Grassland Ecosystems: Cows, Bees, and the Hidden Roles of Dung Beetles

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guests Dr. Ryan Schmid and Katya Busenitz from the Ecdysis Foundation. In this conversation, we discuss the relationships between grazers and bees, both honeybees and native pollinators. Ryan is a research scientist in charge of rangeland programs around North America, and Katya is a graduate assistant assisting with the foundation's research projects.

Andy:

Katya and Ryan, thanks so much for coming to the talk. Please introduce yourself.

Katya Busenitz:

Hi, I'm Katya Busenitz. I'm a master's student studying honeybees.

Ryan Schmid:

And I'm Ryan Schuchat. We're both at the Ecdysis Foundation here, and I studied dung beetles and beneficial insects for ranchers.

Andy:

What came first, the cattle or the bees?

Katya Busenitz:

So I got thrown into bees. I've never been, I've never worked with bees before. And I came out here to Ecdysis, where we study agroecology and regenerative agriculture, and our boss, John, just threw me out there. He was like you’re going to work with the bees. This is a hive tool, and this is a suit. So I got thrown out there. So for me the bees came first, and then Ryan's been doing ranching, ranching stuff for a while.

Ryan Schmid:

Yeah, I grew up on a small cow-calf operation in Northwest Iowa, so that's where I first got interested in cattle and livestock management and took a weird turn studying insects for quite a while. It's been bizarre that it came back full circle now. Now I can combine those two things.

Andy:

Yeah, that's awesome.

Katya Busenitz:

Yeah, he went from the biggest animal in the landscape to the smallest animal in the landscape and brought them together.

Andy:

It's like one of those things that's not unsurprising, like everything's connected, and you know, even from a very fundamental level, you think about, OK, you need insects to break down cow dung. There must be a correlation between the landscape and the ruminants on the landscape and how that impacts the diversity of the bugs on the landscape. As a farmer who does mob grazing and has some bees, it makes sense when you start thinking about it. My first thought was around this idea of okay, if I'm trying to make each better, what's the best option?

Around cattle, letting grasses grow a little bit bigger might reduce bloat, and allowing forbs to flower would provide some nectar for bees. But there's probably much more to this than something as simple as that.

Ryan Schmid:

At a 30,000-foot view on the system, that's pretty accurate. But you would like to mention that it's very complex. These grassland systems are complex, and there are a lot of interactions. If we want to focus on the three players of bees, cows, and grass, they have many interactions with one another. Typically, it's done indirectly, through the soil. The plants, how you touched on cows, poop, insects, start. The nutrient cycling through the soil helps plants and bees, but there's some interesting stuff to it. So let's use that as our model— cow feces. It's rich in nutrients, and if anybody cares, when a cow pees, it's about 95 percent water, 2.5 percent urine or urea, which is nitrogen. Then, the rest is minerals, salts, hormones, enzymes, and other random things, and dung is 80 percent water. Then there's a lot of bacteria, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, sodium, that kind of stuff, and if you want to, just as a sidebar.

When you start amassing that for like a herd, there's a lot of nutrients going on the ground and you can look at it from a national level and it's a huge issue that we have to deal with, but that's a story for another time. So let's get back to our bees, cows, and grass. So cows poop, put it on the ground and then we have our arthropods that take advantage of that. And we focus on dung beetles first for many ranchers in our area because they open up that nutrient.

Because cowpats sit on the ground. It gets like this seal, if you ever looked at one. After a few days, it seals over. It has a crust on it and a little bit of seal, and the flies get there fast, like within an hour. They're on a cow pat within minutes. Usually, they can do that because it's still wet and hasn't sealed over, but many other insects can't get in once it's sealed up, so dung beetles come in there.

They are big, burly guys who basically make a tunnel or highway network through your cow pie, opening it up for all these other beneficial insects, like staff linen beetles or rove beetles.

There are those parasitoid wasps and a whole host of other weird beetles and that sort of thing that come in there and help to control pests on livestock, fly pests usually. They also break down those nutrients, and basically, what they're doing is they're creating more surface area for the next stage in this process, which is for the earthworms, nematodes, bacteria, and fungi that recycle it into your soils.

