How a Cincinnati Cattle Farm is Helping Bees, Beef

Sep 12, 2024

By Isabel Nissley

Beef cows graze in a pasture at a small farm nestled between Finneytown and College Hill. The 32-acre Bahr Farm has been around since 1916.

A few years ago, the Bahr family donated the property to the Cardinal Land Conservancy so it could remain a working farm.

Now, Conservancy Director Andy Dickerson says they're trying a new agriculture strategy: pollinator-friendly pastures.

“Our cattle are grazing among pollinator-friendly pastures, so they're going to weave through and eat clover and grass that we have in there, and a lot of the wildflowers are going to be fine,” Dickerson said. “Then we'll pull them off, and they'll be on another pasture. When they come back, they'll eat some of the new growth, but then they'll also munch some of the leaves on the flowers, the wildflowers.”

This sustainable farming method provides habitat and food for bees and birds. Cattle grazing land doesn't usually do that, since its only purpose is to feed cows.

In fact, cattle farming contributes to habitat loss caused by climate change. Raising cows for beef produces large amounts of climate-warming gasses, according to a 2017 report by the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

To combat that, Dickerson has been experimenting with adding pollinator-friendly plants to pastures at Bahr Farms. This summer, he’s seeing them bloom.

“There's pale coneflower over there, purple coneflower, ironweed — the cows don't eat, but we leave it because butterflies love it,” Dickerson said.

Establishing pollinator-friendly pastures also involved rotationally grazing the cattle, too. Bahr Farm used to have a single pasture. Now it’s divided by fencing. By moving the cows from field to field, none are overgrazed, letting the land recover and leaving plenty of pollen and nectar in plants for bees.

Benefits for bees and beef

Facilities manager Nick Hartley opens up a gate to a pasture. The herd of cattle comes bounding in.

He says he's started seeing different species of butterflies on the pollinator-friendly pastures.

“Nature figures it out pretty quickly,” Hartley said. “We had flowers, certainly right away. Clover came up and was flowering, and you had bees all over it.”

Hartley says the pollinators aren’t the only ones benefiting. The cows are also gaining weight on these new pastures. The native plants and legumes provide more nutrients and protein than traditional grazing grass.

“Two of our cows are 1,500 pounds, and they just look great,” Hartley said. “A couple years ago, they were a little bit leaner when we were trying to get these pastures established. It's just nice to see them nice and filled out.”

What the research says

Bahr Farm isn't the only place using pollinator-friendly pastures.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been funding a research project exploring “bee-friendly beef” since 2020. Ecologist Ben Tracy is one of the scientists on the project.

Click here to see more...

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators