For over a year I’ve been posting short essays centered around a 100 acre prairie restoration on the farm where I grew up in Day County, South Dakota. The blog has slowly expanded to the restoration’s place within the entire “home farm”, 590 acres including other native prairie pastures and haylands as well as cropped ground. That is not all the land that my wife and I own, however. We have also accumulated 420 acres of native grass pastures in several transactions which are managed within our cattle LLC, a business set up to own the pastures and cow herd that grazes them, and which allowed us to take on a partner, Mark, a young farmer who lives ten miles east of us.

The story begins 36 or 37 years ago when I visited with a middle aged farmer from 15 miles northeast of where we now live who had hired me to take soil samples on his crop fields. After a few minutes lining up that work we began visiting about the pasture which took up almost all of his home quarter. I complimented him on its excellent range condition and asked if I could take a walk in it. He was flattered, and said I could walk in it anytime. Though it was grazed, it was full of four foot tall indiangrass and big bluestem seedheads waving in the October sun.

I kept an eye on the pasture over the next couple years, and soon noticed the quarter to the north was almost as good. The owner had recently gone bankrupt in the carnage of the farm crisis of the 1980’s, and the pasture was ungrazed. I couldn’t resist trespassing to have a look around, and found a good quality tall grass prairie.

Why hadn’t these prairies been turned into corn and soybeans like the rest of the neighborhood? The glacial history had left a legacy of boulders that you can literally step across in some areas without touching the ground, as well as an intricate network of wetlands. In between the rocks and the water is a deep, rich clay loam soil as productive as any in the area. You might call it the “Flint Hills effect” after the area in Kansas and Oklahoma which houses the largest area of remnant of tall grass prairie, still there because the underlying geology makes farming too painful.

From there we move forward to the year 2000 and a conversation with Russ, a client from that neighborhood. He was attempting to buy a quarter of farm ground about two miles south of the pastures I’ve discussed, and mentioned there was an adjacent 80 of pasture he wasn’t interested in. He encouraged me to look into it. The pasture wasn’t impressive when looking at it from the road, but made a better impression as I walked across it. The fences were crap and there was no stock dam for water, just a shallow scrape which would dry up in a drought, but there was 40 or 50 acres of decent quality prairie. I saw potential there.

The realtor I went to visit was a nice gentleman named Chuck. ” Bobbie thinks she has a buyer for the 80,” he informed me, “but I don’t think it is a done deal, I’m not her agent on the pasture, but I’d like to see her treated fairly. If you think you have financing I will inform her of your interest.”

A few days later I got a call from Chuck. “The deal on the 80 fell through. The buyer said he would be by with a check on Tuesday and didn’t show. You know how worried old people get. She cancelled the sale at the end of the day and wouldn’t even talk to him the next day. Now, she is going to give you each a chance to rebid. Get me your bid in the next couple days and I will present it to her.

I went home to talk to my wife, Linda, who was very nervous about the whole deal. She was, however very interested in grazing cattle. She has a degree in range management and a great affinity for creatures great and small. She had also recently had a bad experience where a business relationship with a neighbor to manage his cow herd had been yanked from under her, which left her bitterly disappointed. Linda was born to run cattle. Because of that I had recently bid on a quarter of pasture at an auction but had been outbid. We also had just finished paying off the mortgage on the little farm where we live, freeing up some cash flow. I resolutely put in a bid of $28,000, $350 per acre, figuring we would have well over $400 per acre into it after fencing and cleaning out the waterhole, which was the high end of the pasture market at that time.

The next day I was back in the realtor’s office. He stood there shaking his head, “Poor Bobbie doesn’t know what to do. You both bid the same amount. She is thinking about re-advertising the land. She really wants to be done with this, though. What would you like me to do?”

The realtor was tramping down the path in front of me, sweeping the leaves away and inviting me through the gate. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. The other bidder must have really pissed him off. He wouldn’t have done this if the land had been listed with his realty, but he wasn’t going to make a dime off the sale; he was doing this as a friend.

“Would you be willing to take her a bid for $28,500?” I asked.

“I would be happy to do that,” he said. And a couple days later we got to sign the papers purchasing what we now call Bobbie’s 80.

Because of the native prairie and the many wetlands on the pasture we were able to obtain US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) easements on it, which took some financial pressure off us, becoming a late down payment. At that time we had no cattle, so it was used for horse pasture, hayed and rented out for several years. It was also the site of many enjoyable walks.

