Chuck Jarecki ranched in Montana from 1961 to the 1990s, using grazing to heal lands broken by the plow that never grew enough to justify continued crop farming. He had success using the classic management tools: develop stockwater in places cattle don't like to go, graze the most preferred species moderately, and give grasses time to grow back before you graze them again. Chuck won't elaborate much, but what he says is worth listening to and he has lived out his brief advice, starting with instructions from his mentor, Don Ryerson, to learn with "your face in the ground and your butt in the air."
The Art of Range Podcast is supported by the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission; Vence, a subsidiary of Merck Animal Health; and the Western Extension Risk Management Education Center.
Transcript
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>> Tip Hudson: Welcome to The Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.
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The main funding source currently supporting the podcast is a grant through the Western Extension Risk Management Education Center. I had titled the grant, and now the active project, "Conservation through Conversation with Rangeland Sages: Expanding Contextual Grazing Wisdom." As I think I've said a couple of times here, I was motivated to do this because a few people whose wisdom I wish I had gotten more of died before they hit four score and ten, or even four score years. That list includes Paul Loeffler of Texas, Roy Rothe of Colorado, Ken Tate of California, and there are quite a few more. This is just in the last couple of years. And anyone who has seen the Society for Range Management's Lost Resources video from this year's annual meeting, will likely remember being shocked, as I was, at how many in our circle passed away recently. If you live long enough, you get to see a lot of your friends pass away, and this should cause us to rethink how we spend our time. So, I went after some funding that would let me interview ranchers, and scientists, and range professionals, to give listeners at least a little bit of access to that wisdom of these individuals who have become expert in broad ways, through a lifetime of observation, and formal and informal learning, and contextual application of the art and applied science of rangeland management. Today's interview is with Chuck Jarecki. Chuck is one of the longer running living members of the Society of Range Management. He was a founding member of the SRM's Endowment Fund, and remains active on that committee. Chuck was also a founding member of the Recreational Aviation Foundation, a group established to advocate for, and take care of, recreational air strips. He served on the Montana Pilots Association Board for many years as well. As you may catch toward the end of our short interview, Chuck claimed that he had forgotten already that he put up some funding to initiate a rancher stewardship award through the Society of Range Management, which started last year. Stay tuned for more on that at the end of the interview. Here's my conversation with Chuck.
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I was just on the board, and just came off the board for a little while. So I came off the Endowment Committee to come onto the Board of Directors for the SRM, and then just came off the board. But I've been doing this podcast that I called, "The Art of Range," for about the last six years, and I've got some funding right now from the Western Center for Risk Management Education to do interviews with ranchers that are -- in order to kind of capture people's experiences and advice, and tell their stories.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, that may be, but you know, I haven't been a rancher since 1990.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah?
>> Chuck Jarecki: When I decided my health wasn't holding up quite like it should and I better get out before I cause some major problems.
>> Tip Hudson: Well, that was probably, yeah, that's the smart move that not everybody makes.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, yeah, it's like I used to fly my own airplane. Well, you've got to know when to quit.
>> Tip Hudson: Right. Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So I got rid of that.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, it's funny, in rodeo they say when you ride your last one, make sure it's your best one. Because the next one might kill you.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, well that's true. But.
>> Tip Hudson: Did you ever know Chase Hibbard's brother, up by Cascade and Adel? They've got the seed and livestock company.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, I talked with them, it's probably been four years ago, but Chase was saying that they got into it because his brother died in an airplane crash. I'm not sure what year that would have been, but I thought you might have known about it.
>> Chuck Jarecki: I don't know, but that Hibbard family goes back several generations.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And Chase is, he's Chairman of the Board now for the Foundation for Montana History, in Helena.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Which is doing a great job preserving different historical structures and stuff in Montana.
>> Tip Hudson: Good. Yeah, I think when I talked with Chase last, he said that his brother, whose name I don't know, was publishing a book on some -- some kind of history of Montana.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, I --
>> Tip Hudson: Have you heard about that?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, yeah, I heard there was something on the -- on the Hibbard family.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But I haven't seen it yet.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Huh. How did you -- we interacted for about a decade on the Endowment Committee, but I don't know much of anything about your history. How did you end up ranching?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I -- I grew up on a rural area outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, and I had a -- I raised a garden, vegetable garden, and did things you do in a rural area. I had a saddle horse, and I had a bunch of -- I built a bunch of rabbit hutches, and had some rabbits that I raised.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then I worked on a neighboring farm for part of the summer, bailed and put up hay and all that. And then I wanted to get a job on a cattle ranch. My mother knew a woman in Billings and she got me arranged with a ranch down at Roscoe, which is south of Columbus, Montana. So I spent the summer out there and when I worked on that ranch, I knew what I wanted to do.
