“Oh…I’m OK. It’s not about you. I’ve just been in meetings for the past week with potato farmers here in southeast Idaho. It just gets depressing.” 

I completely understood. Potatoes and most carbohydrate commodities are in  a rough “bearish” market climate right now, which means most farmers are sucking wind. That includes corn, grain, sugar beets, and, of course potatoes. Compounding the problem are widespread drought conditions throughout much of the West, and highly elevated prices for crop amendments such as fertilizer and “cide” chemicals (herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides).

Side note: we use none of the above, and still managed to double our production over the last 10 years (that wasn’t a brag, btw. It certainly wasn’t anything we knew how to do. We had to learn HOW from a host of others. More on that in another newsletter).

As a banker, Tom was struggling to justify “carrying” such commodity- and chemical-dependent operations for another year, given the bleak market outlook and high costs. Would the bank be able to forward them the quarter to a half a million dollars it took each year to operate? Would the farmer be able to pay it back despite depressed market conditions?

These were completely valid questions, and neither of us had answers. Thankfully, Caryl and I haven’t taken operating loans for nearly a decade, and instead decided to ride the stressful tide of a “hand to mouth” existence, meaning that the sales of our beef on a monthly basis could literally make or break us. 

I’m grateful that there’s always been enough to get by. There’s been really tight times and a little of the “robbing Peter to pay Paul (poor Peter!)” on rare occasions, but we’ve always been able to happily stay on the “same side of the street” with anyone we bump into on the sidewalk and visit with in our hometown of Salmon, Idaho. 

Few people in agriculture have that luxury. They don’t only owe the bank; often, friends, neighbors, feed stores, and seed dealers or equipment brokers have borne the burden of unpaid agriculture related production bills. 

Why is this happening? What is going on? Why are prices dropping? 

Analysts simply attribute it to “commodity surpluses” resulting from production efficiencies. And that is true. There are surpluses due to increased yields. Production has become king; more bushels per acre on dryer ground, bigger machines to plant and harvest. Bigger farms. Machine automation. Robotic farming is next. Drone spraying. 

Are bigger machines and fatter yields better? What if it costs more per bushel or ton to produce? Does “Go Big or Go Home” make economic sense in farming? It can to some degree, simply due to economy of scale. But for most family farmers, jumping to those production scales simply becomes out of reach. They can’t make the quantum leap to get there. 

And their banker won’t fund them. 

But wait. There’s more. There’s another niggling fact that the analysts don’t like to talk about, and the farmers don’t either. A quiet revolution—a “sea change”—is slowly but perceptibly happening in our food consumer society. It’s not in the processors that are the likes of mega-food companies like General Mills, Coca-Cola and Unilever. It is in each of us: individual eaters of food, making informed decisions about their health. They are listening and learning not so much from mainstream medical practice, but from podcasts, Instagram health “influencers” and naturopathic physicians. There are some isolated (often, actually isolated by their peers) voices in the conventional medical profession who have also sidled up to the new practice of ” holistic health.”

These eaters of food are researching and directing their own paths to wellness. They are individuals, friends and families forging their own way out of the labyrinth of debilitating symptoms caused by autoimmune disease, diabetes, autism, heart disease and cancer. In their quest, many have found alternative self-care procedures that filled a void left by conventional medicine. 

Most of them first focus on what seems obvious to them: the low-hanging fruit, which is what they eat.

And the almost ubiquitous message about food they extracted from their ventures into this place of discovery? Cut back on the carbs. It’s the starting point for many of their journeys. It’s the easy first step.

The second recommendation they perceive is to cut back on processed foods. These are breakfast cereals, frozen pizzas, French fries, TV dinners, pre-made pasta meals, Olive Garden, Panera Bread, McDonalds or Dominos. 

And it just so happens that those are the final product outlets for all of the commodity crops listed above. We don’t often eat raw corn, wheat, sugar beets or potatoes. With the exception of a small fraction of potatoes, there’s almost no household consumption of these foods. They all enter a factory first to be processed.

So it’s double-ended damning of commodity farming; not only has their growing protocol become so productive that they have unparalleled surplus, but their end point customer base is losing interest in the foods they produce!

It’s not a great situation to be in for a farmer–or a bank. And the bank is always going to win. And that leaves the farmer…bankrupt.

What’s the solution? 

Conceptually, it’s actually quite simple. As farmers and ranchers, we have to once again focus on the fact that we grow food. Commodities are NOT that. As a farmer, “food” means that people could (in theory, at least) walk on to your place and acquire something to eat. They could eat a tomato from your field. They could eat a fresh killed chicken (maybe they want to kill it). They could pick a bag of apples. They could harvest beef or lamb for their chest freezer. They could pick up some milk and butter. They could buy a bag of flour with your name on it.

They may not do that, because in this age, the eaters of the food have lost touch with where their food comes from (and how to reduce for their cupboard or freezer) as much as farmers have lost touch with the fact that they could grow food. 

But we could go back to the way it was: an elegant system of market and barter. Farmers and ranchers could grow sustenance. And the eaters could buy it. It’s really simple, actually. Especially since humans have been eating food off the land since the beginning of their time on earth, except for the past 50-75 years. 

Let’s think about our spud farmer. He or she could still grow some for the table. Those southern Idaho volcanic soils could easily raise almost any food crop: onions, garlic, beans, carrots, cauliflower. They could pasture livestock. The climate will grow fruit and also grow any kind of grain. I have a good friend in southern Idaho that mills her own organic grain into flour. She sells it handily to bakeries, households and stores. 

Caryl, my wife, was raised in NW Indiana. On their farm, they raised cows, hogs, chickens, eggs, apples, beans, corn, grain, popcorn, sunflowers, asparagus and melons. This was just 60 years ago, and long before that, even (and that was before widespread refrigerated transportation. Now, on the same land, the new owner of the farm raises corn and soybeans. That’s it.

I think we could do that again, especially given the resurgent paradigm of raising food on living soils. The tools are available for a new generation of farmers to learn how to actually farm for food production once again. 

Lets do this. And let’s halt the entrusting of our food supply–and wellness to the likes of Whole Foods, Wegmans, Albertsons and Sysco.

Happy Trails. 

The post When the Tater Tanks appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

A herd of elk in the distant meadow, about a half mile away. Their light-copper coats mantled with their chocolate brown neck-cape look ragged even from here; the warm weather and longer daylength speaks to their innermost being to shed the warm cloak of winter. Even the springtime short green grass rolls a nutritious and sweet wave over their tongue and rumen. Their whole being responds.

And I think border collie Clyde scents the excitement of another winter past. He’s fixated, and won’t even make but the briefest flash of occasional eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. We’re heading north down the broad Bitterroot Valley on US Highway 93, a former glacial outwash flat trapped between two impressive basin and range mountain uplifts; the Bitterroot to the west, and the Sapphire to the east.

Caryl remarked on the size of the herd. “There has to be over 300 head in that one bunch.” There may be even more than that; we both see that the herd scatter extends into the river bottoms of the Bitterroot, now a rush of grayish white as it begins to swell with the spring melt of low elevation snows.

It’s not the first herd we’ve seen on the 3 hour drive since we left home. There’s been many elk, but also bunches of whitetail and mule deer all along the bottoms. Scattered bunches of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep slip down off the granite precipices where ancient glacial flood-torrents ripped a ragged cleft in Idaho’s Salmon River Canyon and Montana’s upper Bitterroot.

We’ve been driving this road for over 40 years. The changes we’ve seen in that short time are substantive. I could even say they are land transforming. The elk are a case in point. More on those elegant ungulates later.

The most extreme difference that comes to mind is the road hazard. There were times when it was downright white-knuckle scary. 

It was the log trucks. There were so many. Along the corkscrew portion of Highway 93 in Idaho, which runs through the Salmon River canyon, there were no guardrails, white lines or shoulders. Along the riverbank, there were only random pullouts carved into the brush for salmon and steelhead fishermen. On any given morning, one could easily pass up to 20 rumbling and curve tilting log trucks loaded for bear, headed for the Intermountain Sawmill on the immediate outskirts of little Salmon, Idaho, just off Main street. 

The trucks were loaded higher than was legal, and stuffed to the gills to reduce the number of trips needed to haul the logs off a given timber sale in the woods. My thinking is that the law looked the other way on the excess of those loads because in that day and age everyone had family whose life and relatives were somehow tied with those logs as they were felled from forest, loaded whole. At the mill, logs were ripped open into boards and slipped out onto the green chain, readied for the kiln. 

