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Photos from the Ranch This Week…

It’s the herd, spread out and enjoying their dinner of hay harvested from summer pastures! As March hits, it seems like even the cattle are a little tired of hay and look forward to the days when green grass comes up and they can go back to grazing once again. We’re certainly getting a little tired of feeding all that hay!

But even though the cattle might enjoy grass better, that hay looks pretty dang good! Here’s a shot of some of that saved-up summer green (with the gelding Ben enjoying it in the background).

Cows in little pens? Doesn’t seem like Alderspring! Normally, our cows are free to roam (and have their calves once spring comes) out on open pasture. But these are two heifers (a heifer is a young female cow) we purchased from a friend several months ago. Turns out, they’d ended up with a bull before coming here, unbeknownst to our friend! Both of them had a calf recently. Because these are heifers that have never had a calf before and because the weather is too cold for a newborn to thrive out on pasture right now, we put them and their calves in little pens for a few days. This allows them to bond with their calves and provides the calf with easy access to plenty hay to sleep in to stay warm and out of the wind. Now that the calves are both stronger and doing well, we’ve turned them and their moms out on a larger pasture where they’re able to roam.

Here’s one of those big mama cows! This cow will have a calf in May or June when the warm weather hits. For now, the calf is safe inside of her from any weather that might come, and she is well-insulated with fat and a winter coat.

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Dear Friends 

On a much needed break from the ranch, Caryl and I drove north along a remote stretch of the Pacific coast. The road was rough in spots, and tortuously sinuous as the two lanes would skirt precipitous black-rock cliffs high above breakers, and then dart downward, deep into alder and dark conifer forests where a river entered the sea. 

There, I imagined a flush of salmon in each stream, dutifully heading back to their birthplace– the spawning gravels on a near or remote riffle in fresh waters. In this section of the northern coast, all of the creeks, whether large or small, supported a salmon and steelhead run. Now, there were more watercourses without than with.

I thought of the salmon than migrate annually from Pacific waters such as these all the way up to Alderspring. It was a distance of nearly 900 miles. They still come, but it is in less numbers than ever. 

And too often, we humans simply count the change in terms of numbers of fish. But it turns out that the effects on nature are often quite a bit more complicated than that when a element as prevalent as the massive flow of salmon simply cease to exist. It was a huge amount of fish. It was literally millions of tons, if we were to weigh them in aggregate. Even in the upper Salmon River basin, where we ranch, old timers talk of the salmon runs choking rivers to the point where it seemed as if one could walk across the river on their backs. 

This rivers along the coast reminded me of a story I wrote a few years back. Come with me to an alpine lake just 40 miles upstream from Alderspring as we begin to unpack a small part of the relevance of salmon to the forest and even rangeland ecosystem.

Read the story below!

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And that’s it for this week!

Thanks again for partnering in what we do!

Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring.

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We’ve been crafting our pastured protein here in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains for nearly 30 years and delivering it direct to our partners for nearly as long. This is wild wellness, delivered from our ranch to your door.

Your partnership with alderspring directly supports our mission to improve soil health, wildlife habitat, and animal and human wellness through regenerative ranching practices.

Here’s what we’ve accomplished with your help & support in just the last 12 years!