Grazing Management for the Future: “Trying Something New” скачать в хорошем качестве

Grazing Management for the Future: “Trying Something New”

“Whenever we are locked into a very specific regime, it becomes very difficult to get creative or try something new. Many times trying new things is where you find solutions that truly work for the land, for the vegetation that’s there.” - Chris Jasmine, Rancher, Elko, NV For several decades wildfires have expanded in size and severity in northern Nevada. The Horseshoe Ranch is working to restore and expand healthy sagebrush steppe vegetation communities in an area that has become dominated by annual grasses. Their participation in Outcome-Based Grazing has enabled them to design an Outcome-Based Grazing Authorization (OBGA), collaboratively with their Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office, to help them graze flexibly while working towards their restoration goals. The flexibility? Time seasonal cattle grazing to reduce the biomass of cheatgrass, a wildly invasive (and highly flammable) annual grass, in areas for restoration activities and along established fuel breaks. The takeaway? Strategic grazing can be used as a tool to reduce cheatgrass biomass and prepare areas for restoration seeding efforts as well as use grazing to manually remove biomass from established fuel breaks, and ultimately even to change wildfire behavior. OBGAs can enable managers to direct their operations towards this goal with flexibility in their grazing authorizations. ____________________ The Outcome-Based Grazing program enables ranchers to collaborate more closely with the BLM on the design of their public land grazing authorizations. With this program, grazing authorizations are designed with built-in flexibilities tied to the terms and conditions of their grazing authorization. These flexibilities allow ranchers to adapt to changing conditions. The ability to adjust management on an as-needed time frame can benefit both the land health that wildlife relies on, and the sustainability of grazing operations. Check out the rest of the OBGA Program series to learn how ranchers have utilized flexibilities in their Outcome-Based Grazing Authorizations: https://www.partnersinthesage.com/blo...