Foraging for a Sustainable Future
Hobbs Magaret walks Pegasus Equestrian Resort & Venue founder Drew Millegan through the pastures at Sisters Cattle Company.
Pegasus Equestrian Resort & Venue is committed to sustainability, and its founders and team hold themselves to a high level of environmental responsibility. Founder Drew Millegan recently paid a visit to Sisters Cattle Company, a regenerative beef farm in Oregon, where he met with owner Hobbs Magaret to learn about regenerative grazing. Drew became interested in implementing the practice at Pegasus Equestrian Resort & Venue after learning about the practice from Anya Fernald from Belcampo, who directed him to this ranch. Drew recounts his experience at Sisters Cattle Company:
On the outskirts of town, and under the watchful eye of the Three Sisters mountaintops in the distance and crows in the towering Ponderosa pines, the pavement gives way to dirt and gravel. In the back of my mind, I have a momentary prayer for the undercarriage of my car - an electric car, not designed for rough cattle roads, with the bold white-on-black Pegasus horse logo stuck to the sides of it. There was a subtle drumroll of rock chips plinking against the bottom, vibrating through the soles of my boots.
Undeterred, I continued; my destination wasn’t far. I had woken up early to meet with Hobbs, the owner and operator of Sisters Cattle Company. His truck sat parked in a pullout by the side of his grazing field. I was expecting Hobbs to be older, but the bearded mid-30s former composer still fit the part confidently as he stepped out to greet me and I made my own introductions. His herd eyes us suspiciously in the distance as they wait for Hobbs to open the next overgrown pasture for them.
Sisters Cattle Co. practices something known as “rotational grazing,” which is a relatively new practice in an industry not exactly known for being kind to the land it occupies. The idea is relatively simple: rather than let a cattle herd out to graze and trample a wide area, ranchers confine them to small, distinct sections and rotate them through to new sections two to four times per day, grazing the entire field over the course of many weeks.
In so doing, sections not currently being grazed are allowed to regenerate and grow taller while the land rests, while the cattle have a continuous stream of fresh and overgrown pasture land. This also increases the biodiversity of the fields, leading to both more nutritious forage for the cattle, and a net sequestration of carbon as waste is more efficiently cycled back into the environment. This also reduces the need for manual intervention to maintain the soil over time, further reducing the need for inputs like tractors and the fuel that powers them. In principle, it allows for the seemingly impossible - a net carbon negative burger.
Hobbs explained this to me as we walked down the cattle road which connects the various pastures to their water source, “This pasture was barren when I first started grazing it three years ago.” Hobbs ducked under one of the electric fence lines held up by a fiberglass pole - an “underpass” as he told me - before continuing down one of the currently unused fields toward his herd. “You can do this with sheep, goats and horses, but if your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold a goat,” Hobbs jokes.
The process seems to represent the future, harkening back to the changes that had to be made in row crops following the Dust Bowl disaster in the 1930s. I am excited to see how we can implement these practices at Pegasus to regenerate the overgrazed land and create a healthy, self-sustaining environment.
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