In this episode, collaboration is key! Haley teams up with the team at Ranch Stewards Alliance, a group of fellow ranchers (and podcasters!) to talk about support, community, and what’s new in ranching innovations out west.
Leo Barthelmess, rancher and president of the Ranch Stewards Alliance (RSA), and Martin Townsend, RSA’s conservation manager, join Haley to talk about the power of community and collaboration in sustainable ranching. Ranchers and conservationists are working together to integrate conservation efforts into ranch operations, using innovative tools like virtual fencing and managed grazing systems to protect wildlife habitats and improve land management. Leo and Martin share how their community in Montana has built stronger relationships between ranchers, conservation groups, and agencies, creating mutual respect and shared goals across the landscape.
Listen in to learn how these collaborative efforts are reshaping the future of ranching, fostering economic resilience, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion. This conversation is a blueprint for how rural communities can come together to address conservation challenges while supporting the livelihoods of ranchers.
Topics
[0:00] Introduction to RSA
[4:32] Holistic stewardship and the role of RSA
[9:42] New techniques: Virtual fencing and grazing systems
[15:01] Working with landowners and conservation programs
[27:37] How community impacts collaboration
Haley (00:06):
Welcome back to the Land Bulletin Podcast, where every other week we bring you experts in the field to impart their knowledge when it comes to the ranch and sporting property market, buying and selling advice, the latest best stewardship practices, as well as topics that impact landowners every day. I’m your host, Haley Mirr. Let’s jump in.
Welcome back to the Land Bulletin. I’m Haley Mirr. I’m the host here, and this week’s episode is about the intersection of ranching, conservation, and stewardship. We’ll go over sustainable ranching practices, land management, and how a community creates a beneficial environment for all. There’s a growing need for sustainable practices in ranching and land stewardship, and we’re looking to spread awareness with the help from our friends over at Ranch Stewards Alliance. Helping me out today is the founding member and president, Leo Barthelmess and Martin Townsend, conservation manager over there.
(00:58):
Welcome guys.
Leo Barthelmess (01:00):
Thank you. Thank you.
Haley (01:02):
Well, before we get into the nitty-gritty about what you guys are doing over there at Ranch Stewards Alliance, I’d love to know your backgrounds and what brought you to RSA. Leo, we’ll start with you.
Leo Barthelmess (01:14):
Well, thank you. So my name is Leo Barthelmess. I’m a rancher with my family and president of the Rancher Stewardship Alliance. And we’ve lived here about 50 years. We’re the newcomers in the community. My neighbors have been here a hundred years. So the Rancher Stewardship Alliance kind of started out of a need to help guide the changes that were coming to South Phillips County. Some big conservation groups, the Nature Conservancy bought a ranch and were unfamiliar with them, didn’t have any relationship with them. And the Nature Conservancy hosted facilitated meetings, and out of that grew the Rancher Stewardship Alliance. And then we formed a nonprofit. And for some reason, nonprofits change your dynamic in a group. Suddenly nonprofits are equal where ranchers maybe are about self inermit when you’re at a meeting. So that’s just a perception. So out of those consensus meetings, we formed a Rancher Stewardship Alliance to help guide the changes that came to Phillips County.
Haley (02:24):
Awesome. And has it grown from Phillips County since you guys started it or are you guys still kind of keeping your focus on that area specifically?
Leo Barthelmess (02:35):
So we have grant funding to help the ranching conservation and urban communities in a three county area now. Phillips County is a central point of our. We’re based Valley County to the east and Blaine County to the west. And if we get requests for assistance other than financial, we’ve gone to different states and worked with broad-based conservation groups and ag groups across the west. And we have a sister organization, the ACEs group down south of Missouri River. They’re essentially doing the same thing. We’re kind of franchising our program out so that each community could develop their own program that would best fit their needs.
Haley (03:27):
That’s great. Martin, where did you start with RSA and your career path?
