They Laughed at the Widow for Running Geese With Her Cattle—Then the 1988 Drought Killed Everyone Else’s Calves and Spared Hers

Chapter 1

In May of 1976, at the Murray McMurray Hatchery on the southern edge of Webster City, Iowa, a thirty-eight-year-old rancher named Mave Yoder paid $560 in cash for eighty Toulouse goslings and five Emden ganders. The goslings were a week old. They sold for $6.25 apiece. The ganders sold for eighteen.

Mave Yoder carried them out of the hatchery in twelve cardboard boxes lined with cedar shavings, loaded into the back of a 1968 Ford F-250 pickup truck. She had driven 178 miles north and west across the Sand Hills to get them.

She drove the geese back to her ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska in a single eight-hour run, stopping twice for fuel and once for a quart of motor oil at a KICO station outside of Norfolk. The goslings arrived at the Yoder Ranch at eleven at night.

She unloaded them into the brooder shed her father, Roland Cleary, had built behind the main barn in 1958. The brooder shed was sixteen feet long and ten feet wide. It had a corrugated tin roof and a single hand-hinged cedar door, and an interior partitioned into three bays by hand-tooled wooden rails.

The first bay was the heat bay, with 300-watt incandescent infrared lamps suspended from the rafters at adjustable heights against the brutal Sand Hills nights of late May.

The second bay was the feed and water bay, with galvanized steel waterers and a long wooden trough Roland Cleary had hand-cut from a single ash plank in the winter of 1957.

The third bay was the imprint bay, where Mave sat on a low stool every morning at five and every evening at seven for six consecutive weeks during the goslings’ critical imprint window. She fed them by hand from a tin scoop. She talked to them in a low, even voice.

She walked among them in slow, careful steps. She let them follow her in a tight waddling line whenever she changed bays. The protocol came directly out of her mother Adele Cleary’s leather memorandum book, pencil in a section labeled May Imprint and dated June 4th, 1932.

The Toulouse goslings imprinted to her by the second week. The Emden ganders, slower, imprinted by the fourth.

By the third Sunday of August, when the goslings had grown into half-sized geese with their full pin feathers in and their imprinted bond to the woman who had fed them since their first week, she opened the brooder gate and walked them out to the open Sand Hills pasture south of the ranch road.

By the end of August, eighty-five geese were ranging on her pasture among forty-six head of Hereford cow-calf pairs, eating thistle and bindweed and dandelion and the small grasshoppers that came up off the bunch grass at dawn. The men at the Valentine Cafe laughed for two and a half hours when they heard.

Chapter 2

They were still laughing twelve years later when the 1988 drought emptied half the calving pens in Cherry County — and the only ranch in five townships not losing calves was the Yoder operation, where the geese had taught the coyotes that some pastures were not worth the walk.

By the spring of 1976, the agricultural orthodoxy of the American Sand Hills had reached the cleanest expression of its hundred-year arc. The orthodoxy was simple. A Sand Hills ranch ran cattle. Nobody ran poultry.

Poultry did not belong in the Sand Hills where every coyote and badger and great horned owl within twenty miles attacked flocks that no rancher could absorb. Poultry, in the professional judgment of the Cherry County Cattlemen’s Association in 1976, was a hobby for retired schoolteachers in Valentine.

It was not a thing a serious ranch operator put on her grass. The association president, Vernon Bramwell, said it openly. He said it at the spring meeting. He said it at the fall meeting. He said, “Cattle ranches run cattle, and small farms run birds, and the ranch that mixes them runs neither.

It was not a controversial position. It was the consensus of the Nebraska Cattlemen’s, the Extension Service, and every ranch supply firm from Norfolk to Chadron. Geese were too small to be worth a predation tax. Geese ate forage that should have been going to mother cows. Mave Yoder had been raised on a different consensus.

