Essence of Life

Growing up my parents moved me to various places across the west. I was blessed with the opportunity to experience nature in various and different settings, always living on the outskirts of town with the Rockies, the Mojave desert, or the Sierras as my back yard. I remember locking away the trash from the bears, locking away my sister’s horse feed from the deer and elk. I remember the local restaurants on Sundays always filled with ranchers, loud, bustling, big steak dinners on every table. Roadtrip after roadtrip looking out the window of our 1973 Power Wagon, the landscape typified the picturesque western scene, the giant mountain peaks, the late summer streams trickling from between the peaks down across the valley floors, the countless cattle dotting the landscape, the little ranch homes with surrounding poplar trees nestled against the hillside just above the floodplain indicated by the dense dark green grass line at the base of the hillside, all of the cowpies I would have to dodge getting to that little creek to drop my trout line.

I remember during my college days learning about the Amazon rainforest and how it was being burned down to make way for cattle grazing. I was stunned. I never ate a Big Mac again; I did not even eat beef for nearly four years, not even on holidays. It jaded my perception of the ranching industry as a whole. It seemed as though everything going wrong in the world, including global warming, was the fault of the ranching industry and the fast food industry’s quest for cheap beef. Every person in Wranglers and Justins was a villain, black hat wearers and white hat wearers alike. I had been hypnotized by the hocus pocus act, and that act became center stage environmental policy on Uncle Sam’s traveling circus.

Thankfully I soon reached the age of reason. That vegetarian diet left me docile, which ran against my nature, and nothing beats a big steak dinner, or a lamb burger, after a long surf session, or a hike. Those western landscapes were the same as I remembered, not the impending inferno or Armageddon that the scientists or academic establishment seemed to want me to believe. I was finished with college, I had done my time, and I survived with my reasoning faculties intact. One of the benefits of my studies later in life was the development of an intuitive feel for natural processes and how they function. Things were making sense on a deeper level.

And so I am not surprised to have run across an article in the September 2009 issue of Ecological Applications, Agricultural Research Service scientists Tony Svejcar, John Bates and Kirk Davies demonstrated over a 14-year period the benefits of livestock grazing to help rangeland recover from wildfires.

As reported on the USDA’s ARS site: “The scientists conducted a controlled burn on all the sites in 1993, and then measured vegetation cover, vegetation density and biomass production in 2005, 2006 and 2007. They found cheatgrass had infested a large portion of the ungrazed sites, leaving these areas even more vulnerable to future fires. However, cheatgrass did not become problematic on the sites that had been grazed. On these sites, native bunchgrass cover was almost twice as dense as bunchgrass cover on the ungrazed sites. The team concluded that the litter in the ungrazed sites fueled hotter fires that killed off much of the perennial vegetation, which allowed quick-growing invasive annuals to become established.”

Click here to read the USDA/ARS report.

Interestingly, and although the article mentions nothing of it, the established environmentalist stance is that grazing equals erosion. The idea is that the livestock eat up all the vegetation, stampede all over the ground, and then the rains wash all the soil away, eventually leaving nothing but a barren desert behind.

No doubt overgrazing could lead to this end; however, there is another benefit to grazing that the above mentioned article does not address. Implicitly, the vegetation is returning season after season, in fact the article concludes that native vegetation was nearly twice as dense as that of the non-grazed areas. Why? It seems logical that the livestock are tilling, reseeding, and fertilizing the ground, allowing for roots to take hold and vegetation to flourish. With denser vegetation and more root structure to hold the soil in place, it then makes sense to say that proper grazing management also leads to improved soil stabilization and erosion control.

Long considered obvious to the generations of ranchers who have been the caretakers of our western landscape, it is nice to see science finally making efforts to catch up.