12
Hi-Line
October 2017
FARM & RANCH
www.havredailynews.com
Recovery: Producers could use burns ■ Continued from page A1 This way, no pasture grasses are stressed at the same time in their growth pattern each year, allowing for a more well-rounded array of native plants to thrive. “Here I’d really appreciate if you’d put in capital letters if you could, regardless of all of this, if we use each pasture at a different season each successive year — one year we graze it in spring, one year graze it in summer, another in fall another year in winter — then we’re getting into that rotation pattern where the pastures themselves are healthy enough to withstand wildfire.” But once a pasture is hit by wildfire, it changes everything for a while until the ecology is healthy again, he said. In general, livestock should be kept off the burn areas for two years, he said, or longer in areas burned more deeply. The exception to this is in pastures with northern mix grasses that burned quickly and start coming back next spring. “If we stay on the northern mix grass you can burn a pasture in mid summer of 2017 and be back on it in fall of 2018 without any negative impact,” he said. “One study showed that you can even go in in spring with light grazing and not set it back.” But some pastures might require spot fencing of small areas that cattle need to stay off of for a longer period. In riparian areas, by the third year producers can put cattle on the pasture in a rotation, such as in late June graze 35 percent of available forage, pull livestock out of the pas-
ture for a minimum 45 to 60 days in July and August then can go in and take another 35 percent in September, Marlow said. This effectively grazes off 70 percent of the pasture, “which is good for my cattle and good for my billfold, but, because it did it in these light grazing bouts with sufficient recovery time between them, the riparian community comes blasting through.” In the end, Marlow said, he recommends adding pasture burning to the normal way of doing business as a way to keep rangeland healthy by mimicking the bison/wildfire grazing rotation system that the native grasslands evolved under over the millennia. His recommendation is to do controlled burns in late March or early April when pastures still have a little snow in the shadows behind clumps of grass or sage brush, and the ground is wet or, if there is no snow, when kneeling on ground still creates a wet spot on the knees. The moisture protects vegetation. Wildfires come, though, in their own time, but once the land recovers from wildfire, producers can start introducing burning as a way to keep pastures healthy, and a way to mitigate the effects should a wildfire come again in the future. “They know their property, they know their weather patterns, they can start experimenting with a 20-acre patch with their cows and fire,” Marlow said, “and pretty soon they’re burning a third of their ranch and making it work.”
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