Her mother, Adele Cleary, had kept fifty-four working geese on the Cleary family ranch outside of Long Pine, Nebraska from 1932 until 1958, when arthritis had finally taken her hands and she had given the flock to a neighbor. Adele had run the geese as part of a system.

The geese ate the broadleaf weeds the cattle would not eat.

They alarmed against coyotes at night, plucked biting flies off the calves’ faces in the evenings, laid eggs, plucked twice a year for down, and had kept the Cleary ranch solvent through the drought of 1934 on down sales to a pillow manufacturer in Sioux City.

Adele had taught her daughter Mave every part of the system between Mave’s seventh birthday and her seventeenth. Adele Cleary died of a stroke in 1968. Her geese had been gone since 1958. The system had not been lost.

The system had been sitting in a leather memorandum book Adele had kept on the kitchen shelf for the last twenty-six years of her life, in pencil, with hand-drawn diagrams of pasture rotations and gosling imprint schedules and down-plucking cycles. The leather memorandum book had passed to Mave at the funeral.

Mave read it once in 1968 and again in 1973, in the kitchen of the ranch after she had buried her husband Owen Yoder, who had died at thirty-six in a roping accident. She had been thirty-five. She decided she was going to bring the geese back.

Chapter 3

She had been thirty-eight in the May of 1976 when she finally drove to Webster City to do it.

The Yoder Ranch sat thirty miles south of Valentine, on 640 acres of native Sand Hills pasture that ran from choppy sand prairie hills down to a broad subirrigated meadow at the south end, where two natural Sand Hills lakes formed a wet boundary between the Yoder operation and the Dosset ranch on the next section.

The lakes were small — about eighteen acres of open water between them, with a quarter mile of cattail margin around each, and they had been there since the geological retreat of the Pleistocene. They were what made the Yoder Ranch viable for geese. Geese needed water. The Yoder Ranch had it.

By the morning of the third Sunday of August 1976, when Vernon Bramwell drove past the Yoder South Meadow and saw eighty-five half-grown geese ranging among the Yoder Hereford herd in the subirrigated pasture at the lake’s edge, the geese had been on the ranch for three months and four days.

The brooder shed had done its job. The imprint had taken. The geese followed Mave in a single waddling line whenever she walked the pasture in the evening. By the second Tuesday of September 1976, every rancher in Cherry County had heard about the Yoder widow’s geese.

The Valentine Cafe sat on the corner of Main Street and Highway 83, and on Tuesday and Friday mornings between five and seven, the long Formica counter filled with men in brown-felt cowboy hats drinking coffee from chipped enamel mugs and arguing about the price of feeder cattle.

The Yoder widow’s geese had become the dominant topic of conversation by the third week of September. Vernon Bramwell had told the story at the counter four mornings in a row, at the September Cattlemen’s Association meeting, at the United Methodist Church coffee hour. The mockery in Valentine was not cruel.

It was a kind of small-town disbelief that wore the clothing of concern. At the cattlemen’s coffee, Mave heard a man named Jeb Picket — who had taught her father how to break a roping horse in 1948 — tell another rancher that the Yoder widow had let her grief get the better of her judgment.

At the Methodist church potluck, the minister’s wife pulled Mave aside in the basement fellowship hall and asked in a careful voice whether the geese were something Owen would have approved of.

Mave looked at the minister’s wife across the corner of a folding card table that held a covered casserole and a glass pan of cinnamon rolls. She said Owen would have asked her what her mother thought. The minister’s wife said nothing.

Mave carried her green bean casserole back to the kitchen and washed her own dish. Ezra Dosset, who farmed the four thousand acres adjoining the Yoder operation and had been a personal friend of Roland Cleary for forty-three years, drove over to the Yoder Ranch to see for himself.

Mave was working fence wire at the south end of the brooder shed when she heard his truck pull up. She finished the section she was working on, set the pliers on the top rail, wiped her hands on her canvas work pants, and walked across the dirt yard to the gate. “Ezra. “Mave.