Plants take advantage of those available nutrients rather than letting them sit on the ground and oxidize a lot of that nitrogen, which translates to more nutritious plants for both bees and cattle, because of some of these grazing systems. After you do this, we see that the plant community responds a lot differently, and the soil community responds a lot differently.

So Richard Teague and Urs Kruger, sam Mosier, have showed some of this cool stuff where there's more carbon nitrogen in your soil, the soil infiltrates water better, two to three times more forage biomass in the plant community, improved plant community composition, improved fungal and bacterial ratios in our soils and then that in turn improves the forage quality for our bees out there. And there are some cool studies looking at like firm composting and how that improves actual bee health from improved soils, and then thus the cattle or the bees can improve the forage out there for the cattle, and the cattle can keep improving forage for bees, and it's kind of this weird loop. So that was a long-winded answer.

Andy:

No, it was great. It raises a lot of things that I wanted to talk about. So the first thing I wanted to bring up and it's more of a sidebar is, like in a lot of regenerative groups on like Facebook and stuff like that, you see a lot of farmers that have been farming for a long time who are like hey, what's this thing around the cow dung? I've never seen this bug before, and it's usually a dung beetle, and I'm curious to know the answer to this. What are the prerequisites? Because I'm assuming, like a lot of traditional farmers, they have cows and therefore have cow dung there. So why aren't they used to seeing this in a conventional management system versus a regenerative system? Or do you think they're just being more aware of what's happening?

Ryan Schmid:

I wonder, and this is just pure speculation on my part, if it's not because the regenerative ranchers or amp or mob grazers, whatever you want to call them, it's because they're out there more. They're paying attention to the biology that's going on in the land because they care about it and understand that biology is essentially what's making that system work. We just went through this whole thing of essentially a rancher. You could think of them as a nutrient cycling manager, and to make those nutrients cycle, they need the biology, so they pay attention to that.

That's my theory.

Andy:

That would make sense. So I want to mention a couple of other things that you've mentioned in your description of what was happening. So you talked about how important it is for the dung to break down and return nutrients to the soil. You'd mention that it makes the plants healthier, which, everyone understands, is the idea that if there are more nutrients, the plants will be more nutritious. Does it affect the pollen levels in the flowers that are coming up, or is it just that the plants are more resilient, so they're flowering more?

Ryan Schmid:

I can point to a study here from someone, Cardoza, back in 2012, where they kind of applied well, they did apply this vermicompost, and they were using cucumbers as their model system. They don't want to see any behavioral, physiological changes to the pollinator and flower and floral resources and when they added that compost, that vermicompost, they found that one. It significantly increased the number of bumblebees they're feeding on those flowers. They had substantially larger and more active ovaries, which is a matter of nutrition. So the bees are getting some more food from the plants, so the plants have to have more nutrition from the sperm composting, and that's kind of how you can see how it's working its way through the system.

Andy:

Yeah, that makes sense, because I know a lot of bees won't. They can sense the sugar content within the flowers, so they know whether or not it's worth their time to harvest from them. Basically, like a brix scale for them. Then healthier plants are probably producing more things that draw the bees in. That makes a lot of sense, I guess. In terms of application, are you guys actually telling me a little bit about what you're doing to see this in practice?

Katya Busenitz:

Brix is a part of our study; we've got this two-year study right now. We're trying to do it this summer again. We did it last summer, where we took some of our beehives and put them out at different locations where the ranchers manage their cattle differently. So if they're continuously grazing or grazing them like in a rotation, we're going out there and measuring plant biomass and doing floral counts. I'm looking at the bees. So I'm looking at the brood counts for the beehives and some weights, seeing if they're gaining weight, losing weight, like basic health metrics, and then Ryan's also doing rangeland stuff for those exact locations.

Andy:

How many years have you been doing it? Are you still in the first year?

Katya Busenitz:

We have stuff from last summer that we haven't looked at as much as we wanted. I wish we could just talk about what we did last summer and have actual results because it was such a fun study. It was of the honey production comparisons.

Andy:

Yeah, I'm super interested to see if the honey production comparisons play out at all.

Katya Busenitz:

Yeah, and I don't have any analysis done yet, but it does look like it's. There's a pretty interesting difference, and we only did it anecdotally. I measured Varroa, too, and something that I found that you know. This hasn't been statistically verified or anything, but it looks like the varroa stayed lower at rotationally grazed sites.

