Harlan: Kansas rancher makes peace with prairie dogs

By Bill Harlan, Journal Staff Writer | Sunday, October 01, 2006

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Larry Haverfield has raised cattle for 50 years in Logan County in western Kansas, and he likes prairie dogs.

“Prairie dogs do a lot of good things,” Haverfield told me last week from his ranch.

His viewpoint is not widely shared among ranchers in South Dakota or Kansas. After a public meeting in Oakley, Kan., on prairie-dog eradication, he said, the local headline was “1 against 99” — Haverfield being the “1.”

I ran across Haverfield’s name while researching last Tuesday’s story about the black-footed ferrets.

Ferrets were reintroduced to Conata Basin in the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands a decade ago. Neighboring ranchers decry protections for the basin’s prairie dogs — the main item on the black-footed ferret’s diet — saying prairie dogs migrate from public land to private rangeland, where they eat grass to the nub.

Haverfield hears the same complaint in Kansas. Still, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is considering reintroducing a small population of ferrets into Kansas. Haverfield hopes some would come to his ranch.

Kansas law, however, virtually mandates the eradication of prairie dogs. Haverfield estimates that Logan County alone uses about a semi-trailer load of poison every year to control prairie dogs.

In fact, today — Oct. 1 — marks the beginning of the poisoning season in Kansas.

I understand protests against prairie dogs and the fear of ferrets. I’ve got a number of ranching friends — men and women from both ends of the political spectrum — who despair of the bare-dirt wastelands that prairie-dog towns can become. Sure, a black-footed ferret can eat a hundred dogs a year, but ferrets also are among the most endangered species in North America. Protecting them, ranchers say, escalates into protecting prairie dogs.

That’s why, when a wildlife manager told me Haverfield actually wanted ferrets, his story got my attention.

The first thing Haverfield told me was, “We’re rotation grazers.”

That was an understatement. If there were such a thing as “extreme rotation grazing,” Haverfield’s operation would qualify. He runs cattle on about 8,700 acres, which are fenced into three large “cells.” Each cell is subdivided by single-strand electric fence into 30 or more “paddocks” of 80 to 85 acres each.

Haverfield’s herd — 1,500 steers this month — is constantly rotated among the paddocks and cells. This month, for example, cattle don’t spend more than a couple days in any one paddock.

“We’re trying to mimic the buffalo,” he said. His herd moves constantly around the ranch, creating a varied rangeland in constant flux.

Haverfield estimates he’s got prairie dogs on about 6,400 acres of his rangeland, which most ranchers would call a disaster.

“We don’t believe prairie dogs are much of a problem for us,” he said. In fact, he believes they help increase the “energy flow” on his rangeland by opening up grasses and other plants, such as sunflowers, to sunlight.

Predators also thrive on his varied landscape. “I never kill a rattlesnake,” he said. He also has burrowing owls, ferruginous hawks and swift foxes. The Lower Brule Tribe, in fact, recently trapped 40 swift foxes in Logan County for relocation to South Dakota. Many of the foxes came from Haverfield’s ranch.

Haverfield knows his neighbors don’t share his enthusiasm for prairie dogs. He recently completed 19 miles of “buffer zone” — that is, an electric fence 30 yards inside his perimeter fence to prevent cattle from grazing in that strip.

In theory, grasses, sunflowers, weeds — whatever — would grow high in the buffer zone, discouraging prairie-dog migration.

In practice, Logan County receives only about 18 inches of precipitation a year, and western Kansas, like western South Dakota, is in a drought. The buffer is growing slowly, and Haverfield admits it has not been as effective as he would like, especially where his ranch borders other grasslands. Haverfield himself has set out poison in his buffer zone.

Still, he’s skeptical of whether widespread poisoning will work. Neighbors have tried it, he said, only to see the dogs return.

The neighbors blame prairie-dog migration from Haverfield’s ranch, but after 69 years of living on the Great Plains and 20 years practicing rotation grazing, he believes there is another mechanism in place.

When the prairie dogs proliferate on his ranch, Haverfield says, predators prosper. The increased number of predators reduces the prairie-dog population, which, inevitably, leads to reduced predators and more prairie dogs. The prairie eco-system, he believes, has a pulse.

Haverfield thinks attempts to wipe out prairie dogs interrupt that pulse. The dogs inevitably return — they are, after all, rodents — but they come back to a predator-less environment. The result: a prairie-dog pandemic.

That’s the theory, anyway, though the science is less clear and more complicated.

“To me, it’s hard to argue the other side,” Haverfield told me.

The Hays (Kan.) Daily News this month reported extensively on Haverfield’s operation. (Go to http://www.hdnews.net/) Managing editor Mike Corn told me the ranch did look greener than surrounding rangeland. Corn said he drove his Toyota pickup into one bottomland where the grass “reached the top of the cab” despite the drought.

Haverfield thinks his ranch would be a good place to reintroduce black-footed ferrets. The Nature Conservancy, which owns a 17,000-acre ranch nearby, also wants ferrets.

Neighbors remain skeptical, and Corn warned that Kansas, like South Dakota, could have “a prairie dog war.”

Reporter Bill Harlan’s column runs every other Sunday. Contact him at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com