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by Amber Friedrichsen

MOST farm fires are created by accident. Electrical sparks fly, engines run too hot, and wet hay spontaneously combusts. However, there is one instance when fires are planned for and set intentionally.

Prescribed burns are used to mimic the natural fires that once occurred on native prairies. They inhibit encroaching trees and weeds and preserve plant communities. This process is also a routine part of pasture management on Jessen Ranch located near Niobrara, Neb. Tim Jessen and his wife, Annie, use prescribed fire to control the native grasses on their property and maintain a forage system that can support a large herd of grazing cattle — but Tim and Annie weren’t the first ones in their family to pioneer this practice.

Jessen Ranch was established by Tim’s grandfather in the 1940s in the northeastern part of the Cornhusker State, overlooking the Lewis and Clark Lake, which is a part of the Missouri River. Its address doesn’t register on a smartphone map, and the closest city is over 40 miles away. Needless to say, gas stations and grocery stores en route to the ranch are few and far between.

The Jessens’ homestead is surrounded by rolling hills dotted with patches of forest and gaping gullies resulting from previous soil erosion. When Tim’s father, Gene, began farming here in

1952, the tricky terrain wasn’t the only thing causing him trouble. Invasive red cedar trees were outcompeting the desirable forages.

To give the native grasses on the land a fighting chance, Gene began administering prescribed fires every spring. The fires eventually eliminated most of the red cedar trees and allowed sunlight to reach the soil and stimulate the growth of different forage species. In the 1980s, Gene also transitioned from continuously grazing cattle to a rotational grazing approach, which encouraged even more plant diversity.

“Before the 1980s, Dad did like everybody else: Cows were in the pasture the first of June and rounded up in the fall,” Tim said. “When he got into rotating, the diversity in the pasture increased — mostly in a positive way.”

Gene passed away in 2018, but his legacy of land stewardship lives on through Tim and Annie, who have since moved to the farm and started managing the 2,400-acre operation. Tim continues to demonstrate his father’s affinity for sustainable agriculture in combination with his own interest in raising beef cattle by custom grazing roughly 350 cow-calf pairs on Jessen Ranch each year.

Restoring and renting land

Prescribed burns are still carried out on Jessen Ranch; however, they aren’t required annually like they used to be. Tim surveys his pastures for red cedar trees and decides to burn if there are enough popping up. He also considers the weather conditions to determine when it is safe to set a fire. In some years, Tim burns as early as February, whereas in others he will wait until May. Most of the time, burning takes place in late March or April.

The Jessens control the prescribed fires themselves and with assistance from neighbors. To prevent flames from crossing property lines, they backburn along shared fences. This technique is often used to curtail a wildfire’s path of destruction and involves setting smaller fires ahead of a larger one to expend any resources that could be used as fuel. But even with this protocol in place, the burn site must be monitored with a close eye.

“It’s stressful,” Tim stated. “The work really starts when the burning is done because for three or four days — or whenever you get moisture — you have to babysit the fire until it’s out. You have to worry about it spreading in the middle of the night.”

When the fire is fully extinguished, Tim custom grazes for a livestock producer who lives roughly an hour away. Cows and calves usually arrive sometime in April, along with a few bulls. The different classes of livestock ride separate trucks for ease of transportation and animal safety. Once they have been unloaded in the cattle yard near the Jessens’ house, it only takes two or three hours for most cow-calf pairs to reunite. Calves graze alongside their mothers for several weeks until they return to the cattle yard for weaning. After a couple of days of bellowing and longwinded moos, the calves are shipped back to their home farm. Then breeding season begins, which aligns well with plant growth.

Learning by doing

Most of the property is composed of warm-season grasses, offering an abundance of forage when cows’ energy requirements start to rise. Pastures are primarily based on little bluestem, big bluestem, and switchgrass, although Tim said an analysis from the Natural Resource Conservation Service showed more than 100 species of forbs and other grasses are present. This includes some cool-season grasses such as wild oats, Kentucky bluegrass, and different types of fescue that help extend the grazing window.

