Western ranchers are restoring diverse, grassland ecosystem practices that can improve the land’s capacity to hold water—and help them hold onto more cattle.
CIVIL EATS, MAY 17, 2021
It’s calving season and all across the West ranchers are watching the sizes of their herds grow. It’s also the beginning of a new season on most ranches, but in the midst of a historic, persistent drought, a growing herd brings difficult questions.
As average temperatures climb and the water that flows through many of the major rivers and creeks across the west is slowing, the availability of forage—grass, legumes, and other edible pasture plants—has become less predictable. As a result, many ranchers face complex calculations: Do they sell off some of their cattle and cut a profit, but risk flooding the market and getting a low price? Or do they hold onto their herd and buy extra hay and forage, rent additional pasture, or risk overgrazing—and further drying out—the land?
There aren’t easy answers to this question, especially as climate change accelerates and the western United States enters its 22nd year of drought, long enough to be categorized as a mega-drought. This year, leaders in California have declared a state of emergency for most of the state and much of the West is in “exceptional drought,” a dangerous level of dryness linked to water emergencies, failed crops, and barren pastures, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. And as the Colorado River slows and dry periods between rainstorms have become longer and less predictable, the situation is likely to get worse. Ranchers, who often depend on dry, steep, and marginal land that can’t support crop production, could be hit especially hard.
“To be honest, we don’t have any miracle answers at all,” Julie Sullivan, who runs a grass-fed beef ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, said in an email. Yet Sullivan and ranchers like her have found ways to lower the stakes by adopting management practices that can improve the land’s capacity to hold water–and, therefore, hold onto more cattle.
The best bet? Improving or restoring the diverse, grassland ecosystem native to the land, and grazing it just enough to grow year after year. This doesn’t guarantee a rancher will avoid selling off cattle, or needing disaster assistance through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Yet, it does help create something like a buffer within the landscape so droughts and other natural disasters like wildfires are less threatening.
Managing to Avoid Bare Soil
“Every drop of moisture is even more precious than it used to be,” said Sullivan. “You want to do everything you can to make sure your ground is capable of absorbing water.” When the soil is healthy, full of organic matter and microbes, it will sop up water. The relationship between water and grasslands is cyclical: When more water is retained in the soil, it leads to healthier grasslands and healthier grasslands are able to build deeper, longer-lasting reserves of water.
Most of the water-conservation practices that Sullivan and her husband and business partner George Whitten employ on the San Juan Ranch are geared toward keeping the ground covered year-round. In the driest region of Colorado, their meadows—a complex mixture of native grasses, forbs, and legumes—always have something growing and alive.
“You’re always managing to avoid bare soil,” said Sullivan. This involves moving the cattle every day, with an electric fence, so that they do not overgraze the land, exposing it to the drying sun. Their cattle feed off the grasslands their entire lives, never entering an industrial feedlot to be fattened with grains, which makes healthy pastures all the more essential.
Whitten inherited the 3,400-acre ranch from his father and grandfather. In the mid-‘80s, when conserving water became a priority, he decided to stop baling hay in the conventional way. Most ranchers will cut their grasses, rake it into thick piles, known as bales, and then haul it off the field to store and feed to their animals throughout the winter. Yet, in an arid landscape, Whitten says, that process can contribute to the degradation of the soil and grasslands, worsening the impacts of drought.
“When you have hauled all that biomass away, you’ve taken a lot of nutrition, a lot of fertility out of the soil,” said Whitten. “If you keep doing that over and over again, pretty soon, then you need to add another technology, which is some sort of synthetic fertilizer.”
Instead, Whitten and Sullivan keep the hay on the field year-round, bundling the grasses into thousands of small haystacks. This way, their hay meadows stay diverse and healthy. It’s a method of bailing hay that works especially well in an extremely arid, dry steppe environment like the San Luis Valley, where the average precipitation in the valley is just 7 inches a year, though this year will likely be less than that.
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