00:00:10 Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. 00:00:14 Speaker 2: This is Col's week in Review with Ryan cal Kalla. Here's Cal, all right, friends and neighbors. 00:00:23 Speaker 1: Is uh, you know your old buddy Cal and Jordan Sillers here on Col's weekend Review. We got another interview episode out here for you right now today with Jeff Goodwin, who is the president for the Society for Range Management or SRM. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. What we want to attempt to do here today is is try to bridge that divide that many folks, including folks in the hunting community here in America have of folks who can look out at range land, which often would be described as just a barren field, and see it as something good for wildlife habitat, something great for cattle. Tall grass makes fat cattle, as we like to say. And those that look at it and say this is nothing and it's not doing us any good. 00:01:26 Speaker 3: Well, I'm honored to be with you today. Hopefully we can shed some light on those ideas. 00:01:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be fantastic. So would you mind telling us what SRM is and why it exists. 00:01:39 Speaker 3: Yeah, SRM's it's a professional Society for Promoting Sound Science in our rangeland industry. And so our members are the ranchers, their their academics that make up you know, the research scientists that that work and communicate science to the general public, to to the ranching community. They're also federal agency folks, and so we're we're a very diverse community of rangeland practitioners and rangeland professionals that work in the space every day, and so, uh, you know, trying to create the opportunities and the and the science to keep driving the stewardship of those landscapes because they do provide a number of ecosystem services that are often overlooked by the general public. 00:02:36 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:02:37 Speaker 1: I just hung out with some ranchers who are in the Lesser Prairie Chicken Landowner Alliance and it was really interesting. They're they're in it to save ranching and chickens, not to save chickens and then ranching. Uh is there their point of view, which I think is is is great are fined by men of our remaining lesser Prairie chickens, which is a newly listed endangered species, are on private ground and that's where that private ground is still native prairie. So rangelands, like you said, they're there. They exist on private and federally managed ground, both Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, plus plus some other agencies some National Park, Bureau of of Wreck and so on, but predominantly it would be Bureau of Land Management. 00:03:51 Speaker 3: Fair to say, yeah, I think so, maybe maybe just some context here. So, so rangelands make up seven hundred and seventy million acres in the United States, and it's about thirty six percent of the land cover, right, So if you look at look from the top down, thirty six percent of the country is what we would call rangelands. And these are landscapes that are we call them natives. So they have indigenous vegetation, you know, grasses, forbes, shrubs, trees that are all native to that region. Certainly contextual, there's different areas of the state that grow different kinds and different plant communities that support a number of different ecosystem services. I'll get into that in just a second. But of that seven and seventy million acres, about two thirds of those are privately owned, right, And so we've got this sort of dichotomy of public or private lands. You know, in the certainly, if you looked at the Great Plains, most of that's privately owned. But if you look out towards the west, most of those rangeland landscapes are publicly owned. And so if you look at the nineteen states west of the Mississippi, fifty three percent of that land base is rangeland. And so most of the rangeland acres or western west of the Mississippi, including the you know, the Prairies, the Great Plains, and then the western rangelands. And so I think it's important to understand too that these rangelands are disturbance dependent ecologies. And what I mean by that is they rely on some level of disturbance. And so the two primary disturbances are fire and grazing, and so those are the two disturbances that created the habitats that we that we've seen, and they've been managed that way for hundreds of years. Historically, it was it was thirty to sixty million bison grazing on these rangeland landscapes. And it was it was also both wildfire and human caused. Are our Native Americans used prescribed fire and for seven in seventy different ways, over seventy different ways, it's been postulated, and so from that aspect, these landscapes have been managed for a very long time. So fast forward two hundred years now we have these subdivided private landscapes into what we call ranches today, and then the federal lands are then further subdivided into sort of just say grazing allotments, right, and so they're all still being managed. And I think the point here is they require that level of management, right, So it's the conservation of that landscape that's the wise use of our natural resources. So this idea of preservation just walking off and not doing anything that doesn't work in this typical scenario. So it's really important to understand the you know, sort of the landscape of private versus public range lands, but also their importance. They create a number of eco system services for the public in or the general public in the cities that that they may not understand. Number one, food and fiber, food and fibers and ecosystem service produced by these range lands that we often overlook, but certainly water quality and water quantity. In a state like Texas, eighty three percent of every rain drop that falls in the state of Texas falls on on some working land. That's that's that's that's primarily rangeland carbon security is another one, uh, securing carbon and the and in those landscapes, plant and insect biodiversity. And then the last one and probably one of the very most important is wildlife habitat provision. You know, the outdoor recreation space is I mean, it's a three hundred and eighty five billion dollar industry and that includes hunting and fishing. But but those are those are the ecosystem services that that are provided to you know, an urban public that that many times is they're over look that to your point earlier, you said, you know, there is a you know, there's a perception that that's just unused or unimproved land. But they're providing a number of benefits that sometimes they're easier or harder to quantify, but they're absolutely happening. And they have a they have a they have an ecological value, they have a social value, and an economic value. 