(Editor's Note: I wrote this story several years ago, prior to planning a television show on the Mortenson Ranch).
South Dakota Rancher has Conservation Ethic By Tony Dean
In 1862, Washington, DC-based Senators and Congressmen decreed that 160 acres of land was more than enough for anyone. So, the elected leaders of a growing young nation offered that much land…free…in the west…to anyone willing to settle it. They had no trouble finding takers, but there were a few attached strings. They required cultivation of a portion of the property, and it's not hard to imagine someone who had never set foot on what would become South Dakota, assuming all land was good farmland. Sometime in 2002, as Washington-based leaders…Senators and Congressmen… will authorize final payments to over 200 property owners in Pierre and Fort Pierre. Their properties have experienced flooding due largely to siltation in Lake Sharpe, Taxpayers in America will be paying for mistakes made by political leaders in the 1800’s, by homesteaders and by many current property owners.
Today, we can only wonder how many trees were cut for houses, barns and fences. But we do know how plowing this fragile land…impacted it. Today, 139 years later, the scars remain; ugly gullies, void of vegetation, that prior to the construction of the Missouri River reservoirs carried Dakota soil to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, today it is trapped in a series of giant reservoirs, slowly filling them from the bottom up.
In some cases, homesteaders faced problems so serious, a benevolent government bought them out. The resulted in the creation of what is now known as the National Grasslands.
On a July morning well over a century later, Clarence Mortenson gazes across a deep, wooded draw, on his Stanley County, SD ranch, and smiles.
"It's taken me over 50 years to heal what was done during 10 years of homesteading," he says, with the smug satisfaction of a man who had a vision and turned it into reality.
The Mortenson ranch is comprised of three separate parcels; the 10,000 acre home Place, two separate pieces across the Cheyenne River that total another 11,300 acres and another three parcels of leased land.
Clarence is proud. He's retired, has even taken up golf and resides in Sun City, AZ. His son, Todd, manages the land and cattle on behalf of his brother, Curt, a Pierre attorney. Another son, Jeff, owns one third of the land and is starting a native seed business. But each has been involved in the on-going changes that have occurred in this hilly, erosion-prone land overlooking the Cheyenne River near its confluence with Lake Oahe, some 65 miles northwest of Pierre, SD. Their ranch is considered a conservation showplace and they were recipients of the prestigious Chevron Conservation award two years ago. They were even included in the Bad River Water Quality Improvement program, a massive effort aimed at reducing siltation into the Missouri River, until the funding was pulled from projects on their ranch.
Homesteading was not kind to this county, or to many other areas across the Dakotas. In 1910, Stanley County had a population of 14,975. Fifteen years later, just 2,627 residents remained, the balance leaving behind a trail of eroded, badly used land. Deep, ugly gullies, that with each rain or snowmelt, carry silt into Lake Oahe, ultimately choking the life from this giant prairie impoundment.
The late Mark Reisner wrote “Cadillac Desert,” a book about water development in the western US, that focused on the dam building mania that gripped the Congress and ruined some of the continent’s finest rivers. If there was a central thesis to Reisner’s book, it was this: all dams will fail, and that it is not whether, but when. A few, he said, will fail due to location or faulty engineering. But most, he wrote, will fail because siltation will fill them. This is especially true from the Missouri River westward where soils are erodible, rainfall sparse, and where too many ranchers believe that any grass left after the summer grazing season is wasted.
Clarence Mortenson is not one of them. He’s running more cattle than he’s ever had on his land, and they are fatter because the Mortenson ranch is more profitable than most. "I think we probably operate one of the most profitable ranches in South Dakota," he says, in a matter-of-fact way that says he knows, without comparing bank accounts, that this is true.
Used properly, this is good land. Abused, it becomes poor land. Little of it is suited for farming, and some should be grazed only lightly, if at all. This is prairie and when it is diverse prairie, it has the capability of efficiently turning grass into protein. But only in a handful of places, is it done as well as it is here. There are some in the environmental crowd who believe cows are evil, that grazing is a curse. They’re wrong. The prairie evolved with grazing. Properly done, grazing creates more vigorous plant growth. And there are others who believe grazing is OK…if it is done by buffalo. It reminds us of the time Ted Turner was given a standing ovation by a group of wildlife biologists because he replaced cattle with buffalo. They can be forgiven for cheering but should be mindful that free-roaming buffalo grazed an area and then moved on. Enclose the same animal in a fenced pasture, it is still a grazer and can do the same damage a cow can do.
The grazing system the Mortenson’s employ in their ranching operations, one you shall learn about as we go along, is not without its detractors. They include range managers, ranchers, public land managers, and surprisingly, a large portion of vegetarian environmentalists. Some range managers dislike it, we’re told, because it isn’t what they’ve been taught or is currently taught in land grant colleges. Public land managers fault it because it’s more labor intensive and they have enough problems dealing with grazing associations to have to tell them they’re going to work harder. And in spite of the fact that this system seems to produce healthier land, better grass and more grassland diversity, some environmentalists dislike it because it enables a rancher to graze significantly more cattle on the same amount of ground.
