2016 MBG Science Conference
Denny Iversen and Jennifer Schoonen                                                                                                                                               How can rancher-led collaboratives move into the future: dealing with succession and change.

Introduction by Ben Brown:  “Our next presentation is by two friends from Montana.    They work for an outfit called the Blackfoot Challenge Inc. in the Blackfoot River Valley in South Central Montana.     Denny Iverson is a rancher from Potomac, Montana.    His partner Jennifer Schoonen is going to follow up.  Jennifer has been a Blackfoot Water Steward since 2013, and has worked for the National Forest Foundation and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.   She is a native of Arizona and got her master’s degrees in Journalism and Natural Resources Management from the University of Arizona.  Denny and Jennifer will be talking about how rancher-led collaboratives can move into the future.”
Denny:  “It’s truly an honor to be down here in Arizona.    When I left Potomac on Monday morning to get on the airplane it was ten below zero.    The day before we had had nothing but trouble; the tractor wouldn’t start, we were late trying to get the cows fed, and couldn’t get to church because we didn’t finish feeding cows until noon.   To be going to what we thought would be sunny Arizona was great!    But apparently we brought some moisture with us (it was raining outside) and everybody here is happy about that.    I notice the crowd has thinned a little bit, so apparently my reputation has preceded me down here.   At any rate, Jennifer is going to give an overview via PowerPoint of how our organization, The Blackfoot Challenge, is structured and how it has grown over the years.   And we have some pretty dramatic slides of some of the conservation work that we have done.
     Normally how this works is they call the Blackfoot Challenge and ask us to put on a presentation like this, and say, ‘But hey, could you bring a landowner along too.’    So we draw straws and one of us landowners gets to go, and these guys put it all together.   Our staff is the heart and soul of the organization.    They give us landowners all the credit, but without our staff we would be nothing.    I know that as the Malpai moves forward and is looking at more staff they will find the same.    So I will turn it over to Jennifer to get the show on the road.  I am hoping there will be discussion at the end because we are learning and I hope I can learn something from you all today too.”
Jennifer:  “Thank you all for welcoming us here.   For me this is a real honor and something like a full circle visit, as I grew up in the White Mountains of Arizona, went to school at UA, and have been working in conservation in Montana  for some 20 years now.     So it is nice to make the connection.    I also was thinking about my perceived differences in the landscapes, people, and communities.   But this morning those differences were sort of wiped from my mind, and I realized how similar we really are.   We have these little differences- like we live next to Canada and you live next to Mexico- but in essence we are all sort of working from the same playbook.
     Here’s a little slideshow to give you some background on Blackfoot Challenge...and a quick recap.   We were asked to come here to talk a little about organizational succession and how the Blackfoot Challenge has grown in its 20 some year existence.  We are about the same age as Malpai Group but we have more staff at this point and a little different structure.  There are questions we wrestle with all the time with our staff and board, so...we are hopefully not coming up here as ‘experts’ but just with a story to tell.   And hopefully, too, there are a few things we can share that might be helpful and Denny and I will go home with a lot of great lessons for our own organization.
Slide:  Here to give you some perspective is a slide of our watershed in the great state of Montana.   We are sitting on the west side of the Continental Divide.   Not too far above us is Glacier National Park and not too far below is Yellowstone National Park.    We have about a 1.5 million acre watershed.   Earlier today we saw some slides about the complicated nature of your conservation and landscapes, with all the different ownerships and   different ecological characteristics.    We have the same issues.  The Blackfoot covers three counties, seven rural communities and a bunch of different management classifications.      The dark green areas are our 80% forested area, so we have a lot of forestland, and then at the bottom the yellow and light green are mostly irrigated crop and grass lands.
Slide:   This shows how our ownership pattern is a real mix of public and private; private ranches, a lot of Forest Service, BLM, state lands, conservation lands and easements, and tribal lands not too far from us.   So there is a lot of diversity in ownership and management.  When the Blackfoot Challenge first started up  as an idea one of the early players  in the group said...’This is going to be a BIG challenge’...hence our name the Blackfoot Challenge.
Slide:  A snapshot of that diversity of our landscape that makes our job a bit more complicated.   At the top are wilderness and alpine forest areas...all the way down to the foothills... then wetlands and then croplands, rangelands and the bottom lands.
Slide:  Wildlife...is one of the things that makes the Blackfoot really special, but also makes our jobs more complicated.    We have constant ebbs and flows of different wildlife issues.   Our programs have to deal with endangered species.   We have to deal with everything from great big predators, such as grizzly bears and wolves...all the way down to threatened bull trout in the upper range...and then to some even more tiny species.    We have trumpeter swans and a swan restoration program in our watershed.   We have always had elk, but now we have new issues evolving around elk deprivation and elk concentrations in the agricultural areas.”
