Dan Dagget was one of the original members of EarthFirst!, one of the more radical environmental activist organizations of the last 50 years. In his efforts to achieve health for the Earth’s ecosystems, however, he found himself conflicted over environmentalism’s means and the ends those means actually achieved. With that in mind, he began investigating and writing about success stories where active participation by humans in the ecosystems they depended on for livelihoods made the environment h...
Jun 26, 2025•1 hr
"Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws." People think they are primarily 'thinking things', but this quote by a musician from ancient Athens speaks to the fact that most of our decision-making and the direction of our efforts in the world are shaped more by our affections. Creative and expressive arts are hugely influential. We should pay as much attention to what feeds our minds as we do to what feeds our physical bodies, and of course, we realize increasingly r...
Jun 12, 2025•30 min
Visual arts that draw attention to wild, open spaces have been culturally important in the United States. The outdoors painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were instrumental in making Americans aware of spectacularly beautiful places most people would not know about otherwise. And they catalyzed efforts to conserve these landscapes for ecological value and future enjoyment. Frank Stick was one of those painters, one whose work flowed out of deep personal experience and love of natu...
May 29, 2025•44 min
Can we effectively limit wildfire risk or change the fire risk profile using deliberate grazing? Or is this just wishful, simplistic thinking: "Cows eat fine fuel so that stops fire, right?" These are questions that demand scientific answers, not just anecdotes or coffee shop opinions. Sergio Arispe has worked with other researchers in the Western U.S. to better understand numerous questions around grazing for fire control and to fine-tune the timing, duration, intensity, and frequency of grazin...
May 15, 2025•57 min
Over 15 years ago, the veteran journalist Steve Stuebner and Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission executive Gretchen Hyde set out to use the new media landscape to tell good news stories about rangeland landscapes and the unique people who care for them. This has been a wildly successful venture that has reached far beyond the borders of Idaho. Listen to this interview with Steve and Gretchen about the recent "15-year retrospective" story and video on Life on the Range. The Art of Range Podcast ...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 12 min
The National Grazing Lands Coalition (NatGLC) promotes and supports ecologically and economically sound management of grazing lands for multiple benefits to the environment and society through science-based technical assistance, research, and education. Bill Fox has been with NatGLC since the beginning. In this interview, Dr. Fox offers a condensed history of NatGLC and what the organization is doing now. We visit with Jack Field about the June 2025 summer tour in Washington State. From the tour...
Apr 02, 2025•58 min
Does grazing management make a difference? Can we raise livestock and wildlife and take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in soil on the same piece of land? Meet Peter Byck, self-described scientist wrangler and producer of Roots So Deep, a four-part documentary series that explores the world of adaptive cattle farmers and their conventional farming neighbors. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing is one of the faces of regenerative agriculture. Listen to this interview to learn about researched ...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 10 min
The concept of carrying capacity has figured prominently in rangeland ecology and wildlife biology for a century and more. Where did this term come from? Nathan Sayre, a cultural geographer at UC-Berkeley and the author of the book "Politics of Scale - a History of Rangeland Science," answers this question. According to Sayre, "It is a truism that the Earth’s resources are finite, and that human demands must therefore be kept within some bounds. But this idea has a history fraught with intellect...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Can Farmer-Founded Fibers Save American Fashion? Cate Havstad-Casad, founder of RangeRevolution leather goods, and Daniel Mouw, president of Duckworth wool clothing answered this question in a pre-panel interview at SXSW with Ed Roberson joining in. If Duckworth and Range Revolution are not on your radar screen, and if Mountain & Prairie Podcast isn't in your podcast feed, they should be now. Ed interviewed Cate and Daniel in a SXSW talk the day after we recorded this preparatory interview. ...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 13 min
The Sterling Wildlife Management Area in southeast Idaho suffered from accumulated dead cattails, bulrushes, and grasses. Wildlife the area is intended habitat for were avoiding it, especially migratory waterfowl. This Life on the Range story with rancher Chase Carter and biologist Maria Pacioretty describes their successful efforts to use targeted grazing in winter to consume and transform the overburden of dead vegetation. The Art of Range Podcast is supported by Vence, a subsidiary of Merck A...