>> Tip Hudson: Huh.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then I went to Cornell and Ag school.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And to graduate from Ag school, you had to have so many weeks of approved farm work. So I spent almost every summer working on farms or ranches, and then there's twice I took a leave of absence in the spring and I went to work for a ranch east of Great Falls, so could learn about calving and spring planting and all that kind of stuff. And then another spring I took a leave of absence and went to -- transferred to Montana State University, and took courses in range management, beef cattle, irrigation, stuff like that.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And that's where I got acquainted with Don Ryerson, who was the range professor, and he was an inspiration to me on learning about range and stuff like that.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And I'll never forget that -- when you went out on a field trip you were supposed to look at some grass, he'd say, okay, I want the face in the ground and a butt in the air. And so once I got out here, got a job on a ranch here, and then I ended up, it was owned by a widow and I ended up taking it over. But I was always interested in what was growing on the ground --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- as much as what was growing on four feet.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so I was involved with the local range society here, or an SRM in our section --
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- and --
>> Tip Hudson: Can I ask what years that would have been that you started the ranch over here?
>> Chuck Jarecki: I started on that ranch in July of '61, and then --
>> Tip Hudson: And over here is -- where relative to Polson?
>> Chuck Jarecki: West of Polson.
>> Tip Hudson: Okay.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And it's all dry -- almost all dryland out there. And the folks that we sold the ranch to, the Gardners, are doing an outstanding job and they got the Regional Land Stewardship Award. First they got the Montana one, and then I -- they ended up getting the regional one, now they're up for the national. Because we did a lot of -- well, if you know the country over here, like most places it was homesteaded.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So every 160 acres that had ground that you could plow, sort of --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- was farmed.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then when the farmers went broke and they sold out, accumulated to a ranch, that ground went back to --
>> Tip Hudson: Grass.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- whatever would grow there, usually some invasive bluegrass or something.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So we farmed a lot of that ground, planted it back to native species. Put in some water lines, and fences, and the Gardners have gone beyond that and they've got really a top notch high intensity rest rotation grazing system. And there's one place where they put in a pump and a pond. I built a pond, but they put a water pump in the pond and they're pumping water 700 vertical feet to the top of a hill so the cows will graze --
>> Tip Hudson: To the top of the hill.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- up the top of the hill.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So we see them periodically, they're -- but they're busy all the time out there with that ranch.
>> Tip Hudson: So are they the ones that got it in 1990 when you --
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And their son-in-law is involved with it now, and he has actually bought part of it. And then they're leasing a neighbor's ranch, so they tripled the size of their operation. But he's been active in the local Stockgrowers Association here, and she's active in some of the local community groups. They've got three -- three grandchildren. They're -- two of them in school now.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So they're -- they're great people. We couldn't ask for better ones considering all of the complete idiots that came and looked at the ranch when it was for sale.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Like they just wanted something to have to talk about at a cocktail party.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Now that's one of the most successful transition stories I've heard.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Is it?
>> Tip Hudson: They don't usually go that way.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, we couldn't ask for better people to have it, and it'll -- I'm sure it'll continue on.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But as you see when you drive up in this country, most of the valley bottoms is irrigated.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But out where we were, there was no water --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- to speak of. And the last few years have not been good either.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Dry.
>> Tip Hudson: During that homestead era, when -- in the original -- I think the original 1862 Homestead Act granted 160 acres, but I thought that that got expanded in a later act, in recognition that 160 wasn't enough.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I don't know about that, but this place, this area wasn't homesteaded until 1910.
>> Tip Hudson: Okay.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Because they -- it was the Indian reservation at the time.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then each -- each tribal member got to take out a parcel of land as their own. And the lady I bought the ranch from, she was tribal.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so she had -- some of the land was still in tribal trust that she had, and never paid any taxes until it got to my name, and then it went on the tax rolls.
>> Tip Hudson: Huh. Were they the ones that were farming it previously?