It was the same in Montana. I recall one particular stretch between hamlets of Sula and Conner. The road was exceptionally narrow and clung to the side of the granite cliffs in the East Fork Canyon. It was the barest of minimum improvement over the old Indian trail that Lewis and Clark followed in 1805. It was like the highway department took a yoke of oxen over the trail, scraped it a tad wider with a “Fresno” rock plow and proudly stated it was “time to lay down the oil,” as the old-timers referred to black-tar macadam pavement. The road was narrow, shoulderless, unrelentingly curvy and pot-holed to boot. 

But that macadam was a great improvement compared to the scratch of a white-knuckle cat-track that dropped them off the mountain forests to the canyon bottom. So they let it rip on the found freedom of pavement, throttle down pedal to the metal, with black smoke to the skies, cars of tourists and locals wedged between. The mill was only another 15 miles. They’d hit the hairpin blind curves hard, rubber wandering over the double yellow occasionally because of incessant rockfall off the cliffs (bighorn sheep enjoy doing their part of causing that), and it seemed that on that curve was the exact spot where I would meet their swinging 45,000 pound bundle of unstoppable momentum coming towards me. 

There were many times I hung tires off “oil” into a 6 inch margin of gravel which was the only boundary between me and the river. One had to pay attention.

In the 90s, everything changed. Timber sales went under environmental appeal and pretty much ended the logging boom. Forest Service timber programs went defunct by litigative pressure, and were soon replaced with an outdoor recreation emphasis. 

Even the road changed. The Federal Highway Administration finally realized what an embarrassment US 93 was, and funneled the money for a complete reroute of the highway between Sula and Conner.

I still miss the old road. But I do know that many older friends and family in our Idaho valleys seek the diverse health care that the larger towns of Hamilton and Missoula, Montana offer, and for them, the new road was a gift. 

I didn’t realize how many health care migrants there were until one day, about 28 years ago I was stuck behind about 20 cars and pickup trucks at a temporary pilot car/lane closure where they were blasting through the granite ahead. 

The flagger was a burly, tattooed man in a hard hat who walked his way down the line chatting with the people in each car about their long wait times. He had a smile for everyone; and if there was anyone angry about the wait he either defused them or intimidated them enough with his hulk-like presence that they stayed in the car.

And in line.

But then there was something else.  At about every third car on average, he took a little longer. He leaned down toward the car, and reached in as if to give them something. And with his other hand, he took off his hard hat for a moment. 

He finally got to our car. He smiled, and his gravely, deep voice asked how we were doing and explained the highway situation. He leaned down to our window, and said, “They got dynamite loaded in the cores up there, and they gotta touch it off before I can let you through. Where are you guys headed?”

“We’re headed up to Missoula. Got some shopping to do,” I said.

Our conversation paused as a muffled blast shook the air and a cloud of dust rose up from around the next bend. They touched off that one.

“All-righty then. You’re good to go, friend, as soon as I give the signal.” He straightened back up, nodded at us, and was about to step out to the next car when I stopped him mid-stride.

“Hey wait a second.” I said quickly. He turned and leaned back in.

“What are you doing with those people ahead of us? You take off your hard hat and reach in. You didn’t do that with us…”

He smiled a large, unshaven grin and reached in and put his callused dirt-impregnated hand on my shoulder. “Friend, you and your bride here seemed OK. You were going shopping. If you need prayer for that, I’d be happy to pray for you. But these others–they are not OK. I can see it in their eyes. A lot of them are struggling with cancer or major health problems. That’s why they’re going to Missoula.”

I nodded in agreement. Many of my aging friends and neighbors had bi-weekly pilgrimages to Missoula for treatments. Infusions. Radiation. It was often hard to have hope.

“So I pray with them,” he continued. “You see, I don’t know where they stand. But I know a guy; his name is Jesus, if you don’t know him. And he cares about each and every one of them. And I know He’s good, and will at least give them peace. And I can see it on them when I pray. Their burden is lifted, at least a little.” There was a touch of a sparkle emanating from his dusty and weatherworn face. I could see there was moisture in his eyes. Inside his battered and bruised exterior was a heart breaking for the brokenhearted.

He stood up and smiled. “So are you guys good to go? You need prayer?”

“No, we’re good to go. Thanks, man.” I reached out my hand.

“Name’s Jim. I’m here for the duration.”

“Glenn and Caryl.”

He nodded, turned away and continued working the line.

So there has been a lot of change in these valleys. The road is better, the log trucks are gone, but there are some obvious road hazards that we hadn’t had to contend with before. 

They certainly keep Clyde occupied; there are many more elk and deer on the road than I recall 40 years ago. I know in Idaho, the reason was that the expanding wolf population pushed them down for the winter. No more would they winter in the high country. They would head to the warmth and relative security of the privately owned meadows of the river bottoms, and herd in great bunches like their ancestors did on the wide prairies before the plow. 

So we actually drive slower now. It is often we have to dodge elk or deer herds that show up in headlights. I upgraded all of my headlight bulbs to LEDs. 

And now, we are coming of the age that we may be some of the people who will be heading up health care in Missoula. A few years ago, Caryl had both knees replaced up there. It went perfectly.

On the way to get those knees done while driving on the now straighter Highway 93 between Sula and Conner, keeping an eye out for elk and bighorn sheep, I recall missing the encouraging words of a certain rough and tumble hardhat angel named Jim. 

Happy Easter.

The post Change On the Peace Trail appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

The year: 1988. We were at about 13,450 feet on the Grand Teton in Wyoming. It’s a beautiful jagged and abruptly uplifted mountain, and it was my first time up. We took one of the signature “easy” routes up, rated at a mere 5.4 in difficulty. It even had a name: the Owen-Spalding Route. The climb was fairly easy to follow upwards, face to the cold, dark granite. There were plenty of handholds, only two “chimneys” to ascend and easy, wide ledges to stand on. 

But the exposure fairly took my breath away. Not exposure from the cold. It was  a balmy 30 degrees Fahrenheit on this August day. Rather, it was the exposure of simply being confronted with nothing but thin air when the Owen Spalding broke out on what is called the Upper Saddle. And that view to the north was hard to ignore. 

It was the top of what is grimly called the Black Ice Couloir. It’s a tight, near-vertical gully named that because the long, warm days of summer shed the previous winter’s snow, exposing a permanent, bulletproof sheet of “black,” or “ancient,” ice. This exposed ice is consolidated and hard, likely dating from the last ice age. Its cliff-like gradient and northern exposure means it rarely receives sunlight, except perhaps in the first light of day around the summer solstice. Even then, during that early summer period, it is invariably covered with insulating snow.

This couloir is the highest point of water-yielding snowmelt in the entire Snake River watershed. It’s a telltale indicator of how much water will flow down the Snake as it wraps in a 1,078-mile, northward-pointing, crescent-moon arc across the wide belly of Idaho.

*****

Ontario, Oregon. US Highway 20, March 17, 2026: Caryl and I are whizzing 70 mph across farm fields in the broad Snake River plain right in the middle of the rain-shadow desert formed by the volcanoes of the high Cascade Crest of Oregon.

It’s surreal. Desert may be an understatement. Most of these fields, irrigated from the Snake River with rectilinear fields festooned with center pivot, drip tape and gated pipe, are barren. They are simply bare dirt. Certainly, here and there, alfalfa fields show about five inches of growth on this March day. But 90 percent of them completely lack any form of life. 

They are bleached whitish brown, the color I’d expect volcanic ash to be with minimal organic matter. Most of the fields will grow onions and sugar beets. They are clayey dust.

I think it works within that paradigm for a farmer. The water can’t really penetrate the ground due to platy compaction layers below the surface. Without organic matter in the dirt, the clay lacks pore spaces for water, and thus tends to repel water. This means an operator can judiciously apply minimal water exactly when and where it is needed. Also applying the appropriate chemicals at the precise time will grow a very big onion.

But what vexes Caryl and me is that even the untilled desert used to contribute to the water cycle before it was made into cropland. Plants lived on the soil year-round. Occasional native grazers would eat the plants, stimulating greater diversity and more soil life. Water would infiltrate the soil, finding a place among abundant, deep roots and a diverse sub-surface biota. Plants covering the ground shade it, protecting it from excessive evaporative water loss and preventing runoff after the occasional desert rain shower.

