AoR 140: Unsung Caretakers of Unseen Land -- Mark & Wendy Pratt, Idaho Ranchers

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>> 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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>> My guests today are Mark and Wendy Pratt, ranchers in southeastern Idaho, and Steve Stuebner, the driving force behind the Life on the Range series, Mark and Wendy, welcome. Steve, you're welcome too.

>> Thanks, Tip. Glad to be here.

>> You bet. Glad to be here.

>> Thank you. I want to give a little bit of background before we jump into what I think is a bigger topic than maybe it might seem at first glance. I want to address the question and have you, Mark and Wendy, address the question of why does grazing matter to everyone, not just those of us that are involved in agriculture or concerned about rangeland ecology and conservation? There's a number of sort of sub-angles on this that are useful, but I've recently had a few situations where I have tried to engage in conversation with somebody who knew nothing about agriculture, really, except that food comes from agriculture, and even less about the idea of producing cattle or other domestic livestock on naturally occurring ecosystems, and I've said enough there to, you know, to see where I'm attempting to go with that, but, you know, how would I communicate these ideas with somebody who lives in Seattle or New York City on the 18th floor of a condominium or an apartment complex and goes to work at a law office or a local restaurant or a laundromat, and to try to communicate to them why they should care about what I'm calling range land ranching? And I say communicate with and not to, because effective communication involves someone receiving, and not just me sending, and I'm also a little bit reluctant to say beef production, and I know there's been quite a bit of trend in the last 20 years to get ranchers to use that term instead of ranching, but my objection is that I feel like that reduces a way of life, a culture, a socioeconomic endeavor that is actually quite big, you know, culturally and ideologically, reduces that to the just the utilitarian end or goal of what we're calling beef production. And that's not to minimize, you know, one of what I think is the primary purposes of rangeland ranching, which is food provisioning. I think that is a big deal, but I think that this is bigger than that. And of course, you know, people are aware, at least some are, that we can now grow some of these animal tissues in a petri dish and generate stuff that some people are trying to call meat, you know, but if we follow that to its various logical conclusions, we end up in some dystopia. So meanwhile, back at the ranch, Mark and Wendy Pratt are busy thinking about how they can best care for the real animals that they're responsible for, not petri dishes, the land that supports all the animals and all of the other living things that depend on their land and, you know, truly with some consideration for the broader human civilization that rides on these functional ecosystems that have, you know, various sort of concentric rings or different spatial scales of functioning that Homo sapiens, thinking man, has the power to promote or to steward or, you know, as you've mentioned before, Wendy, to interrupt and weaken, and we're trying to not do that. So you two specifically, and other people like you, are maintaining and creating wildlife habitat, which people often don't know about, and you don't really get paid for it. You are optimizing plant growth and defoliation and decomposition that pulls greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere, increases soil water-holding capacity, cleans the water, stores the greenhouse gas. You don't get paid for that either, usually, and I think this is maybe one of the bigger things, you are living out a relationship with nature that is totally different than other forms of agriculture, and I've got nothing against other forms of agriculture, but I think there's something to be proud of here, and we should pound the pulpit a little bit. You know, this Dan Daggett, who is -- was once a fairly radical anti-livestock activist, who is now a ranching advocate, said some years ago in a quote that I've used over and over again, "ranching is now the only livelihood that is based on human adaptation to wild biotic communities." And that's what ranching is when it's done well, and I want to let that sink in for a minute. I've thought about this more than I care to admit, and I think he's right. My forester friends think they're being left out but of course, sawdust is not what's for dinner. You know, this, what you're doing, supports civilization in a way that is more than economics, but it's not less, and again, your only payment for that, usually, is selling pounds of calves. And, you know, to continue the picture here, those animals become food, and beef has been the food of kings. This is the food that has defined a high-class meal for all of human history. You know, ancient man would kill the fattened calf for a celebration, and for celebration today we cook a prime rib or steaks, and I guarantee you that that Seattle apartment dweller, the New York condo person, if she's honest, would definitely prefer a New York strip to a chicken strip. The one is associated with luxury and the other is associated with your roadside gas station, and I like chicken, but I think the connotations are still true. So with that lengthy introduction, Mark and Wendy, let me first say thank you for doing unglamorous work, the kind of work where the fruits of your labor are worth more than your pay, to quote the old Alabama song.

>> Well, that's a mouthful, tip. And I'll take a shot, just first shot of what comes to the surface, but before I do, I want to thank you and Steve for doing more that for the natural resources of the west than anybody I can think of. We really can't thank you enough for that. You've elevated the conversation in ways that's not in vogue today.

