It was a beautiful but crispy subzero on the ranch this morning, the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday, as they call it in other places in the world, was quiet on Alderspring: windless and soundless. There was no line of cars in my way out to fork hay to hungry beeves soon after the sun came up over the icy Lemhi Range. Just above the western mountains, the moon was still making a futile stand opposite the rising sun. In a cloudless high altitude sky, the brilliance of the sun would soon make it a memory.
The beeves were covered with rime from a night of frosty recline. Their frozen vapor breath rose in wisps above their heads as they happily consumed our warm green hay by the mouthful. In this time when all seems dormant, they hungrily eyed the pink blooms of sainfoin and yellow of dandelion in our mixed species green grass hay as I served it up.
And the hay really is warm. Because the hay was baled as still very green but dried grass, bacteria from our pasture soils are still active at a low level, generating warmth that I can feel as I break open a ton bale. In addition, there is still residual summer warmth stored in our 100 foot long haystacks because 700 tons of highly compacted tightly stacked hay insulates and continues to store warmth even as the days get cold. The result of this is that the beeves do not waste much precious body heat trying to warm their forage and they get a bacterial digestive supplement as they ingest it. It’s unfortunate that so much of “grass fed” cattle marketed today are fed crop residues and hay raised on soils with impoverished soil life—killed by years of chemical use on intensively farmed hayfields and pastures.
I believe it is the reason why the beef supplement salesmen have no traction with me on the phone or in person. Our cattle are healthy. They have no problems conceiving when bred (and they produce calves for an average of 5 years longer than on many conventional ranches), gain weight exceptionally well, and simply thrive. Disease is largely non-existent; it is not hard to be organic. In contrast, every other page of Beef Magazine contains a drug, supplement, or hormone ad aimed conventional and commercial grass-fed operations with poorly producing cattle. This lack of thriftiness is the result, I believe, of dead soils.
Maybe sometime the salesmen will stop pestering me. My tiny underground “supplement” producers work for free, liberating soil minerals for plant uptake, and inoculating beeves’ rumens (guts) with fresh probiotic cultures that enable them to elegantly ferment the woody cellulose and lignin found in grasses; solar powered foodstuffs that are indigestible to a mere human like us.
My neighbors like me OK, I think, but they do believe I am a crackpot. I have not found many other kindred souls with the same vision of beef and soil husbandry, but over the years I’ve found a few. Mark and Jane Smith fit the bill. I was out on their ranch this week. The Smiths and their boys raise Angus cross beeves to yearling size for us in the Big Sky country of the Montana prairie. If you stand on a prairie bluff above the sheltered coulee where their home and corrals rests, you can see the distant snow-white jagged band that defines the Crazy Mountains, the first and front range of the Rockies rising up from the high grasslands like a wall across the horizon. Heading east from their prairie ranch, the next real mountains you would hit are the Appalachians.
They too, ranch on intact soils that are certified organic. Their “Aspen Island Organic Ranch” signs show up along the dirt road that bisects their place, thereby preventing the country road maintenance crews from using chemicals for weed control along their roads. We purchase some yearlings from them that we then take to full finish on Alderspring’s pastures. Their protocol is very similar to ours, practitioners of the lost art of animal husbandry. Mark knows each one of his 50-60 cows on a first name basis. He’ll talk in glowing terms of where on the ranch she was born, and what her personality is like (“watch her”¦she is a kicker”). They too, are committed to raising beeves only on grass”¦that is, grass growing on biologically active native prairie soils where the stereotypical great herds of bison roamed”¦and the native plains peoples hunted them.
Sometimes, when out there, I can easily envision those images, as much of Aspen Island’s lands are little changed from what they have been for a thousand years. The Smiths, like us, raise a wild protein.
So Mark and Jane are a fit for us and we have forged a mutually beneficial relationship with them. We cannot raise all of our calves from birth. The Smiths, on the other hand, cannot raise the quality hay that we can in the mountains. We take over the husbandry reins part way through the young animal’s life and turn them out on Alderspring’s pastures and hay. We don’t buy finished cattle from other producers because we have found that our pastures produce a signature flavor complexity–and likely a nutritional complexity–that our patrons have come to expect and enjoy. We loaded 22 of these quiet and gentle yearlings in two gooseneck trailers pulled by our pickups. They loaded quietly and without fuss. Cattle handled right don’t need yelling or electric cattle prods. When I left the Aspen Island, the weather was deteriorating a bit: wind blowing from Canada indicated that snow may be on order for the day. It wasn’t out of the ordinary, but hauling these loaded trailers over 3 mountain passes with incoming mountain snowstorms could be tricky.