Feb 23, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Bildo Saravia is the owner and manager of Rancho el Ojo and Origien Raiz Mezcal. His story showcases the ways global marketing and communication can benefit local people oriented around rangeland economies. By "grazing the wild" he is growing agave in sustainable polyculture with a diversity of other native plants for livestock and wildlife in Durango, Mexico. Go to the episode page, https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-150-bildo-saravia-lauren-svejcar-artisanal-mezcal-ranching-mexico, for links ...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Dr. Germino’s latest research, published in the Communications Earth & Environment journal in November 2024, reveals a startling and significant finding: invasive grasses are turning western U.S. rangelands from valuable carbon sinks into potential carbon sources. This research, a two-year collaboration between the US Geological Survey and Envu, provides the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of invasive annual grasses, like cheatgrass, on soil carbon stocks. The study found that t...
Feb 06, 2025•57 min
A research study in the mountains of Idaho tracked cheatgrass consumption by sheep in the spring and fall. Listen to Kelly Hopping (Boise State University) and sheep rancher Riley Kowitz describe their experiences with implementing this approach to controlling invasive annual grass and changing the wildfire risk profile on the Sawtooth National Forest. Go to https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-148-targeted-cheatgrass-grazing-research-sheep-kelly-hopping-riley-kowitz to see the video and read the...
Jan 23, 2025•54 min
How does wildfire affect soil carbon, the ecological currency of the 21st century? Careful collaborative research involving US Geological Survey scientists, Envu, and Boise State University has begun to answer some of the many questions surrounding soil carbon and fire. This is the first of a two-part interview on soil carbon storage, sequestration mechanisms, effects of wildfire and plant community shifts, and management implications. Be sure to read the Open Access paper at https://artofrange....
Jan 09, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Angus's family has managed the Wyndham Station near the Anabranch and Darling Rivers in southern Australia for 4 generations. That and the promise of a great Australian accent should be enough to make you listen to this episode. But we also discuss managing the earth's Living Skin, Angus's efforts to get others to think broadly about caring for land and livestock and all living things, including improving health care for humans in remote areas. It's a small world, and Angus's challenges in the L...
Dec 31, 2024•54 min
Riparian management, water quality, and livestock grazing used in the same sentence can warm up a room with heated discussion. John Buckhouse has spent a lifetime contending for the Radical Middle, where people recognize that land conditions that are good for fish are also good for cattle. He has effectively advocated for and led collaborative resource management, published reams of research on the most critical and controversial topics in natural resources policy and management, and has loved p...
Dec 12, 2024•32 min
"We have to think of beavers as our friend instead of our foe; for these watersheds to be healthy, you need beaver.” Rancher Jay Wilde experienced a paradigm shift some years ago that convinced him beavers were necessary to hold more water higher in the watershed for longer and that this hydrologic change would benefit a cattle operation in numerous ways. He acted on this conviction with some expert help and it is a classic win-win scenario: cows have water, the larger riparian area grows more f...
Nov 28, 2024•46 min
Riparian management, water quality, and livestock grazing used in the same sentence can warm up a room with heated discussion. John Buckhouse has spent a lifetime contending for the Radical Middle, where people recognize that land conditions that are good for fish are also good for cattle. He has effectively advocated for and led collaborative resource management, published reams of research on the most critical and controversial topics in natural resources policy and management, and has loved p...
Nov 14, 2024•49 min
How do undergrazing and overgrazing affect soil carbon change? What does "optimal grazing" look like? This sequel episode with Paige Stanley goes deeper into the ways grazing factors affect the ecophysiology elements that are responsible for generating or release the various kinds of soil carbon. These changes remain difficult to quantify, but we can describe them. Listen in on this second interview from Dr. Stanley's review paper "Ruminating on soil carbon: Applying current understanding to inf...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 15 min
"The fields of rangeland and wildlife management are brothers in the same fight for the conservation, protection, and management of wildlife and one cannot be completely understood without knowledge of the other." --Paul Krausman. This quote from the foreword of a new edited volume on wildlife ecology highlights the integrated nature of rangeland science. Listen to Drs. Lance McNew and Jeff Beck describe what's in this Springer-published comprehensive guide to what we know about rangeland wildli...
