In May of 1976, at the Murray McMurray hatchery on the southern edge of Webster City, Iowa, a 38-year-old rancher named Mave Yoder paid $560 in cash for 80 to lose Gosslings and five Mden Ganders.
The Goslings were a week old.
They sold for $6.
25 a piece.
The Ganders sold for 18.
Mave Yoder carried them out of the hatchery in 12 cardboard boxes lined with cedar shavings loaded into the back of a 1968 Ford F250 pickup truck.
She had driven 178 mi north and west across the Sand Hills to get them.
She drove the geese back to her ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska in a single 8-hour run, stopping twice for fuel and once for a quart of motor oil at a Kico station outside of Norfolk.
The Gosslings arrived at the Yoda Ranch at 11 at night.
She unloaded them into the Bruder shed her father, Roland Clearary, had built behind the main barn in 1958.
The Bruder shed was 16 ft long and 10 ft wide.
It had a corrugated tin roof and a single hand huneed cedar door and an interior partitioned into three bays by handtoled wooden rails.
The first bay was the heat bay with 300 W incandescent infrared lamps suspended from the rafters at adjustable heights against the brutal sand hills nights of late May.
The second bay was the feed and water bay with galvanized steel waterers and a long wooden trough Roland Clearary had hand cut from a single ash plank in the winter of 1957.
The third bay was the imprint bay, where Mave sat on a low stool every morning at 5:00 a.
m.
and every evening at 700 p.
m.
for six consecutive weeks during the Gossling’s critical imprint window.
She fed them by hand from a tin scoop.
She talked to them in a low, even voice.
She walked among them in slow, careful steps.
She let them follow her in a tight waddling line whenever she changed bays.
The protocol came directly out of her mother Adele Clary’s leather memorandum book and pencil in a section labeled May imprint and dated June 4th, 1932.
The Tuloo Glings imprinted to her by the second week.
The Mden ganders slower imprinted by the fourth.
By the third Sunday of August, when the glands had grown into half-sized geese with their full pin feathers in and their imprinted bond to the woman who had fed them since their first week, she opened the Bruder gate and walked them out across the dirt yard to the open Sand Hills pasture south of the ranch road.
By the end of August, 85 geese were ranging on her pasture among 46 head of Heraford cow calf pears eating thistle and bindweed and dandelion and the small grasshoppers that came up off the bunch grass at dawn.
The men at the Valentine Cafe laughed for two and a half hours when they heard.
They were still laughing 12 years later when the 1988 drought and the coyote year had emptied half the cving pens in Cherry County and the only ranch in five townships not losing calves was the Yodar operation 30 mi south of Valentine where the geese had taught the coyotes that some pastures were not worth the walk.
By the spring of 1976, the agricultural orthodoxy of the American sand hills had reached the cleanest expression of its 100red-year ark.
The orthodoxy was simple.
A sand hills ranch ran cattle.
Some ranches ran sheep.
A few stubborn old-timers still kept a small horse for working herd.
Nobody ran poultry.
Poultry belonged on the small farms in the eastern third of Nebraska where the soil was deep enough for corn and the railroads ran close enough to ship eggs to Omaha.
Poultry did not belong in the sand hills where a chicken laid maybe 130 eggs a year against a Lancaster County average of 240.
and where every coyote and badger and great horned owl within 20 miles took attacks on the flock that no rancher could absorb.
Poultry in the professional judgment of the Cherry County Cattleman’s Association in 1976 was a hobby for retired school teachers in Valentine.
It was not a thing a serious ranch operator put on her grass.
The Cattleman’s Association president in 1976, a man named Vernon Bramwell, who had served eight consecutive one-year terms by election, said it openly.
He said it at the spring meeting in March.
He said it at the fall meeting in November.
He said, “Cattle ranches run cattle, and small farms run birds, and the ranch that mixes them runs neither.
” It was not a controversial position.
It was the professional consensus of the Nebraska Cattleman of the Sand Hills Resource Conservation and Development Council of the University of Nebraska Lincoln Extension Service of every ranch supply firm selling fence wire and salt blocks and squeeze shoots from Norfolk to Chadan.
It was the consensus that geese in particular were a worse than useless livestock on a working cow calf operation.
Geese were too small to be worth a predation tax.
Geese were too loud to keep cattle calm at Calvin.
Geese ate forage that should have been going to mother cows.
Geese were what a man kept on a 5 acre place outside of Lincoln to mow the lawn.
Geese were not a thing a serious operator brought home from a hatchery in Iowa in the back of an F250.
Mave Yodar had been raised on a different consensus.
Her mother, Adele Clary, had kept 54 working geese on the Clearary family ranch outside of Long Pine, Nebraska from 1932 until 1958 when Arthritis had finally taken her hands, and she had given the flock to a neighbor.
Adele Clearary had run the geese in her quiet way, the same way her own mother had run them on a small ranch outside of Atkinson, Nebraska in the 1910s and 1920s.
She had run them as part of a system.
The geese ate the broadleaf weeds the cattle would not eat.
The geese kept the pasture from going to thistle and Russian napweed.
The geese alarmed against coyotes and great horned owls and skunks at night.
