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Sometimes less really is more, as is the case on Pothook Ranches located near Salmon, ID, where Dave Ellis and Traci Bignell use a holistic approach to run their nearly 100 Red Angus cows and manage their private and public forage resources. Cows at Pothook Ranches receive very little supplementation, calves are not implanted or vaccinated except for the required bangs vaccine in heifers and very few animals are treated with antibiotics. Instead, Ellis focuses on a systematic rotational grazing program to provide quality forage throughout most of the year and relies on his herd’s inherited immunity and reduced stress to stay healthy.
“I don’t do any pour-on insecticide treatments, injections or ear tags of any kind,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a long enough period of time with these cows and have seen that their immune system is so much stronger than ones pharmaceutically supported.
“These cows will slick off faster in the spring, they gain body condition quicker and they’re just healthier. I have less everything in these cattle because we’ve built an immune response into them.”
Although it may sound unconventional, Ellis’s approach has paid off. Late last fall, a group of his steer calves topped the market for their weight class during a weekly sale at Twin Falls Livestock Commission.
“It was encouraging because I’ve been selling for so many years, and buyers know my calves and what they can do,” he said. “Because so many buyers are going to administer a round of shots as soon as the calves get off the truck, they know mine are like a blank slate and they’re going to get a good immunity response from them.”
To be successful with this approach, Ellis has worked hard to make cows that fit the rugged environment they live in. Much of Ellis’s grazing land is located in and around the Beaverhead Mountains on a combination of owned and leased ground and two Bureau of Land Management (BLM) allotments. The cattle run on rough terrain at an elevation of 4,000 to 6,000 feet year-round, and he relies on smaller framed cows that are easy fleshing and good mothers.
“As a cost management tool, I need a cow that can take care of herself and make a living on her own without a lot of handouts from me,” he said. “This is very rough country and we get some pretty severe winters, so most of my labor is allocated to grass management and I support those cows by making sure they’ve got a good forage base to go onto every time I move them.
But then it’s up to them to make good use of that and to raise a calf off of it. ”Keeping detailed records and knowing which qualities are best suited for the rough east-central Idaho landscape, Ellis is able to retain heifers each year that are acclimated and ready to go to work. He is very strict about culling heifers out of cows he has to assist, and he selects for short but thick-bodied females that will weigh 950 to 1,050 pounds as mature cows.
“That’s the kind of cows that have to go out here, especially on this winter range, to maintain a pregnancy, come back in and still build enough condition back that she can calve in May with a 5 or 5.5 body condition score,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I love red cattle, and I’ll always have them, but I have some concerns with some of the body types and the phenotypes of the cows we’re producing in the breed because we tout them as functional, easy fleshing, moderate framed cattle, but in my world, the cattle that they’re calling those things are way too big and high maintenance for what this country will allow.
“I’m very in tune with trying to make a cow that will fit this environment and not the other way around, which is a contemporary model that is often followed.”To produce the type of cows that work best in his operation, Ellis said he analyzes roughly 2,000-3,000 bulls to replace two or three of his sires each year. He looks specifically for frame score 3 to 4 bulls to keep his overall cow size smaller but admits they are getting harder to find, and he pays close attention to the Red Angus HerdBuilder Index, which places significant influence on economically relevant traits in profitable replacement heifers and also maximizes the value of non-replacement marketed progeny.
“I look at a tremendous number of bulls to find ones I think are going to help me build the kind of female that will be functional and fertile in this environment with some soundness and longevity I can depend on,” he said. “I want a good Marbling score and Rib Eye Area, but I am more focused on looking for double digits all the way through Heifer Pregnancy, Calving Ease Maternal and Stayability, which is not always easy.”
In an effort to better use available forages to meet his cows’ nutritional requirements throughout the year, Ellis starts calving about April 20 and is done by June 10. The calves are branded and bull calves are castrated during the last weekend in June, and once healed, the pairs are turned out on an irrigated piece of ground that will support them through the breeding season, which usually lasts from July 12 through August 20.
“That’s only one and half heat cycles for those cows, but it’s deliberate because if I’m going to make any progress in the fertility and the doability of these cows, I have to put some pressure on those traits,” he said.Calves are weaned at about six months of age during the first week of November and spend a few weeks on winter pasture 300 miles south in Twin Falls, ID, until they are marketed in early December.
“My steer calves average between 425 and 450 pounds when I sell them, and I am constantly searching for cows that can wean 50% of their body weight in six months,” he said. “That’s a huge challenge anywhere and especially in country like this, but I have a lot of cows that will do it and I think it’s a feather in our cap with these red cattle.”
As successful as Ellis has been in the past with his hands-off approach, the ongoing, record-breaking drought conditions in the western part of the country wreaked havoc on his forage supply and his 2021 breeding season.“We basically run these cows no different than any of the native elk or deer herds, so when you have a very scarce nutrient base, your reproductive rates are going to take a hit,” he said. “And we really did, we got about half of our cows bred last year even though I tried to manage the forage the best I could, but because of the way I run these cows, I’m very willing to acknowledge that risk.”
Ellis said that risk is often outweighed by the ecological and economical benefits he sees from using a holistic management plan. Many of his philosophies are based on the teachings of Allan Savory, Stan Parsons and Dick Divens, and focus on combining the nutrient availability of his resource base with the nutrient needs of his cows and trying to make those complement each other.
Pothook Ranches is dependent on public land grazing, and Ellis believes maintaining a mutually respectful relationship with his local BLM staff provides opportunities that might not otherwise exist. For example, one of Ellis’s BLM allotments allows for dormant season use and he is able to graze his dry cows there until the end of February or until he starts to see body condition scores diminish.
“If I wasn’t managing my grass and my cattle to coordinate calving times and breeding times with some natural seasons and cycles, I wouldn’t even be in business,” he said. “We preg tested our cows two days after Thanksgiving last fall and sent them out to that allotment for nearly three months, so they saved me a lot of money by not having to support them with mechanically harvested feed, and on a small operation like this, that makes a huge difference.
“I’m certainly not going to say that I’m an Allan Savory purist, but I do the best with the resources I have here.” Ellis’s love for the land started as a young boy. He grew up on horseback and “crawling around in the mountains” and is now the third generation to run his family’s ranch. He spends most of his days on a horse checking cattle and often gets help from Traci, who also works off the ranch as an office manager for a local wellness center, and from his daughter, Amy, who lives nearby. His son, Jace, is also involved in ranch activities from time to time.
“They are a tremendous amount of help to me, and I certainly couldn’t be doing what I’m doing without them,” he said. “I just turned 60 years old, and I don’t want to ever lose my enthusiasm for being able to do this, and I know having their support will help sustain that enthusiasm.” — Macey Mueller for the Red Angus Magazine