Martin Townsend (03:33):
Yeah, so in college I thought it’d be fun to live out of my grandparents’ backyard and get a seasonal job with the BLM counting cows. And that turned into, I got a real job with the Sage Grouse Initiative and worked here in Malta with that for a few years. And through that time, volunteered with Rancher Stewardship Alliance and the start of their conservation committee. That then exploded in success off the ground and it demanded adding a position to it. So a position was created to oversee the RSA conservation position, and I took that job in 2021. So I’ve been running this program since then.
Haley (04:13):
Well, you guys have great backgrounds that bring a wealth of knowledge to what we’re going to be talking about today. Before we get into the programs you guys are working on, Martin, maybe this is geared towards you as the conservation manager, but what is the definition of holistic stewardship as it relates to ranching?
Martin Townsend (04:32):
Sure. So holistic stewardship is really a thought process of how do we do an action and have that action have either a no change or a positive change going forward? How do we use resources while continuing to keep them available and successful going forward? And that doesn’t just apply to grass and cows. It can apply to relationships and people and communities and infrastructure and everything that it takes to support a ranch, from grass and cows to vehicles, to cars, to roads, to cities, to city pools and everything in between. So I think when we work on holistic stewardship, we try to get past just soil health, just range management, just cow management, and into just ecosystem health of the area. These ranches are the center point of the area we work in, but how does that affect the rest of the area that we work in that isn’t necessarily on ranch?
Haley (05:31):
And what are the main focuses as it relates to holistic stewardship over at RSA?
Martin Townsend (05:36):
So small scale, I guess the two main programs we work in, we’re in the Northern Great Plains ecosystem, so we work on a lot of grassland focused conservation actions. So there’s a bunch of species of grassland birds that are at risk and suffering population declines. We have a bunch of wide open connected space, so big game migrations has been a big point. So we work a lot in grassland bird habitat focused projects and then big game focus projects. Then as we go up and out from there, we work a lot on ranch business training of we need the ecology to work, but we also need the ranch economics to work. So then our education program then works a ton on ranch succession planning, ranch econ, ranch stockmanship and different things like that related to ranch management. And then another, I guess layer to our education program is just trying to work on community at a broader scale.
(06:33):
If you’re a rancher that’s interested in trying something new and different, here’s some other people that are doing that too, and just serving as a way for people to meet other people like them that they can bounce questions off of.
Haley (06:45):
And Leo, at your own ranch, since you are a rancher, what of these initiatives have you guys integrated into your own operations?
Leo Barthelmess (06:54):
If I can, I’ll give you a little background. I read Alan Savory’s Holistic Resource Management in 1990, 91, and then started attending grazing seminars. And so we’ve gone from basically a four pasture season long grazing management up to 38 pastures that we use in various stages to increase dock density and increase rest periods on the grass wherein it’s no longer just a cow ranch, it’s a soil health ranch. It’s a wildlife ranch and grazing and fire and all of the tools that people use in holistic management are on the table to use in different situations. So we’ve been supported by RSA and other conservation groups to. We’re one of the first adapters of virtual fence so we can subdivide the large pastures we already have in existence because any new infrastructure impedes wildlife migrations, either sage chickens or antelope or mule deer. So we’re just working incrementally as we can.
(08:05):
The biggest thing I learned from holistic resource men is more of a decision making tool than it is a fence building manual. So we consider everything when we’re making decisions, what are the outcomes to wildlife and what are the outcomes to livestock production and soil health? So we use bits and pieces of many different tools based on our topography and landscape as every rancher is unique in their infrastructure and where they work. So it’s important to address things individually.
Haley (08:39):
Yeah, nothing kind of fits the same mold. Have you seen a lot of success with the virtual fencing that you’re doing on your own ranch?
Leo Barthelmess (08:46):
We have seen some success. It’s enabled us to change the grazing behavior in the cattle even when they’re not subject to the virtual fence. We’re harvesting outlying areas and pastures in the wintertime to knock down that decadent growth, either to graze it or put it into the soil surface and freshen up the landscape, let’s say, for messic type growth and wildlife habitat because nothing likes to eat old decadent grass. So we’re using the virtual fence to address areas that rarely get grazed. And by doing that in the winter, they don’t need to trail back to water, which can be in the summertime it’s too far for a walk. So yeah, we’re having success. It’s an emerging technology, so there’s always bugs to figure out, but we’re having success, yes.