The geese plucked tick larvae and biting flies off the calves faces in the long sweet summer evenings.
The geese laid eggs the family ate and sold.
The geese plucked twice a year for down.
The geese paid for themselves three different ways every year on a Sand Hills ranch that had been losing money on cattle in the drought year of 1934 and that had survived the drought year of 1934 because Adele Clear’s geese had been generating side income from down sales to a pillow manufacturer in Sous City.
Adele Clearary had taught her daughter Mave every part of the system between Mave’s 7th birthday and her 17th.
Adele Clearary had died of a stroke in 1968 when Mave was 30.
Adele’s geese had been gone since 1958.
The system had not been lost.
The system had been sitting in a leather memorandum book Adele had kept on the kitchen shelf for the last 26 years of her life in pencil with handdrawn diagrams of pasture rotations and gozling imprint schedules and downplucking cycles.
And the leather memorandum book had passed to Mave at the funeral.
Mave had read it once in 1968 and once in 1969 and a final time in the kitchen of the ranch she had inherited from her late father in 1973.
In the November of the year she had buried her husband Owen Yoder who had died at 36 in a roping accident at a fall branding outside of Cody.
Mave had been 35 in November of 1973.
She had been 36 and three months in the spring of 1974 when she had decided she was going to bring the geese back.
She had been 38 in the May of 1976 when she had finally driven the F250 to Webster City to do it.
The Yoda Ranch sat at the south end of Cherry County, Nebraska, 30 mi south of Valentine, on 640 acres of native sand hills pasture that ran from a north section of choppy sand prairie hills down to a broad suberrigated meadow at the south end where two natural sand hills lakes formed a wet boundary between the Yodar operation and the Doset ranch.
on the next section.
The lakes were small, about 18 acres of open water between them, with a quarter mile of cattail margin around each, and they had been there since the geological retreat of the plea scene.
They were what made the Yodar Ranch viable for geese.
Geese needed water.
The Yodar Ranch had it.
Mave Yodar spent the winter of 1975 to 1976 reading her mother’s leather memorandum book in detail.
She read the imprint schedule.
She read the breeding cycle.
She read the rotation system.
She read the predator defense protocols.
She wrote on three sheets of lined notebook paper and pencil an order for 80 to lose golings and five Mden ganders from the Murray McMurray hatchery.
She mailed the order in February.
The hatchery answered three weeks later.
The order was confirmed.
Pickup was scheduled for the 3rd Tuesday of May 1976.
Mave borrowed her hired hand.
Knox Ackley’s 1968 Ford F250 for the drive.
She had told no one in Cherry County what she was doing.
By the morning of the third Sunday of August 1976, when Vernon Bramwell drove past the Yodor South Meadow on his way home from a Cattleman’s Association field day at the Neobra Valley Preserve and saw 85 half-grown geese ranging among the Yodar herapford herd in the sub irerrigated pasture at the lakes’s edge.
The geese had been on the ranch for three months and four days.
The Bruder shed had done its job.
The imprint had taken.
The geese followed Mave in a single waddling line whenever she walked the pasture in the evening.
They had begun by the second week of August to drift into rough flank formation around the Heraford calves at dusk.
The way Adele Clearary had described in her notebook, the 1976 Calving year had not yet begun.
The 1976 Calving year would begin in March of 1977.
By March of 1977, the geese would be 10 months old and fully working.
By the second Tuesday of September 1976, every rancher in Cherry County had heard about the Yodar widow’s geese.
The Valentine Cafe sat on the corner of Main Street and Highway 83 in Valentine, Nebraska.
And on Tuesday and Friday mornings between 5 and 7, the long for Micah counter filled with men in brownfelt cowboy hats drinking coffee from chipped enamel mugs and arguing about the price of feeder cattle and the prospects for the fall sale at the Valentine livestock auction yard and the question of whether the United States Department of Agricultures pending changes to the conservation reserve program would help or hurt a Sand Hills operation.
The Yoda Widow’s geese had become the dominant topic of conversation by the third week of September.
Vernon Bramwell, who farmed 3,400 acres of native pasture on the east section of the Neobra Valley, had told the story at the counter four mornings in a row.
He had told it again at the September Cattleman’s Association meeting in Valentine.
He had told it once more at the United Methodist Church coffee hour on the 3rd Sunday of September.
By the end of September, he had told it in some form to every rancher within 70 miles of Valentine.
The story changed slightly with each telling.
By the time it reached Ezra Dosset, who farmed the 4,000 acres adjoining the Yodar operation on the south section, the story was that Mave Yodar had bought a thousand geese and was claiming on the authority of her late mother’s handwritten notes that they would protect her cattle from coyotes.
Ezra Dosset had been a personal friend of Roland Clearary for 43 years.
Ezra had attended Roland’s funeral in 1972.
He had attended Owen Yodar’s funeral in 1973.
He had not in 43 years of acquaintance ever heard Roland Clearary say a single useful thing about poultry.
Roland had been a Heraford cattleman as far as Ezra Dosset had known.
The story Vernon Bramwell was telling in Ezra Dosset’s professional judgment in his ranch kitchen on the morning of September 28th, 1976 did not match the man Roland Clearary had been.
It also did not match the consensus of 43 years of working friendship.
