Society for Range Management Excellence in Range Management Award: Chuck and Koreen Anderson, Lemmon South Dakota

News News | Aug 4, 2023

Chuck and Koreen Anderson, Lemmon, South Dakota, recently received the Society of Range Management’s Excellence in Range Management award. A range tour and rainfall simulator demonstration were held Thursday, July 20, 2023, at the ranch south of Lemmon, in cooperation with local and regional NRCS personnel. SRM members were on hand to present the award, and over 80 people attended.

Conservation and range management have been a multi-generational practice for the Anderson family.

“My dad was on the Perkins County Conservation District board for forty years,” Anderson said. “The next generation got involved as Koreen and I worked together on the ranch. Tiffany and Jack both got involved in range science and plant ID at a young age. Everyone has worked hard building fence and moving cows.”

Anderson said that family has been a huge part of carrying out range management practices.

“We are trying to make the ranch better for the next person who is here, whether it’s someone in our family or not,” he said.

Anderson said that he likes the idea of building resilience in his pastures and soils.

“We’re not doing anything new,” he said. “We ‘stole’ these ideas from other people who are working toward similar goals. We’re always looking for things we can learn to help make our place better.”

Chuck and Koreen moved onto their ranch in 2001 and purchased it in 2005.

“2002, 2004 and 2006 were extremely dry,” he said, “So dry that we didn’t turn a wheel on any of our hay ground. We have worked at changing the profile of our soils to get more water infiltration and store more subsoil moisture so that when dry years come we have stronger plants that are more resilient.”

The range tour included several examples of management practices that Andersons have implemented to build up organic matter as ‘armor’ on their soils, as well as showing how range sites have responded after a wildfire burned across Andersons’ ranch in January, 2021. Known locally as the ‘Windy Fire,’ the blaze was driven by winds nearing 60 miles per hour, and affected over 16,000 acres.

Ryan Beer, NRCS Range Management Specialist, has worked closely with Andersons for many years. He explained some of the differences between a wildfire and a control burn. Control burns are frequently used to suppress the growth of cool season, invasive grasses such as crested wheatgrass and Kentucky bluegrass. Beer said that control burns are typically planned for late April and early May after green up.

“The goal in using high impact grazing or fire on Kentucky bluegrass and crested wheatgrass is to get more bare ground to give native species a chance to get going again,” Beer said. “Plant diversity makes pastures more drought resistant and provides better quality forage. We did see a lot of Kentucky bluegrass knocked back after the Windy Fire, and we saw some response from the warm season grasses.”

Beer said that western South Dakota’s grassland ecosystem evolved with fire affecting it frequently.

“Before settlement, fires likely burned through here every three to five years,” he said. “Native plants can come back after fire.”

Unfortunately, the Windy Fire burned so hot that it left little residue on the soil. Since the fire occurred in January, it was several months until the grass started to grow again. The area received little snowfall that would have provided some protection from the strong winds that continued to blow. Andersons experienced some serious wind erosion in the months following the fire on pastures with sandier soils.

“One area of particularly sandy, gravelly ground we had a lot of wind erosion between January, when the fire occurred, and spring when the grass started to grow.” he said. “In some areas the western Wheatgrass filled in and protected the soil, but in the sandiest area there is still a lot of bare ground.”

Two years after the fire, Anderson says they are still working on restoring the organic matter on the soil in that area. It was a serious setback after nearly twenty years of careful management.

“To give some history on this quarter, in the 50s it was disked black,” he said. “It was alternately wheat and fallow, and as good farmers did in that day, the weeds were not allowed to grow, it was kept black. It ended up with a big blowout on the ridge. On one end of the field it was not as bad but on the other end there was no topsoil left. We’ve been trying to improve it through grazing and we have seen some advances in green needle grass, big bluestem and western wheatgrass. We’ve had to be patient, it takes a long time to see changes.”

Now it feels like starting from square one again, but, Anderson says, “The land can heal.”

Andersons have used grazing techniques, particularly long rest periods between grazing, to improve the pastures. They have also successfully converted several formerly cultivated fields to grass, and they use cover crops on remaining fields to benefit both their livestock and the land.

Anderson said that he planted his first cover crop in 2009.

“We seeded oats and peas that spring, chopped it and followed with a cover crop,” he recalled. “We had a tremendous catch: turnips, radishes, millet, sorghum sudan grass and hairy vetch. We turned the cows in for a short duration grazing period because we wanted a lot of cover going into the winter. Our cows had never eaten turnips before, so they didn’t know what to do with them. When we turned the cows in, for the first week they just ate the tops off the turnips, but by the second week they had figured out how to pull the turnips out of the ground to eat them. It was pretty funny to see those cows wallering the turnips around in their mouths trying to chew them up!”

Anderson said that planting a cover crop on cultivated land is helpful as part of the transition process from a single species crop such as grain farming to a multi species crop such as native grasses and forbs.

“Planting cover crops really helps to gain diversity,” he said. “Different plants attract different bugs and get different microorganisms working in the soil. The more diversity, the healthier the ecosystem.”

Anderson also plants rye as a cover crop, a hay crop, to help with weed suppression, and for grazing.

“We try to leave six to seven inches of stubble when we mechanically harvest a crop,” he said. “That way there’s plenty of leaf left for it to regrow. One year we turned cows onto rye after we hayed it, and had them in there for two weeks of grazing before it headed out and was not palatable any more. We harvested the rest of it and got 20 bushels per acre!”

One particular project that Andersons talked about in the tour is a planting of big bluestem and sideoats grama grasses with the goal of establishing a pasture of native, warm season grasses. Although the stand is pretty well established, Anderson said that planting alfalfa as part of the mix was probably a mistake.

“I thought it was important to have a legume in the mix, but the alfalfa was too aggressive,” he said.

Still, the tall heads of big bluestem and sideoats grama are a beautiful testament to patience and careful management. They carry the seeds that will continue to bring positive changes to the Anderson ranch.

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