The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
Out on the Grasslands, with Kelsey Scott
After recording the main episode with Kelsey, we headed out for a very special tour through regenerating cultural and natural grasslands. We pick it up amongst the layered stories around the nearby Missouri River / Lake Oahe. That sets up a sense of the power in arriving at the family’s re-introduced Sundance grounds. Soon after, we witness Kelsey finding Indian grass back on the ranch for the first time, and achieving a long-held dream to see native grasses once again taller than she is. Found alongside the climate cooling, wildlife and nutritional benefits of these grasses, is a family’s deep re-connection in place, and a love story or two. And yet more layers have emerged in these stories since we met at the CREATE reunion last month in Montana.
Olivia and Yeshe are riding in the back for this one, so you’ll hear some kid’s play here and there, and a little cameo from Olivia with Kelsey, comparing herbal medicine notes across Native American and Chinese traditions.
If you’ve come here first, tune into the main episode with Kelsey, ‘Resurgent Land, Culture & Food Systems on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation’. You’ll find a few links in the show notes too, along with a transcript, and a few photos on the episode website, with more on Patreon for subscribing members.
This episode has chapter markers and a transcript.
Recorded 3 August 2024.
Title slide image: Kelsey’s dream realised – the return of native grasses once again taller than she is (pic: Anthony James).
Tune by Jeremiah Johnson.
See more photos on the website, and for more from behind the scenes, become a member via the Patreon page.
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Over here is a pasture that we keep our saddle horses in. I'd like to next year, when dad gets home, kind of create it into more of a horse grazing paddock system. Right now it's just pretty season-long graze so that we can have our horses nearby so we can go get them, go do the work. So they talk about a lot of times like your sacrifice pasture or you're like the parts that look the worst are closest to home. Yeah, that's one of it for us. I think we'll go down this way. It's a hell of a sight, that river down there.
AJ:Is it the sort of thing that evokes mixed feelings, knowing the colonial throughway that it was?
Kelsey:Yeah, you know it's. And it has another layer for me too, because my grandpa Frank was a big part of fighting Congress, I believe, all the way up to the Supreme Court for reparations for the land lost and we received it. But beyond that, my grandpa, wayne Poffey, he was a big proponent of the establishment of the Maniwashde, which means good water, tri-county water development. So we now have water to essentially every existing doorstep on Cheyenne River and it comes out of Lake Oahe. And you know they say, like in rural development it's always the last mile that costs the most, and that's especially true in Indian country because we're so remote and so rural that it's usually getting to the last like mile to that community is what's going to cost the most and it's the hardest to fundraise for. So anyway, him and my cousin Earp Fisher, who still is the director of Tri-County Water are you know it was kind of a lot of their life's work going to DC lobbying for funds to go towards the water and making sure that our folks had good drinking water, clean drinking water to be able to access in their houses. So yeah, it has like layered emotions for me have ties to it.
Kelsey:I was just going to take us for a little drive, see if we can maybe run into some cool wildlife. Looks like there might be an eagle over there sitting on that fence post, some prairie dogs, and then these little birds flying around are burrowing owls, really Mm-hmm. They're, I believe, on the threatened or endangered list, but they come in and just, we have just hundreds of them on the ranch throughout. I think they migrate. We have just hundreds of them on the ranch throughout. I think they migrate. I don't know their full migratory pattern, but they come in and they hunt the baby prairie dogs.
AJ:Oh really.
Kelsey:Yeah, so they're a natural prairie dog. Control a little bit. Prairie dogs are these little kind of gopher-looking things that dig these burrows. You see, like the soil pile right there. They kind of they'll eat like grubs and things like that, but mainly they eat vegetation. So they'll clip the vegetation off. Which is why a lot of folks don't like prairie dogs is they'll waste vegetation. They'll go out there. The reason they clip it short is because they're a prey animal, so they clip, clip their area short, sorry, so that they can see the predators coming. They can see the coyotes and things like that.
AJ:Genius, yeah, it is.
