Article 01

Yes you read the title correctly: it took us 30 years to learn how to kill cactus the 'right way'. What you don't know is that 15 of those years was spent doing it COMPLETELY WRONG.

When it comes to getting rid of prickly pear, terms like 'control', 'treat', and 'kill' are frequently confused in this line of business. That's a very bad thing, as cost is a big issue for all of these methods.

You want your cactus GONE, and only ONE of these words means the cactus isn't coming back after you paid to get rid of it. Most of our guys are deathly afraid of picking the 'wrong method' and then being out quite a bit of money with no results.

We thought it would be helpful to share our experience with trying nearly every method out there. In other words, WE spent the time and the money so you don't have to! Let's start off by telling you what our two BIGGEST mistakes were when we first got started:

1. We blindly assumed that mechanical control works, and then stuck to these methods for way too long, even when they didn't work. As a result, we made our cactus problem way worse than it ever needed to be.

2. We almost bought into the whole, "sprays work great for everybody, every time," myth. Spray cost would have been a big issue for us. Luckily, our next-door neighbors tried spraying and didn't get ANY results from it whatsoever. That was a pretty STRONG indicator that spraying wouldn't be good for us either, so we didn't do it.

So between the issues of cost and not wanting to waste that kind of money, sprays were out of the question for us. That only left us with 'Mechanical Control' methods. Most people with ANY experience in prickly pear management already 'knows' where that road leads...

...For us? It was all we had to go on. So we spent 15 years trying out different methods, and made our cactus troubles infinitely worse. A few of the approaches we tried were quite dangerous too, but I'll get to that part.

Right now, I want to ask you: what comes to mind when you hear about someone who disregards all the conventional wisdom of his peers, and habitually does the 'wrong thing' for 15 years solid? A crazy? A nut? An idiot? A stubborn mule, perhaps? Let's be tactful and go with 'Stubborn Mule'. We certainly earned the title:

In 1987, we used a little John Deer riding lawnmower to cut a trail through 35 acres of solid cactus, and quickly discovered a lawnmower was WAY too small for the job. Ultimately , we vowed to never do that again on account of the thorns, the prickles, the snakes, and the blood. Yup, it took pain, snakes, and blood for us to stop doing that.

In 1988, we bought our first Farmall H tractor and shredder so we could cut those trails and also do ordinary yard work around the house and immediate pasture. That's when we realized the problem was NOT the size of our lawnmower, but all the cactus we had on our place.

So we talked to friends, neighbors, and people in town, and learned that shredding spreads cactus and makes the problem worse. We also got to see this issue first-hand with the mower and shredder, simply by doing ordinary yard work where cactus happened to grow. Fence-lines, anybody?

In 1989, we started our process of removing prickly pear by towing pieces of railroad rail and I-beams on STEEL CABLES. This was the most dangerous part of our quest for learning how to kill cactus, and thankfully this phase was also the shortest.

Given the stories of injurious or fatal industrial/naval accidents involving 'snap-backs' on broken cables, it didn't take us very long to realize how unsafe it was to tow on steel lines under tension, so we switched over to towing chains straight away.

Structural steel towing knocked the cactus back and made the property 'look better' for 3-6 months, but all it really did was spread our cactus and make the problem worse. We continued trying out different variations of mechanical control for 15 years.

Well after doing it 'wrong' for that long, we got pretty frustrated and desperate, on account we noticed our cactus was several times WORSE than it was when we started. All we managed to accomplish with mechanical control was create lots of new cactus plants from all the little pieces we left behind. It got so bad, we started to get desperate for something that DID work, or at the very least, keep the re-growth from happening.

So yeah, we had a pretty rocky start that lasted a decade and a half. We learned that cactus is easy enough to knock down... The real problem was the re-growth.

And at first, we didn't know what to do about that! We knew the methods we'd been using were NOT working on their own. So finally we got the idea in our head that we needed to pick up EVERYTHING we knocked down so it never had a chance to touch the ground and become a new plant.

Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to ACTUALLY do this? Because bulldozer or not, I can tell you right now that debris pick-up is just NOT worth the time, the effort, or the money. Even if you DID somehow manage to pick everything up (which is not likely), it’s still dirty, hot, unpleasant work. Not only does it leave you with a skin-full of tiny and painful cactus needles at the end of the day, but it also takes a lot out of you physically (especially if you’re like us, and you have a bad back and knees).

And I'll tell you something else: our process of 'doing it wrong' for 15 years? Well it caused our neighbors to think we were totally nuts! One neighbor thought we were absolutely BAT-SHIT, and when our I-beam drags didn't work, he said something to the effect of, "I told ya so."

Incidentally, when sprays didn't work for this neighbor, back in '96, he started shredding his cactus instead. He was out there literally every single weekend... all day long… and some days… in the middle of the week... for SIX YEARS STRAIGHT. So to that, we say, "Crazy is as crazy does..."