Ezra Darett had decided by the time he finished his second cup of coffee on the morning of September 28th that he would drive over to the Yoda Ranch that afternoon to see for himself.
The mockery in Valentine was not cruel.
It was a kind of small town disbelief that wore the clothing of concern.
At the cattleman’s coffee on Wednesday afternoon, Mave heard a man named Jeb Picket, who had taught her father how to break a roping horse in 1948, tell another rancher that the Yodar widow had let her grief get the better of her judgment.
At the Valentine livestock auction yard on the Saturday before the fall sale, the auction yard manager had pulled Mave aside after she had finished marking her sale lots and had asked her in a low and respectful voice whether she had thought through what the geese would do to her insurance premiums.
At the Methodist church potluck on the 3rd Sunday of September, the minister’s wife had pulled Mave aside in the basement fellowship hall and asked her in a careful voice whether the geese were something Owen would have approved of.
Mave had looked at the minister’s wife across the corner of a folding card table that held a covered casserole and a glass pan of cinnamon rolls and had said Owen would have asked me what my mother thought.
The minister’s wife had said nothing.
Mave had carried her green bean casserole back to the kitchen and washed her own dish.
Ezra Dosset was 60 years old in the autumn of 1976.
He was tall and lean and weatherworn.
His face had gone deep brown from 40 years of Sand Hill sun.
His white and gray stubble flecked his cheeks and jaw.
His deep set blue eyes were squinted from a lifetime of looking into bright sand hill sun.
He wore a tall crowned light tan stockman’s cowboy hat with a sweatstained band, a faded sheepkin lined denim ranch coat over a green plaid pearl snap shirt, dark blue Wrangler jeans softened by years of washes and scuffed brown stockman’s boots.
His mouth had the paternalistic, worried set of a man who had spent his whole life believing he was responsible for other people’s decisions.
He had wanted the Yodar section before Owen died.
He had wanted it more after.
He had not in the three years between Owen’s death in November 1973 and the geese arriving in May 1976 openly raised the subject with Mave.
He had instead approached it sideways.
He had stopped by on Sunday afternoons.
He had brought casserles his wife Hannah made.
He had asked in the tone of a neighbor who was simply being practical whether Mave had thought about leasing the South Meadow for a couple of seasons.
He had offered to ride her north fence line on his son’s Saturday mornings.
He had offered to send Reed over to fix windmills.
He had told her more than once that any decision she wanted to make about the operation would have his full support and that he and Hannah were always available to talk through whatever she was thinking.
Mave had thanked him.
She had not leased the South Meadow.
She had not asked Reed to come fix the windmills.
She had ridden her own fence line.
The geese changed the conversation.
Ezra heard about them from his hired man, Saul Eper, who had been driving past on a Sunday morning and had seen the geese walking out of the Bruder shed in single file.
Saul had told Ezra at the gas station on the Monday morning.
Ezra had not believed him.
Ezra had driven past the Yodar South Meadow himself on the Tuesday afternoon.
He had counted by the rough estimate of a man who had run cattle for 40 years somewhere between 60 and 100 large gray and white geese ranging in a loose formation among the Yoda Heraford cow calf pairs at the edge of the South Lake.
Ezra had driven home to his wife Hannah at 6:00 in the evening and had sat at the kitchen table with his hat off and his elbows on the oil cloth and had said, “Hannah, my best friend’s daughter, has lost her mind.
” Hannah Doss had set down a coffee pot and had said, “Ezra, you do not call her your best friend’s daughter in front of me ever again.
She is Owen’s widow and she is your goddaughter and she is 38 years old and she has buried a husband and a father and a mother all in 8 years.
You will go over there tomorrow and you will ask her what she has done and you will listen to the answer.
Ezra Dosset had gone over the next morning.
Mave was standing at the south end of the Bruder shed with a coil of fencing wire in her left hand and a pair of fencing pliers in her right when she heard Ezra Dosset’s truck pull up to the gate.
She did not turn around.
She finished the section of wire she was working on.
She set the pliers on the top rail of the Bruder fence.
She wiped her hands on her canvas workpants.
She walked across the dirty yard to the gate.
Ezra Mave, you want coffee? No.
She had expected the question.
She had expected the visit, although not on this particular Wednesday.
She crossed her arms.
She waited.
Saul told me yesterday.
Ezra said, “I came over today.
I drove out at the end of the section yesterday and I counted somewhere upwards of 80 geese ranging with your cattle.
I came home and I asked Hannah to set me straight.
Hannah told me to come ask you.
Mave, what in God’s name have you done? I bought 80 to goings and five Mden ganders from McMurray in May.
I imprinted them in the Bruder shed.
I walked them out to the south meadow in August.
They are running with the herd.
They are eating thistle and bindweed and dandelion.
They are alarming against coyotes.
They are doing exactly what my mother’s geese did on the clear place from 1932 until 1958.
Mave, Ezra, you have 85 geese on a working cow calf operation.
By the time the calves come in March, every coyote in the Neobra is going to know there is a goose flock at your south meadow.
You are baiting predators into your cving pins.
You’re going to lose calves.
The Heraford cows are going to spook every time a gander hisses.