Haley (09:40):
And in layman’s terms, for those listening who might not know what virtual fencing is, without going into those specifics, what is virtual fencing? I know you guys can answer that.
Leo Barthelmess (09:50):
Certainly virtual fencing, we attach a collar to our livestock and then we form virtual boundaries, just lines on a map that are not visible on the landscape. And the caller issues an audible warning and then a physical stimulus if they continue into the barrier. But cattle are actually pretty smart and they hear the audible, they turn around and come back, and so we’re able to subdivide larger pastures and key places of concern that need extra protection or extra grazing. So it’s a hugely versatile tool.
Haley (10:32):
And it seems like that’s something that’s maybe even more approachable to some than building a lot of these fences all the time, monetarily speaking.
Leo Barthelmess (10:40):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, Martin can tell you exactly what it costs to build a new fence, but it’s extraordinarily expensive. And virtual fence, once you invest in the hardware, you can build hundreds of miles of fence with virtually no cost.
Haley (10:58):
And Martin, beyond Leo’s own experience with his ranch, what are some other projects that you guys are working on in-house that have seen a lot of success with the tools that you guys have provided?
Martin Townsend (11:09):
Yeah, so we started to mention it, but fencing has been a huge focus that we have here. We have the recorded longest pronghorn migration in North America coming right through the area we work in. So animals being able to move through that space is huge on a wildlife perspective. And then like you both just mentioned on the cost side, fencing sucks.
(11:34):
I mean an average size ranch that we work with might have anywhere from 150 to 600 miles of fencing just to have the range and pasture management they want, just to replace what breaks every year is a tens of thousands of dollar investment. So to build more, to build new is getting harder and harder to justify on the backs of the profit off of cattle. So we’ve really slowed down how much we’re working on cross fence or management fencing. We’re trying to do that through other avenues like temporary electric or virtual fencing. And then where we are working on fencing, we’re really trying to focus on property boundary fencing and neighbor fencing, basically with the goal of ensuring that as that has to get replaced, it’s in our area, essentially a hundred years old right now, and it was needing to be replaced probably 30 years ago and cost has prohibited it to that point.
(12:32):
We’re trying to find those fences and help put them in a way that’s friendly for wildlife migration. So with a higher bottom wire, most of our big animals like to go under fencing, so a higher bottom wire and basically trying to ensure that snow won’t rot it and break it and the animals can pass through it and that it stays useful for the next hundred years because there’s probably no scenario where that fence isn’t going to continue to be there, whereas cross fencing and other things, we could find different management tools. So we’ve tried to really, really get into fencing and migration work. The other, I guess, main topics of conservation practice we do are grazing systems. So it’s fencing, stock water, making an area graze a bull. One of the biggest habitat threats and threats to ranching, the overlap in our area is just loss of grazing land, whether that’s converted to crop land or converted to housing developments or energy developments, trying to find ways to just keep it in grass so it can be ranched on and so wildlife have a place to live on it.
(13:40):
Basically, the idea is if it’s graze a bowl, it’s less likely to be converted. So even though there might not be anything formally stopping it from going out of production, just the intention of adding the ability that has been greatly successful in grassland staying in place. So we’ve done a lot of those grazing systems. We actually do a bunch. The conservation reserve program from USDA, CRP, we have a ton of that in our area that circulates and turns over. So we have a huge effort to try to put grazing systems on those acres as they come out of the program to keep them in grass. A fun little uptick of that is we work with a bunch of bird focus groups that do abundant surveys of those declining birds. Every time we increase grazing on an acre that’s been ungrazed before, it’s resulting in an increase in abundance of the bird species being looked at.
(14:34):
So a lot of wildlife really, really relies on managed and used range lands. So putting the ability in place to do that has been a huge point of our conservation program.
Haley (14:48):
So what is the process if I’m a landowner and I’m listening to this and I’m in your guys’ jurisdiction, what’s the process of working with you guys and starting to really create a plan for your property?