Kelsey:I think that prairie dog towns likely help to serve as some form of natural firebreak to them. Yeah, the prairie dogs are one of them pests that I have been inviting myself to learn from there's so much to be said for it.
AJ:There are multiple instances in australia we've talked about on the podcast too of designated pests that are playing awesome roles, since it's been not only recognised their innate instincts and potential value, but the relationship has then been able to bring more out, and yet the official designations are slower in changing. Yeah, so it's tragic to think that we might be slaughtering adversely these creatures that could play a huge huge yeah yeah, a little over their own value.
Kelsey:But yeah, I have a few uh interesting habitat management ideas that I'm gonna try playing around with here in the next few years oh yeah yeah, and then just um population control ideas. So it'll be kind of fun to see how they unfold and if any of them are successful. Well, I mean right now, now the most widely used is poison, yeah.
Kelsey:You know, yeah, so with that you're killing off your snakes and anything that would prey upon those animals your hawks, your birds, your owls, even your coyotes and things like that, and I mean your dogs, like whatever. So and then the poison is residual in wherever those animals die, right? So then your grass and your soil is exposed and it has an impact we can't even see microorganismally, is exposed and it has a an impact we can't even see microorganismally. And, um, I think that most pests, if you look at what their key mechanism for survival is and then figure out how to use that key mechanism for survival against them, I mean you can understand or you can kind of shift it. So my thought is they have their key mechanism for survival is in their chirps. They alert one another when there's a predator coming, or they alert one another when there's danger coming, and so those distressed chirps have a direct impact on the organism, have a direct impact on the organism. And so I want to know what happens to a town if you go out there, put the town into distress, record the chirps and then have that distressed chirps just playing on a reel out there like with a coyote call or something. Because a few things that I think could happen would be one. I mean, you create a constant state of distress for them, which would then lead to immune system issues and all of the other things, or you dull them to the distress call so they're going to be easier preyed upon. I don't know. That's one of them. The other is more of like just different types of capture systems for them. Of like just different types of capture systems for them. I mean, there are prairie dog restoration, like habitat restoration attempts all over the great plains, because they're an endangered species and they're such a key um species for creating habitat for other endangered species, like the black-footed ferret, and so I think that there's got it. I mean, plus, they are a meat animal, like people eat rabbits and things like that, so can we eat them? I have, we thought about you. There's a lot of like prairie dogs and prairie dog like things that are consumed in other foods as well. So, yeah, I don't know. That's yeah, yeah.
Kelsey:So this is our Sundance grounds, our family's Sundance grounds. We have our cook shack up here. We had a recent windstorm come through and really raise havoc with it all, so we need to come down and repair it all. We just came down and tore out all the wire to the fence at all. We just came down and tore out all the wire to the fence and we plan to come and put set new posts and stuff like that this summer, waiting for this crazy heat wave to kind of subside before we tackle that project.
Kelsey:And then up there is where we've buried our families, where we've buried our families like we've practiced our traditional ceremony for laying our families' bodies to rest up there.
Kelsey:For quite some time we weren't actually able to practice that method of ritual or burial, whatever you want to call it. It's not burial, because it's placing their body on a scaffold, but there's a law that my great uncle was able to help get into place that now we have protections to be able to practice all of our ceremonies and spiritual rituals. So my great uncle wanted to be put up on the scaffolding for a year's time before his body was buried, and then I had an aunt or a cousin who did the same, who did the same. So we kind of keep that place just maintained in case any other family members are inclined to want to practice that, will you? Probably not? I don't know. I mean, I really don't have any sentiment around what happens to me when I'm gone. Um, my main hope would be that my family does what makes it easier for them for me to be gone, because damn, they're gonna miss me yeah I'll take you to one of my favorite spots on the ranch here.
Kelsey:Just beautiful view and easy enough to get to in a pickup because the road goes right to it.
AJ:What's behind the selection of places like that?
