Green Grass in the Spring: A Cowboy's Guide to Saving the World

By Tony Malmberg

His hard-fought wisdom and keen observations are a gift to all of us and this book is true to everything I’ve known Tony to be: funny, raw, vulnerable, and real. His stark honesty helps us all reflect on ways we are often to blame for our biggest challenges. Holistic Management can unlock the potential for productivity and diversity on our land, but also living in a way where we can see and fulfill our own potential.

—Cory Carman, fourth-generation rancher; mother

Through the pages, I found myself becoming more aligned with my dignity and self-worth, recognizing the tremendous value that land stewards offer. If we want intact grasslands for the next seven generations, we must work with a sense of urgency.

—Amber Smith, program director for Women in Ranching, Western Landowners Alliance

This book is truly about growth from soil to your soul. Embedded in the space between the beautifully crafted words is an invitation for us all to practice our lives as if all life depends upon it. Because it does and Tony proves it.

Be prepared to be surprised.

—Christopher Cooke, Holistic Management field professional and ecological outcome verifier

As a next-generation land manager facing the threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and an uncertain sociopolitical future, I look to the champions of the soil surface to help guide my decisions to help reverse these trends. Tony Malmberg is one such man.

—Cody Spencer, bison rancher; Holistic Management practitioner

Tony’s story is eloquent, joy-providing, and as complete as it can be. The loss of life on this planet is a serious issue. Tony reminds us to ask, “How must we behave, what must we do to promote life—at, above, and below the ground level?”

—Kelly Brink, rancher and student of rangeland herbivory, Deer Creek Ranch - Gordon, Nebraska.

There is an old rancher adage: “If we can just get the cows to green grass in the spring.” Farmers, ranchers, ecologists, environmentalists, and others with a conservation ethos understand that HM principles are not easily understood or applied. Green Grass in the Spring provides tremendous clarity as we see through the eyes and learn from the life experiences of Tony Malmberg.

—Ron Bolze, professor of rangeland management; executive director of Nebraska Grazing Lands Coalition

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662449604

Book preview

Chapter 1

Just as the body goes into shock after a physical trauma, so does the human psyche go into shock after the impact of a major loss.

—Anne Grant, Scottish poet, 1755–1838

Sometime after midnight, I tired of tossing and turning. A drink of water and a walk around the twenty-year-old trailer house didn’t help. Familiar noises such as the clock ticking and the furnace fighting back the cold northeast wind seemed disruptive rather than soothing. At 4:30 a.m., I went outside to check the two-year-old heifers, who were calving for the first time. Finding no problems, I walked back to the house, still agitated, wondering if I would ever fall asleep.

The whole family except me and my Uncle Jack had gone to Laramie for my sister Cyd’s college graduation and nurse pinning ceremony. It was out of character for Dad to leave as we were still digging out from a nasty spring storm. But Cyd was the first in the family to earn a degree. I remember Dad reaching into his skimpy budget to buy her a car when she started college. He did all he could to support her pursuit of an education. He was proud of her.

My wife, Cheri, was in Laramie with the rest of the family. Her absence left a hole in the morning’s activities. I filled the tub hoping I could soak away my uneasiness. This was out of character for me.

Just as I lowered myself into the hot water, I heard a knock at the door. It startled me. I couldn’t imagine who it would be in the early morning darkness. Wrapped in a towel, I opened the door. It was one of my neighbors. We didn’t have a phone, so he had driven up to bring me a message.

All I heard was a big roar in my head. I got sick. I sat on the toilet, oblivious to my nakedness. My uncle, who lived next door, suddenly appeared, stood me up, dried me off, and directed me to put on some clothes.

Soon we were driving into the sunrise. I turned my thoughts to the five hundred unfed cows standing in a foot of snow. We should be out there taking care of those cows, from daylight to dark, not on this road that traced eastward down the Sweetwater Valley. They would have to go without feed for a day.

After several hours, we rolled into Laramie. Jack pulled up to a hotel. We walked up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway. An open door cast a light into the dark tunnel. As I walked into the room, I could feel the oppressive sadness of those around me. Everyone was so somber, standing and looking at me. My mother sat on the bed sobbing, and my sister, Melanie, consoled her.

