The inaugural Range Practicum: A hands-on land and livestock training

RALA-00308; No of Pages 239 The inaugural Range Practicum: A hands-on land and livestock training By Matt Barnes, Randy Reichert and Thad Berrett On the Ground • The inaugural Range Practicum incorporated practical, hands-on training and demonstrations into the SRM Annual Meeting and Training, contributing to its "new look" in 2020. The Range Practicum translated stockmanship, packing, horse training, and prescribed fire, as well as agency rangeland monitoring and soils training, into practical skills. It also included rangeland monitoring, soils training, equipment demonstrations, and a small tradeshow. • The Range Practicum incorporated the 2020 Producer Forum as the transformative Women in Ranching Forum and included a Producer Reception. • Over 200 rangeland professionals, including students, ranchers, agency managers and specialists, and applied scientists, attended the Range Practicum. Most Range Practicum participants registered for the entire annual meeting. • Most participants were very satisfied or satisfied with the training sessions. The most popular sessions of the Range Practicum were the handson livestock workshops, specifically the horse and mule packing and low-stress livestock handling, followed by a wild horse demonstration and a hands-on prescribed fire workshop. • We recommend the Range Practicum be an ongoing event at future SRM annual meetings and trainings. We recommend it include experiential sessions that cannot be included in the traditional format of the annual meeting (e.g., hands-on, with live animals, fire, etc.). Keywords: Annual meeting and training, experiential education, Range Practicum, SRM, stockmanship, transformation and translation. Rangelands 43():231–239 doi 10.1016/j.rala.2021.09.003 © 2021 The Society for Range Management. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 2021 Over 200 lifelong learners from Colorado, Wyoming, and around the West developed hands-on land and livestock skills in the inaugural Range Practicum at the National Western Complex on February 20, 2020. The event, the first of its kind, was part of the SRM 2020 annual meeting held in Denver. The overtly re-envisioned conference, themed “Transformation and Translation,” was designed to be both more groundbreaking and more directly applicable by land managers, while continuing its longstanding history of leadingedge applied science, culminating in the Practicum. “The Range Practicum was one of the flagships of how we were transforming the SRM meeting by providing hands-on, practical training that people could take home and use,” said annual meeting co-chair Julie Elliott, a rangeland management specialist in northeastern Colorado. Experiential education is considered a central aspect of adult learning in theory and practice.1 ,2 Ranchers, range managers, scientists, conservationists, and students all attended the event. The Native American Rangeland Advisory Committee set the tone with drumming and an invocation. Participants then tried their hand at low-stress livestock handling, horse and mule packing, and prescribed burning. They observed a wild horse demonstration, showing how the horses are humanely corralled and given their first training. They observed state-of-the-art reclamation equipment and learned to calibrate a pesticide sprayer. They learned a federal land management agency’s latest range monitoring methods. They compared soil cores and learned to texture soils. They attended a producer forum and trade show. We spent almost 2 years in preparation, and to see the results unfold before our eyes with so many engaged range professionals from students to producers to land managers gaining take-home, on-the-ground knowledge made the effort more than worthwhile. The hands-on sessions allowed participants a chance to directly engage with the presenters. We believe we have created a new, valuable tool for fulfilling the SRM mission of equipping range professionals with the knowledge and skills to use and sustain our lands. Low-stress livestock handling “It’s well-recognized that cattle can be an excellent range management tool. But what if that tool is difficult to man- 231 Figure 1. Whit Hibbard (left) addressing participants in the low-stress livestock handling workshop. Photo courtesy of Kent Reeves. Figure 2. Whit Hibbard and his first volunteer, ranch manager Dave Voth, working cattle in the low-stress livestock handling workshop. Photo courtesy of Kent Reeves. age and ill-behaved?” said instructor Whit Hibbard, a fourthgeneration rancher, as well as founder and editor of the Stockmanship Journal. What is not well-recognized is that to successfully implement a range management plan, we need manageable cattle that we can easily gather, drive, and settle anywhere we want as a herd, that will stay where we put them, and that don’t hang in the lowlands and grub out the riparian areas. This requires a high degree of stockmanship skill. Furthermore, if we elevate our stockmanship skill and train more 232 manageable cattle, the easier it is implement some form of intensive grazing management and, consequently, the more likely we are to do it, and the more likely it will be successful. –Whit Hibbard Hibbard recently won the International Mountain Section SRM’s Excellence in Range Management Award for the Stockmanship Journal special issue on stockmanship and range management,3 and for his stewardship of the Dog Creek unit of Sieben Live Stock Company in western Montana. Rangelands Figure 3. Whit Hibbard, low-stress livestock handling instructor. Photo courtesy of Michelle Buzalsky. Figure 4. The horse and mule packing instructors from the Shoshone National Forest. Photo courtesy of Kent Reeves. 