Martin Townsend (15:00):
Sure. So in our jurisdiction, we operate what we call the conservation committee. So it’s made up of around 25 different partners that have something to offer ranchers in the area, whether that’s education, project dollars or anything in between. Basically, the idea with that committee is it meets regularly enough that if a landowner approaches anyone in conservation, they should be able to get into at least a network of referrals that gets them to the right program, the right person or right support tool that they need to better manage their ranch. In other parts of the world in the West, I think the Natural Resource Conservation Services is always a great place to start. They’re honestly one of our main partners. And then extension service through land grant universities is another great option to start as well.
Haley (15:50):
That’s great. And do you guys have in-house, beyond connecting people with the right people and having these conversations, do you have any really good templates or best practice kind of things that you can offer landowners?
Martin Townsend (16:03):
Really, we try to refer people to people. I think in the agriculture industry especially, it goes so much better to provide ranchers and landowners a person to visit with about what they want to do. We’re actually struggling in conservation. I think nationwide, there’s so much information that exists, but how has it ever been put out and relayed to people? So government programs, agency programs, nonprofit programs turn over as fast as the people do. So I think being able to put out that information has always been a struggle for us in conservation. So I think just getting a personal connection built between someone in conservation and a rancher is usually our first step to go to.
Leo Barthelmess (16:44):
I would agree with that. I just have an example of that. I received a phone call last week and this gentleman who I’ve known for a long time, I’ve visited with off and on. We live a long ways apart, but he called me up, had the opportunity to buy some property, but it had some annual weed issues and it had some wetland issues, and he called me up to get some information from me. So we talked for an hour and I found out that he has a great extension agent in his community. And I said, “Be sure we heavily rely on them, but here are some strategies that I know of and have employed and some I know of that I haven’t employed, but nevertheless, here’s some strategies.” And it was a lot more engaging and entertaining than reading a book. I’ve read a lot of books, but a little dry.
(17:34):
It’s a lot more fun to go one-on-one with a peer than it is just to read a book. So yeah, as an example, as Martin to support what Martin said, people to people is the best tool we have for engaging conservation and production A.
Haley (17:52):
Yeah. I think the exchange of knowledge between ranchers and conservation groups, that’s kind of what we do too. It’s like, “Hey, I have a water issue or my stream restoration isn’t what I wanted.” We definitely like connecting them to lawyers or whoever they need to talk to to really figure out their plan of attack, that’s huge. And just for my own knowledge, what is some of the conservation tools up in Montana? I mean, I know Colorado very well from a conservation perspective, but what do you guys have available up in Montana?
Martin Townsend (18:26):
So I think working backwards from most extreme to least,
(18:32):
Easements have been a popular tool of habitat retention and powerful business tools for rancher. Long-term program enrollments with USDA have been another option we have. The EQIP program is super popular here. That’s basically the NRCS’s infrastructure program, so stock water tanks, fencing, that sort of thing. We’ve had huge growth in some nonprofit programs in the last few years. So in our area World Wildlife Fund runs a sustainable ranching initiative program, and they’ve partnered with the beef industry to do some neat things with ranchers with the help of Burger King and Cargill and some other corporate partners that has been super useful. Pheasants Forever has, I think, tripled their staff in Montana in the last 10 years. So I think just having more people to work with has been huge, and Pheasants is able to act in that conduit avenue as well of providing a person that can direct you to the right agency.
(19:35):
For the most part, they’re working with USDA programs, but they’re also not working for USDA, so they can step out and look at other options. Ducks Unlimited is running programs. There’s been some other neat things that have popped online, but basically from easements back downwards, we’re usually looking at a shorter term agreement with usually a lower total available funding of less options, but less availability, if that makes sense. So that’s kind of the programmatic overview, but then the practice overview is so much of what we’re doing is just trying to make grazing possible. So I know we had a new NRCS guy over in Glasgow that was asking us what we can assist with, and I kept telling him, “If it sounds like it relates to grazing, it’s a maybe.” And he hated that answer. So really we’re trying to work with landowners to identify gaps in management needs.