The ranch is divided into 22 paddocks, using more than 15 miles of high-tensile electric fence on fiberglass posts. While temporary step-in fencing works well in many rotational grazing systems, Tim said the topography of his fields makes moving fences impractical. Instead, his fences are permanent or semi-permanent, and the materials used can withstand prescribed fires.

Permanent water tanks have also been installed. One main holding tank is filled with water from a nearby dam via underground water lines. Then the water is allocated to water tanks in the pasture, and one tank services two to three paddocks. This system is fully functional now, but there was some trial and error along the way.

“My mistake early on was making the water lots too small,” Tim admitted. “You would think if you made the tanks big enough to hold three-fourths of a herd, it would be fine. But we’ve had to make them about four times the size of that.”

Cattle move through the paddocks quickly the first time around, completing a full rotation in a little over a month. Then as the summer progresses, paddocks receive longer periods of rest to ensure adequate recovery and regrowth. As a rule of thumb, cattle graze half of the available forage and the other half is left standing.

“When you get the winds that we have, leaving that thatch of grass on the ground keeps the soil from drying continued on following page >>> out,” Tim said. “A lot of these ridges are just gravel and sand. If you take all the grass off and get a week of 100°F weather, it will just bake the roots.”

Over the years, Tim has observed grazing behavior that has helped him time his rotations. The herd tends to graze in a circular pattern as a single unit, with only a few outliers straying away from the group. He also noted not all paddocks are uniform in size, so some grazing circles in the grass are completed faster than others. Nonetheless, once the animals have made a loop, he moves them to the next section to prevent overgrazing.

Shorter occupation time not only prevents overgrazing, but it prevents pinkeye, too. Tim has found significantly fewer outbreaks of pinkeye when rotations only last three to five days. Flies that carry pinkeye-causing bacteria lay eggs in cow manure, so moving cattle before these insects have time to hatch minimizes the spread of infection.

In addition to grazing, a small portion of land is seeded to alfalfa. Even though the cows exclusively graze grass and are returned to their owner at the end of the grazing season, Tim makes sure to have some hay on hand in case something goes awry. For example, one year an unexpected snowstorm in the fall prevented trucks from navigating to the farm. Tim kept the cows and fed them hay until the roads were clear and they could finally go home.

Calling for border collies

Moving cattle on Jessen Ranch is an undertaking. The steep slopes are difficult to summit in four-wheel drive, and the gullies are so deep that cows seem to get lost inside. Therefore, rather than wrangling cattle on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), the Jessens rotate their herd with the help of border collies.

When Tim’s brother started raising border collies eight years ago, he paid him a visit one day and was inspired by what the dogs could do. Tim realized their talents would be instrumental to rotational grazing, and soon after, he and Annie acquired and began raising border collies of their own.

On the ranch, the young dogs begin by driving a group of steers in a lot close to the Jessens’ house. But their skills are truly put to the test in the pasture.

The canines know it is time to corral cows when they see Tim approach their kennels. They patiently wait for his command to jump up into the bed of his truck and are instantly on the lookout for their grazing subjects. Once the red and black cows have been spot- ted against the green grass, the dogs eagerly enter the field and carefully listen to Tim’s directions. They know when to approach the animals, when to back away, and how to parade them through the gate and into the next paddock.

“It used to be being pretty hard to get the cattle to move, but now I just sit in my side-by-side drinking my coffee while the dogs move them for me,” Tim laughed.

As the dogs’ herding abilities heat up, the Jessens’ pastures continue to improve. With prescribed burning and rotational grazing, there is seldom a red cedar tree in sight. What is in full view, though, are the positive effects their practices have had on the land. Although Tim and Annie can successfully control a large fire, the passion they have for their farming lifestyle is one flame they just can’t put out. •

Amber Friedrichsen

The author served as the 2021 and 2022 Hay and Forage Grower summer editorial intern. She currently attends Iowa State University where she is majoring in agricultural communications and agronomy.

by Mike Rankin

WHISKEY is for drinking; water is for fighting over. This is far from an original statement, but no truer mantra has ever been spoken.

