Growing Grass and Planting Flowers for Ranch Sustainability

As a cattle rancher and sustainability advocate, I understand the harmony between preserving grasslands for my cattle while also helping maintain a healthy habitat for wildlife. For example, our ranch provides wildlife for deer, fox, several bird species, bees, snakes, rabbits and probably several other species I haven’t spied yet! Additionally, our ranch is on the migratory path for monarch butteries so we are proud of providing a habitat for them, too.

Because of the importance of our wildlife and insect pollinators, I want to make sure that nothing that we do on our ranch negatively impacts the wildlife habitat around us – whether it be planting corn for silage for feed for our cattle or using the grass in our pastures for making hay – we want our ranch to be sustainable for us, our cattle and the surrounding wildlife.

That’s why I’m happy to be planting a pollinator patch consisting of cone flowers, black eyed susan’s, sunflowers and other pollinator friendly flowers, in addition to milkweed, so that monarch butterflies, bees and other pollinators are able to complete their life cycle and help keep our ranch green, viable and healthy. Did you know pollinators are vital to crop and grassland maintenance and are needed for our lands to thrive? Without these valuable pollinators, our ecosystem suffers and many pollinators are already at dangerously low numbers.

Additionally I’m going to make sure that I report our patch to HabiTally. It’s an app developed with Bayer Crop Science and Iowa State University and is dedicated to tracking pollinator patches throughout the U.S. so that scientists can determine the future safety of so many of our important pollinators. Our nation’s agriculture scientists are working hard to help farmers and ranchers achieve our sustainability goals that benefit all of society.

I challenge you to create your own pollinator patch and submit it to HabiTally – it’s completely free and you’ll be doing your part to make sure that our grass and croplands continue to be pollinated and while providing ample habitat for our treasured wildlife. I challenge my fellow farming and ranching friends to be pollinator friendly and plant your own pollinator patches! Not only will it help our wildlife habitat but all these flowers will brighten up the landscape!

Be safe and be blessed and eat beef!

Until next time,
~ Buzzard ~

The thoughts and opinions shared in this blog post are mine [Brandi Buzzard Frobose]. I was compensated for my time and creative work on this campaign by Bayer Crop Science to promote HabiTally and create habitat for monarch butterflies and other pollinators.