Kelsey:My great uncle, les, is kind of our family's spiritual leader and he went and studied, practiced, ceremonied with a spiritual leader by the name of Rick T Docs, I believe and that experience led him into wanting to stand up his own Sundance Grounds. And typically the commitment that you make to standing up a Sundance Grounds I mean it's not one that you can just decide you're going to do Like it's something you are welcomed in or you know you ceremony about it with somebody you have like a spiritual leader, mentor, who prepares you for it. Because what Sundance is is four days of fasting, from food and water uh, from food and water and, um, you usually dance, from starting at sun up. Uh, you do typically like eight to 10 rounds of dancing, and so each round of dancing, I would say, is 20 to 30 minutes, and so it's a very um strenuous and to the point of dangerous activity. And you are the leader of the Sundance, you're responsible for getting these folks through this journey and there's a lot of times where, like, the ceremony helps you to kind of transcend this universe, if you will, into that higher level of awareness and being. And you know there's a reason. You go without food and there's a reason. And so you, you end up getting some dancers who become dangerously exposed to the power that is in the ceremony and the energies that surround the ceremony.
Kelsey:And so, anyway, he, I think, committed to four years dancing and praying for and asking the spirits for the opportunity to stand up the Sundance. And then he went and asked my grandpa if he could mark out a place here in this tribal range unit to be the Sundance Grounds. And then I think he had to petition to the tribe to have those few acres carved out of our range unit so that it could be the home to the Sundance Grounds. And I think he did close to 30 years of dances. Wow, wow, yeah, and those were some of my favorite childhood memories, really. Yeah, we would always have our dance around the first full moon of July. It's a super, super hot time of the year, but that's part of why I love the heat. I was raised to love it. You know this is a big bluestem, so I had to stop. See, look at how tall that grass is. That's what our vegetation will be here one day, really.
Kelsey:Oh yeah, oh yeah, I have full faith that we're going to be able to get there. I actually got to go stand by that. Is that a statue? Yeah, so like to me when Nicole talks about people not tapping into the ranches beneath them, I mean, most of our western wheatgrass grows this tall. Yeah, this is four times the production of what our cool season grasses can grow, you know so that's, just that's pretty cool yeah, are there recollections of it being that widespread as you envision it to be in the future?
Kelsey:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean you read in like the Lewis and Clarks and the different journals and stuff they talk about like shoulder high grasses, they do yeah, same in Australia, you know. Yeah.
AJ:And in many instances I guess I'm referring to instances where they've referred to hip-high grasses. So knee-high grasses have come back, but not hip-high yet anyway. So we still don't know what they're referring to.
Kelsey:This is my first summer seeing bluegrass in this pasture.
AJ:Is it really?
Kelsey:And it's not been planted. It's in the seedbed. It just needs help expressing itself. That's cool and I always joke that my goal is to have grass that's taller than me and eventually I'm going to start getting shorter, so if I'm not any, good at management, but yeah, this is just and look at like how much production this one or two plants right here is in a area that hasn't been vegetated.
Kelsey:You know, like there's bare soil here and this you can kind of see the remnants of it right here. Actually it's more widespread, but this was all a.
Kelsey:We call them, or they're referred to as gumbo blowouts uh, just black soil and what I think it probably was, if I'm being honest, is this is starting to validate my theory is the grass that grew right here was so dang tasty that the cows, when it was season long, summer long grazing, would come here and just graze and graze and graze every time that grass would grow and it ended up exposing the bare soil which caused the soil erosion which caused the the big bare patch to grow bigger and bigger. But we've been forcing the rest right, or ensuring that there's the rest, and when we graze here in the winter we come and we actually put, we will set um our lick tubs in in these spots. I was trying to see if we could see a, a ring, because sometimes the rings will form from the cows coming around and grazing it. But that intent is to bring this grass is to all of the maize. The intent is to bring the animals poop and urine right here to this spot to replenish and re-nourish.