He looked across the yard at the brooder shed. He looked back at Mave. “You have eighty-five geese on a working cow-calf operation. By the time the calves come in March, every coyote in the Niobrara is going to know there is a goose flock at your south meadow.

You are baiting predators into your calving pens. You are going to lose calves. “The wolves were already coming, Ezra. I just gave them a reason to walk past my pasture and go to yours. She crossed her arms. “The geese alarm against coyotes. The geese fight coyotes.

The geese are bigger than coyotes and they fight in formation. A Toulouse goose at full breeding weight goes twenty pounds. A Sand Hills coyote goes thirty. And the goose has wings the coyote can’t see in the dark. And a beak that can break the bridge of a coyote’s nose.

The first coyote that comes through the south meadow is going to learn that the second coyote does not come through. Ezra took his hat off. Put it back on. Took it off again. “Mave, I cannot stop you. “Ezra, drive home. Watch what happens in March.

If I am wrong, I will sell the flock at the spring auction in Bassett and I will eat the loss and I will buy you dinner at the Cherry County Fair. If I am right, you will buy me dinner. Either way, you and Hannah will have lost nothing for waiting. Ezra drove home.

The 1977 calving started on the third Tuesday of March. By the end of April, Mave had lost zero calves to predators. Ezra Dosset had lost three calves to coyote depredation on the south boundary of his ranch, the boundary that ran along the Yoder Lakes, and four calves on his north section.

Reed Dosset had walked the coyote tracks himself on the morning of the third Tuesday in April 1977 and had stood at the willow thicket and looked across at the Yoder cow-calf pairs grazing peacefully in the south meadow with eight Toulouse geese in loose flank formation around the nearest calving cow.

He reported back to his father that evening that the coyotes had stopped at the willows because the geese had taught them to. The years between 1977 and 1985 were the deep work years. The geese were on the pasture. The cattle were calving without predator loss.

The thistle infestation that had been creeping into the Yoder South Meadow since the 1969 drought rotation had cleared by the 1979 grazing season.

The cattle weight gains improved by an average of twenty-three pounds at weaning between 1976 and 1981 — partly because the geese ate the dandelion blooms before they could shade out the bunch grass, and partly because the geese ate the biting flies and tick larvae off the calves’ faces in the long Sand Hills evenings.

The Yoder operation was by the end of the 1981 calving year the best-performing cow-calf operation in Cherry County by every metric that mattered. Pounds of weaned calf per cow. Pounds of weaned calf per acre. Pasture composition. Weed pressure. Predator loss.

The men at the Valentine Cafe knew the numbers because the Valentine livestock auction yard published them every fall in its newsletter, which Vernon Bramwell himself edited. The men at the Valentine Cafe did not stop making jokes about the geese. They simply stopped making them in front of Mave Yoder.

By the end of 1985, the working flock had grown from eighty-five to two hundred forty geese. Mave was breeding for size, for territorial aggression, and for the imprint cycle her mother had documented. She had begun to sell breeding stock by the spring of 1982.

She had begun, by the spring of 1983, to pluck her geese twice a year for down. The down went by an arrangement Mave had made with a small bedding manufacturer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at thirty-two dollars a pound.

She was producing by 1985 four hundred sixty pounds of cleaned down a year at thirty-two dollars a pound. The geese were producing $23,000 a year on top of the $48,000 the cattle netted. In the winter of 1984, Mave received a letter from a researcher at South Dakota State University named Dr.

Cornelia Thornberry, an associate professor of range science whose research program focused on multispecies grazing systems in the northern Great Plains.

She had read about the Yoder operation from a feed and grain industry newsletter that had picked up a 1983 article in the Valentine livestock auction yard newsletter that Vernon Bramwell had grudgingly published after the cooperative marketing committee had insisted that the pounds-per-cow data was too good to leave unpublished. Mave answered three weeks later.

She said yes. She said: don’t use my name. Dr. Thornberry published in 1987 a paper in the Journal of Range Management referencing the Yoder operation only as Cooperator A.

