Transcript: Ranching and Conservation in Namibia

presented by Ryan and Ron Klataske

Note: This is a computer generated transcription and will contain occasional errors in words or spelling

Well, thank you all very much. Happy National Prairie Day. It’s really an honor to be here. You might be wondering why. Why I’m here talking about Namibia at the Flint Hills ranching center and. It all goes. Back to Josh Hoy, who I know many of you know and many of you miss. As do I, I wish that he was here today. He invited me to come talk about Namibia. It’s a place that he wanted to visit. As you know, Josh was a Ranger and cowboy, but also someone who loved traveling and loved exploring the world. He had been. He had been to multiple countries around the world working on ranches. He also gave a talk. Here which I attended. Telling a story about traveling on horseback across the country of Kyrgyzstan with his father. And so in many ways, today is also another father, son travel story. But it’s one that, unfortunately, Josh is not going to be here to listen to. But I think of him and I’m really grateful for him inviting me to be here and grateful for all of you being here today as well. So my goal today is to tell you about African ranchers. What it’s like to be a rancher in southern Africa, specifically in the country of Namibia. Namibia is the second least densely populated country in the world, second only to Mongolia, so it’s a country with vast. Ranch lands vast rangelands, grasslands, savannas, deserts on the West Coast you have. The Namib Desert, which runs right up to the ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and on the east. You have the Kalahari Desert, so it’s really often called a land of thirst, a land between 2 desert. And as you can see here, Namibia is located in the southwestern corner of Africa, just north of South Africa and South of Angola. At one point, it was called Southwest Africa. And it gained its independence from South Africa in 1990. So it’s a really wonderful place to explore, especially for someone like me who grew up loving open spaces, loving grasslands and savannahs, and loving ranch life like we have here in the Flint Hills. So. My father and I are going to. Tell you a. Bit about our experience in in Namibia and then hopefully come back and share some similarities and differences between Namibia and the Flint Hills and and hopefully you know we can all think together what are some possible lessons that we could learn here in the Flint Hills from Africa. I often think that many times we as Americans or you know, people in the West, we often go to Africa and try and tell them how to do things. But I think after my time in Africa, there’s so much we can learn from them and bring back here and so many differences, but also so many similarities.