>> Chuck Jarecki: No, they weren't farming.
>> Tip Hudson: Okay.
>> Chuck Jarecki: No, they're -- most of the old homesteaders, they'd long disappeared.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: A lot of them were, they were out of there within 10 years or --
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- twenty years at the most.
>> Tip Hudson: Starved out pretty quick.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah.
>> Tip Hudson: Did the railroads -- were the railroads part of getting this part of Montana established? I talked to a guy who grew up in Ekalaka, and he's 101 now, maybe, nearly 102, he was born in 1923 over in Ekalaka, and he said they were one of many people that came out to settle these railroad towns every 10 miles along the railroad line. And, you know, same story, they tried to make a go of it, would go three years and no rain ever came. When the rain did come, it just sat on top of the bentonite clay and didn't do any good. And they finally gave up and moved to California and just left it.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I don't know where the people go to out here, but they just went broke.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: I don't know the history that good.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Speaker 1: I looked it up, 1909, they did expand the --
>> Tip Hudson: The Homestead Act?
>> Speaker 1: Yep, 320 acres.
>> Tip Hudson: Right. Which is still a joke in this part of the world.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, you need -- out where we ranched, you need 15 acres at least, per cow per year, to carry them.
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then most of our hay was dryland so we had to have, we had about 400 acres of dryland alfalfa, and you get about -- average year you get a ton to the acre.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Some years you get more, so you store the hay away, or another time we'd have to buy hay. Not very often, but we had to buy hay once in a while.
>> Tip Hudson: What did the ranch budget look like? Like what were the expenses in maintaining a cow. I've got some idea what it might look like now, but what was that then?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, back then you had the cost of putting up hay, and then the one that really got to us was weed control. Because this area -- well, so many places in the west are just terrible for weeds.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we had, by the time we sold the ranch, I suppose a third of our operating cost was weed control.
>> Tip Hudson: Really? Herbicide?
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we were fortunate that the last two or three years, our next-door neighbor actually knew how to fly a helicopter and he could spray for us. Otherwise we'd have to get in a commercial sprayer from somewhere else.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And but we had spotted knapweed, leafy spurge, Dalmatian toadflax, I mean just on and on and on, and they talk about biological control. No, it wasn't working. And I guess technically you could probably, if you wanted to get into that, you could maybe get sheep or goats to eat from of the stuff but still, like spotted knapweed, at one point goes to seed, you could have seeds on the ground up to ten years --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- that will germinate.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so it's a tough thing to control. And I even went to the biological research station one time in Delemont Switzerland to look at what they were doing over there. They thought that were going to win the world, but it doesn't work that way. And of course your property taxes would -- compared to living in town in a house, property taxes were pretty reasonable on farmland.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But it's a -- it was an interesting life, and my wife was very much involved, and she helped out a lot.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And the lady I bought the ranch from, she just -- I mean her father stated the ranch in 1890, so there's a lot of that family ties there. And she'd come out and help with the riding, she loved to ride her horse. We had a couple of her horses there. And right at the end of July, when we finished up the breeding season, her -- she came out and she helped me gather the bulls out of this one pasture, and we got the last bull through and she sat down on the ground and she said, I have to sit here for a minute. So she sat on the ground. I watched her put a pull in her mouth. After a few minutes she said -- got back on her horse and said okay, let's go. And she went about 50 feet on the horse and died. Just like that.
>> Tip Hudson: Oh my goodness.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Fell off her favorite horse onto the ranch that she grew up on, and I was the executor of her estate.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So that was kind of a -- if there's any way for her to go, that was a good way for her to go. But it kind of gives you the ties I had to the property.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But I first went to my ranch society meeting in Albuquerque, and I think that was in oh, 1964, something like that.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And that kind of got me started on SRM, and what I could do on it. And I loved going to the summer tour especially here, our section included Alberta. It was really fun to go up there and view some of the Alberta landscape. And back in those days, we had a really active group of people, and a lot of ranchers were involved. It ain't so anymore. There's hardly anybody goes to the -- they've had tours here in Montana where they had them scheduled and they canceled them because nobody -- nobody signed up.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. What do you attribute that to? The loss of rancher participation.
>> Chuck Jarecki: What do I put it to?
