, and we have healthy trees behind us. We've got the wheel started back in the right direction now. It's a real pleasure." A man who used to work for the Hines mill in Seneca before it closed now works in the ranch's timberlands.

Much as Southworth credits better practices for improving their position, the most substantial long-term benefits, he says, have come from the adoption of the HRM goal-centered decision making. Now the primary feature of HRM, this was relatively undeveloped in 1984 when the Southworths took their introductory course.

Six years after taking the HRM course, the Southworths began to establish their goal. They belonged to a small HRM organization for Oregon and Washington. "I had to give a speech on the goal for our ranch, so I wrote one. Later Teresa and I finally talked about it, and we sat down with our main full-time employee and his wife and talked about it. Last year there were six of us sitting around this table talking about quality of life, and that, as far as I'm concerned, is a huge advance."

"We want a feeling of satisfaction and self-worth from living and working on the ranch. We want to be able to participate in the community beyond the ranch. We want to think of this ranch as an opportunity to achieve our life goals, and not an end in itself." The ranch now subsidizes education for its employees.

Their production goal is profit from livestock and from timber. They also want to produce a diversity of wildlife, but not for sale. "We enjoy the richness of having it here."

Their description of their landscape or future resource base includes dense, healthy stands of perennial grasses, effective water and nutrient cycles, and streams lined with willows and stocked with beaver.

"Before we had a three-part goal, this ranch was only concerned about profit and production of beef. The kind of landscape that produced that profit, and the well-being of the people, was a byproduct of producing that profit."

"Anything that would increase a weaning weight, raise the tons of hay per acre, or grow more grass was good. Nothing else mattered."

The three-part goal, Southworth says, is not something you write down once and then put away in a filing cabinet next to the vehicle titles. It becomes the basis for decisions, for planning of grazing and finances, and for monitoring to make sure that the goal is being approached.

"Now we believe that not only do we have to plan for profit and production, but we have to plan for the kind of landscape we want in the future, and for the quality of life we want in the future. If we don't plan for those, and think about those, we're simply not going to obtain them. They'll slip away from us almost without our realizing."

"We used to think about just one thing--staying in business for another year. Now we're as concerned with our landscape and our quality of life."

"Profit is still very important. I think we're more rigorously managing for profit now than we ever did before, because we know that it is up to us to produce that profit, regardless of prices, regardless of rainfall."

"I can monitor our financial statement, and I can look at our landscape and have a feeling for the health of the grasses, the creeks, and say whether we're going toward or away from our goal."

"Our quality of life is the hardest thing to evaluate. Sometimes we get our noses so close to the grindstone that we forget to lift our heads and look around us. Anyone involved in agriculture forgets to do that."

"If I had a goal of a dense stand of perennial grasses on the ranch, and every grass plant was bitten to the ground, and there were large spaces between the plants, you'd realize that we weren't really living our goal. If you came here, and we talked about quality of life, and the opportunity to participate in the community beyond the ranch, and yet we worked seven days a week, and never got off the ranch, you'd realize that we weren't following through. Everything--how we come across as individuals, the appearance of our animals--is reflected in our goal."

"Forming that goal empowered us to pursue activities that didn't have strictly a financial return. When we formed a goal that said we wanted streams lined with willows and stocked with beaver, all of a sudden we're empowered to bring that about. Not only did I believe that, but Teresa, Ed, and Brad believed that. We could fence off stretches of our meadow to protect the riparian shrubs from wintertime use by livestock."

Southworth displays a 1938 boyhood photograph of his father sitting on a calf. The photographer was no doubt expecting a rodeo, but instead caught a still life, with a solid line of willows along Silvies River in the background.

A family story has it that during the dry summers of the 1930s, Southworth's grandfather reported that the river "just kind of trickles from one beaver dam to the next." Today there are no beaver dams and few willows.

His grandfather, Southworth said, "had the advantage of a lot higher water table than we have now. Even in a dry year, it would be easier for him to get a hay crop. I think that if we get willows back, and some beaver coming in behind them, we'll have a higher water table. I'd a lot rather gamble on the side of increased biodiversity and higher water tables than the alternative."

From the 1950s through the 1970s, he said, "all our management was going to a simpler ecosystem--bigger is better, more is better yet. Now we're just kind of throwing that out." The Southworths do not use hormonal or insecticidal implants in their cattle. They no longer buy outside bulls for their herd. Nor do they make a practice of shooting or poisoning predators. "If we lose a calf to a coyote, we're not going to cull the coyote, we're going to cull the cow."

"I think HRM has made that more possible. Without that three-part goal to strive for, I think we'd be going off in a different direction. I think we'd feel that if we weren't weaning 600-pound calves, if we weren't fertilizing our crested wheatgrass seedings, we weren't doing it right."

Where the ranch used to support two families, it now supports three. "I'd rather run more old equipment with more people. If I buy a new piece of equipment, the dollars go shooting out of here and they never come back."

"To satisfy our social needs in a healthy environment, and produce a food product, is a fascinating thing for us to do now. If we didn't have that complete, rich picture to strive for, I don't think it would be any fun at all to ranch."