So, I want to start by just saying that. I grew up around conservation, as you heard. My father has worked in conservation for over half a century, and as a kid I grew up travelling along with him. As I grew up here in the Flint Hills, here’s a photo of us holding hands, walking along the road just up here at what later became the tall grass Prairie National Preserve. And throughout my childhood, I had so many adventures with my father traveling around the Great Plains on his many conservation campaigns. So it’s a it’s a place that is incredibly special to me in a place that I always knew I wanted to come back to. At the same time when I was young, I was obsessed with travel. Every chance I got I. Would. I would take off and go somewhere. Even though my parents kind of often maybe rolled their eyes or my mom says she worried about me, but maybe didn’t always say so, but I. In college I I studied in Spain in the in the Canary Islands, studied and traveled around Mexico, I taught English in China and then after college I Vagabond it around. Europe and Canada working on farms I worked on a sheep and broccoli farm in Nova Scotia right on the Bay of Fundy. I worked on a vegetable farm in France and another farm in Belgium and all these experiences, I think, gave me a unique perspective on the world. And but at the same time, also always reminded me that we have something really special. Here in the Flint Hills, so I have my two kids here today and I always knew that I wanted to come back to Kansas to raise my family. So I’m really glad to be here. So how did I end up in Namibia? Well, eventually I went to grad school at Michigan State University. I studied under a very wise and knowledgeable anthropologist named Bob Hitchcock, who also had worked for nearly half a century, advocating for the rights of indigenous people throughout the world. In particular, San Bushman, people of southern Africa. Bob told me that Namibia was one of the most beautiful places he’s ever been, with vast landscapes. Rural areas that I would probably fall in love with, and I did. I wanted to go somewhere. In grad school from to to study conservation and I wanted. To. Study grasslands and live in a place that had similarities to the Great Plains. I wanted to go and learn and bring back ideas that could be that could be applicable to the Great Plains. And so that’s why I ended up in Namibia. So my first trip there and I was still a. Kind of a relatively new new to traveling around Africa. So I showed up. I rented this little tiny car, the smallest car I’ve ever had in my life, which as you can see, is really easy to get stuck in. Sandy did. Is. So this is like my first week in Namibia with this tiny little car and I hit this ditch and had to kind of dig spend a couple hours digging my tires out before. I could make my. Way. Don’t worry, eventually I came back and I bought a pickup truck like a normal rancher wood and that made things a lot easier. But on my first trip I took my little car. When I traveled across the country from the far northwest. Part of Namibia, which is one of the most rugged and remote places in all of Africa, I visited Himba, pastoralist people who are semi nomadic pastoralists who have large herds of cattle, and I traveled with them, moving their cattle to different pastures I met. People like this guy who live. Miles and miles and miles out into one of the most remote and rugged landscapes in all of Africa. This gives you an idea of what the landscape looks like. It was hot and dusty, and this part of Namibia gets hotter than you can imagine. Rachel came to visit me and we one time we drove up to this part of the country and you know, you we don’t even bother turning the air conditioner on in the in the truck just cause it feels like you’re in a oven. But that’s just the way it is. It’s it’s it’s, it’s rugged, it’s hot. It’s a dusty, but it’s an amazing place to experience a cattle culture like this. So from the northwest of Namibia, I traveled all the way across to the northeast corner of Namibia, a place that is much different. It’s much wetter. It’s it’s the only part of Namibia where they have perennial rivers. So it’s an area of also grasslands. But this, this, this, these grasslands are often marshy and wet, and I camped.here along the Kavango River, which flows into the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and here in my little. Campsite I could lookout. At night and listen to the hippos and see crocodiles below in the river and hear the birds up above. This part of Namibia, which used to be called the Caprivi Strip, was a small area of land that stuck into central Africa and for someone who’s interested in birds and wildlife is an is an incredible place to go. It’s a international birding hotspot with hundreds of different species. Who live here. It’s also a place where both of these areas in Namibia are areas where communities have formed conservation organizations to and which community based conservation takes place. So in which communities work together to conserve wildlife and benefit from tourism. And as I was traveling back and forth between these different parts of Namibia, learning about conservation and learning about wildlife issues. I would often stay on these cable ranches. Like this one and I was always impressed that many of these ranches offered offered guest houses and guest ranches and and. Had accommodations for tourists and they had, but they would sometimes have restaurants and cooking meals, and I was amazed by this by this. Rural Ranch based tourism. And so you would also see on these ranches lots of wildlife like like the zebra here and here. And then you would I I stayed at this place, this ranch and you can see here there’s the pool and in. The background they had cattle up there. And so I became very fascinated by these ranches and also the people who owned them and lived there, people who were very similar to the people that I meet here in Kansas and the people I grew up around and in my family, these are many of the people in this part of Namibia are German Namibians. So these are descendants of the first German colonists to come to Africa. Oftentimes in the 1880s and turn of the 20th century. So they many of these, there’s there’s, well, there’s still around 30,000 German Namibians who live in Namibia and many of them speak a dialect of German called suit vest. Deutsch, which is German but a A, you know, a dialect of German that has evolved in Africa over many generations. Hi. Became fascinated and visited many of these ranchers in this part of North Central Namibia, including this guy who has a large cattle ranch but also a guest house where people come to see these petrified dinosaur tracks fossilized dinosaur tracks. And so here are some other tourists that just happened to be there that. Day and I asked him if I could interview him and stay for a day or so and learn about his operation. And of course, he said, sure, just go ahead and pitch your tent just down there. Weighs in this dusty patch. Away from the house. So I did so. I drove my little car down there and I I pitched my tent and this dusty this dusty patch under these trees and this, it was a really hot day and a really hot night. So I I took the cover off my tent so I could just look up through the mesh. Coverings and I went to bed and the stars, you know, the stars were incredible. I’ve never seen more brilliant stars than in Namibia, except for maybe the Sandhills of Nebraska, where we’ve also traveled. But Namibia is something special. So anyway, it was a hot night. I went to bed in my tent looking out at the stars in