>> I hope so. Thank you.

>> You talked about the high-rise dweller in the city, and that one, that is so hard, but I've thought a lot about suburbia, those people that have a lawn, maybe have a piece of dirt, they have a home or they rent, and I think maybe a good question is, what do we do with plant lives, because if it's not grazed, we generally mow it, we prune it, we put it in bags and put it on the corner. We bury it. For people to grasp that the grass will grow if you don't mow it, I think it's maybe a place to start. And if we can get people to, I mean, have a tomato plant on your deck in a pot, but try to grow some food. If they don't have, you know, a community garden, an abandoned lot in the city that they can actually see what the sun produces, how it produces food, it's going to -- I don't we'll ever get there. And then --

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> I love that you pulled the application right to the to the front of the interview. I really do think that's a big deal with -- as many people may know, I'm also the administrator for a couple of county extension offices, and we have run for many, many years what we call the Master Gardener program. Some people know the term, but don't know that it's associated with the land grant university and the extension system. But, you know, one of the -- one of their big pushes is to is to communicate with people about the importance of what they've called nearby nature, and it really is a big deal. Like, we're talking about promoting mental health by people having access to spaces where there are plants. It sounds so stupidly simple, but it's really real.

>> When you ask why does grazing matter to everyone, I I think about the science that should be being taught at all of the elementary-level classes where science is taught, and more emphasis put on the idea that the photosynthetic process is the one process that all of humankind depends upon. And in order for a plant to photosynthesize, it has to be green, and growing. Old plants don't photosynthesize, so the photosynthetic process is the thing that everyone depends upon, and so I take that back to why grazing should matter to everyone. Growing that that plant, that photosynthetic process, feeds that underground world, and that underground world is as we look more into the idea of One Health, soil health begets plant health, begets animal health begets human health, and the question has to be asked, why does this country have such high rates of disease, of autoimmune diseases? What's causing that? And there's an underlying cause that we're not identifying, but there's getting to be more data pointing at lack of soil health as being an underlying cause.

>> Yeah, and I think that spins out in quite a few different directions. I recently finished reading Dr. Fred Provenza's book Nourishment, where he's describing the benefits to people. He's describing all of the million ways that you are what you eat, and how immune systems and, you know, every aspect of human body function depends on having access to all of the right ingredients, and we, you know, we -- and then there was also a -- interestingly, I think it was actually a longitudinal study involving children in New York, looking at some -- whatever correlations might exist between lifestyle factors and in long-term health, particularly with respect to some of these chronic diseases that you've mentioned. And one of the conclusions of this study that ran many decades was that a lot of children who live in the city, their bodies never actually get exposed to living dirt, and so they don't -- their immune systems are never exposed to these low-level microorganisms and low-level pathogens that, you know, that prompt an immune response but don't result in external disease symptoms, but it's training the body to resist all kinds of things. Anyway, that's an interesting -- I think you're right. We are what we eat and, you know, if we eat bread that doesn't mold when it sits in the cabinet for three months, there might be a problem there.

>> Yeah, there may.

>> Yeah, Mark, that's an interesting point and I think we could -- we might need to even have a whole another episode to talk about the carbon stuff, which I think is important, but I want to come back and do a little bit more introduction of the two of you. Wendy, I'm going to come back to you and go out on a limb and say that your faithfulness to this, what I'm calling a good endeavor, that is as old as time and remains unique in the realm of food production, will provide inspiration to that city dweller, if she knew about it. You said that you were born into ranching, and you certainly see it as more of a calling than a job. And I feel like we, meaning we, everybody, need to know that that there are natural places and people that are working with them out there. How were you born into ranching, and not the mechanics of childbirth, but your family history?

>> We go back to 1870. My great grandparents settled along the Blackfoot River, and have been there ever since. I just remember following my dad with a -- as he flood irrigated and he might have fussed over bluebirds and monarch butterflies, and it's just compelling in a way that you can't pinpoint. It just is for both of us and I'm not on that ranch, but we're less than 10 miles away from that ranch, and I've transferred my loyalty full on to this place. It's just deep, and to learn that cows could be part of the solution was intoxicating. That was 30-plus years ago in our first course of holistic management, and we just -- as difficult as wanting to prove and have the land flourish, can be so difficult, so mind-numbing challenging, but it pushes us every day, and I don't see it lessening.

>> Yeah, we will have a lot of listeners that aren't familiar with the geography and the vegetation of Idaho. Say a little bit about what it -- what the world is like where you live.

