ALEJANDRO CARRILLO LEARNS HOW TO RANCH WITH NATURE, NOT AGAINST HER
Cattle ranching can be done in cooperation with Nature or at war with Nature.
“We don’t want a war with Nature. Nature is telling us Alejandro, you're not doing a good job. I'm going to send you thorns. I'm gonna send you noxious plants. It’s gonna kill your cows. You're gonna get out of here. And you know what, we do. We keep fighting nature, and we keep killing. As Gabe Brown said, ‘I used to wake up every morning and say, what am I going to kill today? Now I wake up every morning and say how we can promote more life?’”
--Alejandro Carrillo
HART HAGAN: Your Ranch has been in your family for generations, but you haven't always practiced the ranching the way you do now. You left the family ranch to become a corporate executive, and then returned. Can you talk a little bit about your journey?
ALEJANDRO CARRILLO: You know, Hart, I spent my summers on the ranch. Maybe I was watching too many western movies, and I wanted to play the cowboy. I really enjoyed going to the big ranches in the summers. But when I asked my dad if I should study something related to animal science or agronomy or something, he said no, study something else.
I was curious about computers. They were new tools at that time, so I got my degree in computer science in Mexico. Then I had a chance to work in the US as a software engineer. I worked in the financial industry as a programmer and consultant in the US. Then I lived in Miami and worked for Reuters, the news agency.
And then when my dad turned 70, he went to Miami. He said, “Can you help me with the ranch?” I said, “Yeah!”
The thing that I did not want to do is to keep working at the ranch the way we've been working because things were getting very difficult. We had a lot of expensive inputs. Remember, as you lose biomass, you have to bring it from somewhere else.
When I joined the ranch, we were supplementing between six and eight months. We had green grass only during the three months because our perennials--which were only like three or four species of perennials, the ones that could deal with the overgrazing--they were behaving like annual grasses, green for a very short time span.
So when you don't have anything green, you have to supplement your cows.
I was very fortunate that when I came back to the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, there were really good holistic management practitioners. Somehow we found each other.
I took some classes on holistic management back in 2006, and then we started the journey.
One thing we [holistic ranchers] did that was very important was to stay together. And then they asked me, “Alejandro, why don't you help us find out where are the best grazers around the world?”
So we invested in our education. People were always surprised because we never went to a workshop alone. There were five to seven of us. They called us the Magnificent Seven, like the movie.
It is that community that will make you very strong in terms of constant communication, visiting each other. And then we created a nonprofit organization called Pasticultores del Desierto (Desert Herdsmen). Our idea was that we have the obligation to share our knowledge. So we put on workshops locally in the entire state of Chihuahua at very affordable prices. It was community-driven, helping people in northern Mexico, spreading the word in our region.
We cannot do this by ourselves. We need to understand that we need our neighbors.
People say, “This is great Alejandro when you get the runoff from your neighbors.” It is great in the short term. But in the long term it is not good. We need to be thinking about how we can spread this, starting with the neighbors, and then communities and so on.
HART HAGAN: How do you propose to do that?
ALEJANDRO CARRILLO: We’ll keep educating and also respecting each other and be humble. We work with the United Nations. We work with a lot of conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. Things are changing for good. There was a point where there was not much communication between ranchers and conservationists. I mean, I understand because conventional ranching is detrimental to the soils and to the grasslands.
But nowadays, for example, at Las Damas Ranch, we went from three kinds of grasses to more than 100 different grasses. We had no forbs. We had these very toxic weeds.
Nature is true. Nature gets really aggressive. We don’t want a war with her. The problem is, we're not speaking the same language. Nature is telling us Alejandro, you're not doing a good job. I'm going to send you thorns. I'm gonna send you noxious plants. It’s gonna kill your cows. You're gonna get out of here. And you know what, we do.
We keep fighting nature, and we keep killing. As Gabe Brown said, “I used to wake up every morning and say, what am I going to kill today? Now I wake up every morning and say how we can promote more life?”