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I think part of it is what we see all the time now is that the younger people don't want to be involved in anything. Or very little. We see it in our community, and our different community organizations, and I don't know what the deal is, and I think that the SRM needs to make more of an effort to find out why ranchers are not interested in participating.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: It's like the guy that bought our ranch, he's a -- he's been a member of SRM since he was in college. But he doesn't participate in anything.
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, he's busy all the time.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Yeah, it's the modern curse.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And you have to make it a -- from my standpoint, I always felt it was important for not only did you do the technical stuff, but you had to have the social part. People liked to get together and visit, and they only see each other once or twice a year.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And on our section tours we don't see that like I went -- the last one I went to Canada, it was no really dinner or anything like that. Or when you have it in a hotel, they didn't have a banquet where everybody came after the meeting.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So, I don't know how to get the damn thing going. But I've -- I've got something set up in my estate plan to fund an investigation within SRM on how to get ranchers more involved.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And really, what does SRM mean to a rancher? It -- because most of the people that are involved are bureaucrats.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And one thing that ticked me off is that there's the Chapline Land Stewardship Award. Supposed to go to a person who exemplifies good land stewardship and all that. Look at who the awardees are over the years. Almost all of them have been non-ranchers. They may be the manager of a research ranch, or something like that, but that's about it.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And I did put the Greg Gardner, that bought our ranch, I did put up -- nominated him for that stewardship award and they didn't give it to him because Jenny Pluhar's name was in at the same time. And she'd been involved, you know, for years.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, she was well-known.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, she was well-known. So they gave him the Lifetime Stewardship Award, which is the best they could do at the time.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, when you started ranching, was this all cattle? Or were there still sheep around at the time? Did you ever run sheep?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, no, we just had cattle.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we had -- back in those days it was the very first start for commercial producers to performance test their herd. So of course we ear tagged the calves, they had to ear tag the cows, and we freeze branded all the replacement heifers every year. And you know, that makes a big white brand on their butt so it's easy to see what their number is.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then when the calf was born, we'd write down the cow's number, the date of the -- all that, and then in the fall there was a computer program at Montana State University that would take all your data and put -- adjust it to a 205-day weight for the calf, and then it would rate all the cows on their production. So you knew which cows to get rid of based on their actual production. And then so we got involved with that, and I was on that board for a while. And then towards later years, we kept all of -- we kept all the heifer calves over as yearlings, and then in the spring we'd weigh each one of them separately as yearlings, because the yearling weight is more highly heritable than a weaning weight. So that way we were picking better replacements, and our weaning weights went up by a hundred pounds over the years. Well, it cost you the same to keep a dumb cow as a good cow.
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So we worked on that part too.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Did that change the mature body weight on your cow herd at all?
>> Chuck Jarecki: No, we actually tried to do some cross breeding with Semmental and the cows, the cross bred cows were too big because they didn't produce a calf that compensated for the size of the cow.
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So we stuck mostly with Angus.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we'd buy, we'd buy good bulls, of course.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Nowadays they synchronize the herd and they breed them all at one time, and you can, with artificial insemination you can get some pretty damn good bulls.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Where if you had to buy them, uh uh, wouldn't work.
>> Tip Hudson: Where did your ideas for grazing management come from at the time that you started? And how would you say those changed, or did they? Did your ideas about grazing change over the time you were running cattle?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I spent time with -- got a lot of good information from Don Ryerson.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Not only when I was in class down there, but afterwards. And I'd go to -- and then I'd go to the Soil Conservation Service had range resource people and they'd hold all kind of training workshops around. They used to have one about every other year down at the National Bison Range. But I don't -- and that got me a little more interested in how to -- what worked good on grazing and what didn't.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And, and of course if you're setting up a good rest rotation system, you've got to have the fencing and the water development and everything else that goes with it.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And that -- that takes time and money.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Did you put that infrastructure in? Water and additional fence, when you --
>> Chuck Jarecki: We did.