Your weight gains are going to drop.
You are going to wean a 50 lb lighter calf in October.
Mave, you have invited the wolves to dinner and you have rung the bell.
The wolves were already coming, Ezra.
I just gave them a reason to walk past my pasture and go to yours.
Mave.
Ezra, the geese alarm against coyotes.
The geese fight coyotes.
The geese are bigger than coyotes and they fight in formation.
And a tus goose at full breeding weight goes 20 pounds.
And a sand hills coyote goes 30.
And the goose has wings the coyote can’t see in the dark.
And a beak that can break the bridge of a coyote’s nose.
The first coyote that comes through the south meadow is going to learn that the second coyote does not come through.
By March, no coyote in five sections is going to come within a quarter mile of my calves.
Mave, Ezra, drive home.
Watch what happens in March.
If I am wrong, I will sell the flock at the spring auction in Basset, and I will eat the loss, and I will buy you dinner at the Cherry County Fair.
If I am right, you will buy me dinner.
Either way, you and Hannah will have lost nothing for waiting.
Ezra Dosset took his hat off, then put it back on, then took it off again.
He looked across the dirty yard at the Bruder shed.
He looked back at Mave.
He said, “Mave, I cannot stop you.
I cannot help you.
I am going home.
I will watch what happens.
” He drove home.
The 1977 calving started on the third Tuesday of March.
By the end of April, Mave had lost zero calves to predators.
Ezra Dosset had lost three calves to coyote depradation on the south boundary of his ranch, the boundary that ran along the Yodar Lakes and four calves on his north section.
Ezra Dosset had lost the three southboundary calves on three consecutive nights in the second week of April.
The coyote pair that had taken them had been tracked by Ezra’s son Reed at first light each morning.
The tracks ran from the Dosset south fence line into the Sand Hills willow thicket on the northern Yodar property line and stopped there.
They did not cross into the Yodar pasture.
Reed Dosset had walked the tracks himself on the morning of the third Tuesday in April 1977 and had stood at the willow thicket and looked across at the Yoda cow calf pairs grazing peacefully in the south meadow with eight tuloose geese in loose flank formation around the nearest cving cow and had reported back to his father that evening that the coyotes had stopped at the willows because the geese had taught them to.
Ezra had not believed his son in April.
Ezra Dosset had lost two more calves on his north section in the third week of April.
The coyote tracks on those losses had run along the section roads and had not gone within a mile of the Yodar operation.
By the end of May, the geese had been ranging with the herd for 14 months.
The cattle had stopped flinching at the gander’s hiss by the third week of August 1976.
They had begun by the second week of September 1976 to walk in loose proximity to the gaggle as if the geese were a kind of mobile shelter.
by the Calving.
In March of 1977, the cows were calving with geese standing flank guard at 20ft radius from the labor mound.
The coyotes were not coming.
The coyotes were going around.
If you have ever brought back a system from your mother’s pencil drawn diagrams, if you have ever heard your grandmother’s voice in a leather memorandum book and decided to listen to her over every man at every counter in your county, this story is for you.
Stay with us.
There is one of these stories in every county in America.
And the one we are telling you today comes from Cherry County, Nebraska in the August of 1988, 12 years after Mave Yoda put 85 geese into a Heraford pasture.
The years between 1977 and 1985 were the deep work years.
The geese were on the pasture.
The cattle were calving without predator loss.
The thistle infestation that had been creeping into the Yodor South Meadow since the 1969 drought rotation had cleared by the 1979 grazing season.
The Russian napweed that had been threatening the north section since 1972 had cleared by 1981.
The cattle weight gains improved by an average of 23 lbs at weaning between 1976 and 1981.
Partly because the geese ate the dandelion blooms before they could shade out the bunch grass and partly because the geese ate the biting flies and tick larve off the calves faces in the long sand hills evenings.
The Yodar operation was by the end of the 1981 cving year the best performing cow calf operation in Cherry County, Nebraska by every metric that mattered.
Pounds of weaned calf per cow, pounds of weaned calf per acre, pasture composition, weed pressure, and predator loss.
The men at the Valentine Cafe knew the numbers because the Valentine livestock auction yard published them every fall in the auction yard newsletter, which Vernon Bramwell himself edited.
The men at the Valentine Cafe did not stop making jokes about the geese.
They simply stopped making them in front of Mave Yodar.
The mockery moved sideways.
By 1981, it had become a mockery that focused on the unusualness of the operation rather than on its performance.
The men at the counter said that Mave had gotten lucky.
They said that one good run of calves proved nothing.
They said that the real test would come the next time the Sand Hills had a serious drought year.
By the end of 1985, the working flock had grown from 85 to 240 geese.
Mave Yoda was breeding for size, for territorial aggression, and for the imprint cycle her mother had documented.
She had begun to sell breeding stock by the spring of 1982.
She had sold glings to a small farm in Hol County, to a cattle operation in Brown County, and to a hobby buyer in Lincoln.
She had begun, by the spring of 1983, to pluck her geese twice a year for down.
The down went by an arrangement Mave had made with a small bedding manufacturer in Sou Falls, South Dakota at $32 a pound.
She was producing by 1985 460 lb of cleaned down a year.