Regardless, our OTHER neighbor had some chuckles over our sanity as well. After all these years, we don't rightly recall his EXACT words anymore, but knowing him, he likely said something to the effect of, "Aw hell, y'all are just nuts!"

We kept on doing it anyway, because we wanted to get to the bottom of this problem. We wanted to know EXACTLY what it took to permanently eradicate prickly pear. Not just 'control' it, not just 'treat' it, but kill the dadgum stuff! We wanted to learn how to turn a place full of prickly pear into a safe grazing area again, but everything we did to try to get rid of it seemed to make more of it!

It got particularly bad in 2003, when we took to SERIOUS inventing and finished building and designing a ‘Scooper-Upper' prototype to test out here at home. It was supposed to work pretty much exactly the way you probably think it sounds:

The machine was supposed to ‘scoop' pads and stems up off their roots, and neatly collect everything so the debris never touched the ground. We could then cart the entire load off to a dump site of our choosing.

In theory, it all 'sounds nice'. In practice though, it wound up doing pretty much the OPPOSITE of what you might expect a ‘scooping machine’ to do. All it did was knock everything down, and smear a lot of cactus debris around our pasture.

There were so many tiny pieces of cactus debris strewn about, that not even a pitch-fork would have worked to salvage the situation we created. That's how bad it was!

Given how much time and money we spent on designing and building this thing, we were absolutely disgusted by the non-performance. We even cut the chains and ditched the machine in the pasture before heading home!

So 15 years of hard effort, and we accomplished NOTHING. Even worse, with nothing to show for our trouble, we were out quite a bit of MONEY too! To be honest, we nursed a bruised ego for a while.

About 6 months passed by before we went back to fetch the machine. We were going to 'cannibalize it' for the steel stock for use in another project. But that's when we noticed something very important:

Wherever we had gone over with the ‘Scooper-Upper’, the cactus was GONE! No new plants, except for the little 'onesies' and 'twosies' that came up from the roots.

That's when we realized we ACCIDENTALLY designed something that turned out to be the correct combination of parts necessary to cause pads and stems to dry up and compost away before they had a chance to re-root into new plants on our place. Again, we got there by ACCIDENT, but so what? We got there! But what did we do exactly?

We took it home and studied our 'accident' a while. We learned that all the traditional methods of 'mechanical control' have something in common:

Not only do they ALL cause the 'wrong' type of damage, they all cause the SAME type of damage! They all create intact cactus pieces, with enough moisture and nutrient reserves, to set down roots and become new plants on your place.

So we went back to the drawing board and redesigned our failed 'Scooper-Upper' from the ground up to be a 'Runner-Over' instead. Then we took all the things that worked about our design, made them better, and then started running A/B Split-Tests in 2004 between it and one of our old 'I-Beam' structural steel tows. The 'Runner-Over' won out. Every. Single. Time.

Okay, so let's fast-forward a little and talk about something else: Let's talk about Dave. Dave is a close family friend of ours. He was also our 'go-to' computer guy in the early 2000's.

As a brilliant businessman, he seemed to be doing very well for himself at his computer repair shop. That is, until we found out he was absolutely SICK of doing it. Dave was on the lookout for a career change.

One day, he found out what we were doing over here with our prickly pear. From then on, he started paying attention to our work. Eventually he started coming to us for prickly pear advice. We were flattered that anybody would even ASK us for advice on this subject, so of course we were happy to share everything we knew with him!

We told him that if you turn prickly pear into 'near pulp', it becomes IMPOSSIBLE for the cactus to hold water or feed itself. We told him that yes, the roots are still left behind, but because they are now UNABLE to feed themselves, they are using EMERGENCY food reserves to survive.

We told him it takes 3-6 months for the roots to push up new pads to replace all the ones you hammer to a pulp. Then we told him our 'big secret' we found out through years of testing:

We told him that if he CONTINUED to apply our kind of damage, the way WE did it, every 3-6 months, to keep up with the re-growth... keeping new pads removed as they came up, the roots would soon run out of emergency reserves and starve to death in the ground for lack of photosynthesis.

So in other words, we told him that whether your aim is to create more safe grazing area, keep your livestock and horses protected from cactus, have less places for snakes and vermin to hide, or you just want a low-cost alternative to do something about your cactus without hurting your good trees and grasses, the principle is ALWAYS the same:

Getting rid of prickly pear is simply a matter of causing the RIGHT kind of damage to your prickly pear, at the RIGHT times!

We told him we learned from all our tests that the changes we make are indeed permanent. We told him we knew how to do it cost-effectively, too! As you can imagine, Dave's mind was completely blown by what we told him.

Apparently, Dave found his new calling too, because he folded up on computers and launched a completely new business on what we taught him! For 10 years, until the day he finally retired, Dave offered a statewide 'on-site' cactus removal service.

Dave helped to perfect our technique all over Texas... on just about every acreage size and terrain/tree scenario you can IMAGINE. Every single client he had became a happy success story. Word got around about him, and then us.

