October Reading List: Five Books on Scale
From the vastness of the universe all the way down to the very personal challenges of a young man from Wyoming, a selection of books that examine the micro to better understand the macro (or vice versa).
Fall Senescence
We are now on the cusp of one of the great transitions to occur each year on the shortgrass prairie: the shift from the growing season to the dormant season, when life becomes subdued by the threat of winter.
Healthy Earth 80 Years in the Making
António Garcia has been farming successfully for over seven decades. His guiding principle? Topsoil. Meet one of the local farmers whose produce supplies the Zapata Ranch kitchen.
5 Homesteading Tips From a Holistic Management Expert
Don’t start until you finish, don’t be afraid to ask, and other advice on starting a small-scale growing operation from consultant and educator Kirk Gadzia.
Ranchlands Today
In the Unknown Certainty of Tomorrow It is November 1999. I am standing in the Chico Basin ranch corrals, watching […]
Horses and Helicopters
There’s definitely certain situations where the helicopter shines. But cutting pairs, sorting cattle, you can’t do that in a helicopter or a bike, that’s a horse job. The interesting thing is that people think it’s one or the other, but in combination, you can’t beat it.
Water is King
Water is the most crucial tool in establishing a regenerative, rotational grazing operation on a large scale.
From Locals, For Locals
For six years, Nick Chambers, aka Chef Funghi, has managed Valley Roots Food Hub, a distributor of locally grown produce located in Mosca, Colorado. Besides supplying truly local produce to consumers across Southern Colorado, Nick’s operation supplies the majority of produce featured on Chef Chase Kelly’s menu at Ranchlands’ Zapata Ranch.
Self Selection
I was first introduced to the term “self-selection” in a barefoot trimming clinic in Australia about a year ago. The couple that were hosting the clinic, a trimmer and a vet, were starting a holistic rehab center in New South Wales in which one of the main focus points would be a Paddock-Paradise-style track system with a wide variety of planted herbs to provide the natural process of self-selection to their rehab horses. The thought behind this being that in the wild, horses (and other grazing animals) will seek out and choose to eat specific plants with medicinal properties to benefit their unique health, a process that most domestic horses don’t have access to, and which most horse owners compensate for by feeding an excess of supplements that blanket a wide variety of needs as a “cover all the bases” strategy.
Little Bulls with a Large Impact
Lessons from a small-scale prescriptive grazing project.