Livestock is the Problem, Not the Cure

By George Wuerthner, 8-02-07

A couple of hundred years ago, if someone were ill, the typical response was to bleed the “bad blood” from the patient. If the patient’s condition took a turn for the worse, more blood had to be let. If the patient died, it was because not enough bad blood had been purged from the body. It never occurred to these old time physicians to stop bleeding the patient.  They were convinced that bleeding a patient was not only a cure, but also necessary for a healthy body.

A similar case of misinformation dominates the thinking (or lack thereof) of ranchers in the West. They cannot conceive that grazing may be bad for the land, and indeed, if something is wrong with the range it’s probably because it is not grazed enough.

In the aftermath of recent large range fires such as the Murphy Blaze in Idaho, many ranchers (as well as those in Nevada and Utah) are asserting that the problem with these rangelands is “failed range management”.  In their opinion, the rangelands are not grazed enough. The assumption is that if only the cows had chomped the range to dust, there would be no fuel, hence no fire. Good theory, but absolutely wrong in practice.

The reason we are experiencing large blazes is primarily due to climatic conditions. The conditions that created the large Murphy Fire in southern Idaho include the hottest July since 1870, lowest humidity and soil moisture ever recorded, and low snowpack in the mountains. This combined with 2600 lightning strikes in one day and high winds pushed the blazes across the landscape.

With extreme drought, low humidity, high temperatures, and wind you get fires that cannot be stopped. Not surprisingly the West is experiencing some of the driest conditions in recent history. So big unstoppable fires are to be expected. And they will easily burn through closely cropped grazed grasslands under these conditions.

But exacerbating those historic drought conditions are a hundred years of grazing abuses. Livestock grazing isn’t the panacea as livestock proponents suggest, but the problem. This problem did not occur overnight—rather it is the cumulative effects of years of grazing our public lands by ranchers.

Livestock grazing has dramatically altered some vegetative communities. In particular the lower elevations of the Great Basin of Nevada, eastern Oregon, southern Idaho, and Utah never had large herds of grazing animals like bison and are extremely susceptible to livestock grazing impacts. As a consequence of grazing are in many places now converted to cheatgrass monocultures. And livestock is the major factor in the spread of cheatgrass.

Cheatgrass is more fire prone than native plants it has replaced. It is an annual that dries up earlier than other native perennial grasses, and is highly flammable.

But cheatgrass does not just appear on a site. Cheatgrass has a difficult time “invading” healthy native perennial grasslands for several reasons.

First there are soil crusts that form a more or less impenetrable mat make it difficult for cheatgrass’s small seeds to gain a foothold and help to keep native grasses widely spaced in their bunched habit. Livestock hooves break up the soil crusts, which facilitates establishment by cheat grass seedlings.

Second, cheatgrass cannot effectively compete against healthy native grasses. Native grasses are to cattle what apple pie and ice cream are to kids. Cheatgrass is like turnups. Livestock prefer to eat the native grasses over cheatgrass. Before they will eliminate cheatgrass, they completely nuke the native grasses.  By continuously chomping down on the native grasses season after season, livestock weaken these native grasses, giving a competitive advantage to cheatgrass.

Third, cattle help to spread cheatgrass into new areas by transporting seeds in mud of hooves or on fur.

Fourth, by destroying riparian areas and wet meadows through trampling and heavy grazing (and our riparian areas are in very poor shape), livestock grazing has also eliminated and reduced the natural fire breaks that once existed in the past.

The only long-term solution to the cheatgrass invasion is to reduce livestock grazing, if not eliminate it. Native grasses can recover if given sufficient rest from livestock abuse—though this is never quick.

First you have to recover the soil crusts by removing the continual pounding from hooves—this may take years.  And then—assuming you still have some native grasses left on the site--you have to wait for good seed years –which do not happen every year. Full native grassland recovery may take decades.

Pounding our rangelands with even more cows is like bleeding a dying patient—it is only going to kill our rangelands completely.