An inquisitive writer, one known to have been critical of public land grazing, shades his eyes and scans the horizon, which includes the shimmering surface of Lake Oahe, 260 miles long, stretching from Pierre to Bismarck. He knows the fate of this prairie ocean lies in the hands of landowners like Clarence. The draw in front of him is lined with ash trees. It wasn't always this way. He remembers hunting here, in this exact draw over a quarter century ago, along with Jack Merwin and Bruce Coonrod. There were few trees then and even fewer deer. The writer hadn't seen the ranch since that hunt and where he stands today, there were no trees, no shrubs. Instead, today there's ash, cottonwood, elm, hackberry and juniper; chokecherry, wild plum and currants. And within a 30-foot circle around the writer, there's an amazing diversity in grasses and forbs. Western wheatgrass, buffalo grass, green needlegrass, blue grama. Even a stand of little bluestem. The late summer tans of the grass is punctuated with colorful stands of purple coneflowers, Sensitive Brian, Breadroot, and many others including wildflowers beyond the writers’ identification ability. He is told that experts from the University have identified seven different species of trees, two vines, 17 shrubs and dozens of wildflowers, all on this ranch.
In 1941, Clarence came home to run the family ranch, fresh from earning a degree in geology from SD State University. He was about to find that the degree wasn’t wasted and that what he’d learn about land, water, grass, trees, insects and wildlife over the next five decades would make him the envy of the range managers at the same college.
He discovered there was a bed of gravel underlying much of the ranch. And, his first task was to develop a dam to help recharge underground water. He knew water was important. But, he was also a student of history, the study of which is important because it is impossible to know where we’re going unless we know where we’ve been.
Louis Young was one of the first homesteaders near Foster Creek, the same creek that flows through the Mortenson ranch today. A year after Clarence had been at the helm of the ranch, Young told him what the country looked like in the 1890’s.
“The creeks could be crossed with team and buggy at a trot,” he recalled, “and they were tree-lined. Water holes that never went dry existed about every mile along the creek, and the grass was belly-deep on a team of horses.”
Clarence looked around. What he saw bore no resemblance to what Young described. For the next several decades…transforming the gullies to Young’s vision, became his goal.
He began by building a dam to control the erosion, then another dam, then another, and another, and another. Wet periods followed. He recalls that the winter of 1949-50 was a wet one. The runoff washed out a pair of 24-inch culverts between the house and the barn in late March, and as he watched the water, he began to wonder.
“What would it be like if all the water originating on the ranch, could be kept here for use over an extended period of time,” he asked?
Of course, everyone’s heard of the “dirty 30’s. However, the next decade was one of the wettest periods in the history of Stanley County. And, while the rain was welcome, it only intensified the erosion problems. It was time to heal the land, a project that takes time.
The first task is to slow the water. Clarence built two dams on Foster Creek; low dams that experts said would never hold much water. That did not bother Clarence. He only wanted to slow it. In one year, the dams silted in and vegetation began to take root, first willows, and then cottonwoods. Soon, beavers moved in and took over the dam building chores. To understand the enormity of the task, you must realize that Foster Creek plunges 400 vertical feet in less than eight miles. And, as it flows, it cuts through very erosive soil. But, if you can slow the water and allow vegetation to take hold, you have applied the glue that holds prairie soil in place. And Clarence was learning that everything on the ranch had a purpose.
The interaction of the beavers was the first indication of how interrelated everything would be on his ranch. As his sons grew, they were indoctrinated early with what Aldo Leopold called, “a land ethic.”
Over coffee in the ranch headquarters overlooking Todd’s draw, the writer takes note of something Clarence said earlier that day.
“We manage everything concurrently,” he said, “insects, plants, grass, trees, wildlife. Everything plays a role in our management decisions.”
He explains that some insects pollinate the grasses, others, the forbs, and some serve as food for other insects, birds or animals. There’s no spraying on this ranch because it kills beneficial insects. The Mortenson’s are willing to put up with some losses to save insects that are beneficial to the operation.
Then came another lesson.
“I’d really been working hard to establish trees,” recalls Mortenson. “I hand planted many of them and some of the ash trees were beginning to move down the draws. We had a prairie dog town and 1080 was legal at the time, so I decided to get rid of them. Dumbest thing I ever did. A few days later, I found dead coyotes, then dead raptors. But the lesson didn’t sink in until that winter. I never saw so many rabbits and they nearly wiped out everything I’d done with trees. That was when I realized that everything that’s out there has its purpose.”
