in this. There were a number of bison ranchers attending the class. “We had a gentleman here who moved to the U.S. from South Africa and lives in North Carolina raising bison as well as some local people,” Lee says. “The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin will be sending some of their people to another class we are holding. They have a very large herd of bison in the Green Bay area that they’ve been managing for several years. Gail Griffin has been president of the NBA (National Bison Association) and she said that other than buying bison, the investment into that September class was the next best thing they’ve ever spent money on. It was a great success,” Lee says. “We forget how different we are. My daughter has gone to the FFA convention with the NBA, promoting the bison industry. When she came back she told us that she never realized how different we are. We are way different from ‘normal’ agriculture—very unique in what we do and how we do it.” Bison are unique animals and managing them with holistic principles, to be sustainable, is totally different from mainstream agriculture. “After attending the FFA convention, she told us that of all the thousands of kids they talked to, she could count on one hand the kids who planned to do something in animal agriculture. A few were going to do dairy and a few were going to do beef. The others were planning to go to work for agribusiness companies.” That’s not a sustainable future. Big corporate businesses just keep growing and they don’t put back
anything into the land like grass farmers do. “Some of the land we utilize is much healthier than it was, and the difference is like day and night. This is especially true on the pastures where we held the Holistic Management class, on the Boy Scout reservation that we’ve leased for about 20 years. When we first went in there with our animals, weeds would hardly grow on some of that land. In earlier years it had been leased to conventional farmers to grow crops. They’d mined that soil down to nothing. It’s a light, sandy soil anyway, and it needed more organic matter,” Lee says. After bringing in the bison, the soil health improved. “We haven’t used any fertilizer except the bison manure. We went out there to do the pasture walk during our seminar, and turned some soil over to see what’s underneath. The grass was so tall that Dave Griffin said all he could think of was that we should make some hay! We told him that no, this was our stockpile to graze in winter and early spring. The bison will get to eat this! But most people think in terms of making hay and hauling it to them later.” It’s better for the land if the animals can eat it on the spot and put the litter and manure back into the soil. The Graese family has come a long way from their early days when they purchased their first 2 bison. Along the way, they have grown their own business and an industry, healed land, and learned about Holistic Management—a tool they want to share with others. “Holistic Management revolutionizes people’s thinking and the way they look at everything, including their lifestyle,” Lee says.
Sims Cattle Company—
Creating Profit Holistically BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS
S
cott and April Sims and their son, Shanon (and wife Melinda), ranch holistically near McFadden, Wyoming. Scott’s grandparents bought the place in 1942 after working in the oil fields for 13 years. “We don’t have any oil in our income from this place, however—just cattle,” says Scott. “My dad ranched with my granddad for several years, but they didn’t get along well together so my dad went back to college and became a hydrographer (water commissioner) here in the valley, administering the water here. As my granddad was getting older, he got crippled (a cow got him down) and ended up leasing the ranch to my dad and myself in 1976. My brother Olin came into the family operation in 1983,” Scott says. Once Scott (and later Shanon) took Holistic Management training, they were able to manage more effectively to increase land productivity, changing herd management, and involving others in the family to create more ownership in the family’s holistic goal. In doing so, they have been able to get more family members back on to the ranch, leaving off-ranch jobs that took them away from the family. On top of that, they were able to meet their profit goals. While the Sims note there is always room for improvement, they are pleased with the progress they have made.
The Early Days
The Sims Ranch has always been a cow-calf operation and hay ranch. “We fertilized the hay meadows and put up lots of hay, and sold hay, and kept building our cow numbers. Between Dad and April and me, we started out with about 75 cows and just kept building up the herd over the years. Now we are running more than 600 cows on the place,” Scott says. During the 1980’s the ranch was doing well, the calves were getting
The Sims Family (left to right): Shanon, Jentry, Melinda, Kagan, April, Scott heavier all the time and the herd was growing in numbers, and the ranch was growing extra hay to sell. “Then in the late 1980’s my brother and I were riding across a pasture after we’d moved the cows out to summer grass. We asked ourselves if we were really being sustainable. We were doing well, but perhaps at the expense of the land. Riding across the pastures that day, we realized that we needed to be doing something different. It just seemed like the grass didn’t look healthy. We had quite a bit of larkspur and some weeds and we thought we should be doing something else to correct this,” recalls Scott. “During the late 1970’s through early 1980’s my family plowed up a lot of marginal rangeland that had been abused years earlier with previous owners—not so much from mismanagement but because this area had been a large water gap for cattle, back before there were fences.” “To resolve that, we put a lot of crested wheatgrass in that area, which greatly increased the forage production on that ground. This gave us an CONTINUED ON PAGE 12
N um ber 168
h
Land & Livestock 11