Of swans, wolves and bears: the challenge of ranching sustainably

Two trumpeter swans lifted skyward, white angelic wings beating slow and effortlessly over the meandering Red Rock River.  It was a cool but clear early morning at the J Bar L Ranch, and I was drinking tea while looking out over the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, a stunningly beautiful and diverse wetland landscape in southwest Montana.  I had been invited to participate in a tour of the ranch by the Western Sustainability Exchange, an organization that promotes sustainable agriculture in the Northern Rockies.  I had known one of the main ranch hands through work on carnivore conservation; but I had never met the others, and I was curious about what was going on with a ranch that is situated in the best remaining ecological corridor between Greater Yellowstone and central Idaho’s Selway Bitterroot ecosystem.   

For the next day and a half, I looked at a lot of grass, sagebrush and wildlife, kicked a lot of dirt, and wrestled with other tour participants over the question of what it means to ranch sustainably in a biologically rich landscape. These included other livestock producers and experts on range and wildlife management, as well as the neighbors --The Nature Conservancy and the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

The owner and staff of the J Bar L had been pursuing some recent dramatic changes in their management, which they wanted to share with others.  They wanted to discuss the results they were seeing on the land and what they meant. It did not take an expert to know that some of their biggest changes were beneficial to both the environment and human health. First, they are now producing 100% grass-fed cows (read: no corn, unnecessary drugs, or hormones). With an abundance of grass available in winter on a lower elevation ranch near Twin Bridges, they have been able to eliminate their previous reliance on hay, which greatly reduces their energy consumption and carbon footprint.  They are also not selling their cows to feedlots, many of which are horrible from the standpoint of chemical and hormone inputs to the cows, which in turn are not healthy for the people who consume them. Feedlots are also notorious causes of air and water pollution, as well as inhumane for the cows.

                                       Photo courtesy of J Bar L Ranch

J Bar L’s  program of frequently moving cows around the landscape means that there is a lot of grass, sagebrush, and other plant cover and forage left over for birds, foxes, coyotes, bobcats and other wildlife that use the area. In my brief time there, I saw coyotes, fox, three black bears, numerous moose, pronghorn, elk and an abundance of birds, including bald eagle, harrier, sandhill cranes, great blue heron, lesser scaup, coots, bluebirds and meadowlark.  And I heard of a grizzly bear that they saw occasionally on a nearby mountain. 

One of the things that struck me most from the discussions with ranch employees, Red Rock officials, Fish and Game staff, and the crew from Western Sustainability Exchange, was how much we all knew we were in a magical wild place, and that we all wanted to keep it that way.  This was not what I expected.  I had become accustomed to the old storyline, embraced tacitly or overtly by so many involved in agriculture and resource extraction, that people are meant to dominate and subdue the land.  That the West is to be cultivated, safe, settled -- where  wilderness and wild animals are a token sideshow, perhaps acceptable within National Parks, but not outside their borders.  In my experience, this traditional storyline, the residue of the old myth of “manifest destiny”, runs so deep that many who espouse it don’t even recognize it. Throughout the West, the story is encoded in the DNA of many communities.   

But in the last number of decades, the old storyline has come up against a newer one that, over time, has become more compelling.  The core of the new story is that we, wildlife, and ecosystems are interdependent in profound ways, some that even scientists may not fully understand.  That our history of eliminating thousands of bison, wolves, bears in the name of progress was, looking back now, wrong-headed.  That it is long past due to replace the old story of dominance over nature with a new one that honors the earth and promotes coexistence with animals and each other.

What I found in discussions with the staff of J Bar L, The Nature Conservancy, and Western Sustainability Exchange, was that we shared versions of this new story, although we each expressed it differently. Looking at how the J Bar L ranch was being managed encouraged me.  Maybe, just maybe, it is possible to live and ranch in such a way that leaves the landscape whole and healthy for the next generation, while giving room to bears and wolves and swans and more.  We all seemed to be groping toward some vision of sustainability, even if we couldn’t necessarily agree on all of what that means. Indeed, there is a big debate in cattle country right now about what is sustainable, and what can be labeled as such. With big corporations such as Cargill and McDonalds in the fray, as well as smaller organic and grass-fed cattle producers, the debate promises to be a heated one, in which the smaller, more environmentally friendly operators will be at a significant disadvantage.

In this group anyway, there was a shared recognition that sustainability involves a shared vision of healthy people and healthy ecosystems. There was agreement too that we need to find new ways to work together to make sustainable practices an on-the-ground reality, rather than a pie in the sky fantasy. And J Bar L is undoubtedly on the cutting edge of sustainably raising beef cows in the region.   

                                        Photo courtesy of J Bar L Ranch

I was left with a head full of questions such as: What is difference quantitatively between operations like this and those that send their cows to big feedlots in the Midwest, in terms of energy, carbon footprint, water quality, human health, biodiversity?  How replicable are efforts such as the J Bar L in other areas, even within the region?  What difference is J Bar L making among their neighbors and the broader agricultural community in terms of setting an example of coexistence with carnivores and other wildlife?  Is it possible to take a comprehensive view of costs and benefits (including non-consumptive values such as wildlife) for an operation like J Bar L, compared to others that rely more heavily on chemicals, feedlots, and pesticides? 

As part of a sustainable beef project, NRDC will try to tackle some of these questions in the ensuing months.  These are questions that I’m certainly going to be grappling with myself for quite some time, for these agricultural issues are enormously complex, not just for the producers, but for consumers and all of the people in between in our complicated food system. But for now, I am happy to relish the memories of the early morning liftoff of white, wild swans against the snowy backdrop of the Centennial Mountains.

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