The western U.S. is in all-out battle over water, and it’s being fought in localities, states, and nationally . . . all the way up to the Supreme Court. It’s a complicated war because the rules and water sources are so diverse. There are a plethora of treaties, compacts, and laws to consider, negotiate, or renegotiate.

Complicating the situation are widespread drought conditions across the West and urban expansion in cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Los Angeles. It should be noted that much of the West is arid by nature, even without a drought. In some areas, environmental regulations that were put in place to improve the status of endangered aquatic species are further limiting water resources for human or agricultural use.

The situation is bad — very bad — and alfalfa along with pasture and other forage acres are in the crosshairs on the war’s front line.

“We are seeing a demonization of Western irrigated agriculture and, in particular, alfalfa production,” said Dan Keppen at the World Alfalfa Congress held in San Diego last November.

Keppen is the executive director of the Family Farm Alliance, which is an organization that advocates for family farmers, ranchers, irrigation districts, and allied industries in 17 Western states. Its mission is to ensure the availability of reliable, affordable irrigation water supplies to Western farmers and ranchers.

To highlight the urgency of the water situation, Keppen noted that there were 695,000 acres of land fallowed in the Central Valley of California during 2022. This region relies on reservoir fill from the Sierra Nevada Mountain’s winter snowmelt, which lately has been deficient. For the federal Klamath Irrigation Project straddling the California-Oregon border, farmers only received 15% of their normal water allocation. Some irrigators in Arizona decided to keep their fields fallow because of power costs. Electricity costs jumped because of lower reservoir levels while natural gas prices were also high during the past year.

“California is a hard place to farm right now, and other states are moving in the same direction,” Keppen said. “Currently, there are a multitude of environmental and labor regulations that have added significant compliance costs in the past 10 years.”

These regulations are exacerbating the natural drought. Keppen said that the method that agencies are using to protect endangered fish species in places like California’s Central Valley and the Klamath Basin is taking water that was originally developed and stored for agriculture and allocating it for the benefit of certain species. “What’s frustrating is that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the water reallocation is helping the targeted species,” Keppen shared.

River woes

If northern and central California’s water situation is thought of as critical, then the Colorado River Basin is even more dire. As background, the Colorado River provides irrigation water to seven Western states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. Lake Powell is formed by the Glen Canyon Dam, which is close to the Utah–Arizona border. Further downstream, Lake Mead is formed by the Hoover Dam. These lakes provide the region’s needed water reserves and are sources for hydroelectric power generation.

“I don’t see things getting much better, particularly in the Colorado River Basin,” Keppen said. “Urban areas are expanding rapidly, which hikes the demand for limited water. As a result, some interests are pressing to fallow thousands of additional farmland acres in 2023.”

Many people, including Keppen, believe there is a very real possibility that Lake Mead water levels could get down to dead pool, the point at which water no longer flows through the dam. Even before that occurs, hydroelectric power generation will cease from a lack of adequate water pressure through the dam. A dead pool water level is also a justified fear for Lake Powell, where boat docks are already many feet from the water’s edge.

“Currently, the government is looking for ways to back water up to keep dead pool from occurring,” Keppen noted. “A part of their plan is to limit water to farmers and hopefully compensate them in return. Such a plan, if implemented in a way that solely relies on agriculture, would result in 1 million acres of farmland being fallowed to meet the targeted 2 to 4 million acrefeet of water cuts.”

Many entities and Keppen still believe that a workable solution and plan for the Colorado River Basin is attainable. “Answers can be found that do not pit urban and agricultural interests against each other,” Keppen said, “but the issues are complex.”

Adding to that complexity is that some of those with senior water rights are understandably reluctant to use less water for fear of permanently losing their allocation.

The stakes are high

The complexity of the water situation in the West is undeniable, but the stakes are higher than you’ll find on any Las Vegas casino floor.

“There’s probably never been a more important time to protect American food production,” Keppen said. “Western irrigated agriculture, including alfalfa and other forage production, has to be viewed as a priority in the context of national security. This statement is based on what we’re seeing in the world and in our country today.”

