Wildlife care on the V6
It’s been a pretty dry season and our normal rainy times are only 6 months from November through April, but Mother Nature has adapted all the trees, birds, grasses, and grazing animals to the Cholame Valley’s climate over thousands of years and all have prospered.
Well, along comes rancher Jack age 27 in the year of 1961, that was 64 years ago. I wanted more open grazing land, but on the north side of my mountainous ranch was a very thick stand of Blue Oak trees that made the grass under them very unpalatable. Having graduated from Cal Poly College in 1958 and had taken a course in Range Management, it was mostly about using different methods to create more grasslands by irrigating grass, control burning, using chemicals, and clearing forests. But Rachel Carson in 1962 had just written her book Silent Spring about the harm the indiscriminate use of DDT was doing to the environment and it started many to ask how many other ways are we degrading the environment? I hadn’t read the book but for me to be successful, I needed to run more cattle so some of my Blue Oak forest had to go. With two Cat D8 tractors 50ft apart and a heavy anchor chain in between the two Cat tractors, the drivers started down through the Blue Oaks, snapping them off or uprooting them. By the end of the second day, with one ridge cleaned off, I had started on the next ridge when a feeling entered my soul that there was something about what I was doing that was so wrong. The next day I sent the two tractors that I had rented back to construction work. At the time, I never asked the question, “Could I have thought of a better way that I could have kept the trees and still prospered?” It would be years of traditional practices before those kinds of questions would finally be answered. I was still practicing the typical way of tilling the soil so that you could raise a grain crop without irrigation. All you needed was a normal amount of rainfall. This was done by tilling the soil and leaving the land bare for one year, thus saving that year's rainfall and plowing under any unwanted growing things. With the start of the second year, I would have two years of water for my grain crop to use called summer fallow. I did it that way because all of the Central California farmers did it that way. Now in retrospect how could a practice be so wrong for tens of thousands of acres for almost 200 years? Because the land was that fertile. By harvesting this way, you were losing all the Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, just like taking money out of your bank account and not putting any back. This was the start of the low yield problem, but the new commercial fertilizer companies were quick to fix that problem with an artificial blend made just for our type of farming (mining) and dry farming was once again profitable for a few years. 1994 was a wet year and I don’t know how much of my best soil I sent down The Little Cholame Creek to my downstream neighbor then to the Pacific Ocean but it was probably in the thousands of tons.
Then came Holistic Resource Management to the rescue in 1991! I adopted this method as a way to make better decisions. It gave me permission to think for myself and to not watch what my neighbors or traditions were doing. So, I started to question everything I was doing and found a fair amount of faulty practices that I was using. The first was Dry Farming. It failed in every way possible so in 2001 I gathered up all my balers, swathers, harrow bed bale loader, tillage equipment and sold it all. What I couldn’t sell, I took to the local scrap yard.
Now Jack, you have to replace that loser with a winner. Zee and I had just gotten out of the local movie theater after watching a really good movie called City Slickers starring Billy Crystal. I said to Zee “We can do that.” We have a ranch, lots of good horses that you trained, and it’s friendly to the environment. So in October of 1994 we put on our first Cattle Drive, and to me everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I thought to myself what a disaster. The pipe to my 2,000-gallon water tank broke on the second night and drained the water supply. My portable Out House left a lot to be desired, but in spite of these problems and a few others, our guests loved it! It’s been 32 years now that we put on four cattle drives a year, now with reliable water and flush toilets, and showers.
This switch from destructive dry farming to constructive cattle drives that pay much better than mining the soil and come Monday morning, Mother Nature says thanks, it makes me feel good.
Our son John and his wife Barbara have surpassed our cattle drives and added a whole new level of horse-related events. They have also brought to life the town of Parkfield, which in 1987 was just about ready to become a ghost town. John and Barbara resurrected it back to its once thriving 1899 self again. It’s a step back in time that’s sure to put a smile on one’s face.
I feel proud of what my wife Zee and I, now married for 67 years, have accomplished from starting with a starvation ranch near Lake Nacimiento in 1958 to our present-day 20,000-acre V6 ranch. The real reward is our four children and their spouses, nine grandchildren, two great-grandchildren (with one more on the way), and all the critters that make their home here. All of these things sit at the head of the V6 table, which is protected by a Conservation Easement held and monitored by The California Rangeland Trust for the past 24 years, that says The V6 can not be divided or developed in perpetuity.
See Ya,
Jack