>> Tip Hudson: -- bought the place?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, and then we farmed a lot of ground too, the homesteaders had abandoned.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then planted it back mainly to Bluebunch wheatgrass type.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But the problem was that when you farm the ground with bluegrass, so you had to -- you had to farm it one year with a grain crop, because it takes a long time to kill that bluegrass --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- and so we'd end up having to farm it and pick one hell of a lot of rocks --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- and then I ended up -- later years I bought a machine that windrowed the rocks and another one, a rotary picker that picked them up and put them into a hopper.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So we could haul the rocks and dump them in the gullies, so if you ever had a flash flood, it would slow the water down.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But that -- now what's -- God, I wish in those days we'd had Roundup. We could have sprayed that ground and got rid of the --
>> Tip Hudson: Without plowing it.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- without, well you still have to plow it once, but not be plowing it --
>> Tip Hudson: Every, yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- summer foul and twice.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But, and then of course the old farmland that was abandoned, that was the best ground on the place for rangeland, because it was better soil --
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- and steep hilled with solid rock wedges.
>> Tip Hudson: Right. How would you say that your ideas about land management or livestock management changed over the period of time that you were ranching?
>> Chuck Jarecki: How they've changed?
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: I don't know, because I've -- I've been out of it, out of touch so much over the years, but --
>> Tip Hudson: So you sort of followed the same pattern. You found something that worked pretty quick and you kept at it, while you were running cows here?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh yeah, we didn't -- there's very little that we tried and had to abandon.
>> Tip Hudson: Okay.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Because we'd -- you know, I did some -- you know, how you do the observation and research and see what's going on somewhere else.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we had range tours out there. And when I was president elect of our Range Society section, the International Mountain Section, when you're the president elect, you have to host a summer tour. And so I had, we had it on our ranch, and got a bunch of cattle trucks and put bails in for people to sit on, and drove them all around. And we've had -- been on a lot of tours like that, and they were good tours.
>> Tip Hudson: Are there trends in how you see the public perceiving ranching that you think are positive or negative?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I think there's some positive and some negative. I think that the ranchers are not given -- the chance to be successful in some ways, I think, where they got -- they want to have more restrictions on what you can do and -- and the wild -- the predatory wildlife is a real issue, where you know, with wolves, for instance, bright wolves down from Canada, which is ridiculous. And most people, the laypeople that I talk to, they don't understand some of the background like you read -- you hear the stories about Yellowstone Park, and the bison down there and all that. Well, when you get back to the -- way back in the history of the Yellowstone area, there weren't any native bison there. They were all imported. And some of them came from here, because before homesteading here, there was a private herd of buffalo on this reservation. The Pablo-Allard herd. And buffalo are not native to this valley. They brought calves over from the eastern part of the state. And introduced them here. Well, when they had to -- they had to round the bison up and get them out of here before they could homestead.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so they were driven down to Ravalli where the railroad was, and they were most -- a lot of them shipped up to Canada. But one load went to the Yellowstone Park. And so they got started down there.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, the bison just grew and grew and grew, and now they introduced wolves. Well, the wolves are doing a -- I read, they're doing a decent job on Elk control, but they -- they're not too -- too aggressive on those big old bison.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so they're, it's overgrazing.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And it's just a -- people -- you can't make land management decisions based on emotion. It's got to be on hard factual data, and so we see -- but we see more of that all the time.
>> Tip Hudson: What do you know now about land management, running a business, grazing, working with people, whatever, that you wished you knew in 1960?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, I don't know, because I've been out of it so long. But I don't -- I don't have a really an opinion on that.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Now I just sit back and daydream.
>> Tip Hudson: That's the prerogative of older men, I think.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, this is not range [inaudible], when we got rid of the ranch it gave my wife and I a chance to do some traveling you wouldn't do otherwise, like --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah?
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- like a month-long hike -- hiking trip in Patagonia.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: I did six treks in Nepal, hiked around Mont Blanc in the Alps.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Swiss Alps, did all that kind of stuff. Flew an airplane all over Northern Canada. Hiking, camping. Did a lot of river running. One summer I spent -- well, we still had the ranch then, she took care of it, I was gone six weeks. Took a four by eight foot rowboat up to Northern Canada and rode down 400 miles of river.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And first was a canoe route, then I was eight days on my own, and then we joined up with a rafting company. Got back to real food then.
>> Tip Hudson: Right. Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So that's -- and you look around this house and there's souvenirs you see all over the place, like that Musk ox. We got that up in -- way up in far Northern Canada, in the mouth of the Mackenzie River.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, that's beautiful.
>> Chuck Jarecki: That's a solid soapstone.
>> Tip Hudson: Huh. What was your favorite trip? Or your favorite part of the world?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, they're so different.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But, it was interesting to -- we did a trip in Australia and part of it we rented a car and we drove around, driving on the wrong side of the road, but then the major part of it was a self-fly safari, where just the two of us were flying one airplane, the leader had a plane, and other people had planes.
