This Colorado rancher sees a world where conservation can turn a profit

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JEFFERSON — Their hoofprints fan out in four directions but the elk that overwinter here have scattered. The snow is changing to ice and a brisk wind scours the ground. Maybe the gusts chased them off. Or a memory, stored deep in their DNA, of an elk caught in a barbed wire fence with a coyote eating it. That’s a slow, horrifying death, even though it’s just nature at work. Except it isn’t, says Dave Gottenborg, because of the fence. 

Dave and his wife, Jean, bought the 3,000-acre Eagle Rock Ranch in Park County in 2012. But when they introduce themselves, they say they “manage” it. 

That’s because Dave doesn’t like the idea of “owning” ground that’s been around millions of years longer than he has. In fact, he just worked with Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources on a biological survey of Eagle Rock, and when he saw himself listed as owner, he said, “it kind of made me wince a little bit, because we’re trying to get away from that, in the sense that we belong to the land rather than the other way around.” 

The Gottenborgs’ daughter, Erin Michalski, sells their beef direct-to-consumer and at Eagle Rock Ranch Mercantile in Fairplay, billing it as being raised “with the land.” They’re big into transparency — inviting customers to visit the ranch to see how the cows are raised and to talk about sustainability — and quality. Their beef is grain finished with whole commodity corn and distillers grain.  

Tractor-driving, wild rag-wearing Dave is a disciple of the great visionary conservationist Aldo Leopold and the great poet-farmer Wendell Berry. He likes to quote both in casual conversation, saying, “Well, Professor Leopold said …” or “Berry wrote …” and then rattle off one of their thought-provoking worldviews or manifestos. In the 1960s, Berry challenged environmentalists to give greater weight to the importance of agriculture in society. Years earlier, Leopold had called for the adoption of a land ethic that puts people and the land on equal footing in an interconnected relationship. He also identified different ways to “harvest” the land while protecting its inherent value, through things like hunting and bird-watching (“esthetic harvest”) and, as Dave says, experiences that remind us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain (“cultural harvest”). 

Dave referenced Leopold about 10 times during a visit to the ranch in mid-February. He and Jean also put Leopold’s land ethic into practice. 

Dave says Eagle Rock gave a small grant to CSU’s Colorado Natural Heritage Program to cover the cost of the survey. In return they got a baseline inventory of the plants, wildlife and plant communities on their land. The results were astounding. Among other things, researchers discovered four species of bryophytes, or mosses, they categorized as “new Park County occurrences,” and several wetlands. Also on the land: a large concentration of vulnerable grassy-slope sedge and several threatened or endangered bird species. 

Over the past two years, the Gottenborgs have reduced their cattle herd from 250 cow and calf pairs to 125 and then to 80, because of increasing recreational pressures on the U.S. Forest Service land they lease for grazing, to reduce labor and as research, to gauge the impact of different densities on the ecosystem. They’ve built seven fish ladders on the portion of the Tarryall Creek that flows through the property. They’ve planted hundreds of willow bushes along its banks to protect habitat quality. And they let a herd of elk roam their property during the winter — something other ranchers despise elk doing, Dave said. 

There’s a reason the Gottenborgs can go all-in on conservation ranching. Once Dave, 68, and Jean,69, sold their small oil and gas company, they had the money to buy Eagle Rock and start ranching the way they wanted to, but not in the manner of extremely well-heeled Colorado ranchers like billionaire Louis Bacon, who turned his Trinchera Blanca Ranch into a lab for milling lumber from beetle-killed trees, or Ted Turner. “We are both hands-on ranch managers and workers,” Dave said. “There is nothing here that we don’t do ourselves. From cleaning manure out of pens, to gathering cattle on horseback, to doing most all the doctoring and vaccinating ourselves, to doing all the haying. Ranch life here is actually 90% cleaning or feeding. Mostly cleaning. I tell people that I used to ride my horse a whole lot more before I bought a ranch.”

