The Art of Range Podcast

The summer of 2022 is nearly in the books, as they say, but range managers and graziers should pay attention to increasingly sophisticated tools to characterize both forage yield and fire risk in order to respond to annual and seasonal anomalies in forage quantity and type proactively. Listen to an update on 2022 conditions and a description of Fuelcast.net, a decision support platform that everyo...

Financial resiliency requires knowing and tracking costs of production and comparing the costs and revenues of a specific enterprise against other possible enterprises. In this second episode with Jack Southworth, James Rogers, and Clay Worden, they discuss the many ways every ranch's context is different from another's, highlighting the importance of spending some time working on the business and...

Many ranchers don't do it for the money, but one cannot ranch for long only losing money. In this first episode in a grant-funded series on ranch financial resiliency, Jack Southworth discusses principles and common problems in ranch money management with James Rogers and Clay Worden. Stay tuned for more. TRANSCRIPT available at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-86-intro-ranch-financial-resilien...

Americans hear news of social conflict and small-scale warfare in Africa and we ignore the news because it's far away and doesn't affect us. It's also not possible to meaningfully engage emotionally with everything bad happening around the globe. But there are real people and animals in Cameroon whose lives are disrupted, and because pastoralists are often politically marginalized it's important t...

Paul Bechtel is an almost-centenarian, born 1923, whose family was lured to Eastern Montana by hopes of homesteading good land still free for the taking. Reality wasn't quite so gentle in the northern Great Plains in the rainshadow of the Rocky Mountains. He lived in Ekelaka in harsh conditions through the Great Depression and until he joined the U.S. Army in 1941, but his best memories of his ent...

This episode is the second in a two-part series with the authors of a recent article in the journal Rangeland Ecology & Management telling the story behind their work on ranch sustainability: Clare Kazanski & Marissa Ahlering (The Nature Conservancy), Patrick Lendrum (World Wildlife Fund), and Sheri Spiegal (Jornada Experimental Range). Sheri was recently honored with the USDA ARS Early Career Sci...

This episode has the authors of a recent article in the journal Rangeland Ecology & Management tell the story behind their work: Clare Kazanski & Marissa Ahlering (The Nature Conservancy), Patrick Lendrum (World Wildlife Fund), and Sheri Spiegal (Jornada Experimental Range). Sheri was recently honored with the USDA ARS Early Career Scientist of the Year Award. The organizations represented by thes...

Jim O'Rourke and Barbara Hutchinson have been part of the effort to have a United Nations International Year acknowledging the importance of rangelands and the people of rangelands for many years. On March 15, 2022, the UN General Assembly finally approved this proposal. Listen to Jim and Barbara describe why this matters for people who already know and care about rangelands and how you can height...

We're taking a break this week from the normal release schedule. Come back on April 14 for the first episode in a two-part series on ranch sustainability indicators. You can prepare for that episode by downloading the article at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2021.08.011. If that link gives you trouble, email me at show@artofrange.com.

Ranching for Profit is an organization started by Stan Parsons and recently run by Dave Pratt that has been helping ranchers work on the business instead of in the business for decades. Dallas Mount, former Univ. of Wyoming Extension economist and now co-owner of Ranch Management Consultants, talks with Tip about ranch finance competencies, common weaknesses in ranch financial planning, and fundam...

Forestry and range sciences are tied to each other in a long and complex social history, and many areas of the Western U.S. and semi-arid parts of the world host rangeland and forest plant communities in the same space and within the same management boundaries. So there is good reason to encourage range folk to given some attention to forestry, not necessarily 'board-feet' production forestry but...

How do we build soil health? What is soil health? Is careful grazing helpful or hurtful? Can anything be done to meaningfully influence soil health? And how would we know? What can be measured that indicates progress? These are the questions Derek Scasta and Jeff Goodwin and their team intend to begin to answer through a recently funded national-scale project called Metrics, Management, and Monito...