We're trying to do like a natural approach, where we don't treat for varroa throughout the summer. This year I did a treatment going into winter, just trying to save some hives, hoping that someone would make it, but that's the first time we've treated for varroa.

Andy:

I try not to treat, and am super into the idea of natural beekeeping. Still, I think you're getting to the point that you can't meaningfully and naturally treat beekeeping or bees without addressing the bigger ecosystem issues. It's like one of those things you always see in various natural beekeeping groups. It's like, how do you get rid of ants? How do you do this? How do you do that? And you try all these different things and like none of them work. I've seen mint put above the hive or around the hive, cinnamon, or any of these other things, and I've never had any of them work. So, like, there's a lot more going on, and it ties into this bigger ecosystem issue.

So, to get back to my questions a little bit, I know you weren't focused just on honeybees, but also like the local bugs in the ecosystem. How did grazing impact that, or do you have any data on that?

Katya Busenitz:

We don't have data from last year.

Ryan Schmid:

With the pollinator community.

Katya Busenitz:

Yeah, with the pollinators.

Ryan Schmid:

We have some previous studies looking at arthropod diversity and pasture grassland systems. Interestingly enough, we did it three years ago in the southeast US. So we measured the dung community, the soil arthropod community, and then the foliar community. So what insects are up in the plant canopy? And we found more diversity in the plant canopy arthropods when you're grazing them regeneratively or holistically, whatever you want. And the soil community didn't respond as with more diversity to that kind of grazing treatment, but the functional guild.

So when we look at essentially group arthropods by the jobs they're performing, so their guilds, they change quite a bit in the dung and the foliar community from your grazing. So you get more predators and fewer herbivores in a foliar community, which is fantastic.

Andy:

Yeah, it would point to more cycling of the nutrients. Yeah, I'm curious why you said there didn't seem to be much change in the soil. Is it because it's a longer process for those changes, or do you think it has to do with, maybe, the species? I think about cattle, for example, and I'm not sure what you were looking at grazing in the south, but cattle aren't always the most suitable species for grazing in the southeastern United States. So it would make sense then that, like that, maybe even doing a holistic grazing or whatever term you might want to use, still wouldn't produce like optimal results.

Ryan Schmid:

Yeah, yeah, oh, man you struck at the thing that I've been thinking.

I'm writing this paper right now and have been trying to figure out what's happening. Why isn't that soil arthropod community responding? And a couple of theories I have on that One. We've seen that soil arthropods usually react differently to regenerative practices. They're a little slower, and it might be because they're generally less mobile, and you know they're crawling around in the soil most of the time. They're not going to move across pastures or row crop fields as much as their foliar counterparts, who are like grasshoppers and flies and other things that move around really well.

The other concern is that maybe we're not measuring it correctly. That's what keeps me up at night. If we did something. Perhaps we didn't capture what we needed to capture within that community correctly, and I think of things like mites and all those smaller critters that are making up that community in the soil that we don't measure. We typically measure mostly insects, but many other things are important in the soil that we usually don't measure. Yeah, not a hundred percent sure.

Andy:

What species were you grazing? I'm assuming it was cattle, but was it anything else?

Ryan Schmid:

There were pretty much cattle on all the pastures except for one. The rancher had some sheep that he was grazing with his cattle.

Andy:

Did the results be any different with those sheep?

Ryan Schmid:

Not really. Which is interesting? You'd expect it to be a little different, wouldn't you?

Andy:

Yeah.

Ryan Schmid:

With those different livestock. So at least nothing statistically different that really jumped out at us.

Andy:

Yeah, that's interesting. You talked about the bees being good for the grazing, so that's the side we haven't really talked about. We spend a lot of time talking about how grazing is good for bees, but not vice versa. I'm not sure who wants to talk about that a little bit, but I'm interested because I'm struggling to understand that piece.

Katya Busenitz:

Well, it comes back to this whole looking at as a system thing again. And I'm using honeybees because we can measure that, and you know we've got a pretty standardized way of managing the colonies and measuring, you know, health responses, if they're healthy or not. But the whole system, you know, requires pollinators, no matter what you do. So this pollination is going to increase the health of the plant community, and then that's also going to, you know, feed back into whatever is eating the plant community.

