“Things like to change”, sometimes we can change with them

Post by Clemson undergraduate Charles Ruth

Jeff Hermans of Montana DNRC has been trying to convince landowners to change their land management practices for years. He sees the buildup of fire fuel as a major threat to ranchers and regular landowners alike because of the threat of complete stand replacement fires. He argues that not thinning timber and just managing through fire suppression is building up fuel and is inefficient because at some point, there is going to be a fire that cannot be effectively stopped until it burns up everything in its path. He maintains that “things like to change”, and that preventing this change from occurring will only make it inevitable and potentially catastrophic.  With areas becoming more populated and subdivided, it is also becoming more difficult to convince new landowners to thin their timber for future protection. Hermans also wants to promote the use of these timber rich private lands to make revenue through logging, reducing the buildup of fire fuel and allowing money to be made from the timber. To me this seems like a fantastic way to approach this issue, but Hermans has said that it has not been completely well received. Many Landowners either simply don’t think they need to thin their timber at all, or they view on thinning timber is too negative to realize the danger of not. There is also a lot of pushback from environmental groups who also hold the preservation of land over efficient management. These groups can outbid loggers for the rights to the timber, cutting the initiative off at the knees before it can gather enough support. The longer this prevention of efficient management continues, the likelihood of these stand replacement fires popping up increases. And many of the landowners who are resistant to this change might lose everything. But private land owners never enjoy being told how to manage their land, something that is having a big effect on the Montana landscape.

We have continued the theme of Rangeland Management with ranchers and government agencies, and a lot of our focus was on cattle nutrition and how what we feed cattle affects us and the environment. Dr. Gustavo Lascano talked to us about specific parts of cattle nutrition and made an interesting point about food resources as a whole, “if you don’t secure your nutrition, your ecological niche disappears”. I agree with him on this premise because of how important food resources are for ecosystems and how even relatively slight changes in climate and resource quantity can cause specialist species to decline or prosper. This applies to humans as well because while we are pretty good at surviving just about anywhere, our health and success is heavily influenced by our nutrition. What cattle forage on influences the quality and nutrient content of their meat and their milk, and Dr. Lascano showed us how changing our cattle’s diet, like foraging more Omega 3 fatty acid rich plants, can, in turn, benefit us as well. The Omega 3 FA’s can, in turn, begin to have a higher concentration in the milk of the cows, which would provide us with a good source of the fatty acid. This type of forage management, combined with good rangeland management, could benefit people’s health along with improving habitat quality, which I think is a fantastic possibility for the future if ranchers’ and dairy producers are willing to try different forages and feeds.

Not all change is necessarily resisted outright, but sometimes because the new answer doesn’t fit the original problem in the needed way. We saw this when we visited the Weschenfelder Feedlot in Shepherd, Montana. There we got a first-hand look at how much resources and time goes into preparing cattle for final sale, the effects this has on both the cattle and surroundings, and how the operation needs to be efficient to persist. The cattle are fed a massive amount of feed each day, and the production of this feed along with the subsequent digestion by the cattle leads to a lot of greenhouse gases being released. But I don’t condemn the feedlot or the workers there, because I also think this practice is necessary until more efficient and ecosystem friendly strategies become popularized and proven. The beef industry is very important for our economy and to wildlife, because the ability to harvest cattle at the rate we currently do means that game species don’t take the brunt of that demand. The feedlot puts a vast amount of effort into maximizing the efficiency of their feeding routine. The ration formulas each group of cattle receive are heavily scrutinized to put as much weight on the animals as possible while trying to minimize the cost of feed as much as possible. The use of GrowSafe feed systems also helps track the amount of feed specific animals eat to determine how much weight they put on with that feed, helping to track efficient animals for owners so that they can improve on their stock and use of the land. The biggest issue the feedlot seemed to have is the conditions of the immediate area, like how all those cattle effectively destroy the ground. Developing a way to reduce the density of the cattle by letting them graze would help alleviate this damage, but the cattle would take longer to finish. This balancing act will be tough to overcome, but I think if the environmental and cattle groups that are currently at war work together, then they would stand a good chance of developing an efficient alternative to the tightly packed feedlots that I think a bit unfairly maligned.