Ranchers say they can graze away wildfires. Environmentalists beg to differ.

Eight years ago, lightning struck a remote corner of northwest Nevada, and started a fire that tore through canyons and ridges at a brisk clip. Rancher Carolyn Dufurrena watched in horror as it devoured dry brush and bunchgrass. Three weeks later, after the Holloway Fire scorched over 462,000 acres, her family, which had been ranching in that area for four generations, had lost about 95 percent of the grass they needed to feed their cattle and sheep. “When you have a few dry years, that grass becomes tinder,” said Dufurrena, who previously wrote about the fire for Range magazine. She suspects that if her livestock had been allowed to eat more of it, the fire would have slowed down. “If the cattle could get to it at the right time of year, and really hit it, they would make it much less of an issue.” Dufurrena is one of roughly 16,000 ranchers that raise livestock on public lands. Even though, during the Obama administration, the amount of grass they’re allowed to forage actually went up, it’s been decreasing overall since the 1950s. And that, ranchers say, has caused a huge problem. For years, they’ve asked the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal agency that regulates those lands, for longer grazing seasons. This would open these lands up beyond the traditional spring and summer months, for livestock to eat the leftover grass that can be fuel for ever-nastier wildfires.  Under the Trump administration, the ranchers’ pleas have been heard. Last month, BLM unveiled a proposal for “targeted grazing” permits to chew some of that forage into fuel breaks—strips of barren land that slow down a rampaging wildfire. The main offender, the agency says, is an invasive species called cheatgrass—a highly flammable annual grass that grows between native shrubs and takes over native sagebrush ecosystems. Ranchers say it’s a long time coming, and they need more latitude to take care of the land they use. But some ecologists say a plan to let animals loose on 24 million acres of fragile sagebrush in Nevada’s Great Basin will actually make things worse. In the short term, cattle may chew away that tinder. Over time, all that added trampling will degrade the soils, and in turn, encourage the growth of those flammable weeds—in short, making the problem of the fires even worse...MORE