So I think the connection is sort of just there in the system, if that makes sense yeah, that makes sense and then for you like you, you're working with sheep, right sheep, chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese so, like for your grazing plan, you've got uh, your trees worked in right yeah so your fruit fall and stuff um. You know pollination would be a part of the fruit set, which would also impact. You know how your grazers are eating in the fall, or whatever time of year you put them under the trees.

Andy:

Yeah, yeah, definitely, I could see that. I got bees the first time because I was unhappy with the pollination rates I got on my annuals. I was like, I don't understand. I've got tons of flowers everywhere, and nothing's fruiting. I brought in bees, which didn't make much difference. What I think was making the difference is that there's a lot of spraying here for like West Nile virus and I'm right near the highway, so that's where they spray, so I'm right in the dead zone.

So, we've had a little bit of improvement, some of that because of the land management here. I think we're like a little bit of an oasis now in suburban hell, so I think we draw a lot of interest that way. But it's been a slow process, which it makes me wonder about, like with the work you guys are doing I'm assuming not all of the sites, or probably none of the sites, if you're looking for like that, that standard point to start this research we're doing mob grazing beforehand.

So I'm interested a little bit about how you saw over a year or two or three years how the ecosystem changed from these practices in terms of the general diversity that you were seeing. And you know, is this something people? If someone were to buy a farm today and it's just a traditional farm, how long would it take to start seeing those impacts?

Katya Busenitz:

That's an excellent question. That's something we've been doing a ton of research on for years, trying to figure out how long it takes to transition into a functional ecosystem.

Ryan Schmid:

Yeah, we're starting those studies now. Typically, in our previous studies, we've been talking about, we select systems that have been in place for five years because we want to see the effect of that system and not the impact of transition. There is a transition period because you hit the nail on the head there. It takes a few years for biology to respond. And come back to an area and you look at some of Fred Provenza's work on some other folks, they're saying three years and anecdotally, after talking to a lot of farmer or ranchers in this area of the northern plains, in our climate it takes minimum three, sometimes five, before you start to notice changes.

Andy:

Coming back to the landscape, yeah, that lines up with what I've seen. It was around year three, like the end of year three. You could see it by the fall of year three, okay, and by no means like I've got a lot of land still to manage and change, but you can start to see the number of dragonflies and how quickly manure is broken down. You know all those things that suggest that like the ecology is changing. And of course, this is just based on vision, unlike any assessments. But yeah, I would agree that and in my personal experiences, even anecdotally, like just walking around these different pastures.

Katya Busenitz:

They're so different, like the ones where the ranchers are rotationally grazing there. Just the flower community is so much more intense and more diverse, and you know, like we do transects and we set them out and walk along them and count, and I'm always excited about those because we're going to find some cool plants. We're going to be like Oh, I've never seen that before, or I have to learn that plant because it's like it's new yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Andy:

That does bring up another question. Like, most farms are basically like seeded, based on, like probably 100 different varieties, but realistically, most farmers are only running about a dozen other plants between forbs and grasses and obviously for 95% of the United States, those are not native species or they've been improved, so they're not like natural native species. So when you talk about diversity coming in, obviously that means that's not a part of that 100 or so or dozen or so plants.

What do you think about how that's happening? Like what is happening that's causing native plants to or even like regionally native, maybe not native, you know, given climate change and all this other stuff, but these new plants to enter an ecosystem where you haven't explicitly gone and added these seeds. I know that's a big question to ask.

Katya Busenitz:

I mean, we see that if we burn our prairie, we see the natives just kind of pop up, you know, or at least a lot of the flowers in the forbs. So it's sort of like managing the grasses that are staying in the way of everybody else.

Andy:

So it's like a seed bank thing?

Ryan Schmid:

There's a lot, at least in our prairie systems. There's a lot in the seed bank, but so I guess. I suggest you reword the question a little bit for me here.

Andy:

So you guys are talking about the fact that when you start mob grazing or holistically grazing, these pastures are going from like a half dozen, you know, red clover and timothy grass are growing, and then you're starting to see these new species that hadn't been there before. So, where are they coming from, if you know? I'm assuming that most of the farms you're working on are in areas where everyone has a farm and they're all growing the same thing. What's driving that diversity? Like, where are the seeds coming from?

