On Memorial Day weekend, the small oasis of pasture backing into the foothills and sandwiched along the I-80 corridor between Ecker Hill Middle School, Junction Commons and the Pinebrook neighborhood has a few new faces.
The Hi Ute Ranch is now home to 45 grazing cows for a regenerative grazing pilot led by 3 Springs Land and Livestock in partnership with Utah Open Lands.
The project uses the cattle to restore soil health, improve wildlife habitat and demonstrate the viability of sustainable agriculture on conservation land.
“This is a grand experiment,” said Wendy Fisher, executive director of Utah Open Lands, waving to a small herd of cows cautiously inching toward a group of people. “Can we have a model of how we use domesticated tools, if you will, to improve wildlife habitat?”
Hi Ute Ranch is protected under a conservation easement that allows agricultural use in the front section, but it is also focused on protecting wildlife habitat as a refuge. As owners of the 344 acres, Fisher said, Utah Open Lands began looking at how to carry out that mission.
“When you look at so many of our landscapes that we have protected, a lot of it has been with farmers and ranchers. They are part of the equation,” said Fisher. “What we started looking at is, are there things that we can do that, one, provide a value to the community … and then the other part is to improve the forage for wildlife.”
They put out a detailed request for proposal, outlining the goals and limitations of the project, and Fisher admitted they weren’t sure anyone would be willing to try it.
But for 3 Springs Land and Livestock — a local business founded by ranchers and scientists Mitch Dumke, McKinley Smoot and James Gilson, who are committed to healing the land while simultaneously growing food — it was a great opportunity.
“We were so stoked when we saw the request for proposal that Utah Open Lands put out prioritizing our types of practices,” Dumke said. “You don’t see a lot of conservation easement groups trying to do this type of thing proactively.”
They’ve been using regenerative grazing methods with their cattle and chickens for four years now, he said, and were able to work with Utah Open Lands and share their insights for the project, too. Proposal accepted, 3 Springs has a year to see if this can even work, mainly ecologically, but also financially.
Regenerative grazing is founded on a handful of positive impacts, drawing from what would have been natural to this region with large herds of bison and elk, Dumke explained.
For one, animals like cattle are able to turn a grassland into usable protein, unlike humans.
“The humans aren’t going to migrate to this field and graze it,” Dumke joked. “Bringing ruminants, ungulates, a cow that has this four-chamber stomach, that can take a fibrous plant like this and convert it into energy and protein … that’s a value-add to our community.”
Other elements, like cow manure and the effect of hooves, are important elements for soil health, which leads to increased productivity of the land, he said. Covered soil is the best indicator of healthy soil because bare patches of dirt can form cap soil, where the clays in the dirt come to the surface, harden and limit water absorption. So as the cattle graze, or run to escape a threat, their pronged hooves break up cap soil so water can better reach the soil.
Stampede effects also help return the organic materials from dead grasses back into the soil, where it can be used positively.
“Where the grasses grow up, aren’t grazed and then die over, but they don’t touch the ground — instead of the health and organics going into the ground, it’s just oxidizing,” Dumke explained, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere.”
Another way to achieve covered soil more quickly is through cow manure, which temporarily covers the bare earth until plants recover, and deposits useful “food” for the microscopic organisms underground.
“After two or three weeks, you’ll start to see this manure already leveraging the beautiful underground world of microorganisms,” Dumke said, describing how worms, dung beetles and microorganisms can bore those nutrients into the soil. “That is a void that this land has had for a little bit.”
Key to these positive impacts is limiting the cattle’s grazelands so there’s a higher concentration of helpful disturbance but also a mitigation of potentially harmful disturbance. Cows are selective eaters, Dumke said, meaning when given a huge plot of land, they’ll pick out their favorite plants and only eat those. That can negatively affect the diversity of grasses, which is why regenerative grazing adheres to strict rotation of the land.
On Hi Ute Ranch, 3 Springs is first working with a 90-acre plot, but the cows will only have access to roughly six to nine acres at a time, often fewer. The limitations ensure the cattle are hungry enough to eat a variety of plants, and then moving them off those portions gives the plants enough time to recover.