He referenced the war in Ukraine, which has landed a massive blow to world food production and created pockets of food deprivation. “Global hunger is back to record levels and is rising,” Keppen asserted.

According to the 2022 Global Agricultural Productivity (GAP) Report, Keppen said that total factor productivity (TFP), which rises when producers boost their output while using the same or fewer inputs, is at its lowest level of growth since the report was initiated in 2010. The 2022 GAP report found that current efforts to accelerate global agricultural productivity growth are inadequate to meet future food needs.

“The western U.S. has been a longtime, proud agricultural powerhouse,” Keppen said. “Our country has consistently run an agricultural trade surplus, but that has changed in recent years. In 2019, the U.S. ran a trade deficit for the first time in 50 years. The USDA projects it will happen again in 2023. Imported Mexican fruits and vegetables are driving this deficit,” he added.

Fallowing vast acres of agricultural land, even if farmers are compensated, will significantly lower domestic production and make the country more dependent on imports. In some cases, it may shift production to other U.S. regions, which will dictate agricultural products be transported back to the West, raising consumer costs.

“Simply cutting off water will have a devastating effect on not only the farmers, but also the greater rural communities that depend on agriculture for their well-being,” Keppen explained. “In California’s Imperial Valley, there is no other water source above or below ground than the Colorado River. The residents of the valley rely solely on irrigated agriculture for their economic survival.”

Keppen noted that one of the silver linings to the drought is that it’s bringing heightened political and public attention to the needs of Western agriculture and rural communities. In the federal bipartisan infrastructure law, $8.3 billion was allocated for the Bureau of Reclamation. Previously, it was hard to draw enough political attention to get that level of funding, Keppen said. Also, the Inflation Reduction Act included $4 billion for Western drought mitigation, especially in the Colorado River Basin.

Alfalfa under fire

It’s not surprising that alfalfa is front and center in the water crisis discussion. A majority of the alfalfa hay produced in the U.S. comes from Western states. Most of this production is irrigated. Further, alfalfa, with its multiple cuts, generally needs more water annually than many other crops.

“The two big arguments being made are that alfalfa should be abandoned in favor of higher value crops or ones that use less water,” Keppen said. “The dissenters don’t realize that farmers will only grow crops that people will buy. Further, the Western agricultural community was built on the local supply of feed and food. Relocating alfalfa production, for example, would increase fuel costs and greenhouse gas emissions. These reports also fail to mention that the Lower Colorado River Basin states have the highest alfalfa yields in the U.S.,” he added.

Another frequently heard argument regarding Western alfalfa is that hay export sales are the equivalent of shipping water overseas through field crops grown in Arizona and California. Keppen pointed out that this argument falls apart because it doesn’t address other export products that also use a lot of water or consider products that are imported and used by U.S. residents.

“Alfalfa has proved to be highly flexible and resilient in surviving droughts while sustaining productivity, even when as little as half of the water requirement is applied,” Keppen asserted.

A major research emphasis in the West has been to find ways to keep alfalfa profitable while reducing traditional water application amounts. These efforts include developing irrigation systems that reduce water application losses and, in turn, require less water to be applied. Government assistance for implementing these new technologies would help accelerate their adoption.

Deficit irrigation is also a practice that has been researched, promoted, and used for alfalfa where water is being limited. With this approach, alfalfa is fully watered early in the season to capture maximum yield and forage quality, then no water is applied during the hot mid-summer when both yields and forage quality are lower. The crop then goes dormant as it would during a Northern winter. When rains or irrigation return, alfalfa has the ability to break dormancy and return to full production. Grower adoption of these practices will no doubt need to increase in the years ahead as both agricultural and urban interests will need to make concessions.

Perhaps abundant winter precipitation will return to the West on a regular basis, but that’s not a bet we can afford to take. Finger pointing from either the urban or agricultural sides won’t get the water problem solved. There will need to be concessions across the board, but those concessions shouldn’t include completely shuttering the Western communities and businesses that were built and rely on irrigated agriculture for economic survival. •