In December, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association awarded the Gottenborgs its commercial producer of the year award. Erin Spaur, CCA’s executive vice president, said it was because they embrace their motto of “quality in everything we do” with a level of commitment she’s never seen on another ranch. “They’ve gone the extra mile to ensure biostability,” she said. “They’ve built a state-of-the-art stocking facility.” And they’re big into both sharing what they’re learning while learning from other ranchers “that have inherent knowledge of being on the land.” 

Ranchers dedicated to conservation are nothing new in Colorado. Maggie Hanna took over the ranch her grandfather started in 1947 after her dad, Kirk, known as a “tenacious and creative advocate for the conservation movement,” died by suicide. She says the industry is filled with ranchers who practice innovative and effective conservation.

Their ranches run the gamut from one acre to operations spanning many thousand acres, Spaur said. They range from uber-wealthy to the “cash poor, asset rich,” she added.

Ranching can be backbreaking work with slim profits, and that’s where Dave may be most valuable to the ranching industry. He and Jean are riding along with a wave of ranchers prioritizing the land and wildlife over cattle and a bottomline, while preaching a Leopoldian ethic that could help humans leverage their stewardship to turn a profit.

A decades-old ranching dream  

When Dave and Jean met as teenagers working as wranglers in Estes Park, their common dream in life was to run cattle. 

“Oh, OK, nice,” Dave said, recalling it. “Someday we’re gonna have a ranch, and someday we’re gonna have some cattle.” 

They got married, had kids, had jobs, and the ranch dream kind of fell by the wayside. “So then when we were getting kind of old, we decided we needed to get out of the city and buy our dream,” Jean said. 

As they both came from the Front Range with no ranching experience, they had to learn their new livelihood from scratch.

“I mean, we’re not perfect. We’ve made mistakes,” Dave said, including a big one the first year they were on the ranch. Following accepted practices, they calved in February. But it gets so cold at the ranch in southern Park County, that when the cows calved on Tarryall Creek some newborns froze to the ice. 

The newbie ranchers brought the cows down there, thinking they’d fare better out of the incessant winter wind. Another rancher suggested they calve in May, when the grass is green and the newborns can take their time getting up and moving around. They followed his advice, shifting their breeding program around, and ever since, the calves have thrived. “Now if we lose a calf, it’s because it was breech or had other problems,” Dave said. 

They “listened to their gut” when they saw their cattle grazing on a hillside with good forage but without water. Dave built a solar-powered watering system consisting of five “drinkers” in the meadow, which spread the cattle out.

Through trial and error, learning from others and trusting their instincts, they built the ranch they had dreamed of when they were teens wrangling horses in Estes Park. And because their sole income isn’t from raising cattle, they have some extra flexibility to implement their conservation methods. 

Dave said in “A Sand County Almanac,” Leopold recognized “that private landowners have the majority of land and if conservation is going to happen it’s going to take landowners. With pressures coming on private landowners whether it be from people opposed to grazing, fences or agricultural water use, we have to think of ways to coexist with what we have here. How do we know we’re doing a good job in terms of our land management practices? According to Wendell Berry and even Leopold, it’s measuring what we’re doing with what was here before we got here.” 

Which brings us back to the elk that “when Mother Nature was in charge, had free movement,” Dave said. 

WWAD: What would Aldo do?  

Dave thinks ranchers could increase their commercial value by doing things in the land ethic, like helping migrating elk from becoming coyote food in fences. 

The elk were here long before the people who put up the wire, he reasons. But most ranchers aren’t particularly fond of them. “Why? Because they eat your grass and your grass is your livelihood,” he said. “The more grass that’s eaten by something other than your cows, the less your animals eat. I understand that. I get that.” 

But he lets elk from the Kenosha Pass herd — which Colorado Parks and Wildlife numbers between 2,300 and 2,500 — forage on his property. And in the last five years, he’s come upon at least two live elk and several dead ones with their heads tangled in barbed wire. 

When Dave recently came upon a live one, he had three choices: turn around and ignore it; shoot it and put it out of its misery (with CPW’s permission); or try to cut it free. 

“The elk was still standing,” he said. “It still had plenty of energy and life left in it.” He cut it free because he felt he could do it efficiently. “I went in as quickly as I could and cut the wire. The elk jumped away from me and took off in the direction the rest of the herd had gone.” If it was damaged enough it might still have become coyote food, but Dave said if he’d left it to die, he wouldn’t have been able to get the image out of his mind.

