Regenerative ranching helps save sage grouse and salmon

Tony Malmberg spent his life as a rancher.

To do his job well, he told the Statesman Journal in fall of 2024, he also needed to be a poet.

“By poetry, I mean explaining to the environmental community how my being out on the land contributes to their values, whatever that value may be,” said Malmberg, who died in April 2025. "It might be fish in a river, it might be sage grouse, it might be functional ecosystems. Whatever it is, I can explain how my working with livestock contributes to their values on the land.”

Malmberg practiced holistic agriculture for four decades.

In the late 2000s, he and his wife, Andrea, moved to northeastern Oregon and began using cattle to improve salmon habitat on their ranch, Bunchgrass Land & Livestock .

“When we bought this place, the plant community i