Red Hills Rancher’s unconventional approach to range management proves successful

When Barber County, Kansas, rancher Brian Alexander was a kid, he never thought he wanted to be a rancher. All these years later he is, although it took him a few years to get there.

“I grew up on the ranch and Dad never owned any cattle,” he said. “In the late 1980s he first used the phrase sunlight salesman, to describe what he did when I asked.”

Alexander spoke at the Soil Health U and Trade Show event in January sponsored by High Plains Journal.

Alexander’s dad told him his job was to turn sunlight into protein using cattle.

“For 10-year-old me that was good enough, but I wasn’t even 100% sure what he meant,” he said.

Following high school graduation, Alexander didn’t have a plan in mind for his next steps in life.

“Dad told me there wasn’t a place for me on the ranch for a few more years, that I needed to get out, experience the world,” he said. “So I joined the Navy because taking on a crap load of debt for a piece of paper didn’t interest me at the time.”

He served 8 1/2 years in the Navy with three deployments. At one point he woke up and “realized the uniform just didn’t fit any more.” He got his discharge papers in February 2006 and moved home to Kansas that summer. By 2008 he felt as though he was ready to do something for himself with the ranch.

“I leased the south side of the ranch from the family partnership and started my grazing business,” Alexander said. “The ink on the agreement was barely dry and I was a week away from receiving cattle when a wildfire swept through the ranch and burned 55% right up the middle.”

That summer Brian and his dad spent most of the summer rebuilding fence, and by 2010 he thought it was time to change things up again.

“I took over the other two cells on the ranch and decided not carry it like Dad had the last few years,” he said. “I partnered with my neighbor Nate. We ran a herd of over 900, another herd of just over 1,000. We had the normal hundred days and they were split through my place and his.”

By watching how the cattle grazed and how the grass responded Alexander was able to discover what his rangelands were telling him to do. At the end of 2014, he attended a holistic management training series in Nebraska, which lead him to what he could be doing better as a manager.

But in 2016 things came to a screeching halt with the Anderson Creek fire blazing through the ranch, burning 90% of it. After time spent rebuilding following the wild fire Alexander was ready for more educational opportunities in 2018—attending the King Ranch Symposium on the Future of the Beef Market, Regenerator conference and Ranching for Profit among others.

“It’s good to sharpen the saw from time to time, get out of your comfort zone,” he said.

Alexander uses what he calls holistic context when he talks about his ranch. He’s found that having a shared context between all the decision makers on the farm or ranch is one most important concepts for him.

“If your vision of what you want your farm or ranch to look like isn’t shared with all the people that can make a decision to affect that land, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not involving other creative minds in your production process,” he said.

His context includes the vision of what he wants the ranch to look like. This includes cedar trees in areas inaccessible to cattle, tall grass for the livestock, a few scattered native hardwood trees, creeks full of beavers and fish.

“In short, as perfect of a habitat for native wildlife as I can make it,” he said. “It includes a vision for time off for family, friends and fun. It includes a vision of a prosperous local community that’s much closer to growing it’s own food locally. I’d like to see multi-species grazing in more local markets.”

Alexander understands the need for global trade, but disagrees about its implications.

“If we can’t feed our local, rural communities with local, home-raised food, we’re living in a food desert,” he said.

Beginning in 2011 he’s made a conscious effort to manage and control the invasive cedar trees on the property, going through a large track skid steer and later larger, more efficient equipment. By 2015, he and his dad were getting a handle on the land, leaving it better than it was after removing the cedars.

“Herd impacts are okay, machine impact, not so much,” he said. “The results were very encouraging. Several of the canyons I cleaned out, were starting to have dampness in the bottom and one’s starting to flow water.”

By the third week of March 2016 the end was in sight for the removal of the cedar population on the ranch. Two little areas were all that stood between the pair to be able to move the machinery home. Then the Anderson Creek fire happened.

“The story of the fire is a story for a different time, but suffice to say that the four hours it took the ranch to be totally burned up—I knew that day would change me and the ranch forever,” he said. “All my plans and dreams for what I was going to do in the near future went up in smoke along with 90% of the trees left on the ranch.”

By summer of 2016, fences were up and cattle were grazing. Alexander now had time to think and figure out his next step. He knew the now dead cedars were going to be a problem, because of what the 2008 fire taught him.

“I knew that I had five to seven years before the dead cedars started falling over to create a tangled mess with nothing man or beast could navigate,” he said. “I was determined not to let that happen to my place.”

“Removal on the cedar trees plus good grazing management has restored more than one creek on the ranch,” Alexander said. “Actually now that I’m counting, in the past 13 years we restored 52,000 feet of creek bottoms and made water flow again, including clearing 320 plus acres of riparian habitat.”

Alexander’s been asked how fire fits into his holistic context. The ranch has been burned at least eight times since 1985, and he believes the Great Plains grasslands evolved because of fire.

“We live in a landscape that is fire adapted, and if we are going to live here we need to understand that, and adjust our lifestyles and thinking to suit,” he said.

There’s two main reasons to burn the Red Hills he said—either reclamation and maintenance.

“The difference is subtle and probably imperceptible to an uneducated observer,” he said. “I like fire. I’ve been burning pastures for 33 years now. I don’t plan to stop.”

So how does it fit into his holistic context?

“It’s simple. It’s a tool that I use to manage forage and herbaceous vegetation,” he said. “I feel that once we get our stock density right, and our species mixed right the need to burn will be drastically reduced.”

He knows because of his 30-year burning and grazing experience.

“I’ve tried to manage certain kinds of brush with chemicals in the past, and it hasn’t worked,” Alexander said. “What has been successful is managing it with a high stock density.”

Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].