After winning the Environmental Stewardship Award (TESA) for Alberta, Doug and Tim Wray were already happy with the success they’d had.
They only had to travel an hour to the Canadian Beef Industry Conference, hosted in Calgary, Alta., in mid-August to see who won the national award, so making the trip was an easy decision. But they knew competition was tight in the national competition. When their names were called at the banquet, both were in shock.
“You don’t dare expect to win, because there’s many ranches bringing very good stories to the table,” says Doug in an interview, adding the unexpected win was a thrill. “It’s always more rewarding to win a tough competition, where there’s lots of quality players in the game than otherwise. So, we felt very honoured and very grateful that we (won).”
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This award comes after many years of the Wrays working toward and focusing on sustainability and environmental stewardship on their operation.
Wray Ranch
Doug Wray is the third generation to farm the land Wray Ranch is located on, near Irricana, Alta.
Before he took over the ranch, the operation was mixed, with the previous generations of his family having both cattle and cropland.
However, in 1998, Doug converted 1,000 acres of cropland into a high-legume perennial pasture, switching permanently from a mixed operation to strictly cattle. He says one reason they did this was because of their focus on sustainability.
“We’ve created a livelihood and a way to make this land base a more viable place,” Doug says.
Doug’s nephew, Tim Wray, joined the operation in 2015. Tim had obtained his bachelor of agriculture degree from the University of Alberta in 2001, where he learned about sustainable farming practices.
“While I was making my career and finishing university, Doug was home implementing these various things on the ranch with these pasture species. And so I got all excited to come back in 2015 because it was a chance to come home and practice what I’ve been seeing play out in nature and YouTube videos and science literature, and try working with nature to sustainably produce food.”
Now, Tim and Doug ranch together, building up an operation and grazing partnership that prioritizes the things Tim learned all those years ago at university — sustainable practices on the ranch.
Sustainable practices
When asked what environmental stewardship means to him, Tim Wray says it’s about prioritizing the land.
“A steward takes care of things that don’t belong to them,” Tim says. “And the environment is the combination of the surroundings, the enviro and mental mindsets. So, you know, it’s setting your mind to be attentive to what’s around you, and being enriched even by that which you do not own.”
He says the point of environmental stewardship is to nurture what is already there naturally. An example he gave is the bird species and other wildlife on Wray Ranch, which have become more prominent as the Wrays have done their sustainability work on the land.
“There’s a bunch of biodiversity, more biodiversity on our pastures than there is in the monoculture wheat and canola fields around us. So we see that difference,” Doug says.
Doug reseeded the land to legumes and grasses so the legumes could provide nitrogen. A mix of legumes and grasses would also be more productive than just grasses or legumes alone.
“We divided that landscape into 20-acre paddocks and ran water lines … to the paddock. So the cows didn’t have to go very far for water and then we moved cows every two or three days across that landscape,” Doug says.
They practice adaptive multi-paddock grazing, a high-intensity method of grazing, which entails rotating the cattle from paddock to paddock frequently and then leaving those paddocks to recover for an extended period.
“We get more capacity, we run more cattle, and it’s very good for the grass because it gets snipped up quick and then rested a long time, much like the buffalo would have done over the centuries before us,” Doug says. “And so it’s good for forage, it’s good for our cattle. And that piece there has kind of been the cornerstone of our management strategy.”
When they use sustainable practices on their operation, they keep some of their values regarding the environment at the forefront.
“The environment is our teacher,” Tim says, adding they try to work with the environment instead of trying to force things.
He says another important aspect of being stewards of the land is looking for natural processes, such as photosynthesis, and providing as many means as possible to allow those processes to occur.
Doug adds that instead of prescriptively using fertilizers and herbicides, they’re trying to “get out of the way, let nature be all it can be and encourage all the productivity we can get from that perspective.”
“It’s kind of a mind shift from making it happen to figuring out how to let it happen or enhance what’s already there,” says Doug.
Succession planning
Doug and Tim Wray aren’t just trying to do right by the environment through their work. They also want to do right by their operation, their family’s legacy and each other. That’s why, when Tim came back to the farm in 2015 after working away for years, they took succession planning seriously.
Tim’s father owned 40 per cent of the farm, and when Tim came back to the farm, his father allowed him to pay rent at a very affordable rate, as well as rent the homestead his father had inherited, which had previously been his great-grandparent’s house. Tim was able to use the facilities that Doug and his wife Linda had built up. Tim also bought his grandfather’s cattle herd, which resulted in some debt — but not as much as many other people in the business experience.
The most important piece, says Tim, was the mentorship agreement with Doug and Linda.
“We just had to get a hold of some cows. And then we could kind of learn under their expertise, how to handle cattle and how to tend to the equipment and how to fix them. So that was how we got our start.”
The Wrays also applied for a grant through MNP to hire lawyers and accountants to help with the succession planning process. Tim says with three households all negotiating what the future would look like, this type of professional advice was necessary.
“Three different financial requirements, financial positions, life stages — there are different implications on capital gains and taxes. Add my grandfather’s estate into that — he was still alive at the time but well into his 90s. So he wasn’t at the table, but his estate was in place. And so that succession planning process helped us to sort of put on the table what we might expect over the next five years and how we might go about that.”
What came out of that was Tim and his wife, Joanne, formed a partnership — something Doug says he and Linda had for 35 years.
However, there will be more work that needs to be done in the future regarding their succession plan. Doug says it’s an ongoing process.
“We’re probably at a point where we need to take another look at that. We’ll get it through different eyes now that Tim understands the operation fully, now that we’re eight years down the road.”
Advocation
With this win under their belt, Doug and Tim Wray feel reaffirmed in the work they’re doing on their operation to help the environment. Now, they feel the need to spread that message to others.
“As ranchers, we’ve been told the cow is bad for the environment, that beef is bad for our diet. And all along, we felt that wasn’t true. We felt we were doing a good thing on the landscape, and we’re raising a very, very necessary food,” Tim says.
Tim and Doug intend to continue their work in sustainability and prove to consumers the value of the industry.
“That’s a great place to be as a rancher, to have that knowledge behind us that we can, not just defend, but promote our industry in our business and our business model. And it’s an important piece of the foodscape and of the long-term agriculture in our country,” says Tim.
