The Healing Power of Collaboration – Timber Ridge, Stavely, Alberta
Glen and Kelly Hall have been managing Timber Ridge Ranch, a 480-acre farmland situated an hour south of Calgary near Stavely, Alberta, for over 40 years. Their approach to agriculture involves regenerative practices and the conversion of their land back to perennial coverage, including the cultivation of multi or polyculture crops for swath grazing. Their operations primarily consist of a cow-calf program with approximately 200 mother cows, and they also custom graze calves from fall to spring.
Since 2018, the Halls have been on a mission to collaborate with local organizations to rejuvenate their land, which was previously subjected to conventional farming methods involving fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Over the last four decades, they have seeded an impressive 5,000 acres, aiming to enhance biodiversity both above and below the soil.
We spoke to the Halls about the challenges of ranching in Alberta’s drought-prone “banana belt” and how they’re adapting their practices to “drought proof” against increasingly warming temperatures and extreme conditions.
EP65 Grazing Through Drought
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Our hope is that the series can help with the mental health issues the agriculture sector is grappling with right now. Farming and ranching are stressful businesses, but that’s brought to a whole new level when drought hits. By equipping cow-calf producers with information and words of advice from colleagues and peers in the sector on the best ways to get through a drought, things might not be as stressful in the next drought. Things might not look so bleak either.
In this final episode of the series, we are talking to Ralph Thrall of McIntyre Ranch who shares with us his experience managing grass and cows in a pretty dry part of the province.
