Clint Josey and team practice HM on the LO Ranch

by Pat Q. Richardson
It is apparent as you listen to owner Clint Josey and manager Robby Tuggle that these two men are enjoying the collaborative process of running the L O Ranch. When they speak of the management team for the ranch, they also include consultant and advisor Bob Steger. Robby is there everyday, Clint is there on a regular basis. Bob advises by phone and joins them when they work on the grazing plan, and when they carry out the annual monitoring.

Clint and Robby each have their own personal/family goal, but the goal they talk about today is for the ranch itself. Actually they are managing the 1000-acre L O and the 7 miles away 800-acre Pittman. They want to be a Holistic Management® learning site. “We decided that a long time ago, but we didn’t put it down. We’re now spending money on exclosures, we’ll probably build a pavilion, and we’re trying to get North Central Texas College to come more often. We’ll spend money on that, so we felt it should be [written] in our goal.” They want to show that ranching can make a profit, and eventually that grass-finished beef can be profitable too. They want to improve the land and sustain a high level of production. They want to work with animals, with the outdoors, nature and wildlife.

Several years ago they decided to include the future resource base as part of the quality of life, “because the landscape description satisfies our quality of life goal.” They then describe means of production that sustain that landscape.

Landscape: “The tallgrass prairie restored is the main thing. Now if you tell that to somebody, it doesn’t mean grasses tall, it means the tallgrass prairie as defined by agriculturalists. 80 % to 90% of forage comes from the big four tallgrass prairie species – little bluestem, big bluestem, Indian and switch – but [regarding] number of plants, they are only 30% to 40% of the total. There are short and mid grasses and high successional forbs that fill in to make a stable, healthy prairie community.” They want high biodiversity, and effective water cycle, mineral cycle and energy flow. They’ve planted trees in the bottoms (originally all forest) and even up on the prairie hills, because they like and need the shade, and they harvest the pecans. They want to be sustainable biologically and financially.

In their forms of production, they have to generate profit, but only enough to “keep and maintain the ranch”. They include income from livestock. They currently run sheep and cattle together. Clint says that took real persistence and patience on Robby’s part, because they have guard dogs that stay with the sheep. When they combined the cattle and sheep, the dogs would try to chase the cattle off and the cattle would try to chase the dogs off. They used to have brood mares and sell weanling colts, but they found that the horses deliberately keep the cattle away from the water points. They want a single herd of animals for effective grazing management, so they stopped raising horses. They include income from hunting leases for both deer and turkey. They do not have enough animals to graze all the enormous explosion of cool season grasses, so they cut hay, sell some and feed the remainder. They harvest the native pecans. They have their eye on nature tourism, and propose to stock the lesser prairie chicken on the Pittman ranch. They think folks would come to hear the male birds strut and drum during breeding season.
Petroleum engineering is Clint’s vocation, but his avocation is ranching. He purchased this ranch piecemeal – 5 tracts at Leo, where the Rendezvous will be held, comprise 1000 acres of bottomlands and upland prairie hills. The bottomlands once were forested but were probably cleared in the mid 1800s and farmed ever since. The Pittman prairie ranch has been grazed for decades but never plowed.

In 1982 Clint went to one of Allan’s courses. Within a year he returned with his son-in-law Tom and his ranch manager Robby and all their wives. Robby had experience working on ranches. He said that when he came back from the course, “It just made sense to me that on land that carries 1 animal per 14 acres, if you can run 1 animal per 7 acres simply by changing how you manage them, you just bought yourself another ranch. You spend money on fencing, but not near the cost of another ranch.”

Clint actually bought several ranches after attending the course, but later sold them, and with that money he bought the Pittman and had enough money left to build a grazing cell. He ran the decision through the testing guidelines and determined that, given the size of the ranch, it would make more money to put the cell in (rather than invest the money in something like municipal bonds) and get the ranch into full production immediately. They put in 10 paddocks with 5-strand barbwire fence, 10 water points, and divided each paddock into 4 with electric fence. They currently run yearlings at the Pittman.

When asked how their ideas have affected the community, Clint replies, “Zero – neighbors vary from totally indifferent to hostile. Our community beyond the ranch boundaries is our grazing club, the Red River Grazers. There are about 20 ranchers in it, and we’ve gotten pretty close. They all have the same experience of being considered the freaks in the neighborhood. We like to get together with people who don’t feel that way. We talk about mistakes more than anything.”

Clint thinks they’re about half way on the brittleness scale – they have a drought every summer from mid-July to October – sometimes through October. Any forage left over just sits there and oxidizes – it doesn’t incorporate into the soil. Everything needs to be eaten the year that it grows. “We get our rain in May/June, and the early part of July. We get some winter rains too. Average rainfall is 35 inches. We’re more consistent than further west. We get down to 20 inches, and it can get up to 50 inches, but it doesn’t swing quite as badly as further west, which is why, I guess, it’s a tallgrass prairie.” They’ve learned that their drought strategy depends on being able to de-stock rapidly. They have positioned themselves to reduce to about 1/3 the number of animals without hurting the brood cow herd.

When asked what they are most proud of accomplishing, Robby says, “being able to do as much as we do with as little help as we have.” Clint adds, “Holistic Management takes more management but less labor.” They run most of their decisions through the testing guidelines with a focus on marginal reaction. “When you’re trying something new you have to make the assumption that it will work.” Currently they are trying compost tea as a tool to boost growth of native grasses in the bottomlands. Up on the hills they have 4% to 5% organic matter in the soil. Down in the bottomlands it’s at 1%. “After all,” Clint says, “it was fertilized for 100 years – those salts just kill all the micro life.” Compost tea didn’t cost much to get started, but they’ve had some interesting experiences learning how to make both the tea and the compost They’ve inoculated the whole bottom and feel that once the bacteria and fungi get started, they won’t have to keep re-applying. They expect the micro life that supports a grassland community to regenerate itself.

With regard to monitoring, they use the dart method and have five monitoring points at each ranch. They concentrate on what they feel best indicates in four or five years whether they are “gaining” on their future landscape description. Most remaining tallgrass prairie is on shallow limestone soil (that’s why it was never farmed). There is always mature capping. “If there’s been rain since the cattle were in the pasture, there will be mature capping, that’s all there is to it.” So they look mostly at amount of bare ground and whether it’s a basal plant or litter.

The management team collaborates on most decisions. They’ve learned that when Bob Steger comes every year at monitoring time, his “outside eyes” really help. Bob was the one that encouraged them to try sheep. Even the veterinarians in their area don’t know anything about sheep. With respect to grazing management, they’ve found that they don’t need to reduce cow numbers (e.g. 100) in order to add sheep (e.g. 20), because much of what they eat is complimentary, and they all eat the overabundant cool season grasses. They’ve also learned that lamb is mighty delicious, and that they may end up eating less beef.

They’ve had to put the Rendezvous into the grazing plan, so that cattle and cow poop don’t clutter the prairie hill where it will be held. Chinqapin oaks line the bluffs. Several large wise trees will bower workshop sites. Coyotes yip at night (and the guard dogs bark). Tall grasses undulate in the breeze. Around 1900, one fellow running with outlaw Sam Bass was murdered at his cabin ‘cause he “ratted to the Texas Rangers which bank they were gonna rob next”. You can see his old windmill from the Rendezvous site. The ranch house at one time was the Leo Post Office and the site of a “still”. Settlers picked up their mail and bought a little moonshine. Clint says folks thereabout to this day make some tasty distillate…

When we asked Clint why he has invested in such a long-standing and deep commitment to Holistic Management both with the Center and with HRM of Texas, he thought for a moment, and replied, “It’s the only thing I’ve seen that works. It’s the way to save agriculture.”

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