>> Tip Hudson: Oh yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So we could see all that different rangeland.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And it was -- some of it was good, and some of it there wasn't a damn thing down there but sand dunes.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. I was in Adelaide a few months ago, at the International Rangelands Congress.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh.
>> Tip Hudson: And we took a look at some of the sheep stations north of Adelaide, and they're at the tail end of a pretty long drought period. In fact, I think -- I think the previous 12 months was the driest 12 months since they've been keeping records. And so there was nothing left. Everywhere the sheep had been there was nothing left but red dirt.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, we've seen a lot of it in different pastures and overgrazing over years in primitive parts of the world, saw a lot of bad overgrazing in Nepal, when the yaks and sheep and stuff like that. And it's a wonder that the country hasn't washed away.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. What's the solution there? Any idea?
>> Chuck Jarecki: No.
>> Tip Hudson: Are they still nomadic, or are they mostly sedentary?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, they're not nomadic, to speak of, yeah. There's -- a lot of them living in villages.
>> Tip Hudson: Resident animals.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Tourism is important because that's new money coming in.
>> Tip Hudson: How did you manage your ranch to be prepared for the, you know, the fluctuations in grass production from year to year?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, there's some years you didn't -- the good years you didn't take -- there's always plenty left, and other years, you kind of ate it down.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But if you did it the next year after they ate it down, you didn't want to -- you've got to give it a chance to come back.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so, but when we -- we normally didn't start feeding until well, let's see, we got married on January 10, 1970, and it was one of those years where we didn't have to start feeding until about the 20th of January.
>> Tip Hudson: Wow.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Because it was an open winter.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But if you'd have been overgrazing your place, you wouldn't have had that grass --
>> Tip Hudson: Right.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And some of our bottomlands that we reseeded, that were homesteaded, we seeded those to basin wild rye.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: You know that grows four feet tall.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And --
>> Speaker 1: Five or six or seven, depending on the soil.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, and matter of fact I had an article published in the SRM Magazine years ago on -- on the -- why the cows -- why we planted basin wild rye.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And a picture of Penny sitting on a horse, and the grass was right up about to here on her leg.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, I published two -- two articles in that -- when they used to come out with a rangelands magazine.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Now, of course, everybody looks at computer -- on their computer screen.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Instead of -- and I don't, because I [inaudible]. I still read the daily newspaper.
>> Tip Hudson: On paper?
>> Chuck Jarecki: On paper.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, I don't like reading off a screen either, so I still take all of the journals in paper, because I like to mark them up and make notes. Keep track of where I'm at.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well yeah, and we -- we take the weekly newspaper here and --
>> Tip Hudson: Which papers do you take?
>> Chuck Jarecki: We take the daily papers, the Daily Inter Lake.
>> Tip Hudson: Okay.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Out of Kalispell. We don't take the Missoulian anymore, that got too far left.
>> Tip Hudson: Uh huh.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then there's a weekly paper here in town called the Lake County -- the Lake County Leader, and they do a decent job. At least they cover the local issues that the Kalispell paper doesn't.
>> Tip Hudson: Right. Yeah, that's good. What do you feel like are some ecological problems that we have not addressed adequately yet?
>> Chuck Jarecki: You mean for range?
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, yeah. In range and grazing, across whatever geographic scale you like.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- the biggest, the base thing this -- I can see is invasive species. And --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, we still have all the ones that you mentioned. Leafy spurge --
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah.
>> Tip Hudson: -- you name it.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then we got -- maybe we need to find some critters that'll eat them.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: The, you know, sheep or goats will eat some of them, but I know the problem with sheep or goats is you've got to have a better control over them and then they're more susceptible to predators.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: We've got wolves around here.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And because this is the reservation, and I shouldn't be talking about this, I suppose, but there's no hunting of -- done by non-tribal members, big game or anything, so when there's getting to be more and more elk and the people that bought our ranch, they'd love to have people come out and elk hunt.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But if a tribal member wants to hunt or anybody, they want them to use their vehicle, or the rancher's vehicle, to drive around, because the vehicle that the hunter shows up in may have weed seeds all stuck up underneath it.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And that's the stuff we really got to be careful about, is the spread of weeds by vehicles, whether it's -- it's a pickup truck or a four by four, or a bicycle, whatever.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so the people don't want to -- they don't want that kind of a hassle, they want to have -- be able to run all over the place with a vehicle.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So the elk are getting to be more of a problem.
