How Animals Impact the Ecosystem

You have to decide that, what’s key. You’ve got to give enough recovery time for those roots to build back strength.
It amazes me the amount of diversity that comes. If you look closely at that photo there’s a lot of different species there.
That’s what we want to see is the power of diversity.

I’m going to give a series of slides here that show what we’re able to do and I’ll address the noxious weed issue with it.
This land that I’m going to show you here was gifted to the state of North Dakota a number of years ago.
The state decided there’s a live stream running through it, water runs through it year round.
They’re going to take and make it a wildlife management area.
In their infinite wisdom they said, “Well, we’re going to exclude livestock except for a little bit during the summer.”

What they did, the state had it for 20 years, they allowed grazing from May 1st to September 1st, but
only 40 animal units, and this is a section, so 640 acres of land.
They came to us, though. They were spending a fortune on noxious weeds and there was no wildlife.
They asked my son and I, “Would you take over management of it?”
We said, “We’ll do it but here’s our demand.
You can’t put any limit on the number animals we bring.
You can’t use any herbicides because we won’t allow our animals to graze where herbicide’s being used.”
They had to document it in film and they had to do wildlife counts and plant species counts on there.
We wanted to prove to the public that livestock are an integral part of the ecosystem, or animals in general.

Here we were the first year. That’s my son.
Notice I take the picture as he wades through the noxious weeds, and those are all thistles.
That’s a prohibited noxious weed in our environment.
They were spending $15,000 annually on this section just for herbicide and this is what they got.
Of that 640 acres there was at least a third of it that was solid noxious weeds. That’s all it was.