Kelsey:We'll roll hay out here and let them trample it into the ground. So yeah, I'm really excited because we've got our forbs coming back. We've got our sage, our medicine and our most desirable warm seasons. It's awesome, Kind of cool. So the fence line on the other side of the draw, all of the way to remember that little bridge that you guys crossed just down the way here, it was all one pasture.
Kelsey:Really really yeah. So it's about a fourth, probably close to a 4 000 acre pasture at one point in my grandpa's time, um, and we now have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, twelve pastures there, um, still plenty, still plenty of room to go as we can one afford to, two, give the time to. But it's just allowed us to kind of revolutionize the rest periods that some of these pastures get, and it's quite tremendous the way that it expresses itself.
AJ:It's an interesting thing when I've come to think, and when we talk about bison, we think about fences as just getting in the way.
Kelsey:Yeah.
AJ:But that actually fencing has this other the lens to it.
Kelsey:Yeah, where it's key, yeah, what a sight Look at that so you can kind of see where those trees it looks. You can kind of see like a wheat field down there on the bottom, yeah, yeah, so those trees that stand out in it. Um, if you go, if you were to go like a quarter mile kind of that direction from those trees right into the middle of the river is where my grandpa and his siblings home was really yep and uh, it's just.
Kelsey:It's just around the bend a little bit where the the bridge is that gets you across to the east side of the river, which you guys will take on your way to minnesota tomorrow. Um, but yeah, that's, that's where home was for them. And then they flooded the Oahe. They talk about how it was just turn your cows out, winter storms coming open the gate to the river opened the gate to the river. There was wooded, um, like a wooded corridor all along the river that the cows would go into and they'd come out and they'd just have dry backs after the blizzards and like it was just so wooded in there that they had great phenomenal protection and your cows would come out. My, my grandpa used to always say shitting through a sieve, meaning they're really loose poop, so they had like really high quality diet in there and, yeah, some more big blue stem. That's exciting, it's so funny. This, this big blue stem, has like shot up in the past week and a half really yeah, only yeah far out it's really far so you're flying high up.
Kelsey:Yeah, seeing that right now. Yeah, it's pretty cool Wow.
AJ:It is, and it's what I marvel at, you know, and in truth, it entices us to some stupid ship of land to experience some of that. Yeah, what a reward.
Kelsey:It really is.
AJ:But it does it by itself. You know, reward, it really is, but it does it by itself. You know, just get the conditions, get the juiciness.
Kelsey:We had our cows in here when Monty proposed and he had picked up the mineral and the salt blocks that I needed to go turn out to the cows before he came to visit that weekend and I said, well, I'll wait, or you had to go run to his uncle's house in Ridgeview, which you guys would have went through just a little tiny town, slow down 55 and keep going. But, um, ridgeview, uh, is where he was running some cows with his uncle and he said, well, don't go put the mineral out, just wait for me when I get back and I'll come help. Okay, sounds fine. And he was gone for a little while, longer than I thought. But whatever, I had plenty of projects to do, and he came back and we stopped two or three places and put mineral out and, uh, uh, I gotta go take a look at that. Um, I think that's gonna be Indian Indian grass, which is going to make me really happy. There's the grass as tall as me.
AJ:Hey, hang on, hold the pose Far out, kelsey, that's pretty cool. Mission accomplished.
Kelsey:Mission accomplished. We stopped several places and I was like he was driving and I'm like like I don't get it. Why, why do you keep getting out every time we stop? Like I can take a bag of mineral out? You know I'm not incapable, you know, here I am strong, independent woman.
Kelsey:Well, we get to this spot, I'll take you guys too and we put some um, we put the blocks out, and the blocks come with like a little sticky label that tells you what, like um, salt content it is and what thing. You know what all ingredients are in it. Where it was mine and I peeled it off and I kind of and it was the, the salt was blue and so it kind of had a blue hue to it and I went to smack, like you know, tap it on his face to get his face blue. And he dropped down to one knee and he proposed to me and I was like, okay, like now I get it, why you weren't getting out every time and this and that, and so that's kind of been. It's become one of our favorite places on the ranch, but also it's just beautiful scenery down here.
