TCFA's 1999 Environmental Stewardship Award winner has grown and expanded while keeping a sound stewardship ethic in mind.

Yogi Berra, one of baseball's most endearing figures, once observed that it's best to begin at the beginning.

Mc6 Cattle Feeders has taken that advice to heart. And for Mc6 Cattle Feeders, the beginning means using its core values of environmental stewardship as a guide to put together an operation that is living testimony to the notion that sound stewardship is also sound business.

Built in 1989 north of Hereford, the feedyard has grown from its initial 1,500 head capacity to 55,000 today. And all throughout the yard's expansion, close attention to the needs of the environment, as well as the needs for the cattle, have guided Warren White's decisions.

White, who manages the yard, came to Texas from Nebraska to work for a feedyard construction company. Along the way, he spent some time in the late 1980s working with Joe Weatherly at Heritage Beef Cattle Company near Wheeler, in the eastern Texas Panhandle. It was there, on an operation that won the industry's national Environmental Stewardship Award in 1996, that White saw firsthand how a strong environmental ethic can work hand-in-glove with a feedyard operation.

"He's been an inspiration to our environmental stewardship program," White says of Weatherly. "I don't think anyone can match what he's done."

But that doesn't stop White from trying.

Because the feedyard is so new, and has been a work in progress for the past 11 years, White has been able to meld sound environmental practices into the working operation of the yard. And, heeding Berra's advice, White says it all begins at the beginning, with the dirt work.

"I learned in construction that it's really important to have the dirt work right," White says. "All this other stuff would be wasted effort in you don't have the dirt work done to allow you to manage the water."

Managing the water not only means getting it drained quickly from the pens, but holding it so that it not just meets permit requirements, but can be recycled back on the land. The feedyard is the center post of about 3,600 acres of land. Of that, about 1,500 acres is farmland and the rest, not taken up by the yard itself, is native pasture.

The effluent from the retention ponds is mixed with fresh water and piped back to fields of wheat and corn as irrigation. The farmland, in turn, enhances the feedyard by producing feed and feeder cattle. Wheat, for instance, is grazed by lightweight calves. What wheat isn't grazed out is allowed to grow and is harvested for hay. The grazed-out wheat is planted back to corn to be harvested for silage.

In addition to recycling their effluent, the farmland allows them to recycle their manure as organic fertilizer. The manure not only provides the wheat and corn with essential nutrients, thereby reducing and even eliminating the need for commercial fertilizer, but it enhances soil tilth and improves the water-holding capability of the ground, increasing utilization of the effluent irrigation water.

The feedyard can only utilize about a third of the manure it produces. Due to excellent relationships with neighbors, however, a ready market for the manure exists. "Neighbors around us are all in the farming business, too," White says. "We sell manure to them and we buy their farm products back, whether it be corn, corn silage, hay or feeder cattle."

It's been said that good fences make good neighbors. While that's true, good environmental practices such as dust and odor control make for good neighbor relations if you own and operate a feedyard.

In an effort to control dust, particularly in high traffic areas, the underground water system that provides drinking water for the cattle can be tapped to water the work alleys. "This eliminates dust where the cattle and cowboys travel most, and when combined with stocking densities in the pens, helps keep pen surfaces moist," White says. "Because we clean our pens regularly and no manure is stockpiled, and the retention pond is pumped to irrigate crops, we also have fewer odor problems."

However, White is seldom content with conventional thinking and is always receptive to new ideas. To that end, the yard is looking at installing a sprinkler system to not only cool the cattle, but to keep dust down.

Good environmental stewardship not only pays its way in the feedyard and on the adjoining farmland, but it is an integral part of the management plans on the nearly 2,000 acres of native ranchland that makes up the third leg of the operation. They've cross-fenced the native pastures and put in underground water systems to help spread the cattle. "The cross-fencing has created pastures of roughly the same size," White says. "This allows us to use a rotational grazing system, resting pastures as needed. In addition, we can use water as a tool to ensure even grazing." While this system prevents overgrazing the sensitive native pasture, it also makes economic sense.

The present carrying capacity of the native pastures combined with winter wheat grazing is about 3,000 head. It hasn't always been that way, White says. When they bought the operation, carrying capacity was about 40% less.

Wildlife is also a consideration. The feedyard is working with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to develop management plans in an effort to improve wildlife habitat. Windbreaks and other improvements provide critical habitat for a variety of animals and birds.

Warren White gazes across the feedyard and wonders what the changes in the industry will mean to the future of cattle feeding. "I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity the next few years," he says, "particularly among people who are willing to expend the effort and time to be in a position to take advantage of those changes as this business evolves. "I think (the business environment) will have a lot different look in five years than it does today."

But some things remain-the land, the water, the soil and the cattle. These endure and will continue as the very lifeblood of the cattle business. And as long as cattlemen's basic tools remain the land, the water, the soil and the cattle, the environmental ethic that keeps them healthy will remain as well.

-end-