On their last morning in the San Luis Valley, students of the Sustainable Development economics class visit two nontraditional cattle ranchers. The first, George Whitten, takes the neoconservative approach of holistic

No bales of hay here: CC students walk through piles of native grasses that George Whitten’s cattle use for winter grazing.

Photo by Anne Christensen.

“We manage from the viewpoint of the grass,” he says. “When the grass needs something — rest, fertilizer, Ph adjustment, soil loosening — we take care of that by doing something with the cattle. During the drought, our productivity went up! Most people had to sell all their cattle, but we only had to sell a third, because our land is healthy.”

Telling the students that he’s increased his land’s productivity while decreasing his water use, Whitten says sustainability is an inadequate goal because it doesn’t go far enough. “Sustainability is like saying, ‘I don’t need to make it better.’ I’ve gone beyond sustainable farming to building the soil,” he claims. (His techniques are described in Sam Bingham’s book “The Last Ranch: A Colorado Community and the Coming Desert.”)

The group walks toward his calmly grazing cattle; some students offer handfuls of dried grasses from the piles lying about. Gina Fiori ’06 asks, “Do you think sufficient economic incentives exist in the valley for farmers here to go sustainable?” Whitten doesn’t hesitate. “No,” he says. “I don’t think farmers of the future will be from today’s agricultural families. They will be people like you who come back to the land.”

Ruminating over Whitten’s philosophy, the group heads for the last stop, the Coleman Ranch, which raises cattle later sold as “natural” beef. Fourth-generation rancher Jim Coleman’s disarming manner (“People can’t eat grass; if we could, there wouldn’t be any need for cows”) prompts an easy give-and-take.

The students ask about marketing; he says his beef costs more because it takes longer to raise without antibiotics and hormones, but many people will pay extra for it. They ask why many San Luis Valley farmers grow water-hungry alfalfa (“There’s a good market in the cities – so many people have horses”). They ask what he thinks of raising bison (“All head, less meat”).

Then the students ask to buy meat. They line up by a freezer, where Frances Coleman sells them hamburger meat and a few rib-eye steaks. It starts raining again; over by the barn, Jim Coleman starts to holler. “My God! It’s raining! Whoopee!”

It’s been a long drought.