"Now we're managing for things, for these healthy perennial plants, for this quality of life. Before, we were managing against so many things: against scours, against low weaning weights, against low cattle prices, against sagebrush. And that's a different mindset. I feel like I have the freedom to bring about these desired results."

"It used to be I had sword in hand fending off these things that were out to get me all the time. Maybe I'm naive or something, but I don't feel like anybody's out to get me. I'm not really worried about environmentalists, and our ability to graze on public lands. If we're really screwing up out there, we shouldn't be out there--it's that simple. And if I am doing a good job of grazing public lands, I think I'll be there."

Southworth's cattle graze National Forest permits in the summer. He does not attempt to involve the Forest Service in the HRM decision making, as he feels that they are overwhelmed with other concerns. "What I tell Forest Service people is, whatever you want is what we'll achieve. Just don't tell me what I can't do. Don't talk to me about 50 percent utilization in riparian areas, tell me about how you would like that riparian area to look like. I don't say it in that harsh a tone. But that's my thought process. That's helped. I want to be perceived as an ally by them. When they think of me, I want them to have a good feeling in their stomach, and not be secreting lots of adrenalin. I think they have a real hard job right now."

"When we meet with the Forest Service, the result of our having a three-part goal, the result of our knowing that that public land is as important to us as anything we own, means that we're sure understanding of any regulations they have to deal with. If they have to graze so that there's 50 percent utilization of riparian areas, we'll find a way to do that. But let's not lose sight of what we're really striving for--what do you want this land to look like?"

Increasingly, Southworth sees the signature of their three-part goal everywhere on the ranch. "I can see more and more that our actions and our decision making, and what we do and the way we live, are so related that it really is all one. And we're not there yet."

"If we can get the philosophy just right, the day-to-day will just take care of itself. That's a belief."

PHOTO CAPTION a

"What we're trying to do in planting willows is to create habitat that'll support beaver. A beaver may come in and gnaw the hell out of it. But he'll leave some, and that's all I'm after."

PHOTO CAPTION b

Southworth explains that dead plant material on the surface lowers midday soil temperatures, leading to more microbial activity and better cycling of nutrients, better survival of seedlings, more photosynthesis, and better absorption and holding of rainfall. "So we've got this whole show functioning in a better manner."

Sidebar: ALLAN SAVORY AND HRM

Holistic Resource Management is largely the creation of Allan Savory, who began his career as a wildlife biologist in the grasslands of Northern Rhodesia. In the 1960s he trained and led the Tracker Combat Unit of the Rhodesian Special Air Service against insurgent guerrillas. He often went barefoot to feel the ground, and continually asked himself why the veld he loved was turning into desert. His independent and unorthodox observations of the soil surface grew into answers that have challenged established thinking in every sector of resource management.

Early on, Savory accepted the conventional opinion that it was domestic livestock that were causing the deterioration of the grasslands, and he advocated removing cattle. By the 1960s he had realized the importance of grazing animals in maintaining grasslands in arid environments. He began to teach and do consulting work, advocating high-intensity, short-duration grazing, and the importance of planning and monitoring. His work was based on his observations of fundamental ecological functions: the water cycle, mineral or nutrient cycles, solar energy flow, and ecological succession.

Since coming to the United States in 1979 he has claimed that the arid American West is "understocked and overgrazed." According to Savory, overgrazing is not caused by numbers of animals, but by the period of time a plant is exposed to grazing. He has observed that even a few widely scattered animals will overgraze plants, if left on a pasture for weeks or months. He has been widely criticized by environmentalists, university professors, range managers, and even cattlemen's organizations, who believe that grazing has only a negative impact on land, and that overgrazing is caused by numbers of animals, not by time.

In the 1970s and '80s, Savory continued to wrestle with the problem of achieving lasting gains against desertification, biodiversity loss, and the resulting conflict and deterioration in rural communities. Conventional scientific management seemed powerless and often seemed to accelerate the deterioration.

Savory realized that one couldn't work at influencing the ecosystem processes without stating what one wanted to produce. His teachings evolved, from a system of grazing practices whereby cattle are used as a tool to improve the land, to a decision-making process centered upon a goal that includes both human and ecological values as well as production.

This evolution distinguishes HRM from other resource-management strategies such as organic farming, low-input farming, or integrated pest management--which are collections of practices (or prohibitions) to be applied on the land. Because so much of the debate about resource management is about practices or tools, such as whether cattle should graze public lands, or whether pesticides should be used on food crops, the more fundamental problem of how decisions are made has largely been ignored.

Most of us, Savory claims, make our decisions according to the problems of the day, short-term profit, and peer pressure. Unintended consequences, which result in new problems, are the result. The Southworths, like all practitioners of HRM, now test every major decision against their goal. Such decision making, Savory says, achieves results that are economically, socially, and environmentally sound--not only on ranches but also in businesses and organizations that do not manage land.

An HRM goal should be a collaborative effort and it should be written. It includes three parts: (1) desired quality of life, which involves core values; (2) the forms of production that will sustain that quality of life and those values; and (3) the future resource base needed to sustain such production. Conventional decision making, Savory notes, frequently results in a farm, ranch, or business degrading either the basis for its future prosperity, the quality of life of its employees and owners, or both.