Seeding in extreme environments such as arid and semi-arid rangelands requires extra care in site preparation, species selection, seed selection, seed placement, planting timing, and care for emerging seedlings. Mel Asher and Jerry Benson have been successfully doing large-scale restoration on challenging rangeland settings for many years. Jerry owns BFI Native Seeds, specializing in locally-sourc...

Deciding whether to seed, what to seed, and how to apply seed after wildfire are weighty questions. Seeding costs money, seedings often fail, and most rangelands won't pay you back for rehabilitation failure. Richard Fleenor, NRCS state rangelands conservationist in Washington, has a background in plant materials and revegetation and discusses with Tip analyzing burn severity, pre-fire plant commu...

Soil organic matter is considered an indicator of soil health, there are numerous methods promoted for building it, SOM is credited with the potential to alleviate greenhouse gas increase, but Andy & Doug say the way we've understood SOM is perhaps an artifact of the old ways of measuring it. The complexity of what we call 'organic matter' is significant, challenging, and prompts a re-thinking of...

Soil organic matter is considered an indicator of soil health, there are numerous methods promoted for building it, SOM is credited with the potential to alleviate greenhouse gas increase, but Andy & Doug say the way we've understood SOM is perhaps an artifact of the old ways of measuring it. The complexity of what we call 'organic matter' is significant, challenging, and prompts a re-thinking of...

Ranch sustainability requires land care that works for the long haul and management that makes a profit more years than not. Jim Rickert, owner of the Prather Ranch in northern California, makes the case that a ranch must take care of people and animals, too, in order to last, and these goals are synergistic, not mutually exclusive. This two-part interview with Jim chronicles his circuitous path f...

Ranch sustainability requires land care that works for the long haul and management that makes a profit more years than not. Jim Rickert, owner of the Prather Ranch in northern California, makes the case that a ranch must take care of people and animals, too, in order to last, and these goals are synergistic, not mutually exclusive. This two-part interview with Jim chronicles his circuitous path f...

Ranching and livestock production on rangelands provide food and fiber concurrently with other ecosystem services such as wildlife habitat, clean air and water, carbon sequestration, cultural resources, recreational opportunities and scenic vistas. However, an implicit “wicked challenge” is the lack of mechanisms to effectively value ecological services to reward ranchers and landowners for their...

How to measure soil carbon, influence soil carbon, and influence others to care about soil carbon has motivated Peter Donovan for nearly three decades now. He locates himself squarely between the social worlds of science and practice and has worked to foster the relationship between knowing and doing with a passion that is unusual in our culture. In this wide-ranging interview, he and Tip discuss...

Microbial source tracking has gained accuracy in the last decade, and a multidisciplinary team at University of Idaho recently used MST methods to help US Forest Service managers identify causes of contamination of a stream listed by regulatory authorities for high bacteria. This is the first of a two-part episode with Eric Winford, Associate Director of the Idaho Rangelands Center; Dr. Jim Sprink...

Microbial source tracking has gained accuracy in the last decade, and a multidisciplinary team at University of Idaho recently used MST methods to help US Forest Service managers identify causes of contamination of a stream listed by regulatory authorities for high bacteria. This is the first of a two-part episode with Eric Winford, Associate Director of the Idaho Rangelands Center; Dr. Jim Sprink...

Grazing managers of any kind and in any place must answer the questions of what is and what is not possible and how to manage toward meaningful landscape change. LandPKS was developed to make basic rangeland site data available to anyone and enable time-efficient long-term monitoring based on the rangeland health principles. Jeff Herrick has been working with graziers and managers across the globe...

The future ain't what it used to be (Yogi Berra): there are more price risks and stressors on cattle markets than ever, and the predictability of cattle markets is at an all-time low. Livestock insurance is not new but is recently gaining adoption as a reliable risk tool to prevent catastrophic financial losses and prepare for uncertainties such as drought. Listen to Jack Field, with CKP Insurance...

Pima County owns and leases large tracts of land for working landscapes and biological conservation. Vanessa Prileson manages the range program which ensures this arrangement is successful and has good advice for other organizations selecting lessees/operators who need to be able to manage toward conservation goals and as well as economic and production goals. Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. htt...