Graze Anatomy
Stefan Selbert watches over a herd of Bonsmara cattle at Las Cumbres Ranch.
How one family is breaking away from the herd to embrace regenerative agriculture and give new life to Las Cumbres Ranch
Written by Wade Graham | Photography by Dewey Nicks
The landscape of the Santa Ynez Valley is as iconic as any in California: dark, chaparral-clad mountains enclose a tapestry of oak-dotted hills and grassy vales segmented by creeks.
“We have three main goals for the ranch,” says Stefan. “Raising healthy cattle, regenerating the land, and sharing what we’re learning,” through education and training events sponsored by the Selberts’ Las Cumbres Ranch Foundation.
Its seasons are marked by changing colors on the grasslands: the bright Irish green of new winter growth, splashes of colored wildflowers in spring, then summer’s mellow gold, fading to gray in the fall, before rains begin the cycle anew.
The landscape is capacious, generously accommodating the activities of its human inhabitants—vineyards stretch away here, cattle graze there, occasional, tidy towns announce themselves to travelers with horses in white-fenced pastures. There seems to be a permanent state of harmony between nature and people. But, in fact, this is a place held together by a complex and fragile balance.
When Jim and Patricia Selbert bought Las Cumbres Ranch in 2017, they were looking for a beautiful and tranquil place to retire. A perfect distillation of the Valley, perched on a range of hills overlooking a fertile, bucolic landscape, the ranch covers about 1,000 acres of a former Mexican land grant, about 6 miles west of Los Alamos and 12 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Little did they expect that their retirement would prove to be a hardworking one.
The ranch had some cattle on it—also some exotic animals, such as African antelope—but the land was conventionally managed and not healing or regenerating. When the Selberts had the animals removed, a friend told them: “No, you have to graze it,” remembers their son Stefan, who, after years of working as an audio engineer in Los Angeles for artists including Kanye West, is now the ranch’s operations manager.
Animals that graze, it turns out, are important to this ecosystem.
The ranch currently has 110 Bonsmara cows, a breed developed in South Africa that combines the toughness and heat tolerance of African cattle with the milk and meat characteristics of British cows.
The landscape of the Valley, indeed of most of California, evolved for hundreds of thousands of years along with grazing animals: deer, elk, and pronghorn. Tightly bunched in herds and continuously moving to avoid predators, they browsed the shrubs and grasses, breaking up the soil with their hooves, then quickly moving on. Their passage renewed and regenerated soil and plants by encouraging nutrients, water, and seeds to cycle and kept vegetation low, which, in turn, kept seasonal fires from climbing into the tree canopy and destroying it. Native Americans—in this area, the Chumash people—also used low-intensity burning to manage the landscape, maintaining a mosaic of grassland, trees, and brush.
When the Spanish came, they all but eliminated the Indians, as well as the wild herds and their predators, which they replaced with wandering cattle that performed similar work, though sometimes too much and sometimes too little, often tipping nature’s intricate arrangements out of balance. Too much grazing denudes the land, causing desertification. Without enough grazing, the grass dies, turns gray, and oxidizes, blocking sunlight from seeds below and interrupting the flow of nutrients. A hard crust forms over the soil; rain runs off without absorbing, and the land itself begins to die.
Before permanently relocating to the ranch in 2020, Stefan worked in Los Angeles as an audio engineer for clients including Kanye West.
“It is a bucolic image, straight out of the Old West—cowboys on horseback moving the herd on the range. But unlike in the movies, there is no whooping and hollering, no stampeding, no dust. Instead, there is a purposeful pace and an amiable conversation.”
The key to turning the degraded land around is the right kind of grazing. The Selbert family, Stefan explains, learned in a hurry about techniques that allowed them “to make a positive difference environmentally while benefitting ourselves and our community both socially and economically, all through choices we make on the ranch.” Generally referred to as regenerative holistic management—a term coined by grassland ecosystem pioneer Allan Savory, whose son, Rodger Savory, is a consultant for Las Cumbres—these techniques turn degraded landscapes, even near-deserts, back into productive ecosystems, through a series of steps. First is “animal impact”: putting closely bunched cattle on a restricted area for a limited time to reduce the vegetation and break up crusts with their hooves. The cows’ urine and dung stimulate funguses and other microorganisms that make up healthy soil. “Poop, pee, and hooves” in combination, according to Stefan, do the hard work. When the animals are removed, the land is allowed to rest and regenerate.
After much experimentation, the Selberts found the perfect breed of cattle for the Valley’s conditions: Bonsmara, a strain developed by Professor Jan Bosma in South Africa beginning in the 1930s by crossing African cattle, adapted to the hot dry season, with European cows bred for meat and milk. Medium size, with short, red-brown coats, Bonsmara have the best qualities of both: “It has the tenderness of a European cow, but the strength of an African cow. It not only feeds on grass but eats brush, too,” says Stefan. And “the breed has a really strong herd instinct. They like to move together, which makes my life easier.”
“There seems to be a permanent state of harmony between nature and people. But, in fact, this is a place held together by a complex and fragile balance.”
The results at Las Cumbres have been astonishing. The ranch had “a lot of dense, half-dead brush, suffering from not being grazed,” says Stefan. On a small plot of brush, 100 or so cows are brought to the edge and a bale of hay is thrown into the center to excite the cattle and cause them to trample, mulch, and fertilize the area. “We keep the cows in a tight area on the brush for a few days, and they eat it down and break it down,” pushing stalks and seeds deep into the soil while fertilizing it. This “crush” treatment reboots the land’s fertility: A couple of months after the crushing—even after more than 120 days without rain—shoots of native perennial grasses appear among the resprouting shrubs. It seems miraculous, but the cows are nature’s gardeners: trimming, composting, and fertilizing. Using a rough formula of grazing one-third of the ranch, trampling a third, and resting a third, the landscape is steadily returning to health, and the herd of Bonsmaras is growing.
The red cattle move deliberately across the grassy slopes of the ranch, munching and walking. Among them are seven wild mustangs that were rescued from the Bureau of Land Management by Return to Freedom, as well as one retired horse and Stefan’s working horse. The animals are believed to have less stress in this mixed company, and the cows put on more weight when grazing with horses.
It is a bucolic image, straight out of the Old West—cowboys on horseback moving the herd on the range. But unlike in the movies, there is no whooping and hollering, no stampeding, no dust. Instead, there is a purposeful pace and an amiable conversation. Stefan explains that he and the other hands talk to the cattle: “We have cows from South Africa that speak Spanish.” To his call of “Toma!”—“Take” in Spanish—the cows answer back, mooing in a chorus.
Las Cumbres Ranch is conserved through The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. The Las Cumbres Ranch Foundation is dedicated to sharing the knowledge of experts in holistic, regenerative, and sustainable practices to the central coast community.