(20:31):
And from our perspective as the nonprofit in this, we work with Bureau of Land Management, we work with USDA of we can work with their programs with what’s missing and can we find a way to add that in? So on stock water, we can figure out how to pay for stock water, but we couldn’t figure out how to support temporary electric fencing. So that was an avenue we went down to figure out how to add that availability in planning.
Haley (20:54):
That’s awesome. It’s good to know all the different kind of things available to landowners across the west. Are you guys seeing a big, you were saying the transition of taking grazing land and developing it. Are you seeing a lot of that kind of pressure and that change of population growth in the area you guys are in as it relates to maybe diminishing some of the grazing lands that are available?
Martin Townsend (21:20):
Where we are hasn’t had the same population related development. I think the development that comes for us has been from the energy and food sectors. So we’ve had a bunch of cropland conversion and we haven’t had any energy development yet, but it keeps coming up of let’s look at this
Haley (21:37):
Area. Right, I’m sure.
Martin Townsend (21:39):
And so we joke sometimes that our biggest threats to ecosystem conservation are organic markets and alternative energy, which is really fun
Haley (21:49):
Things. Yeah, but it’s interesting just to know what different pressures other regional kind of ranchers run into because Colorado, it’s very different. The population growth is insane right now, no matter where you live. It could be the Eastern plains, could be rural communities up in the wet or in the mountains, but it’s just interesting to know that that would be kind of a unintentional kind of pressure on grazing land. And it’s funny how – We would think they’d kind of go hand in hand.
Martin Townsend (22:17):
And it’s funny how much it changes by location. When we just go across the Missouri River to that sister group that Leo mentioned earlier, they have more elk down there and an easier to get elk tag, so they have more land ownership pressure down there. They have more lease pressure for access to land. And then I spent the whole first part of this week down at the southern end of Montana and down there it’s housing. It is housing development left and right. That is the pressure on ranch lands.
Haley (22:45):
And with that, with your sister groups that you’re working with, is there an exchange of ideas as it relates to these different kinds of pressures that you guys can come together and figure out?
Martin Townsend (22:56):
Oh, for sure. I mean, if it’s not something we’re used to and it happens here, instead of spending five years trying to wrap our minds around it, we can just ask someone that’s dealt with it, what’s that been like? And that’s been, I think, immensely valuable in both directions. We’ve had input flow both directions from groups in Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and different ranching communities always have different pressures, but usually I guess the social model of it is pretty similar of there’s an outside pressure, ranching has to find a way to respond with limited resources. So it’s how do you pull that effort together and get somewhere with it?
Haley (23:41):
And beyond the tangible net positive outcomes of some of these operational changes that you guys have been implementing on ranches, what are some of the other positive net outcomes from a social perspective or community perspective?
Leo Barthelmess (24:01):
So I’ll take a first run at that, and then Martin, he works a lot closer. But because we work with a number of conservation groups in the conservation committee and we’re providing an opportunity for them to engage with us and us with them, we have some really positive social engagement with the conservation community. They love the landscape, they love to hunt, they love to fish. I mean, maybe they’re not 100% engaged in cows, but they can get over that because we’re helping them do their work and I can get over some of their wildlife concerns and I recognize their concerns. So we’re communicating all the time and we’ve become partners and friends and talk about family instead of conflict. And yeah, we’re just engaging a lot of people a lot at the time, and we have far more in common than we don’t, so we get over the little stuff.
Martin Townsend (25:03):
Yeah. And yeah, we maybe didn’t mention it enough, but our pressure was wildlife between endangered species focuses of blackfooted ferrets and sage grouse and different things through the 2000s, that’s been the pressure on ranching our area has been from wildlife. So that’s been a huge hurdle for us to overcome from just a perception standpoint of no, some of these wildlife groups do have beneficial things to look at. They’re not all out to get ranching, which is I think the go-to assumption. So like Leo said, just the integration of those two on paper opposing communities. One story, we have a rancher in the north part of our world that is the bullseye of the best waterfowl habitat in the lower 48. And he wanted to do a project and I looked at it for a minute and I was like, “This sounds like a Ducks Unlimited issue.” Got our friend Adam from Ducks to come over tour the place with us, and we came over a hill and we’re looking at this big stock water reservoir that they use for their main cow water source, and it had 40,000 ducks on it.
