Ranchers Restore Pastures to Boost Forage Production for Cattle

Dan Crummett, Contributor

When they bought the 7,000-acre JX Ranch in eastern New Mexico 21 years ago, Tom and Mimi Sidwell saw a semiarid rocky terrain that had practically no grass standing on the severely grazed property. The seller had told them he had been using a 58-acre-per-animal-unit stocking rate.

Today, despite five years into an extended drought, the Sidwells have nearly doubled the advertised stocking rate. They run a 100-head Angus/Corriente spring-calving cow herd, 100 yearlings and 60 to 70 calves throughout the year at a conservative 30 acres per head. Ten years ago, during better rainfall years, that stocking rate had increased to 1 animal unit per 27 acres.

The Sidwells' productivity boost is tied to improved grazing management, an extensive, low-labor watering system and conservation efforts to cover acres of bare soil with productive native forage grasses. That involved bulldozing hundreds of acres of invasive brush to make room for grass stands that had been decimated by overgrazing in the past.

A LONG JOURNEY

"When we arrived, we knew we wanted to operate one herd," Tom explains, "but we needed to be able to make better use of the grass and, in turn, improve the diversity of the plants in our pastures."

That meant they needed to decrease the size of the seven existing pastures into manageable paddocks. It also meant being able to move water with the cattle as they rotated from paddock to paddock over short periods of time. "Water is always critical in our area, and most of our neighbors still haul water to their cattle," he points out.

Tom is an adherent to the methods of the Savory Institute, which seeks grazing management emulating the natural activities of large herds of herbivores, such as bison or wildebeests. He has honed his systematic grazing rotations to leave each paddock undisturbed a minimum of 90 days before grazing resumes.

The ranch is now divided into 30 pastures -- ranging from 80 to 1,000 acres -- with miles of high-tensile electric fence and thousands of T-posts. The couple provides the only labor on the sprawling ranch, and the paddocks let them easily move cattle to new grass on horseback with only the help of their German shepherd.

"We can whistle them through the gates or holler at them, and they come running," Mimi says. "Usually, we can move them to new grass within 5 minutes."

WATER SYSTEM

As they were clearing pastures of cedars and mesquite, the Sidwells also tackled building an extensive watering system for their planned intensively managed ranch. They built a main water line stretching nearly 5 miles through the lower pastures of the ranch (4,300 feet elevation) to those on the top of The Caprock (5,000 feet). The system is fed with six shallow wells pumping 1 to 1.5 gallons per minute. Each well feeds its own 9,000-gallon covered storage tank. Except for an electric submersible pump lifting the final push to the High Plains pastures, the system uses solar-powered pumps to keep stock tanks full. In all, the ranch has 100,000 gallons of water storage.

One problem the Sidwells noticed with their hot summers is that the water pumps were barely keeping up with evaporation in the stock tanks. They had heard about ranchers using shade balls -- black plastic balls floated on the surface of water in stock tanks to fight evaporation.

"We were loading some in our truck planning to experiment with them when we just decided to do every tank on the ranch," Mimi recalls. "It amounted to about $1,100 for each trough, but after we had some experience with them, Tom figured it saved us about 100,000 gallons of water per year. When your pumps are only producing about a gallon a minute, that makes a big difference."

Judicious use of water and optimal harvest of forage has made the JX Ranch stand out in an area where traditional continual grazing methods allow cattle to spot-graze (overgrazing), which leads to bare soil and the succession of invasive species. The Sidwells' intensive grazing forces uniform utilization of available forage by cattle over a short period before they are quickly moved on to new pastures. That practice favors the recovery of natural prairie forage species.

Over the years, the ranch's pastures have returned to a diversity not seen when the Sidwells took over. Nearly all the bare soil present when they purchased the ranch in 2003 is now covered with forage.

"We did no seeding," Tom explains. "The native grass seed is in the soil and will germinate when conditions are right under management. Overgrazing over a long period of time results in a monoculture of primarily blue grama grass and tobosa grass on heavier soils.

"However, there were other species of grasses within the canopy of mesquite brush and cholla cactus that were protected from past overgrazing practices," he continues. "When we began managing the land under holistic management, the various species of grass protected from grazing began to establish along with germination of seed that has been in the soil for a long period of time."

Tom says the grass seed still present will germinate when overgrazing ceases. Savory Institute's experience shows the impact of a herd of livestock will prepare a seed bed, aerate the soil and break the capillary action of evaporation.

The process takes time because of the semiaridness of the ecosystem, but the grasses on the JX Ranch have established and survived under these conditions for thousands of years.

"At first there were very little native grass species surviving on the ranch," Tom recalls. "But, our cattle are not allowed to overgraze any paddock with the rotation providing a minimum of 90 days of forage rest." Today, the ranch has healthy stands of blue grama and tobosa. Other grasses that have returned and spread are plains bristlegrass, Arizona cottontop and vine mesquite (a valuable forage plant, not the undesirable desert shrub), black and sideoats grama, along with Hall's panicum.

The Sidwells plan for drought every year and monitor grass conditions in late fall using several formulas to determine stocking rates for the coming year. "And, in planning for drought, we've never been wrong," Tom chuckles. Since 2019, however, drought has been no laughing matter to the area. Still, ample standing forage on the JX Ranch at the end of each year is proof the system is working.

"I've been using this management for 44 years," Tom explains. "It began when I once worked for the Bureau of Land Management [BLM] and realized the prescribed grazing recommendations they used make little positive change."

That's when he spent time studying the writings of Allan Savory and participated in several of his educational workshops. "We'd all been missing the effect herds of animals themselves have on healing the land, especially with the right numbers per acre and the correct grazing period," Tom explains. "When you start keeping cattle penned up in a single pasture for weeks or months at a time, the grass gets overgrazed and never gets a chance to replenish its nutrient stores. When I learned that, I quit the BLM and started managing ranches the way we do now at the JX."

GRASS-FED BEEF BUSINESS:

In step with the agronomic improvements to the JX Ranch, five years after receiving the ranch deed, the Sidwells also sidestepped the traditional cattle market. They began selling all their 100% grass-fed beef directly to consumers through Mimi's side of the business: JX Ranch Natural Beef (https://www.leannaturalbeef.com/…).

"We say we quit being price-takers and became price-makers," Tom says, explaining the benefits of selling retail instead of taking chances on the cattle market, order buyers, feedlots and sale barn commissions.

Mimi operates the website for JX Natural Beef and uses a list of butchers across the state to market all the ranch's yearling cattle, which usually weigh about 1,000 pounds at 17 months. In 2024, that included nearly 80 head sold mainly across New Mexico for primal cuts. Additional cattle go into her USDA-inspected retail market, which extends across most of the U.S. and is fueled by internet sales and word-of-mouth repeat local customers.

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