The next opportunity came five years later. Russ had the chance to buy another piece of land which included 210 acres of grass, the land I had walked over about 20 years before. The grass was intertwined with the farmland, so was being sold as a 480 acre unit. I walked the land again and hesitated a bit, as the intervening years had not been kind to the pasture. Leafy spurge had greatly increased, necessitating herbicide treatments which had almost eliminated native forbs without really controlling the spurge. Nothing but rudimentary patching had been done to the fence for twenty years, and it was a mess. The dugout was badly silted in, necessitating an intricate piping system by the last renter to bring water from the farm site half a mile away. And it had been badly overgrazed, meaning the mosaic of tall prairie grasses I had seen were no longer evident.

Once again, the components were still there, however. The native grass bunches were still visible within the bromegrass and spurge. There were still some native forbs. Fences can be rebuilt and dugouts cleaned out. We told Russ what we would be willing to pay him, so he had that in his hip pocket when he went to the auction, and we were soon the owners of 210 more acres of native grass pasture.

Once more we placed FWS easements on the new pasture, and rented it out while we planned its future. The future of the pasture became secondary to my own future that fall, when life slapped me upside the head. I was diagnosed with stage 3/4 squamous cell cancer of the head and neck about the time of my 51st birthday in the fall of 2006. While my original diagnosis had implied that treatments were rarely successful, I had the good fortune to be referred to Mayo Clinic. At Mayo I came under the care of a prestigious team pioneering a new treatment regimen. All three doctors in the team, the surgeon, the medical oncologist and the radiologist, separately told Linda and me the same story. They would beat the holy hell out of me; I might never work again; I might never eat again; I would lose my saliva and probably lose my teeth; and I might need reconstructive surgery. At the end of my ordeal I would be cured of my cancer. Was I in or out? I signed on without a moment’s hesitation.

The treatments took three months, mostly on site at Mayo. At their conclusion I recuperated in a hospital bed in our living room at home, and within a few weeks I began to get out a little. By summer I was able to get back to work, though I had two separate scares on recurrences of the cancer. A recurrence was even scarier than it sounds because there were no tools left in the toolbox to fight the cancer. Mayo had already shot their wad. Luckily, one of the recurrences wasn’t cancer, and the other one was cut out before it got a chance to spread, so we walked on the proverbial eggshells and tried to get back to something approaching normal life.

About the time I started to feel like I might have a future we heard that Ray, the owner of the pasture that began this essay, had passed away and that the land would be for sale. Russ had been renting the farmland for some time, and was given the opportunity to purchase the farm, and he once more came to us as a partner. Land prices were much higher than when we purchased Bobbie’s 80, we had more debt and my health was still dicey. Linda, who didn’t grow up on a farm, with its attendant comfort with debt, told me she had to go into the bedroom and put a pillow over her head to block out the stress and worry. We still weren’t sure I had beaten the cancer as there seemed to be a new worrisome development every time I visited Mayo.

This was too good of an opportunity to pass up, however. Adding the 130 acres of Ray’s pasture would give us a contiguous 340 acre unit which allowed great flexibility in management, and could be complimented by Bobbie’s 80 which was only two miles away. Russ put a three way deal together on Ray’s two quarters: we would buy the 130 acre pasture, Russ would buy the 150 acres of farmground and a third party would buy 40 acres which included the house, farm buildings and livestock lots. Once again we placed FWS easements on the land which meant that in seven years and three transactions we had permanently conserved 420 acres of prairie.

We had already formed an LLC two years before, which gave us a vehicle to bring in the young neighbor, Mark, who was looking for ways to enlarge his livestock operation. We sold Mark a 50% interest in the LLC at a very reasonable price, but the decision was as selfish as it was altruistic. We had unloaded half the financial risk, bringing the debt down to a very reasonable level, a big concern with my health situation. More important, we now had a young, strong, capable partner who could shoulder at least half the load in both labor and management. Mark winters the cows and feeds out the calves. Linda manages the six months on pasture. Together they make decisions on goals and actions. Though Linda was born in suburban Chicago, she was meant to be born on a ranch where she could care for livestock. Over the course of seven years we got Linda her ranch, composed of 420 acres of prairie. We found a partner for her whose skills complement hers. Thus, while I write blog posts about all my activities on my home farm and its restorations, Linda is doing creative and innovative grassland management with the mouths and hooves of 100 head of stock cows and the attendant calves and bulls. It’s a full and busy life.