Kelsey:See what things men go through.
AJ:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found myself more nervous than I thought I was going to be the same position, so how wide would the river have been before it was stopped?
Kelsey:I would compare it to what you saw with Yellowstone.
AJ:Really, yeah, it's a bit crazy to see it like this in that sense, but on the other hand it's like an ocean, so I'm like drawn. Yeah. I mean, the water's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah, is this the spot?
Kelsey:This is the spot.
Olivia:Yeah, it was very proposed Beautiful.
Kelsey:It's lovely. It looks like I'm holding it up. Can you take this picture for?
AJ:me 100% Very cool.
Kelsey:It's so cool. This is the first time I've seen it on the ranch. Oh, cool, yeah. And when I moved home in 2015, I was like I'm going to get our warm season grasses back. And I still remember the conversation. Dad said, well, what does that mean? And I said, well, when I see Indian grass on the ranch, I'll know that we're succeeding. So, yeah, that's pretty cool. I've seen big bluestem and other pastures. This is the most widespread I've seen it so far this summer in more pastures than normal. But I have I haven't ever seen this. So that's pretty cool, it's so good.
Kelsey:Better grab one and take it home. So this is like the sage that we pick for smudging and purification.
AJ:It's such a beautiful plant.
Kelsey:Yeah, yeah, it smells so good. This is varro, which is kind of like nature's band-aid. If you ever are bleeding, you have a cut or a burn, this is the perfect thing. It's very, very high in vitamin K, so it causes blood clotting. Like if you ever have a cut.
Kelsey:Mm-hmm, yep. One time I was like a few miles away from the ranch and I got sunburned. I didn't realize I was going to be away that long fixing as much fence as I was, and I threw some of this in my mouth and kind of chewed it up into a paste and just slathered it all over my arms and by the time I got home like the sunburn was gone, Like it worked better than aloe vera, it's amazing. Yeah, yeah, really cool.
AJ:It still amazes me what's in there, in plain view, you know, right in front of us yeah, so we haven't.
Kelsey:Let's see, we grazed this pasture this winter. Um, so we'll, we'll probably save this, at least until probably around december or the first of the year before we turn cows into here.
Kelsey:So the cows do okay through winter they're tough, yeah, um, we, we do all that we can to try to keep them fed I mean water is one of the most you know hard to navigate things, especially when they're in here, because we don't have any water tanks, so we're always like chopping ice so they can get to the river. But this is a phenomenal pasture for draws for them to go and stay out of the wind in. So we we put in the labor, I guess, of making sure the water stays open just so that they can have better shelter in here.
Kelsey:And then the grass is always real. I mean this this grass is going to take quite a snowstorm yeah to cover, yeah, so there's still going to be. That's another added value to getting these taller warm season grasses back is there's gonna be so much more forage available through the winter storms yeah, good point.
Kelsey:So that ice is over yeah, man, yeah, I mean, like this, this will get to where you only see white it will yeah, there's no and and they have to kind of dig in the grass, you know, like buffalo did, but they can do that too yep, yep. It's easier for them to do if they don't have to dig quite so low right so
Kelsey:the bigger grasses are ideal. Yeah, let's jump in and and drive back through the. If you guys want we drive back to the other pasture, there might be a spot we could get to to see if, uh, there's some choke cherries we could pick. Oh, yeah, some berries beautiful it's a beautiful grass.
AJ:There's some choke cherries we could pick, oh yeah, some berries.
Kelsey:Beautiful it's a beautiful grass. It is, I agree, wow. Yeah, I heard the choke cherries are ready, so we better go take a peek. So their choke cherry is what they're called. They're a little bit more of a bitterberry, which is where they get their name the choke part right. I think they're delicious though, but I think it's just because I've have been raised to try, you know, to appreciate that bitter flavor.