And the seed bank is probably a big piece of it, but they've always been there. So is it just the additional nutrition that's giving them that opportunity? The grazing, cycling itself, something about the way that they're? I don't know. I don't know if anyone on earth has an answer, even though people keep saying they've seen it. But since you guys are doing a lot of research in this area, I'm really interested in getting your thoughts, even if it's not statistically verified at this point.

Ryan Schmid:

I can speak anecdotally about it from what we've seen visiting many places here in the Northern Plains. Yeah, the seed bank plays a lot of it. Many things are either growing out there or waiting for their opportunity to sprout from a seed, and with some of these rotationally grazing, mob grazing practices, essentially, you're cutting back evenly the potential invasive competition for them. So that allows an opening for some of those natives to be a little more competitive across that landscape that are just there but you're not noticing because there's just one of them out there, and it keeps getting nipped off right away because the livestock likes that one. It's very palatable to them. So there's some of that, which gives them room to expand more within that system.

And a bizarre kind of interesting thing we've noticed a lot when we're, I guess, it's not that bizarre, but we found many of our natives. They're tailored towards specific little microclimates within those grassland systems. For us here, it’s side hills. If you're on a side hill, you'll get many more natives. And we see many more invasives where hills come together and a little gully or something between them. Or, like in the flat bottom ground, we see more invasives.

For us, it's a lot of smooth brome and Kentucky bluegrass. That might be because it's wetter there and the natives are more tolerant of those microclimates on the side hills so that they can outcompete the natives or the invasives. There might be more nitrogen or something like that available there. The natives don't need as much, but the invasives can take advantage of and out-compete them in those little micro environments. And so by your rotational grazing, you can pick who the winners and losers are out there, uh, and set those invasives back and let the natives flourish a little more.

Andy:

Yeah, we recently, well, when this episode came out, like nine months ago, I had a guest on, Dr Lynn Hunsinger, who's been working with trying to well-graze and bring back a lot of native species in California. She was talking about the idea of grazing as a tool to reduce invasive pressure because native grasses grow a lot slower. Still, once they're kind of at equal footing when they're a little bit older, they tend to be able to beat out and grow faster on that second half of their growth cycle, which makes a lot of sense because most invasives, especially in like pasture lands like you're talking about Kentucky bluegrass they're designed, or been bred in some cases, to be fast, early growers because the plan was to harvest them early anyway. So is this something you're also seeing that like that, with mob grazing, you’re giving those natives some chances to get into that space?

Ryan Schmid:

Yes, short answer. Yes, that's what we're seeing on a lot of our regenerative sites, but I should mention, it's a little bit more than just the grazing. Many of the folks we're working with are using that grazing as a tool in tandem with other things like biological control using insects, or they might be using multi-species grazing, here, sheep, a lot of times. So if we take the leafy spurge as an example, I've had ranchers who can use that grazing to control leafy spurge, which is a big invasive in our part of the world. But it works a lot better if you integrate some of these spurge beetles and move those around, or you do some multi-species grazing with sheep because they love to eat a lot of spurge more than cattle will.

There's an outstanding thesis out of North Dakota State Jasmine Cutter looked at. Interestingly, this multi-species grazing with sheep and cattle can affect floral resources for bees and butterflies and the diversity. To bring this back to the bee point, they found that there were way fewer floral resources in the sheep-grazed paddocks, and the cattle-grazed ones, as a result, had three to 16 times more native bees in them.

Katya Busenitz:

Which makes a ton of sense considering their preferences, you know.

Ryan Schmid:

Yeah.

Katya Busenitz:

Like what they want to eat out there.

Ryan Schmid:

It's both good and bad. You have to look at what your invasive community is out there and what you're trying to encourage with the natives. If you're trying to promote a lot of native floral resources, well, maybe then the multi-species grazing machine isn't the right one for you, but yeah, or perhaps graze them very over a long, very long period, so 100 days versus going through three times a year.

So it's a bit more nuanced than just I'm gonna put on some mob grazing and it's gonna work exactly how I want it to. You have to understand a little bit about how the grasses and forage work and what you're trying to manage for work.