Denny:   “I might interject a really interesting point here....With the re- introduction of the swans and the return of the wolves...we now have all of the species that Lewis and Clark documented on Merriweather Lewis’  return trip through the Blackfoot.”
Jennifer:   “Just looking back to the early days of the Blackfoot... and the things that got the discussions going in our local communities...we see an obvious recurring theme of land use change and increasing pressure on the landscape.   That started to get some of the communities nervous about what might happen to their landscape.
Slide:   Recreation...this is a big deal for us.    That’s the big Blackfoot River as it looks in July, with fishing and floating.    We are not too far from a big university with lots of college students having a great old time with their floating coolers of beer.   That creates its own set of conflicts and challenges with the different uses of the landscape.
Slide:   Mining...We have an interesting legacy of mining and resource extraction in the landscape.     In the 1970’s a major dam burst at the headwaters of the Blackfoot, and it released contaminated tailings all the way down the river.    That is one of the big environmental impact events that happened, and 20 years later it was still on the minds of the people starting the Blackfoot Challenge.  
Slide:   Grazing....I did get the memo that I had to have the fence line picture in my presentation, so, yes; grazing and private land stewardship is one of the things we talk about with our landowners.
Slide:   Timber...    With so much forest in our landscape,  timber harvest has been a   traditional economic driver in our part of the world.   Initially the conversations were about how it was sustainable.    Now we talk more about wildfire risk as more and more people start building out to the fringes of the forest, and then how to sustain timber as an economic piece of what supports our communities.      We have an operating mill in one of our communities, but week to week we wonder how much longer we will actually have that mill.
Slide:    Leafy spurge....This was something all of us in the Blackfoot could agree we DIDN’T like.    It was probably one of the first areas of agreement in our community, and a really easy issue to tackle.  To this day we have a really active program of weed management together with the land owners.  
Slide:   How the Challenge got started.....Our organization was founded in 1993.    Right around that time, with all the other issues floating around in folks’ minds, American Rivers, which is a national   conservation organization, had designated the Blackfoot as one of the ten most endangered rivers in the country.    And that got people wondering what was wrong with their river.  Why was our river so endangered?   It sparked more conversations about what our communities could do about it.  That was an important moment in the early discussions of the Challenge.  That led right away to the strategy of town hall, community style meetings, much like what you guys have used in this region.  It’s really important to the Challenge to talk to the communities about what they care about...what their priorities are.    And then we sort of ‘tease out’ what we can work on and where there are zones of agreement.  After that we let the communities be the drivers about what the Challenge can help them accomplish.”
Denny:  “To accomplish that, Dave Maddox one of our Board members...came up with the ‘80-20 rule.’  Generally we can all agree on about 80% on whatever topic you throw out there, but we get hung up on that 20% that we can’t agree on it.  And then we end up spending all our time trying to change that 20% instead of building on that 80%.   It reminds me of another speaker talking about how 80% of people in general can usually get along, but that there is always that 20% who never can.   It’s a good rule to live by and sometimes we do find ourselves getting hung up on that 20%.    Then we say ‘Whoa...wait... let’s go back to the 80%’...and pretty soon we find that other 20% doesn’t matter anymore.    It’s an important thing for any collaborative conservation organization to keep in the back of your mind as a good rule of thumb.”
Jennifer:  “That led to this fairly simple, straightforward mission statement formed in 1993...  
 Slide:  ‘The Blackfoot Challenge coordinates efforts that will conserve and enhance the natural resources and rural way of life in the Blackfoot water shed for present and future generations.’    I’ll circle back to that ’rural way of life’ piece towards the end here, because it’s a really critical piece of the mission statement.  
     We are all working together to...keep things much as they are... both for the communities and for the natural resources there.  Our community- based approach to conservation means we lead with the community values.  They tell us what they are interested in and what is important to them.   We have conversations with them before we ever launch into any program of work at all.  We have the 80-20 rule we have come to live by.  All our meetings are open.    We have lots of partners in the watershed as you can see from the maps on the slides:  federal, state, private companies, academic-university interests, community leaders and our landowners.   We invite all to attend our meetings.
Slide:     This is the coordinating framework we have created.    A lot of what we do is coordinate...which sounds kind of boring but really turns into really great stuff on the ground.   That framework includes committees that are led and run by stake holders.   Board members sit on many of these committees.  They are the groups that make most of the decisions, and we as staff and coordinators use them to help us accomplish and direct our work.    Of course we support everything with good science, so we like to see good science at work.
