Hunting and fishing magazine Field and Stream this month recognizes Wyoming Rancher Mike Healy for his conservation work on the ranch. Healy runs the LU Ranch, a large cow-calf operation near Worland, in north-central Wyo., encompassing private and public lands at high elevations.
The magazine includes a monthly section titled “Heroes of conservation,” which includes short profiles of each month’s honorees. Typically, the winners are sportsmen and women who organize or participate in volunteer programs to create or restore wildlife habitat, often on public lands. Healy on the other hand, is recognized for his efforts on his own land and for his land-management practices on public-land allotments where he grazes his cattle.
The article says Healy has worked to implement wildlife-friendly fences that allow elk migration, reintroduced trout into Grass Creek and created off-channel water sources for livestock in order to protect stream banks. The ranch also pursues a program to control invasive weeds affecting 75 miles of streams.
Drovers/CattleNetwork readers will recognize Healy, as he’s been featured in a number of articles describing his animal-health practices and management strategies build around retaining ownership through finishing. For more, read “Lessons from the feedyard” or “Refining retained ownership,” or view our video with Mike titled “Managing for retained ownership.”
Within the farming and ranching community, we regularly discuss and recognize landowners’ efforts to protect the land, water and wildlife habitat, but often those messages never travel further, to non-agricultural audiences who need to hear them most. Seeing an article about a rancher’s efforts to restore and protect wildlife habitat in an outdoor-sports magazine with a circulation of over 1.2 million is a step in the right direction.
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