| Editor's
Note: This is the second of a two-part
series on the work done at the U.S. Department of Agricluture's
Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, N.M.
What role might livestock play in this emerging
concern for sustainability?
At the Jornada Experimental Range, this
question is very much on the mind of Dr. Ed Frederickson.
For starters, he wants to know how beef cattle use landscapes
and what their impacts are over time.
"It's an interesting question, in part,
because there really aren't any specific answers," said
Frederickson. "Like most ecological questions, every
component of the system being studied is changing at
various rates. The situation is never the same at any
two points in time.
Animals are learning, their social interactions constantly
shifting, and physiological needs are adjusting to varying
internal and external conditions every moment. Likewise,
their environment is even more dynamic."
Why research a question to which there are
no answers?
Frederickson cites Simon Levin's book "Fragile Dominion"
in which the first commandment of environmental management
is to "reduce uncertainty."
"In a world of increasing energy
– Dr. Ed Frederickson,
USDA Jornada Experimental Range
It's the same reason we watch the weather
forecast on TV – for peek at the future. Increased
certainty allows land managers of all stripes to make
decisions that will have more reliable outcomes, which
increases our ability to achieve sustainability.
However, as Frederickson notes, we should
be aware of Levine's second law of environmental management:
"expect surprise."
The uncertainty Frederickson is trying to
reduce specifically is how livestock alter landscape
soil nutrients and seed distribution.
This is important, according to Frederickson,
because research has demonstrated that livestock hastened
the conversion of 94 million acres of desert grassland
in the United States into mesquite shrubland not simply
through overgrazing, but also through seed dispersal.
"This research permits modelers like Deb
Peters and Sandy Tartowski in our group to use modeling
to detect emergent ecological patterns or properties
and predict future landscape directions given a range
of potential scenarios," said Frederickson, "which will
allow us to determine how grazing animals shape plant
communities."
There's another question on Frederickson's
mind: what is the best cow for arid ecosystems?
He suspects that Criollo cattle –
a lighter animal adapted to arid lands and brought to
the Southwest over 450 years ago by the Spanish –
may be the answer.
"My interest in these animals began while
reading a ranching magazine published early in the last
century," said Frederickson. "In this publication, a
rancher was concerned about bringing Hereford cattle
into New Mexico since the little Spanish cattle could
"rustle up grub" better than any other cow he'd seen.
In a world of increasing energy costs,
and human competition for grains, an animal that can
rustle up its own grub might be just what the industry
needs."
To find out, Frederickson and Mexican researchers
selected semi-wild Criollo cattle from the Copper Canyon
country of northern Mexico and brought them to the JER.
The goal is to understand what behavioral
and physiological traits allow Criollo to persist in
arid environments. For instance, does their relative
‘wildness' give them an adaptive advantage when
it comes to disease?
He also wonders what role Criollo cattle
might play in the development of alternative livestock
production systems that fit desert environments.
Could they be good "‘grassfed'
animals that might become a part of the burgeoning health
food market?
All of this leads Frederickson to a philosophical
thought:
"I believe my primary role is to discover
and organize knowledge, then to share this knowledge
with others."
Frederickson's goal is to help entrepreneurs
with new knowledge – though he'll leave the entrepreneurship
to the experts.
"Prescriptive, or rigid, production systems
lead to greater dependency on others and ultimately
fragile systems," he said.
"Knowledge-based systems lead to creativity
and a greater ability to adapt to change. This is important.
While the beef cattle industry in the United
States is highly efficient, it also has become increasingly
centralized and rigid. This leads to a system that is
vulnerable to collapse in response to catastrophic events.
By promoting increased entrepreneurship,
the system will become more diverse and increasingly
modular with time; thus, it will be more resilient."
In a sense, the circle is closed: resiliency
is also the key to ecological integrity, which is the
foundation for economic sustainability.
Landscape Scale
Being useful means not sitting still for
very long. In the case of the JER, this means tackling
new, and pressing, frontiers, including how ecological
processes work at landscape scales, how to effectively
conduct restoration, understanding the ecological effects
of land fragmentation, and continuing to explore how
to mesh ecological flexibility with economic flexibility.
To accomplish these goals the scientists
at the JER are taking an increasingly collaborative
approach.
Under Havstad's direction, for example,
all the scientists convene regularly in order to share
their latest research as it pertains to overarching
issues, such as developing land health indicators that
work at landscape scales.
"You work for the good of the group," said
Jeff Herrick. "To the extent possible, egos are jettisoned.
Collaboration is the new paradigm."
All the researchers at the JER understand,
of course, that collaboration is also the key to getting
anything done on the ground at landscape scales in the
West.
"Fifteen years ago the question to us was:
tell me how rangelands work," said Havstad. "Today,
the question we get asked is: how do we restore and
maintain these systems?"
That means people. Which means collaboration.
And economics.
"What we've learned is that the trouble
has not been with the tools," continued Havstad, "but
how we have used them without a landscape ecological
perspective.
But that's changing. There's a movement
now – it's not just scientists. Politicians are
talking about it, so are business leaders. It's going
global too.
"To be truly sustainable,
– Dr. Kris Havstad
Range health manuals are being translated
into Mandarin and Mongolian as we speak."
Naiveté isn't an issue: everyone
knows it will be difficult to accomplish landscape scale
restoration, if, for no other reason, the challenge
we all face from the long tradition of managing the
West by "fractions” as Havstad puts it –
meaning the fragmentation of lands among various private,
state, tribal and federal owners.
But this too is changing as tools such as
grassbanks, for example, allow management to be coordinated
over larger landscapes. And there is little doubt that
the JER will be right in the thick of this change as
well, being useful.
Since indicators are such an important part
of the JER's effectiveness, here is an indicator that
I like to use when contemplating their success: when
I first met Kris, Jeff, and Ed they worked out of trailers
in a parking lot on the New Mexico State University
campus. And there were only eighteen people involved.
Today, the JER resides in a large spiffy
building and has over 80 people employed or associated
with it.
This type of growth doesn't happen by accident,
or simply by effective lobbying. It happened because
people are beginning to understand, thanks to the work
of the JER scientists and others, that land health is
the foundation to social and economic health.
It might start with soil, grass, and water,
but it includes us as well.
Or as Kris Havstad put it: "To be truly
sustainable, we must be educated and practiced observers
of our environment.”
Read the first part of the Jornada
Range Experiment series. |
Courtney White writes