Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
TEN SLEEP, Wyo.—The alfalfa weevil, scourge of Western ranchers, appears when the frost melts, skeletonizing leaves and profits. There are ways to limit its damage – early harvest, livestock grazing, and intercropping alfalfa with grass – but most growers opt for insecticides.
R.C. Carter, a third-generation rancher in Northern Wyoming, recalled a realization he had while using a 1.5-gallon container of concentrated pesticide to spray a 60-acre alfalfa pasture.
“I was pumping this chemical to kill these alfalfa weevils, and it says don’t get it on your skin. And somehow I got it under my armpit. And then on my eyelid. And this stuff burned, it burned for three days, and water didn’t help, you couldn’t wash it off,” he told The Epoch Times at his ranch.
Historically, alfalfa growers used arsenic-based insecticides, which have been mostly phased out, and DDT, now banned for its bio-accumulative and carcinogenic impacts.
In recent years, the pests’ resistance to newer generation chemicals has proven challenging for ranchers.
R.C. Carter’s wife, Annia, herself a fifth-generation Wyoming rancher, remembered the smell. “I thought, ‘this is going to make you sick when you’re older.’”
Soon after, they learned about health risks associated with glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the United States, which early studies found can persist in certain soil conditions for up to 22 years.
“That means even if it’s just put on the soil for the first year, there will still be residual,” Annia Carter said. “It leaches into everything. It doesn’t disappear.”
The experience was a turning point for the Carters, who have since pivoted to “regenerative” or holistic agricultural practices to cultivate pastureland where they graze more than 1,400 cattle, focusing on regrowing native grasses and building soil health without chemical pesticides, fertilizers, tilling, or monocropping.
R.C. Carter dips down into bright, tall grasses and alfalfa to reveal fat slugs and nubby worm castings.
This “bug life” is exciting to him; it signals progress, as do signs of water infiltration. The Carters routinely test the fields for organic matter and say they’re seeing increases where they’ve grazed cattle and then let the land rest and rebound.
Their 7,000-acre ranch near the tiny town of Ten Sleep—named, as legend goes, for being 10 “sleeps” or nights by horseback, a halfway point, between historic Sioux camps—is a speck in the verdant arterial valleys intersecting parched badlands at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains.
“We used to participate in all the normal commodity agriculture. We didn’t know any better,” he said. “Then we were like, this is wrong. And we started looking for—what’s the off-ramp?”
Figuring that out has alienated them from their community, and caught them between critics on both ends of a roiling debate—ranchers who use conventional practices on one side, and conservationists who argue “regenerative” is a buzzy greenwashing of harmful practices.
All of that, the Carters say, stems from misunderstanding.
‘Before the Fences’
Tromping through vibrant pastures, leapfrogging around fresh piles of cow dung and drawing curious stares and a symphony of groans from the 700 or so Black Angus heifers, the Carters called out for one in particular—Stacey.
“What’s up, good looking?” R.C. Carter said as she sidled up for pets. A “bum,” rejected by her mother, the Carters and their three sons took turns bottle-feeding her for a summer while she lived at their ranch. A yard cow.
“That’s the spot!” he said, scratching hard on her hind quarters as she demurely lifted a back hoof in appreciation.
Critics on both sides of the debate who have accused them of overgrazing don’t understand the process or the vision, they said.
“People were calling the BLM, saying this is ruining the land, this should be illegal, it looks terrible,” R.C. Carter said. “But they just don’t understand the strategy, which is a long-term approach.”
Instead of grazing a smaller herd for a longer period on a piece of land, the Carters opt for high-intensity, low-duration grazing, meaning they sometimes move the animals every day or so, now with the help of virtual fencing.
The concept is based on a much older practice.
“We’re really just mimicking what the bison did, what was here before us, before the fences,” Annia Carter said.
Large ungulates such as bison and antelope have long populated the Great Plains; they grazed, fertilized, and trampled pastures, mixing soil and seed in the process.
Millions of bison and other herbivores roaming Western rangelands over millennia contributed to carbon-rich soil and diverse ecosystems—which ranchers such as the Carters hope to restore by building on the ancient blueprint.
“We need to create impact and mix the manure and plant the seeds with the cow’s feet,” R.C. Carter said.
Around Stacey’s neck, and those of her 700 or so brethren, is a collar with a solar panel charger, which pings to a satellite tower. An app on Carter’s phone shows exactly how many cows are in the field, and allows him to move the boundary with a swipe of an index finger.
It’s a shock collar, but not as bad as it sounds, Annia Carter said, explaining the animals may be zapped once when they reach the boundary, but are then quickly deterred by a warning.
“As the cow comes in and she gets close to the new imaginary boundary, she’ll feel a vibration. It’ll beep, and then you’ll see when the cows get close to it, they’re like, ‘Oh man!’ It’s like God’s speaking to ‘em. They’re like, ‘yeah, I’ve been struck down by lightning before!’” R.C. Carter said. “They respect it real quick.”
Controlling the collared animals via satellite has allowed the ranchers to “fine-tune” their footprint, directing them to mow down a whole pasture, devouring all the grass and alfalfa—and, potentially, invasive species—instead of grazing selectively.
“We’re using more cattle in less area—we’re really hitting it hard,” he said, “but we are resting longer. So we won’t come back to the same spot every year. You have to let that time for the land and the decomposition and all the lifecycles to happen for it to renew.”
The virtual fencing doesn’t eliminate property or fence lines, but the Carters say it gets them closer to those natural, historic migration patterns—and the model can be repeated on a smaller scale.
It’s also a lot easier on the ranchers. Running cattle on horseback and moving poly wire every day or so is a full-time job that takes the whole family. And if something or someone runs through it—more common than you might think, Annia Carter said—that’s another few days to fix it.
“There’s a lot of oil and gas development here, so the ‘weekend warriors’ would come out and be drinking and cruising through the fence, and you’re like, ‘Oh man, cows are out. All of them—again!’ It’s just days from hell where you ride until your hands are numb.”
‘Never Seen it Yet’
Conservationists say the claim that rotational grazing mimics migration patterns of native ungulates such as bison or antelope is an unproven anecdote at best—and at worst a harmful myth propagated by the cattle industry in an attempt to deflect from the damage livestock cause on public lands.
The problem, according to CBD and others, is that, at current levels, no form of beef production can be sustainable as Americans consume four times the global average of beef, according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist with the Western Watershed Project, says it simply comes down to scientific evidence.
“We would accept livestock grazing that was fully compatible with maintaining healthy, vibrant native ecosystems,” he told The Epoch Times.
“We’ve just never seen it yet.”
What’s needed for true regenerative grazing, Molvar said, “is not one of these gimmicky rotational schemes. It’s fundamentally reducing the number of livestock on the landscape to very low densities.”
Molvar said the study misrepresented how typical the results were. “They used that study to greenwash all public lands grazing,” he said.
It reported that “properly managed” grazing had no negative impacts, but could in fact benefit the species by reducing invasive grasses and building robust habitats.
Molvar does allow a cautious optimism about the “cutting-edge” virtual fencing technology used by the Carters.
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