u/One_Vision_

It was dust in the wind. Caryl and I honestly thought we'd made a few million dollar mistake buying this ranch. Short growing season. Short season irrigation rights.

The mile-and-a-half-long fields were mostly weeds or bare dirt. Part of it was still stripped to dust from last year's potato harvest. The irrigation was hashed too - broken pipe scattered everywhere, fences falling, two old pivots barely limping along. We genuinely didn't know if we could make it work.

But we got busy anyway. Caryl started building cover crop mixes. That first year we had 18 different types of seed falling through the old drill. Meanwhile Scott and I went after the irrigation, putting money into a new pivot and getting the old ones running again.

By the end of the first season, most of the ground had living plants covering it. A lot of it was weeds, but it was cover, and even though it looked embarrassing, we came out a little money ahead baling some of it and grazing the rest high intensity/short duration with long rest periods. Through the winter we fed on the ground while the cows polished off the cover crops.

Year two: fewer weeds and more production. Year three we added perennials planted with the cover crops for a total of nearly 40 species and varieties. By year four the perennials were established, some annuals reseeded, and we grazed it late into the season.

And this year, year five, the land is finally paying us back. It's all diverse perennials now. We just calculated the first cut hay yield on this short-season ranch: 3 tons per acre, with another 1.5 to 2 tons of grazing likely this fall, on ground that couldn't produce a ton of dry matter an acre when we bought it.

I'm telling you this because Caryl and I are still astounded. All we put in was sweat, seed, old equipment, and cows. Dirt that used to blow from my hands is soil now, full of life. It went from gray ash to chocolate cake. It smells good. It’s alive. It’s beautiful.

I'm also telling you this because a lot of advisers will tell you it can't be done without spray, fertilizer, and monocrops. But in just a few years, we saw that nature still holds all the cards.

Lean in.

— Glenn

https://www.instagram.com/alderspring\_ranch

https://www.alderspring.com/

I wonder what they said it meant to get it through.