this dusty patch, and then I woke up the next morning. I looked out my tent and all around me in this dusty patch were cat tracks. Big Cat tracks just circling my tent. So you know, if I just would have opened my eyes, I would have been greeted by something quite intimidating, I would say. But as I traveled around Namibia, I learned about the history of ranching. I got to see these beautiful ranch lands like you see here, and I got to learn about these. These groups called conservancies and and Namibia. There’s two different types of conservancies. There’s. And servants use on communal land, so like the communities I described before where they have large community organizations where they manage wildlife. And tourism. But there’s also conservancies on private land, on private on private ranch land. And these are groups of neighboring ranchers who have agreed to work together to manage free roaming wildlife across the boundaries of private land. And I became fascinated by this. I I thought, well, this is really incredible. I want to learn more about these ranchers. And why they’re working together and how they’re working together and why they’ve chosen to conserve wildlife and how they integrate wildlife with cattle ranching and how they get tourists to come here and pay all this money to come stay on their ranches. And so I went back to Michigan, and I saved up some money. And then. A year later, I was back in Namibia, this time for much longer. I came back to stay for for over a year, and so I showed up on my own. This time I I bought a pickup truck like I said, not my little car that got stuck in the sand and I was back this time to stay so. My goal was to try to learn about these conservancies and to conduct ethnographic research, which means, as an anthropologist, I study humans and our hallmark method of research is called ethnographic research, which involves participating and observing in the ordinary life. Of the people you’re studying, so sort of. About immersing yourself in people’s everyday lives and interacting with them, and over time, gaining the perspective of how they see the world. So that was my goal, to try to understand these German Namibian ranchers and the conservancies that that they formed. So this map here gives you a bit of an idea about. The differences in land tenure in Namibia so that the different types of land ownership. About 45% of land in Namibia is privately owned, so these are large ranches in the north. Most of these ranches are cattle ranches and. In the South. Most of the ranches are small stocks, so goats and sheep and things like that. So the dark as you can see here, the dark red area that’s privately owned land, the yellow are national parks and other government run. Natural areas and then the green areas are the communal lands which I mentioned earlier. So these are areas in which the land is owned communally and managed communally. So as you can see, Namibia has large areas of livestock production production on private land and communal land Namibia. Most people in Namibia have some connection to livestock and private land. As you can imagine has its as you can you know, probably imagine has its origins and and European colonialism. As I mentioned it was first a German colony around 1880. So many of the German Namibians that I met their ancestors first came with the shoots Troopa the. German colonial military that came to Namibia and some of the people that I met their their land was first given to their ancestors in exchange for their military service during the colonial period. So when I showed up, I moved to a small little town in the north. Central Namibia called Ochi Marongo, and in many ways, Ochi Marongo feels like somewhere you might find here in Kansas or Nebraska and the surrounding towns as well. They’re small, dusty villages and small towns with churches and shops and. Markets, schools and Ochi Baranga was a wonderful place to live. This gives you an idea of what the landscape looks around, Osvaldo. This is. The vast range lands that surround the town, and as you can see, Bush encroachment is a major problem in Namibia and what we can talk more about that. But my research at the time was was funded by Rotary International, so I connected one of the first things I did was I connected with a local Rotary Club, which actually met had their meetings at a crocodile farm which was unique. So we’d sit and have lunch and look at the crocodiles. And many of these. Rotary members were were farmers themselves and Namibia. I should note the ranchers call themselves farmers, so no one really uses the word rancher or ranching. So if I talk about farms or farmers, that’s what I that’s what I mean. And after these being after these meetings, I’d go and drink coffee with all the older guys and hear stories of what it’s been like to, you know, to grow up and raise the families and ranch in Namibia. And this one guy here on the left. His name was Hair Stickman. He was one of the older guys and he he barely spoke any English and I barely spoke German. But somehow we always managed to have wonderful conversations. Although one time I said, I told them that I bought a new truck and I was trying to explain. I said I I bought a new bulky. That’s the word. Well, Bucky is the word for truck. Booky is a goat. So for for a long time. We had this long conversation back and forth. How my truck. But he thought I was talking about the goat that I bought, and he kept asking me. Well, like, well, are you gonna tie it up? And I’m like, why would I do that? Are you gonna eat it? What? So it’s easy to have those types of miscommunications. As you probably know, if you’re speaking in another language or trying to learn one. But her steak. John was an interesting guy. He’s the only person in Namibia that I met that actually visited Kansas. Not only that, but he visited the Flint Hills. He told me a story about how he came to Chase County. In the 1950s, and someone took him up on a hill where they had a piano, so he went and played the piano up on some hill here in Chase County, which is really incredible. And I wish I knew more of that. Story. But a number of these of these Namibian ranchers came to the US. For to visit other ranches or to buy bowls and they would fly them back to Namibia so there was often these these interesting connections between ranches and in Texas and Kansas and other places here in Namibia. And because of this German culture, there’s wonderful food in Ochi Marango so some of the strongest coffee you’ve ever had, which probably is the reason why I developed an addiction to coffee during my time there in Namibia. But also great strudels and pastries and German bread and schnitzels and all kinds of wonderful German cuisine. It didn’t take long for me to fit in an Ochi baranga within my first week. I was thrown in to to local culture on with their big carnival celebration, so within within my first week I was, you know, partying and dancing and riding on the float in the parade and and starting to fit right in. Taking from. Ochi Frango is really quite an amazing place, the German culture. Really shapes the town, and so every year they have a big Oktoberfest celebration where everybody comes together from the farms and has a, you know, a big festival and they’re clinking their beers together and eating sausages and dancing into the night. And it’s really at the heart of the of Namibian cattle country. And that’s why I wanted to be there. I wanted to be. In the heart of Namibian ranchland, where I could learn about these conservancies that I told you about. I think this picture really also