Managing Grazing for Rangeland Health on the Key O Ranch

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Conservation and Education

Noel Keogh’s family bought the ranch in the Stillwater Valley in 1947 and started working with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) – then the Soil Conservation Service – about 20 years later. The way he puts it, “I’ve got a list about as long as your arm going back from about 1968. There’s just been so much education that I have received from the technical people at NRCS that it’s just helped us immensely on this operation.”

The first project was some fencing, then the local office in Columbus helped with some surveying and design work to redo an old ditch. “It just kind of steam-rolled from there all the way from the Great Plains contract we had that we did a bunch of fencing and spring development with all the way to a CSP, Conservation Stewardship Program, contract that we had,” said Keogh. “NRCS has been a big help and I think more so than the financial assistance is the technical expertise, the knowledge base.”

Garrett Larson, the NRCS district conservationist in the Columbus field office, says Keogh is a great advocate for the technical assistance NRCS can provide, but is humble about the knowledge he passes on to NRCS. “We use Noel as a reference as well,” said Larson. “Usually the best source of knowledge we’ve got is the local farmers and ranchers. If you want to know specific details about how some plants react to some grazing, firsthand knowledge, they are the ones you need to go to.”

Healthy Native Rangeland for Healthy Cattle

The Key O Ranch is a cow-calf operation that tries to graze year-round with minimal supplemental feeding. “High-quality native range can satisfy a cow’s needs just about all conditions of the year, except for a couple really deep, long snow storms,” said Keogh.

Under this philosophy, managing for that high-quality rangeland is crucial. To maximize production of grass for grazing, the Keogh family has been building fences to create smaller pastures. Every new pasture must also have a water source, which may require installation of a pipeline and stock tank. Smaller pastures give Keogh more flexibility to manage where and how much grass his cattle eat depending on grass and weather conditions from season to season. He says his grandfather’s grazing theory of “take half, leave half” basically holds true today.

Grazing management (Grazing Management and Soil Health PDF; 4.7 MB) systems aim to produce high-quality forage to feed livestock for as much of the year as possible. The timing and extent of grazing affects the amount of grass and but most importantly, impacts plant root growth. Healthy roots lead to healthy plants and animals. If a plant is grazed too often in a season, the root system can shrink, making the plant less productive and less resilient to weather conditions.

Balancing Grazing and Plant Health

“If you take too much of the plant away, those roots aren’t growing anymore. It’s a fine balance,” said Larson. “Farmers and ranchers are the ones that have got the best experience to do it. They know the animals. They’ve got the tools to make it happen.”

“When I was a kid this was essentially a four-pasture ranch and now I’ve got three different areas, grazing zones,” said Keogh. Each of those zones is further fenced into five to eight smaller pastures with livestock water tanks. NRCS helped to plan and implement the livestock water system in one of the grazing zones through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. The system is 7.5 miles of pipeline with eight water tanks.  

“We are on a deferred grazing rotation that the NRCS helped set up,” said Keogh. He says that grazing plan along with the water system have “really helped us increase our utilization or get our utilization more even throughout the pastures instead of the riparian areas and the bottoms being grazed out. It’s been a real environmental plus for us having the NRCS and their experience and their knowledge and their assistance helping us put programs and projects together.”

Healthy Rangelands Have Many Benefits

Healthy rangelands don’t just benefit livestock. Managing for healthy, productive range plants can help to decrease bare ground and erosion, decrease weed infestations through competition, increase diversity of plant communities and the wildlife that use them for food and cover, and much more. Keogh says they have more wildlife than in the past, including elk. Traveling elk herds can be hard on the fences on the ranch, but Keogh manages for that as well by building wildlife-friendly fences. “We have a pretty good resident elk herd here most of the winter. I put the top fence wire lower and the bottom wire higher. It lets the elk through easier and they don’t do as much damage to your fence all of the time,” said Keogh.

The livestock water tanks have also been modified to withstand wildlife – in this case, playful bears. “One of the big problems we have up here is with the black bear getting in these tanks and they like to play with these float balls. It looks like they start dribbling that float and all of a sudden whack. Then I will find it clear over in the pine trees somewhere,” said Keogh. Several years ago, they started adding sections of heavy wire panels to protect the floats in the tanks. NRCS requirements also include ramps that help birds and small mammals escape stockwater tanks.

“I definitely feel that the improvements that we have made are now starting to show increased productivity. A lot of this rangeland has been deteriorated, but we are starting to see bluebunch [wheatgrass] populations coming back into that now,” said Keogh. “As we increase the productivity it’s going to make it a more profitable operation.”

“We are here to help, that’s what it amounts to,” said Larson. “I get to go to the field and use my knowledge and help them out. It’s a great feeling at the end of the day to know you are making a difference.”