>> Well, I'm looking out at old sand hills that blew in from the last -- or are flowed in from the last ice age, that are covered with -- it's right now, it's sage and rabbit brush and bloom. It's beautiful in this time of year and flood-irrigated pastures where our forefathers first diverted water and put it through some ditches and put it out on the land, and they leveled it over time. We've all taken a turn helping that process along, and in the background are the foothills of the Blackfoot River Mountains and they are sagebrush and glorious bunch grass and forbs of all kinds. This is -- it's not unique to the west, but it's part of the vast diversity that is Idaho. We're surrounded here by mostly large circle pivots that grow potatoes and grain and some corn. We're a bit of an island, and we're just hoping we can hang on, because there's urban pressure. There's pressure for land prices that have gotten so high it's remarkable to think that it can keep -- that they can keep going up.

>> Mm-hm. Mark, how did you get into ranching? The two of you are doing it together now, but what's your history?

>> I was -- happened to be born here, and my great granddad homesteaded 160-acre homestead in the early 1900s, some of the last homesteading that was done, and my grandma and grandpa moved out here. They had a stint in town. Grandpa worked as a mechanic, and as my great-grandpa aged out, Grandma and Grandpa came back to the ranch. When they came back to the ranch, there was no power here, so Grandma's refrigerator became her linen closet when they moved out, and she could tell you the number of years and to the day and the hour before she got power again. My grandfather and a neighbor asked the power company about getting power, and the power company said, "If you'll dig the holes, we'll supply the poles, but you'll need to guarantee $5 worth of power monthly, whether you use it or not." And so they dug the holes and they got the power to the house. The neighbor wouldn't hook up. He said, "I can buy a lot of kerosene for $5 a month," so he didn't. He didn't join in once they got the power here, but it's been a long haul. Each generation has added a little bit of ground to it. We're not -- it's our own little deal, I guess. We're not huge by any means, but we have enough to make it work.

>> Yeah, and to what extent does that -- my sense is that that is fairly representative of the cow/calf sector of, you know, the beef production portion of agriculture. You know, people sometimes have these perceptions about big corporate ranches and factory farming, and at least in the world of cow/calf production, those two things don't go together, because we don't raise calves in a factory. But is this owner/operator set up that, you know, as a viable, but not gigantic, family ranch, fairly representative, at least of the Northwest>

>> You know, I think if you look at statistics, the average cow/calf producer has 50 cows. It might even be lower than that, now.

>> I think you're right.

>> So 50 cows certainly isn't going to make a living. A lot of people enjoy having cows with calves and using a piece of land that they have and doing -- participating in all of the different facets of cow/calf production and giving their kids a chance to be out in the middle of it as well, so quite a few of those operations are lifestyle operations, and when you get large enough, then they become a full-on business, and we're kind of in that interim.

>> Mm-hm. So how many employees do you have?

>> We have one, and then our family, we happen to be lucky enough that both of our kids live here with their spouses, so we have one other child that lives over in Boise, but two of them live here, where they're part-time help. They have other jobs. They're employed virtually, which is adds a new wrinkle to ranches, I think. After 2020, there were a lot more virtual jobs than there was prior to it, and those have pretty good returns, so it -- you can wrestle with the golden shackles while you're ranching.

>> Yeah. No, that's a good point. Wendy, you mentioned a little while ago the bluebirds that your grandfather cared about. There was a really good keynote talk at the Society of Range Management conference a couple years ago, maybe, I think it was, yeah, a year and a half ago, about the importance of grassland birds and the roles of ranchers in in maintaining some of these grassland birds, and it was really interesting at the very -- the tail, (ha-ha) the tail end of her talk, she played some bird calls for an extended period of time over the loudspeakers in the conference hall, and it was crazy how -- just how visceral people's reaction was to that. I mean, you could just tell, and I mentioned this in a talk that I gave the next day, you could sense that every single person in the room had their pulse go down. There was, you know, clearly, anxiety being released just with the sound of the birds. We're not even in nature. We're just hearing it, and I think that one of the things we tend to shy away from is the fact that this style of ranching, which is raising animals in a naturally occurring, native, oftentimes, ecosystem is beautiful, and that doesn't sound like a scientific term, but it's also real and people feel it, and but beauty doesn't pay the bills either. So do you feel like there's -- yeah, we can -- we'll come back around to what some ways may be to try to increase the profitability of ranching, but do your kids want to do it, to continue what you're doing?

>> They do. They do. I think they're -- I mean, these are modern parents, that the dads are modern dads, and they'll all full on say they don't want to work as hard as we did, and they want more family time, and so we can work with that. They want us to take more leisure time, and we have a hard time doing that. But I love your bird story. We -- I got a Merlin Bird ID app this year.

>> I'm an addict.

>> Oh, my gosh, and I've never -- I just -- it is so wonderful, the way that technology can help in many, many ways, but it's been --

>> Yeah.

>> -- great, and if you were to come to our house right now, I mowed my lawn once. There's a lot of plants, let's just say, that are expressing themselves here. One of the things we noticed is we knew it got quiet in September, but when you've been really going out every morning and seeing what birds are calling, the silence is so noticeable. It's beautiful in its way, and there's a few calls left, but it's that -- that's maybe a way to connect with people is you just want them to get interested enough to build some sort of intimacy with the natural world, and how to do it, I don't know. We got to keep working on it.

>> I agree.

>> I don't know if you had a question in there, Tip or what, but.

>> I just wanted to jump in here for a minute, if that's okay.

>> Yeah.

>> This is Steve but, you know, people should know that this -- the call of the songbirds would be a benefit that Mark and Wendy enjoy as part of working on the land every day, and they are very much in tune with the birds and everything around them in nature and what's happening out there on the earth, but they're -- I mean, these are extraordinary people who have been working on holistic management for over 30 years. Nowadays, people are referring to folks like this as regenerative ranchers, but anyway, I mean, they're just very thoughtful people, and I've met Mark's father as well, spent a day with him, and he's very much the same way. And anyway, they just are really in tune with what's going on around them, and they care about what's happening to the resource in the way they graze their livestock, and they put a lot of care and thought into that. And so anyway, just in terms of context, these are the kind of people that I think are leading the way of what ranching is going to be like in the future, and they are showing by example, but I think both Mark and Wendy would tell you that it's hard, and that it doesn't always turn out the way they're hoping for. They're working with a brittle landscape that has limited amount of water and so forth, so it just takes a tremendous amount of care and stewardship and but I feel very fortunate to have -- to know these guys and have been out on the land with them, and I just think that context is important.

>> You know, Steve --

>> Yeah, thank you.

>> -- you -- we so appreciate that, and if -- I mean, sometimes we get jealous. We go -- we see slideshow put on by a rancher that has these fantastic before-and-after photos, and honestly, if you came here, that's not what you'd get. We could walk across the land and talk about an ethic, a true north, look down and talk about what's on the land, but it -- each ranch has its own constraints, its own context. And I just want ranchers to know that, you know you're not going to come here and you're probably going to see more problems than a great success. We just keep working at it, and I think your intention, if you can get the care there and the intention there, where it's going to be, okay, that needs to be what we secure first.

>> I think that's a great point. There's a -- it reminds me of a really good quote from one of Wendell Berry's books, Jayber Crow. He's describing Mattie Keith, who's a middle-aged farmer that the protagonist of the book, Jayber Crow admires as sort of an old-school farmer, but he says he was always studying his fields, thinking of ways to protect them. He was improving his land, intending to leave it better than he found it. His principle was always to maintain a generous margin of surplus between the fertility of his land and his demands upon it. Wherever I look, he said, I want to see more than I need and have more than I use. And that principle really serves rangelands well, and I'm hearing that in what you're describing as an approach to regenerative ranching, which really is, I would say process-based rather than outcome-based. You're saying that your place wouldn't be the kind that you would put on a brochure to advertise a tourist destination, but to this point, you're constantly thinking about how we can do it well and take care of what we have.

>> Yeah. Yeah, when the -- the quote you mentioned made me think of the way Mark's dad says it is I want more grass than cows. It also makes me think of the inefficiency of cows and how we have these discussions around resilience being inefficient, and I think that describes a cow really well. The figure I found was that 80% of what she consumes she puts back on the ground, which is maybe not something you're going to tout if you're producing beef, but it's great for the land.

>> Right.

>> She takes --

>> Part of a larger system.

>> Exactly.

>> Yeah, that -- maybe this is the time to jump into your TEDx talk. Wendy, you did a TEDx talk a few years ago. I think it was in Idaho Falls, and I --

>> Yeah.

>> -- couldn't quite figure out what year it was, but I want to say I'm an introvert, it, but I'm also not intimidated by public speaking, but I think doing a TEDx talk would intimidate me. How was that and how did it come about? What was the setting?

>> Well, TEDx is a local effort.

>> Yeah.

