The Art of Range Podcast

How does your agricultural business compare to similar operations in financial performance metrics? That's the question answered by benchmarking. Megan Shroyer is the president of Montana AgWest Farm Credit Services and she offers guidance on how to properly use benchmarking as one element of understanding and managing ranch financial health. Financial stress is usually what causes a ranch to call...

Is environmentally sound livestock grazing more financially viable than overgrazing or just thoughtless grazing? If so, why? Dave Voth is a rancher in Nevada who helps lead the Society for Range Management's Good Grazing Makes Cent$ Program, an effort to take range science directly to those who make a living on the land. At least in rangeland settings, there are no future farmers without stewardsh...

A new report published by the Society for Range Management, Connecting Nature and People, outlines key ecosystem services provided by rangelands and their benefits to society. Agricultural Research Service scientist Lauren Porensky and Texas A&M Center for Grazinglands and Ranch Management director Jeff Goodwin discuss the report’s origins, framework, and upcoming plans for the project. A transcri...

Remotely-sensed data products are not new, but applications using these data that are available and useful to landowners are relatively new. Matt Reeves discusses the current status of forage volume and phenological development across the Western U.S. (midsummer 2023) and the sources of data in useful fuel tools such as FuelCast, Rangeland Production Monitoring Service, Rangelands Analysis Platfor...

Livestock distribution is the key to good grazing, and water is the limiting factor to distribution. What if you could have water anywhere, produced from air? Genesis Systems, a company founded by Dave Stuckenberg, now offers atmospheric water generation devices that could revolutionize grazing management. This sounds like science fiction, but there's no fiction, only cool science. Check out the c...

Don Stuart is the author of a new book "No Farms, No Food: Uniting Farmers and Environmentalists to Transform American Agriculture", a history of American Farmland Trust and the origins of national-scale efforts to bring to America's attention the loss of farmland and the need for conservation effort. Don is a former commercial fisherman, lawyer, and Pacific Northwest regional director for America...

Plants and animals and weather patterns do not respect property boundaries, state lines, or national borders. Managing landscapes requires not the obliteration of human-defined boundaries but working across them. In this plenary session from the Society for Range Management's 2023 annual meeting, Tammy VerCautere and David and Holly Ollila describe their efforts to conserve wildlife species, espec...

Rangeland science is not a single discipline but a synthesis of numerous scientific topics and lived experiences. Successful management of rangelands requires knowledge of soils, water, climate, plants, livestock, wildlife, humans, and much more. It is impossible to master all topics in a rangeland textbook or land management handbook. It takes a unique and confident person to recognize their limi...

This is the story of Sharon and Richard Kline, a couple in southern California who became unlikely ranchers by buying an unlikely property. They have worked with California Rangeland Trust to keep the land as rangeland and conserve both habitat and ranching. Conservation easements are controversial and must be considered on a case-by-case basis, but agricultural land trusts have made this option m...

Wise management and conservation of rangelands in the future will require knowledge from the hard-earned experience of those near retirement and the fresh and uninhibited ideas of young professionals. However, reaching across these generations of ideas and experiences can be challenging. This final plenary will be a thought-provoking discussion that highlights the value of combining well-lived exp...

The PRF program insures against unusually low precipitation during 60-day periods critical to your forage growth, unlike drought insurance, which typically is based on annual precipitation over a water year or calendar year. Matt Griffith of WSR Insurance in California explains how PRF works in this episode in our ranch financial resiliency series. TRANSCRIPT AND LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TH...

Dick Coon is a rancher in Eastern Washington who has used LRP insurance for nearly a decade to reduce the significant financial risks of ranching in pretty tough country. And because the Northwest cattle markets tend to be lower than the rest of the country, LRP has added attraction. In this episode, Dick describes why and how he has used LRP and Pasture, Range, and Forage insurance products in hi...