2021 233 Figure 5. Instructor from the USDA Forest Service and student packing a mule. Photo courtesy of Kent Reeves. Participants who have heard about low-stress livestock handling had an opportunity to practice it under Hibbard’s guidance (Figs. 1-3). We planned the hands-on session to follow the Bud Williams Memorial Stockmanship Symposium,4 ,5 the fourth in a series organized by Kent Reeves at SRM annual meetings, which brought together leading practitioners and instructors to teach the method, show how lowstress is a quieter version of conventional livestock handling, and explore applications of low-stress herding, including im- 234 proving livestock welfare and performance, improving grazing distribution and land health, and coexisting with wildlife including preventing predation. Horse and mule packing Participants favored the horse and mule packing workshop, lining up for a chance to tie manties—the large pieces of canRangelands Figure 6. The horse and mule packing workshop with the Shoshone National Forest range staff. Photo courtesy of Michelle Buzalsky. vas that packers use to wrap their cargo, and which also become tents and bedrolls—and load them onto a live mule. The stock in the workshop came from the Shoshone National Forest, which is known within the agency as “the Horse Forest” because of its pack string and the many days its employees spend riding the rugged Absaroka and Wind River Ranges of northwestern Wyoming. The Shoshone range staff (Fig. 4) taught participants about stock, equipment and tack, and essential knots, and how to make and balance loads with both panniers and manties (Figs. 5-6). They also covered breakaways and tying animals together for safety on the trail. “It was a great opportunity to gain knowledge and hands-on skills in field and backcountry tasks related to rangeland management,”said instructor Jason Brengle, a rangeland management specialist on the Shoshone. “Many of these traditional skills such as packing stock are slowly being lost.” Wild horse demonstration To kick off the wild horse session, Barr y Perr yman explained the need for new, creative approaches to wild horses and burros in the Intermountain West.6 The wild horse demonstration featured humane methods for getting feral horses from the range to training and adoption. Sean Kelly and Megan Print from the Carson National Forest demonstrated their bait mare wild horse trap design and how its doughnut shape works for loading horses after they are caught. The team from the Mantle Ranch Adoption and Training Facility in Wyoming spent the rest of the day demonstrating initial training methods (Figs. 7-8). They began with an untouched horse, demonstrating the first steps in gaining trust 2021 and respect, while showing the development of a solid bond and foundation with the horse. They showed various exercises for desensitizing, leading to the acceptance of a blanket, saddle pad, and saddle. The exercises are an example of further development of trust and bonding, leading toward the final goal of accepting a rider. Riding a green horse demonstrates the ultimate goal in developing trust, respect, and acceptance. This is accomplished through a series of steps involving how to safely saddle, mount, ride, and dismount a young, green horse. “We actually got one of these horses adopted today,” said Steve Leonard of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program in Colorado, “and that’s what it’s all about.” Soils, monitoring, and prescribed fire training In addition to livestock, participants learned about the land, including soils and range monitoring. At the soils training, attendees looked at different soil horizons down to 2.1 meters (7 feet) below the soil surface and compared soil cores from different ecological sites, as well as cores from a Sandy Plains ecological site under different land uses (i.e., native range, no-till cropland, and a field enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program and seeded to perennial grass; Fig. 9). The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) explained and demonstrated water movement below the soil surface, soil structure, and soil texture. Attendees tested their own soil texturing skills, estimating the proportions of sand, silt, and clay in several soil samples. The NRCS had computers available to demonstrate the Web Soil Survey7 and allow attendees to give it a try. Web Soil Survey allows users to obtain soil maps for a user-defined area of interest, such 235 Figure 7. The wild horse demonstration with the Mantle Ranch. Photo courtesy of Michelle Buzalsky. Figure 8. The wild horse demonstration with the Mantle Ranch. Photo courtesy of Michelle Buzalsky. as a ranch or pasture, along with information on the physical, chemical, and engineering properties of the soils, as well as the suitabilities and limitations of those soils. Participants also learned about range monitoring, including how terrestrial core indicator data are used to understand status and trend of BLM lands in a diversity of land management scenarios,8 ,9 in a session led by Emily Kachergis, Lauren Price, and Alex Laurence-Traynor of the BLM National Operations Center. Participants practiced measuring plant cover and height with real monitoring equipment. The youngest ever training participant listened alongside his father and grandfather, who are both rangeland managers in Wyoming. Attendees in the prescribed fire workshop learned about benefits and challenges of prescribed fire, fire research in short grass prairie, equipment, and crew needs. Ranchers shared burning techniques for private land. Attendees then con- 236 ducted small straw bale burns in the conference parking lot to simulate real-life burn methods and fire behavior, using drip torches to light heading and backing fires (Fig. 10). Carol Baldwin from Kansas State University and colleagues from the Great Plains Fire Science Exchange, a regional network of the Joint Fire Science Program,10 led the session. Women in Ranching forum A provocative forum on Women in Ranching featured a panel including women with