"Oh, look at the pretty flowers!"

Texas is a land of wildflowers.  They are pleasing to view while traveling across the open spaces of the Lone Star State.  They have their place and are useful to wildlife, but some are toxic to many species.  In the photo you see what I believe to be Bitter Sneezeweed (Helenium amarum).  It is an invasive plant that likes to colonize overgrazed pastures.

This one was growing on our place -- not at our invitation.  When a plant is not where it is supposed to be it is considered a weed and we treat them as such.

One of our neighbors has a pasture that is almost completely covered with these weeds.  They grow right up to our fence and then stop.  His pasture was overgrazed a number of times and the weed has colonized.  We see only an occasional plant pop up in our pastures.

In the photo you also see seed heads of Bahia grass and you see a lot of organic material covering the ground.  It is important to let the grasses go to seed regularly in order to maintain plant populations.  The organic material covering the ground helps to conserve moisture, return plant nutrients to the soil, provide strata for bacteria and fungi which break down that material and also to prevent the colonization by invasive species.

Monitoring pastures is something we do constantly.  Every time we cross a piece of ground we are looking at the plants, the condition of the grasses, the moisture levels, invasive plants such as trees and weeds, the shape of manure piles from the cattle as well as their coloration.  We watch for insect species, for other wildlife signs, the height of remaining forage, and many other things.  It is a habit of constantly monitoring and evaluating our operations.

I had a great conversation at breakfast yesterday morning in which we talked about how in every business there is a tendency to quickly "institutionalize" the things we do.  We lose the motivating factors to innovate -- to change -- and things become routine.  The problem is that the world changes around us and sometimes we get significantly "behind the curve" because we fail to change with it.  We stop monitoring the processes because they are "tried and true" and familiar.

Whatever your business, it is important to constantly monitor the processes that brought you success.  Subtle changes, like the appearance of that single invasive plant, could signal the need to make an adjustment, or they might just be an anomaly.  If we aren't paying attention, those anomalies can become part of the "accepted" background and creep in on a scale that is destructive.