Charcoal and melt water

Navigating hard life stuff is, well, hard. There are no perfect outcomes and actual outcomes seldom look much like desired outcomes.

To make things really fun, there are essentially zero life situations which are not made up of multiple parts and multiple ape-lizards which do not immediately cast 1st, 2nd, 3rd -- even nth -- order effect shadows.

The world is dynamic and kinetic. In certain ways and with certain situations it's an ongoing deflagration continually threatening to step to detonation.

Not boring.

Over the years I've found that the key to keeping as much blood in the body as possible is to trust god and then work as hard as possible to do the best things for the best reasons to the best of your ability. Following this recipe I never get what I want but I always, it seems, get what is best. And while that path is often unpleasant and difficult, it somehow manages to add exponential value to the heartbeats expended in the doing.

As you can tell I'm talking around every bit of detail. Someday I might publish the details because I think the story might be helpful to some people. For now though, the message of the solution will have to be enough.

Trust God. Don't quit. Drive on.

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Chicken morning. This is from Friday.



Chicken morning with pigeon puppies. Also from Friday.



Friday's rainbow. A storm had just passed over. It delivered only a bit of wind and very light rain, but in its wake it kissed us with magic.



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Yesterday morning with calves.

All of us living creatures go on until we no longer go on.

I don't know what or why. Looks perfectly healthy, and as if he just keeled over. Perhaps lightning.

His mama doesn't, of course, understand. She's also not human. Anthropomorphizing her bovine existence is a bit twisted. 

She does understand that her full and tight udder is uncomfortable.

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Remember this?





Well...





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Here's a snapshot of nature's wonder and complexity. Down through the years we've had a larkspur (Delphinium sp.) infestation along the w-e draw cutting through our south unit. Larkspur is extremely toxic and cattle sometimes eat it when it is a young plant. They don't eat it at all after flowering, at least in my experience. Therefore we keep cattle out of that part of the pasture until the poisonous weed has finished blooming. Larkspur is, by the way, is a non-native forb.

There are of course a number of ways to address the problem of larkspur. The one that most people immediately think about is using a herbicide to kill it. And that will work. Kinda. You'll simply never get a complete larkspur kill though, and you'll always have a seed burden in the ground, so you'll never win the battle chemically. In addition, you'll do awful harm to the other broad-leaf forbs making up the shortgrass prairie ecosystem. And that, my friends, is not only holistically wrong, it's shooting yourself in the foot as a grass farmer/rancher.

Let me just back track a bit and restate my ranching practice and fundamental principles. While I do raise cattle (primarily or secondarily) and while I do love to call my self a rancher, the cattle are really only a means to the end of preserving the grassland ecosystem of the ranch. That's the real asset, and it's the thing that drives all else. We use the cattle to harvest the grass which is essential to the health and sustainability of any grassland -- they were all evolved to be grazed and grazing them is every bit as vital to the ecosystem as sunshine and rain. Happily, there is also a system for turning cattle into cash, and cash allows us to be sustainable in the societal ape-lizard realm. But it all goes away if we don't nurture and preserve the ecosystem of the land we own. Therefore we are grass farmers and caretakers first, last, and always.

All the above being true, applying herbicide to control larkspur will seriously and adversely affect the ecosystem we must nurture. And it won't get the job done.

So what to do?

A dozen or so years ago when I took over the boots-on-the-ground management of the ranch ecosystem the larkspur problem was quite bad and getting worse. The bandaids we had been using were just covering up the problem.

In my mind the proper solution was to introduce management and grazing practices which supported native grass/forb growth. In theory this would allow the natives to choke out the non-native larkspur. But it wouldn't happen overnight, and it would mean some reduction in income as part of the solution would be to reduce cattle numbers.

Flash forward a dozen years or so. Where once there was abundant larkspur, now there is almost none.

Did my management practices do the trick? Well, they didn't hurt. But nature is the architect and the engineer. And in a very cool way, nature's climate variability -- which 99.99 percent of people love to call global warming and shit themselves over -- has been a big driver. More rain, more carbon, less heat. The native ecosystem thrives and with the absence of overgrazing her grass bounty is incredible.

It happens on nature's time though.

This is the kind of thing which is true sustainability.

And it's diametrically opposed to virtual sustainability.

All us ape-lizards have a tough choice. Live in the tee-vee or in the real world.

Take yer pick.

Be well and embrace the blessings of liberty.