Other landowners, like Eagle Rock’s last one, hate elk on their property so much they’ve hazed them with propane cannons and shotguns, Dave said. Now he’s helping elk by installing lay-down fencing. Or, installing isn’t the right word. Anyone with a barbed wire fence can create lay-down fencing by simply lifting the fence posts out of the ground and laying the barbed wire sections on the ground.

“It’s very basic but very effective,” Dave said. And the elk’s legs don’t get tangled up in it. 

Fencing currently is the biggest impediment to wildlife in Colorado as ranches are subdivided and more fences go in, said Mark Lamb, CPW manager for Dave’s area. Which makes wildlife-friendly fencing critically important. 

“Dave’s one of those guys that kind of thinks out of the box,” Lamb said. “He also cares about wildlife, which from our standpoint is also wonderful. So it’s a really nice mix of the two.” 

With fencing, “it all comes down to the operator,” Lamb added. “So if you have somebody who’s willing to take the time to lay a fence down, that is phenomenal. So kudos to Dave for coming to us and going, ‘What do you think about this?’”       

Now, letting elk range on his property might help him improve his ranch while offsetting costs. Last summer, he entered discussions with the conservation-focused Property and Environment Research Center that works to incentivize landowners to protect wildlife.  

PERC recognizes that certain wildlife species on private lands can cost landowners money through forage loss, fence damage and disease transmission, causing them to “view wildlife as a liability to be avoided instead of an asset to be protected.”

But they’ve had success pairing landowners with conservation organizations to incentivize wildlife protection. Travis Brammer, PERC’s director of conservation, says ranchers are “essential in providing critical habitat to elk,” and yet “they bear the brunt of incurring costs.”  

Through PERC’s conservation innovation lab landowners are being paid to do things like install virtual fencing to make it easier for elk to pass through their property, rotate cows within grazing allotments to minimize grizzly bear depredation, and an elk occupancy agreement that pays ranchers for letting elk forage on their property. 

Brammer said Dave reached out to him last summer and that they’re working on a program that will be tailored specifically to Eagle Rock Ranch. Specifics are still being ironed out, including funding.  

But if, and likely when, an elk occupancy agreement is established, Brammer says it will be the first of its kind in Colorado, and could help other ranchers financially. 

That could be good, as the Farm Bill, stalled in Congress until the end of September, receives heated debate in both the house and senate over crucial funding for conservation agriculture.

How the other half ranches 

Here is where this story gets political. 

Some say the term “conservation ranching” is problematic because of its association with “climate smart” ranching, a Biden administration policy. 

Yet the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, awarded an additional $20 billion for existing conservation programs conservation agriculture in 2022, is enhancing existing programs that have long enabled producers to keep ranching through lean years and in some cases save their ranches, preserving vital American landscapes. 

Hanna, who emphasized she was representing herself as a producer and not in her role as director of the Central Grasslands Roadmap initiative, is one of those Farm Bill beneficiaries. On her ranch in El Paso County, she says, she has used Farm Bill money in many ways. “I’ve done several of the climate smart practices over the last several years. I added a significant amount of cross fencing, which changed my ability to graze on my family’s ranch. I installed a lot of water pipeline, which was intended to distribute grazing.” 

In the early 1990s, Hanna’s father was doing a similar grazing rotation to hers, but at the time, the model for watering was a hub-and-spoke system, she said. It brought cattle to a center point to graze. That created a lot of localized impact. One of the best ways to protect soil health on a ranch is by distributing grazing cattle across it.  

Farm Bill money allowed Hanna to add 17 watering facilities across her ranch, which she says means she can water at the end of two paddocks, spreading out the cattle. 

It also helped her as a woman, she said.

“We talk all the time about resilience, and I think a lot of the power of these programs is that they create resilience in the human dimension. Like, I’m 5’5, and I feel quite strong, but I can’t lug tarps around in the same way my male counterparts can or once did. So this gated pipe (she installed with Farm Bill money) created water efficiency, but it also means that I can pretty easily check water in the morning, move water by myself, close gates, open gates.” 