highlights the interesting cultural divides or or, you know, hybridity of this area. On one hand, on the left, you see this the sign that banner advertising the upcoming October Fest. So this really gets to the, you know, the the German Namibian culture and on the right hand side. You see a banner. Promoting SWAPO, which is the Revolutionary Party that controlled the media at the time. So 1 is a, you know, a black independent Independence Party. The other is a German Namibian cultural celebration, which in a way really highlights the unique mix of people in in Namibia in this area in particular. So it didn’t take long for me to make friends and build connections. And at first when I’m when I moved to achieve orongo, I rented a room at a German boarding school, basically in town, and I got to know many of these German ranchers whose kids were coming to school and. Soon after that, I moved onto a ranch just outside of Ocv Orango where I lived and I I worked and I helped out and I took part in the normal activities of ranch life. So here they’re you’re tagging cattle and, you know, working cattle. Most as you see here here, here this rancher has a number of workers. Most ranchers in this area have farm worker communities on their ranches. So anywhere between maybe 5 and 15 workers who live in little communities on the ranch, not usually not very far away from the main. Home, Ranch Stead and many of these workers have their families who also live with them on their ranches. Uh. So in in that way, it’s quite different than here. This. This, this, this farmer was a Simon Toller breeder, so they had cattle for beef and cattle for milk. They also produced Simmental Genetics and they had trophy hunting operation. Many of these ranches. Bring in trophy hunters from around the world who come and pay to stay and to hunt wildlife on their land. And so in many ways, this hunting industry helps to support these ranches in this area. This just gives you another picture of what this ranch looked like. Like like many of his neighbors, this guy was very proud of the wildlife on his land. At one point in this area, wildlife had been decimated and recently, because of the efforts of these ranchers working together, wildlife has been returning. And so he’s been working hard to. To restore the giraffe population on his land. And one of the interesting things about giraffes is they just hang out, oftentimes in the same areas in their family groups. And so you can drive out and go check fence or go check the water water points and say hi to the giraffes. And so often times at the end of the day, we would go for drives just to go check the water and check the fences and check the gates, and we’d go and we’d pull up. And just sit and watch the giraffes and I just thought that was really amazing. And these this giraffe population had spread beyond his land, onto neighboring ranches as well, and many people in the area were were very proud of this. These are just some of the farm workers that lived on. His ranch. As. An American, an anthropologist, I was able to sort of move between these different worlds. Namibia is a very racially divided place, and many of these divides go back to the history of apartheid and colonialism and so. Even on ranches, there’s a, you know, a major division between the ranch family and the farm worker family. And many white folks don’t interact with black folks unless it’s in a working relationship. But me, I can kind of be, you know, float between everyone. So, you know, oftentimes during my research, I’d hang out with the ranchers and their family. And then I’d go and hang out with the farm workers and I get to know them. And I I’d hear their perspectives. And as an anthropologist, this this is really important. It’s really important to hear the perspectives of people who are often maybe excluded or or outside of the realm of whose whose voices are normally heard. And I just thought this House here. I thought symbolized their connection to the wildlife as well. Many of the farm workers that I met were very also very proud of the wildlife that was returning. I mean, they were doing much, much of the labor that was helping to bring back the wildlife and helping to care for the cattle. And so in many ways and one of the things I advocated for is that these conservancies and that that the benefits that come from. Hunting and tourism also flow to these often very impoverished farm worker communities. This older man on the right, for example, he, he told me a story about how when he was a kid. He would grow up playing with the the farmer, the white German farmer, and they were kids and many, many of the German ranchers, they would, they would speak the indigenous languages as well. So they grew up playing with the farm worker kids, but then often times when you know when they grow up and then the they become 18 for example and take over or work with their fathers. All of a sudden, these social relationships change and it becomes much more of sort of boss and worker relationships as you as I experience on many of these farms. But for many of the farm workers, they. They struggle with this and they, you know, they. They question why these types of social relations have to continue to persist. So I mentioned this guy because he told stories of running around as a kid playing with this farmer who’s now his boss and treats him in this sort of way. And you know, as a as anthropologist go into a place with these types of. Racial divisions and was often challenging. So here’s one example where the Conservancy came together to to help fight a wildfire. So we were sitting around. I think we were listening to the the one German Namibian radio station on the front porch when the call came in on the radio that there was a wildfire. And in in Namibia, they really worry about wildfires. Especially because of the the problem with Bush encroachment. So the radio call went out to everyone in the in the Conservancy, all the neighboring ranchers, and we all jumped in in trucks and rushed off and filled up tanks with water and grabbed our, grabbed the workers and speed off. And at one point. Well, at one point we were racing down this road. We were pinned on a fence on one side and thick brush on the other, and the fire was racing towards us and I rolled up the window as fast as I could, right as the flames hit the truck and we speed off and we we managed to get everything under control. But this is just just reminds me of one of the ways in which these ranchers work together. Uh. I made friends with lots of other ranchers in this area as well. This is one of my best friends at that time, Thorsten, who actually just was talking to the other day on WhatsApp. We still keep in touch and every year he sends me messages whenever they get rain on their on their farm and the water holes fill up and he sends me pictures of. How beautiful. Everything’s looking, but his family also raised cattle, but also took pride in the wildlife that they had. They had they installed wildlife friendly fences, so for different types of animals to go through these fences on their on their land. And they also reintroduced Springbok and had a large population of Springbok that moved freely across their ranch and neighboring ranches. And they cared for their. For their pastures and their forage and their cattle, and we spent. Many days on the farm, at one point we were when Rachel came to visit me. We were sitting on their front porch. She was facing the house and I was facing out, looking at the landscape just like this and the one of their old farm worker guys was sitting there next to