Intern Diaries saboranch on 23 Apr 2010 05:34 pm
Sabo Ranch Intern Blog- John Thiebes, April 20, 2010
John Thiebes, with Riley and Kiril Sabo on the truck, feeding our herd of Rotokawa Embryo Devons, Red Angus mother cows and their Devon/Angus calves (and a few A1/A2 Jersey heifers) the last hay of the year, as we wait the impatient weeks for the first green grass of spring. April 2010.
John Theibes, one of the best "big brothers" our boys have ever had, gamely trying on 7-year-old Kiril's birthday crown.
Sabo Ranch Intern Blog- John Thiebes April 20, 2010
This will be the final full day working with the Sabo’s as their intern, and although my appreciation for ranching and all of its related sciences and arts has deepened, my ability write about them has not. So, in an effort to keep pace with some of the more esteemed agricultural writers, I want to embark from here on my own agricultural work having left with one last blog entry.
The greatest highlight of this entire experience has been observing how a family operation such as this one actually works. Behind their reputation as producers of flavorful, nutrient dense beef are years of fine tuning a system that juggles land stewardship, animal husbandry, direct marketing, education, observation and local adaptation. On top of that you include trying to raise a family, mentor an intern, and find the time for the occasional game of ping pong and you very quickly fill a day, and then fill three months almost as fast. But the amazing thing about a system such as this one is that it never remains the same, and something that never remains the same never runs out of things to teach you.
For my own farming and ranching endeavors I have taken away the lesson that none of these things happen overnight. As Jenny says, “an overnight success, twenty years in the making”. If you want to raise healthy animals then you need to steward healthy ground. If you want to sell those animals than you need to create a market that will support it. The way to achieve a profitable and sustainable system like that is to educate yourself as to the factors which drive that system.
For instance:
Good soil starts usually having something green growing in it, mostly grasses and legumes. That soil builds its health through cycles of intensive grazing and long rest.
You can get healthy animals by creating a herd that is genetically adapted to meet both the local environmental demands, such as the severity of the winter or forage availability, as well as the production demands that you place on them, such as the timing of calving and amount of weight gain.
A good rancher understands that you cannot turn an ass into a horse by fighting nature. Only by working within the limitations of your environment can you create realistic demands of your animals. Anything else will result in a system that is both inefficient and labor intensive for you and the animals.
But it doesn’t matter if you have the finest grass feed, organically raised, tenderized, localized, grassfed beef in the world, because if no one knows why they should consider buying your product over what they find in the supermarket, or doesn’t know that it exists in the first place, then all you have is a cow, not a profit. This is where talking to and writing for the public becomes essential to the viability of an operation outside of a conventional system. If you are selling beef in a manner that adheres to your own personal values and in a way that is site specific, then every step, including getting people excited about what you are producing, must be taken by you.
The stewardship and the marketing must can take off at full steam. It seems to me that you can take this on at the greatest possible pace. You can never have too much grass or plant too many trees, just as you can never reach enough ears in spreading news that you can provide healthy food that was raised in a sustainable fashion. But if you start breeding livestock before you know what your land can sustain itself and that a market will support your finished product, then you are in danger of dropping all the balls at once. If there is one lesson to take from nature it is this. Things take time.
But things also take doing. And it is in doing these things mentioned above that a farm starts to take on a life of its own. This summer I am going to take what I have learned from the Sabo’s and try it out on 3 acres of pasture just outside of Bozeman. The family that my friends and I are renting it from are giving us this opportunity so that I can implement the ideas and tools that I learned here at the ranch. The pasture is full of weeds and after trying spraying and grazing, the family was giving up. But after explaining that weeds are indicative of an imbalanced soil and improper grazing, they were willing to give it one more try.
Now, we are raising chickens, sheep, goats and pigs as well as growing a vegetable garden and collecting waste food from restaurants for compost and animal feed, all within a system that is designed to take advantage of the local conditions of our rented ground.
If there is anything more exciting than having been given the chance to work side by side with the Sabo Family, then it is to be able to take what they taught me and put it into practice in Bozeman.