There — with the support of wife Sarah Wildman Courtright — Glen Courtright has transformed 66 acres once rife with rubbish, the remains of 19th century gravel pit and invasive plant species into a model agribusiness dealing in hay, forage and two 30-strong herds of grass-fed bison and Corriente cattle.
Kevin Mattinson, who was instrumental in having Courtright recognized as 2024 Clark Soil and Water Conservation District’s 2024 Cooperator of the Year, calls Green Plains Farm “an oasis” where, while “doing things that are good for the environment” Courtright has “brought back some old ways” of working with the land. Among them: an unsubsidized profit.
Junk trees and Vaseline?
“The plan was always to bring livestock out here,” said Courtright, who will turn 64 this year. But he hesitated because the one-time Christmas tree farm lacked fences, buildings and machinery — in short, any of the infrastructure of a working ranch.
In 2016, the year he and Sarah married and started building Soaring Plains, “we had a lot of long conversations” about the future of the plot that had been in her late husband’s family for generations, he said.
The primary reason was the amount of work and cost involved in bringing the property up to snuff even for the new house, a project for which Courtright was his own general contractor.
They had at their disposal the proceeds of the sale of EnviroFlight, the business he founded, operated and sold along with the process he painstakingly developed to maximize soldier flies’ capacity to convert factory food waste into fertilizer.
He’s taken similar pains at Green Plains.
An initial challenge was the bramble on the west side of the property.
“We went through with machetes to see where the driveway would be,” Courtright said. “You really couldn’t see anything.”
On the other side of the hill lay the remains of a 50-foot-deep quarry from which the 19th century Little Miami, Columbus and Xenia Railway harvested limestone gravel for the track bed of today’s bike trail across Ohio 42.
A local bulldozer operator who estimated it might take a week for the job “was out here for eight weeks pushing sand and tailings into the holes,” Courtright said.
To be fair, borrow pits dotted the landscape as well as a century and a half of trash, including shoes, mattresses, old car parts and a bunch of concrete. More of a mystery, said Courtright, were the “thousands and thousands of empty jars of Vaseline.”
Any hint of scandal disappeared when he discovered the substance had reduced the amount of friction in the lives of dairy cows at an operation across the road.
In clearing the land, Courtright said, “we made a point of trying to save as much timber as we could, meaning hardwoods including black walnut, white and red oak and cherry. “Junk” and invasive species were removed, among them migrant honeysuckle, Osage orange, multiflora rose and the remains of elms taken by disease.
In a test of his own mettle, strengthened by a career in the military and national security, Courtright fashioned 8-foot lengths of black locust into fence rails while discovering “it’s tougher than iron.”
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Interceding with interseeding
All the while he was browsing the internet for information on the best practices for raising hay and forage crops. In the tones of the former Army and Navy officer and national security worker he is, Courtright recites what might be the mantra of the grass-fed animal movement: “I treat grass as a crop, not as an afterthought.”
For him, it’s been a harrowing experience.
To approximate a blank slate, a harrow was run over 20 acres of hayfields and 30 acres of pastures remove thatch buildup, get rid of weeds, level out any mole hills and manure piles and open up the soil to air, water and seeds.
“It kind of stimulates that root activity in desirable plants,” Courtright said.
The came the “interseeding,” a term familiar to old timers, for adding to their hay and forage ground seeds to enrich the crops and the soils that support them.
“For example,” he said, “legumes (clovers and alfalfa) are used to incorporate nitrogen and a high protein source for the livestock, annual rye grass for tonnage and energy, and other cool season grasses, as needed.”
The result: “I’m just getting more plants per square foot.”
The yield of one hayfield went from 2.8 tons per acre to five tons per acre. That hay also was taller and thicker, more fully shading the ground and retaining moisture longer in years of drought, like the most recent one. (After feeding his animals, he sells the surplus hay to horse owners.)
While the early years required extra effort to remove an established weed bed, fall and spring interseeding has moved to more of a maintenance level. He adds soil supplements and seeds based on field grid samples taken every three years and what plants he sees on the ground.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Where the bison roamed
The first animals grazing in the grass at Green Plains were bison, known for the lower fat levels of their meat. While still a part of the business, there were relocated away from the main property because his insurers were nervous about the proximity of bison herds and the human herds of uninvited tourists.
So – again, after the required research – Courtright brought in the Corriente cattle, commonly called longhorns, that now dot the Green Plains landscape. Smaller than bison, he said their meat has even lower fat content. They’re also low-maintenance animals, able to live outside throughout the year (saving the construction cost of a barn) and can be bred onsite because Corriente bulls are not as threatening as their bison counterparts.
In addition to what nutrients they get from hay and forage grasses, the animals gather around small feeding stations stocked with minerals treated with chelating chemicals to optimize digestibility.
Nutritional leftovers from the interseeding, hay and animals go back into the ground through gravity, erosion and manure.
“None of this is rocket science,” Courtright said. But it is scientific knowledge rigorously applied.
To market, to market
The business model was as carefully formulated by a businessman who has a dependency relationship with spreadsheets.
“The only way this works is not selling animals at auction,” Courtright said. “I do not sell quarters and halves.”
He periodically sells cuts of bison directly to high-end restaurants, (Cecil and Lime and the Winds Café, locally) and spends the lion’s share of his weekends at markets in the upscale Columbus suburbs of Worthington and New Albany.
The addition of lower-cost and lower-fat Corriente cattle is a bet that the trend to more healthful, low-fat meats will expand, and more people will put their money where their mouths are.
Eight years into it “the bison business is going well, and the cattle (business) is taking off,” Courtright said.
“In the end,” he said, “this is a health and wellness operation.”
Spreading the word
“The margins are so tight in grain farming, it's hard to squeeze a dime out of it. You have to be strategic. You have to be smart."
It’s also growing into a small-scale consultancy for people like farmer Mark Toops, who had noticed other remarkable changes on the Green Plains site, “but what really got my attention was his hay” – hay grown on sloping land that was thicker than what Toops was getting from his rich bottom land soil.
Soon after knocking on Courtright’s door, “Glen came down looked at everything (and) planted a field of hay for me using his blend that he has worked for him.”
“Wow, beautiful hay — and just such quality for the first year. Instead of increasing my acres of pasture, we’re going to increase the amount of hay and rotate, rotate, rotate,” a return to “really old technology.”
Mattinson also is impressed with “how openly (Courtright) shares what he has learned with his blood, sweat and tears.”
In addition to being “ecological and as close to organic as you can be without being certified … he’s more efficient, he’s streamlined,” said Toops, who is following suit.
“Instead of increasing my acres of pasture, we’re going to increase the amount of hay (raised in the same acreage) and rotate, rotate, rotate.”
And every extra bale of yield helps.
“The margins are so tight in grain farming,” Mattison said, it’s hard to squeeze a dime out of it.”
Which means that Courtright’s operation offers something for people with low-fat budgets as well as diets.