|
Cattle rancher puts pesticides out to pasture
By Tom Lindley
The Oklahoman
WAYNOKA - For years, Kim Barker was curious about the tiny grave dug
long ago beneath a stand of cottonwoods near the path his cattle take from
the supple pasture above to their watering hole below.
All he really knew was what the fading white marble headstone told him:
"Our darling Georgie. "Nov. 1, 1898, died May 26, 1901. "Saved from earthly
taint and sin."
Then, about 10 years ago, he saw strangers kneeling at the foot of the
grave, which was surrounded by strands of wire held precariously in place by
rickety and weathered cedar posts.
The gravesite marked the end of a long search.
Barker then heard the story of baby Georgie, who had ridden to town in a
wagon with the rest of the family. Among the items they bought was a box of
rat poisoning, which Georgie must have gotten into on the way home.
Barker thought about how the child had died, not knowing exactly what to
say. The words came to him some time later as he walked by the grave on the
100th anniversary of the child's death.
"I thought to myself that we'd been killing people for 100 years with
chemicals and fertilizers, and I said that we don't want to do that anymore
on this land," Barker said.
To keep that promise, he has had to become a maverick in a maverick
land. Some of his neighbors still shake their heads over how a cattleman was
transformed into a grass farmer, or a cell grazer, who subscribes to the
intensive grazing of cattle for short periods of time, followed by periods
of rest for the land.
It is a promise that has forced him to buffet the tide of history and
conventional wisdom and refuse the assistance of fertilizers and pesticides.
And it is a promise Barker said could restore the bluestem and Indian
grasses to their original glory and save the Panhandle before the aquifer
dries up, if only others would listen.
But not many do.
Cattle prices are up, there's ample hay stored for winter and new
biogenetic advances are improving crop and livestock yields in such a way
that few producers may see the need for the type of change Barker envisions
for the land.
"It used to irritate me that others didn't see what I saw, but it
doesn't anymore," he said. "Change is hard for people."
At first glance, it would appear that this stretch of the Cherokee Strip
would be a willing participant in change.
Except for a few islands of irrigated land, the Oklahoma red clay is
either packed too hard for big bluestem grass to penetrate or too sandy to
grab onto a root.
Its fragility is magnified by the massive dunes south at Little Sahara
State Park, which for thousands of years have captured blowing sand from the
Cimarron River basin.
At the same time, the land serves up remarkable beauty and grandeur,
punctuated by rows of rolling hills woven with layers of sandstone, shale
and gypsum, each wearing a caprock crown. From a distance, they serve as
deep purple beacons on the prairie. Up close, their castle-like towers are
striking enough to do any sculptor proud.
It is only natural that a naturalist at heart would choose to follow the
lead of the buffalo not far from the spot where the last of the great herds
once roamed.
Using cattle instead of buffalo, he has chosen to graze the land the way
kings of the prairie grazed, hard and fast and on the run.
He has given up many of the tools of the modern agricultural producer,
such as a barn and a tractor. But that doesn't mean he plans to follow the
buffalo into near extinction.
"This is planned grazing," he said. "You don't do this without thinking
and planning a lot. It's like being a symphony conductor where you try to
make sure all the animals come in at the right time."
Barker grazes more than 100,000 pounds of cattle on native grasses and
legumes across 720 acres, rotating them for days at a time on 56 paddocks,
or cells, that have been divided.
It's a concept that Barker said depicts grazers, whether they are
cattle, sheep or bison, as nature's gardeners, whose hooves create vital
seed-to-soil contact by breaking the soil and by pruning a plant's top,
which causes its root to self-prune and create new soil.
"The higher the density of grazing, the faster the land changes," he
said. "You get more good perennial grass and fewer weeds."
Barker acknowledges that his philosophy is foreign thinking to
traditional ranchers, who are accustomed to putting X-number of cattle on
X-number of acres and leaving them on land that has been sprayed for weeds.
"A lot of them are stuck in a rut and are told this is how it should
be," he said. "It's almost impossible to convert to a holistic management
approach because most of the corporate money and university research goes
into telling them how to make that rut deeper."
Barker chooses to try to stem the gradual erosion of the soil by
focusing on the cycles of water, mineral, en ergy flow and succession that
impact life and the land.
"I'm trying to learn from nature, instead of working against it," he
said.
Occasionally, nature still teaches him a hard lesson.
In one case, Barker was schooled by the sticky and unwanted curly-cup
gumweed.
"I thought I'd dump a bunch of cattle in there and let them eat it off,"
he said. "They didn't touch it, so it was back later that year bigger than
ever."
As bad as it was, it still didn't drive him to pesticide. After all, he
has a promise to keep.
E-mail me
|
|