nontraditional backgrounds and those whose families have been in the business for several generations.11 Pat Pfeil of the National Grazing Lands Coalition chaired the panel, which included ranchers Mar y Budd F litner of Wyoming, Mimi Hillenbrand of South Dakota, Nancy Ranney of New Mexico, Julie Sullivan of Colorado, and AshRangelands Figure 9. Participants examining soil cores with soil scientist Andy Steinert of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Photo courtesy of Michelle Buzalsky. ley Wertheimer Hibbard of Montana. The forum provided a breadth of their perspectives on ranching, and why women are critical to the mission of sustainable ranches. It ranged from cattle to bison, and from embracing outsider status to developing a ranch management apprenticeship program.12 “I loved having these remarkable women in one room…. Each left us with a different image of ranching borne from contemplative perspectives,” said Cindy Villa, a rangeland management specialist from Colorado. The experiences the women shared were philosophic and refreshing. Julie Sullivan’s prose quieted the room in recognizing the maternal self in working with the cow herd, transporting us to the core of our vulnerability. The influ2021 ence of the wealth and range of experience and diversity of ranching perspective must continue to be developed by such forums in our Society. –Cindy Villa Practical training for a culture of stewardship A producer reception the previous evening featured a keynote address by James Rogers of the Winecup Gamble Ranch on “Why management pays.” Rogers emphasized production and diversity, and outcome-based grazing, in the context of quality of life on the sprawling Nevada landscape: “The number and diversity of heartbeats is an index of our stew- 237 Figure 10. Igniting a prescribed burn with Great Plains Fire Science Exchange. Reclamation equipment demonstration in the background. Photo courtesy of Matt Barnes. ardship.”13 The producer reception included recognition of ranches nominated for the SRM’s prestigious Excellence in Rangeland Management Award. Many attendees felt that celebrating outstanding examples of practical application of the art of range management should be a growing aspect of both SRM and the ranching culture. “I believe the Range Practicum is something many of us have been yearning for within SRM—redistributing conference priorities into our hands and hearts, balanced with our minds,” said Cindy Villa. “We as SRM finally matched our stated goals of changing the title of these meetings from SRM Annual Meetings to SRM Annual Meetings and Trainings,” said annual meeting co-chair Chuck Butterfield, of Y2 Consultants in Wyoming. This year with the work the Range Practicum team did in developing the hands-on training, we actually hit the mark. We had attendees out there learning and doing. And to the doubters that said students wouldn’t attend, we sure had a lot of students out there. I think many of the people involved and taking the Practicum would agree. –Chuck Butterfield A survey of SRM 2020 Annual Meeting attendees found 49.8% of 263 respondents attended training opportunities such as the Range Practicum; of those, 38.2% were “highly satisfied,” 38.9% were “satisfied,” 17.6% were “neutral,” 3.8% were “disappointed,” and 1.5% were “highly disappointed” ( Joshua Tashiro, Colorado Section SRM, unpublished data). Several students said it was the most valuable day of the SRM meeting for them and they hope the event continues in future 238 years as they are already looking forward to it at next year’s SRM meeting. We hope the Range Practicum will become a recurring event at future SRM annual meetings and trainings, beginning in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2022. We recommend that future iterations maintain focus on hands-on experiential training. Related sessions featuring oral presentations (e.g., the Producer Forum) should remain in the regular annual meeting format, not concurrent with the Range Practicum. Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests. The authors certify that they have no financial interest in the subject matter discussed in the manuscript. The authors were the co-chairs of the inaugural Range Practicum. M.B. and R.R. are consultants. M.B. is a past member of the Rangelands Steering Committee but was not involved with the review or decision process for this manuscript. Acknowledgments The Range Practicum was sponsored by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Forest Service, National Grazing Lands Coalition, Colorado Department of Agriculture, Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, Corteva AgriRangelands science, Agricultural Division of DuPont, AgRisk Advisors, Priefert Rodeo & Ranch Equipment, the Stockmanship Journal, Trainor Cattle Company, and Jax Outdoor Gear Farm & Ranch. The National Western Complex hosted the event. Dan Nosal and Roy Roath organized the Producer Forum and Reception. References 1. Kolb D. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice Hall; 1984. 2. Miettinen R. The concept of experiential learning and John Dewey’s theory of reflective thought and action. Int J Lifelong Educ. 2000; 19(1):54–72. 3. Hibbard W, Barnes M. Stockmanship and range management. Stockmanship Journal. 2016; 5(2):1–15. Accessed August 19, 2021.. https://stockmanshipjournal.com/v5i2/ . 4. Reeves K. 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James Rogers, leadership in managing rangelands for people. Accessed August 19, 2021. https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor- 45- james- rogersleadership- managing- rangelands- people Authors are from: Research Associate, Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, and owner, Shining Horizons Land Management, Dolores CO 81323, USA; Owner and consultant, T&R Ranch, Nunn, CO 80648, USA; Rangeland Management Specialist, US Forest Service, Buffalo, WY 82834, USA 239