>> Tip Hudson: That seems to be a common story.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Is it?
>> Tip Hudson: All over the west.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah.
>> Tip Hudson: Where do you feel like we've made good progress in teaching people and practicing better range management?
>> Chuck Jarecki: The information is out there if people want it.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But, well there's probably ranchers that think that their primary concern is taking care of their livestock. And I always felt that land managing had an equal -- was equal to livestock care. You've got to do both.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And you have to be a good steward of the land. And that'll be carried on long after each cow has died for whatever reason.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And you just have to be cognizant of what -- of what type of land you're managing and do it properly. Well, we look back over the years and a lot of changes, like oh, years ago when we -- the cattle market wasn't worth a damn around here and we shipped all our calves to Iowa for sale, we formed a marketing association and we loaded them all on a railroad down at Ronan --
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- and shipped a train load of cattle back there.
>> Tip Hudson: Huh.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then they had a drovers car, so some of the ranchers went with the train, and I know four of us drove back in a car. Then we got them back there, like five days before the sale, so the calves had time to settle down and eat and stuff, because they didn't get anything to eat on that damn train.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we came out ahead on that. But just, times have changed. Now they sell their cattle over the internet.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. So would you ordinarily sell weaned calves? Or would you carry them for longer?
>> Chuck Jarecki: No, we'd sell weaned calves.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Right off the cow.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, we tried -- one year we tried -- kept the steers over and ran them as yearlings, but they -- and then we sent them to a feed lot in Idaho. Well, the damn steers were pert near 900 pounds when they left here, because of our production testing.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, they were too big, really, and they didn't spend enough time in the feed lot to get anywhere.
>> Tip Hudson: Hmm, at what weight were they going to slaughter them at that time? Because now they might run them out to 1,500 pounds.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, about 1,200.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. So they wouldn't be on feed very long.
>> Chuck Jarecki: No.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Huh. We have a - the Society of Range Management has a new ranch scholarship in your name. What motivated you to do that?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, there's -- that's been two years now that that award has been given out.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And I just wanted to have something that will encourage ranchers to participate in SRM. But you don't -- you don't see it that much.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But it's expensive to go.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And of course, my age, like the -- hell, the meeting was over here in Spokane last year, if I remember right.
>> Tip Hudson: It was. Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But just too much for me to do.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But I did -- that first year I -- where the hell was it? Albuquerque maybe, where I met the awardee. Penny and I were both down there for that.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: A guy named Frank Price.
>> Tip Hudson: Oh yeah, I know Frank. Yeah, a good rancher. I know what I forgot to ask earlier, how did you get into flying?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Well, that has nothing to do with range.
>> Tip Hudson: No, it doesn't. But it is interesting.
>> Chuck Jarecki: My father was a pilot and he owned airplanes from before I was ever born. And then he -- after World War II, he flew in the war, and then he was a corporate pilot, but he owned his own airplane, a Beechcraft Bonanza. And he flew for a corporation. And I started taking lessons when I was, oh, 18-19 I guess.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And by the time I graduated from college, I had a commercial pilot's license. So I was -- then I rented planes for a while. Then we finally bought our plane in '76.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: I put 5,000 hours on it. And we used it to go to range management meetings and stuff like that.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Instead of a lot of driving or things like that, we'd fly the airplane.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And when my wife and I got married in January, and people say, well what'd you do for your honeymoon? Well, I waited until February and I took her to a range management meeting in Denver.
>> Tip Hudson: How did that go over?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, it went over okay.
>> Tip Hudson: Okay.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah.
>> Tip Hudson: You're still married.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah, and I -- I gave a presentation there. I made a 32 minute video on our ranching.
>> Tip Hudson: Really?
>> Chuck Jarecki: And if you -- I can give you a copy of that if you want to take it with you.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, I'd love it.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And it's how range and cattle management all fit together, and from the time the calf is born until you sell the calf. And I went back to Iowa and visited a farm that bought some of our calves and they still had them there, but just before he sold them.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But I got some extra copies here and Don Ryerson was a help on that, putting that film -- because I did it -- I made the whole thing it was 16 millimeter film.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah, I was going to ask what year was that? Because it wasn't so easy to make videos back then.
