How cattle ranching complements high-fence hunting

To hear Mark Hollenbeck tell it, Sunrise Ranch of his near Edgemont, South Dakota, is just a great big science experiment. The operation has beef, horses, and an extensive hunting operation, which keeps it all interesting.

"I still am amazed at the things we're discovering," he laughs. "And unfortunately, I'm rediscovering in my mind things I knew but just didn't implement."

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Hollenbeck recalls how he did "a 20-year sentence in corporate America," then came back and bought his ranch.

"We have about three miles of the Cheyenne river bottom on part of the ranch," he explains. "When we bought that, it had been continuously grazed by sheep and horses. So, it was an extremely short grass — all Buffalo grass and blue gamma — almost exclusively. We have since put in two stretches of electric fence that cut the ranch in half, twice north to south."

This allows Hollenbeck to further subdivide with temporary fences and provides an infinite number of pastures for the management of grass. And not just for cattle. Those river bottom acres produce good grass and great hunting.

Hunting on the Land

"I have a couple of summer land ranches leased that are good grass ranches, too, but this home place is great in other ways," Hollenbeck remarks. "There are so many pine trees and rocks and it's really not great land for running livestock. That's why we have converted this to more of a hunting operation because it is absolutely beautiful mule deer and elk country. Hunters love to come out here."

Hollenbeck manages the genetics of his animals and provides hunters a good place to stay and have the opportunity to harvest trophy animals.

Currently, he's also building a meat processing facility for the game part of the operation. It should boost hunting revenues.

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Interesting thoughts coming from a beef guy.

"When we bought this place, we built the lodge and we started running this outfitting business. I worked for 15 years with another guy who had a high fence operation. We decided to expand into a high fence hunting this year on our place. As a result, we fenced about nine miles of canyons in our roughest country into a hunting preserve, and we stock it with elk, mule deer, and white tail deer," he says.

He says high-fence hunting has a negative connotation amongst a lot of people, but there is an allure to it.

"In today's age, most states offer a rut hunt, meaning big bucks with good genes are hunted when they're most vulnerable and exposed, as they're often times shot chasing after does in estrus. That causes animals with the best genetics to get harvested. We have literally degraded our genetics over decades," he says.

As a result, trophy animals are harder and harder to find, licensing is difficult to obtain in many areas, and there are complicated regulations in many states, with preference points and other complex regulatory rules that have to be adhered to.

Hollenbeck makes it simple. His ranch offers hunters an opportunity, for a fee, to hunt trophy animals in a controlled area. Their hunting business is busiest during the fall season.

What makes his operation work is his management, both food source and genetics of his huntable herd. Hunters come to harvest his big, trophy-sized deer and elk.

Grassland Management

The grassland management Hollenbeck implements isn't just for cattle.

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"The first year we had the place, we did some tourism and began our hunting business. Then I got more into range management in an effort to develop and improve the land resource as well. We've been working on that ever since," he says.

Hollenbeck attended the Ranching for Profit School and to the South Dakota Grazing School for the grasslands to learn more.

"I started reading, getting interested in the biology of ranching and started paying attention to how it related to this ranch. I saw an economic opportunity in raising organic grass-fed beef," he says. "People were paying top dollar for that product. With the organic system, you're forced to work with nature. And nature always bats last.You have to learn to work with nature, then life's a lot easier."

That opportunity brought about his observations on calving dates.

"You don't see any antelope, elk or deer babies in February, March, April, or really even in May," he explains. "The first of June is when those babies really start coming. I have found now in my operation­­ May 10 works about the best. Once I started realizing that much of what we had done was wrong, then I became addicted to learning again."

His beef operation started to mirror what he'd learned from watching the wild animals.

"We have been developing our water systems and our fences for the better part of 10 years now," he says. "Now we focus more on a proper grazing, proper management, and our hunting business."

Return to the Grasslands

Looking out over the operation, from the grasslands with beef to the high-fence country, he talks about the trees and what he's learned from watching them. And the need for them to flourish.

"Our management killed the cottonwood trees," he says. "I have all kinds of new cottonwood trees coming on my place, and cattle love cottonwood. You'll see a browse line as high as they can eat the leaves. All the new stuff that comes up gets hammered by livestock. By giving them proper rest, we have changed that."

Hollenbeck is excited about the return to nature.

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"I don't think we really know what this country looked like before we started homesteading here," he says. "The journals of Lewis and Clark talked a lot about the animals that they saw out here, but they really didn't do a great job of describing the grasslands and the species diversity, the species mixtures of the grasslands."

He gestures toward the rough ground his herds of deer and elk prefer.

"I'm still not sure what that area is supposed to look like, but I know that with our management, every year the trees are getting taller and taller down there. We're getting more diversity from big bluestem, needle and thread, green needle grass, and there are a lot of taller grasses coming in there to replace the buffalo grass and the grama. We're getting side-oats grama instead of a blue grama. Diversity is coming," he says.

As more young cottonwood trees grow and overgrazing of the sandbar and willows ceases, the beavers will come back in. The beavers' dams will cause the water to push back in the alluvial plane for natural irrigation. Warm season grasses with deep roots will be well-watered in the area.

Hollenbeck has already seen more diversity in the landscape.

"As soon as we started giving a rest to our pastures and subdividing places where cattle weren't coming back and going to the same places every day, we saw warm season grasses thriving," he says. "I had never seen leadplant before and now that's coming back. The big bluestem was coming back, and yellow prairie clover, too."

Each one of those has a different root system and brings minerals from different levels up to the surface and shares them with everything else. The more diversity, the more likely it is some vegetation will grow at all times as the cool season grasses go dormant early and then the warm season plants take over.

"If you're missing one of the two of those, then you just have nothing going on and you don't have shading of the ground. And here, it is extremely critical to get a litter on the ground and to get shading because this sun and our dry air will just bake it," Hollenbeck explains. "It's a vicious cycle of trying to keep something growing on that ground year-round."

Hollenbeck explains his perspective that animal genetics shouldn't be the most important factor on the ranch.

"It doesn't matter what I use to harvest my grass with," he laughs. "I use sheep. I use cattle. If you look at my cattle, they're in every color, some have horns, they have white faces, they have every color of skin possible. It's the management of your grass and the management of your soils that build the foundation. You can do so much more with lousy cattle genetics and good grass management than you can with the world's greatest genetics and poor grass management."

He sums it all up, "When you walk among your pastures to see how they're doing, look down to see the real story. You never want to see bare soil. You want everything covered. When you're checking your grass, look down, not out."