‘Cowboy logic’ aids conservation

LINCOLN — You might call this the year of the cowboy.

Four of the five Master Conservationist Award winners in production agriculture are ranchers or cattle producers, chosen for their expertise in managing grasslands and cattle herds.

The techniques they use include rotational grazing, water pipelines and prescribed burning, maintaining a delicate balance between grass, soil and animals.

Conservation is more than a smart business practice. It reaches into the soul.

“I just like cattle and grass,” said Sand Hills rancher Thorval Hansen, 72, of Burwell, one of this year’s winners. “It’s the way God made it. When I go out, I feel like I’m close to him. That’s the way he made it, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

The Master Conservationist Awards are sponsored by The World-Herald and the University of Nebraska.

The 2009 winners:

Ÿ Thorval and Artis Hansen, cattle producers representing north-central Nebraska.

Ÿ Rod and Amy Christen, Steinauer, cattle producers representing southeast Nebraska.

Ÿ Lynn and Marlene Myers, Lewellen, cattle producers representing the Panhandle region.

Ÿ Stan and Marilyn Pilcher, Curtis, cattle producers representing southwest Nebraska.

Ÿ Don and Ruby Arduser, Laurel, retired corn and alfalfa farmers representing northeast Nebraska.

In the Community-Public category, the Serenity Garden Club was named a Master Conservationist for building and maintaining a public rock garden on the slopes near Scottsbluff’s Monument Pathway.

The names of this year’s cattle producers came through the Nebraska Grazing Lands Coalition, which nominated Myers, Christen and Pilcher. Hansen also is a member of the group.

It was Myers who spearheaded the coalition’s Cowboy Logic Stewardship Network, a mentoring program in which experienced ranchers share their knowledge with others. Christen and Hansen also are mentors in the program.

Although they each pasture cattle on thousands of acres, the cattlemen face different challenges and diverse geography.

Lynn Myers, 59, is a grizzled cowboy who uses a horse and a lasso to manage cattle on his 15,000-acre Sand Hills spread. He says it takes a bit of “cowboy logic” to master the delicate art of protecting the land while earning a living from it.

“I always look down when I’m riding pastures,” Myers said. “I naturally score composition, condition and changes (of the vegetation). I even monitor my neighbors’ pastures out of habit.”

The Tippetts Myers Ranch has been in the family for a century.

“The grass is our conservation tool,” said Rod Christen, 39, who runs a cow-calf and feeder calf operation on about 2,600 acres.

“Nothing conserves, harvests and stores energy better than grass. If you manage cattle properly, you can enhance the grass and make it thicker.”

Christen works in a pocket of southeast Nebraska that lacks underground water. He subscribes to a rural water district.

He started raising cattle with his father, Richard, 79, who still helps out in the operation, which includes about 300 acres of row crops, primarily corn for silage to feed their cattle.

With three young children, the Christens’ conservation efforts have to include making a profit to support the family.

“It’s a lot easier to be an excellent steward of the land if you don’t have to make it pay,” Rod said.

“If the money isn’t there, you’re going to be tempted not to maintain. You’ve got to live, you’ve got kids to go to school and go to college. You’ve got health care. That’s a big money issue and a big responsibility.’’

“I consider myself to be a steward of the land,” he added. “I want to enhance it and make it better than when we got here, but I have to do it in a way that’s feasible.”

Hansen, who “always wanted a Sand Hills ranch,” bought the 5,000-acre Carson Lake Ranch near Burwell in 1993 and moved there from his family homestead in 1998.

He rented his ground out for a while, but took it back because he wanted to manage it his way.

“With rotational grazing, if you don’t do it right, you can really make a mess of it,” he said. “Four hundred head of cattle, if you don’t pay attention to them, they can really make a mess of a pasture.”

Unlike Myers and Christen, Hansen doesn’t have a cow-calf operation. Instead, he runs between 1,000 and 1,200 yearling cattle, rotating them between pastures in groups of 350 to 400.

Pilcher, 66, bought his 2,200-acre ranch in 1999, after retiring from a 33-year career as an entomologist and extension agent at Colorado State University.

His land in the Loess Canyons had been so overtaken by invasive eastern red cedar trees that he now rents his pastures to a neighbor so he can concentrate on reclaiming the land.

With an estimated 585,000 acres in the region infested with the cedar trees, it’s a problem shared by his neighbors.

As president of the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, Pilcher aids other landowners in conducting prescribed burns to clear cedars. He also has used mechanical shearing to eliminate the trees.

“I was attracted to this area, partially because of the terrain. Even the cedars, although I could immediately see I had a problem, were pretty,” he said.

“When you look at it now, though, you see deciduous trees replacing the cedars. Instead of being just a monoculture of cedars, my gosh, there’s five or six different shrubs, forbs, several grass species and flowering plants, too. The diversity out there now in the vegetation is unbelievable.”

Don Arduser, now 79 and retired, was nominated by a previous Master Conservationist winner, Bob Dickey of Laurel, a former state senator and current president of the National Corn Growers Association.

Arduser was a leader in adopting conservation practices in northeast Nebraska, Dickey said.

He was among the first in his area to install terraces to prevent soil erosion and runoff on his hilly farm ground. He was among the first to abandon his plow to adopt low-tillage and no-tillage practices.

The Serenity Garden Club was formed about 15 years ago, when the public garden was “nothing but a weed patch,’’ said Kathy Tando, club president.

One of the club members, Helena Parker, “saw this slope and all these rocks and said if we’d just rearrange these rocks, we could have a rock garden,” Tando recalled.

The club vowed not to water the garden, which was started in the midst of a drought. They chose drought-tolerant plants and use old newspapers as mulch, she said.

Contact the writer:

402-473-9581, leslie.reed@owh.com