The bedding manufacturer in Sou Falls had been started in 1947 by a Norwegian immigrant named Olaf Toliffson, who had returned home from a Sand Hills cattle drive in 1939 and had told his wife that the only soft thing on the northern plains was a goose and that someday the rest of the country would figure it out.
Olaf Toliffson had died in 1972.
His grandson, who ran the operation by 1983, had answered Mave’s first letter with a handtyped contract for 500 lb of cleaned grade A, down a year at $32 a pound, and a written promise to buy whatever else she could produce.
The grandson visited the Yoda ranch once a year in October to inspect the down.
He stayed for one cup of coffee.
He never asked about the cattle.
He always paid in cash on delivery.
The down income alone was $14,720.
The egg income was $800 a year.
The goose meat income from Kohl’s was 1,200 a year.
The breeding stock income was by 1985 $6,000 a year.
The geese were producing $23,000 a year on top of the cattle revenue in 1985 on a Sand Hills operation that was netting $48,000 on the cattle alone.
The geese had become by the end of 1985 the second best income generator on the ranch.
In the winter of 1984, Mave had received a letter from a researcher at South Dakota State University in Brookings named Dr.
Cornelia Thornberry.
Dr.
Thornberry was an associate professor of range science.
Her research program focused on multiecies grazing systems in the northern great plains.
She had read about the Yodar operation from a feed and grain industry newsletter that had picked up a 1983 article in the Valentine livestock auction yard newsletter that Vernon Bramwell had grudgingly published after the cooperative marketing committee had insisted that the pounds per cow data was too good to leave unpublished.
Dr.
Thornberry had written Mave a letter on December 14th, 1984 on University Letterhead asking whether Mave would consent to a multi-year research collaboration in which Dr.
Thornberry would visit the ranch annually with a small graduate student team to measure pasture composition, soil organic carbon, livestock health markers, and calf loss data.
Dr.
Thornberry promised in writing that no individual ranch would be named in any peer-reviewed publication without the operator’s express written permission and that Mrs.
Yoder could withdraw at any time.
Mave had answered three weeks later.
She had said yes.
She had said don’t use my name.
Doctor Thornberry had arrived at the Yoda Ranch for the first visit on the morning of May 16th, 1985 in a 1981 Brown American Motors Conquered with two graduate student assistants from the South Dakota State University Range Science Department in the back seat and a yellow hard hat on the front passenger floorboard.
She had introduced herself to Mave at the gate.
She had asked to walk the south meadow on foot before they did anything else.
Mave had walked her out.
The maylight was long and golden across the bunch grass.
The geese were ranging in their three established subflocks among the Heraford cow calfe pairs at the edge of the south lake.
Dr.
Thornberry stood at the rise overlooking the lake for 45 minutes without saying anything.
She watched the ganderled north subflock cross the lake margin to drive a coyote off a fence line in the middle distance.
She watched the damled south subflock pluck biting flies off the faces of three calves resting in the shade of a sand hills willow stand.
She watched the third subflock graze the thistle margins of the bare sand patches where the bunch grass had thinned.
She turned to Mave at the end of the 45 minutes and said, “Mrs.
Yoda, I have spent 11 years studying northern plains grazing systems.
I have ridden in research plots from the Texas panhandle to the Saskatchewan border.
I have never seen anything like this.
I am here for one day.
May I have five? She had five.
Dr.
Cornelia Thornberry kept her promise.
She visited the Yoda Ranch every May from 1985 through 1990.
She rode the South Meadow on horseback with Mave every spring for one 12-hour day.
She measured pasture composition at 64 sample points using a Dobin Meyer frame.
She recorded calf health metrics with a portable Roland bovine diagnostic kit.
She took soil cores at 12 sample points.
She published in 1987 a paper in the journal of range management titled multiecies grazing with resident ancerapformms a case study from the sand hills.
The paper referenced the yodar operation only as cooperator A.
The paper found in conclusion that the cooperator A operation showed a 38% reduction in calf loss to predators.
a 41% reduction in pasture broadleaf weed cover, a 23 lb increase in weaning weight, and a 26% increase in soil organic carbon at the 0 to 12 in depth.
All measured against a 5-year rolling baseline of comparable Sand Hills cow calf operations in the same 8count region.
The paper was the most cited article in the Journal of Range Management for 1988.
None of the Sand Hills ranches found cooperator A.
Then the summer of 1988 arrived.
The rain stopped on the 17th of June.
By the first week of July, the temperatures in Cherry County had reached 103.
By July 15th, they had reached 105 and held there day after day for 19 consecutive days.
The native bunch grass in the sand hills, which had been holding through the dry June at fair condition, began to crash by the third week of July.
The pastures that had been overg grazed in the late 1970s and early 1980s went first.
The thistle and the bindweed and the Russian napweed, which had been suppressed in good years by competition from healthy bunch grass, exploded into the bare patches the drought had opened up.
By the first week of August, every Sand Hills pasture in Cherry County, except the Yodar operation, showed visible thistle and napweed infestation.
The infestation was bad enough on Vernon Bramwell’s east section pasture that he was projected to lose 40% of his summer forage to the weed shift.