>> Chuck Jarecki: No, no it was all 16 millimeter camera with a hundred foot --
>> Tip Hudson: Reel to reel.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- reel to reel.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And then I tape recorded the narration and my wife had -- had a phonograph playing music and then she'd up the volume or lower the volume at the right time. And then --
>> Tip Hudson: I love it.
>> Chuck Jarecki: -- a friend of mine here in town got it all put together, finally on a disk.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But at -- when I first started showing it, I showed it to the -- an SRM Convention in Calgary and then again in Denver.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And we'd start the film on a projector, and then there was a recording there and you ran the tape. And --
>> Tip Hudson: So you played them separately but simultaneously?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Yeah --
>> Tip Hudson: Because there was no audio on the videotape.
>> Chuck Jarecki: No.
>> Tip Hudson: It was just a moving picture.
>> Chuck Jarecki: It was just, you had to -- the narration was separate.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: And so you had to kind of make sure that they stayed synchronized.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: But you could either shut the audio off or you could -- I shot the whole film at -- normally I think it's like 18 -- 16 frames per second, well I shot it at like 22. So when you're showing the film, you could slow it down.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah?
>> Chuck Jarecki: And let the audio catch up.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: Not too -- not too professional but you did what you could at the time.
>> Tip Hudson: Oh yeah.
>> Chuck Jarecki: I used to take a lot of movies.
>> Tip Hudson: What else did you -- what else did you collect film from? What other movies did you make?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Oh, nothing -- nothing fancy really like that. Just whatever I happened to see. I used to take a lot of slides.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: There used to be a company called Seattle FilmWorks, and you could get your slides back, or they'd supply you with the film, and then you could get back slides, prints, and negatives, when you sent the film in for processing.
>> Tip Hudson: Mm hmm.
>> Chuck Jarecki: So I could get prints made, well we got photo albums, and Penny did a lot of scrapbooking and stuff like that. But we just bought -- over the years we just collected junk from all over the world. It's like that green plate there, that's -- that's jade. And you go up further northern BC and there's the biggest jade deposit in the world up there.
>> Tip Hudson: Huh. How long have you been married?
>> Chuck Jarecki: Fifty-five years.
>> Tip Hudson: You have any marriage advice?
>> Chuck Jarecki: No.
>> Tip Hudson: No.
>> Chuck Jarecki: You just say, yes dear. Yes dear.
>> Tip Hudson: Yeah. Yeah, I'm acutely aware that I'm imposing on your time, and I'm glad you let us just stop by on a whim and say hi.
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The Society for Range Management recently established the Chuck Jarecki Rancher Land Stewardship Award to recognize ranch operators who demonstrate outstanding rangeland stewardship and contribute to the ranching profession through local, state, and national service. This is a cash award that goes to a recipient who is an active ranch owner or operator with a lengthy record of successful ranch management. Applications are ranked based on evidence of land stewardship practices, including effective grazing, soil, vegetation, noxious weed, and fish and wildlife habitat management. Special consideration will be given to those who participate in community activities, especially people in service or leadership roles that benefit natural resources. Membership in the SRM is not a requirement for award eligibility, and you can submit nominations for the award through the link in the show notes. That application deadline is June 1 for awards that will be given in the subsequent calendar year. Thank you for listening to The Art of Range Podcast. Links to websites or documents mentioned in each episode are available at artofrange.com. And be sure to subscribe to the show through Apple Podcasts, [inaudible], Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting app, so that each new episode will automatically show up in your podcast feed. Just search for, "art of range." If you are not a social media addict, don't start now. If you are, please like or otherwise follow the Art of Range on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, formally Twitter. We value listener feedback. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode, or just want to let me know you're listening, send an email to show@artofrange.com. For more direct communication from me, sign up for a regular email from the podcast on the homepage at artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by Connors Communications in the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by sponsors. If you're interested in being a sponsor, send an email to, show@artofrange.com.
>> Speaker 2: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own, and does not imply Washington State University's endorsement.
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Visit the Society for Range Management Honor Awards page for more information about the Chuck Jarecki scholarship and to nominate awardees.
Read more about Chuck at the Recreational Aviation Foundation's website
Read SRM's article about the establishment of this award.