Meet our Guests: Betsy Devin Smith, Casey Smith, Johnnie Duguay-Smith

Betsy Devin Smith, Casey Smith and Johnnie Duguay Smith

Owners and Operators, BCS Livestock

Twisp, WA

9/1/2021

Betsy Devin Smith and her husband, Skip, started BCS Livestock, a farm that sells grass-fed lamb meat and wool products in the Methow Valley in Washington state. The business became a full-family endeavor when Casey, their son, and Johnnie, Casey’s wife, graduated college and moved to the Methow (BCS stands for “Betsy, Casey, Skip”). Together, the family practices regenerative agriculture. They focus on using mob-style grazing; placing many sheep in an area for a short period, which they believe improves soil health.

BCS grew from the family’s realization that the traditional cow-calf operation was no longer financially viable for them. Betsy believes that “the producer isn’t capturing enough of that dollar value [of the beef sold]” to break even. After taking a holistic ranch management class with Washington State University, the family realized that they could change the way they thought about agriculture.

Betsy says that they asked themselves: “’Are we really cattle ranchers, or are we grass farmers — land managers?’” After some discussion, they decided to raise sheep, which can be sold more quickly, and to focus on understanding the environment in which the sheep graze.

Now, the family works within the Methow Valley community and provides local services. BCS Livestock sells directly to the Valley’s occupants, mostly through word-of-mouth. They also rent many irrigated properties in order to graze their sheep and “mow” lawns for events.

“The ranch today is not going to be like your father’s ranch,” Betsy said. “The agriculture of tomorrow is not going to be necessarily like your father’s or your grandfather’s agriculture. It’s new and different.”

By Emma Fletcher-Frazer

Meet our Guests: Dana Visalli

Dana Visalli

Organic Farmer and Editor of The Methow Naturalist

Winthrop, Washington

August 28, 2021 

A self-proclaimed “refugee from American culture,” Dana Visalli moved to the Methow Valley in 1970, built an off-the-grid house, and began preparing the sandy soil surrounding it for farming. He wanted to know how to grow food, and how to make something by hand—two things his city upbringing had not taught him.

“It’s a tough way to start: living in the country, growing up in the city,” Dana states. “I just constantly put everything together backwards. You have to learn how to do everything, but that makes life challenging and exciting.”

Disenchanted by conventional American agricultural practices—which he notes were “built on energy addiction”—Dana embraced the ethos of challenge and excitement, and set about farming with ecological processes in mind.

Dana explained how the alchemy of ingested food becoming manure, and manure returning to enrich the soil is one cycle that has been wholly undervalued. It’s a cycle of reciprocity that demonstrates humans’ embeddedness in ecological processes. But that cycle has been broken, Dana claimed. Rather than treasuring our “humanure,” as Dana calls it, we label it “waste” to be disposed of. Rather than enriched soil, we end up with fertilizer dependencies and mass scale waste problems that, Dana claims, are wholly unsustainable.

An example of his penchant to take the road less traveled, Dana’s garden tells a different story: the once sandy soil is rich and dark with organic matter and humanure, the air hums with pollinators, and the garden rows swell with bounty. As a result, the compost pile is well-fed, and so are Dana’s neighbors who come by on weekends to buy his produce.

Standing amidst it all, Dana declares with reverential glee: “I’m entranced by the miracle of life!” Then, more quietly: “I don’t know what the question is, but the answer is ecology.”

By Nicki Caddell