The paper found a thirty-eight percent reduction in calf loss to predators, a forty-one percent reduction in pasture broadleaf weed cover, and a twenty-three-pound increase in weaning weight. It was the most cited article in the Journal of Range Management for 1988. None of the Sand Hills ranches found Cooperator A.

Then the summer of 1988 arrived. The rain stopped on June 17th. By the first week of July, the temperatures in Cherry County had reached 103 degrees. By July 15th, they had reached 105 and held there for nineteen consecutive days. The native bunch grass began to crash by the third week of July.

The thistle and bindweed and Russian knapweed, which had been suppressed in good years by competition from healthy bunch grass, exploded into the bare patches the drought had opened up. By the first week of August, every Sand Hills pasture in Cherry County except the Yoder operation showed visible thistle and knapweed infestation.

Vernon Bramwell was projected to lose forty percent of his summer forage to the weed shift. The coyote populations in Cherry County had been climbing through the spring and early summer. The drought had compressed the prey base. Jackrabbits and ground squirrels and prairie dogs were dying off in the dry pastures.

The coyotes had begun by mid-July to push into Sand Hills calving operations in numbers nobody had seen since the 1956 drought. By the end of August 1988, the countywide calf loss to predation was running at 11.4%. Ezra Dosset had lost thirty-eight calves on the south section by the morning of August 23rd.

Vernon Bramwell had lost twenty-two on his east pasture. Jeb Picket had lost nineteen on the section he ran with his son. The Cattlemen’s Association called an emergency meeting. Sixty-one ranchers attended. By seven-thirty, the men in the back rows had begun to ask Vernon Bramwell in increasingly direct terms about the Yoder operation.

Bramwell said he would not be making any official comment on operations conducted without cattlemen’s consultation. Knox Ackley stood up in the third row. Knox had worked for Mave Yoder since 1973. He said: “Vernon, I have spent twelve years standing in that south meadow during the worst of every season.

I have watched the geese walk out of the brooder shed in single file. I have watched them flank the calves at calving. I have watched a Toulouse gander chase a coyote off a fence line at three in the morning in the rain.

I am going to tell every man in this room something I should have said in 1976. The geese are not freak luck. The geese are not a hobby. The geese are exactly what Adele Cleary wrote in a leather memorandum book in 1932 and exactly what every Sand Hills rancher’s grandmother knew before we forgot.

The geese are why Mave Yoder is sitting at zero calf loss and the rest of us are sitting at 11.4. The geese are our blind spot. We laughed at them for twelve years. We are going to apologize for the laughing for the rest of our lives. Knox Ackley sat down.

The meeting ended ten minutes early. Reed Dosset drove over to the Yoder Ranch on the morning of August 24th. He arrived at the gate at seven. She saw him. She walked over and set the feed bucket on the dirt. “Reed. “Aunt Mave. You want coffee? “No. “I came over to ask a question.

My father didn’t send me. He has been losing two calves a week for seven weeks. I have been driving past your South Meadow on the way home from the auction yard every Saturday for twelve years. I came to ask if you would sell us goslings. Mave set the feed bucket down.

She said: “Reed, I will sell you goslings. The price is thirty-five dollars a gosling. The minimum order is thirty goslings. The order includes three Emden ganders.

The order also includes one consultation visit from me at your operation in spring 1989 to set up the brooder, train your hired men on imprint protocol, and walk the pasture with you to identify the holding water and the predator approach corridors. There will be no follow-up consultation included in the price.

If you want follow-up, the rate is eighty dollars an hour. Reed Dosset said, “Aunt Mave, I am in. Word travels in Cherry County. By the morning of September 2nd, 1988, Mave had received fourteen telephone calls. By the end of September, twenty-three. The callers were Sand Hills ranchers.

Most of them had laughed at her in the Valentine Cafe in 1976. All of them wanted to know if Mave would do for their operations what she had done for hers.