Winter cover crops on today’s farm ground could offer a similar level of protection to soil moisture and the web of life beneath the surface. I mean, we all need onions. But nearly all onions are grown using this near-hydroponic method. Couldn’t we protect the soil and keep the water cycle intact?  

Wait. What? What does bare soil have to do with the water cycle? Does the water cycle function without plants? The fact is that it doesn’t. Certainly, if rain falls on that bare farmland dirt, it likely won’t soak in very much. The water will likely penetrate the surface down to the tractor-compacted subsurface, and then slowly evaporate off from the soil surface into the atmosphere. But what’s the problem with that? Water rises up into the sky, ready to make clouds and rain, right?

Wrong. Water vapor needs some kind of “nucleus” to condense on to form cloud droplets. There must be some sort of particle for water molecules to aggregate around. Then, it takes as much as 1 million of these cloud droplets to form a raindrop. A dust particle can work as the core of a droplet, but dust tends to repel water vapor. This usually prevents water droplets from aggregating until a favorable water attracting chemical veneer coating accrues on the dust particle, or water vapor concentration reaches “supersaturated” proportions, or both. Dust particles are very large, and when water aggregates on the dust finally occurs, a very large droplet forms. They in turn form “mega” drops of rain or hail. These weigh a lot, and fall hard and fast. 

Excessive amounts of dust in the atmosphere is one culprit behind the extreme rainfall we’ve seen over the past few years. It becomes feast or famine (literally?), because of the long time it takes for dust particles to finally serve as a nucleus for water droplet aggregation.

This becomes an even greater problem in the context of dirt and chemical agriculture. Large raindrops cause soil movement upon impact; with enough fast falling rain, the bare soil washes away. Within minutes, gullies are formed, and a field is lost. The once rich topsoil is now in the river, eventually finding its way to the ocean in some instances. 

Because of an abiotic agriculture.

And now, what about biotic agriculture? Here’s where plants and soil microbial biodiversity come to the rescue. Living soils with diverse plant cover grow plants that emit water (a process called transpiration), oxygen and two other key components: biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) and bacteria. They are released from the plant’s breathing organs, called stomata, on the underside of leaves (yes, bacteria live inside the plant). The BVOCs react with “free radicals” in the air to form secondary organic aerosols (SOAs). I know this is a lot, but these two items are much smaller than dust particles, and water is drawn to them. Much of the water vapor that is drawn to them was emitted by the plants themselves via transpiration. Both the plant chemicals and bacteria thrive in diverse native grasslands (not so much in crop monocultures).

Because water is drawn to them, droplets condense quickly on the welcoming surface of organic aerosols and bacteria. Water droplets aggregate, forming raindrops, snow or ice, and as they enlarge, they fall. They are not big drops, but they are more frequent. Soil impacts are lessened, and even more so if the rain falls back onto the diverse system from which it arose. 

I have a rancher friend in Mexico named Alejandro Carrillo. He has turned his part of the Chihuahuan Desert back into grassland using his grazing animals. And he has witnessed this very effect: light rainfall and more frequent rains occur on his large ranch.

He is a rainmaker. 

Meanwhile, the contingent of conventional bare-dirt farmers scattered around the West—the majority of crop farmers—do not create vegetation and soil biology that allow for anything but extreme rainfall events. With a generally eastward weather flow, the eastward snowpack suffers. For onion and beet growers farming in Ontario, Oregon, the next snow-collecting mountain ranges are the Tetons, and Swan of Idaho and the Absaroka of Wyoming. The National Park Service has been monitoring glaciers in Grand Teton National Park and discovered a categorical decline in the Teton Range’s glacier extent.

Most people think regenerative agriculture is about storing carbon in the soil to address global warming. That is important, but it is probably not the primary benefit of increasing soil organic matter and keeping a living plant cover over the soil. I think the biggest global benefit is the effect of the water cycle: more water infiltrates and is stored in the soil, available to plants. More plants emit the rain-making bacteria and BVOCs. More gentle moisture events occur and fewer extreme events. Climate change is not the primary cause of reduced snowfall deposition. Instead, the true culprit is a breakdown of the water cycle, mostly due to bare-soil monocrop agriculture and continuous grazing. 

But this doesn’t change the climate’s temperature, you may say.

But it does. The water cycle is key to thermoregulation. Walk underneath the canopy of trees on a hot day. It’s cooler because the trees are transpiring water from their stomata. Like a rooftop “swamp” cooler, heat is being removed with the water vapor. I’ve taken the top of the soil temperature on our irrigated grasslands and found it to be as much as 40 degrees cooler than the nearby continuously grazed public lands desert range just a quarter mile away (not our grazing ranges).

One word describes this phenomenon: desertification.

If we look at where desertification has historically occurred on the planet—such as in Africa’s Sahel or Mesopotamia’s “Fertile Crescent”—those situations arose long before automobiles or fossil fuel emissions from power plants existed. Early cultures in those areas of the globe almost categorically practiced continuous grazing and exposed-soil monocrop agriculture. And they desertified what was once covered by green plants.

Reflecting on my climb of the Grand Teton nearly 40 years ago, I wondered if the ancient black ice that I observed on the North Face even still existed on the highest source of the Snake River. And I thought about the farmers and ranchers in those valleys hundreds of miles away that tilled and grazed their lands, ignorant of just what their practices were doing: the very water they depended on to irrigate their croplands was likely being depleted by their agricultural practices.

They, in fact, are desertifying. As is already happening in the arid West, ultimately, they may run out of water. And be out of business. 

There’s a better way to grow food. Together, we can insist on a change. We can start by buying only food grown on living soils that maintain year-round plant cover. This is what off-season cover crops do: they insulate and shade soil and retain water while enhancing a living soil sponge beneath them. 

And they will start to turn any farmer or rancher into a rainmaker. 

And on that Grand Teton, ancient black ice will remain. Snowfields and glaciers will expand.

Happy Trails.

The post Farming on Thin Ice appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

My name is Wesley Littleton. My wife Maddy and I are transitioning into ownership of the Alderspring beef distribution. I know that sentence alone can sound a bit intimidating—especially for those of you who have been part of this community for 20+ years. Because of that, I believe it’s incredibly important that our relationship moving forward is built on transparency, honesty, and connection.

I’d like to share a little bit of my story with you.

I grew up about four hours away from Alderspring’s current headquarters. I was a three-sport athlete in high school, and I had a hard time staying indoors during my free time. My dad was a bull rider, and agriculture runs deep in my family. Ranching and livestock were never just an interest—they were part of who we were.

On senior night for each of my sports teams, the announcer would say a few words about every graduating player. When it came to me, the message was always the same:

“This is Wesley Littleton. When he leaves here, he wants to own and operate a large-scale cattle operation.”

That was it. Simple and direct.

Since I was fourteen years old, I knew deep down what I wanted to do. The path to get there wasn’t always clear—but the destination never changed.

One day I was sitting in history class, probably daydreaming and staring at the clock waiting for the bell to ring, when I saw a picture my cousin had sent to our family group chat. She had spent the summer of 2021 as an intern on the Alderspring range.

I was blown away.

What she was doing—the landscape, the horses, the cattle—it all looked like something out of a dream. I immediately looked up Alderspring online and discovered they were offering internships.

Before the bell rang that day, I had already submitted my application.

Later I learned that some applicants spent hours carefully crafting every detail of their applications. I always laugh when I think about it—I finished mine in about twenty minutes. It wasn’t because I didn’t care. I read every question carefully and answered with everything I had.

The truth was, I had already been answering those questions my entire life.

The feeling reminds me of when my wife and I pull our boots on before a ride and our dogs realize what’s happening. The moment they see those boots, they can’t contain themselves. They bounce off the walls, run to the door and back again, wagging and shuffling every direction. They know exactly what they were made to do, and the opportunity is right in front of them.

There’s a fire inside them.

And when that door opens—they run.

A few months later I was pulling into Alderspring headquarters for the first time. I was driving my truck, with my dad following behind me in his. Unsure where to go, I headed toward the cluster of vehicles near the corrals.

That’s when I saw something that honestly felt like a movie scene.

Sitting on the top rail of the corral were a handful of people watching the pen below. Inside, Melanie and Linnea were working with a couple of range horses, training them before the summer season began.