Ranchers from all over the US started asking us to help them. That's when we went into business ourselves. We ran ads in Texas Coop Power. Next thing you know, we started showing up as local news stories on TV.

And our neighbors? The ones that thought we were totally NUTS for doing what we did? Well, they finally stopped laughing when they saw our cactus-free pasture! In fact, you should have seen their faces the day we told them our company has been teaching clients how to kill cactus for over 10 years!

So that makes 15 years of us 'doing it wrong', 5 years of testing our breakthrough, and another 10 years that our pest plant removal company has been teaching our clients how to turn their prickly pear into safe grazing area for livestock and horses. And that pretty much sums up in a nutshell why us Johnsons absolutely LOVE being a couple of 'Stubborn Mules'!

Yeah sure, sometimes you'll 'butt heads' against a problem for 30 years before you finally come up with the solution for EVERYBODY. A good answer for a tough problem (like prickly pear) can be a 'long-time coming'. But that's TOTALLY OKAY by us! People like us are the 'industry outsiders'.

We always seem to manage to DO what everybody else either says, "Can't be done," or, "You're crazy if you try that!" But those same guys almost NEVER realize the huge advantages of guys in our position:

1. Sometimes if you're a stubborn mule about 2 things, like we were about mechanical control and sprays, you'll find you're the only one in the world at that intersection.

2. I would put it to you that being the ONLY 'stubborn mule' at an intersection can often be the best way to solve an expensive problem that nobody else has fully figured out yet. (Example: Nobody really figured out how to get rid of cactus without hurting your good trees. We did!)

3. Being a stubborn mule about our prickly pear also forced us to meet lots of known authorities in the environmental, agricultural, geological, and pest plant management fields.

4. There are ALWAYS authoritative people in 'X field' who admire a stubborn mule, and love being able to offer you their assistance and expertise. I cannot tell you how grateful we are to the 200 county extension agents we contacted about prickly pear, and all the hundreds of ranch managers, licensed applicators, real estate people, and hunting enthusiasts who wrote in to offer their input and support on the cactus removal technique we developed here.

5. It also helps to appear a little 'crazy', because a nay-sayer's expectations of you will typically be super-low. So much so, that when something DOES happen, the person who wrote you off as a nut is always so surprised/amazed that you did it at all! Then you get the satisfaction of patenting your solution and forming a company off the very thing they said could NEVER be done, and watch them kick themselves for not thinking of it first!

6. Finally, I would also put it to you that sometimes even credentialed professionals and seasoned pros can benefit from an 'outsider perspective' from time to time... someone who isn't afraid to ask the dumb/obvious questions, and maybe test an assumption or two. Sometimes, real progress can happen that way... especially in areas where a hard wall has been reached supposedly.

The point is, we've spent 30 years researching and testing prickly pear elimination strategies. We made a LOT of mistakes along the way. Some of them were real doozies!

But I'm also here to tell you that we valued every single mistake we ever made. Each one was an important lesson that brought us 'that much closer' to discovering the methods we now teach as a company. Our mistakes brought us closer to a REAL solution for prickly pear that almost anybody can use.

The Sad Truth: All the 'usual suggestions' for prickly pear take a LOT of time to do, and just about every choice you make, right or wrong, can cost you a LOT of money... so what method do you try out FIRST? What if you're wrong?

Let's face it, most people don't want to pay $30-300 an acre on something they aren't 100% certain will even work for their situation, or wait 2-4 years to know if they even got a 'good kill' from the sprays they paid for, or worse... put up that kind of money and then not see ANY results.

Most people literally CANNOT AFFORD to make a wrong choice on their prickly pear!

So yeah... being a Stubborn Mule isn't for everybody. A lot of people don't have the time, the patience, or the budget for it! Most people are not in a position to be like us, and spend 30 years of their lives getting rid of their prickly pear.

Nobody wants to spend 15 years wasting time on the wrong methods... For livestock ranchers, time is usually a factor:

• You need grazing territory NOW.

• You need to increase your stocking numbers NOW.

• You need to keep your cattle and horses safe from prickly pear NOW.

• You want to give snakes, mice, and rats less places to hide NOW.

So we went out of our way to test out as many methods as possible, welcomed the failures along with the successes, and learned from everything we did to produce our technique... 30 years of hits and misses, A/B Split-Testing, statewide field-tests, simple observation, focus groups, research, and expert consultations.

We get the occasional random person on Facebook who asks us, "Was all that work even worth it?" You bet it was! This makes over 10 years now, that our specialized pest plant removal company has been teaching clients how to turn prickly pear into safe grazing area for livestock and horses.

Sure, we've had our ups and downs, but the worst stuff only really happened when we did all the stuff that people usually try on their prickly pear. That's why 'The Cactus Guys' will always be 'Stubborn Mules' for as long as we live!

Talk Soon,

Dr. Gary W. Johnson and James Johnson A.K.A The Cactus Guys!

It Only Took Us 30 Years To Learn How To Kill Cactus The Right Way!

Ready to Get Started?