00:08:24 Speaker 1: And yeah, if we could magically connect all of our urban dwelling friends with the fact that a rain drop in grasslands one hundred miles away can affect them and. 00:08:39 Speaker 2: That's the value of that land, that would be a hell of. 00:08:42 Speaker 1: A victory on today's short podcast. 00:08:46 Speaker 2: I'd love to see that happen, can you. 00:08:50 Speaker 1: I'm always been fascinated with water, you know, grown up in the West, we grew up in like hard drought times in Montana. You know, I'm a nineteen eighties kid, and certainly drought exists in Montana right now as well. But you know, I like always laugh when I see fireworks going off or on Independence Day weekend here in Montana, because like, we did not grow up with that, Like it was never legal to shoot off fireworks. Everything was so dry, right, So would you mind just taking a second and talking about that relationship between between water conservation and water conservation and in grasslands. 00:09:36 Speaker 3: Sure, So for me, it all starts with the soil, and it's the and it's the health of that soil. Most of the time we think of soil as this it's just this sort of inactive medium to grow a plant. Right, That's not the case. It's a it's a living ecosystem. There's a biological component to that soil that impacts the canmical and physical structure of that soil. And so it's often said we can't control how much rain we get, but we can control how much we keep, and so from a rancher's perspective, if we think about what are the opportunities to keep more of the rain that we that we do get, a couple of different things can happen. Right, There's some basic soil health building principles that we would focus on. Number one is keeping the ground covered as much as we can and so ensuring that we try to limit bare ground where possible. Now that goes back to the individual landowners specific goals and objectives. Maybe they're, you know, managing for a specific habitat type that may require some bare ground. In the Great Plains, maybe it's a little different. You will have less brown ground here typically than we do in some of the western landscapes. But trying to reduce bare grounds one thing, because if the soil is moving or blowing, it's not becoming healthy. Right, If it's washing away, we're having seeing erosion issues. The next thing is building the structural capacity of that soil to be able to hold water and so not only instead of that rain drop falling and having this many explosion displacing all these soil particles and then they wash into the creek and ultimately end up into the you know, in a basin or a water body. It's getting the water into the soil, so increasing the ability for that soil to infiltrate, right, infiltrate the water into the soil. Once we get the water to slow down, we can infiltrate it once we That's one of the things that we talk about when we manage for healthy soils. We're trying to increase the organic matter content of that soil because organic matter and soil not only helps hold particles together that increases the ability for that water to infiltrate, but it also holds water longer, so you can withst out. Many times, the folks that we work with that have worked to increase organic matter in our soils, they're the last one in a drought and they're the first one out because they've held water longer. And then when it does rain h they infiltrate it and they can they get green up sooner. So managing our uplands has a significant impact on the health of our riparian zones. 00:12:14 Speaker 1: And we're at a time right now where we were losing about two million acres of grasslands a year. Right now, like a lot of the literature that's out there says the most imperiled the ecosystem on the planet. 00:12:30 Speaker 3: I agree, And there's so there's three strategies I would I would propose, and we've published all this in a in a technical report through the Society for Range Management. It's called rangeland Ecosystems Connecting Nature and People. I would encourage your readers to look on the SRM website. They can find it there and it outlines those primary eco ecosystem services. But uh, there's those three management strategies. One of them is is avoiding conversion, just like you know you were alluding to. You know, it's been reported that we've lost thirty two million acres of grassland to cropland since twenty twelve. That's nearly fifteen times the size of Yellowstone Park, and so significant amounts of areas have been converted. Also, look and I kind of bring that a little bit closer to home, and I'll just speak to Texas. We're seeing not only conversion but land fragmentation. And so from nineteen ninety seven to twenty twelve, the population in the state of Texas has increased fifty five percent, over eleven hundred people. A day or moving to the state of Texas, the number of small farms, these are farms smaller than which is the majority of those farms have increased thirty one percent. Mid sized farms have decreased by twenty seven percent. So these larger ranches are getting broken up into smaller partss of land. And so everybody wants their peace right and which is great eight but we're but it's fragmenting the landscape into smaller parcels of land that that, you know, it becomes a little bit more of a challenge to have collective conservation across a broader, more broad landscape. When you think of wildlife habitat, they don't stop at the fence, right, and so and so we've got to we've got to think about this from from sort of a larger perspective. Texas has saw the larger ranches, you know, greater than a couple of thousand acres, they've seen the sharpest decline over the last five year period. And since we've been recording it, we'll lost over a thousand operations in that time period. And so not that they're lost, they're just smaller, right, And so the number of smaller operations have has certainly increased. So avoiding conversion is one thing, right, trying to keep range lands range lands. The next one is range land restoration. We've got to have the tools. We've got to have the funding to implement the management practices that steward those help with steward those land capes. And more importantly, we've got to have the people that can provide the technical guidance, the technical expertise to the know how to know how to communicate the science to producers that are managing these lands and learn from them as well. It's a two way street. 