Catching up with the Bar K

By Kate Arpin
We talk a lot about conservation practices, and our favorite part of the talk is hearing from the people who are actually using them. So I sat down with Luke Todd of the stewardship award-winning Bar K Ranch recently to talk about how their summer has been on the ranch.
Plenty of moisture and good temperatures have made for a great summer across most of Southwest Montana. But on the Bar K, ranch Manager Luke said that it’s been probably the best summer they’ve ever had. He attributes a lot of that to the conservation practices they’ve implemented.
On Bale Grazing
One of the Bar K’s most innovative practices they’ve implemented has been bale grazing on pastures that struggle with club moss. It’s something that they’ve done a couple of times in the fall with great success, but this year they tried doing it in the spring, too. Luke said it wasn’t as successful in the spring as it has been in the fall, mostly because when the cows have calves at their sides, they’re not as aggressive, and therefore don’t pull the bales apart as much.
On the whole though, the bale grazing has been extremely effective. “Last week there was still green grass at the bale grazing sites,” Luke said, “it’s pretty incredible to see green grass on that bench this late in the year.”
On Intensive Grazing Management
When I asked what else they were doing that was going well, Luke brought up their intensive grazing management. They put their cattle in much smaller pastures and rotate them more frequently, so that the pasture has more time to recover. Luke said that it’s one of the things that really surprised him. “We’ve got a section that’s 1200 acres, and when we were done grazing, we’d left 150 acres completely untouched. We didn’t even need it!” And on their BLM grazing allotment, a few weeks after they’d grazed, you couldn’t even tell that they’d been there. “The grass is knee high now,” he said. “We could graze it again.” It was a common theme in our conversation, and we joked that some people might buy more cows to eat all the grass they have.
When I asked Luke what else they had going, he mentioned some gravity fed buried water tanks that they’ve put in. The tanks, designed by Hutterites in Ontario, don’t need heat or electricity and won’t freeze, because they’re buried underground. “I’m excited to see the power savings we get from that,” Luke said. He also added that they only took about half an hour to put in with an excavator.
Overall, it was clear that the Bar K is feeling good about the changes on the ranch. Of course, all of these changes will need to be managed appropriately to continue the good results. “We could always slip back,” Luke said in his modest way, “But for now we’re having more fun than we know what to do with.” It sounded to me like it’s a pretty good time to be spending days on the Bar K.