It didn’t help that the day before, I got T-boned in an intersection in one of the few towns I passed through (the old guy pulled from a stop sign and never ever looked). The collision damage was ugly, but non-mechanical. Little did I know that another implication of the crash would soon become urgent.
The weather indeed closed in and snow began to blow horizontally across the pavement as we travelled west across the high prairie. The wind here is fairly incessant and the only change is in where it comes from. Cattle born here don’t seem to mind. I see them standing on a hilltop, even in the winter in a stiff breeze, as if there is nothing better. Even old-timers I see walking in the few towns up there seem to have adapted with a permanent lean. I noticed one old boy hanging Christmas lights up around an ancient locomotive in the park of one town. The old-fashioned big bulb lights were blowing near horizontal in his hands as he hung them in the blasting wind. He smiled at us and waved as we went by.
I stopped often and checked beeves: they were snug and content, out of the wind, seeming to look at me questioningly with an “are we there yet?” expression. With the driven snow, I was concerned not about us staying on the road, but about the other guy. We’ve all been there after a crash or a fender bender: you eye all with the conviction that everyone is a potential criminal—trying to pull out in front of you”¦or wander across the line. Thankfully, this was Montana, and traffic was by no means heavy, but it was getting dark.
I looked in my mirrors and did a double take. My trailer had no running lights. It was dark and invisible. If I hit an elk, or lost traction, I would be a sitting and already dead duck. Someone coming up on me would never, ever see me. I had visions of bashed in trailer, beeves busted up, dead, suffering, and limping broken limbed down the highway in the dark as I chased them in futility with a rope. Unthinkable.
My earlier T-bone incident must have killed the line to the back of the trailer. With hazard signals on to a place I could pull off in the now whiteout blizzard, I got out in the windstorm and tried, with soon frozen fingers and headlamp on head, to fix or rewire the problem. No luck. Mindy the Kelpie dog watched from inside the warm pickup. She’s generally not a kind dog, and I think she was smiling at me smugly. The beeves just chewed cud in the warm, out-of-wind trailer. Then I noticed my extension cord I used to plug my engine in the night before. My ticket. It was long enough to reach my entire 40 foot length. I popped the hood, rigged one end to my battery, strung the wire back through the cab of my truck and over the bed and hot-wired the plug end to one of my trailer tail lights. Eureka”¦the re-lit marker lights set off the trailer like a Christmas tree. Off we went. Warming hands. Thank God. Dog wagged tail, greeting my snow caked face.
After a couple of hours of white knuckle whiteout, we broke through the south end of the front—into a full moon in Montana’s high Horse Prairie valley. I’ve driven through the middle of winter night many times here before”¦as much as 3 hours can go by at 60 mph, never meeting or passing another car or pickup. Lonely it may be, but there was no more other guy trying to crash into me.
Actually”¦the other guy was still out there”¦in the form of elk, moose and deer. In the bright moonlight, I saw literally hundreds of elk foraging in the snowy valley roadside to escape the wild mountain weather. I’ve plowed into their 700 lb frames before, and they can easily total your vehicle. I have one vivid memory of a huge elk cow that jumped in front of Melanie and I as we drove down the Pahsimeroi late one night. We slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. We hit her hard, broadside. She rolled up, skidded up our hood and imploded our entire windshield, blasting us with glass, elk fur and our blood as we finally screeched to a stop. Suddenly, the elk stood up, shook the glass off of her, and trotted up to her buddies on the hill, without a limp and elk cow talking all the way. We limped home that night with our heads out the side windows.
As the highway turned to dirt for the long climb up to the Continental Divide, we slowed. The roads had turned to solid ice snow floor and we hoped not to break traction with our heavy trailers. After a few partial spinouts, we finally arrived at Bannack Pass and the Idaho line at some 7300 feet.
I jumped out and checked the beeves. No concern in their eyes. Still chewing cud. The frozen vapor steam from their breath drifted out of the high openings in the trailer walls in the icy moonlight. I dropped to low gear, and started the slow grind down Railroad Canyon, and the Idaho’s Lemhi Valley beyond. It wouldn’t be long now that the prairie beeves would set foot on Alderspring. Fresh green grass hay was being set out for them by Cowboy Josh as we journeyed home; it would be waiting for them.
And they will never again have to endure that incessant prairie wind”¦again. They are in the protection of the mountains now. Sure, occasional wind hits on a frontal shift. And maybe the beeves don’t care. But I know they have never seen sainfoin pink flowered hay as beautiful as ours. They happily put their heads down in the warm, fragrant green within seconds after stepping off the trailer. They were home.
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