00:15:27 Speaker 1: Jeff, I thought your whole job was to look at a chunk of grassland, a pasture, if you will, and say this is how many cattle you can run out here for how long? 00:15:39 Speaker 3: That's part of the story, that's part of it. It is certainly one piece. It's not the whole pie. 00:15:46 Speaker 2: And it sounds like the other pieces of this pie take a little a little bit of time to learn. 00:15:52 Speaker 3: You know, they do. It's just like anything. You know, you walk out and I started my career just by walking out. And I kind of grew up on a ranch and my grandfather managed and probably wasn't ever an own one. So I kind of got into this conservation role because I wanted to work with ranchers. But you know, I would walk out there and I didn't know what I was walking on, And so it started by just knowing the plants. Right. Then when you learn the plants, you want to learn how to manage them. Then when you learn how to planetge them, you want to tell somebody about it, and so that's it just kind of grows from there. 00:16:26 Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, right now. 00:16:30 Speaker 1: We seeing a reduction in at least the federal side of that workforce. Obviously with some federal funding freezes. It puts universities in an interesting spot too, because there's a lot of funding that goes to our universities to continue education like this is there are you seeing an impact in like the rangeland ecology escape right now? 00:17:00 Speaker 3: From a from a grant perspective, you know, there's been some there's been some Certainly there's been some halting of some grants. Some of it's precautionary on you know, kind of maybe a subwordy may say, Okay, we're gonna pause work until we figure out what's going on. So some of that's happening some grants have been halted, so there's certainly an impact, you know, I think I think when we step back and look at it from a from a larger perspective and the impact. There was an interesting report by in twenty thirteen, so this data is a little bit older, but they estimated the direct spending impact of conservation efforts to be about just under forty billion dollars, which is about and sixty percent of that came from federal and then you had state and local conservation efforts as well. But when they looked at what that generated from a total economic activity perspective, it was over ninety billion dollars, and so it was like a two point four to one to one return on investment for conservation activity benefits from the investment, And so, you know, I think we we've got to look at it from a from a larger perspective. There certainly are opportunities where there there have been some some assessment of some of the funding that's being spent. I think I think they're gonna, you know, they they have a priority to work through and try The administration has a defined opportunity to work through and try to find efficiencies, and I think that's what they're doing, you know, it's it's you know, how they go how they go about it is is up to the administration. I think our role as from an SRM perspective is to ensure that they understand the importance of rangelands, understand those those range lands require management and ensuring that that, you know, if there's an opportunity for us to provide insight, help or guidance on on how to most appropriately implement that stewardship from a scientific perspective, that's our role. And you know that that that requires people. Right, most of these landscapes are managed by people with two feet, you know, it's the two legged people that are that are managing all these landscapes. And so we've got to have a technically adequate, scientifically sound workforce that can that can implement the strategies on private and public landscapes. 00:19:41 Speaker 1: Where do the bulk of like rangeland ecologists come from? Are they generally starting in one sector or another? 00:19:52 Speaker 2: What's like the federal to private to NGO split? If you're aware of it, you. 00:20:00 Speaker 3: Know, I don't know they answer to that question, but I know that the sort of the federal the NGO space is growing, I think, uh, I think there's certainly opportunities there for what we call private public partnerships, and r CS does a really good job of that through their Regional Conservation Partnership program. That's what that's for. It's it's a program through the Farm Bill where they partner with conservation organizations to implement conservation on the ground, both technical and financial assistance. And so that that's been a really successful model for them. In terms of the breakout, I'm not really sure how to answer that, but I would say that, you know, there's there's there's different sectors, right. There's there's the scientists that work for the Agricultural Resource Our Research Service and and so those are the primarily the research scientist PhD level scientists they are doing of science within the U s d A. You know, there's there's conservationists rangeland conservationists that work for BLM, for nr CS, for you know, there's a whole cohort of folks that are that are providing either tech technical assistance to an allotment UH or a permittee or technical assistance to private farmers and ranchers on a day to day basis. And they're they're implementing. They're helping those those producers develop conservation plans. And then on the on the private side and uh, and then helping facilitate those actions through farm build programs. 