Slide:     Leadership is something I threw in because it is so important.    We’ve been asked to go talk with and mentor neighbors to help them manage their watersheds and drought issues.    It does not always work, and I think the missing piece a lot of times is Leadership.  We have some pretty courageous people up there, as you do down here, who are willing to stand up and bring their neighbors to the table.    I believe that’s ultimately a really important key to the success of keeping the conversations going and the momentum going.     One thing that concerns me the most over the long term is how to keep those leaders engaged and mentor the next generation of leaders for your organization.
Slide:  This is a quick snapshot of our Board make-up....All the partners that are working in the landscape are represented on the Board.  For those agencies that have restrictions on Board service for their employees we call them Board Partners and they can come to Board meetings and fully participate.
Slide:  The Conservation Strategies Committee...This was one of the first and our longest working committee.   A driving force behind their early work was the changing land ownership and the potential for subdivision and loss of agricultural land.   This committee doesn’t meet quite as regularly any more, but they did a lot of good work as you will see soon.
Slide:  The Blackfoot Watershed in 1996 and in 2011...Conservation lands are in RED.   Conservation lands have really increased since 1996, and there are a lot more RED lands to be added in some areas since the 2011 map.    These are lands that were just recently acquired by The Nature Conservancy and will eventually go into some form of conservation status.    At the time the 2011 map was drawn we said about 70% of the watershed was placed in some sort of conservation status, with most of that as a working landscape.  We have a community conservation area where we do timber harvests and also lease it out to grazing.     We want to retain the sort of traditional, sustainable, natural resource use that has been there.
Slide:  Weed Committee...We continue to this day to have a weed committee that works on implementation of weed treatment projects across the watershed, and it is really active and important.
Side:  Water Resources Committee... This is really my bailiwick.  We have a drought management program.  We have a requirement through a state owned in- stream flow right that restricts use of water when the river drops to a certain level.   We manage that whole process to work with the individual landowners to have individual drought plans so they can cut back on their irrigation water use when flow is low.  And this is.....to protect native fish...the Bull trout and Westslope cutthroat trout.”
Denny:    “Just to expand on that...I have a real senior water right, so I don’t need to participate.   Someone asked me last night how we got someone like me to participate when we don’t need to.   The cool thing about the Blackfoot is that most all of us are related in some form or fashion.    My in-laws through marriage have a larger ranch up the Blackfoot and they are ‘junior’ to those in-stream flows.    So if I want to see them stay in business, I can cut back a bit and so can my neighbors and we can keep that river level above the Fish and Game trigger numbers.    This is the first year in about 20 years that Fish and Game had to finally make the call.    We had a really severe drought this year.   All our best planning for water conservation and drought still wasn’t quite enough, but it got us far enough through the summer that most of us still had a crop.   They might not have had quite as much grazing in the fall, but we all got through the worst part of it anyway.”
Jennifer:  “One other quick thing...to show how these programs are constantly in transition.    Our nearby Indian tribe, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai, has recently acquired the in-stream flow right for our watershed.  That goes into effect about nine years from now.    It changes the priority date to a much earlier date.    So it will make a whole lot of ranchers ‘junior.’    We will be working really hard with our land owners over the next few years to help them comply.    The tribes have said they really like what we do in terms of a voluntary conservation and they don’t want a more regulatory model, so we are working to build a good strong partnership with the tribal entity to work together on that.
Slide:  Wildlife Committee....Recently we have started to see the Grizzly bears moving down into the bottoms of the Blackfoot more regularly, and then the wolves have returned to our part of the world as well.     Both of these events could have been huge problems, both for ranchers and for the critters themselves.    A few years ago (2003?) the NRCS gave us a grant to start experimenting with strategies to reduce predator conflicts.    I keep thinking back to the slides this morning... where the strategy was to kill as many critters as possible!    Since starting our strategies we have reduced Grizzly bear conflicts by over 94%.    This has been through basically a few key strategies.    One of our strategies is removal of carcasses, particularly during calving season.    We take them to a composting facility so there aren’t those attractants on the landscape to bring the predators in.    We work with electric fencing as well around high probability attractants such as calving yards and chicken coops.
Slide:  Here you see photos of our range riders.   This is another of our predator control strategies.    We have a few range riders employed during the key spring- summer season.    They are out watching predator movements and staying in touch with the landowners.    They let ranchers know where the predators might be moving, and if the cows are looking fine and calm or if they are bunched up in a corner because something might have happened.    That’s a really important relationship piece for what we do.  The person running that program is highly respected by the landowners and has good relationships with them.  That has helped us live peacefully...with Grizzlies and wolves.
