A Grant County rancher on how to manage for the future

Cattle ranching is a nearly $20 million industry in Grant County. But it can take a serious environmental toll on the region’s land and waterways. Jack Southworth, a fourth-generation rancher in Seneca, has been practicing holistic land management since the 1980s. He’s planted willows to restore the streams on his property and worked with the Forest Service to sustainably graze his cattle in the summers, among other measures. Southworth joins to give us a tour of his land and talk about what he sees as the future of cattle ranching.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, in Grant County. Yesterday afternoon we headed south from John Day, up and over a gorgeous pass in the Malheur National Forest, to get to the tiny town of Seneca in Bear Valley. That is where Jack Southworth and his family have ranched for four generations. Jack set up some folding chairs in the middle of one of his pastures and we got to talking. I started by asking him to just give us a sense for where we were.

Jack Southworth: Geographically, Grant County is kind of in the center of Eastern Oregon. We’re in the southern third of Grant County. We’re about as far from Redmond as we are from Ontario. We’re about as far from Pendleton as we are from Lakeview. If there’s a center of Eastern Oregon, we’re not far from it.

Miller: How long has this been your family’s land?

Southworth: So my great grandfather came here in 1885. He came to Canyon City in 1862 as part of the Gold Rush and he ended up with a small sawmill outside of Canyon City, had a few head of horses, some oxen to move logs around the mill and needed hay for them.

Miller: Wait, so he created a ranch to basically, to grow fuel for his mill?

Southworth: Well, for hay, for the livestock, yeah …

Miller: I mean, but in a sense it’s like buying gas except he didn’t… it wasn’t internal combustion, it was livestock to run the machinery. So he grew hay here to feed the animals to run the mill.

Southworth: And early on, I mean, they were out here with hand scythes and they would load it on wagons and haul it to the mill. And then my great grandmother and grandfather and great uncle thought that they could turn it into a ranch. And so by combining the ranch with a post office, it was the first - not the first, but early post office in the valley. And the original post office of Seneca was located at our ranch headquarters. It was named after a family relative in Portland, Seneca Smith, a judge and lawyer who I don’t think ever visited his hometown, so to speak. And they also had a store, they did some freighting and they had a stagecoach stop.

When you’re just getting going with homesteading, the one thing you don’t have is money, and they had just a little bit of money when almost no one else had any of it. And so they were able to gradually acquire other homesteads and put together a ranch.

Miller: So let’s fast forward a couple of generations. You grew up on this ranch?

Southworth: Yes.

Miller: When you were 10, 12 years old, did you assume you were going to be a rancher too?

Southworth: Yeah. It always just felt right to me. It felt like each day you were getting to decide what you wanted to do and you got to be outside. And it utilized your physical body, utilized your emotional body, because of your attachment to the land. And then it’s an intellectual challenge to try to make a profit in cattle ranching.

Miller: I should say that I have so much to get to, but we have to mention what is facing us right here. You set us up on some portable chairs in the middle of this field, because some of your steers are grazing here and as we’ve been sitting here, 300 plus steer have just… well, now they’re, they seem to be on the move a little bit, but they …

Southworth: Well, you embarrassed them, you started talking about them.

Miller: They are our audience. And so they just, they were curious about what we were doing, why did they come over to be 15 ft away?

Southworth: Well, believe it or not, this doesn’t happen every day at their pasture. And so for us, we move our cattle gently, they don’t think of us as a threat, but they’re wary of us because they are a prey animal. And so they’re being careful, but it’s so interesting what’s going on here that they can’t resist hanging around, kind of. And so I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that you don’t have to be real interesting today, you just have to be more interesting than grass.

Miller: I don’t know that I’m tastier than grass for these guys.

Southworth: But being more interesting than grass in Bear Valley in May, that’s kind of a challenge.

