Dan Rasmussen's family has been on their South Dakota ranch since 1914. As somebody with a family history in ranching, Dan has seen firsthand the endearing, invaluable, and beautiful facets of ranching culture – the deep power it has to bring people closer to themselves, the land, the animals, and each other. He wants to make it clear that he doesn't aim to change this.
“We don't want to change our culture completely, but we want to change it for the benefit of the land, the people, our finances, and the livestock. That culture where neighbors are working together, helping each other out, we don't want to lose that or the ability to live that life. But in order to maintain it, we’re going to have to make some changes in ranch country,” says Dan. “There’s no reason to lose the ranch culture that so many of us love and want to maintain. The part of the culture we want to change is the part that doesn’t support land health and soil health.”
When it comes to Dan Rasmussen’s pivot down the path of soil health, he says “curiosity killed the cat”. Every farmer or rancher has a turning point where their priorities, strategies and perspective shift, and Dan says he’s so curious that he’s always keeping a keen eye out for facets of his work he may have overlooked.
“That very curiosity is what took me out from the old ranching culture I saw in the 80’s to the new ranching culture that I know now,” says Dan. “In 1991, I went through a program called ‘Bootstraps’, which was an extension program teaching people how to get to the next level of management in ranching. That's where my curiosity kicked in, and I decided I want to learn more. I figure I'm going to be learning until my last day.”
Dan has now been working with the South Dakota Grassland Coalition for 22 years and was a board member for 18. Through this work he saw a need - he watched people emerge from grazing schools with a head full of entirely new strategies, but not enough support or context to follow through in the long run. “So, we started a consulting program we called the Grazing School Follow-Up Program. I’d say we’ve gone through about 120 ranches now in South Dakota and neighboring states.”
Dan references the chart in Figure 1 to illustrate that everyone is somewhere on this line and show that the ideal process that ranchers start down, depending on where they are on the line, when leaving a grazing school with new intentions and a new soil-health-oriented approach. Holistic resource management helps managers move to the right on the line. Improved grazing practices improve soil health. To get these improvements, management must give pastures time for soil to become healthier before increasing stocking rate.
Rasmussen emphasizes that any season-long grazing is overgrazing, as indicated by the starting point on the left most extreme of Figure 1. The first stage in the progression, moving to the right to “slow rotational grazing”, gives plants some time to rest after having been repeatedly grazed by livestock. “The next stop is ‘fast rotational grazing’; this gives those plants a much longer recovery time. And on the far right side is ‘faster rotational grazing’, and that is more like intensive rotational grazing where an example would be 400 yearlings in a pasture for one day, and then they move on and don't come back for 14 months.”
One indicator of healthy soil is that it infiltrates water well. In soil that has been overgrazed, organic matter decreases and water is less likely to effectively infiltrate into the soil, leading to ponding, runoff, and undernourished soil. Rasmussen references the term “effective rainfall,” coined by farmer and resource management expert Alan Savory.
“So, when my neighbors or friends say ‘I had two inches of rain’, I ask them, ‘well, how much of that actually went into your soil?’ If their soil was healthy, they might have had an effective rainfall of two inches. If the soil is not healthy, they might have had an effective rainfall of a quarter of an inch, while the remaining inch and three quarters ran off and went to a river or a dam or something like that. What we want is to keep every drop we can on the prairie, on the grassland, on our property.”
Moving management toward “fast rotational grazing”, the soil receives more rest, allowing root structure, plant diversity, and water infiltration to recover and improve. The principle behind rotational grazing is that the livestock is in a different pasture on the 1st of May every year, allowing each paddock sufficient rest time across differing seasons each year.
“Eventually you come back, and you do it all over again. So, the cattle come in in June and they graze it down to 4-5 inches high and then they move on. Then the grass is growing, growing, growing. Then we’re in September, the grass is pretty high. Now we’re in December and it's snowing. That snow is landing on that grass that had a chance to grow up and now we have insulation for the soil. That's nature's way of protecting that soil. With snow on that grass, there's an insulation factor, and we have soil activity with bugs [soil microbes] thriving longer than if the grass was only 4 inches tall all summer long. We have that bug activity under there because in the middle of the winter there's areas, if the grass is tall enough, that might not even have frost through it. And that allows these bugs to create organic matter and do their work much longer.”