Oct 03, 2024•52 min
Meet Mark and Wendy Pratt, ordinary people doing unglamorous work with extraordinary care. C.S. Lewis said "we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is frustrating . . . to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch." We are quick to praise teachers and medical professionals ...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 8 min
Forage on semi-arid rangelands is finite but variable across space and over time. And grazing decisions start with balancing animal forage demand with forage supply, a significant challenge in vast and varied landscapes. In this episode, Matt Reeves, Sonia Hall, and Tip discuss StockSmart, the new free, online decision support tool just launched that accesses remotely sensed forage production data and allows the user to easily define what forage is accessible to their livestock based on fences, ...
Sep 05, 2024•55 min
The Bruneau Owyhee Sage Grouse Habitat (BOSH) project is a collaborative partnership of state and federal agencies, wildlife advocacy groups, and private landowners to restore native upland landscapes in Southwest Idaho to a more natural condition benefitting sage grouse, songbirds, antelope, spotted frogs and other wildlife. Conifer encroachment is now recognized as the second most significant threat to sage grouse populations in the Western U.S., second only to invasive grasses like cheatgrass...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 8 min
Thank you for your patience as we shift funding sources and work into a slightly different approach to content. This brief piece describes these changes and previews upcoming episodes.
Aug 08, 2024•3 min
Dr. Nathan Sayre has written a delightful book on the origins and history of rangelands science, public ownership, agency management, and grazing philosophy in the United States. Join Tip and Nathan as they discuss his background building fence on ranches on the Southwest, his pathway to the sociology of rangelands, and then surprising findings in Sayre’s book research. Finally, they visit about recommendations for modern range management. Transcript and links at https://artofrange.com/episodes/...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr 20 min
Our language both reveals and shapes our internal philosophy about all of the beings and things in the world. And it guides our behaviors and interactions with those things -- humans, animals, plants, and non-living things. Yet these below-the-hood inclinations are formed very informally, usually without conscious thought. This interview with Anna Clare follows from an article in Rangelands on whether we should consider cattle 'partners' rather than 'tools' and invites the listener to ponder thi...
Jun 27, 2024•51 min
Maybe there is no silver bullet, no holy grail of grazing. But there are patterns of grazing impacts that work well for particular plant communities, and good grazing managers give attention to these effects and modify them over time to achieve landscape goals. Jim Howell is the founder of Grasslands, LLC, a ranch management company that directs grazing on over 320,000 acres of land around the world. Jim discusses lessons learned in observing and and manipulating grazing patterns in the varied e...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 12 min
"Decades of scientific research on grazing and soil organic carbon (SOC) has failed to form a cohesive understanding of how grazing management affects SOC stocks -- characterized by different formation and stabilization pathways—across different climatic contexts." This quote from the introduction to the review paper "Ruminating on soil carbon: Applying current understanding to inform grazing management" frames the dilemma we're discussing in this episode. How can common management levers that d...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Solar "farms" have met with resistance in Middle America because they often displace food farms, taking arable land out of production. But what if solar energy could be harvested at a utility scale on top of food or forage? This is the face of solar energy research today, and AnnaClare Monlezun is leading some of this research on White Oak Pastures, a livestock farm in Georgia owned by Will Harris. Listen to AnnaClare describe how agriculturalists are optimizing these potentially compatible land...
May 16, 2024•48 min
It's been said there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors. But in the same way that not all practice makes perfect, only good practice, it's important to listen to people with a proven record of range management success. This panel of experienced range professionals discusses principles that have helped them adapt well personally and professionally to change. Join my discussion with John Ruhs, Annie Overland, James Stewart, and Liz Munn recorded during the 2024 SRM plenary session. Transcript ...
May 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min
