Description

In 1978 Maryanne Mott purchased the B Bar Ranch in Tom Miner Basin. The ranch is located 9,000 acres in a steep mountainous valley near the northwest corner of Yellowstone Park. The ranch included two Forest Service grazing permits that provided the initial impetus to enter the cattle business. After a couple of years it became apparent that while Tom Miner Basin was a great place to pasture cows in the summer, winters were too severe for a year round cow/calf operation. A search was begun for a winter location and in 1981 a ranch property of nearly 1,800 acres was purchased for wintering the growing cowherd. Over the next ten years an additional 5,200 acres were added to bring the size of the operation to the approximately 7,000 acres it is today.

The B Bar Big Timber operation is located 15 to 20 miles north of Big Timber in Sweet Grass County in south central Montana. The land is in very open country with rolling hills and very few trees. The altitude ranges from 4,200 to 4,600 feet above sea level, which causes winter low temperatures to commonly be 10 degrees colder than Big Timber. The ranch is far enough north of Big Timber to be in the rain shadow of the Crazy Mountains which are about 10 miles west of the ranch. This rain shadow effect reduces precipitation on the ranch and also makes it subject to substantially less wind than most of the upper Yellowstone drainage. The ranch operation has over 1,000 irrigated acres with water supplied by off stream reservoirs supplied by Sweet Grass Creek. This storage system means that in all but the very driest years, irrigation water is abundant.

The irrigated lands are used primarily to raise forage crops for wintering cattle and pasture to summer cattle. Crops grown include alfalfa, peas, grass mixes and small grains. Irrigation is accomplished with center pivot and flood irrigation systems. Rangelands, both native and improved, comprise the remainder of the ranch. Productivity varies widely from bare arid hillsides to lush sub-irrigated wetlands below the more than 15 miles of leaky irrigation canals that cross the property.

In the late 1980's considerable research was done to determine management direction that better reflected the beliefs and values of the owners than conventional, chemically intensive agriculture. In 1990 organic management of the land and cattle was adopted. The lands have been managed organically since that time and have been OCIA certified since 1993. In the mid 1990's we moved away from certified organic production of cattle. The main reason was our inability to control lice effectively with organic methods, which then put our desire to care for the herd humanely at odds with our desire to not use common agricultural chemicals. We decided in favor of the animals and chose ivermectin as the product of choice based on its relative toxicity in our environment and its use in the treatment of parasites in humans.