Miller: We’re gonna talk about grass because it’s, as you have said, it’s basically what you do here, but I want to go back in time again. So, it seemed like for a bunch of reasons you always knew you were gonna follow in your parents and grandparents and great grandparents footsteps. What was the state of this ranch when you took over? And when was that?

Southworth: Teresa and I graduated from Oregon State in ‘77. We were married in ‘78, and we moved to the ranch. And my folks had separated, my dad had a drinking problem. His drinking made it hard on our marriage. We were having a hard time figuring out how to be married and by the way, we just bought some additional property, so now we’re a million dollars in debt. Early eighties, interest rates go to 15-16%. And I define myself as a rancher and I couldn’t think what would happen if we lost the ranch, but I knew we were on the verge of it. Banks were saying, we’re having a hard time lending you money.

And so in ‘84, Teresa and I spent 2,500 bucks we really didn’t have and went to a week-long course in Albuquerque, taught by Alan Savory, this Zimbabwean game scientist, who thought he knew how to graze cattle in a better way. And we went down there and learned the first smattering about holistic management. And the core of holistic management is to have a goal or what they say nowadays, a context for the quality of life you want, what you produce and then the landscape that supports those two things. It’s as simple as it could be.

Miller: You say simple, but how different is that from…

Southworth: From what I grew up with.

Miller: And what you had thought you were even gonna do and you had studied too, you went to OSU. So how different was that, from what you were going to be doing otherwise?

Southworth: Growing up, everything was economically driven. And my dad always said that we were here to make a profit. And we didn’t even think about quality of life, we just assumed if you made enough money, you’d be happy.

Miller: The quality of whose life?

Southworth: Of the people on the ranch. Especially growing up, our family, I mean my dad and my mom, they worked hard at making this thing work economically, but we didn’t plan for fun things to do or anything like that because you were always trying to make enough money in order to have fun. Thinking about the quality of life we wanted was not part of growing up. It was all economically driven.

And then landscape was the kind of landscape that would maximize production. And so there are a lot of talks about inputs of, especially a fertilizer to increase production. And then when we learn about holistic management, you start with quality of life. And we get back from this class and on a perfectly good winter’s day, to be out doing, “real work” - I say that in quotation marks - Teresa and I and our employee, Ed Newton were in the house trying to come up with a quality of life goal and we could hardly say the words. It was so embarrassing to each other, we couldn’t even think of something we wanted to do with our lives.

Miller: Because you hadn’t thought in those terms before?

Southworth: No. And so [what] we finally came up with is that we wanted to have a sense of satisfaction and self worth from working on this ranch. And we took it from there and then we asked ourselves, OK, describe what we want to produce. We said we wanted a profit from livestock, which also at that time seemed ludicrous to even say, how could anyone make a profit from livestock? And then we asked ourselves, what’s the landscape that supports us? And we’re sitting in part of that landscape. We’re in the range land part of this ranch. And we wanted a dense stand of healthy perennial grasses with some shrubs and a diversity of other forbes to go along with that.

In our meadows, we want productive hay meadows that we can irrigate and grow high quality hay. In our timberland, we want a parklike, fire tolerant forest of mostly Ponderosa pine that are of different ages. But with trying to make as much old growth Ponderosa pine as we can. And that gave us a picture we never had and suddenly we started to be able to make decisions.

Oh, and then our creeks and our streams, we wanted creeks that were lined with willows and good habitat for fish and beaver. And a lot of our streams then and even now didn’t have willow; they did in the 1820s when Peter Skene Ogden came through here, but we grazed those out a long time ago. And so we were, it just seemed far fetched to us but enabled us to start making decisions that led us towards our goals. We built the riparian fences, and we started planning our grazing. We did a better job of economic forecasting and planning.

Miller: Well, let’s look at the river protections as one example because that seems like that was a big one. So what did you actually do to improve the habitat along the river and improve water quality in the river?