“Once a plant like this is grazed, it’s about five to seven days, depending on water, before it actually starts to regrow again,” Dumke said. “That two to three inches of regrowth is a cow’s ice cream.”
Of course, a cow is going to prefer the “ice cream,” Fisher added, and in the absence of this area’s natural apex predator, the wolf, it’s the same dilemma they’ve noticed with wildlife, especially with elk eating the young aspen sprouts.
With domesticated animals like cows, ranchers can mimic the impacts of a predator through the use of electric fencing.
“We think of electric fence a little bit like a wolf, a predator,” Dumke said. “Cows explore with their nose and tongue, both are usually wet, which means they have more conductivity, enough to make the point to stay away.”
He and his team will also try to alarm the cows back into a herd formation and stampede scenario, which increases the positive impacts of their hooves.
A portable shade structure is another tool to mimic predators because it pulls the cows away from waterways, where they would usually hunker down in the summer. High traction there can cause damage to the stream banks, Dumke said.
The shade also provides a high level of impact to an area, since the cows congregate there, meaning more of those hooves, grazing and manure benefits, too.
The plan is to allow the cattle to graze into the foothills as a form of wildfire mitigation, using the animals to remove an overabundance of fine fuels that can feed a fire.
In the meantime, both groups are assessing the project as they go along and will evaluate its success in a year, said Fisher.
“We are trying to be really critical of ourselves as an organization to make sure that we are making the right decision for the land and for the community. And so that means constant monitoring,” she said.
Their teams are checking wildlife cameras, doing soil sampling and taking images of the property on a regular basis, Fisher said, and 3 Springs has their own testing goals to check the health of the soil.
“A lot of what happens in agricultural soil science is lagging indicators,” said Dumke. “You’re taking a soil sample, you’re measuring phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, soil organic matter is a pretty key one. … But all those things require five, 10 years, and it’s a pretty latent response to understand how your decision last year affected next year.”
So instead they look for more covered soil, photographing designated plots to observe signs of regrowth, lessening of capped soil and, ideally, denser grasses. That’s the end goal, Dumke said, because by increasing the forage productivity of the land increases the amount of animals that land can support.
“You can buy another ranch on the ranch you already live on simply by changing your management practices,” he said.
Soil organic matter, though understudied, is one of the main indicators of higher productivity.
“If we can increase (soil organic matter) from 1% to 2% in a single acre of land, that means that the land can hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water,” Dumke explained. “If we can increase the water-holding capacity of the land, that would be a huge win on Utah Open Lands’ part because it doubles the forage productivity of cattle, but it also increases forage productivity for wildlife.”
Fisher said they’re excited to have a partner in Dumke and 3 Springs, experts passionate about long-term impacts.
“Maybe this is just me being hopeful, but they seem to be emblematic of a new generation of rancher that is really looking at sort of a holistic approach to how we eat, what we eat, how we graze,” she said.
Dumke said the feeling is mutual.
“Working with Utah Open Lands has been pretty rad because there’s a whole crew of nerds on their side that are teaching us a lot of different things,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s coming to the table with an ego. Everyone’s coming to the table with a really good knowledge base that we can mutually put our Venn diagrams over each other and be more effective together.”
If the project works like they hope, Fisher said there will be more conversations on how to use the cattle as a community resource. Maybe that’s beef for sale, or educational opportunities around ecology, farming and ranching for the next generation at Ecker Hill Middle School who will inherit these lands.
“We think that this could be very much a model for how we continue to have food and ranching livelihood on all of these amazing open spaces that we’ve protected,” Fisher said. “Can we have something that is in balance with our wildlife, because as our lands get developed, there’s less and less land for us to grow food, and there’s less and less land for the wildlife.”
And if the wildlife thrives — alongside cows, plants and people — “then I think the experiment is a success,” Fisher said.
For more: utahopenlands.org. 3 Springs sells their chicken at the Park City Farmers Market on Wednesdays: 3springsutah.com.