Green Grass in the Spring: A Cowboy’s Guide to Saving the World by Tony Malmberg
Green Grass in the Spring by rancher Tony Malmberg is subtitled “A cowboy’s guide the saving the world.” While the world certainly needs a lot of what Malmberg advocates, this story itself is far humbler. It’s an entertaining and well-written memoir about a Wyoming rancher’s quest to heal his landscape and himself.
Malmberg has a gift for storytelling. There’s as much dialogue between people in the book as in a standard work of fiction, which makes the tone far more conversational and less preachy than many other books on regenerative rancher. He describes the life of a cowboy in the 1980s and 90s — a time when the way things had worked in the past for fathers and grandfathers started not making financial sense anymore. Readers will feel the depth of the challenges faced by ranchers in states like Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana, both then and now.
Malmberg is not shy about calling out the mistaken attitudes of many of his fellow ranchers — that everything that was happening was out of their control. They “felt like others were controlling their destiny, and there was nothing they could do to alter that course.” He knew that he couldn’t join in their “fatalistic conversation.”
Rather than giving in and feeling bitter about his many trials and disappointments, Malmberg recognized that he needed to make some changes — both to his personal life and on the ranch. He attended his first Holistic Management course with Allan Savory in 1987 and never looked back.
Short chapters on the principles of Holistic Management are interspersed among the narrative. These certainly read in a more didactic style than the rest of the book, but they give context to the story.
One of the most interesting issues Malmberg discusses is over-rest. Overgrazing is definitely an issue in many places, but it’s easy to diagnose and to remedy. It’s more difficult to see how letting certain species rest for too long — without facing grazing pressure — can lead to just as many problems. Too many environmentalists fail to understand this point, falsely believing that just leaving the landscape alone will heal it.
Healing only really comes with the proper mixture of grazing and rest. As Malmberg puts it, “It seemed illogical, but I needed to simultaneously graze and rest all the plants. Low stock densities result in grazing the same plants all the time and resting the same plants all the time. With higher stock densities, we graze everything and then rest everything.” His point that “civilization without ranching is dead” sounds a bit extreme, but it’s true that if we aren’t going to allow herds of millions of bison to roam the American West, then we have to allow cattle to mimic their action.
How did Malmberg’s perspective on grazing change? In a larger sense, how does anyone’s mind change about deeply ingrained customs and beliefs?
In some ways, this happened slowly, through many conversations with the local Bureau of Land Management staff and with fellow ranchers. Malmberg also began to consciously seek to leave his comfort zone. He took off his cowboy hat — a sign of his identity — to visit different bars in town where non-cowboys hung out. He played golf — a leisure that his hard-driving rancher grandfather scorned. And he began to read widely to give himself new perspectives: Emerson, Peter Drucker, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible.
In another sense, though, the change came suddenly. As Malmberg writes, “My dad died when I was twenty-three years old. I went broke and lost my wife. I had nothing else to lose. My barriers of tradition, family, and ranching were shattered. I no longer had a barrier to change.”
Holistic Management is an agricultural philosophy that’s as much about goal setting and personal self-help as it is about grazing livestock. It seeks to categorize desires and ends and tools to a degree that may, to some, seem dizzying. But it’s a worldview that definitely works for many people, and this book helps illustrate it in a concrete way.
For anyone who’s heard of Holistic Management but hasn’t delved into the details, this book is a great place to start. It illustrates the principles in the form a one rancher’s story while simultaneously presenting those principles in his own words.
As author Judith Schwarz points out in the intro, “Tony’s memoir illustrates our common foibles: the tendency to double down on obvious mistakes and brush off what doesn’t fit our plans.” He overcame these shortcomings, though, by being brutally honest with himself and by seeking to regenerative not just his landscape, but also his mind.