Kelsey:They have a pretty decent sized pit in the middle of them, like cherries do, and what's really cool about these ones is that, um, these are what we would with the pit and the berry. We would grind them down and make a paste, and that's what we would slather on our pemmican, like our, our bison strips, and it's a preservative. It preserves them, yep, and we, uh, so the the berry itself. You can eat the pits. You don't want to ingest too many of the pits because they're high in um cyanic acid, yeah, and so it's really interesting, though, that when you grind the cyanic acid with the berry and the citric acid in the berry, it kind of releases the poisonous aspect to it and it's able to be used to preserve the meat. Yeah, it's, wow, it's quite in.
Kelsey:That's one of those instances for me where I was like how many people died from eating the seeds before we figured out this mashing together? And then when nicole made that comment about nobody had to die to know these things, we just communicated with the plants and I was like, well, duh, yeah, that makes total sense. It's a perfect example. Nobody had to die to know these things, we just communicated with the plants. And I was like, well, duh, yeah, that makes total sense. It's a perfect example.
AJ:Yes, because I think by the former logic, who would persist to even find out what neutralized? It.
Kelsey:Exactly, at the risk of being the next person to go Exactly.
AJ:Yeah.
Olivia:That's so interesting because there's certain things like that in Chinese herbal medicine too. Yeah, there, that's so interesting because there's certain things like that in Chinese herbal medicine too. There's a particular herb which is very commonly used to neutralise certain conditions, and it's prepared in a certain way with another herb and then it totally neutralises the toxicity.
Olivia:And then there's another one which is so it's not that commonly used, but it's a really powerful herb with particular conditions, and in Australia and I think here in the States too is it's banned like you can't use it because of the actual root. It's quite high and I can't remember what, but it's very toxic, but it's never used raw it's always used prepared traditionally, but they won't let us use it Over here.
Kelsey:you can kind of see that point that goes out there into the on the other side of that bay. So that entire point used to be covered or just bare soil, and now we're starting to welcome the vegetation back to kind of cover it up. And I think that I mean, with the flooding of our river bottom, we also flooded the habitat which would have kept our beavers around, kept our dam makers you know all of those fur traders also that had come in. You know what animals were left, were over hunted, and so that had a very tremendous impact on our ecosystem. That I don't think we really talk enough about, um, but I I think that if they were still around they would have been up and down these drainages helping to build the dams that would be needed to help to build the trees up here.
Kelsey:Uh, those flooded them all out. Yeah, but it's, I mean it's cool to see the vegetation starting to come back in that instance, um, over there, because that whole knob all the way up to, like, the top of the point up here used to just be bare soil. What is the herb that you talked about?
Olivia:In. I don't know if you call it a food, sir, but it's aconite. Okay, it's the root of aconite. Wow.
AJ:There are many things that are prescription only. You can't access it, and who wouldn't know its consequences? So the fact that you, as a traditional Chinese medicine novice, you don't have that ability. What's stock standard for allopathic doctor is just to be able to have the power that no one else has. Yeah, to know its judicious use.
Olivia:Yeah, there are some practitioners who had contacts in the Chinese community, so I knew that there were some Chinese doctors in the Chinese community who could access these herbs, somehow managed to get them into Australia and had a little stash of them. Chinese medicine Wow.
AJ:You know, there are places in northwest Western Australia where First Nations still keep the stories of places that are underwater for when they're not underwater again. It occurs to me when I hear you tell that one.
Kelsey:That's something Quite a concept Stories of the places for when they're not underwater again.
AJ:So in that location there was 130 metres of sea level change over the massive climate shifts through us ages. So we're talking hundreds of meters offshore. Yeah, now yeah but they will come, they will come back. This is the pattern of the planet, thousands of years long stories. Which is, then, interesting, because these tribes don't climate change. There's another one, but of course, they constructed even still their sensibility around moving, just moving in.
Kelsey:Yeah.
AJ:In this phase, whereas we've got a bunch of edge that's on the coast. No one wants to let go, so we're sandbagging the crap out of them. Yeah, all sorts of things already.
