10 Questions with....Cody Spencer

Intro by Brandon Regier. Interview and transcription conducted by Brandon Regier.

I had the opportunity to interview Cody Spencer, a friend of Oldman Watershed Councils, and a local bison rancher here in Southern Alberta. Cody grew up in the area in and around the farming and ranching industry. He later found his fascination particularly for bison and his passion for managing them in a way that promotes sustainability of our watershed and the landscape. Cody didn’t hold back, he got his boots dirty right away, he started learning and exploring the industry of bison ranching; he even spent some time down in Texas managing a bison ranch. He said this “opportunity helped to gain perspective on the differences between climate, landscape, and the conditions of our soils”, he also stated that “we have a great opportunity even in the face of climate change to build up resilient systems”. Cody brings a wealth of information to the table when looking at the bigger picture of ecosystem management, and how bison ranching fits into this picture. He shared with me how he got started, the current bison ranching situation alongside what management looks like, as well as his future in the industry. 

Bison have been a popular topic throughout the last number of years. With Parks Canada reintroducing a small herd to Banff National Park in 2018, it hit the news, and people were hearing about it from all over. I think back to the days when bison roamed our plains of North America, not confined by fences and civilization. Going from millions of bison to a keystone species nearing extinction. This interview was captivating to learn more about what managing bison is like in a “totally unnatural system” as Cody put it.

1. How did you get started with bison ranching?

Well, I grew up on a farm near Milk River which my family sold when I was about 12. I have a bit of a background in agriculture before I was removed from it. I then graduated high school and started working after that. I started spending a lot of time on ranches and farms with my friends, alongside doing a lot of hunting. I kind of became reconnected to it. My mom had a coffee table book called ‘Portraits of the Bison’; I picked it up and started reading it, I became fascinated by the animal. I wanted to figure out how to get involved with them. Once I realized that bison ranching was a thing I was dead set on doing it. I got in touch with some local ranches; there was one out near Foremost that was a perfect fit for me. I started working there where I learnt about the animals and ranching, and then got into the meat side of things. From there it snowballed!

2. Can you walk us through a typical day on the ranch?

A typical day is seasonally based. In the spring time when the grass is growing more, we may be moving animals once a week. Really there is not a whole lot that goes into it once the infrastructure is set up on a ranch (which takes a lot of work). If you are setting up a property for bison or grazing, there are a lot of water developments that need to be done, pasture pipelines, and fencing installations. In the winter time, we may be feeding some hay, checking that the water is working, and that all the fences are electrified. All in all, it is pretty hands off.

Because you are managing more remotely, do bison make this easier?

Yeah, I would say so. In some senses. Calving season is a big one. With a lot of cattle producers, if they've been doing it in the so-called traditional sense, they are spending 24/7 for several months on end tending to their cows and pulling calves. If they are foolish enough to be calving in the middle of winter, they are dealing with crazy temperatures and all sorts of problems. Whereas bison, they naturally calve in sync with nature which coincides with the growth of grass. There are no added supplements and cost as far as machinery, bringing feed into the animals, and all the stuff that humans have put in there thinking that we are doing something beneficial. When we have actually taken several steps backwards by taking these actions. With calving season there is zero work, we just move them around every now and again to a fresh pasture and they calve themselves. Bison know what they are doing, they don’t need help. This is a really big benefit to having bison versus cattle.

3. Your ranch is located in a beautiful area of the watershed. What was the condition of the land when you started working it?

It was generally overgrazed in some spots. The riparian areas were really beat up, and some areas further from water were under grazed. All in all it wasn’t in horrible condition. But there was a lot of room for improvement. Some good, some bad.

4. You worked with OWC on a Watershed Legacy Project a few years ago—can you tell us a bit about your project? What type of impact did that have on the land?

So there was a project done to the Watershed Legacy program to build a fence along a riparian corridor to fence off 60 acres of cottonwood trees; the floodplain had been pretty heavily grazed and damaged by continuous cattle grazing in the past. We fenced that off 4 years ago, so it hasn't been grazed since then. The grass has come back and has improved drastically in health. But now it's at the point where it needs to be grazed again. In order to make this happen, we would need to build another fence along the edge of the river to be able to graze it with our bison; which OWC has offered up another grant for us to be able to do that. It's a matter of getting the manpower to build and make it happen as it's a lot of work to build the fence, especially if we build a temporary style where we can take it down at the end of the grazing season. The project has been really good for the health of the 60 acre forest as it is a critical habitat on that property. Hopefully we can graze it again and let it rest for a long time.