My eyes slid down a blank wall until they rested on Dad’s boots, those Paul Bonds with the fourteen-inch tops and two-inch riding heels that would never again slip into a stirrup or scuff up another cloud of dust. Never. I looked into my brother’s eyes and felt all the sadness of the world crashing down on me. Dad was dead, taken by a massive coronary several hours before. I broke down and cried, then ran from the room to hide my shame.

His loss was too much for me to handle, so at the funeral, I hid my grief with a lot of laughter and joking. I was twenty-three years old, and Dad was fifty years young. Too young. Too damn young. I kept asking myself why, over and over again, but an answer never came. We had all lost our leader, the unquestioned boss. The hearse headed toward Sheep Mountain, like a beacon on the horizon, taking Dad to his eternal rest on our hard-won ranch at Twin Creek.

*****

My great-grandfather Charles had left his Swedish homeland nearly one hundred years before, making his way to eastern Nebraska with the hope that his kin could live and be buried on their own land. Charles died when my grandfather, Emil, was twelve years old. Emil saddled his horse, rode west, and joined up with the Matador Ranch, riding the breaks of the Belle Fourche River in South Dakota. As he matured into a ranch manager, he moved into Nebraska’s Sandhills. Sixty years later, my father, Don Malmberg, continued the western trek, finally buying the Twin Creek Ranch in Wyoming’s Wind River Range with his brother, Jack, and me.

My earliest memories of Dad are from when I was four years old, riding and working cattle with him. When I was ten, Dad would wake me to help him pair out the calving lot before breakfast. As the cows got ready to calve, we brought them into a small forty-acre pasture called the heavy lot so we could watch them for problems. As soon as a newborn calf suckled his mother and walked without stumbling, we put them out in a larger pasture, so the calving lot didn’t get too crowded. This process helped us make sure that the cow and her calf got out the gate together—hence paired out.

I helped Emil cut heavies after I got home from school. We rounded up a 640-acre pasture, and I held two hundred to three hundred cows against a fence while he sorted out the pregnant ones that would soon give birth. I feared going with Emil because his sharp tongue lashed quick at hesitation or error. He taught me a lot about handling cattle and paying attention. But I’ve often wondered what would have happened to my self-esteem if my mother, Sybil, hadn’t been there to rebuild it in the evenings.

I would mope into the house after taking off my boots, and Mom would begin the nightly rehabilitation. What horse did you ride today? she asked.

Bimbo, I replied.

You like that slow lope he has, she said, drawing me back.

Yeah, it’s way better than Chief’s trot. That’s all he does is trot, trot, trot. It makes my side hurt.

What did you do with Emil? We all called him Emil, not Grandpa or Dad but Emil.

We sorted heavies.

How many did you sort today?

I don’t know for sure, maybe thirty?

Okay, go wash up and help set the table.

Mom and Dad met when she taught his younger brother and sisters in a one-room country schoolhouse, deep in the heart of the Sandhills. They married in 1955, and Dad soon went to work for Don Hanna, who ranched near Thedford, Nebraska. I was their first child, born in 1956; my sister Lani was born eleven months later. In 1958, Emil, my dad, and his older brother, Charles, leased the Dan Hill Ranch located south of Gordon, Nebraska. Dad moved Mom and their two children to this ranch on the western boundary of the Sandhills. My sister Cyd was born during their first year there, and Melanie followed a couple of years later. The youngest of the five children, my brother, Reg, was born six and a half years after me, during an April blizzard.

At night, after we cleared the dishes and Mom got them into the dishwasher, we would gather around her on our worn green couch, and she would read to us. This practice began before I could remember. My mother, Sybil Ickes, grew up on a farm in eastern Nebraska, where she was reared on classic literature. She seeded that interest in me. As the clock struck 8:00 p.m., she would place a bookmark in the page, close the book, and say, Off to bed now! Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Each morning, I rushed to the barn to see which horse Dad had caught for me. I really liked Half-Pint, a stocky sorrel with lots of zip, but I trembled when Hugo stood munching hay in the stall. At twenty years old, he could still turn a cow inside out and be waiting for her at every turn. This didn’t bother me as much as his habit of bucking within the first half mile of the barn each morning. But my greatest fear was finding no horse ready for me. Sometimes I knew why, like if the ride was going to be too long or the weather too cold. I was devastated when my sisters got to go on a ride once, and I didn’t. That night, I overheard my mother and father talking.