I remember thinking: This can’t actually be real.

But it was.

The door had opened—and I was running through it.

Life on the range turned out to be even better than I had imagined. It was my Super Bowl, my World Cup, my Olympic gold medal—the thing you work for your entire life and finally get to experience.

And on top of all that, I met someone.

Her name was Maddy.

On our very first day riding the range, we parked near a campsite and rode about three miles to where the yearlings had been left the night before after turnout. It was gray, windy, and cold. Physically, I’ll admit—it was miserable.

But I wasn’t cold.

Even if it had started snowing and dropped to zero degrees, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. I felt completely at peace.

There’s an energy when you let cattle out in the morning. The cows are eager to graze, the horses are ready to move, and the riders are excited for whatever the day might bring.

As we rode, people paired off and drifted around the herd, getting to know each other.

Looking back, I only remember one person who rode with me that day.

Maddy.

There’s a saying around the ranch called “creating a star.” I’m not sure who originally came up with it, so I’ll assume it was Glenn.

A “star” happens when two riders leave their posts moving cattle and find a ridge somewhere to park their horses and chat. It becomes obvious when there are three riders on the north side of a herd and three on the south, each responsible for holding a stretch of country.

Each rider might normally cover 500 to 1,000 yards. But when two riders drift together, suddenly one person is left covering twice the ground—and before long cattle start slipping through and making a mess.

As you might guess…

Maddy and I created quite a few stars.

In my defense, I understand that stars have a gravitational pull—and hers was a powerful one. It was so strong that when I went home to visit my family for the first time that summer, I told my best friend—who would later become my best man—

“I found her.”

He looked at me and said, “What are you talking about?”

“I found my wife,” I told him. “I just know it.”

In early July there’s a week when everyone gets some time off while the cattle come down to private ground. During that week the crews were rearranged.

Well… almost.

I stayed on the same crew—with one major change.

My star was gone.

Later I learned the truth: the sisters had decided that Maddy and I created far too bright of a star, and therefore very little work was getting done.

The rest of the summer flew by. Every time Glenn or Caryl spoke, I soaked up every word. They approach ranching differently. They study, adapt, and experiment constantly, working to build rangeland that is bursting with life.

Being part of that was an incredible opportunity.

As the summer came to an end, the interns were asked if anyone wanted to stay an extra month to help bring the cattle down. The grass had held longer than expected that year.

I said yes immediately.

But my motivation had changed.

I stayed because of Maddy.

I had started looking for ranch jobs, but none of them were anywhere near her. I didn’t want to leave.

A few days later we were riding through thick timber toward a water tank where another crew would relieve us. The cattle drive down the mountain was only a couple of days away, and I still hadn’t found work nearby.

As we approached the tank, I could see riders gathered around the hose filling the water troughs. Maddy was riding beside me.

We stepped through the hotwire gate and I saw Glenn standing beside his dog, Clyde. He was off his horse, watching the cattle closely—studying each one as they came in to drink.

You could see the care he had for every animal.

Maddy and I stepped down from our horses and walked over. Glenn turned toward me and said,

“You’ll get paid starting Monday. Welcome to the family.”

No long conversation. No formal offer.

Just clear instructions.

And honestly, who was I to say anything except:

“Wow. Thank you.”

I turned to Maddy, trying to hold back tears.

I was staying.

That moment was the beginning of my journey with Alderspring. My heart still swells when I think back on it.

I hope this story gives you a glimpse into the care, honesty, and passion behind the beef we raise and provide to each of you.

Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

With gratitude,
Wesley Littleton

The post The Door Opened, I Ran appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

Then there’s the unimpressive presses: the French press and the aero press. We’ve actually dragged those gizmos up on the range for those too snooty to go all in on cowboy.

But as cow camp living approaches, I find that my caffeine-driven desires begin gravitating to the simplest of simple: the camp coffee. 

Here’s how it works. It’s still pitch dark in camp as I mosey my way to the cook tent; my border collie Clyde accompanies me happily (he has no problems getting up at 4 am and is quite happy to get going with the day). I grab a match and light the Coleman lantern. Its generator is usually a little clogged, so it’s appropriately a little dim for the wee hours. A warm yellow glow illuminates the inside canvas walls, and I light the cook stove. Whumph. I find the  half gallon speckled blue granite ware pot, blackened by years over the fire. There’s a few chips out of it, and they’ve gotten a little brown with rust, but that’s perhaps a little “rustic” flavoring, I think. Because the pot never got rinsed out from the day before, the first step is to get those grounds out (the early morning crew leaves the hot pot of remaining coffee for the “early” risers on the night crew to warm back up on the stove, and it rarely ends up getting cleaned out).

So I fill the pot half-full, and step out of the cook shack into the black. The stars, complete with a full-on representation of the Milky Way and its corresponding members of the Zodiac are bright enough to light my way to the sump hole. Our grazing range is right in the middle of one of the largest patches of dark sky in the US. There is no light pollution, because there are no towns. There’s no airports. There’s no shopping centers. There’s no people. To the west, the nearest habitation of humanity is a 100 miles away. To the east, it is about 60 miles.

You’re probably wondering what a sump hole is. It’s a hole we dig in the range soil about 50 feet from the cookshack. The excavation is only a foot or so deep. It’s where we pour our dishwater and coffee grounds. When we break camp  we fill it again with soil and forest and range duff, smoothing it out, leaving no trace. This “leave no trace ethic” is what we do with our entire camp when move to the next nomadic stake for the summer; cold ashes get spread out, fire ring stones get scattered, all gear gets stowed, rolled and folded up, and trash gets carried and bundled. It happens every week, as we follow the green grass upwards over several thousand feet of elevation, as our cattle graze several hundred miles over the summer.  

Coffee pot rinsed but never perfectly clean but well seasoned, I next fill it 3/4 of the way with water, set it on the stove on high, and bring to a boil. This is not a 212 degree boil. It’s probably only around 190, as our 7000 foot camp elevation doesn’t allow for more; boiling point lowers with every thousand feet of gain. After it rolls away for a minute or two, I’ll turn the heat way down and bring the tin of coffee over. It’s already ground. Drip size grounds are about right. I’ll take 3-4 handfuls (about 1 cup) of coffee and stir while pouring it in. 

Here’s where it gets dicey: I turn the stove back up to medium heat and slowly bring it back to boiling. Boiling is absolutely critical for preventing any resemblance to the bitterness and burn of used paint thinner. And the reason I have to mind it carefully, stirring occasionally, is so that the coffeepot does not boil over. Frequent is this occurrence in the hours between 4 and 5 am, as awareness, at that hour for many souls, pre-coffee, is not optimal.

If boil-over occurs, slide the pot off heat, pet your border collie who thankfully will never judge you, and reignite the gas stove taking care not to burn your knuckle hairs off again like you did earlier. I write this in the second person because I have for the most part been able to skip this section due to a great deal of practice.

Now, I continue the boil of the grounds for a total of 5 minutes. This is not a wimpy boil, but a good rolling one. Don’t despair on this step–it only takes practice. The foam that plagues for the first minute or two will soon dissipate, and there will be just rolling java for the next few minutes. No more than 5 rolling boil minutes needed, but less is guaranteed to fail the smoothness test; coffee will be predictably bitter with less. Now, I pull the pot off all heat, and dump in a half-cup of icy spring or mountain creek clear water into the pot, and stir briskly for 2 seconds. This precipitates the grounds downward. I don’t know why the water does it, but it works. I think it is something about surface tension. Some camp cooks swear by a half teaspoon of butter for precipitating. Same effect. Then, I leave it set for 2 minutes.

Then, the elixir is ready. I turn off the gas stove, and welcome again the silence. I carefully pour the first quarter cup through the strainer spout to wash trapped grounds out. Next, I throw that into the black cosmos outside the wall tent. Then, I pour the thick, earthen brown beauty smoothness into my waiting mug, taking care not to disturb the quiet precipitate of grounds at the bottom of the pot. 

As I sit on my camp chair outside with cup in one hand and Clyde’s neck in the other, we watch the vague glow of rosaceous fill tendering the eastern horizon. The stars won’t give up their place for another half hour. There’s a coyote serenading on the ridge beyond the 400 head of bedded down black cattle, but they pay crooner no mind. I can hear their deep breathing in the silence, along with the rhythmic sound of  cud chewing. I once heard an animal scientist tell of his discovery that there is a pleasure inducing endorphin flow in cows while they chew their cud. 