Kelsey:Yeah, oh, so we're sandbagging my crap out of the roof. Yeah, so it's a big already. Yeah, there's a. My husband and I have been thinking a lot about the energies at play in our management on both places his family's place and the place here since that trip to megan's and nicole's and.
Kelsey:Nicole's Really, yeah, and it's really. You know, this summer we had our annual branding where we work our calves. It has always been a celebration for us. It's never been work, it's always been everybody's welcome. It's always been on a weekend so that people can be there.
Kelsey:Intentionally, my grandpa very firmly believed that the essence and culture of branding and what it used to mean should be kept alive. And what it used to mean is back in the age of not everybody having phones, you know, not everybody going to town, because they didn't have a vehicle to do it. All the time, like you, had made it through the hardest part of the year, which is winter and calving season, and now your neighbors were coming out to your ranch to help you celebrate making it through that. And it was the. There was a mental, social, wellness aspect to it and then it ended up becoming a how fast can we get this work done and get on with it? Get back to our own operation, because I'm so busy, which is just perpetuated by the myriad of realities that producers face in the industry. But we've worked really hard to always not only uphold our branding to be that way, but to treat other people's brandings that way.
Kelsey:When my neighbor, kenny Giesinger, is branding on the 19th of May. I don't plan for anything else on the 19th of May, I don't plan for anything else on the 19th of May. I'm going and I'm there to help him. I'm not going to complain about how long it takes, I'm going to be glad to be there all day. I'm going to be happy to be able to help him in whatever ways you know he needs, and it's just. You know that mindset, right. So so we have, um, this past year at our branding.
Kelsey:Every year after the branding, we get everybody scattered out on the fence and we take a picture. And there were 99 people, yeah, and so that's. You know it's. It's our holiday here, it's our Christmas as a family, our family reunion of sorts, and, um, I mean people come from all over the place, wherever they're at to, to be able to be here, and many filled it in as like their annual vacation to come out. So we have, um, we this year, the meal.
Kelsey:My uncle, wayne, and his wife, in that red house that we stopped by, prepared the meal, and that's the house that my granny and poppy made a home in, and it sat empty for several years after granny passed away, while, I mean, wayne was living in Minneapolis for some time as the executive director of the Native Governance Center and he came back, uh, and moved in to it around COVID and that's when he relocated his family back home and it just was such an interesting essence of we're we're in Granny and Poppy's home or, like you know, the the energy was a new level of like a return to home this year around branding time, and I think that that's playing into why we're seeing Big Blue Stone.
Kelsey:I mean, the land is healing from the trauma of losing grandma and grandpa and the pain that we carry with us because of that loss, just like we are, and it's been really interesting to look out at the horizon through that more multi-dimensional way and in respect to the healing process it's going through as well yes, it's part two of noticing, isn't it? Yeah.
AJ:Correlations like that.
Kelsey:I'm just gonna come check the water tank, make sure that we're good here. This is the one water source that those cows are. On 100 degree day they can't go. Can't go too long without water working. Have you got?
AJ:the black Angus as well.
Kelsey:We actually have a heavy influence of Solaire in our herd. Yeah, so a French breed. There's definite black Angus, but also we have some Brangus influence in some of our cows, which is like a Brahma-Angus mix. Yeah, they've got a little longer ear, more skin to them. We found them to be even more pest resistant and heat and winter tolerant. They do. They're really good moms. It's kind of our number one. What we're aiming for is good moms, you know, and so we're always trying to.
Kelsey:Best we can select for those maternal traits. A lot of the industry pushes you to select for the paternal, like the terminal traits, like the big butts, the big, you know, the big bellies, all of those things, of those things. Well, basically, if you do that and then you keep your heifers back from those types of calf crops, what you're doing is you're perpetuating a scenario where you're selecting the most, uh, paternalistic, expressed heifers, so their fertility is going to be less, and you're you're shooting yourself at that butt. Basically, water's good, so all the grass is um. So you know, it's been monty's the one who brought the solar influence in. He's a big fan of the solar angus cross and I didn't even know what solar was. I've come to, I like our cows a lot, though they're very Disposition first is just kind of our mindset. Disposition is a focus all around for any animals that live here.