But, that was long ago, and today, the ash trees have moved down the hills. And what has evolved here is something called “holistic range management.” University-trained range managers as well as those who manage public lands, have a hard time with that term. In fact, in the Restoration Guidebook entitled, “The Mortenson Ranch – Cattle and Trees At Home on the Range,” a publication prepared by the College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences at SD State University, the term is used just twice. Holistic management is new and sometimes, it takes a while to accept new thinking.
However, the Mortenson’s are believers in the method, first developed by Allan Savory, who studied ungulates in Africa and introduced the concept to America. Savory stresses managing every living thing concurrently, a philosophy reminiscent of Aldo Leopold’s belief in “saving all the parts.”
Savory’s system employs rapid rotation grazing, and perhaps that’s the reason it hasn’t caught on among many ranchers. During a goodly portion of the summer, cattle are rotated from pasture to pasture as frequently as every 3 to 7 days. There’s a complete absence of flies because the larva hatch in the manure and by the time hatching occurs, the cattle have already been moved to another pasture a mile away. The grazing is short and intensive and the grasses respond with more vigorous growth. Come sale time, calves born on the Mortenson ranch frequently weigh up to 200 pounds more than cows born at the same time on other ranches. If calves are selling for $100 per-hundred- weight, that means Mortenson cows are fetching, on the average, $200 more than the others do. These are not corn-fattened cows. They gain the weight on the superb forage on this ranch.
“The sun is free,” notes Todd, “and that creates the energy to grow the grass which is eaten by the cows and converted into protein. It’s a great system that works even better with this type of management.”
The writer walks along a draw accompanied by two generations of Mortensons. A pile of skunk scat is discovered by Todd who quickly dissects it with his pocketknife. It contains chokecherry pits coated with nature’s fertilizer.
Almost every plant on the ranch is seeded in this way, passing first through the digestive tract of a bird or animal, then fertilized, and dropped to the ground, where it is compacted into the soil by the hooves of the larger grazing animals. It’s a natural system that would be hard to improve.
The writer cannot help but notice the preponderance of birds, large numbers, and species he’s never seen. He’s not the first. In 1997, Bruce Harris, an ornithologist, conducted a three-day survey of birds on the ranch. He recorded 67 species, many, neo-tropical migrants that have been fighting a losing battle for survival because of the destruction of their grassland habitat across America. The sharptail and ringneck population is excellent and prairie chickens, the birds that first greeted the homesteading arrivals in the late 1800’s, have been staging a major comeback. Mule deer have rebounded and so have whitetails, which lost so much habitat when Oahe’s rising waters inundated the Cheyenne River bottoms in the 1960’s. Wild turkeys abound.
Certainly other ranchers must have taken note of the larger size of the Mortenson cattle. How do they react to Mortenson management?
Both Father and Son exchange glances, then pause before answering that question. It’s obvious they do not wish to upset colleagues, friends or neighbors. Todd speaks first.
“Most look, they see what we’ve done and then they say, but that won’t work on our ranch,” he says. “Some things probably have to be modified, and they might have to initially reduce the size of their herd, because you can’t get the kind of grass growth we get at the outset without having a few less cattle. And it does take more money to fence the pastures and more work to move the cattle more rapidly…but it certainly pays off.”
Clarence adds, “Our rangeland is sustainable and healthy, we have diversity and wildlife. My other son, Jeff, is starting a native seed business; we earn income from a fee hunting operation and we’ve been able to increase our cattle numbers a third more than we could just a couple decades ago. And because of our woody draws, we lose very few animals in severe weather. During that blizzard in ’97 when the cattle losses were so great across South Dakota, we lost one calf…that was sick before the storm started.”
The writer ponders this, then thinks about all of the deeply eroded gullies along US Hiway 34 he saw on the drive west from Fort Pierre. Those gullies are probably responsible for a goodly portion of the silt that clogs Lake Sharpe.
He turns to Mortenson and asks, “If all ranches in these watersheds did what you’re doing, could we curb much of the silt that currently flows into the Missouri River reservoirs?
There is no hesitation.
“Sure,” he says. “You can’t mine rangeland or farmland and that’s what so many seem to do. You nurture it, realize how everything’s related out there, and along the way, you discover that this is conservation. And it doesn’t cost. It pays.”
The writer remembers a dinner with a high-ranking Corps of Engineers official earlier in the year. Certainly the engineers who built these dams must have realized that siltation would occur. Why, he asked, did they go ahead, knowing that sometime in the future, we’d have to deal with that problem?
The Corps official replied, “They believed that by then, technology would have provided the ways to do so.”
When an impoundment fills with silt, water can only move laterally. That’s essentially what’s happened in Lake Sharpe. Silt deposition has gradually moved eastward, now reaching the Joe Creek area. Where the old channel had depths measuring 10 to 15-feet, today that same channel is about 6-feet. The sonar does not lie either. The weak signals are the result of a soft bottom.
Some suggest dredging. But, that is a bandaid, albeit a costly one, and one that would have to be frequently applied. Is it not much more sensible to stop the silt before it gets to the reservoirs?