I too, share that when I hear them, provided that warm cup is in my hand. I’ll savor this brief moment of quiet, enjoying a cuppa as the crew finally makes their wavering and wandering pilgrimage to their same habitual needs; coffee from my same pot, or perhaps tea, while rifling though the gang-pile of horse halters, trying to find theirs with which to gather their mount for the day. 

In another few minutes, we together wordlessly walk across the meadow and the dark timber where we can hear the horse string on the graze. It sometimes takes some wandering to locate them in the dark, but we know their habits and favorite haunts in each and every camp setting. The steeds are hurriedly grabbing their last bites, knowing we are on the way to catch (they miss nothing). We all know who we are riding, and as the very first iota of gray light steals onto the scene, I see mine: it’s Ben, the tall paint gelding. He has what we call a big motor, and is a pleasure to ride because he likes to work. He likes the cattle, and has a resounding appreciation for the big country. 

He’ll be a solid partner for today. I lead him to camp, to the beacon of Coleman light, and to my saddle gear perched on a sagebrush. That’s where I set my coffee, and those last few sips are just what I need before we turn the 400 out and ride into the sunrise with Clyde beside and Ben beneath.

Happy Trails.

The post The Range of Java appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

After all, it is really hard to plug your nose with hooves. We humans like to use our fingers for that. 

But one spring day, we were high and dry–away from any deep waters of any kind, and had a near drowning. Fact: Caryl and I are both certified by the Red Cross to be lifesavers. In our teenage years, we both went through the training to be lifeguards. We knew how to save people from drowning. 

But they didn’t cover cows in the workbook or the “in-water” practicums. But somehow, Caryl and I knew what to do. Like we learned in our trainings, the main thing was to keep the “victim’s” head above water and airway clear (they called them “victims” in the 70s. I think now there is a nicer term for a drowning case. Maybe I should take a refresher).

Our first ranch in Tendoy was a hardscrabble place–a sort of jigsaw network of flood irrigation ditches surrounding 5 to 15 acre fields. Keeping it wet and growing with meager water flows that rolled off snowmelt-fed springs on the Continental Divide in July and August was as much art as science. Either way, it took years of practice to master. Some people never get it. Split the water too much, you’d never have enough water to flood the 5 acre field. Split it too little, and you’d never get over the whole place. Sometimes flood sets were only an hour or so long before they watered where you needed to. If it was the middle of the night, I would just nap in the field, wake up after an hour or so, and move the next canvas dam flood set.

The soils and grass responded in spades when tended this way. Flood irrigation is all about relationship to the land–you get to know it like no other rancher. You knew where the rocky soils were–and where the light, arable soils were. You knew where the Nebraska sedge grew as well as the the tall stands of timothy and orchard. 

It was April when our situation happened, and the creek was full, a veritable cascade off the high divide. I sent all the water down the “lateral ditch,” as we called it, down the edge of our calving field. The ditch was only about 2 feet wide and 6 inches deep, but it was full and fast. A microcosm of frigid whitewater. 

We had about 50 cows in the 5 acre piece of ground. They were “heavies” I sorted off the main herd the day before: cows that were likely going to calve within the next day or so. With experience after several years of calving and tutelage by Ron Alder, the former owner of our small ranch, I was able to spot heavies fairly easily. 

Caryl and I were checking the cows to see if any needed assistance with calving. It took a few minutes to check every one, but Caryl spotted our problem cow first. “Glenn!” she yelled. “Come quick!”

I ran over to where she was along the lateral. On the way there, I noticed that water was flooding and spreading from the ditch, doing a nice job of irrigating the pasture, but I didn’t recall setting one of my portable canvas irrigation dams there. It turned out that a cow had set a dam for me. 

With her heavy-with-calf enlarged body. 

I don’t think she meant to do it. She simply had started labor near the whitewater ditch and on a contraction, she pushed, and thereby started rolling on to her back. She was making nice progress, after all. The calf’s head was out, and her “bag of waters” was broken. The calf in progress probably was looking around at his beautiful mountain meadow surroundings from his position part way out of her back end. 

The problem arose when the cow rolled back. It was just too far, and she kept rolling down the gentle hill until she was upside down, legs pointing wildly in the air, milk-leaking-from-the-teats, udder jiggling wildly to and fro. 

And her backend–her tailhead–was completely in the ditch. And her new baby was now not seeing any surroundings because he was completely under water. 

That’s when I showed up. Caryl was already struggling, trying to right the cow, kneeling in the ice cold torrent. I immediately jumped to her side in the flood, and we heaved away at the struggling twelve hundred pound cow. She wasn’t exactly happy in her upside down position and was quite aware that she was stuck. The ditch was nearly dry on her head’s end, because her butt was acting like the Hoover Dam in the torrent.

The calf was flailing–and failing. Head was fully submerged most of the time, and as he hadn’t progressed with shoulders out, he was pretty stuck there until mom would issue a laborious heave-to push. The problem was that in the middle of all the distress of being stuck upside down, she stopped pushing. Caryl immediately saw the need and lifesaving instinct kicked in. She stood with leather booted feet in the raging flood, facing the cow, hunched over her writhing form cradling the calf’s head above the rushing water so it could breathe. I rushed over and we tried to get the calf to progress, but couldn’t unlock shoulders from the grip of the upset mother’s rocking and rolling pelvis. 

I’m retrospect guessing the water was around 38 degrees. It was snowmelt, after all. It was only another few minutes before my wife and the cow both went numb from hypothermia.

“I’m getting the Allis!” I yelled.

Caryl yelled back, still hunched, still cradling the airway above water. “You better go FAST!”

I nodded and ran. 

Fast. 

The Allis was our old reliable. It had a 4-cylinder Perkins diesel that never died. My only hope was that it was plugged in. This morning was cold, and the oil would be thick. It would never start unless if plugged in. The normally built-in glow plugs were non-existent, normally an ace in the hole on diesels. But the tractor was too old. I could see the orange extension cord hanging from the block. It was plugged in! I yanked the plug on the way by the front of the tractor, and jumped on board. Fuel on, key on, clutch down, neutral tranny, press starter. The engine roared to life. I jumped off as it warmed for seconds, grabbed a log chain from the barn wall, wrapped it around the 3 point and drove at a speed akin to riding a rank bronc, with me gripping the steering wheel for dear life–to get back to my wife.

She was still there; they both were–her and the cow. I swung Allis around, backed in close, jumped and grabbed the log chain in singular motion. Clipping the grab hook around the farthest leg-hock, I climbed aboard and eased the clutch to start forward movement, trying for a full reversal of the ditch roll–outwards.

It worked. Caryl cradled calf through the rotation. Cow was on terra firma (but muddy from the flood), water was in the ditch, and calf head, muddy but wide-eyed was exposed for air intake. In just another moment, there was a tremendous push and heave as the cow remembered her labor, and calf was out in the mud, afterbirth and all.

As the cow managed miraculously to get up, the second she sniffed her newborn, I carefully dragged the baby to dry ground where she could lick it clean. Caryl looked tremendously relieved, and I was smiling. 

By the time the sun hit the meadows in the afternoon, I was ready for another calving check. Ditch-baby was happily sucking on the milk-bar, tail wagging. Proud mama was licking her calf as if none of that morning’s trauma had ever occurred. The only memory-nudging evidence I would have was a few days later. There, I spotted a brilliantly green patch of grass, growing tallest in the morning sun, where one particular cow chose to flood the meadow…instead of me. 

Happy Trails.

The post Why Cows are Called Dams appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

She’s only four and a half months old, and not even a crawler. But she’s a smart little whipper-snapper, and gets really angry at her lack of mobility. She sees us walking around, and wants nothing more than to be ambulatory. 

So it was up to Papa to make that happen. 

I carried her in the “football” hold. The cattle were about a half mile away, and I hadn’t gone through them yet, like I try to every day for a wellness and weight gain check. I occasionally carry the tike on my hip like her curvy mother does, but I am fairly hipless. I have carried all of my own seven daughters in this way of the “pigskin”, perhaps inspired by none other than childhood hero Larry Csonka (the greatest running back of all time–Dolphins of ’72). Little Kate fell right into my hold, and off we went for the half mile. 