>> And so that's, that's way more imaginable than the national stage, but -- or international. Basically, my kids put me up to it. And a TEDx talk, a TED talk, is about you got to have some sort of a twist or a reveal about something, so I kind of knew shit, but I'll tell you, it is one of the hardest things I've ever done, and it was months of preparation, so it's not that I was brave. It's just that I memorized the dang thing, and I haven't been able to watch it. I did. I've watched it a couple of times since. It's been five years and --

>> Yeah.

>> -- very, very difficult for me, yeah.

>> Yeah, I understand that. I almost -- a little secret here, I almost never listen to these podcast episodes because I don't like hearing myself talk.

>> Right.

>> Yeah, and I love that your kids put you up to it, so what did you talk about? We'll link to it in the show notes on this episode, but --

>> You know, my son --

>> I'd like to have you tell it.

>> -- gave me the title because I couldn't figure out, and it's a little lofty, Grazing to Heal the Earth, but it's just about how grazing fits into natural ecosystems, and ruminants have been around for -- I mean, grass has been evolving with ruminants for, like, 30 million years. This is a long symbiotic relationship that's been evolving, and we ignore it at our peril, essentially, and it's all about the value of insoak on a watershed and how that matters to everyone, including city dwellers. It's about drying up of our lands because we've, in our efforts to -- because we thought grazing was extractive, we've taken livestock off the land, and we need a new model that leaves the ruminants on the landscape, but we manage them differently. And finally, it's about, you know, us doing it together and continuing to learn.

>> Yeah, I think that's a big deal. I'm prone to zoom in and think about details, and we began to just scratch the surface on the carbon cycle and how livestock grazing contributes to that, but I think it's important to zoom all the way out as well, and you sort of did this in the TEDx piece. You know, zoom all the way out to where you can see all of planet Earth, this blue marble that appears to be potentially totally unique in the known universe, but on that blue marble, grass is the skin of the earth, and as Mark was alluding to in a little bit fancier language, undergrazing causes problems because it diminishes the photosynthetic capacity of that grass, and so you have this skin, but the skin only works if you've got stuff that's animals that are using it. It functions best when there's these cycles, these patterns of partial defoliation and regrowth, and then we do it all over again. Say more about this idea that we have, on most of the land masses on the Earth, grass is really critical to just holding the dirt down.

>> Well, that -- the notion, and I think it was Alan [inaudible] that first talked about it, I believe, the notion that there's brittle areas, which is most of the Earth, and then non-brittle, which is the humid environments, and in those, the microbes of decay are always living and active, and they can cycle plant life, but in the brittle environments where you have a dry season, it's the gut of the animal that has the microbes, where it's moist and it's the right temperature, and they do the cycling, but if you -- yeah, if you leave out that cycling part of returning nutrients to the soil, where the microbes in the soil can cycle them, you just short circuit that process.

>> Yeah, to spell that out, in places that you're describing as brittle, meaning that it's relatively dry at the plant-soil interface during the active growing season, and even much of the rest of the year, you don't have the combination of moisture and temperature that supports above-ground decomposition of that plant material, and so when there's no grazing animal to do something with this most abundant carbohydrate on the planet, cellulose, the stuff that makes up plant tissue, if no animal uses it, it just sort of piles up and then turns to dust, and the animals convert that into something that is plant-available, whereas in what you're calling a non-brittle environment, you do have temperature and moisture that promotes just natural decay.

>> You actually have temperature and humidity, and humidity allows that grass to rot off at the surface and fall over, and if you don't have -- in a brittle environment, that grass grows up, and unlike trees, trees, they are able to drop their leaves. Grass can't do that, and so there is nothing but oxidation in those brittle environments to cycle plant material, and as we know, oxidizing something takes an inordinate amount of time. So for the sun to be able to get to the growing points to feed the underground world, you've got to take that plant material off at some point during the growing season. When we were at a -- when Don Nelson did the Kellogg project, he had annual meetings, and we were at one of those annual meetings, and there was a couple of old foresters, and we've kept their -- what their statement in the forefront of what we've been doing for the last 25 years. They said we take from the bounty of the land, not from its character, nor from its capacity.

