Year-Round Grazing in South Dakota: Lessons from Pat Guptill & Bart Carmichael
- Buz Kloot, Ph.D.
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Buz Kloot
When we recently shared a reel on our social media, I expected curiosity. What I didn’t expect was the mix of affirmation and incredulity that followed. Some ranchers chimed in with pride — “We graze year-round in Saskatchewan.” Others shook their heads: “Grass is dormant in winter; it’s low in protein.” One asked, “Is there a point where you’re too far north to do it?” I read those comments and realized: this wasn’t just a question about grazing—it was about possibility.
When we first spoke with South Dakota ranchers Pat Guptill and Bart Carmichael, I understood why they never framed year-round grazing as a miracle. It’s not a trick or a fad. It’s a mindset. “We were doing everything ‘right,’” Bart told me, “and still the land didn’t look healthy. We had to do something different.” That “something different” turned out to be everything: how they grazed, how they calved, and how they thought about grass itself. Their story comes to life in the Year-Round Grazing video we produced in 2022, filmed by our Joe Dickie, which captures the principles, methods, and results in their own words and on their own land.
A Mindset Shift
Both men started where most of us do — managing cattle and hoping the grass would follow. But Pat said it best: “We no longer look at our cows as our primary management. The cows are just a tool we use to manage grass.” Once they made that shift, everything began to change. Pastures that once seemed tired responded with new vigor. Fences went up, moves got shorter, rest got longer. Bart remembers subdividing a half-section into forty-acre paddocks during the 2012 drought. “It was all temporary fence,” he said, “but it worked. The grass responded.”
The land began to breathe again.
The Joy of Diversity
Listen to Bart or Pat for more than five minutes, and you can hear the delight in their voices when they talk about plants. They don’t talk about grass as a single crop. They talk about communities of plants — each one filling a role, each one feeding another. “Every plant requires something different,” Bart said. “We counted over a hundred different species in a hundred-yard stretch — grasses, shrubs, forbs. That’s what year-round grazing does: you hit it at different times, at different intensities, and then you let it rest.” That diversity doesn’t just feed cattle — it feeds the soil. When the cows trample and move, they lay down armor that protects the ground, feeding microbes that turn dying roots into living carbon. Pat has seen it firsthand: bare ground can take 3 to 5 years to recover after a drought, but a covered pasture springs back in 3 to 5 months.
That same living fabric of diversity connects to much of what we’ve written before — in Do Cows Eat More Than Grass?, Diversity into Dollars, and The Range According to Bart. The message is the same: the more we expand our definition of forage, the more the land gives back.
Calving on Grass: Timing with Nature
When I interviewed Pat for the podcast, I finally grasped something I had never considered: the timing of calving is the key to making year-round grazing work. He explained it with the quiet patience of a man who has tested every assumption. “Mother Nature tells you when to calve,” he said. “It’s when the deer have their babies.” In western South Dakota, that’s late May — not March. Most ranchers calving in March have to keep cows at a body condition score of 5½ or 6 through winter, feeding hay and high-protein supplements for months. Pat lets his cows slip to a 4½ by March. “They look rough to most folks,” he admitted, “but by April and May, when green grass comes, they gain it all back — and it doesn’t cost me a dime.” It’s simple in principle, profound in practice: by aligning calving with green-up, the cow’s recovery and the land’s recovery become one process.
Economics Rooted in Ecology
When Pat started tracking his costs, the numbers told the story.Across the northern Plains, the average cost to wean a calf runs about $850 per head, and 80 percent of that is winter feed. Pat’s cost is roughly $450. The difference is not a feed supplement or a new piece of equipment. It’s timing. Instead of burning diesel every day, he rolls out a bale of hay every two or three days — just enough for protein, not as a full ration. His cows harvest their own feed. “The tractor gets used once a month,” Bart added, “and the pickup burns two gallons of gas a week instead of two gallons an hour.”
These numbers aren’t about thrift for thrift’s sake. They’re the arithmetic of harmony — fewer machines, less fuel, more sunlight captured by living leaves.
Simplicity and Sanity
There’s a kind of peace that comes through their voices when they talk about stress — or the lack of it. Pat has a way of distilling complexity into something anyone can grasp:
“When I make a new plan,” he said, “I design it so a ten-year-old kid can run it.” That philosophy — low stress for people, low stress for cattle — has turned his ranch into a place of rhythm rather than reaction. The cows trust the people who move them. They’re calm, even affectionate. “If you’re stressed,” Pat told me, “your cattle will be too. It goes both ways.”
Full Circle
So can you graze cattle year-round?Yes — if you’re willing to listen. Not to a set of prescriptions, but to what your land is already saying. Year-round grazing isn’t about toughness or proving something to your neighbors. It’s about learning the timing of your place — when grass grows, when cows need it, when to rest, and when to move.
For Pat Guptill and Bart Carmichael, that rhythm has rebuilt soil, restored diversity, and reduced costs. More than that, it’s restored joy. “We started making money,” Pat said. “And we started having fun again with our cattle.”
That might be the best definition of resilience I’ve heard yet.
Related Reading:
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2. Video page to watch videos of other ranchers’ journeys toward improved rangeland/pasture.
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