Sustainability I: Walmart
Several years ago the Nature Conservancy called and said they wanted to fly me and other ranchers to Arkansas to discuss “sustainability” with Walmart executives. My initial response: What? Walmart executives? The Nature Conservancy? Sustainability? It turns out Walmart sells a lot of meat and they wanted to get a jump on sustainability marketing. The Nature Conservancy saw an opportunity to leverage a big player into a greener protocol. I thought I could learn something from the smart guys at Walmart and The Nature Conservancy so I headed to Arkansas.
The first thing I learned was that ranchers have a very different view of sustainability than most.
Walmart wanted to know what practices or protocols ranchers might follow in order to be part of a “sustainable beef chain”. Their premise was that these practices entailed sacrifice for the rancher and would require economic compensation. The ranchers, including myself, struggled to answer their question. Most rancher’s view of sustainability is fundamentally different because we depend on our ecosystem to survive. A cost analysis on ways to limit our ecological impact is a foreign concept. Instead our land and our cattle force us toward sustainability or we go out of business.
Stocking rate is the most fundamental example of forced sustainability for ranchers.
When too many cattle compete for the limited forage resource on a ranch the performance of individual animals suffers. For example, yearling cattle grazing on pasture need to gain 1.5 or more pounds per day to make a profit in most circumstances (similar limits apply for cows and calves). If I have too many cattle on the land and they gain only 1 pound per day I lose money that year. That economic signal causes me to change my behavior the next year before chronic overstocking has caused long term ecological damage. Ranchers who do not respond to the “overstocking signal” eventually go out of business.
This scenario is very real and lies at the core of a ranchers view of sustainability. Our dependency on the land resource forces a limited stocking rate and an associated baseline level of ecological health.
This feedback mechanism where the land speaks to the rancher is at the core of Holistic Management.
The next few journal posts will continue this discussion beyond “sustainability”. We don’t want to just maintain or sustain our land, we want to improve and maximize ecological health. We will look at concrete examples of how ecological improvement, ie. increased diversity, leads to improved bottom line.
