Grazing buyout would eliminate ranchers' best tool

By Tony Malmberg

Tall grass waving in the wind is such a beautiful sight. Ranchers, wildlife biologists and environmentalists love that scene. Yet, the facade of grass masks the land’s fundamental health. The proposed grazing buyout legislation will promote this facade.

On my way home from a five-day seminar on holistic management, the tall grass inside the Bureau of Land Management exclosure made me a little edgy. Even a rancher couldn’t help notice the contrast between grazing and no grazing.

Stepping across the fence to investigate, I looked straight down between my toes. This perspective revealed a far different picture than driving by at 40 mph. Each step across this seeming Eden revealed bare ground, erosion, dying and dead plants, and no seedlings. What looked like an abundance of grass from the road would actually starve a jack-rabbit.

My interest had moved beyond grass-for-cows, to the soil surface and ecological function. With the environmental community’s concern about grazing on western lands increasing daily, I was banking on holistic management for a foundation to realign my cowboy skills with ecological management skills. I began my practice.

Sustaining tall grass means having a foundation of healthy land, recycling plant material and building soil. The practice of overgrazing on our ranch south of Lander, Wyo., caused soil to be lost. We wanted to build soil.

Ranchers need to stop flexing political muscle to maintain the status quo and find ways to equip cowboys with knowledge of how to use the tools.

Soil building comes from decomposition, which speeds with warmth and wetness. How can we improve decomposition in a dry, cold, arid environment? Allan Savory and holistic management discovered that different ecosystems respond differently to grazing, rest and other tools. To guide managers in this understanding, a brittleness scale was developed.

The brittleness scale measures how decomposition (and ultimately soil building) happens. It has to do with the constancy of humidity. The extreme brittle side of the scale might be the Sahara Desert, where plant material takes a long time to decompose and the tendency is for it to decompose chemically, through oxidation, or physically, through weathering from the top down. Fire also sends plant material up in smoke through chemical oxidation.

On the other side of the scale, a non-brittle environment would resemble the Amazon jungle, where a leaf begins to decompose before it hits the ground and decomposition happens from the bottom up, biologically. So why would we use different tools in these different environments?

Because, it takes moisture and bugs contacting plant material for biological decomposition to happen. In the non-brittle Amazon, humidity surrounds everything and the mass of material feeds a plethora of insects and other organisms. The tool of rest will build soil in a non-brittle environment. When I strolled through the BLM exclosure, it was clear that the tool of rest does not build soil in our brittle environment.

In a brittle environment, dryness seeps through every pore of space. Finding ways to keep the plant material wet will promote biological decomposition. Grazing by a ruminant animal puts the plant material in the animal’s warm-wet gut, where it decomposes biologically, and the dung provides a wet environment for bugs.

Another means of stimulating biological decomposition is by the hoof, which places plant material on the ground and an environment more moist than the air. Hoofprints collect and hold water and break soil capping to better absorb and hold moisture. In a brittle environment, we apply the tools of grazing and animal impact to build soil.

But we had been applying these tools with our cattle for years and our range was still in a state of degradation. After the holistic management seminar, I could no longer remain comfortable in my state of blissful denial. Luckily, the class also gave me a thought process to stop the degradation.

Building soil means getting as much plant material on the soil surface as possible. Growing a lot of plant material means catching as much sunlight as possible. To catch more sunlight we want more plants and many different species. Another way of saying this is that we want diversity and complexity in our environment — biodiversity.

We know that rest moves us toward the goal in a non-brittle environment, while grazing and animal impact moves us toward the same goal in a brittle environment, such as Wyoming’s cold, sagebrush steppe. The reason it wasn’t working on our ranch must lie in misuse of the tools — overgrazing, too much animal impact and over-resting.

We all know that we don’t use a hammer to tighten a nut and if we tighten a nut too much the threads strip. Through time we had fenced off ranches and then pastures until we were managing cattle rather than rangeland. We unwittingly adopted the practice of grazing season-long. This caused plants to be overgrazed, or grazing plants’ regrowth before they can recover. This practice weakened plants to the point of exhaustion and eventually death.

Continuous animal impacting tromped ruts and paths. Yet the over-grazed and over-impacted areas were side-by-side with many over-rested plants. The purpose of rest is for plant recovery. Misuse of rest results in dead plant material not breaking down and being recycled, or soil surface capping. We had old, dead, over-rested plants right beside overgrazed plants. We were using the right tools but we weren’t using the tools right. We were stripping the threads.

Our first grazing plan shortened the time of grazing and animal impact so plants had more time for regrowth and recovery. Plants put down roots and gained vigor. Cow trails, roads and bare ground filled in with grass, and bunchgrasses appeared where we had seen none before. Increased stock density simulated the migrating herds of buffalo, which impacted the over-rested land and plants. We were grazing and impacting more intensely but for shorter times.

With the worst drought on record, we have increased rest and recovery periods to 18 months and in some cases up to 26 months. In our low-production, arid environment, longer rest periods supply ground-covering plant material, especially during a drought. Contrary to high-production, brittle environments, over-rest in our low-production, brittle environment may not be a problem for a year or more. By grazing less and resting more, we are running more cattle and more wildlife. We have many more plant and animal species — biodiversity. We were making dirt.

The grazing buyout will throw out tools desperately needed to manage for land health in a brittle environment. Ranchers need to stop flexing political muscle to maintain the status quo and find ways to equip cowboys with knowledge of how to use the tools.

Knowledge and understanding are the first steps in securing commitment from cowboys to use the right tool, in the right way, at the right time, and improve land health. With that commitment, we will move towards increased biodiversity. We do need to stop stripping the threads but don’t throw away the wrench.