Reducing financial risk in ranching requires first identifying and defining those risks. John Nalivka, owner of Sterling Marketing and a well-known expert in beef industry economics, has been consulting with cow-calf producers, feeders, and packers for 35 years. In this episode, John discusses with Tip and Clay Worden global trade trends, cattle pricing predictions, and ranch-level advice on manag...

Management recommendations for limiting undesirable ecosystem state shifts driven by cheatgrass in the West and Eastern red cedar on central US grasslands can now be outlined with greater certainty. Jeremy Maestas, NRCS National Sagebrush Ecosystem Specialist, and Dirac Twidwell, range and fire scientist at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, present the Defend the Core framework for invasive species...

Is it time to surrender the Western U.S. to cheatgrass and frequent fire or regroup and work smarter? Jeremy Maestas, NRCS National Sagebrush Ecosystem Specialist, and Dirac Twidwell, range and fire scientist at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, present the Defend the Core framework for invasive species management, a fresh approach that prioritizes preventing degradation where intact, functional pla...

Trying to stay up on the most recent developments in soil health? SoilCon, a free virtual conference, will address the latest research to help people put soil health principles into practice for regional systems. In this episode, Molly, an organizer of SoilCon, shares more details on the speaker lineup and the Washington Soil Health Initiative. SoilCon 2023 will be held on Feb. 14 and 15, with dai...

What if you could insure calf price against catastrophic price drops? LRP puts a price floor under feeder calves, paying for the difference between an insured calf price and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange feeder cattle index value for a selected marketing date. This episode with Jack Field and Clay Worden continues our series in ranch financial health with a deep dive into LRP mechanics. Find res...

"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" has been a New York Times best-selling book since publication in 2006. Charles C Mann's writings have reformed popular ideas about Native Americans and challenged cherished notions of nature. Join Charles and Tip in part 2 of a two-episode discussion about the origins of the book and some of the revelations about the peoples in North, Central...

"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" has been a New York Times best-selling book since publication in 2006. Charles C Mann's writings have reformed popular ideas about Native Americans and challenged cherished notions of nature. Join Charles and Tip in part 1 of a two-episode discussion about the origins of the book and some of the revelations about the peoples in North, Central...

The global nature of agricultural trade and market forces makes cattle price cycles less predictable, and this presents a different kind of risk than historical pricing pressures. But Dr. Shannon Neibergs, director of the Western Center for Risk Management and a livestock economist, believes there are real opportunities to respond to (in winter 2022-23). Listen in to learn about the current milieu...

"Nature’s regeneration was the primary source of the Pristine Myth." --Shawn Miller. The influence of the idea that the American continent was essentially untouched by man at the time of European arrival is great. The Pristine Myth, a term coined by William Denevan, a cultural geographer, strikes at prejudicial ideas about the primitive-ness of indigenous peoples. And the persistence of this idea...

The giant bathtubs off the western and southern coasts of North America contribute large amounts of heat and moisture to the continent, driving much of the climate (long-term) and weather (short-term) of the Western United States. And oceans have regular oscillations in temperature, which drives moisture delivery. Researchers looked at historical yearling cattle production data going back to 1939...

What exactly are we hoping to sustain in applying the term sustainability to ranching? Without definition, sustainability could just be circular reasoning: "that which persists is sustainable". But this is not what is meant by any of the many proponents of rangeland-based livestock production. Dr. Sayre offers partial answers to this question and prompts to reader/listener to further thinking in t...

Measuring the financial health of a ranch operation is as important as measuring rangeland health. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) combine production and financial data into metrics that measure various elements of ranch financial health. Stan Bevers describes how to accurately calculate KPIs and use them to improve a cow-calf operation. OTHER RESOURCES Learn more about KPI calculations and valu...

You need a ranch financial team. Keeping ranch financial records for tax purposes is not the same thing as managing the financial health of a ranch. Stan Bevers has been teaching and consulting on ranch finance for decades with Texas A&M Extension, the King Ranch Institute, and now RanchKPI. This is the first episode in a two-part series with Stan on managerial accounting and key performance indic...