5. Have you adapted the way you work to accommodate extreme and unexpected climate events?

We are selling off most of our animals to adapt to the reality of the lack of grass for them. At the end of the day we need to maintain plant cover on the soil surface to be able to bounce back from this drought when it turns around. We don't know when that will be, but not having so many mouths to feed to further degrade the situation is important. This is tough, as it makes it really difficult to run a business when you don’t have any grass to feed your animals.

6. Can you tell us about how you graze your bison? How does it positively affect the health of the watershed?

Well, we try to graze them in a way that we are in a pasture for a short amount of time. Short can be anywhere from a couple days, to a week, or maybe two. Followed by moving them along to a fresh piece, and allowing that recently grazed pasture to recover from grazing. That can vary anywhere from a couple months depending on if you have rain and good growing conditions, to an entire year plus if you have no rain. It's not perfect, and we are not where we need to be. But we have a pretty good system; increasing the number of pastures we have really helps. Labour is our big constraint, because nobody lives at this property. Everytime we have to drive there, it costs X amount of dollars, 40 to 50 dollars just to get there, and then the labour. That being said, none of us are able to generate our full time income from this property. So all of this has to be balanced. In a perfect world, we would be there moving them every single day, or potentially multiple times a day if there was a way to pay for it. But economics just doesn't work in that situation.”

How many individuals are managing this operation?

Between 5 or 6 of us part time helping here and there.

Bison versus Cattle: you always hear that their grazing and therefore, management is different, how does this differ between the two?

Generally speaking, bison will graze further away from water, they won’t linger at water sources which have big implications for riparian areas and riparian health; they don’t park and camp like cattle do. They will travel further away from water, and therefore graze areas that may not get touched by cows; and also graze on steeper slopes. During the winter time, bison graze a lot more effectively than cows (as long as there is grass). They can generally forage throughout the entire winter depending on the quality of the grass, and can get away with a little bit lower quality feed.

There are other interesting implications too. Bison wallow, meaning they get down on their backs and roll around giving themselves dust baths to keep insects off. This creates big concave dishes all across the prairie that then fill in with water and create water sources. If you go out on native grasslands that haven't been broken, you will find all these ancient buffalo wallows that have been since grassed over. They are everywhere on native grassland, and are something that cows don’t do. There are other impacts these water sources have for biodiversity in dry prairie climates. Bison have that thick coat of hair that they shed every year that gets deposited down onto the ground. Birds, rodents, and other wildlife will make their nests out of those big chunks of fur. It is some of the warmest material on the plant.

There have been studies done that show it increases the survivability of grassland birds by 30 percent plus. Bison will also attack and demolish woody vegetation such as sagebrush, aspen, cedar, and juniper with their horns; this has been observed all across North America in different ecotypes with different woody plants. They’ll kill a lot of these plants which tend to encroach on grasslands and therefore, help to maintain prairie ecosystems through their natural behaviour. There are all sorts of little things that are different between the two, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who think: “Oh, you just put bison out on the land and it immediately becomes a paradise”, that’s not true. Either they have to be managed, as they can still overgraze. It's all dependent on our management… we are managing within this totally unnatural system of being fenced in.

7. As descriptively as possible, can you tell us about the sights, sounds, and smells of healthy soil?

The sights, sounds, and smells of healthy soil… I would say that in terms of the sights: if you are walking onto a piece of land, you should see diverse plant communities with a lot of ground cover; covering the ground's surface, seeing zero bare ground, all the soil being covered by growing plants, and plant material. As you start to clear that away and dig at the soil surface, you'll see all sorts of insects and microarthropods. Then you take a shovel out and start to dig into the soil, when you press that shovel in, it should go straight in with very little resistance. You will hear the sound of roots ripping under the pressure of the shovel, as healthy soil has a lot of living plant roots.