New Fathers, take note: the football hold almost guarantees a happy baby.

The beeves lifted their heads from the deep graze, and watched us approach with more than a little interest. They had never seen a tiny human before. At first, they backed off. Kates big blues stared unblinking at the massive animal forms before her, but she never squawked. She just peered at them across the grass.

Then, we knelt down. Little Kate sat between my knees in the lush grass, barefoot. That got their attention. They edged in closer and closer, until they paused, just 8 feet away from us. Thousand pound steers nonchalantly sniffed the air, transfixed by the clean, white innocent presence of tiny Kate. 

She just stared back. 

One massive and well-muscled steer pushed his way through the frontliners. They all immediately made way for him when they saw who it was and the weaponization he presented. He would intentionally point a horn-tip at anyone who didn’t immediately yield and step aside. It was Jose’, the great Corriente cross, with an intimidating horn spread of nearly 5 feet.  

He was of the wild strain of Mexican, formerly Spanish Conquistador introduced cattle, that successfully became feral in the most intimidating climes of the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts of North America. No other breed of cattle could have survived. The Corriente are beasts with an attitude. Tenacious, stubborn, and sometimes fearsome, and certainly fearless. 

I watched a single Corriente mother, Myrtle by name, leave a herd of 250 head of black angus mama cows on our pasture one day this spring. She sprinted out of the herd full on, bellering loudly at an unseen intruder that I couldn’t pick out from my vantage point. 

Suddenly, her baby, an unbelievably cute spotted calf, half the size of the rest of the black calves sprinted after her mother with an inspired-by-mother raging, tiny beller, with the same objective in mind: kill or be killed.

The interlopers turned out to be a pack of coyotes. They didn’t even yip. They simply spun around and formed a streak of gray lightning trying to get away from bovine terror. 

Never saw that one coming.

Jose’ was Boss Steer. And he wanted to find out what all the crowding was about. Slowly, the cattle encircled me and little Kate, with Jose’ clearly in charge. And you, dear reader, are probably now concerned. And you should be. Jose’ is nothing to sneeze at or disregard. He demands attention. When you see the horns, you immediately picture what it would be like to have one in your guts.

But I know Jose’. He’d never threatened any of us on foot or on horseback. And now, he obviously softened when he saw boss human–but even more, tiny baby on the turf. 

Kate wasn’t impressed by him in any shape or form. Instead, she was impressed by the object at hand: it was thick orchardgrass, big bladed and robust after several gentle fall rains followed by intense, high-altitude sun. Certainly there were many other species of grass in this sward, but for whatever reason, the orchard, Dactylis glomerata, fully captivated her 4.5 month old attention span, even with Jose’, boss steer, just 8 feet away, twitching his horns. 

She had her mouth around several blades of the lush grass that offered itself up all around her face. And she closed her mouth and chewed it, working it against her newly teething gums like no other human. 

I wondered why, but only for a moment. 

And then I tried it. The very same leaves of grass. And I knew. And I knew that she knew: it was sugar. Pure and unadulterated, right from the source, just like sugarcane itself. After all, cane is indeed a grass, in the same family as orchardgrass, the stem which Kate happily sucked on. 

Kate was grazing in the sugary-est time of year. It was after we’ve had repeated high 20 degree frosts, and the brix, or sugar content, was at the very highest measurable amount during the grass year. I knew, because I measured it with a glass-prism refractometer, the same measuring device winemakers and beer brewers use to measure the dissolved sugars in their grapes, or their wort. And orchardgrass in October, after frost, can score at a pretty consistent 15 to 25 percent brix, meaning that percentage of the sap has dissolved solutes like sugars, proteins and fatty acids. Ripe and sweet blueberries will test at 20%. And Kate was sensing something that sweet.

And that’s the fuel cattle need to grow. It’s even the fuel we need to grow, especially at an age like Kate’s. 

But here’s the sad truth about most grass: if those grasses are not growing on a living soil–a breathing, cell-dividing, tumult of thousands of species of microbes and arthropods reflecting a diversity of life–brix isn’t very impressive, even in October. Most grasses in the US sit at around a very modest 5%. 

And that means that the cattle who graze that grass don’t gain weight. Their coats won’t glimmer with that natural oily shine; they will be dull. They don’t have the ability to fight off disease. 

And tiny Kate doesn’t gnaw on it. Because it is all fiber. 

It took us 10 years to get there, but now, our grasses can carry the masses. It could be the roots of revolution: cattle production could fully shift to regenerated grasslands all across our country, and the verdant swards of waving-in-the-wind green could feed protein to a nation. 

The numbers work. I’ve done them. And the bison proved it. Our nation used to raise more bison that we currently do cattle. 

On just grass. That thrived on a living soil, not a mined and extracted from one.

Ask Kate. She knows the difference.

Happy Trails.

The post Baby Gets Brix appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

My girls called it the “Thumper.” The operators thumped for about a week or two, I think. My curiosity didn’t get the best of me; I never stopped to talk to them to find out what the heck they were doing. We were too busy. We were trying to survive–giving it our best shot–ranching. The neighbor gave us an answer when we didn’t even ask for it. 

“See them guys on the machine?” Jimmie Lea Dowton, my neighbor asked me as I was struggling in the wind moving a 4 inch by 40 foot sprinkler pipe. His 7.3 diesel was idling loudly. He was yelling out his window. I would have to yell back, because I knew from experience that he wouldn’t shut it off (after 10 years or so, he did start shutting it off. We became friends). 

Jimmie was a sort of Baron or Bully of the valley at the time. It all had to do with how he saw you. We struggled and had some tussles at first. Nothing physical, but certainly verbal, and more than a little psychological. He knew some things about how to get what he wanted. I was ignorant to some of his antics at that time, but others, not so much. We had words, on occasion.

“Yep. Sure have been watching them. Wondering what’s going on,” I said. 

“Seismic surveys.” It’s all he said. He put F350 in gear and drove off, black smoke of unburned diesel marking territory. 

I put it in my mental file, pushed the folder down, and shut the cabinet. That was it. It wasn’t until 20 years later that I cracked it open again, and found that we beat Baikal. The lake, that is. The deepest one. 

Until now. 

Our valley is the Pahsimeroi. Never heard of it? Neither did I before I set foot in it. There’s only 300 people here, and you’ll probably know why when you drive up from the Pahsimeroi river’s confluence with the Salmon River. It surprises you. When you wander through the gentle bends in the road in the lowest reaches of the valley, it looks like a bucolic ranching community with a scattering of homes, barns and corrals surrounded by green fields. Then, when you pass the Hatch Ranch, you see the real character of the valley. It rolls out in front of you so fast that after coming up that first straightaway, it fairly takes your breath away. 

It still does mine. I’ve been up it literally a thousand times. Suddenly, a big valley that resembles the high pre-Himalayan plains of Tibet stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s desert, and there are little to no trees up the valley floor. Then, each side of the wide and austere valley suddenly gives rise to massive jagged peaks, often crusted with snow and ice, marching off into the distance until the curve of the earth steals them from view.

That view–the one I just described–can be so unsettling for first time visitors that the discomfort, or perhaps the loneliness, or the exposure makes them push through every now and again, but the consideration of living there is categorically unthinkable. 

That’s how I felt. I took Caryl through the valley once in 1985. We were both awestruck about the scale and feel of the valley. We both agreed we could never live there. Nope. Never.

Yet now we do. And we’ve been living here for 21 years.

After 21 years, the valley still is austere. But the coarse fabric of it starts getting interwoven with things like family, memories and beauty. And now, it’s home. So much that my adult kids don’t want to leave. There’s no place like it to them; their hearts become joined to it; some of their blood and sweat inevitably gets spread on the ground and the valley never forgets. The girls have sense of place that few others have. Sometimes, it’s a love and hate sense. It’s a place of extremes: we barely survive the 40 below zero with wind driven graupel snow, and then thrive in the luxuriant cool and deep green grass that the winter staged for us, just 4 months later.

But now, there is something else. Below us. I have a sense of it now.

Lake Baikal is located in Siberia, Russia. It is thought to be the world’s oldest and deepest lake. Three hundred rivers and streams feed it. It is home to 20% of the world’s freshwater, roughly the equal to the combined volume of all 5 of the Great Lakes bordering US and Canada. 