Southworth: Well, let me tell you how we ruined it. And that is that we feed hay here for at least five, maybe 5.5 months out of the year. And on our ranch, we, my grandfather and my dad, hay was always a short part of the equation of the year round forage equation. And so they barely fed enough and those cattle in the afternoons during the wintertime, they’d go out to the creeks and any young green willows, they got eaten. And so gradually all that was left on this ranch were old willows. And I have a picture of my dad sitting on the back of a cow as a college sophomore in 1938. Somebody had just given him a new Kodak Brownie camera and they were going for a rodeo, but they got a bovine still life instead. And he’s sitting there and that’s kind of fun, but you look at it and they’re looking up the valley, through Oliver’s land and through what’s now Holiday’s land, and on our land you can still see willows, but it’s just a nursing home for willows.

Miller: Why do willows matter?

Southworth: Willows matter because we want a diverse ecosystem here on this ranch. And if we’re gonna have shading on that stream, so that the water is cool enough to have fish and also to support beavers, we need willows. We need those willows back. In 1826, when Antoine Sylve, a trapper for Hudson Bay came through here, he reported to John McLaughlin, “I found an area abounding in beaver, more than any place I’ve seen in the west.” In the west! And he was talking about Bear Valley and Silvies Valley.

Miller: Where we are right now.

Southworth: Yeah. And no, that picture is gone, but we’re trying to bring it back.

Miller: What did your dad think when you put fencing along the river banks to keep cattle away from munching on the willows that you were planting? Willows, if I understand correctly, one of your jobs when you were a kid was to get rid of willows and now you are in charge, and you were planting willows and keeping cattle away. What did he say?

Southworth: I’m in charge. But my dad’s still out here every day.

Miller: That must have been actually hard in and of itself.

Southworth: Well, welcome to the family ranching. And so, one afternoon, Ed goes out to start working on the riparian fence. We wanted to build a riparian fence to prove that we were managing right. Not that we were doing anything wrong. And, he goes, dad asked me what I was doing. I said, “I’m not gonna tell you.” He said, “Oh, come on, is Ed going out to 500 flat to cross fence a seat?” I said, “No,  he’s working across the river.” “What’s he doing?” I said, “I’m not gonna tell you.” He said, “Oh, come on, tell me.” And I said, “Well, because we have a three part goal and because we want willows back along the river, he’s building a quarter mile of riparian fence on both sides of Silvies River in the upper meadow.” And my dad grabs his hat and he slams it on the ground and he says, “You and your holier than thou grazing and your less than savory management.”

Miller: Those were classic lines at the time?

Southworth: He’s kind of teasing me, but he’s also serious.

Miller: It’s not holistic. It’s holier than thou.

Southworth: That’s his word for it.

Miller: OK. But, he wasn’t alone, right? And he’s not alone today?

Southworth: Right. There’d be a smaller crowd, but it was a new thing then. And to build a fence just to protect a section of streams seemed wasteful. But what we found out is as we had these fences on both sides of creeks, going up the river, we suddenly had twice as many pastures, well separated so we could better control our cattle. And then, we noticed that during flood events, there was enough residual vegetation that the erosion stopped. And if we were out in the meadows in the fall, I’d show you where my dad was concerned about erosion. He isn’t a bad rancher. He was the 1954 Grassman of The Year in Grant County. But what he would do to control erosion is carefully place old car bodies along the creek bed and we laughed.

Miller: Thousands of years old technology right there.

Southworth: And we laugh, but we’re, I’m sure we’re doing things today that will be just as laughable 50 years from now. Isn’t that the truth?

Miller: Well, it’s interesting you said that because I was going to ask you that exact question because it seems like, and we’ve just gone over one example and we may get into others, of how you’ve essentially said there is a better way to do this, a better way for cows, for people, for fish, for fire, in a lot of ways, [a] better way than say previous generations have done things, or many people today. What do you imagine sort of progressive ranchers of the future will look at what you’re doing today and call into question?