Tony was so disappointed he couldn’t go today, Mom said.

Hmm, was Dad’s usual response.

Why didn’t you take him?

This was a short ride for the girls. He’ll help tomorrow, Dad answered matter-of-factly, but I was crushed whenever he didn’t take me along.

Dad didn’t talk much. If I wasn’t doing something quite right, he would step in beside me and start explaining by doing, joining in on the task. But then he quietly faded away before the job was finished, so I felt like I had done it on my own.

I broke my first horse at twelve. He kicked me in the stomach, and as I stood gasping for air, Dad caught him and brought him back to me. He asked if I was okay. When I assured him that I was, he said that I needed to hold the headstall lower when I cheeked him. If I controlled the horse’s nose, Dad explained, he couldn’t pull his head away from me as easily when I drew him in to put my foot in the stirrup.

That same year, Half-Pint got away from me and ran to the barn. I had to walk a half mile and got myself pretty stewed up. When I caught the horse, I proceeded to whip him. Dad stepped out of nowhere and asked, Do you think that did any good? His few words always made the point.

When I was sixteen, the owner of the ranch I had grown up on died, and there were discussions of losing the lease. Overheard conversations about buying a ranch excited me. As the expiration date of each five-year lease approached, anxiety welled up. Must we leave our home this time? Emil launched into a tirade whenever purchasing a ranch surfaced in discussions. He reminded everyone how tough times were in the 1930s and how the Great Depression could happen again. Hard times during the frontier years had honed an edge on him, a toughness it took to survive those lean years. His sharp tongue constantly demanded more from those close to him; he drove everyone around him as hard as he drove himself. He tolerated no laziness, squandering of money, or irresponsibility. He meant to prepare everyone for the next depression. Toughness became a virtue ingrained at an early age. We lost the lease on the Hill ranch in 1974 when I was seventeen.

We became nomads. We leased pasture by the month and bought hay to keep our cowherd together. The first winter we were on the U-Cross ranch south of Merriman, Nebraska, and a nasty blizzard in April killed a third of our calves. One hundred died in the storm and another one hundred from starvation and sickness afterward. Dad and Emil couldn’t see the calving shed one hundred feet away for three days. Dad said the wind blew the little camper-trailer they hunkered down in around so much it reminded him of crossing the Pacific in a ship with the Marines. As soon as the storm broke, Emil followed snowplows to town. I left my senior year in high school to fill in for him at the cow camp. Emil’s first night of rest in weeks became his eternal rest. He died of a heart attack at seventy-two.

Dad and Mom sat my brother, sisters, and me down to talk about our future. They were considering selling the cows and retiring but wanted to know what we thought. Of course, we all agreed that we wanted to continue ranching.

We leased pasture in southern Nebraska the summer after I graduated from high school and moved our cowherd to the Laramie River to spend the winter. We moved there in anticipation of leasing a ranch south of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. I left Chadron State College—education had become a diversion with no heart—to join Dad on the Laramie River. My dad’s younger brother Jack left a ranch he managed near Chadron and moved as well.

I was so excited Uncle Jack was coming along. He got out of the Army when I was seven years old. I started scatter-raking the hay fields that year; Jack was foreman of the stacking crew and my boss. Uncle Jack taught me how to scatter-rake. At night he played football with me and taught me how to sharpen a knife, how to shape a hat, how to make things with rawhide, and how to trap muskrats. He visited with me as if I were a man.

Dad, Lani, and I spent the winter with our cattle on the Laramie River. Mom stayed in Gordon with Cydney, Melanie, and Reggie still in high school. I was surprised to learn that Dad could bake and cook pretty well. I would find him in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of camp coffee, and mixing batter for sourdough biscuits, with nothing on but his cowboy hat. Being in this cow camp brought back the practice cowboys had of undressing from the bottom up and dressing from the top down as they crawled in and out of their bedroll. I guess being in a warm house allowed him to stop dressing with his hat.

Our time together that winter was the same as growing up: quiet. If I successfully fought the urge to fill silence with blather, communication occurred. Thoughts were conveyed with an expression, a nod, or a glance. Unspoken dedication to his family and his cowherd was Dad’s creed. He gave all he had to see that we got what we wanted in the way of life choices, but he did not encourage any material desires.