Joe Hack, spokesperson for the Invest in Our Land campaign, which “elevates farmers’ voices” to “safeguard the future of U.S. farms,” said conservation programs have existed through the Department of Agriculture for years, so incentivizing conservation is not necessarily something new. “But it is wildly important, and the programs are wildly popular, and they’re oversubscribed,” he said. “Just for example, in 2022, 73% of applicants to these conservation programs were denied because there was not enough funding for them to participate in the program.” 

There are no better stewards of the land than farmers and ranchers, Hack said. “They don’t just live on the land, their livelihood is dependent upon it. So what these programs do is allow for improvements to soil health, dealing with clean water, and allow farmers and ranchers to be able to focus on productivity.” They also ensure family farms or ranches can remain so for years. 

But Hack said Invest in Our Land believes the Farm Bill could be in trouble, based on comments made by Glenn “GT” Thompson, a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. Hack said Thompson has mentioned reallocating funds for these programs, something that could be detrimental to producers who need it to keep their farms and ranches alive.

“These conservation programs have proven to be effective for producers who are planning and preparing for economic uncertainty and changes in the environment,” he said. “Conservation has never been a partisan issue. Republicans and democrats have long benefitted from these programs and the fact that they are so oversubscribed points not just to their success but to a real demand that congress can and should meet.”

“A lot of people are doing conservation work,” added Hanna, whose story is one featured in the Invest in Our Land campaign. “There’s a demand to put this work on the ground.”   

Hack said the Farm Bill “is critical not just for the success economically of these ranches, but also just the long-term environmental health of the land that they’re working. I guess the frustrating part is there’s nothing not to like about these programs.”

WWGD: Dave Gottenborg’s Leopoldian vision 

If the Farm Bill loses conservation funding in November, Dave Gottenborg’s agrarian dream might start to sound pretty attractive. 

“Elk rent” could be a viable revenue stream, for instance. 

“It’s not like I’m gonna be able to retire on it or anything, but it will help construct some fences and, more importantly, I think, set a precedent for my neighbors,” he said. 

They’ll see it as a way to “maybe help pay for fences that get tore up every year. And you know, the elk are coming through here anyways,” he added. “So now we can get paid to have these wildlife friendly fences and this will enable better elk movement up and down the valley.”

He also believes times are changing in the ranching business, with the trend being “obviously fewer cattle, not more,” on private and public land. “I’m not saying the trend is good or bad. But my range conservation officer and the Forest Service, they see, at some point, grazing cattle can’t go on independently. Recreation pressures are coming and when push comes to shove, there’s more of them than there are ranchers.” 

The antidote, he thinks, is developing other income streams. At Eagle Rock, he’d like a quarter or a third of the income to come from cattle and the rest from agricultural tourism, “from ecotours and education and that sort of thing.”

It might be hard for other ranchers to imagine following the Gottenborgs’ way, because their ranch is 500 acres versus 3,000, say, or they don’t have a creek brimming with trout running through it. Not everyone has a deal with The Broadmoor, in Colorado Springs, paying them to let people fly-fish on that creek, or a daughter who’s a mastermind at marketing the beef tenderloins they sell at their mercantile in Fairplay. And hardly anyone has a cushion of money to fall back on if push comes to shove. 

“I do worry about fellow ranchers that don’t have maybe some of the natural resource attributes we have,” Dave said. “But I think we can help develop a way where other ranchers can do the same kind of thing we do. That trend is going to be good for the urban-rural divide, or breach, by exposing people to our perspective and us to theirs. There’s always going to be an opportunity for exchange of ideas and culture.”

“Ranchers are essentially land stewards whether they realize it or not,” he added. “As the saying goes, ‘you take care of the land, the land takes care of you.’ Yet nobody — besides ranchers, essentially — realizes this fact. If we highlight it — and even go so far as to showcase it, i.e., make it the focal point of the enterprise — I think in today’s world, one can then perhaps monetize it.” 

Corrections:

Correction: This story was updated at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 30, 2024, to clarify information in a biotic survey conducted on Eagle Rock Ranch by Colorado State University's Colorado Natural Heritage Program.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.