(26:11):
It had every kind of duck that could exist out there. And Adam and I both hunt ducks and we’re flying through with binoculars naming off all the ducks we see. And this rancher looks at us, he goes, “Boys, hate to admit this, but before today, I didn’t know there was more than two kinds of duck.”
(26:26):
And we’re like, “Well, you are the epicenter of where they’re all from.” And then got him excited about ducks for the next year. He called me every so often. He is like, “I saw a duck. It was more brown than it was gray. What kind of duck was that?” And so that’s been fun to see his interest in ducks, his then now knowledge that Ducks Unlimited supports ranching in some way. And that even turned into Ducks Unlimited was doing media coverage of some of the projects they’ve done, and they brought their journalists and went up and they hunted on that guy’s place and brought him with them and tried to get him to hunt ducks. And he called me a week later and told me how boring duck hunting is, but I think he had fun.
Haley (27:06):
But I love those stories. It’s when you recognize, “Oh my gosh, this is what I have. This is what’s impacting. How do we figure out how to integrate this into our overall operations as a ranch?” It’s super impactful. And then from a perspective of what you guys have seen as an outcome since you guys started, what has been the overarching impact on the communities that you guys live in?
Leo Barthelmess (27:33):
It’s been so slow and glacial, it’s hard to even recognize change, but we’re including more and more inclusive in our community. The town of Malta has lots of hunters, and we introduce people, and we work together with lots of people from conservation groups from out of the county and even out of the state. And it’s a way to influence outcomes and support other people’s desire for positive outcomes. It’s just a big relationship building exercise to where we actually value more people than we had the opportunity to do before. We’re pretty isolated. Your cow guy, you’re a horse guy, you’re sheep guy, you farm. We are all living in our silos, and now we live in a big arena, let’s say, with a stadium full of participants. Yeah,
Haley (28:30):
I love that.
Martin Townsend (28:32):
Yeah. I think we have a long-term BLM guy here that gave me a great comparison one day. He really felt the beginning of his career, he was here right at that on-ramp of the area really hadn’t had outside focus or outside landowners. Then all of a sudden it did and in giant numbers. And he put it as the entire area just seemed beat of just down on the ability of ranching to thrive. And I think a huge part of what we try to do is show that ranching isn’t just valuable, but has a universal landscape value for more than just agriculture production. It has social value, it has wildlife habitat value, it has broad scale economic value, and that ranchers being open to outside interests and working with and getting out of that isolation and working with those outside focuses gives them the power to make change both on their place and at scale around them.
Haley (29:30):
No, it’s neat. I think in general, just the exchange of ideas goes against any type of isolationism that you might be feeling on your properties because sometimes your neighbors are miles away. So it’s nice to have these kind of communal things that bring you all together. And any other good testimonials from people you’ve worked with? Leo, obviously you’re a living, breathing kind of example of where this has kind of impacted you personally, but any other kind of Stories you guys want to talk about of ranchers that have been impacted by connecting with you guys?
Leo Barthelmess (30:08):
Well, Martin, especially recently, has got to go to a number of different events and there’s a lot of enthusiasm out there in the arenas that he’s talking at. But I’ve had a couple of comments not necessarily made by ranchers to me that I’ve been in contact with over the past few years that they speak positively of the extraordinary work that RSA is doing and the fact that. Well, one college professor mentioned to me, he said, “The whole world has been watching what you guys are doing and the outcomes are extraordinary. You are charting a new path for conservation and ranching.”
