New West Feature

Grass-Fed Cattle and Superfund Cleanups: A Day at Montana’s Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch

By Kate Whittle, 4-04-11

	Bryce Andrews manages the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch with a little help.

On a chilly day in early spring, Bryce Andrews drives his truck up a rough dirt road and parks on top of a rise overlooking part of the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch. The dogs, an attentive red heeler named Tick and an enthusiastic lab named Maddie, jump out the back.

From this hill, Andrews can look out on the entire Deer Lodge valley. Below, tiny trucks and cars whiz by on Interstate 90. The Clark Fork wriggles by on the southernmost edge of the ranch property. Red Angus cows and calves sniff at hay in a corral. About 20 miles southwest, the Anaconda smokestack stands grey against the white snow and dark navy of the Pintler Mountains.

The smokestack and the river are why Andrews is managing a ranch. Andrews, a tall, blue-eyed 28-year-old with a Master’s in environmental studies, works for the Clark Fork Coalition, the watershed restoration group based out of Missoula. This working ranch on a Superfund site belongs, at least in part, to the nonprofit. It’s an experiment, of sorts.

Standing on the rise, Andrews can see where, in 1908, a massive flood washed heavy metals from the Anaconda-Butte mines down the Clark Fork, leaving behind toxins that include lead, copper, zinc and arsenic along more than 100 miles of the river. The contamination reached more than 100 miles to Milltown, outside of Missoula. After testing found arsenic in Milltown wells, the EPA designated the floodplain the biggest Superfund environmental restoration site in the country.

That’s why, in 2005, the Clark Fork Coalition became part-owner and managing partner of the ranch. Coalition science director Chris Brick said they got involved at a time when Superfund cleanup “seemed imminent,” though now, asking Department of Environmental Quality officials when the restoration will actually start often elicits chuckles.

Andrews, who’d already worked for the coalition part-time, got the offer to manage the 2,300-acre ranch the day he graduated from the environmental studies program at the University of Montana in 2009.

“I bet I’m one of very few EVST grads running a ranch and driving a three-quarter ton truck,” he says.

He divides his time between managing up to 250 cows and helping plan the slow-moving Superfund restoration.

His job, he says, is part of a new kind of environmentalism: less litigious, more focused on practical, hands-on work. “You can’t sue all these ranchers,” he says. He points out how one end of the Deer Lodge valley to another is private ranchland. “These four or five families are essentially responsible for managing the valley,” he says.

For instance, the rolling hills he stands on are pasture for the cows during summer. He spends a lot of time and effort moving portable fencing back and forth so cows don’t overgraze any one area. He admits it’s something that would be much easier with several more people, which the coalition, and certainly most other ranchers, can’t afford.

Plus, there’s the marketing aspect to managing this place. A big part of his job is to show how ranching can be good for the environment and still pay the bills, and it can be a challenge.

Most of the ranch’s cows are auctioned off in Butte, to disappear into the industrial food system, but Andrews keeps a few steers to raise on grass for an extra year. Most of those end up on plates and in freezers in Missoula, either through the farmer’s market or by word of mouth.

It’s a profitable project. Even after paying for a butcher and selling assorted cuts for $4.95 a pound—a “screaming deal,” Andrews says—they still cleared roughly $7,000 in net profit. This year, they’re keeping 10 steers to raise on grass.

In a typical week, Andrews will spend four or five days on the ranch, then head back to his Missoula office and home.

He feels a little bad about the hundreds of miles he drives every week, but thinks the work he does on the ranch far outweighs the carbon emissions. He waves at all the pastureland that’s kept lush with careful rotational grazing. “The net impact of me being here is way on the good side,” he says. “It makes up for the truck.”

A background in environmentalism gives Andrews some unique perspectives. He knows on one hand that public lands grazing can cause erosion and harm watersheds. But on the other hand, the ranch leases some public lands, and he likes having the extra acreage for the cows to graze. It’s a dilemma.

Andrews drives back down the hill to the light blue barn that serves as ranch headquarters. He built himself an apartment in one section. It’s one room with a futon, desk and kitchen area, but clutter-free and homey. Cast-iron pans hang on the wall and bowls of onions and tomatoes sit next to the stove. Next to his desk, there’s a filing cabinet with some of the Superfund paperwork, including piles of maps with red squares showing the worst of the contamination.

Down near the riverbank, though, the only signs of toxic contaminants are the tracks left by Department of Environmental Quality bulldozers. Slickens, areas where contamination is so heavy plants can’t grow, look like benign bare patches of earth. On a dry day, they’re blue-green with copper salts. The area looks harmless, but in the soil are metals that, without intervention, will someday wash downstream and into the water supplies of people and animals.

So how can cows graze on a contaminated Superfund site? Andrews says it’s been a big concern for people buying his beef, but actually, the cows aren’t much affected because fencing keeps them away from the river and the grass they eat doesn’t absorb heavy metals. Some of his beef has been tested, just in case; a lab found no contaminants other than a slightly higher level of arsenic.

It’s not clear if Andrews, or the Clark Fork Coalition, will be ranching for decades to come. The Superfund work lurches slowly along—actual restoration won’t start until 2013, optimistically. The coalition’s plan for the ranch lasts until 2015, and after that no one is sure what will happen. For now, Andrews, though, has to go check on the cows.

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