Slide:  Education Committee...a pretty recent thing and we don’t do a lot of it, but we also realize that we need to mentor our next generation.    We work with the local schools and provide them opportunities.   Our schools are small and have a lot of flexibility.   One school has just eight kids, and they can come out with me for example on water quality and stream monitoring trips, or swan release day every year.   We give them little bits of education throughout the year...to be sure our next generation of landowners really understands and appreciates the landscape they have grown up in.
Slide:  Forestry Committee...does mostly thinning and fire risk reduction projects around homes and wild land-urban interface areas.
Slide:   In 2013, at our 20th anniversary, we went back to our communities and asked them how we were doing.    What do you like that we have done?   What do you think we need to focus more on?   And this slide shows what they said.  There is real concern about the economic future of our watershed.  How do we get opportunities for the kids to come back?   How do we make sure we can keep people on the land and keep it sustainable and still provide a living for people?   We worked with Headwaters Economics   to produce a paper to define our local demographics and opportunities and look for ways that the Blackfoot Challenge could support the communities in their goals to improve their economic outlook.”
Denny:  “So how do we keep this going?  This is always on our minds now.   We all know how agency folks come and go.   It doesn’t diminish their desire to be on the landscape or their land ethic; it’s just the circumstances of their work that they get moved around.    And we know we will always be working with new agency folks.  But our core group is getting grayer and balder and longer in the tooth.   We didn’t think about that ten years ago because we were just kids...under 50!    But now that we are mostly over 50 it is something to really think about.  
     There are a lot of elements to this.    There is the Institutional Knowledge that I have been inspired to write down now.  I’m doing it for the ranch.  My wife has...said I need to start writing stuff down.   She reminds me our kids will be coming back one day and I have all that stuff in my head.    I know when to turn the water on or turn the bulls out, but the kids don’t!  She reminds me that if something happened to me tomorrow all that knowledge is lost.     So, I started writing it down.
      It’s not rocket science or brain surgery, or whatever that term is...(I always get that wrong!).   I just took a spiral notebook and started with January.   January was easy.   It just took a minute; get up every morning, make sure there is water that isn’t frozen, feed the cows, work on things in the shop, then maybe go to town or go to a movie.   That’s January.     Someday I will go back and edit things a bit.   Like where I said ‘the way we do things around here is...because I said so’...I will try to edit to say...’because that’s what works, but feel free to try new things.’
     My nephew came back to the ranch about 3 years ago and he said ‘Wow, this is going to be a steep learning curve for me,’ and I said ‘Why, you grew up here?’  And he said, ‘Yes, but I was in school all day and playing sports and you and dad were doing all the work and I didn’t pick any of it up.   I was too young to care.’  I was telling someone the other day about this blue notebook that I am writing for my kids, and he said ‘Can I have a copy of that?’  So it is gratifying to know that he wanted that stuff written down as well.
     I think that organizations like you and us need to write things down as well.   We have kept pretty good track of how and where we started and where we came from, but we haven’t written down and captured very well things like how to develop  and keep trust; with agencies, folks in town, hunters.   More important than that, at some point you are going to lose that trust and we need to know how to build it again and get it back.    We need to know how to be humble enough to know you have lost that trust, and that it’s your fault and not theirs.  And then we need to know how to humbly go to them and say ‘We really screwed up.  Will you give us a second chance?’
     We have had to do that sort of humbling a number of times over a number of issues.    When wolves came into our landscape there were efforts to delist them or control them in different ways.    A lot of the ranchers came to us and said ‘You guys at Blackfoot Challenge gotta do something about this.’   They were primarily talking to us landowners.   So we agreed to set up a meeting and coordinate it.    Some 15-20 of us met and they kept saying ‘you guys gotta’...’ you guys gotta come up with a strong stand on wolves.’     And I was kinda in their camp.   But somewhere along the way one of the ranchers said ’What do you mean by YOU GUYS?    This challenge is about US.   It dawned on us then that everyone in the community was a member of this challenge, and the challenge was for all of us, not just the Blackfoot Challenge.  This was really gratifying to have another rancher stand up and say it’s US.
     In the end Blackfoot really didn’t do anything.    We basically understood that it was inevitable that we were going to have wolves, and we should be focusing our efforts on helping our landowners, cattlemen, sheep producers and our neighbors deal with the inevitable wolf.  We’ve been able to do that pretty well with our programs and we didn’t lose any trust through that.    But if we had gone the other direction we would have lost trust with Defenders of Wildlife who help us the carcass pickup program.   We would have lost trust with some landowners that felt wolves have a place in the landscape...and who are we to say they don’t and eliminate them?