Mave sat at the kitchen table on the evening of October 7th, 1988, with the leather memorandum book and a pencil, and wrote down what she could do alone, what she could do with Knox Ackley, and what she could do if she expanded the brooder shed.

By the end of the evening, she had figured the math. She could supply goslings to between nine and twelve Sand Hills ranches in spring 1989 at thirty-five dollars a gosling with planting design, brooder construction, and one consultation visit per ranch.

She would work seventy hours a week from January through May, hire Knox Ackley’s son full-time, expand the brooder, and teach the next generation how to work geese with cattle. By the end of February 1989, eleven Sand Hills ranches had signed contracts.

Three thousand seven hundred goslings and 140 ganders arrived in two semi-trucks in April. By May, the goslings had been distributed to eleven ranches, and Mave had visited each to walk the pasture. She walked each pasture in the early morning, marking holding water with white-painted stakes and predator approach corridors with red.

Each ranch received the same twelve-page consultation document, typed by Mave on her father’s 1964 Olympia SM9. It included the imprint schedule, the predator approach map, the stocking ratio table, the down-plucking cycle. It ended with a one-page note in Mave’s handwritten cursive: “Do not change the imprint schedule. Do not skip the morning walk.

Do not name the geese. The geese will name themselves to you. Vernon Bramwell drove over to the Yoder Ranch on the third Saturday of May 1989. He sat at the kitchen table. He did not take his cowboy hat off until Mave had poured him a cup of coffee. He said he had two questions.

The first was whether she would consider presenting a series of educational lectures on multispecies grazing systems at the Cattlemen’s Association quarterly meetings, with a small honorarium for her time.

The second was whether she would accept the apology of a man who had been wrong for twelve years about the most important thing he had ever held an opinion on. Mave said yes to both. The first lecture was held on October 14th, 1989. Forty-two ranchers attended. The second was held on January 20th, 1990.

Sixty-one ranchers attended. Ezra Dosset drove over to the Yoder Ranch on a cold Saturday afternoon in October 1989, one year after his son Reed had stood at her gate. He stood at the open wooden gate of the Yoder South Meadow.

He looked at the geese walking in loose flank around a small group of Hereford yearlings at the lake’s edge. He took off his stockman’s cowboy hat and held it against his chest. Mave walked out from the lakeside. Her braid was a little more silver. Her hands were a little more weathered.

She stopped at the gate. “Ezra. “Mave. I owe my son’s herd to you. I owe my own herd to you. I owe my friendship with your father a debt I should have paid in 1976. I am asking forgiveness.

I would like to come stand at this gate one Saturday afternoon a season and learn what I should have learned in 1976. Mave unlatched the gate. She held it open. She said: “Ezra, you are forgiven. You were forgiven on the night Hannah sent you over here in September of 1976.

You did not need to come today. “I did need to come today. “Then come walk the meadow. He came in. He walked the meadow with her for an hour. They watched the geese from a low rise overlooking the South Lake. He took the leather memorandum book from her hands. He read three pages.

He gave it back. He drove home at dusk. The next Saturday, he came back. The Saturday after that, he came back. The Saturday visits continued until Ezra Dosset’s death in 2003. The bench on the rise overlooking the South Lake was named for him in his obituary in the Cherry County Sentinel.

Mave Yoder ran the gosling and consultation business from 1989 until 2010. By the end of her career, more than eleven thousand working geese had been placed on Sand Hills ranches in five counties under her direct supervision, on more than two hundred working operations.

The 1976 flock on the Yoder South Meadow today numbers four hundred sixty geese in twelve generations of Mave’s breeding. They still walk in loose flank formation around the Yoder Hereford herd at every dusk. Mave Yoder did not explain why she chose the geese. Not because the why was hidden.

The why had been sitting in a leather memorandum book on the kitchen shelf of a small ranch outside of Long Pine, Nebraska since 1929, waiting for a daughter who would carry it to a county her mother had never named and a year her mother had not lived to see.

__The end__