Lake Baikal’s depth is 1700 meters at the deepest point. 

The May Grange hall is an old building, but not that old. It’s likely just shy of 100 years old. The plate over the main door, facing the street says “Est 1931.” I’m not sure if that was the date of the founding of the May Grange as an organization or when the building was constructed. 

It is old enough that the floor creaks when you dance on it. 

The hall is where we usually have our Pahsimeroi Water District meetings. Jimmie Lea Dowton, and his wife, Maria, presided over those meetings for years. I went to nearly every one. Jimmie’s gruff nature, as well as Maria’s, was a performance to behold. I still miss those meetings. 

Now that Jimmie and Maria have left this Earth, George Miller presides over the water meetings. George is also the Fire Chief, so now, we meet in the Firehall. There’s a table in front of the 4 fire engines that are parked there, doors open, keys in, ready for action. 

There were several of us valley ranchers in attendance; I was in the middle of the age range. George, Jim Martiny and Ted O’Neal held position of the older operators in the valley. Jim and Ted were 4th generation right here in May, Idaho.

Then, there was a new face. He knew the previously mentioned men–in fact, they all went to school together–right here in the Valley. He was Bob Whittier, or actually, Dr. Robert Whittier, now, of Hawaii, as of most recently. 

It turns out that Dr. Whittier left ranching as a young man to become a submariner for the Navy. I think he told us that he was in a sub for 19 years, and then earned a PhD in geomorphology or perhaps hydro-geomorphology. He studied ground water and ground water movement right here in the Pahsimeroi. 

Anyway, when I finally opened my file cabinet and put two and two together, I realized that he was the one responsible for conducting the seismic surveys those 20 years prior with the Thumper.

And then, he pushed over his results to me. There was a map of the valley, and I recognized the features and few roads and easily oriented myself. 

“What is this grey blob on the map, Dr. Whittier?” I asked. 

He simply said: “That’s water. Ground water. Two kilometers deep.”

It took a second for that to sink in. “So we’re sitting right here on a lake of ground water in this desert valley that is 2000 meters deep?”

He quietly nodded. 

That was deeper than Lake Baikal in Russia by 300 meters. It was all fresh. When the lake fills, which is pretty much every year after snowmelt sinks into the ground, our springs flow, and flow into the Pahsimeroi River. All of a sudden it all made sense. 

Fact: the Pahsimeroi River has very few surface waters that fill it. I can think of 2 creeks out of the many that occasionally make it from the snowy mountains to the river. What happens instead is that the snow melts, and when it hits the valley, it sinks through literally hundreds of meters of gravel, and fills the lake. Sometimes, even with big creeks, it takes all summer for those waters to reach the lake, and then the river. It’s why our river’s high water is often in the fall. 

It’s exciting stuff. We didn’t know until now that we have high desert, lakefront property. Or that Alderspring is a floating cattle ranch. 

I’ll just venture it is safe to say this: Alderspring is the world’s only Certified Organic Floating Cattle Ranch. 

Yes. Things get more interesting every day. 

Happy Trails. 

The post Ranching On the Deepest Lake. appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

That call was what I needed to lock eyes with him. A steer, probably weighing around 300 lbs, stood stock still, staring at me through the brush as I opened the gate.

He called out again, and I responded with a a quiet cow call. He advanced out of the brush a few feet. I think he was stepping out into the hope that I, a mere human, often perceived as a predator, could possibly meet his all-consuming quest: to find his mother.

It had all started at first light the day before. We had gathered nearly 210 cows and their calves from lush organic pastures on the Madsen lease place, and separated cows from calves. It was a pretty simple procedure; we used a makeshift “cow filtering” device that consisted of 3 parallel bars of steel pipe across a gate opening- high enough for a calf to pass under, but too low for a cow. The crew and I just trickled the entire herd down the corral alleyway past the filter, and calves went under, and cows went by. It took minutes, and no stress whatsoever. 

Then, we backed up the semi-truck, and commenced to loading the cows. They were bound for abundant grasses, well over the height of their noses that we had been “stockpiling” for the entire summer. Their destination was our North Unit Ranch (also certified organic) in the next valley along the Continental Divide. The forage there was deep and thick enough that it would likely last the cowherd well into the winter. 

It was too far to simply trail them there; it was about 40 miles over the imposing massif of the 11,000 foot Lemhi Mountain range, and 4 days journey on foot. So we opted for the all day affair of putting wheels under them, and hauling them, semi load after semi load, 80 highway miles thereby going around the mountain range instead.

The only trick was that we had to separate cows from calves to prevent the young from being trampled in transit. Putting a crowd together of 1200 lb mothers with 2-300 lb calves in a standing room only semi truck almost always ends up in someone getting hurt. So the calves would ship with calves, and the cows with cows. 

I knew that in the herd we had some cows that were still without a baby. They were our latest calvers, and would calve within the next month or so. So I had Annie and Jed sort them out after I cut the calves off. They could tell they were “dry” or non-lactating by just looking at their udders as they went by. A “wet” cow would have a fully developed, milk carrying udder, and would have “waxen” looking or shiny and clean teats. She also might have a little curly hair around the top of her teat. Both of these indicated that her baby had “sucked,” or nursed on her that morning. 

Inevitably, we misidentify a few in the process. Sometimes, it can be dang hard to tell. We’ll intentionally leave all the “drys” in the corral overnight, in case we miss one that has a calf. Inevitably, the cow will tell us, as she’ll miss her offspring and begin to call out. Annie and crew separated 6 head from the herd on their sort.

It was the equal of 7 semi loads of cattle we trailered to the grass ranch. It was a long day. I pulled into our home ranch in the dark with the last empty truck, exhausted. Today was Saturday, and tomorrow, we were planning on heading to church–and then fishing on a remote alpine lake with the entire family for the afternoon. 

It would be short night of sleep after finishing chores. My phone buzzed with a text message from Aaron, my main hand on the Madsen Ranch. “Looks like B31 here in the corral dry bunch is missing her baby. She’s been calling out for her.”

I knew what I was doing before heading into church. I wanted to make it because two of my girls were singing. I would just have to leave early with the cow, and was hoping it was obvious she was missing her calf.

The next morning, I grabbed truck and trailer, and headed down to the Madsen corrals and backed up to the loading chute. As I jumped out, one cow broke from the small herd of dry cows Annie sorted yesterday and walked up to me as I headed to open the trailer gate. It was a little unsettling: our cows are fairly wild cows, and almost never come right up to us, except to maybe attack when  protecting their baby. It was a behaviour I was proud of because that protectionism translated into the same cow standing her ground against a wolf, mountain lion or bear. We actually encouraged it. 

I turned to face her, and she stopped 5 feet away, raising her nose to me and sniffing me to determine my status as friend or foe. And then she let out a low, heartfelt bawl. She recognized me, and I think she knew that I alone was her hope. 

Her eartag was B31. Aaron was right. Her baby had got on the bus to tallgrass without her.

I simply said “C’mon, girl,” and she followed me to the trailer gate as I opened it. I stepped aside, and she jumped in. It was easy as that. No coaxing, pushing or cajoling to load, as was often the case with wild cows. She simply trusted me that this “bus” was heading to her lost baby.

I checked fuel and tires, and set out. It was one of those beautiful watercolor coming-of-autumn mornings in high mountain Idaho. The air was fresh and clear from the recent rains we’d had, and the persistent cool reminded of the fact that fall was full on its way.

About an hour and a half later, I pulled the trailer along the Lemhi Valley back road to a lonesome gate along the extreme North boundary of our grazing ranch. The backbone of the high Continental Divide shone in the early morning sun as I stepped over to the cow gate. 

It’s where we released all the cows yesterday. They knew the trail up to the big pastures (from years prior) on the hills above us, and it was an easy unload with the semi where we simply dumped loads of mama cows on the county roadway. 

The calves were a different story. We had to haul them another 20 minutes to the middle of the current pasture the cows grazed in. They wouldn’t know the way–they had never been here before. They would likely get lost on the trail up to the hills where the cows were.

I checked the cow in the long trailer before getting the gates ready. She was sniffing the air–she knew the place by smell, I was certain, and was eager with the anticipation that her kid might be here. She lowed at me as she paced back and forth, hurrying me to let her out.