us and all of a sudden he jumped up. We didn’t know what was happening, but he. Jumped up. He grabbed this whip, made from like a broomstick and like a Serpentine belt from a truck and just ran behind Rachel and smacked the snake on the head. And it was like this long spitting cobra that was coming up right behind Rachel. So that was her. That was her. One of her first encounters with Namibian wildlife. Then the guy said, well, you’re going to have to eat it. Now you know that, right? And she’s like, well, OK, I guess. But we never did. I don’t know why. Yeah. So during my research I took part. And all the different activities of ranch life, so often many days, were spent working cattle were hunting most of these of these ranches would harvest game to feed their worker communities and their families. So oftentimes they would outsource that job to me and I would go hunt and bring back meat for everyone. In this instance, I shot, I was asked to go shoot this koodoo who had been actually speared by a poacher, and I wasn’t doing very well. So I went out and and shot that animal, and then we brought it back, and everybody had a feast. This is another rancher who is one person in particular who really worked hard on combating Bush encroachment. In Namibia, it’s like the Flint Hills in many ways, in the sense that fire was a natural part of these landscapes, but as as. Fire suppression during colonial periods became more of a more of a something that was promoted. And as overgrazing became more of a problem and as fencing encircled areas, all these factors together, you know, started to really. Lead to this problem of Bush encroachment. But there’s some people who are really working hard to fight against it. This is someone who struggles with Bush encroachment, as you can see in his lands. Behind him, almost the whole areas is covered in these Acacia thorn bushes and it really as you as you know, reduces carrying capacity for cattle and for wildlife. It impacts cheetahs for example, because they poke their eyes on thorn bushes. So he has this whole community, this whole village of people that have come from central Africa and other places to come and produce charcoal by chopping up these trees and burning it and turning it into charcoal. This is just another. Branch family, who has a beautiful guest ranch where people come and stay and they take tourists out. Hunters. Here’s a hunter. Getting ready to. Go out for for his hunt. So I mentioned these conservancies. This is what I was there to study. I. Wanted. To know why and how were these groups of neighboring ranchers voluntarily working together? And what what could we learn from them? So this is what a typical Conservancy meeting looked like. Oftentimes there were 20 or 30 members, and most of the ranches in Namibia averaged around 10,000 acres. Although I met some ranchers who had over 100,000 acres. One person who had nearly 200,000 acres. So oftentimes they were very large ranches. In fact, some people had ranches that were so big they rarely ventured into certain areas, and one one way they would keep an eye out for poachers was to look for vultures. And if they would see vultures circling on one area of their. Ranch. They would know that something’s up, so they would often go check out the vultures and find perhaps a whole little group of poachers who had set up shop and were hunting game on their land. This is. What a Conservancy looks like from above. So here’s like a platen map of different ranches in the area, and all the colors show the different 4 subdivisions of this one Conservancy. So these conservancies would have meetings, and they had membership with different ranches, and they would outline all these different activities that could be performed collaboratively. So here we’re getting ready to do a game count, getting ready to go up in this in this little tiny plane which just landed and took off from like a dirt Rd. the roughest Rd. you can imagine. And they they took me up on there and this plane and we went up and it was kind of a windy day. So the planes like going like this. And my stomachs feeling a little rough. And I’m not sure I was very good at counting koodoo below. But conservancies work together to, as I said, manage land, manage fire, manage, set quotas for for game, for hunting, to they work together to reintroduce game species of various sorts. Oftentimes they’ll take down internal fences and have one large. Area that’s one large contiguous area where cattle and wildlife can move together. And. One of the interesting things about conservancies is that they have been. Remarkably successful. Increasing wildlife populations on private ranch land in Namibia and so as I mentioned at one point during colonial times, sort of like here, most of the game species were wiped out and many of these ranches had had no game at one point, and many of the ranchers saw wildlife on their land. As competition or as a threat and so much of it was killed. Something really interesting took place in the 1960s and 1970s, however, and that’s when the the the government of Namibia decided to give the ownership of game species to land owners. So they basically gave property rights to wildlife. 2 land owners, which made which made. Which really really changed things. In Namibia, this incentivized conservation and all of a sudden people started to see wildlife as something that they could potentially benefit from rather than something that was just competing with them for cattle. And so with ownership over the wildlife on their land land owners. Had an incentive to try to conserve it, so they started to well. The first thing that started to happen was that people started to put up big game fences, Big 12 foot game fences that would often enclose the wildlife on the on a ranch. But this obviously causes major problems with the flow of wildlife and and genetic diversity and bottlenecks and all types of things. So people came up with another idea which was, well, how about we work together? And how about we create these conservancies and collaborative collaboratively manage the free roaming wildlife on our land? And so. At. After a time in which there was very, very little game. Now, Namibian ranchland is full of wildlife, 80 percent, 80 / 80% of all wildlife in Namibia is on private land. These ranches that I’m describing have often 20 to 30 times more wildlife than in the national parks and the state protected area. Ranchers benefit from hunters, from tourists, from photographers, from hikers, from people who just want to come and stay in rural Namibia and eat good food and drink wine and look at the stars. And many of the ranchers I met say that their way of life is possible now because of the benefits that they get from wildlife. And so, in a way, what I found really amazing about Namibia is that these groups of neighboring ranchers worked together to create economies of scale and reshaped their whole ranging economy. That to benefit not only them but also their environment and wildlife in the process. So I’ve been there for a while and I was very excited to have my dad come and visit. As I mentioned, I grew up traveling around on adventures with my dad and now it was my turn to host him on an adventure with me so I thought I would invite you up now Dad and you could share some of your thoughts. And. I have to say he sent me like 100 photos to put in this PowerPoint and unfortunately I didn’t get many of them in in time, but I I have some photos, so we’re gonna we’re going to go through them together and we’ll we’ll share some stories and we’ll talk together. Does that sound good?