Southworth: So first of all, let me preface that by saying that what every generation does is the best they can do. So I’m not trying to slam my grandparents or my parents because I think what they did was entirely appropriate for their time, but we were literally going broke and we had to change or go out of business. So I think we have to think in terms of adaptive resilience and my hero for that would be Malheur Lumber Company. I want to be the cattle ranch equivalent of what Malheur Lumber Company is to saw milling. I mean, their ability to go from big logs to small logs, bring in this equipment, automate, is the kind of adaptive resilience.

It’s not enough to be resilient. Resilient means if I push you, you come back to where you were. Adaptive resilience means I push you, you don’t tip over, but you find a different place to push, to set your chair. And so I want adaptive resilience where we evolve. And so to get back to your question, what are we doing today that would be considered ludicrous 30 years from now? It might be that we’re a cow calf yearling outfit, in a high mountain valley that requires this months of feeding. What Bear Valley is probably trying to tell us is that we should bring in yearlings for the summer and graze them here, and then leave.

Miller: This should be a finishing place?

Southworth: Not a finishing place, it would be a grass growing place. They would be for summer grazing. A finishing place would be a place that would have grain, high energy feeds.

Miller: Before, just before slaughter?

Southworth: Yeah.

Miller: In other words, you’re saying it’s possible that you’re raising cattle the way, I guess, your father did in terms of the overall model of it, even if the mechanism is a little bit different but the model is basically the same. And you’re saying maybe this land, this climate, is not the right place to have year round cattle.

Southworth: But I told you about this holistic context, we have quality of life. We want our employees to have a sense of satisfaction, [of] self worth and we want them to accomplish their year round goals. Seasonal employment here doesn’t cut it. If we want families to be part of this ranch and to have kids in our little school in Seneca and have contributed to a healthy rural community, we need a year round enterprise. And so that cow/calf thing is.

Then maybe another adaptation is we simply calve later in the year when the weather is nicer. There’s no hurry to maximize weaning weights on this ranch because these fellows are gonna be carried over through the winter after weaning, and grow out. And whether they’re 950 pounds going to feedlot or 850 probably isn’t that big a deal. So that’s an example, that we’re constantly evaluating what we should be doing and why, in order to best fulfill that three part goal.

Miller [narration]: That’s Jack Southworth in his ranch in Seneca. We talked in the middle of one of their pastures in front of an audience of about 300 steers. At times, they were interested in us and would nudge closer in a huge semicircle, but they actually seemed more interested in the grass. It reminded me of something Jack likes to say: that even though people call him a cattle rancher, he sees himself as more of a grass rancher. I asked him what that means.

Southworth: So the purpose of cattle here is to take a product and make it marketable. I can’t sell grass. I can’t take this grass to Portland and have people buy it. The beef does that but you don’t call a wheat ranch a combine ranch, do you? That, combines do the same thing that cattle do here. They make a marketable product. And so I say that we’re a grass ranch, but maybe we’re a sunlight ranch. Maybe we’re utilizing sunlight to make this remarkable product.

Miller: Tell me about the grass though. I mean, we’re sitting on it, standing on it. We’re sitting on it right here. What do you see when you look at this grass?

Southworth: So we’re in a crested wheatgrass seeding with some sage brush. There’s also some giant wild rye, there’s some intermediate, there are some forbes that we see that I can’t name. And then on the soil surface in between plants, you can see a residual from last year’s grass, the dead tan stuff.

Miller: And so this, it looks sort of like straw.

Southworth: Yep. And then you see manure. And what we want is we want covered ground. And there’s five soil health principles: and one is no tillage and while we might plow up some ground, we might only do it once every 30 or 50 years in a particular spot.

Miller: You don’t want to disturb the dirt.