     We were in a meeting one time and talking about grizzlies, but wolves were coming into the landscape at that time and the conversation turned there.    Oh boy... the conversation changed quickly.   It became...’oh my God we’re going to have wolves!’  They were in a place where they couldn’t see beyond wolf killing cow.    But I interrupted to say... ‘Well, wait a minute guys.   Those wolves may become our best friends.’    I explained that we have a huge elk problem here.    They have habituated themselves to the valley bottoms and everyone blames it on the wolves, but it was happening long before the wolves.    The elk are eating us out of house and home, so if these wolves behave themselves and just prey on deer and elk, they may be our best friends.     I am sure they were still thinking. ..’Boy, aren’t you Pollyannaish!’    But the point is we are trying to continually maintain that trust.
     Now, how do we pass on all that institutional knowledge and trust?    I don’t know.  We are faced with the same thing.  I know what I am doing right now.   When my nephew came back to the ranch recently his dad told him how he and uncle Denny went to a lot of meetings...’so get over it.    We won’t be here all the time.’    I followed that up with...’So will you if you are smart.   Get yourself involved in this community.    Join the fire department or whatever.’   And I drug him into the Blackfoot Challenge meetings,  and now he is even beginning to drink the cool aid [laughter] and  get involved.
     Land ethic is not inherited.   Your kids inherit the genes you pass on to them.  I didn’t know who Aldo Leopold was until I was 40 something.  I was asked to speak at some big thing at the University of Montana because it was the anniversary or something of Aldo Leopold and I said ‘sure.’    But then I went home and said to myself ‘Crap, I better read up on who this Aldo Leopold guy was!’  
     I came to conservation, and a conservation ethic that I could identify, late in life.   I was always doing it.    I felt I was ranching and doing things on the land for the right reasons; but putting a name on it, like ‘land ethic’ was an important step.  My kids ask me why I do such and such, and I can say because it’s the right thing to do.   If they ask why I don’t  graze the riparian areas in the spring I can explain that the animals won’t just graze on the grass, but will go over and chew on the willows... and pretty soon you don’t have any willows to protect the stream... and now the stream bank is eroding.   They weren’t just picking that up.    They wanted to know why I did it that way.
     So I think it’s important as organizations like ourselves and the Malpai to get the kids involved somehow.   First we need to get them back to the ranch.   But even if we can’t get them back to the ranch we can get them remotely involved.  They don’t have to in the landscape or living on the ranch to be able to participate and carry on the traditions of your organization.  There is tremendous stress in trying to do that.    But we can start planning ahead to think about ways to slowly incorporate these kids into what we are doing; getting them on a committee,  making more opportunities for the kids to participate, encourage the kids to come to meetings and to get their friends to come.   They may have no connection to the land other than that they snowmobile there occasionally.   We need them involved, no matter why they love the land.    So don’t discount anyone.
Now I’d like to open this up for questions.”
[Questions]
Q:   What is the total number of inhabitants in your planning area?
Jennifer:  “It’s about 9000 in the total community.”
Denny:  “My community is the farthest down the block, but it’s only about 20 miles from the urban Missoula area which is some 100,000 people just in the city. The subdivision pressure is pretty high.”
Q:  How do you fund yourselves?
Jennifer:  “Our funding is pretty diversified, which is important.    We started out with a lot of federal and state dollars based on the partnerships we developed in the watershed, and we still rely on that a lot.    We have a lot of private foundation dollars and individual giving.    I came from a fundraising background before I was with the Blackfoot, and I thought one of the most unique things the Challenge had done was their work with agency partners...like Fish and Wildlife.    Those agencies actually pitch in and help finance positions such as mine to coordinate things on the ground   We also have a lot of shared positions/salaries with the county board and local organization chapters.”
Q:  inaudible
Denny:  “A lot of that RED land (on the slides) was former timber land and the big timber companies owned it.   Through three different acquisition phases with The Nature Conservancy we consequently disposed of that land to neighboring ranches or agencies or whatever.    In just the Blackfoot watershed it approaches a couple hundred thousand acres or more.  TNC and the Land and Water Conservation Fund were big players in getting the land over into Forest Service or BLM ownership.    In my neighborhood there were some 34,000 acres where our community came together after TNC bought it and we went to our state legislature...and asked if it could go into state ownership.    We got a general obligation bond through our state legislature to buy it.   It went through both houses with great support.    Our private ranches work with a great variety of land trusts; from TNC to USFW easement programs, to our state agency Fish Wildlife and Parks, two or three local land trusts, and the Montana Land Reliance.”

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