AJ:We saw a lot of Angus sitting in dams. Not just around them yesterday.
Kelsey:So hot, so hot they're, so long it doesn't even sort of bell curve, it's up to 100 days there for 5 hours, right through to the sun back on the grass yeah, and if we got out here and if we were aware of it, the temperature standing in that grass that we were just in significantly different than standing out here on these shorter grasses. Really an interesting thing to think about that if we're able to grow all of our grasses that tall Look at those burrowing owls right there. That's beautiful, that is beautiful.
Kelsey:And another one hidden in the I don't know if you can see it hidden in the frayed apple. Yeah, they're pretty cool creatures. I think they are cool creatures, but if we're able to raise the grass that tall, we're also raising the shade. It's easier to grow grass that tall every year than it is to grow trees that can provide shade, so just gotta think a little differently about the types of shade we're trying to offer our cows to stay cool. Yeah, there's several of them, owls. I think we might end up driving past the horses, the mare, in full bunch. That would be nice.
AJ:Was this part of the historic it was? You were describing it. It was part of the historic range of your culture. Yeah, just a small fraction.
Kelsey:And so, right there, you can see the butte, scatter Butte, right there.
AJ:You know, it's always interesting to me too just thinking of your dad alone, let alone your other family who've been in positions of authority, but don't exchange their humility out, and yet it works. Someone gives you the idea that you have to be that funny, paternalistic, macho vegan to get things done.
Kelsey:Another poppy-ism is there's always time to be an asshole later. I exercise that one a lot in my work with USDA. Yeah, like two weeks ago it was just green. A lot of our grasses are starting to lose their color from the heat.
AJ:This is luminous green.
Kelsey:Yeah, so this has been mowed and we put this up for hay already, and so all of the taller part of the plant which would have been turning kind of darker color is removed from the scene. So it tricks you a little bit.
AJ:So you hide this as well. The roadside, that's cool.
Kelsey:Yeah, otherwise they just send a rotary mower down and waste it.
Kelsey:Yeah, there's a lot of our neighbors would think we're crazy that we waited so long to start haying, but we're the only neighbor that has warm season grasses.
Kelsey:So I mean there's a reason why we hay in the time that we do and it's because I want our warm season grasses to have a chance to go to seed and redeposit fresh seeds before we cut them, to go to seed and redeposit fresh seeds before we cut them. But as the green color starts to fade, your nutritional content will start to decrease a little bit. But I mean, arguably what's happening the most is the water content of the plant is depleting, which could suggest that from a mineral standpoint, if you've got a good abundance of minerals in the system, you mean you'd have a more dense mineral. But you're like your protein or what's often looked at when you're doing sample tests for talking about how good or not good your hay is is gonna, you know, maybe deplete a little quicker. I don't know. I haven't ever done a peak of growing season and shortly after kind of test comparison to see the actual difference here on our grasses.
Olivia:But bees, oh far out. Do you manage?
Kelsey:that too. No, we let somebody else come in and put them out. That's cool. We welcome them for the ecosystem service mainly.
AJ:So free use of the land in that sense.
Olivia:Yeah.
AJ:That's great.
Kelsey:So, how big is this allotment? So the allotment that I've been talking about is a couple of allotments that have been purchased and clumped together it's around 600 acres, but we have access to a tribal lease that perfectly plugs in with the land that we own. So in total, including the tribal range unit that we get to graze on on a lease, we are managing around 7,200 acres, give or take, depending on the river shoreline. The river is managed, the flow of the river is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, Army Corps of Engineers, and so, generally, if there is a potential for flooding in the higher density population areas downstream, they will slow down the water flow or they will increase the water flow if there isn't, because that's how they generate electricity.
AJ:These are our horses. That's a sight. Wow, wow, wow. Just so you get to see there's a little one in there too.
Kelsey:Couple of them. Yeah, hey girl.