>> Hm. Yeah, and this, again, it's helpful for me to try to zoom all the way out and think about what the big picture is, and one of the big pictures is this miracle of the process is going on inside a ruminant animal. A little while ago, I finished a book that was recommended to me by somebody called the Alchemy of Air, and it describes how, for all of human history, up until yesterday, up until the invention of what's been called the Haber-Bosch process to convert atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available nitrate, animal manure was considered black gold, because this transformation that the animals do, converting essentially straw, stuff that's going to be dust if it just sits any longer, converts that stuff into nitrogen that supports all of the other things that we need to grow like crops, because humans don't eat grass. So it's great to have grass everywhere, and we eat animals, but we also grow other foodstuffs that depend on nitrogen, and the main source of nitrogen, up until pretty recently, was animal manures, and part of what I think is interesting is that that Haber-Bosch process to pull into atmospheric nitrogen out of the atmosphere and make it into nitrate requires -- only happens at a really high cost. It requires heat and pressure, and it took a long time to get that dialed in, and it's still one of the main -- it still accounts for much of the energy usage on the planet, more than people know, but as the cost of these various forms of what is now synthetically produced nitrogen go up, there's really growing interest in letting livestock perform that transformation again, because the animal does the work instead of electricity. I think that's a useful trend. Do you see the trend, and do you think that will persist?

>> Well, I think you -- as you hear more about the principles of soil health, the one that is there -- nowhere in the six principles of soil health to do they mention synthetic fertilizers. The only thing that they are suggesting is incorporating livestock back into the system and the role that diversity plays in creating land health, so they're going to a more natural system to try to feed this whole underground world, rather than depending on higher and higher levels of application rates of fertilizers. So, yes, I think they -- it has a lot of potential, and when you follow some of the people like Gabe Brown or others that have made the switch, it is possible. Context becomes a very big part of it, but it is certainly possible.

>> Tip, could I jump in for a sec? I would just like to go --

>> Sure.

>> -- back to Wendy's TEDx talk, and what's really cool about that is that she put herself out there talking about rangelands as a renewable resource with good grazing stewardship and all kinds of cool educational material, and she shared that with an urban, a very urban audience in eastern Idaho, and this is one thing that's really important that we feel with the Life on the Range project, and that's public education. And so we get below the surface and really talk about what's happening out there, and so it was really brave of Wendy to do that, I though. And, you know, I'll encourage listeners to go and watch that TED talk when they have time but, you know, both mark and Wendy put in a lot of time, you know, in their life, to help educate the world about what ranchers are doing and what they're seeing and feeling and experiencing. And another way that happens is with Wendy's blog, which I think is titled The Pastoral Muse, and Wendy writes her blog, I think, at least once a month or more, and it's really cool to read about what's on her mind as they're herding cattle or having grandchildren home for the weekend or whatever, but I mean, this is a big part of our project with Life on the Range is really getting out there and trying to transcend or bridge the cultural divide between urban and rural. And so, you know, we've done over 100 videos about many rangeland topics over the last 15 years, and I've been involved in all of those, and it's just been incredible learning experience for me, who's, you know, coming from, like, a suburb of Minneapolis, originally, you know, to work on all these things and learn about these things, and I think it just helps bridge that cultural divide when you have people like Wendy getting out there and really, you know, talking about their life and what they do. And then they can talk for a long time about the value of what they're doing and what's happening to the Earth. And anyway, it's just hats off to Wendy for doing the talk, and to both Mark and Wendy for all the things they do to help educate the world about ranching and rangelands.

>> So I have a question for you guys. Is that even legal on this? Are we getting there at all, because, man, cattle and meat is so vilified across the planet. I don't know. I think it's not enough by a longshot, I don't think.

>> Yeah, I think there are pretty significant glimmers of hope. I'm curious what was the audience reception to your talk, because I think that gives us a hint of an answer?

>> Oh, gosh, good. There was a woman that she came up and said, I really, you know, appreciate your talk. I don't eat meat. I'm a vegetarian, but I understand about water. So I thought that was a big win. But, you know, I haven't got a lot of real feedback.

>> Mm-hm. What was the setting like? How many people are actually in the room for the thing?

>> Oh, gosh, I don't -- do you know, Mark?

>> It was in an auditorium in Bonneville High School.

>> Yeah?

>> There was a couple 300 capacity, I think.

>> I think it was full.

