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Learn from Others
One person can’t know everything, so successful managers learn to rely
on other experts. Some go as far as developing a formal team of advisers.
Duke Phillips, Colorado rancher and winner of the 2003 Colorado Society for
Range Management “Excellence in Range Management Award,” teams with
experts in range monitoring, ornithology, mammalogy, entomology and botany to
track ecosystem health on the 87,000-acre Chico Basin Ranch. Phillips uses the
information to market his beef to urban, conservation-minded consumers along
Colorado’s Front Range.
“This relationship is the bridge between the rural agricultural and urban-suburban
community that Chico Basin Ranch believes must be created for many producers
to remain economically viable,” Phillips says.
Teamwork pays off in other ways, too. Ranchers in Washington measure their
“triple bottom line” of contributing to the environment, the ecosystem
and society by using multi-species grazing to reduce costs and increase forage
growth. But finding local solutions to using sheep, goats and cattle to graze
areas takes time, creativity and persistence. A SARE-funded project helped individual
ranchers create management support groups to share their experiences, both good
and bad.
“A training workshop can create awareness of new information or new ways
to do things, but unless this learning is applied soon, people won’t change,”
says Don Nelson, extension beef specialist for Washington State University.
“Forming groups of people who can work together after the training workshops
helps to create responsibility and accountability. If I tell my fellow support
group member that I’m going to do something, I feel some responsibility
to get it done.”
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