By: Buz Kloot
I was out in Danielsville Georgia preparing for a grazing field day when my friend, Michael Hall, former NRCS grazing specialist, told me that Stan Boltz passed away. I say this because I cannot imagine how his loss must be felt by his family, friends and community, also his NRCS colleagues as he worked as a Regional Soil Health Specialist. I also say this because the ripple effect of his loss was felt down here in South Carolina and Georgia as well and who knows where else Stan had such an amazing influence.
When I was directed by the NRCS to start talking about perennial systems (I had always worked with row crop systems up to that point), the first person I was told to talk to was Stan Boltz. I even remember the date, September 9, 2020.
Stan talked to me (keep in mind that I was completely new to prairie habitats) about some of his concerns. His big concern was the loss of prairie habitat – the obvious one was conversion to cropland, especially in eastern South Dakota. This was the first time I heard that nonnative cool season grasses (smooth brome, crested wheatgrass and Kentucky bluegrass) robbed the range of resilience in dry weather, affected aboveground wildlife and was death to soil biology (his words, not mine). This was evident in the visible degradation of soil structure in pastures infested with these plants.
Stan was also the first person to introduce the concept of Adaptive Grazing to me. I have since learned a lot about the subject and hopefully this is evident in the body of work (videos, podcasts and written work) at GrowingResilience.com.
In that first talk, Stan told me to speak to amazing ranchers like Jim Faulstich, Gene Ausland and Pat Guptill, and it was through Stan and these and other ranchers that I got to fall in love with the prairie.
The next time I spoke with Stan was in March 2021 during a podcast interview. We went into more detail on rangeland health. This podcast was aired later that year and the link to the podcast and the associated blog are displayed at the end of this page.
Stan and Mitch Faulkner, whom we lost not six months ago, were also deeply involved in developing the SD Drought Tool which in my opinion, is invaluable to the rangeland manager and user friendly enough for even a noob like me to use.
When I read through Stan’s obituary, I was struck by the fact that Stan was 4 years younger than I am and that we lost him and Mitch too soon. Yesterday in Church, I was reminded in the sermon of the movie Shadowlands about C.S. Lewis’s life and the untimely loss of his wife who discovered she had cancer even before he married her. Some of Lewis’s confident assertions in his writings that loss makes us stronger and refines us by putting us through “the fiery furnace” came back to him after losing his beloved and suddenly his own words sounded like meaningless platitudes in the face of his own crushing grief. What Lewis was left with was this inexplicable sense that God was somehow not only with him, but actually experiencing his grief with him. This is too deep for me to fully understand as I am only left with questions of why we lose these good people.
However, having just ‘celebrated’ my own 65th birthday, I have become aware of my own mortality and realize that I am sure my family and community may experience my passing differently than the community at large. But I would hope that if I were able to have but a fraction of the legacy that Stan and indeed Mitch had on the rangeland and soil health community, I would be content with my fleeting trip on this planet.
In South Africa, there is a saying in Zulu that when we part from someone, we say Hamba kahle which means "go well”.
Hamba kahle Stan. Your legacy lives on in the people you inspired and the land you cherished.
Links:
For those of you who may not have know Stan personally, we also leave a link to his obituary: https://www.welterfuneralhome.com/obituary/stanley-boltz
Visit these “Growing Resilience Through Our Soils” information pages:
1. Podcast page for drought planning fact sheets, Q&As, news, podcasts, and more.
2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture.
3. Follow Growing Resilience on social media:
4. Our homepage: www.growingresiliencesd.com