Well, let’s give it a shot.

Yeah, I like that we went camping on Conn’s farm. We went camping one night. And I was always a little bit intimidated by being out in this brush. Rocky country at night when they’re things like. Black mambas around. We we were in a in one of the hunting blinds on one occasion and and Ryan got real nervous and we had to leave. There was a black mamba coming down, you know 6 foot black snake nearby and if they bite you you only. Have time to say Hail Mary and you’re gone.

Actually, people, people in Namibia say that if you get bit by a black mamba to just say goodbye to whoever you’re with and find a nice tree and sit down beneath it and say, see you later.

So that it I don’t think Africa is near as scary as Australia, I’ve never been to Australia, but everything in Australia is poisonous. I jumped at the opportunity to take a month off in 2010 and joined Ryan. Basically, I was just tagging along with him as he went from ranch to ranch to interview ranchers about their about their management. Protocol. And this was much better in many ways than a safari, because you got to know people and the people connected to the land. And so I really greatly appreciated that. One of the things I’ve always been interested in right of way management. In Kansas, on highways. But we don’t have any signs to slow traffic down like they do. On this one ranch that where we were in a hunting, photography blind, one of my greatest thrills was to be able to see a wild cheetah on a ranch, not a cheetah in a enclosure, nor in a National Park. But here on this ranch, near came down near that farm pond.

This is this is the the water hole where I would often hunt on this one ranch. The old, the older Guy Stickman, who had came, who had. Come to the. Flint Hills he often sent me out with his World War One German rifle to go hunt for Kudo to bring back for his workers. And this is where we would often sit and look out over this water hole. This is where we experienced the black Mamba. They were sitting there in this. In this little rocky. Outcropping. When I heard a slathering sound. I look to my right and here comes the black mamba, just going right by us. And I said, Dad, don’t move. Whatever you do, don’t move. So we held still, and I think our faces turned bright, you know, bright white. And it just kept going, which we were very thankful for. Farm workers are very afraid of black mambas. They’re very often very aggressive. Black Farm workers will talk about how they’ll try to attack them in the. Back of pickup trucks. And sometimes you can even see them stand up on roads like this and look at you. So we were, we were fortunate that day.

This was a marvelous farm pond for wildlife, and Ryan tells me that when Rachel was there visiting that they went out there and they were more or less harassed by a gang of baboons who didn’t want them there. Which was kind of scary in its way. But baboons are in pretty intense critters.

They are pretty intense so that I took Rachel to this nice spot. A little romantic getaway. We were sitting there and we were surrounded by these baboons and they they the baboons will send out their like enforcer, the big guy and he’ll come forward and he’ll show his teeth and he’ll yell and scream and. And try to intimidate you and then. But at that point, you know, I’m used to baboon so I can intimidate him. Back and throw some rocks back at him so. But she she was like uh. Are we OK?

I’m glad he didn’t have that experience before he was a teenager because he probably would have showed his teeth in such at home. One-on-one other occasion. We were at Tosha National Park, which is one of a couple of days where like a safari except with just MY1 driver. And early in the morning and we were out driving and photographing wildlife and Ryan said he really had to go to the bathroom. So we headed down to this rest area. And then when we got there, there was a whole pride of lions surrounding the place. Ryan lost all interest in whatever he had to do. He said that these lions looked as if they were already well fed, so they probably wouldn’t have been hungry, but they’re still pretty intimidating. One of the other things that’s quite interesting is that these farm workers and and fellows that have their own land in many cases use donkey carts for transportation on these rural roads. And that’s that’s quite interesting. We even Ryan and I had my encouragement, even went to church there one Sunday morning and one of their. Big shift sheds that they use for a church, and then I got to go ride on one of these coffee donkey carts. And I know now that I can get around even if my vehicles all pan don’t pan out too well.

I’ll tell the next story. So we also went to a a live game auction. So some of the farms, you know, some of the farms bring in hunters, some of the farms sell meat and some game meat and some of the farms sell live game. And so we went to a live game auction where people, ranchers from all over the area came and had a big barbecue and then they had a rodeo. Which I have to say as someone from the Kansas and the Flint Hills, it wasn’t the most impressive rodeo. And uh, when so my my dad was a bull rider when he was in college, he wrote on K States Rodeo team. And when this lady who was riding this animal barefoot fell off in like 3 seconds, he says, well, I think I better get out there and show him how to do it. And I was like. Dad, just hold your horses. I don’t think we need anybody riding bulls today. But so I had to kind of hold him back, although he was, he was itching to go.

One of the things that I thought was interesting was that you could hang on with both hands to the to the strap. So I figured there’s a much better chance that I could stay on than when I was bringing my bull and that a Hearn field house at K State. Ah, this particular writer was a lady. You’ll notice she’s barefoot, you know, no spurs. No boots. That’s how it goes. I actually wanted to, but you know, as as you get older and your kids get in control. They do exactly what you did to them.

Here’s a roadside picture. One of the things we’ve been trying to. To and we succeeded to a large degree, was having the Kansas Department of Transportation reduce unnecessary mowing along some of the state highways for birds and pheasants and other wildflowers and things of that nature. Here’s the same sort of thing, and. Namibia.

Just some pictures of ranchers that we did it we visited. I found it interesting to observe the dogs that they had in many cases. For the most part, they have rat terriers. Which Jack Russell Terriers that that helped to patrol their homesteads for snakes.

