If you’ve ever had the opportunity
to hear Gregg Simonds speak about ranch and resource management,
he likely gave you plenty to think about as you returned home to
your ranch.
Simonds has four decades of experience as a ranch manager and
consultant across the West, and he is likely best known for his
leadership at the Deseret Ranch where he dramatically enhanced
the resources and the ranch’s bottomline.
Strongly influenced by Holistic
Resource Management principles that he learned from Alan Savory
in the late 1970’s, Simonds still expounds on many of those same
concepts today. Here, he shares his views on the issues that
continue to face today’s ranchers.
How did you get your start in range management and ranch
consulting?
Having grown up in southern Idaho with an affinity for hunting,
Simonds jokes that he got into college in the early 1970s
because the standards were quite low. But, while there, he
excelled at both economics and watershed management.
Simonds also developed an
interest in helping ranchers, and says, “I thought ranchers
would be a big part of conservation solutions.”
As a college junior, he landed
his first consulting job on a ranch, Simonds set up a
book-keeping system to match each ranch activity to the
financial benefit it provided; and through that analysis, the
ranch was able to make decisions that lead to profit. Word of
his success spread, and Simonds consulting career was launched.
What are some of the core things ranchers need to do to be
profitable?
“It doesn’t matter if it is a small ranch or one of the largest;
the first thing that has to be done is setting up your financial
books,” says Simonds. He advocates that records need to be kept
by individual enterprise, so that you know what your production
costs are and decisions can be made accordingly.
With financial records, Simonds
says, “The solutions are there. You’ve just got to know what
things you need to work on…And, most ranches don’t have the
right feedback mechanism to do so.”
He adds, “I’m big on measuring
things so we can communicate and learn.”
As an example, Simonds points to
the cost of feeding hay – something he says is in excess on most
ranches. For his graduate research thesis in the 70’s Simonds
evaluated 90 ranch budgets across the West and found that 60-80%
of the ranch’s total cost was from harvesting and feeding hay.
Nearly 40 years later, the high
cost of hay is still true on most ranches. Simonds encourages
producers to look for alternatives to help break the habit of
feeding hay and in turn reduce their costs and increase
profitability. Alternatives to consider may be raising smaller
cows, weaning calves earlier, calving later to match available
forage resources, stockpiling forages to graze throughout the
year as much as possible, or purchasing hay instead of raising
and harvesting it.
Once a ranch has its financial books in place, how should the
ranch manager use that information?
Simonds suggests, “You have to be able to focus on weakest link;
the item that produces the highest marginal reaction.”
He likes to tell ranchers to
focus on no more than three main issues. He recognizes that
everyday a ranch is faced with an overwhelming number of issues
and decisions, but he says for positive change to come about,
focus is essential. “If you aren’t working on your three top
priorities, I say anything else is recreation,” says Simonds.
As you begin to act on the plan
you put in place, Simonds cautions that not everything will work
according to plan – but he says that’s OK. “Because you are
monitoring, it leads to a better plan,” he says.
The ability to change and adapt
“requires a real mindset change,” says Simonds – and many
ranchers just aren’t willing to do that. But, in his experience
with persistence, focus and monitoring, Simonds has been able to
bring the cost of production on ranches from $1 down to .50-70
cents, which in turn puts more money in the rancher’s pocket.
Looking to the future, you are working to help producers
monitor and measure another aspect of their ranch –
environmental services. Tell us what that’s about.
“The most valuable thing ranchers
can do is get water from the sky into the land and create
plants, animals, microflora, etc.,” says Simonds.
He adds, “My goal is to help
ranchers be able to make money from these environmental services
– not just from livestock and wildlife. And, I think in the
future there are going to be a tremendous amount of buyers for
clean air and water.”
But, Simonds recognizes that
ranchers have had very few ways to accurately measure the
environmental services they produce.
“I can tell you to the penny a
ranch’s financial statement, but our methods for measuring
environmental services are so crude it is like having a cattle
scale and measuring in 200-lb. increments,” says Simonds.
To that end, about 10 years ago,
he made it a personal mission to work toward developing methods
to better quantify the environmental benefits that rancher’s
provide.
Using satellites – which allow
for a large sample size – and other new technology, Simonds and
his colleagues are working to develop methods that show if a
watershed is sequestering water and sequestering carbon.
Simonds reports that the trials
are in the last six months of validating the methodologies.
How might the ability to measure environmental services impact
ranches for the future?
Simonds says, “If we can create a broader footing for ranchers
to have value [by being paid for environmental services] – more
ranches may be able to bring their kids home to the ranch and
pass it to the next generation.”
He concludes, “We need ranchers
on the land to have these big open spaces function, and society
wants open space and clean water. It requires people to do that.
Land can’t just be bought and let sit. It requires active, daily
management. And if ranchers can transfer their experience from
one generation to the next that is what is going to keep land
healthy. They will be the real environmentalists.”
For more about Simonds, visit his website at
www.openrangeconsulting.com. |
