By Sara Millhouse
Special to the Daily Sketch
Farming isn’t easy in the high-altitude dryland prairie of El Paso County, Colorado. William Vogl learned that at a young age. At 13, he saw his family’s cattle operation “screech to a halt” after an epic drought. Their farm went nine months without a drop of rain.Vogl became a firefighter, a demanding and rewarding career that he loves. Firefighting depends on understanding how wildfire ecosystems function – just as he learned to do as a kid on the farm. When Vogl bought a seven-acre parcel in the open prairie of Black Forest, Colorado, he started gardening and raising chickens. One thing led to another.
“The next thing I know, we had over 100 birds, and we could sell eggs and whatnot,” Vogl said. “About that time, I was introduced to regenerative agriculture, and it really, really clicked with me. Watching how my parents’ operation did so poorly in a major drought, the goal of regenerating your soil to where it can handle those stresses really made a lot of sense to me.”
Today, Vogl runs 200 sheep on his farm and leased land, selling the meat and using the sheep for prescribed rotational grazing that rejuvenates the soil through stomping hooves and rich manure.
Vogl brings a spirit of constant experimentation to his business, land and animal husbandry. “I’ve always been a big fan of just trying things and seeing what works,” he said.
With the gardener’s old friend of compost, he’s found scalable success in his pastures. Each year, Vogl gathers tons of yard waste, manure from a local horse rescue and more than 1,000 rotting jack o’ lanterns to create compost that he spreads to enrich the soil.
“It almost seems unbelievable how well it actually works,” Vogl said. “We’ll see, within a growing season, two to three times the amount of biomass growth, and it’s simply because of the water retention capacity that compost added to our pastures.”
His hungry sheep attest to the multi-year benefits of a single treatment of compost. “They attack that grass way faster than the areas we hadn’t treated yet,” Vogl said.
Through the Quivira Coalition, Vogl joined other farmers and ranchers who wanted to demonstrate the benefits of compost and biochar on rangelands. Quivira received a $3.9-million Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant from the USDA, which was going to support livestock producers to transform agricultural and wood waste, finish livestock and poultry on grass, and help enhance biodiversity and potential carbon sequestration on the land.
Besides measuring the efficacy of compost and biochar application on rangelands, the grant would have paid for equipment for Vogl to develop an aerated static pile (ASP), a piping system that delivers the air necessary to break down waste into compost. The ASP would reduce time-consuming pile turning and allow Vogl to scale compost production as he fights fires, cares for his kids and moves his sheep.
In early 2025, the Trump administration canceled the already-obligated grant, ending this support for producers. Since Quivira had already enrolled many livestock producers into the program, the organization was dedicated to supporting Vogl and others through their journey to create resilience on their lands; Quivira was able to raise funds to cover Vogl’s costs for soil monitoring and report completion.
Vogl also applied for and received a Colorado Department of Agriculture Soil Health and Optimizing Water (SHOW) grant to continue demonstrating the benefits of compost.
“If we can get to doing this on a big enough scale, we might actually see some countering to ecological problems that we’re seeing in our community,” Vogl said. “Water is our biggest limiting resource here, so anything we can do to help capture natural precipitation and keep it there on the land and prevent it from either evaporating or running off is just a huge benefit.”
By retaining moisture, composting and other regenerative soil practices can even help replenish Colorado’s besieged water tables. “We’re actually seeing the water table rise again,” Vogl said. “That’s huge here, because we were seeing water tables drop with development coming in, with more wells going into our aquifers and pulling water out that doesn’t replenish or replenishes very slowly.”
As a firefighter, Vogl sees how his grazing animals can also reduce the undergrowth that fuels massive forest fires. “We liken it to going into a hoarder house,” he said. “When we bring the sheep in, we’re able to restore one of those natural functions that our ecosystem used to have, which was huge herds of migratory animals.”
On a small scale, Vogl’s sheep mimic the millennia-old movements of elk, deer and bison across the American West. As he builds his business, he acknowledges that his work is personally as well as ecologically fulfilling. His “cherry on top” is being able to connect people with food, agriculture and the environment.
“When you see how sheep interact with the grasses, how the grasses respond to these rotational grazing cycles, how the forest reacts to these mitigative measures and the subsequent rest and recovery periods, and then seeing the wildlife moving, it all starts to click how nature functions, and why it functions that way,” Vogl said. “Being a part of that cycle, it fills me up, spiritually.”
