Fred Colvin’s family began running cattle on this prairie land in 1854 when Ignatius Colvin arrived to find grass as “high as a horse’s belly.” Four generations later, the Colvins are changing how they work with the land, restoring salmon habitat and carving out a unique niche that capitalizes on their greatest asset: the lush prairie grass that covers most of their 640 acres.

Where traditional ranchers concentrate on raising the cattle that ultimately pay their bills, Fred has shifted his focus from the animals to the grass they eat – from cattle marketing to cattle feeding. He offers top quality pasture for rent to cattle dealers who pay him based on how much weight their cattle gain. Fred is happy to see the responsibility for marketing cattle rest on someone else’s shoulders: “I let somebody else who’s set up to handle marketing do that. I take the cattle and grow them up on the grass resource we have here. That’s my specialty.”
 
Fred is not even a year into what he calls “this experiment” but he is already pleased with the results. Standing in a summer green field with black, blonde, brown and white Herefords, Short-horns, Brahmas, Limousins, and Angus, he says, “I like the idea that these cattle are here, putting on a couple hundred pounds of weight, and I like the idea that they’re leaving in a few days.”

Using grazing animals to maximize grass production requires diligence. Every two or three days the animals have to be moved to new pasture, giving the grasses in the previously grazed fields a chance to regenerate and build up food reserves. Fred uses portable electric fencing to keep the cattle moving across the pasture, maximizing the productivity and health of the grass. The cattle seem used to the fence-moving routine. He remarks, “Every time I show up they get fresh grass and they like that!”

Nose pumps operated by thirsty cattle have made accessing stream water from afar convenient. “Since the idea with strip grazing is that you’re always moving the animals through the field, you’ve got to be able to take the water with you,” explains Fred, ”This type of technology enables us to do that.” Fred admits he was dubious about the nose pumps to begin with, but has found them to be a godsend.

The Colvin family’s picturesque red farmhouse was built in 1877 and is on the National Historic Register. The driveway is lined with maples of the same vintage. “When I grew up here we used to continuously graze,” recalls Fred. “Probably the biggest change,” he explains, “is that we’ve gone to dividing the prairie up into small paddocks. But we still have the basics: we’ve got your ground, it grows grass, the cattle eat that, grow up, put on some weight, and then they get sold.” The differences are subtle but profound. “We’d rather just try to fit the cattle and the management to the land. It’s easiest to work with nature the way nature is operating and not try to change it. If she says, ‘I don’t want to grow grass in June,’ okay, we’ll get rid of the cattle then.”

Fred has decided not to hay this year and hopes instead to extend his grazing season by as much as 45 days, minimizing the expense of buying hay for his own small herd. This ranch is unique geologically, with low rolling hills that were formed as the last glaciers were receding. “The theory is,” says Fred, “that the glaciers broke into chunks of ice, and as they would melt, water would run around those chunks of ice, eroding the soil and leaving these mounds.” Haying these uneven fields, strewn with rock, mud and the occasional beaver dam, is not something he misses.

Fred is intrigued by the possibility of direct-marketing a small amount of grass-fed beef locally. “It wasn’t until the last year or two that I really believed the hype about grass-fed beef,” he remarks. “I guess I kept reading enough until it finally started making sense.” The Colvin’s are not far into it yet. “We’re seeing if we can have the right kind of cattle and the right kind of pasture conditions to have an acceptable product,” Fred explains. His daughter is helping with marketing the grass-fed beef, and he hopes that someday one of his daughters will take over the ranch, keeping it intact and maintaining the family tradition. “It’s up to our generation to figure out how to set this thing up so future generations can manage,” he adds.

Much of the prairie land that once covered southwest Washington has been lost to development and encroachment by larger vegetation. He explains, “Native Americans would come down here every year and they would burn these prairies in the late summer and fall so that they could get at the camas bulb, which was one of their primary food sources during the wintertime. Consequently the prairies stayed wide open like this.” Fred is working on projects with the Natural Resource Conservation Service to mimic burning and encourage native species through grazing.

Prairie grass isn’t the only feature that sets the Colvin ranch apart. Coho salmon spawn in the mile of Scatter Creek that cuts through the land. Fred recalls, “Dad tells a story that when he was a kid, they could go down to the creek with pitchforks and throw the salmon up on the banks of the creek.” Fred hasn’t seen salmon like that in his lifetime, and didn’t even know they were still there until his dog turned up sick from eating raw salmon. Now, in addition to careful grazing that minimizes runoff, Fred is working to improve salmon habitat in the creek, fencing the cattle away from the banks and increasing the riparian buffer zone. “We’re working with the local conservation district,” he explains. “They’re going to come in and put in some native plants, trees and shrubs. We’re going to try to get it back to like it was a long time ago.” The ranch is home to rare native wildflower and butterfly species, as well.

“If you’re going to survive in this country and do natural resource management, you’ve got to be in tune with what the public wants,” comments Fred. “Society wants clean water and they want salmon in the water. I’ve got to figure out: how can I meet those societal goals and still continue what I’m doing on my private property? Can we figure out how to have a cattle enterprise on this ranch with that creek here that has salmon in it? I think the salmon would do better going through a ranch than going through a housing development. I don’t have any studies to tell you that, but it’s my gut feeling.”

Fred clearly does not miss dealing with the vagaries of the commodity cattle market, where price fluctuations can mean you don’t always cover your feed costs. Says Fred, “I see custom grazing as an opportunity for some of our local ranchers to reduce risk.” But he is not quite ready to convert his neighbors. “To be honest with you,” he laughs, “I haven’t told a lot of people. But word’s gotten out, and I think maybe they’re thinking ‘He’s kind of crazy!’ And that’s fine, I don’t mind. We’ll see what happens. I don’t mind talking about it if it works, and I don’t mind talking about it if it doesn’t work.”

Contact
Colvin Family Ranch
Fred A. Colvin
16816 Old Hwy. 99 SE
Tenino, WA 98589
Tel: 360-264-2890
fkcolvin@cs.com