1. Elster Ranch

    When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

    - Aldo Leopold

  2. ELSTER RANCH

    A place to learn, build, and share a land ethic. Since 1880 four generations of Elster’s worked to improve the soil, support family traditions, and provide pasture based protein into Nevada and neighboring Counties.

    It's 320 acres are complete with oak woodland and savannah, grasslands, creeks, ponds, diverse wildlife and flora, with a long history as a working landscape that harvest the suns energy for the benefit of all.

    The key partnership in this endeavor lies in the relationship between plant communities, herbivores, an underground livestock of soil microbes, and holistic land stewardship.
    A land steward utilizes grazing, with its pressure of timing, intensity, disturbance, and duration to increase the complexity of nutrients in the system, support wildlife and habitat diversity, re-water the soil profile, improve soil stability, and bring nutrient dense livestock products to market...it is a food web.

    The time-lapse video shows how cattle, confined to smaller grazing paddocks on the ranch, can be compelled to “mob graze,” thereby consuming all plant species, including invasive, not just the “sweets” on their buffet.

    History

  3. History

    Different places on earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.

    D. H. Lawrence

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    Myths

  4. Myths

    By midday Hermes was playing the lyre, and in the evening he stole the cattle of Apollo...myths have influenced societies since Grecian time. Grazing practices and land health, red meat and our health are so burdened.

    A better understanding and healthier future is here.

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    Herbivores

  5. Herbivores

    Like organic gardeners, herbivores aerate, nourish, and graze the land in ways that regenerate all the basic building blocks, increase biological activity, and increase productivity.

    Gretel Ehrlich

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    Holistic

  6. Holistic

    To change ideas about what land is for is to change ideas about what anything is for.

    - Aldo Leopold

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