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About Homestead Ranch & the Flint Hills

    Homestead Ranch is a working cattle ranch in the heart of the Flint Hills in Chase County, Kansas. The ranch has two year-round cow-calf herds and provides seasonal pastures for yearling cattle, both double-stock and full season.

    The tallgrass prairie, whose undulating grasses are reminiscent of the waves on the ancient Permian Sea out of which it was born, once covered a roughly 400,000 square mile swathe of land from Canada to Texas; it is now the most endangered ecoregion in North America. Three percent or less remains intact, most of it here in the Flint Hills of Kansas and in the Osage Hills of Oklahoma. These hills’ saving grace was the native limestone and flint—a gift from the Permian Sea—that stymied every plow ever invented.

    These tall grasses support thousands of cattle without investment in cultivation, seed, fertilization, pesticides or harvesting of crops. Summer cattle on these hills gain two or more pounds a day without supplementation. Each spring the grasses oblige by coming back once again.

    The Flint Hills are also a huge carbon sink, much like a giant set of lungs that remove tons of carbon from the atmosphere. If you live anywhere on the planet, you are the beneficiary of the process by which prairie plants take the excess carbon dioxide created by the burning of fossil fuels and transform it from life-threatening to life-sustaining.

    There are many more reasons to value the prairie, but they do not translate into dollars per pound or carbon credits per acre. They are incalculable, ineffable, spiritual.

    Stand alone in June on a high point at sunrise with a 360-degree view of the landscape and nary a manmade structure in sight and you may discover that the prairie is no less wild and dramatic than Yellowstone or Yosemite. Like all untamed places, the prairie can alternately make you feel large and expansive or small and insignificant. Both perspectives are necessary to finding one’s proper proportion on a universal scale.

    There are many places here in which the view has not changed measurably in ten thousand years. And that is the feeling you get, walking through grass up to your shoulder in September, that you are perhaps the first person to ever set foot on this patch of ground, which might very well be true. Or, as you stand on the limestone bluff above a creek, you might just as easily be in exactly the spot where a man stood in 9000 BC, plotting a strategy for his band’s next mastodon hunt.

    Out here in the tall grass, coyotes still yip and howl at the rising moon. A bobcat’s chilling screams ricochet through a ravine. Greater prairie chickens strut and dance on their age-old booming grounds in the spring. Dependably, unless interfered with, the big bluestem, little bluestem, Indiangrass and switchgrass rise again year after year.

    We believe that this wild, uncivilized world deserves to be treasured, if only to remind us that it’s still possible to be deeply rooted.

How sorry she felt for white people...who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass?

Alexander

McCall Smith

Republic

of Grass

Psssst! Click me to find the secret entrance to the Chicken Coop.

Personal greetings from the cows