Southworth: Right. And the microorganisms, the living culture that’s in that soil. We want diversity, we want covered ground and we want year round roots. We want a living root in the soil. Even though we get 50 below zero here, we want a perennial plant that provides something in the soil on a year round basis. And the fifth thing is we want to incorporate livestock. And what we’re seeing here is a good example that [is why] I wanted to bring you out to this field because you can see there’s still a lot of old feed in here. And we’ve built an electric fence on the south side of this field in order to better confine these steers. I mean, you feel like you’re in a big place, but in Eastern Oregon, this is a small pasture at 66 acres. We made it 66 acres by building that electric fence. How do we know it’s 66 acres, because we can go on Google Earth. We can trace the outline of our fences and know it’s 66 acres. Knowing it’s that size, I know that I want to take about 15 animal days per acre off this. An animal day is what this steer, what a 1,000 pound animal will eat in a day. And these steers are about 7/10ths of an animal unit right now.

So we do some math and we can calculate that we want to graze this area for about seven days. And they should have, by that time, knocked down a lot of this old feed, covered the ground and then grazed somewhat, but not too harshly, the grass plants. We want to stimulate a response in the root in the ground. And when these grass plants are nipped by these steers, part of their roots will be shed and those roots that die off, that’s food for microorganisms, microorganisms eat them. And then the plant starts to regenerate from the grazing and establish new growth. It utilizes the byproducts from the microorganisms. And there’s this cycle going on underground and we want to stimulate that and then have this new growth.

But in addition to new growth, there may be some tillering and by grazing right now when the plant has not matured, but it still has three leaves of grazing on it, there will be some tillering. So, between the old feed that we’re knocking down, the occasional manure patty and the tillering you get, we’re covering the ground.

Miller: And tillering, if I understand correctly, that’s sort of like a rhymezone, not quite, but it’s like it’s grass spreading without a seed and a seedling?

Southworth: Correct.

Miller: OK. And what about this time of year? We’re talking at the end of May going into June. What does this time of year mean for grass?

Southworth: This is a time of year to… we’re in a high mountain valley by Oregon standards. By the way, we’re about the same height as Santiam Pass and we’re about 45- 4600 ft. here and by Oregon standards, that’s a high mountain valley and we have a short growing season. You go back a month and there’s snow here. And we’ll grow grass from the first of May until the end of June on these dry land ranges. And so we have 60 days of grass growth that we need to take advantage of.

Miller: So this is a pretty key time.

Southworth: You’re trying to grow grass at the same time …

Miller: The cows are right in front of us, the steers are eating it.

Southworth: And so how do we get around that? We have a short graze…

Miller: They’re all back and staring at me. I’m not gonna take away your grass, I was just pointing it out. They don’t look convinced.

Southworth: We do that by having short grazing periods on small pastures with fairly high stock density and then long recovery periods. This piece of ground that we’re sitting on is gonna be grazed for six or seven days and that’s it.

Miller: For this growing season?

Southworth: For the year.

Miller: For the year?

Southworth: And that way all the regrowth that comes out back will be here next spring. And then when we bring our steers in again, guess what? They get more knocked down on the ground and we do a better job of covering the soil.

Miller: How common is the grazing regime that you’re talking about in the west right now?

Southworth: In the west, it’s getting more and more common. I can’t put a number on it but every magazine we pick up talks about the importance of planned grazing and rotational grazing. We’re part of a beef cooperative called Country Natural Beef and they have a graze well program, thanks to a grant from Sustainable Northwest, and it’s administered by Dallas Defrees, the daughter of a rancher from Sumpter. In conjunction with a third party that takes care of monitoring, we’re doing a really large scale grazing, planning and monitoring, across the west on 100 different ranches. So this is a big deal. Sustainable Northwest recognizes it. And what I’m excited about is that we’re gonna be learning as we do this. I want covered soil. I mean, that’s just paramount in our landscape goal.

Miller: Why is covered soil - meaning not bare earth, it’s visible - why is it so important?

Southworth: So it’s 66 out here today.

Miller: 66 degrees.

