Researchers to combine fire, mixed-species grazing to answer livestock production issues

COLLEGE STATION —Building on more than a decade of stakeholder interactions, a team of Great Plains scientists is rewriting the playbook for livestock production utilizing fire and mixed animal species to graze the land. The team, led by Bradford Wilcox, Ph.D., Texas A&M AgriLife Research ecologist in the Texas A&M University Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, College Station, will work under a five-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, NIFA, Sustainable Agricultural Systems program. The project, Enhancing Livestock Production from Rangelands in the Great Plains, will facilitate adoption of management practices to increase food production and more sustainable rangelands. Utilizing their combined research experiences and work with landholders, the scientists have identified management strategies they believe hold promise for maintaining and possibly increasing livestock production across the Great Plains, Wilcox said. In 1965, there were 4.6 million goats in the Texas Hill Country, and juniper encroachment and wildfires were not a problem, Walker said. Today, there are less than 1 million goats in Texas, and both juniper encroachment and wildfires are a concern. Controlling brush was once mostly a southwestern problem, but today it is threatening rangelands in the Great Plains, affecting places as far north as the Dakotas, Walker said. A goal is to change the culture of rangeland managers through interactive learning between ranchers in Nebraska and Oklahoma, where prescribed fire has a long history of use, and Texas, where goat production is a well-established ranch enterprise. “A new management paradigm needs to be developed, one based on the restoration of fire and grazing regimes that will maintain ecosystem structure, function and resilience,” Wilcox said. “Traditional grazing practices have created a homogeneous structure, by encouraging grazers to use the entire landscape equally.” Woody plant encroachment presents challenges to landowners and agricultural producers by threatening the productivity of rangelands and their ability to provide ecosystem services, he said. Land managers find themselves caught between the high cost of traditional woody plant control and the loss of forage if they allow the woody plants to expand...MORE