So we also had the chance to visit a number of what are called resettlement farmers in the area. So these are people who are formerly landless people whose whose families land had been taken from them during previous decades and who had been given pieces of land from from the government. To try to resettle and basically make a go at. It. Many of these.sparse.miies of land were much smaller than the ranches that, you know, the the white Namibians ranched on these were often small. Small, small areas, small homesteads, oftentimes very, Bush encroached and poor forage quality, but many of these resettlement farmers lived right next to these ranches, so this area that I have been describing was often. Often scattered with these resettlement farms, and in some areas there was large areas of resettlement farms altogether, and so we had a chance to go visit this guy here with a nice smile. His name. Was Adolf he was one. The most charismatic intelligent resettlement farmers that I had ever met and he had seen, he’s seen over his lifetime the changes that have been taking place on Namibian ranchland the the repopulation of wildlife, and the way that tourists come and the way that all these ranchers benefit from tourists and benefit from wildlife. And he wanted to benefit. To do and so one of the things that he wanted more than anything was to form a resettle a Conservancy. Of resettlement farmers and he wanted to be able to work with his white neighbors. And so I spent a lot of time talking to him about his goals and his vision. And one of the things I’ve advocated for is that ranchers and Namibia work closely with resettlement farmers to try to also expand the, you know, the scale. Of conservancies, but also to try to provide benefits to these rural communities who are in many ways much more impoverished than the ranches around them.

One of the things that Ryan suggested, and I’m pictured here in the center of these gentlemen, is that they respect age and so that’s why I got the set there with these guys. I’m trying to bring that message home but. Haven’t been too successful here. All righty.

Like how agile you were back then.

Yeah, I could get in out of a tent. Uh, I’ve had a tent like that set up on Bill Brownings ranch photographing pretty chickens. One of the things that I thought was incredible was how friendly everyone was, how friendly the white. Ranchers slash farmers were and as how friendly the. Native resettlement folks and farm workers, all of them. I I’ve just never felt that everybody wasn’t as much harmony as and and had as much hospitality as they did in in Namibia. Here’s a picture of a a worker for Adolph who is pictured. And that lives on his his property.

And Adolf built this house brick by literally brick by brick. He collected these bricks from nearby farms over a period of years and built this house brick by brick. He collected old solar panels that ranchers had thrown away. And refurbished them. He had all these crops and goats and cattle. And. You know, I often I often throw in this picture to just show that this is sort of the condition that many resettlement farmers are living in. So for many people. Gaining a piece of land and trying to make a go at it is an incredible challenge, especially in the face of Bush encroachment. However, as as he mentioned, as my dad mentioned, there’s such joy and such hospitality, and I’m often reminded of this picture of these small resettlement former kids and kids of resettlement farmers who just have so much fun and you know now that I am raising. My kids, you know, I think about how good childhood childhood is for many kids in Namibia, even on resettlement farms like this where they can run around and play and explore freely. And this is just one more example of some efforts to combat Bush encroachment. So this is this is an operation at the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which is a non profit organization in Namibia and they have a large, they have a large scale Bush clearing programs in which they bring in. Machines that are much larger than these actually that are like giant combines, basically that will clear this brush. They chop it up and one of the things they’ve been doing is they’ve been taking this. You know this mulch and putting it in. These wood blocks that burn for like up to 8 hours and so many people like these resettlement farmers, they still cook over fires. So having these really long lasting fire logs is is a really nice thing and it helps to, it helps to clear these ranch lands and improve cheetah habitat.

And I’m looking for volunteers to do this on our place. We have an excess number of cedar trees and a little more Dogwood than we need. So if you’re interested, please talk to me after the presentation.

OK, one of the things that I think became very obvious was that, you know, a century or more of fire suppression has made the land less desirable for many grassland species. You know, cheetahs in particular. But also many of the grassland birds, cheetahs can’t run through these thorn bushes because they could get them in their eyes. And that’s a real problem for cheetah conservation. There’s an organization. Their OCI brongo, called the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which is run by an A lady that would, I think, originally from Oregon and she’s really done an awful lot for cheetahs and cheetah conservation there. In addition to a relative absence of fire. Which probably requires some strategies that go beyond what we have to deal with is. The that I noticed that they they don’t use bulbar fences in Namibia, they’re all smooth wires, have more post closer together, but they have smooth wires and I kind of like that idea. I don’t. I don’t like working with Barb wire myself, but it works to keep livestock in. And closed. The other thing that I noticed is that. Well, they refer to themselves as as farmers rather than ranchers. And there’s one thing that we have in our ranching culture in America, particularly in the central Great Plains and and southwest, is the use of horses. And you see very little evidence of use of horses. For livestock around the round up and movements and stuff in in Namibia.

And their ranchers often wear shorts.

Yeah. Yeah. The ranchers themselves wear shorts. I don’t think the workers do very much, but I don’t. I don’t wear shorts and that kind of country even here.

I’ll take it from here and then you can come. And share some more thoughts if you.

OK.

So all of this brings us back to the Flint Hills, and these are two photos from our land. In Pott County, north of Manhattan, and I think a lot about, well, I thought a lot about, well, what, what can we learn from Namibia and what can we learn from conservancies? And I think actually we can learn a lot. I think it’s quite inspiring that all these different groups of neighboring ranchers came together and formed voluntary. Associations to manage wildlife and work together. Other and increase the scale of habitat management. The scale of ranching and the scale of cooperation. And you know, I think well, so recently I’ve been attending a number of grazing workshops here in the Flint Hills and I hear a lot about burn associations and. I think about burn associations and their similarities to conservancies and in many ways they’re exactly the same. They’re groups of ranchers, neighboring ranchers who. Come together form some sort of management plan and agreement to work together, but I think we can actually go beyond that. I think that we can learn from that from Namibia and not only can we work, can ranchers work together to, to, to burn and to manage fire, but we can work together to. You know, manage habitat and reintroduce species and perhaps think creatively about tourism opportunities and hunting. And bringing visitors here to experience the wonderful ranch lands that we have, just like in Namibia. And so I think I think conservancies are actually a great model for the Flint Hills and a great model for Kansas and the Great Plains. And this is a map of Manhattan. You know, as all of you know, we are facing major threats in the Flint Hills and elsewhere in terms of Woody and. Approachment and I think it’s going to continue to pose a greater risk for places like Manhattan. I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve been to Manhattan recently, but if you drive north northwest of town or in these other red areas, you’ll see the extent of cedar encroachment and you know, growing number of ranchettes that spread out into the countryside and all of this. You know, suburban sprawl and landscape change is only going to continue to increase.