Southworth: And we’re comfortable, but it’s gonna get hotter and hotter during the summer. And it seems like, whether you believe in climate change or not, our summers are getting hotter and they’re getting drier and anything we can do to keep that soil cooler is less soil moisture evaporated.

Miller: We’re sitting right here in your family’s own land. But in the summers, I understand, for a long time you’ve taken your cattle to National Forest land where you have permits and have for a long time. What’s your relationship like at this point with the Forest Service?

Southworth: Our relationship, I feel, is good. We understand that that’s not our land. We use it at the courtesy of the Forest Service. But that land is critical to the sustainability of this ranch. Being able to take our cows and calves out on the Malheur National Forest in the summertime and then graze in a manner that is good for the riparian areas and doesn’t conflict with other users is really important to us. When I grew up, we would turn our cattle out in the forest and then we’d leave and we’d go back to the more important work of putting up hay. Now, we have one, sometimes two riders out there all summer long, herding the cattle, making sure they don’t overuse any particular place.

Miller: Is that something that you’re required to do?

Southworth: You’re required to meet Forest Service standards. And the only way I could figure out how to do that to make sure I was meeting those standards is to have a herder out there.

Miller: To make sure the cows and calves aren’t where they’re not supposed to be?

Southworth: And then another thing we’ve been doing on the National Forest is if there are areas where people definitely like to camp, or there’s an area there [where] our cattle we can’t keep them from congregating on, we’ll build either a permanent fence to keep our cattle out or a temporary electric fence to keep our cattle out, in order to protect that spot or reserve it for the public to use. We’re not the only people out there using that. [During] My grandfather’s time, he was. But the Malheur National Forest may have an important role to play today as a place to seek solitude, as it is a place to produce beef. And we recognize that. We just appreciate the fact we can still graze out there and we want to make darn sure we graze in a way that the Forest Service is happy with us.

Miller: One of the newer things that you’re working on right now is putting solar panels at least in one part of your land. How did that come about?

Southworth: So there’s Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative, that covers Baker, Union, Grant and Harney counties, which provides power [and] has a substation on the corner of our land and apparently substations attract interest. We were contacted by a rather large developer and they said that the minimum size of solar installation they want to put in was 800 acres. Well, that’s not part of our goal is to have this factory that transforms what we think of as a beautiful valley into something that produces electricity. But we also think that producing electricity using sunlight, done the right way, could be a valuable thing to do on a lot of Eastern Oregon rangeland. So we asked this outfit, would you be able to do it in a cow-friendly manner? Could we graze our cattle under it? And the answer is definitely no.

So I’d read about some research at Oregon State and using sheep and solar panels, and I called them and said, have you done anything with cattle? And the researcher said no, but I know a couple of guys that have, or are working on it. And we got in touch with each other and it’s kind of like being in touch with the Wright Brothers, we have this great design for a plane, but we’ve never actually built it yet. But that feels right to us and so we hope that in August this year, we’ll develop a one acre site and if that works, we might do an eight acre site, but it won’t be an 800 acre site.

Miller: What’s your theory for how cattle can coexist with solar panels?

Southworth: We put them up higher.

Miller: How high?

Southworth: Think of the Willamette Valley, think of a hop field. And it’ll work the same way, is that they’ll be still on poles.

Miller: 9 or 10 feet up?

Southworth: Yeah. And then there’ll be cables that’ll be stabilizing them that run through the row of solar panels and those cables will also control them. They’ll tilt them during the day for time of day and time of year.

Miller: How concerned are you that the grass is going to get less sun?

Southworth: Well, we don’t know, but we think it’s an experiment worth trying. There’s a lot of sunlight out here and we think if we have the spacing right, there will still be adequate sunlight. But once again, it’s a way that we might be able to conserve moisture.

Miller: So, even if there is less sun, that in its own way could be a benefit because less evaporation?

Southworth: Exactly. So, would that extend the growing season for the grasses under those solar panels?