The cattleman’s association called an emergency meeting at the Valentine VFW Hall on the evening of August 23rd.
61 ranchers attended.
The meeting opened with a presentation by the Cherry County Extension Range Specialist on emergency haying options.
It moved to a presentation on the federal disaster declaration paperwork.
Then the coyote question came up.
The coyote populations in Cherry County had been climbing through the spring and early summer of 1988.
The drought had compressed the prey base for coyotes.
Jack rabbits and ground squirrels and prairie dogs were dying off in the dry pastures.
And the coyotes had begun by mid July to push into sand hills cving operations in numbers nobody had seen since the 1956 drought.
By the end of August 1988, the countywide calf loss to predation rate was running at 11.
4%.
Ezra Doset had lost 38 calves on the south section by the morning of August 23rd.
Vernon Bramwell had lost 22 on his east pasture.
Jeb Picket had lost 19 on the section he ran with his son.
The losses were not evenly distributed across the county.
The losses were concentrated on operations that had had the worst pasture going into the drought.
The pastures that had been overg grazed in the late 1970s were the pastures where the thistle had taken the broadest hold by the third week of July.
The thistle attracted white-tailed deer and jack rabbits in unusual concentrations because the broadleaf was the only green forage left in the county.
The deer and jack rabbits attracted the coyotes.
The coyotes, finding the deer and jack rabbits insufficient, had moved to the calves.
The chain of failure had taken six weeks to play out from June 17th, the day the rain stopped, to August 2nd, the morning a Cherry County rancher named Carlton Tulliffson had walked out to his cving pin at 5:00 a.
m.
and had found the carcass of his 3-week old purebred Heraford bull calf with its hind quarters missing.
Carlton Toliffson had lost 11 more calves in the four weeks that followed.
By the morning of August 23rd, he was selling off the rest of his cow calf pairs at a 30% discount at the Basset cattle auction to cover his feed bill for September.
The coyotes were taking calves at midday.
They were taking calves at the salt licks.
They were taking calves through fence lines.
They were taking calves in pairs.
The Cherry County Cattleman’s Association had no answer at the August 23rd meeting other than to recommend federal predator control assistance and to encourage ranchers to file for emergency depradation cost share.
The meeting was scheduled to end at 8 in the evening.
By 7:30, the men in the back rows had begun to ask Vernon Bramwell in increasingly direct terms about the Yodor operation.
Vernon Bramwell had not in the third week of August 1988, yet driven over to the Yoda ranch to check on the South Meadow.
He had heard the rumors.
He had heard them from Ezra Dosset.
He had heard them from Saul Eper.
He had heard them from Knox Ackley at the Valentine Co-op gas pump.
He had not gone himself.
He stood at the front of the VFW hall on the evening of August 23rd and told the men in the back rows that the Yodar operation was the responsibility of Mrs.
Yoda and that he would not be making any official Cattleman’s association comment on operations that had been conducted without cattleman’s consultation.
Knox Alay stood up in the third row.
Knox had worked for May of Yodar since 1973.
He said, “Vernon, I have spent 12 years standing in that south meadow during the worst of every season.
I have watched the geese walk out of the Bruder shed in single file.
I have watched them flank the calves at Calving.
I have watched a tulose gander chase a coyote off a fence line at 3:00 in the morning in the rain.
I am going to tell every man in this room something I should have said in 1976.
The geese are not freak luck.
The geese are not a hobby.
The geese are exactly what Adele Clearary wrote in a leather memorandum book in 1932 and exactly what Roland Clearary’s wife ran on her ranch for 26 years and exactly what every Sand Hills rancher’s grandmother knew before we forgot.
The geese are why Mave Yoder is sitting at zero calf loss and the rest of us are sitting at 11.
4.
The geese are our blind spot.
We laughed at them for 12 years.
We are going to apologize for the laughing for the rest of our lives.
Knox Aley sat down.
Vernon Bramwell did not respond.
The meeting ended 10 minutes early.
Reed Dosset drove over to the Yoda Ranch on the morning of August 24th.
He arrived at the gate at 7.
He sat in the cab of his 1984 Ford F-150 and watched Mave walk from the Bruder shed to the lakeside of the South Meadow.
With a 5gallon feed bucket in one hand and a coiled lariat over her shoulder, she saw him at the gate.
She walked over.
She set the feed bucket on the dirt.
She stood at the driver’s side window.
Read, “Aunt Mave, you want coffee?” No, I came over to ask a question.
My father didn’t send me.
He doesn’t know I am here.
He has been losing two calves a week for 7 weeks.
I have been driving past your South Meadow on the way home from the auction yard every Saturday for 12 years.
And I have been watching the geese walk along the fence line in the evening like they own the place.
I came over today because I think they do own the place.
I came to ask if you would sell us gosslings.
Reed Dosset was 35 years old.
He stood 6’2.
He had his father’s tall stocky build and his mother Hannah’s green eyes.
He wore a faded brownfelt cowboy hat and a denim jacket over a blue plaid pearl snap shirt.
He had not in the eight years since he had taken over the day-to-day operations on the Dosset ranch from his father ever asked Mave Yoda for a single thing.
He asked, “Now Mave set the feed bucket down.
She said, “Read I will sell you Goslings.
The price is $35 a Gossling.
The minimum order is 30 Goslings.
The order includes three Mden ganders.
The order also includes one consultation visit from me at your operation in spring 1989 to set up the Bruder, train your hired men on imprint protocol, and walk the pasture with you to identify the holding water and the predator approach corridors.
The fee covers that visit.
There will be no follow-up consultation included in the price.
If you want followup, the rate is $80 an hour.
Reed Dosset said, “Aunt Mave, I am in.
” Word travels in Cherry County.
By the morning of September 2nd, 1988, Mave had received 14 telephone calls.
By the end of September, she had received 23.
The callers were Sand Hills ranchers.
Most of them had laughed at her in the Valentine cafe in 1976.
All of them had heard by the end of August that Reed Dosset had ordered 30 to lose Goslings and three Mden Ganders from the Yodar operation for delivery in May 1989.
All of them wanted to know if Mave would do for their operations what she had done for hers.
Mave Yoda had not anticipated this.
She had planned on the morning of August 24th, when Reed Dosset had stood at her gate, that she would sell Gosslings to the Dosset ranch in 1989 and possibly to one or two other neighbors in 1990.
The 23 telephone calls had changed the math.
Mave sat at the kitchen table on the evening of October 7th, 1988.
With the leather memorandum book and a pencil, she wrote down what she could do alone, what she could do with Knoxley, what she could do with one part-time hatchery hand, and what she could do if she expanded the Bruder shed.
By the end of the evening, she had figured the math.
She could supply Gosslings to between nine and 12 Sand Hills ranches in spring 1989 at $35 a Gossling with planting design, brooder construction, and one consultation visit per ranch.
The total revenue, if all 9 to 12 operations bought, would be between 36,000 and $60,000.
She would work 70 hours a week from January through May.
She would hire Knox Ackley’s son, Owen Ackley, full-time at $12 an hour.
She would expand the Bruder.
She would teach the next generation of Sand Hills ranchers how to work geese with cattle.
By the second week of January 1989, eight Sand Hills ranches had signed contracts.
By the end of February, the number was 11.
The first godling delivery from the Murray McMurray hatchery to the Yoda Ranch arrived in two semi trucks on the morning of April 3rd, 1989.
3,700 Too Glings and 140 MDEN ganders were unloaded into the expanded Bruder shed over the next two days.
Mave Yoda supervised every imprint protocol.
By the morning of May 15th, 1989, the glings had been distributed to 11 Sand Hills ranches, and Mave had visited each to walk the pasture and identify the predator approach corridors.
She walked each pasture in the early morning before the heat.
She marked the holding water with white painted survey stakes.
She marked the predator approach corridors with red painted survey stakes.
She wrote in pencil in a hardback notebook she had bought at the Valentine Co-op for $2.
20 the imprint protocol for each ranch and the goose to cattle stocking rate appropriate to each pasture’s topography.
The smallest ranch had taken 18 glings on 180 acres.
The largest had taken 60 glings on 2200 acres.
Each ranch received the same consultation document.
12 typed pages handyped by Mave on her father’s 1964 Olympia SM9 manual typewriter.
The document included the imprint schedule.
It included the predator approach map.
It included a winter feeding plan for the geese.
It included a goose to cattle stocking ratio table by pasture acreage.
It included the Adele Clearary downplucking cycle adapted to the northern plains climate.
It included a one-page note in Mave’s handwritten cursive that said in part, “Do not change the imprint schedule.
Do not skip the morning walk.
Do not take a gander in trade for a calf.
Do not name the geese.
The geese will name themselves to you.
The 1989 calving season opened with the largest multiecies grazing conversion ever conducted in a single Sand Hills County at one time.
Vernon Bramwell, who had not yet apologized to Mave in person, drove over to her ranch on the 3rd Saturday of May 1989.
He sat at her kitchen table.
He did not take his cowboy hat off until Mave had poured him a cup of coffee.
He said, “Mave, I have two questions.
The first one is whether you would consider beginning in fall 1989 presenting a series of educational lectures on multiecies grazing systems at the Cherry County Cattleman’s Association quarterly meetings with a small honorarium for your time.
The second one is whether you would accept the apology of a man who has been wrong for 12 years about the most important thing he ever held an opinion on.
Mave said yes to both questions.
The first lecture was held on October 14th, 1989.
42 ranchers attended.
The second was held on January 20th, 1990.
61 ranchers attended.
The third was scheduled for April.
Ezra Dosset drove over to the Yoda Ranch on a cold Saturday afternoon in October 1989, one year after his son Reed had stood at her gate.
The 33 goings on the Dosset ranch had grown into 33 working geese.
They had ranged with the Dosset herd through the 1989 Calving season.
The Dosset predator loss in 1989 had been three calves against 28 in 1988.
He stood at the open wooden gate of the Yodor South Meadow.
He looked at the geese, now 12 generations into Mave’s selective breeding, walking in loose flank around a small group of Heraford yearlings at the lakes’s edge.
He took off his tall, crowned, light tan stockman’s cowboy hat,” he said it against his chest.
Mave walked out from the lakeside.
She was wearing the same gray wool work jacket she had worn the morning he had stood at the gate in September of 1976.
