Our Environment, Animal Tips & the Great Outdoors

If you’re taking a drive through the countryside and you find yourself on Route 83 in Amenia, NY, chances are you’ll come across Elk Ravine Farm. The farm – owned by Jim Archer and named for the Rocky Mountain Elk that it initially housed – sits on 90 sprawling acres that encompass multiple different habitats, including wetlands, marshes, meadows, and forests. 

Today, the farm is most commonly recognized for its herd of Scottish Highland cattle and its driving horses, as well as a number of other animals. Elk Ravine is home to well over 100 animals, including Scottish Highland cattle, water buffalo, Belgian draft horses, miniature donkeys, ponies, Kune Kune pigs, Nigerian pygmy goats, white peacocks, Flemish giant rabbits, and pigeons of different varieties, among other animals.  

Visits to the farm, where guests can interact and learn from the animals, are a core of Elk Ravine’s ethos. “If you’re just looking at an animal behind a fence and there’s no one there to educate you or any one-on-one contact with the animal, there’s a disconnect,” Jim explained. 

Jim has owned animals for the majority of his life, but owning and operating this ranch has finally allowed him to use his animals to better the environment while simultaneously ensuring they have the best quality of life possible.

“Even when I was doing more conventional farming and raising the animals for meat production, my number one priority was always the quality of life for the animals. If you own any animal, its quality of life has to be the most important thing. They always live a short life in comparison to ours, so giving them the best quality of life possible is the main goal. They have no control over where they end up, so their life is dictated by what we as humans do to them.”

An average day on the farm

Jim is fond of saying that there is never a routine day on the farm, as each day presents its own unique challenges and differences. One day an animal could be sick, and the next, one of the cows could give birth. “You can’t make a plan, even if you wanted to,” Jim mused. 

That became evident soon enough; after hanging up the phone with me on the day we spoke, Jim quickly had to attend to a newborn HighPark calf (a cross between Scottish Highland and White Park cattle). While the mom could have had the calf by the feeding and bedding area, she instead chose to birth the newborn out in the field. 

“Within a short period of time, the calf went from standing to lying flat out, so we reacted quickly and took him into the barn and started life-saving measures,” Jim wrote on the Elk Ravine Farm Instagram. “Just like everything else in life, always be ready for change but be ready to handle the challenges directly and to the best of your ability.”

Jim and his fiancée, Kathy, do everything on the farm, with Jim’s daughters coming home on the weekends to help with tours. Indeed, being able to take care of the animals themselves is one of the most rewarding parts of their work. 

“I’m not a conventional farmer in that I don’t look at my animals in terms of financial gain, and I don’t have to decide life or death issues over money. I love them as pets,” Jim said. “I don’t have to look at them and decide what amount of money they’re worth. With animals, your life is theirs, too.” 

Environmental restoration 

Why Scottish Highlanders, you ask? Scottish Highland cattle are considered good for the environment for a variety of reasons. They are hardy grazers that can thrive on a wide variety of vegetation, including less palatable plants and invasive species, which helps maintain biodiversity, and due to their relatively light weight, they cause minimal damage to the ground compared to heavier breeds. This makes them ideal for conservation grazing, as their lighter weight minimizes soil compaction and reduces erosion, especially on sensitive terrains.

A few years ago, the area experienced high levels of rainfall during the summer. This caused many areas to flood, including some of the wetlands in which Jim had the Highlanders grazing. Because of the flooding, the Highlanders wouldn’t go into the wetlands, so Jim had to think outside of the box and ended up getting water buffalo as well. 

The water buffalo can be especially helpful for wetlands – as their name might suggest, water buffalo are heavily dependent on water and spend a majority of their time wallowing in rivers, mud holes, and other bodies of water. Water buffalo often will eat vegetation that even the Highlanders won’t, one example of this being the Japanese knotweed, an invasive species plaguing waterways and moist areas in New York State. 

“Water buffalo love the phragmites (an aquatic invasive species of tall grass that commonly grows in wetlands and consumes a lot of water, effectively lowering water levels in some wetlands). They just decimate it. And as for their ideal environment, they prefer the wetter the better, so having the water buffalo is a win-win environmentally,” Jim explained. 

Elk Ravine’s Highlanders and water buffalo spend their summers grazing on off-site environmental restoration projects up to 25 miles away from the farm. 

“The average site is about 30 acres, so we’ll only put six or seven animals in there. It doesn’t look like they’re doing much, but they’re eliminating all of the tall-growing vegetation that would shade the habitat,” Jim said. 

Jim notes that they’re lucky to work with concerned individuals who are doing their own environmental work and land preservation on their own properties, in addition to working with organizations that work with the federal government. In fact, the farm and carriage tours that Elk Ravine offers are two-fold in purpose: for one, they allow visitors to get an overview of the farm as a whole and of the rural countryside, and Jim also hopes that the funding from the tours will allow him to cover the expense of the environmental work in the event that federal funding is cut. 

“I think this kind of work is more important now than ever before, considering that lots of strides made for the environment could be lost. I do it because I’m addicted to animals – both wild and domestic – so if there’s something I can do to help them, I will do it.” 

Educational awareness

While many visitors may come to Elk Ravine to brush the coat of a fluffy cow or hold a baby goat, Jim says that many walk out with an increased awareness of the local environment and the vital role Elk Ravine’s inhabitants play in the ecosystem. 

“You come to see me and hopefully you follow us online, so when you get here, you say ‘Oh, that’s Jim,’ and you’re at ease. Then I get the chance to tell you about the water quality issues or the invasive insects that are killing off vegetation,” he explained. 

Many of Elk Ravine’s guests hail from urban areas, so being in the rural countryside, firmly entrenched in the farm is an entirely new experience for them. “When I explain these environmental issues to them, they go, ‘Wow, this does affect me, and prior to this, I had no idea what these issues were.’” 

“Our main goal is to make people aware of these issues, and that also goes hand-in-hand with land conservation. It maybe wouldn’t matter so much if we didn’t drink the water or live off the land. There are so many naysayers and deniers of climate change, but to me at this point in time, I don’t understand how you can’t see it,” Jim continued. “A lot of young people – especially the ones who come visit us here at the farm – are open-minded and realize that their generation is going to be facing the consequences of the actions of my generation and older.” 

Above all, though, Jim wants Elk Ravine to be the place where people come to forget about what’s going on in the world. The two-hour farm tour allows visitors to meet the Scottish Highlanders and have hands-on experiences with them and the other animals. 

“When I first began this, people were coming to see the cows, but how often do you have the time to do the same experience twice? So diversifying the kinds of animals that we have here at the farm was important. I want our visitors to be in the moment and enjoy being with the animals.” •

To learn more about Elk Ravine Farm, visit its website elkravinefarm.com and keep up with them on Instagram @elkravine. For more information about farm tours, visit elkravinefarm.com/tours or contact Jim Archer directly at (914) 262-4737 or via email elkravine819@gmail.com.

All photos in the slider below by Lindsey Clark.