The threat of wildfire and reduce the productivity of grazing lands, and so I think in a lot of ways, what we need now are conservancies here to help deal with this threat, but also to help find other avenues for providing sustainable livelihoods on ranch land in the Flint Hills. I think a lot about. How well Namibia has done in terms of nature based tourism and wildlife based land uses this is. A photo from two years ago I I LED a tour with Ed and Sill, who are back here. We we LED a tour together of Kansas, focusing on the tallgrass Prairie and mixed grass Prairie for people from all over the country. And we took them here to Matfield, Green and here we are walking on the on the art trail just down here at Matfield Station. People. These many of these folks have traveled all around the world. Some of them have literally been to Timbuktu, you know, and but some, but many of them have never been to the Prairie, you know. And so people want to come see what we have here. And I think many people from Kansas don’t even understand or don’t even realize how special. The Flint Hills are and how special what we have is. So I think there’s so much potential here for for incorporating nature based. Tourism and wildlife based tourism. Into into our ranching economy and this is a picture of me and my wife and kids floating in a we’re we’re we’re tanking on the Kalamas River in Nebraska, which is one of my favorite Prairie rivers that weaves through the Sandhills of Nebraska. And you and you just get in a livestock tank like this, which I often say is great for kids and drunk people, either one. I have incorporated Namibian rituals into my life like the sundowner. So in Namibia on all these ranches, it’s very common in the evenings to go drive up on some hills somewhere and bring a cooler and watch the sun go down and enjoy each other’s company. And this is now. One of our favorite activities, my kids love to eat watermelon up on our we have a watermelon hill which is this hill that looks out into this valley and that’s where we go and eat watermelon and we love taking friends up into the Prairie. For our Flint Hills sundowners. I also love cooking over fires. That’s a Namibian thing that I’ve added. Did. So in many ways, ranch life into Namibia is is the good life and we can learn about that and incorporate those things here. And we do many of those things. Here. As well I. I feel so happy that my kids get to grow up around farm and ranch life and get to explore the Prairie and get to run around in the hills and the same creeks and Woodlands that I got to as a kid. And that they get to grow up around livestock. I’ll just mention I for the past few years I’ve been part of a research project on the benefits and risks of growing up around livestock, and this comes from really amazing research that shows that kids who grow up around livestock, in particular from the time in utero to the time of age of three, have stronger cardiovascular systems, stronger immune systems. Lower rates of skin conditions, lower rates of asthma. So we have all, there’s all these biophysical benefits along with all the social and cultural benefits that that come from growing up around cattle on farms and ranches. So, since Namibia, I’ve continued to work with farmers and ranchers, as Andy mentioned in the in the introduction on the anthropologist now and I continue to practice anthropology as a consultant and I work with the University of Nebraska Medical Center and other health and AG research centers. I work on large cattle feed yards and I spent time on dairy farms and the meat packing plant workers and one of the most interesting things that kind of ties this all back together is that on my work in my work on cattle feed yards in Nebraska and Kansas and Texas in this area, the. I continue to meet white Africans who are here working in the plains in American agriculture, and so I’ve met many of these S most of them are from South African or South Africans, but I’ve met Namibians and people from Zimbabwe and many of these, in contrast to the German Namibians that I worked with. Many of these speak are are Afrikaans speakers, people that are often called Afrikaners, and I met many of them in Namibia as well, but many of these Afrikaners are now coming here to work on feed yards and work on custom cutting crews and ranches. And I think it’s important that we. Understand their culture and where they’re coming from and the context of land and and why they’re arriving here. Many of them are coming because they fear the threat of rural violence in South Africa, the threat of land reform, many of them struggle to find economic. Opportunities in their areas, but most importantly, many of them fear some of the changes that the governments in southern Africa are proposing in terms of. In terms of land reform, but also just the the level of rural crime. And so I think it’s important to understand these people and and how they’re come and why they’re coming here and yeah, and also just to know, I think that they’re oftentimes incredibly skilled. They have many of them have backgrounds on ranches and farms and. And mining and manufacturing. And they’re such interesting people and they’re here in our communities. And so I just encourage you to keep keep an eye out for them and say hello. And you can tell them that now you know something about Southern Africa. So this comes to the end of our journey to Namibia.

I want to thank you all very much. I really appreciate you being here on National Prairie Day to hear about grasslands and savannahs and ranchlands of Namibia. If you have any questions, I’m more than happy to answer them and I’m sure my father Ron is as well. So thank you. Very much.