He said if we didn’t lie, cheat, or steal, we couldn’t do much wrong. I received his wrath only three times in my life: first, when I turned my horse’s butt to a cow. (We want to keep the cow on the horse’s mind, so we must keep the cow in the horse’s vision.) The second time he got angry with me was when I threw away a half-eaten apple, and the third, when I talked during the national anthem.

As spring approached, the Medicine Bow lease fell through, and we were in a jam. Jack and I thought it was time to buy a ranch. We feared inflation would escalate prices beyond our reach. My dad, who read the Wall Street Journal every morning over a pack of Lucky Strikes and a pot of coffee, thought the economy was out of hand and due for a day of reckoning. He thought we should bide our time.

Dad and Jack hit the road to find a home for our cows, while Lani and I calved out 600 cows and 283 two-year-old heifers. Dad and Jack would come help us catch up every few days.

As green-grass time rapidly approached, urgency made our choice. We needed a home for our cattle, and no lease could be found. Dad and Jack looked at a ranch in Newcastle, Wyoming. After running a bunch of numbers and calculations at the kitchen table, Dad looked up and said, It won’t work. Uncle Jack and I looked at each other in shock. We said we would just make it work.

We bought the ranch—Jack and I because we were frantically grasping for a fading dream and Dad, well, he didn’t say. This was my dream come true: owning a ranch with Dad and Jack, my mentor and my hero. Although hope, work, and living a dream are good seeds, they must be tended to secure success. A little luck helps too. The harsh country, in a rain shadow west of the Black Hills, critically wilted our financial resources. Dad had been right. This wasn’t going to work.

Our banker, Dick Van Pelt at the Bank of Laramie, lined us up with the Farmers Home Administration. They said they liked our operation, but we needed a different ranch to make it work. They recommended ranches with US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management leases to reduce the investment per cow, which would help our cash flow. We relinquished our investment on the Newcastle ranch and, in the spring of 1978, went farther west to look for a place to feed our cows. We purchased Twin Creek Ranch south of Lander, Wyoming.

It was here, in the shadows of the Wind River Range, that we buried Dad at the foot of Sheep Mountain, fulfilling my great-grandfather’s wish. Following the twenty-one-gun salute echoing up and down the canyon and final words, everyone drifted away from the gravesite. I paused to thank my neighbor, Ed McKinney, for bringing his backhoe and digging the grave. As he turned away, I saw a tear on his cheek.

That night, I went to the Legion Club and shot pool, danced, and got drunk. After everyone was gone, I pointed my car, a black Ford Elite with red leather bucket seats, back toward Sheep Mountain and drove home. Rain splashed on the road and glistened in the moonlit night. Wisps of smoke flagged the remnants of an old willow tree, split from top to bottom by a lightning bolt. It seemed fitting that the gnarled old tree met its demise on the night that rain washed Dad’s tracks from the earth forever.

Downy Brome

Overgrazed

A grazed plant draws on root reserves to regrow its leaf area so it can once again capture sunlight and turn it into energy for growth. Drawing on the French scientist André Voisin’s work, Allan Savory defined overgrazing as he developed the Holistic Management Framework. He determined that when a plant is grazed before it recovers from a previous grazing, it becomes overgrazed.

This can happen in three ways:

When a plant is exposed to a grazing animal for too long and the plant’s regrowth is grazed before the plant fully recovers, overgrazing occurs. Plants can grow one inch per day during fast growth periods in the spring. Overgrazing can occur in just a few days during this period.

If grazing animals return to an area before grazed plants have recovered, overgrazing occurs. Rotational grazing, which plans livestock moves based on the calendar rather than in response to the growth cycles of plants, increases the incidence of overgrazing by returning animals to a grazed paddock too soon. In essence, this management style rotates overgrazing.

Overgrazing also occurs when a plant is grazed before it gathers root reserves in its first spring growth. A general guide to many grass species considers a plant ready to be grazed at the three-and-a-half-leaf stage.

A range, a ranch, or a pasture that prevents the movement of grazing animals allows overgrazing of plants and overdisturbance of the soil surface. Overgrazing suppresses the plant’s vigor until it eventually dies. Given a choice, grazing animals select their