Martin Townsend (30:51):
Yeah. And I think outside of the local projects, I mean, it’s always a good feeling to know that you’ve helped a ranch meet their goal. And I think we’ve done 150 some of those projects that’s really taken off. And then I think we’re able to then spread that onto other programs and agencies. So we’re increasing that success across our partners. So I think that’s been good. I think one of our last, I think things that we felt really good about was I got kind of panicky a year or two ago and noticed that all of our partner staff, all of our support staff, all of our other agency staff just all of a sudden left. So we’re a fairly high turnover area anyways, but we were at zero. And I looked around, I was like, “Well, it’s not that bad of a thing. Everybody that had been working here and working on this partnership got promoted.” So that’s a huge positive.
(31:43):
And those people are now out, they’re in different areas of the state, different areas of the country, and I think they’re bringing forward a very collaborative, very landowner focused energy to the conservation organizations they’re working with. So I think that’s been a huge success of ours. And then we’ve touched on it a few times, but I think just the ability to translate ideas to other ranchers to let them know that yes, it’s hard, but it’s not unique. We went to New Mexico earlier this year and we were hearing about the problem in their general area of why it doesn’t work. And they explained it and we’re like, oh, same. Same. It’s the same.
Haley (32:24):
Did you guys talk to Malpai Borderland Group ever? I know they do some kind of – Yeah,
Martin Townsend (32:29):
Years ago, but not this trip. I don’t know if Leo can talk about Malpai.
Leo Barthelmess (32:34):
So when RSA was exploring the art of the possible, I’ve been told, we went to the Malpi Borderlands Group during their annual event and met with them and there was five or six of us spent three or four days down there meeting the people and figuring out how they did it. And then we also did to other conservation groups like the Blackfoot Challenge and the Nebraska Sand Hills Task Force to learn how to do this so that we would have some idea where we wanted to go and needed to go. And so Malpi was instrumental in helping us get started.
Haley (33:13):
That’s awesome. Well, it just shows, I mean, I don’t want to say the phrase beat a dead horse, but I don’t want to. You guys are creating this really cool partnership idea of exchange of ideas. I think that’s what’s so cool about groups like you guys, Malpai, whomever, is that you are exchanging these things and making the ranching industry and these different communities better and more performative and making sure these grazing lands don’t get changed into these different types of landscapes that aren’t usable anymore for cows.
Martin Townsend (33:47):
I mean, we’ll steal ideas from anywhere and we hope people do the same from us. That went so far as our executive director had to travel clear to Arkansas to hear about a technology of electrified cattle guard mats that would make it so electric fencing could operate on public roadways. Had to go clear to Arkansas to learn that they were made just at the other end of Montana.
Haley (34:11):
That’s crazy. That’s such a good idea. Yeah.
Martin Townsend (34:14):
So I think just the idea of getting out and seeing other ways of doing things or working with organizations that have access to that kind of information and those contacts, I think is hugely beneficial for ranchers. So I think just being open to what other people do on their ranches, whether as ranchers or what other agencies or groups do with ranches on ranches of look into it. It might not be exactly right for you, but maybe something similar to it is. Maybe it is half of an idea that leads to something more useful. I think one of the most powerful things we ever had was on a tour once, somebody showed us how they hooked up their tanks with radiator hose, so it was flexible. And I’ve seen every ranch that was on that tour by a bunch of radiator hose since that time.
Haley (34:59):
Well, it just goes to show, I mean, I think ranchers are the most resilient type of people on this planet. They change the way they do things. They kind of absorb information from their neighbors and the people around, but it’s neat to have something like you guys to have a one-stop shop for that exchange of ideas. So it’s been really good to meet you guys. We’ve done a couple deals here and there in Montana, and it’s just neat to know what’s happening in your neck of the woods. And I’m sure as our relationship grows, we’ll continue to exchange these ideas as we chat. But I really appreciate you guys taking the time and coming on the land bulletin today.
Leo Barthelmess (35:40):
Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having
Martin Townsend (35:42):
Us. Appreciate you.
Haley (35:43):
Thanks so much. See you guys next time.
Leo Barthelmess (35:45):
See you.
Haley (35:48):
Thanks for joining us today. To learn more about the ranch real estate market or our ranch marketing process, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website at mirrranchgroup.com or give us a call at 303-623-4545. See you next time.