Miller: Stay tuned to find out.

Southworth: Yeah, but we hope to involve the same scientist that did the research for the sheep at Oregon State in this project as well. And so we’ll compare land adjacent to it without solar panels to land under the solar panels and see what the production is.

Miller: When we drove here, we had to open two different gates, gates that are here with some barbed wire just to make sure that the cattle don’t escape.

Southworth: And by golly, you did rather well on your second try.

Miller: Well, that’s kind of you to say. Not exactly true. You had to come out of the truck to help me.

Southworth: But, still [if] this radio thing doesn’t work out…

Miller: Well, the reason I brought it up is that the first time you did it yourself and you told me what you were doing and the second time we got in front of the fence and you said, ok, you do it. Do you think of yourself as a teacher?

Southworth: No, but I’m used to showing people how to do things and how we do things. And I think that it’s fun to see people try new things. My wife’s father was an engineer and he could not close a wire gate, so you’re not the first to have to struggle with a wire gate. I don’t know what it is about them, but they intimidate people. Am I a teacher? No, because I’m not evangelical about what we’re doing in this ranch.

Miller: You’re not?

Southworth: We’re trying to do the best we can. I like sharing it, but I’m not going on the road and thumping the ranch manual of Jack Southworth, saying this is the way to ranch. I’m willing to share it with people and I’m happy to show people around a ranch, but there are a lot of different ways to ranch. And I encourage people to develop a holistic context in order to know how to make decisions and good decisions. But beyond that, I’m not gonna tell you.

Miller: You’re a fifth generation.

Southworth: Fourth [generation].

Miller: Fourth generation. Is there going to be a fifth?

Southworth: Teresa and I don’t have kids. We don’t know who the next owners of this ranch will be. I just hope that it matters. I hope it’s not a plaything. I think there’s too much of in agriculture where people sell their land and then there’s an absentee owner - and don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great absentee owners - but there’s some absentee owners that just want it for the hunting or something. This ranch has always mattered. You know what, what is it that Robert Frost said, “My purpose in living is to unite my vocation and my avocation, is my two eyes make one insight, only where love and need are one and work is play for mortal stakes. Is the job ever really done for heavens or the future’s sake?” And that work and play are one, is critical to this ranch.

We’re passionate about this, but we have a good time doing it. We make critical decisions around a stove and a shop. We make critical decisions, Teresa and I, around a dining room table. I hope that continues. I hope that continues on family ranches across the west, because it’s the people that have a close relationship to the land that I think take the best care of it. And ranching as if it matters. This ranch could disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow and you would not notice it in terms of the price of beef in Portland. But because people do care about it is why it does matter, and it’s why people show up at our shop every morning and we talk about what we’re gonna do that day and what’s important and everyone has a say in what we’re gonna do that day. It’s ranching at a family level that I think makes a great difference.

Miller: Jack Southworth, thanks so much for letting us sit here.

Southworth: Thank you, Dave. And I just think that what you did in Grant County this week is important. You’re talking about the future of the West and, and two Oregons. I’m thankful that there’s two Oregons. This is gonna become a beef product that’s gonna go to a New Seasons market in Portland, Oregon and people are gonna appreciate it. I like that two-way street. We can’t all work for Intel or Nike, can we? We need this diversity in the state and I like being part of Oregon and I think that we have these differences, but I think we’re gonna figure them out.

We’ve seen the era of litigation and that didn’t work out. I mean, the environmentalists, in the terms of logging, got old growth logging shut down, but it didn’t solve the health of the woods in the Northwest. We need a different context for solving problems in the West and it’s gonna be involving more of that collaboration, which isn’t fun, but I think it produces the best long term solutions.

Miller: Thank you very much.

Southworth: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Miller: Jack Southworth and his wife, Teresa, run Southworth Brothers Ranch in Seneca in Grant County. You can see a picture of him and the cows behind him on our website.

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