Her braid was a little more silver.
Her hands were a little more weathered.
She stopped at the gate.
Ezra Mave, I owe my son’s herd to you.
I owe my own herd to you.
I owe my friendship with your father a debt I should have paid in 1976.
I am asking forgiveness.
I am asking it as a man who watched his goddaughter for 12 years and decided that the easier thing was to assume she was wrong.
I would like to come stand at this gate one Saturday afternoon a season and learn what I should have learned in 1976.
Mave unlatched the gate.
She held it open.
She said, “Ezra, you are forgiven.
You were forgiven on the night Hannah sent you over here in September of 1976.
You did not need to come today.
I did need to come today.
Then come walk the meadow.
” He came in.
He walked the meadow with her for an hour.
They watched the geese from a lowrise overlooking the South Lake.
He took the leather memorandum book from her hands.
He read three pages.
He gave it back.
He drove home at dusk.
The next Saturday, he came back.
The Saturday after that, he came back.
By the end of October 1989, he had come back four Saturdays in a row.
By the end of November, he had come back six.
He did not pay her for the visits.
She did not ask him to.
The Saturday visits became in the Dosset and Yodar families a thing that was understood and not discussed.
They continued until Ezra Dosset’s death in 2003.
The bench on the rise overlooking the South Lake was named for him in his obituary in the Cherry County Sentinel.
The Cherry County Sentinel ran a feature in its November 22nd, 1988 edition under the headline, “The geese that saved the Sand Hills.
” The article was eight column inches on the front page and continued for 14 more inside.
Knox Aley was quoted.
He said, “I worked beside Mave for 12 years.
I knew the geese were right by 1981.
I should have spoken up then.
I am sorry.
I waited until the VFW meeting in August.
Vernon Bramwell was quoted.
He said, “I was wrong.
I was wrong from the morning Mave Yoder put the Goslings in the Bruder in 1976 until the morning the Cattleman’s Association met in August 1988.
I was wrong for 12 years.
The Cherry County Cattleman’s Association is going to spend the next 20 years correcting what I said.
We are going to do it well.
Reed Dosset was quoted.
He said, “I owe my herd to my father’s godaughter.
I will spend the rest of my life learning from her.
” Jeb Picket was quoted.
He was 71 years old.
He had taught Roland Clearary how to break a roping horse in 1948.
He said, “I knew Adele Clearary.
I taught her husband to rope before he taught me how to read a Sand Hills lake.
” I will say this once.
The daughter is what the mother was.
And what the mother was was the smartest stock person on the eastern sand hills.
and her daughter is going to be the smartest on the western.
I am sorry I did not say so in 1976.
Dr.
Cornelia Thornberry at South Dakota State University was quoted.
She said, “We have known about the Yodar operation since the autumn of 1984.
Mrs.
Yoda asked us to keep her name out of the literature.
We did.
We are no longer going to.
” The Yodar operation is the foundation of multiecies grazing research in the northern great plains.
It is, as far as we have been able to measure, the cleanest multiecies grazing operation in the United States.
It has been quietly funded for 12 years by a single Sand Hills widow on a leather memorandum book her mother had kept on the kitchen shelf since 1932.
The article noted in its final paragraph that the Yodar operation had recorded zero calf loss to predators in the 1988 drought against a Cherry County average of 11.
4%.
4% that 11 Cherry County ranches had ordered Yodar Gzlings for spring 1989 and that the Murray McMurray hatchery in Webster City, Iowa had received an order for 3,700 to lose Gosslings to be delivered to the Yodor operation in April 1989.
The article did not note because Mave Yodar had not told the reporter that the breeding records on file at the Yoda ranch had been maintained in the same leather memorandum book in which her mother had recorded the original 1932 imprint schedule.
that the brass clasp on the memorandum book had been buckled and rebuckled several thousand times since Adele Clary had bought it from a hardware store in O’Neal, Nebraska in 1929, and that the geese that had saved Cherry County had been ordered with money Mave had earned in the summer of 1975 selling weaned heers at the Basset cattle auction.
$560, 80 Too Goslings, and five Amnden Ganders, a rancher’s daughter.
The geese nobody wanted in the hands of the woman nobody understood until they saw what a working flock could do in the worst Calving year Cherry County could remember.
She ranched the Yodor section for 24 more years.
She ran the gossling and consultation business from 1989 until 2010.
By the end of her career, more than 11,000 working geese had been placed on Sand Hills ranches in Cherry, Brown, Rock, Hol, and Boyd counties under her direct supervision on more than 200 working operations.
The 1976 flock on the Yodar South Meadow today numbers 460 geese in 12 generations of Mave’s breeding and they still walk in loose flank formation around the Yoda Heraford herd at every dusk.
Mave Yoda did not explain why she chose the geese.
Not because the Y was hidden.
The Y had been sitting in a leather memorandum book on the kitchen shelf of a small ranch outside of Long Pine, Nebraska since 1929, waiting for a daughter who would carry it to a county her mother had never named and a year her mother had not lived to.
If you have ever brought back a system everybody told you to leave behind, leave a comment below telling us what it was.
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There is one of these stories in every county in America.
We are working through them one harvest at a time.