>> Yeah, yeah. I often run into people that don't have much exposure to agriculture in general, and certainly not rangelands-based ranching specifically, and I think sometimes their response is a little bit like Steve's was. You get presented with this, and you think, oh my gosh, where has this been all my life? There's people like that out there that actually do this? And they get excited, and then they tell their neighbors. I also think that we have begun to overcome, maybe just by virtue of time but also successful stewardship, the negative connotations of ranching that came from the legacy effects of poorly managed grazing back at the turn of the century. And, you know, we've alluded to some of the causes of that, which are numerous, on this podcast before, including a recently reposted interview I did with Nathan Sayer about his book Politics of Scale. And in the book, he -- the book is a history of rangeland science, and of course, some of that is tied with the history of ranching in the West, and he points out that a lot of the causes for the cattle boom in the 1800s were government policies and easy credit, and it wasn't just greed on the part of local ranchers or, you know, complete ignorance of ecological principles. There was -- as is usually the case, the real world is a lot more complex than that, but I think, you know, through the work of people like you over the last 100 years, 140 years, since the, you know, 1880s cattle boom, we have begun to heal up many of those places, and there is receptivity to using livestock as a means of managing land in a way that is healthy, that enhances wildlife habitat, you know? And by enhances, I mean, I really think we can do this in a way on rangelands, where a grazed landscape, when it's done carefully and with some smarts, is better habitat than if it had not been used at all, for many of the reasons that you've already alluded to, Mark. And, you know, back to this point that resilience is inefficient, you could maximize livestock production, but that may -- you know, in a closed system that pokes out somewhere else, and so there's -- there are other reasons to, you know, to be more conservative in how you manage, and I think that speaks to people. And I guess, to come full circle, I feel like we're sort of past some of these, you know, cattle-free by '93 inclinations, because there's enough people that are not managing that way, and I would say one of the reasons why they're not is because, in the long run, that doesn't work economically either. If you're in a business that relies on using natural processes and not using expensive crop inputs to grow stuff and then harvesting it using an animal instead of a machine, that ought to be, in theory, both ecologically and economically efficient, and I think over the long haul, it actually comes out that way, and that's eventually going to weed out the people that are not taking care of their land, because if you don't take care of the land, then it won't take care of you, and it won't work.

>> I think there's a Harrington Emerson quote that would fit very well in this. He was an efficiency engineer at the turn of the century. But in so doing, he says, without ambition, one starts nothing. Without work, one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You will have to win it. The person who knows how will always have a job. The person who knows why will always be their boss. As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. And I think principles have been laid in front of us by numerous people, whether it be understanding ag and the principles of soil health or the four ecosystem processes that Savory was so eloquent in defining with Holistic Management, and they've continued to be a focus of the understanding ag purse people, and I think the principles are laid out there, and that's what we've been striving for, is the application of principles on this ranch for the last 30 years.

>> Mm-hm. Maybe a couple thoughts to try to bring us around to some kind of a conclusion. I've spoken of cattle ranching that's done well, in pretty lofty terms, and I think I can defend that, but I also don't make my living ranching. I advise people who ranch. But for that to continue, you know, the two of you have to make enough money in it to pay the bills in, you know, 21st century America. It's no longer a subsistence farming. I came from Arkansas, and they were -- that part of the world was characterized by that until electricity and washing machines, and then people had to have cash. But, you know, this is always the -- this economic tradeoff is still a bit of a mystery, I think, to economists in that the rate of return on investment in nearly any sector of agriculture, but probably including ranching, is between 3% and 5%, and so you could probably sell your ranch and invest the money in the stock market and earn 10% for the foreseeable future, and do better than ranching. And the mystery has always been, what prevents ranchers from doing that?

>> Yeah, that's what we talk about over coffee every morning, Tip.

>> The afterlife stops me from doing it. I can't imagine facing my grandparents on the other side and trying to explain why we sold out.

>> Yeah.

>> We can't even imagine it. I mean, if we did that, we'd just curl up and I don't -- we just -- it's unthinkable.

>> I think that's a good answer. You have to live for something.

>> Yeah. Yeah, which, it doesn't mean that we want to give up our life now because of it. I mean, it's, stressful, and we're trying to figure out how to have a more balanced life. We have hope, but selling it is never in the conversation.

>> Mm-hm. Yeah, that's interesting. That brings me back to a thought that I had when I was putting together some notes for the interview and I debated whether to say anything more about, you know, this idea of utilitarianism, but food is a good example, and the illustration is that there was an old hospital building that my office used to be in some years ago that had some emergency provisions in it from the Cold War era, and this is really fascinating. There was a big like a three-pound Folgers can sized aluminum can that had a flat, gray label on it that said 12% MPF in big letters. And it literally was human multi-purpose food. It was a mush that would provide, you know, at least according to the science of the time, all of the basic nutrients and protein, energy, vitamins and minerals that were necessary for human survival, and of course, it begs the question, if that's efficient, why don't we just do it? Or, you know, we could inject stuff straight into our veins and save the energy expenditure of chewing and digesting. You know, when you -- when it sounds that stark, people react to it, but, you know, but what you're describing is that there's something more to life than just maintaining bodily metabolism until the end of natural life, and we have a hard time describing that, and science doesn't do a good job answering that question.