Andy:

It's very holistic, and I know that's why the term holistic grazing exists, but it's very much within the context of your location. To tie this back to bees, like you were saying, theoretically, sheep are not necessarily good or better than cattle when it comes to trying to produce more flower content for bees to harvest if you're managing for pollinators. You're trying to keep as many forbs and flowering plants as possible for the entire year.

We have some resources for all year round, up until winter. Were there any like surprises that came out of the research?

Katya Busenitz:

We started noticing invasives on the conventionally managed sites, you know. So there's like way more thistles and way more spurge. And then even at the spurge site, I noticed that the bees were not doing that great, and the ants were dominating all the spurge, so it's almost like the bees weren't getting access to it.

Ryan Schmid:

It was really cool and really interesting, but you can get these weird quirks on those conventionally managed sites where you get these huge blooms of an invasivere like, oh, invasives, but sometimes it was maybe to the bees' advantage, which is a weird quirk. It's like one ma’t's like one mass bloom all at once for them, yeah, and then it's done.

Katya Busenitz:

So yeah, you could have a lot of flowers if you, you know, you don't put as many cattle out and let it rest a little more, so you could, you could have like a conventionally managed system that still has a lot of flowers.

Andy:

Again, it goes back to what the local ecosystem looks like, especially with invasives like here. We have a lot of Japanese knotweed, but it also flowers late into the year, which is great for bees, even though it's an objectively terrible plant for our ecosystem.

And again, this speaks to a lot of things. It's never as black and white as we try to pretend that things are. It's, you know, much more complicated than that, and we have to do a better job of acknowledging, when these like exotic species come in, that they're not purely evil. It doesn't mean they don't have problems, but it's more than just being like. This is an all-negative thing that's happened.

Katya Busenitz:

Yeah, it comes back to the question, what are you managing for?

Andy:

And how does that fit into climate change, where the existing ecosystem can't exist in most places?

Yeah, so it's a complex, challenging question. Still, I think a lot of the work, like what you guys are doing, is critical to figuring out and navigating a way forward because you need to understand the relationships. We are really in a very fundamental stage compared to a lot of other sciences. I think for us to get ahead of the changes coming with climate change, we have to have a much more thorough understanding of these relationships.

Katya Busenitz:

Yeah, we have to understand it, and right now, I don't really feel like we do. That's pretty interesting.

Andy:

Ryan and Katya, this has been great. Can you guys plug in where you work? If you want to plug some other projects, I'm happy to send some folks your way.

Katya Busenitz:

Yeah, so we work for ECDYSIS Foundation. We do mostly insect-related research in regenerative and sustainable agriculture, and we're starting a new project called the Thousand Farm Initiative. It's supposed to be. We're trying to make it like the biggest sampling of farms for diverse communities and insect communities that has ever happened, pretty much, and we're trying to go all over the United States and sample a thousand farms, which is a considerable step up from what we've been doing lately.

Yeah, we work for Ecdysis Foundation and have a cool farm here. It's a functioning regenerative ag farm. It's in the middle of the Midwest, so cornfields surround us. And, like you said earlier, if you're trying to stop the spraying from the road, we've got no-spray signs out front because we're the only place in the whole area that's like, please don't spray.

And so, we've got a cool farm and a research lab. That's like on the farm, we've got llamas and pigs and chickens, all sorts of violent geese, ducks, you know, they do that.

Andy:

Yeah, why do you have llamas? How does that fit in? I know people graze them for various reasons, but I'm curious why you guys have them.

Katya Busenitz:

Honestly, right now we have llamas because they're really cute.

Ryan Schmid:

That's the main reason.

Katya Busenitz:

They're just cute and fluffy. There are some plans to maybe start making yarn with them and bring them out for grazing. But alpacas—yeah, we've got alpacas.

Andy:

Yeah, and I know many people who use alpacas for guard animals. I don't know if that's what you guys are doing with them.

Katya Busenitz:

Not yet, but I would be really surprised to see them attack anything.

Andy:

They're pretty big and scary-looking. So that's half of it. All right, guys, this has been great.

Katya Busenitz:

Thanks so much, thank you.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #117 of the Poor Proles Almanac.