Climbing The Learning Curve
While easy to say, it can all be very difficult to execute. Dan wants to offer support for the steep progression from the far-left side of the chart, which is an entrenched ranching culture, to the far right side, which is a new paradigm with a different way to manage soil, land, and livestock.
“We can make a lot of mistakes, costly mistakes, along the way. People can lose interest, lose money – the path is fraught with mistakes. One way to make this journey successful over our years is through education. Holistic resource management is an educational tool originally started by Allan Savory himself that teaches us how to make this trip from seasonal overgrazing to intensive rotational grazing with the least amount of casualties.”
When addressing the challenges ranchers face in transitioning to new grazing practices, Dan introduces the Dunning-Kruger effect. This psychological phenomenon describes how people with limited knowledge often overestimate their competence, while those with more experience recognize the complexity and feel less confident. Dan explains that new ranchers often get excited and invest heavily after attending a grazing school, only to face difficulties and become disillusioned. To combat this, he stresses the importance of making small, manageable changes and building a support network of mentors and consultants.
“The reason that we put the follow up program together was that ranchers come to the grazing school, they're there three days, their head is filled with new ideas, then they go home. Now, how do they implement this stuff? That's why we have consultants that will come to the ranch and spend about 40 hours with a rancher, do a grazing plan from the resource inventory and the mapping and help answer these questions. And we have a mentorship program that people can find on our website and call our mentors with questions. – Why did this fail? What should I do here? The tragedy of this is getting started and going too fast, and becoming so disillusioned because you have failures that you quit. We want to avoid that.”
Dan emphasizes the importance of surrounding oneself with a network of resources whose first priority is not profit, so that when the inevitable setbacks arrive, you are not financially being dug further into a hole.
“And that's where education comes in. You can take your issues and problems to these workshops and look for answers there, and oftentimes your answer can come from participants. Oftentimes at our workshops, our participants are where we’re getting a lot of good information.”
South Dakota Grassland Coalition has a myriad of partners looking to make resources more accessible to ranchers and farmers, partners willing to supply cost-share dollars. Dan explains that through these partnerships, the grazing school can cost $300, about a third of what it costs to actually put it on, and the follow up program can cost $150, which is about a twentieth of the actual cost of the program. A $4000 consulting program can cost $150 through the support of these partnerships.
“We’ve tried to design this so that there is no obstacle financially to doing this. The obstacle that I often hear is: ‘I’m not ready to start yet’, or ‘I don't want you to see the disaster I have at home yet, I want to fix some of it first’. We do not, as consultants, judge anything. We say, ‘this is where you're at’. Everybody is somewhere, and our job as consultants is to say this is where you are, let's get started, what's the first step. Which is often the hardest thing for a lot of land managers, ranchers, to get past– the first step. As a consultant, I can sit down at the kitchen table, and after the resource inventory is done, after the mapping is done, and I know a little more about the operation– I can just say here's the first step– it’s small, it doesn't take much, not very expensive, and once you take the first step and see the results, it is incredibly helpful in taking the next 2,3,4,5, -thousand steps.”
In all, Rasmussen wants to be one of the many firmly leading the charge to a new paradigm in ranching culture, one small change at a time. In this process, he takes the human into account by acknowledging how discouraging it can be to shift one’s land management approach, and knowing how imperative it is to have an intuitive, attentive support network.
Find the full interview on the Growing Resilience site at: https://www.growingresiliencesd.com/podcasts/episode/fcf47f11/65-sd-ranchers-tips-for-bridging-traditional-ranching-culture-and-the-best-of-modern-agriculture or search for the SoilHealthLabs podcast on your favorite podcast app.
Other helpful Links:
SD Grassland Coalition’s Grazing Schools: https://sdgrass.org/grazing-school/
SD Grassland Coalition’s Resources: https://sdgrass.org/resources/ (includes mentoring network, videos, blog, radio spots, weather stations)
Check out the feature on Dan in the July issue of The South Dakota Cattleman, pages 20-21. https://issuu.com/sdcattleman/docs/july-aug_issuufinal
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