I walked toward the big backroad gate, and that’s where I started this story. That one calf stood and now emerged from the brush. By himself, that steer had come down to this corner of the ranch. He’d never been there, and he had absolutely no way of knowing that this was where the cows all were unloaded yesterday. It was a good quarter to half a mile from the herd. 

I opened the gate, and ran to the side of the trailer, opening the side door. I didn’t even worry about backing the trailer in; I knew that the cow knew.

And I could trust her.

She jumped out immediately, and ran through the gate, calling out for her steer which she spotted immediately through the lattice of the trailer frame when he first called out. 

Calf ran to Mama. Mama sniffed calf. Calf went to sucking on the milk bar immediately, wagging tail. Mama sniffed and licked her 300 lb baby as he sucked. They stood there, and looked at me, unmoving, a picture of perfection and some semblance of bovine gratitude if it were possible, I thought.

I stood there in absolute wonder. I long knew that I could trust the cow, but had never trusted the calf. But yet, here was a steer who showed up at the exact place on the planet earth where his mother was most likely turn up. He walked from the herd on his own—absolutely unthinkable for a wilderness raised prey animal–and showed up alone to meet mother. 

At the bus stop. When no one told him that one even existed.

I would have never guessed it possible, and it is because there are some things (many?) about animal intellect and intution we will never understand. 

But I am learning. And cows are patient teachers.

And that is why my relationship with the lowly cow is one of the utmost respect. Truly one of God’s creatures; they never cease to amaze. Those who abuse and mistreat cows as a commodity I will never understand.

And after closing the gate behind them (they’d wander up to the rest of the herd by midafternoon), I slipped the truck in gear and pondered about the wonder of it all. I rolled into Salmon, Idaho, in a half hour, late for church. I missed the sermon but got there in time to hear my lovely daughters sing the closing song. 

Now that I think of it, I didn’t miss the sermon. I had witnessed one in what The Maker showed me today.

Happy Trails.

The post Orphan No More appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.

“There were three schools in the Valley; one was here in May, another was up in Patterson and there was one more in Goldburg,” Jim said. 

I was dumfounded, but I knew Jim was telling me the truth, because right across the table from me was Robert Whittier, now a PhD geologist living in Hawaii. He was visiting our Pahsimeroi Valley for a few days on vacation and had joined us at the May Firehall for a meeting to discuss historical river flows in the valley. Robert (Bob) had grown up here, and Jim and he had played on opposing ball teams in grade school.

Bob attended the Goldburg school. 

The reason I was a little speechless is because the entire town of Goldburg is gone. It’s not a “ghost town,” by the definition of such. Where the town of Goldburg once stood, there is a blank slate of featureless sagebrush. Nothing.  

“I could show you the foundation of the schoolhouse. I’m pretty sure you can still see it,” Bob told me. 

None of those schools, or even towns, as they were, exist today. There still is a Patterson school, but it has stood empty for several years. The town is gone. The scattering of buildings and a few homes called May still exists, but the store, cafés, filling station, school and post office are no more. There’s still the Grange Hall (daughter Abby puts on community dances there) and the firehouse. The log church is still there but stands unused and empty.

You probably are thinking what I’m thinking. Where did all the people go? The fact of the matter is that the 40-mile length of the Pahsimeroi Valley had a lot more human inhabitants as recently as the 1950s than it does now. Now, there’s only about 300 people here. Then, numbers certainly varied seasonally, but there were often more than 2,000.

Are there less ranches or farms in the Pahsimeroi than then? There are certainly fewer individual owners of ranches, but the land in agriculture has generally remained the same. And there weren’t and aren’t subdivisions in the valley. 

One of Alderspring’s long-term cowhands, Webb, is leaving the ranch today for another cowboying job in California. It’s a new place for him, and he’ll learn new skills. The crew all got together in the bunkhouse to send him off last night. There were about 15 of us gathered to send him off. Several gals on the crew cooked everyone a nice dinner, and there was a beautiful chocolate cake and ice cream to enjoy for dessert. Cow dogs happily joined in on the festivities, and stories and laughter were shared by all. 

There were a lot of people. Some of them were former Alderspring hands who journeyed long distances by air and highway to join us for the fall gathering of cattle off the ranges. Many of them were returning for the second or even third time. 

Our seasonal range and ranch crew at times exceeded 20 people this season. Is it because Alderspring is a huge ranch? Absolutely not. Our scale is moderately sized for our country—it’s probably about average. 

So why all the people?

My friend, Ken Price, lives in an apartment above our beef fulfillment warehouse near Salmon, Idaho. He really helped me capture at least part of what I think the difference is. 

Scott, our longtime ranch-hand and point man on our North Ranch, near Tendoy, Idaho was in the fulfillment center unloading a fresh shipment of dry ice on Monday while Ken and I visited. Ken is about my age and was brought up on a ranch in Southern Idaho. He often remembers back to a time when he was a young buck on the ranch, handling draft teams to do some of the work on the place with his family. It was a different time; actual horsepower and human power got most of the work done.

As Scott was unloading ice, block by block by hand into a waiting dry ice holding cooler on our packing floor, Ken right away asked me why we don’t just buy a forklift to unload the pallet of dry ice from the truck to save all that time unloading 180 ten-pound blocks of dry ice by hand. 

It was a good question. Scott had to not only lift them out of a palletized cooler onto the bed of his truck but then had to jump down and handle the same blocks again to carry them over to our waiting floor cooler. It was quite a bit of work. Ironically, Scott built up a sweat handing dry ice that runs at a cool negative 109 degrees below zero.

As we watched Scott, I told him “It’s the same reason that we feed 1300 tons of hay (that is 2.6 million pounds) of hay by hand every winter. Each flake, stem, or blade of grass hay is fed by human hands to the waiting cowherd. It might be 20 degrees below zero when the crew feeds it, but they are out there, with the cows, feeding them their sustenance.” 

Ken got it, because as a youth, he was doing just that.

It was the same reason we ride horseback over 650 miles a year with our cattle with 3 or 4 people saddled up for the entire summer from a remote cow camp, or why we have humans string up well over 200 miles of temporary electric fence to put our beeves on the best grass, rather than feeding them in a feedlot. 

The reason is simple: husbandry is always human hands-on. Where we can have a human work on the ground with the cattle, or with a horse, or even do other work equally as efficiently as a machine, I’ll take the human every time. 

You might say that forklifts are more efficient and that Scott wasn’t working with animals. That’s valid, until I pencil what the amortization and depreciation of a forklift requires over time. We simply don’t need one enough to replace a human to unload ice an hour a week. So, I’d rather use Scott; it keeps him from the sedentary life, and the ranch even saves money. 

When we work with animals, feeding them, living with them, riding horseback with them, we always learn from them. Wearing a T shirt in a 200 horsepower John Deere tractor, warm cab, feeding hay with a hay unrolling or chopping machine when it is 30 below zero sounds nice; you can listen to your favorite podcast, too. But when I’m out there, on the ground with my animals in the cold, am I not more inclined to feed them in a circle to keep the wind off them? Or take them to a willowy windbreak to get them out of the cold?

I feel what they feel. I might hear that isolated wheezing or coughing calf out of 400 that may be suffering from a little early pneumonia infection. Or I can hear that calf bawling trying to look for their mother in whiteout conditions. 

Before the machine age really dawned, all those things I mention above simply happened as a matter of course. As late as the 1950s, there were few machines—tractors and the like—in the Pahsimeroi. Most of the work was done with human muscle, associated with horse and mules. It simply needed more people. 

Many more people.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against using equipment. We have some heavy equipment: a larger John Deere tractor, a backhoe and some haying equipment. We like technology, but not when it steals from an attitude of husbandry, or when human muscle actually saves us money. Sure, labor is a high cost, but equipment is sky high, and depreciation by rust is rapid. 

But I would argue that an even greater cost is in the younger generation that no longer knows the experience or value of physical labor for both man and beast and no longer understands that working closely with one’s animals is the true way to wellness and relationship with the land. 

Perhaps we can change that culture and bring people back to the land. After all, our ranch alone could have fielded at least one baseball team. One day, in my perfect world, baseball teams in our valley would once again challenge each other on the sandlot. 

Unlikely perhaps, but for us, this is right as we see it. It’s the way we believe the Maker of it all has asked us to practice agriculture. 

And for me, that makes all the difference. 

Happy Trails.

Glenn                 

The post When Baseball Reigned appeared first on Organic Beef Matters.