>> It concerns me when we think about the entire cycle, when we think of these huge landscapes with no animals on them, and the question has to be asked how do you intend to keep them alive? And I haven't come up with a good answer. I've thought about that with recreation. Recreation, people go out, they play on it, they do all these things, but that recreation does not keep that environment alive. It takes an animal harvesting plants to actually keep it in some type of condition that you recognize that isn't desert.

>> Wendy, at the end of your TED talk, you had some suggestions for people, and you began -- nearly began the interview with a suggestion for people to be around plants, grow some tomatoes. Do you have any other thoughts on how people can engage more with the natural world and maybe even have more exposure to this world of rangeland and ranching?

>> Well, I think as ranchers, it's hard to have folks out, but we all need to do a better job of that. As agency folks, you know, they get their degrees and they have it in whatever discipline they've got. We come together and we try to figure out policy, and we don't come together near enough to just learn from one another, to really have some humility and ask questions, both sides. That's the best I can say. For ranchers, whatever you're good at, if you could share that with others, you know, it might be you're excellent with dogs, and you can share your love of animals. Everybody loves a dog, right? But our dogs are used to herd animals, herd our cattle around. It's an age-old tradition, and maybe that's something you can share.

>> It sounds like you're describing something a little bit more organic and local than what has sometimes been called agritourism.

>> Any and all.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure I answered your question from a while back, and we can see if Steve had any -- has any thoughts either, but the question of whether or not we're doing that well, I think one challenge is that, you know, I was in the field, actually, yesterday with a television reporter and a reporter that I didn't invite, and it was another group that, you know, they put a call out to some reporters to say there's going to be something going on at this ranch, and if you want to show up, you could do a story on it. I don't even ever think of that. And I think it's because I have the presupposition, which is probably incorrect, that all reporters are hostile to agriculture and the kinds of things that I'm interested in, and I think that's a really bad assumption. And I felt a bit chastised in my failure as somebody who's paid to be a public communicator about these things to get the word out, because I just assume, you know, what we're describing in the beauty of ranching done well, is not a man bites dog story, and that tends to be --

>> Well, I --

>> Yeah, Steve, jump in.

>> Well, I would just point out that that's usually what the media are looking for, is some level of conflict, and the mainstream media feeds off conflict and strife all over the world, but what we've done with Life on the Range is basically profiled stories where there's very substantial conservation work going on, on the ground, often on private lands, sometimes private and public, and the strength of that story is that there's so much cool stuff happening. Maybe they're creating, you know, little ponds on their land for spotted frogs, you know, or they're clearing out juniper trees to let the land thrive and more water and all kinds of things, when you remove the junipers and let the land thrive. There's just so many examples of conservation projects that we've profiled on Life on the Range, and those actually become really great news stories, and so they go from our website and online stories to I share them with the mainstream press and they're like, wow, this is really cool. They might run that story frontpage, or they run it in their Sunday edition. And so people are hungry for those kinds of stories, because these are success stories, and so that gives them hope, you know, and it's something that they're interested in hearing about and reading about, because it's actually good stuff. And so a lot of the conflict stuff, people get really tired of that, and it kind of -- it's very repetitive. And we're in a political season now, and so there's all kinds of that going on. So anyway, I feel like that's been one of the hallmarks of our Life on the Range project, you know, and we get out with people like Mark and Wendy and just show them something that they'd never learn about otherwise, and it wouldn't be covered by the mainstream media. So there's a real value, I think, in having other platforms out there where you can tell your own story unfiltered, for the public to enjoy.

>> You know, another piece to that, Steve, would be getting this into elementary, high school, junior high science classes, and this book called Nature's Best Hope is a new conservation movement that starts in your yard. You know, I don't think that the general populace understands that their propensity to cleanliness around their homes is starving things to death. I don't think they've made that connection, that in order for songbirds, etc., to thrive, they need something to eat, and you're it.

>> No, absolutely, I totally agree. And yeah, the public education part in the K-12 schools is just as vital, absolutely.

>> That's encouraging. I do think there's good work to do there, and I have been given some ideas by this conversation. Mark and Wendy and Steve, thank you again for what you do, and there are links to Wendy's blog, The Pastoral Muse, in the show notes, as well as the Life on the Range page, and her TEDx talk, and we'll put a link in there too, Mark, to Nature's Best Hope. Thank you, all.

>> Thank you, Tip --

>> Thank you.

>> -- Steve.

>> Thank you.

>> 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, Podbean, 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, formerly 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 home page 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

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