As you dig that piece of soil out and you hold it up and look at it, you’ll see all sorts of micagrogates, which are basically chunks of the soil parent material glued together by plant root egzegates, which are carbon based sugars that create pore structures that form habitat for soil microorganisms. As you put that piece of healthy soil up to your nose and smell it, you will get a whiff of these rich earthy smells, smells that are very very pleasing, that aren’t rancid or sour. The soil will have that rich earthy smell that most people can probably picture after a big rain event, you’ll get that smell of this compound called geosmin that is in the air. When you go back to that smell, that is the smell we should be smelling when we lift that soil up to our nose. As you break it apart, it should be completely filled with plant roots, there should be tons and tons of earthworms and other organisms in the soil. If we were to go deeper and put it under a microscope, you would see this vast array of fungal networks, bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, everything in the soil food web working together in symbiosis with the plant roots that are feeding everything through photosynthesis.

8. Are there any innovations in restoring the land that you are particularly proud of?

I would say that we haven’t actually restored the land yet, however, we have done things that are going in the right direction. Very simply providing space and time for those plants to recover after grazing. It's really simple, but in practice it's kind of difficult being able to move the animals off and not return till the plants have recovered. That doesn't sound very innovative, but we have nowhere near enough people attempting to do just that. Additional items we are working on are trying to figure out how to reestablish these fungal and microbial communities under the soil surface.

We are just scratching the surface of this but that's a big part of what we are missing in our agricultural systems. We have wiped out the fungal and microbial populations from the soil that are actually supposed to be doing most of the work for us, and replaced that with chemicals and synthetic fertilizers that kill those communities. Up until recently, we haven't really understood the importance of them. So trying things out like doing fungal inoculants and seed coatings if we are doing some planting; planning them with biology and carbon sources attached to those plants, to then be able to re-inoculate the soil and reestablish those communities. Now we are, and I say we as a collective humanity who are focused on restoration, are just scratching the surface of what is actually happening there. We, as in our tiny operation, are basically in kindergarten when it comes to this stuff. So I think over this next decade we will really see some huge advancements in restoration once we start to pay attention to the fungal and microbial communities that all soil systems are associated with. The world leaders in soil science and soil biology recognize that they only know less than half a percent, maybe at the most 2 percent of what's actually going on in the soil. So it literally is a frontier of discovery.

9. Where would you like to see your ranching operation in 5 years?

In 5 years I would like to have more land under management that we can actually run a ranching operation from. One that can support someone's living or at least support multiple people's part time living. Because right now we are not there and we need more diversity and access to land which is a problem. We are the scrappy bootstrapper startup ranch that doesn’t have land and is under capitalized trying to figure out how to make it work. Access to land is the number one thing that you have to figure out. This ranch that we have the bison on right now is great, but it's just not big enough to be able to produce the income we need from it. Finding more land that we can either lease, purchase, or come to some sort of partnership agreement with; one where we can be at 4 to 5 thousand acres under management and be able to produce several hundred bison at a very low cost, high profit margin, and then be able to grow the direct consumer market where we are feeding a lot of people locally, at a price that we can actually make some money on. Now all of that is easier said than done, but that is where we need to be if we have any chance of making it.

When did this ranching operation commence?

Well I have been doing it since 2014, but we have had bison on that particular piece of land since 2018.

How many head of bison are you running & on how much land?

So, we lease 1600 acres. Which may sound like a lot to some people but it is not even close to run a viable operation in our climate. Earlier this year we had about 140 head - beating hearts, on the ranch which equates to about 80 animal/ unit equivalents. So 140 that includes calves and yearlings which are not full grown bison. With the extreme drought this year… we have cut that number in half. We are going to cut it down even more, and we still may go down to zero.

10. If someone was interested in trying bison, where would they find more information or place an order?

You can email me at: cody@sweetgrassbison.ca
Also check out their website!

Watch Cody Spencer’s episode of OWC:Eats!

This was produced by the OWC as part of the "Uniting Rural Producers and Urban Consumers" program, which was made possible by the support of Canadian Agricultural Partnership program, the Government of Alberta, and the Government of Canada.

Thank you to Cody Spencer for his contributions to this project and to bettering the watershed for all those who live, work, and play here.