00:21:39 Speaker 1: And and a conservation plan in this instance, that's that's typically something that would be like a long term grazing plan. 00:21:53 Speaker 3: Yeah, it would, it would. An overarching conservation plan would include a grazing management plan. But it starts by working with that particular landowner defining their goals and objectives. It's their property, and I'm talking on the sort of the private space, and then and then identifying the what what the resource concerns there are. It may be an erosion problem, it may be lack of forage availability, there may be other resource concerns. And then they had done it. They work through a process of identifying or or identifying the resources they have to work with, going working through the alternatives that the landowner has in terms of implementing management practices. They work through the process helping them make that decision. And then one of the most important parts is developing a longer term monitoring program so that you have that when they provide this financial investment, we have the monitoring to help them see if they're getting better, right, monitoring forage alloications or forage productivity and or monitoring maybe it's monitoring for brush encroaching, woody encroachment, whatever, the monitoring strategy is that that monitoring and follow up is keenly important. 00:23:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing fact that I was recently made aware of. To go back to the lesser prairie chicken. And you know here in Montana, we're always talking about the greater sage grouse, right, which is an awesome bird that I grew up with on big open range cattle country in eastern Montana. But the lesser prairie chicken won't nest within six acres of a vertical structure, right, So it's a bird that is just by evolution. Gram design is made for wide open spaces. And I imagine your job, especially when you start talking about these landscapes getting more fragmented, broken up into more individual owners versus you know, something that we would certainly think of as like a traditional agricultural path where it's it's family expansion. Not saying all families do things the same way, but that that job gets gets harder to get out and educate more and more individual property owners who may or may not take that education. 00:24:22 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's certainly a dynamic we work with. You know, each individual operation is going to be different. You've got a different history, you've got a different dynamic. You know, some ranches we work with have are large and have a board of directors they answer to, you know. You know, some of these smaller operations have you know, their their their family owned. But many of them that's not their single source of income anymore. They have a job in town. Uh, and it's a you know, it's a it's a maybe even a recreational property for them. And then there's this dynamic of abs and tee ownership, you know, where the property owner lives in the city but and doesn't live on the land anymore. And so there's all these uh dynamics that you have to work with dealing with you know, families or decision maker maybe one or two or three people or more. And and so anytime, anytime you work through those types of scenarios, you just have to step back and and and understand that there is a there's a social dynamic to managing landscapes. UH. And it's it's not just grass cows and white tail deer anymore. It's we have to we have to work through the manager's lens and help them see where their goals, how we're going to help them implement their goal and objectives. And it's not a straight path all the time. 00:25:47 Speaker 2: Sure. Sure. 00:25:49 Speaker 1: And then when we're you know, talking about like the really important stuff, which is like growing big antelope bucks and and mule deer bucks and making sure there's a bunch of upl birds out there, it's it's probably pretty nice to be able to point back to the fact that there were millions of very heavy bison roam in the range and had many times of abundance during that like open management system to where you know, I'd point out all the time that grazing isn't always bad because from certain conservation circles, folks can point at that and be like, well, that shouldn't be here. 00:26:32 Speaker 3: It's often stated that it's the it's the how, not the cow, and uh, and that that it's certain that that's certainly true. I mean, how we manage these landscapes, whether it's a you know, you're reintroducing bison to a to a landscape or we're grazing, a grazing you know, Herford steers it how we manage the herbivaly or the grazing managements really and so you know, you had mentioned that historically we have these really large herds of bison and they would they would travel to forage and water. Many times they were following a prescribed fire because it got green it would green up, or a wildfire and so and so that's what we try, honestly to mimic in many situations from a grazing perspective. I mean, that's that's essentially what we're trying to mimic in any type of rotational grazing strategy is to not only that have that animal impact, but have the long recovery periods. And so it's to me, from a grazing perspective, that recovery period is way more important than the grazing period, right, And so we work with ranchers to develop a strategy that not only works for the ranch and those plant communities and their operational design, but also works for the rancher, right. And so it it's not very helpful for us to walk in and say, well, you know, ought to graze it this way. If it doesn't fit their context, it's never going to work. And so so we have to figure out how do we develop a strategy that number one fits their economic context, text, their social context, and the ecological context of the ranch. And so it's a dynamic situation. It's more than just putting up fence and rotating cows. But the just is to provide the use and the recovery so that those plants have the opportunity to recovery and increase the health and function of that range land system. 00:28:35 Speaker 1: And then when you jump over on to the public side of the fans, the federally managed side of the fans, how do things change from a rangeland ecologists perspective? 00:28:47 Speaker 3: You know, it's a it's it's it's still rangeland right. We we have to manage those landscapes. There are some regulations. There's there's regulations with you know BLM and for Service both have have set regulations around how UH or the animal unit months or a u MS that will be provided for each of those and the permittees work with a range specialist to develop a plan and then and then they implement those accordingly. I think there's you know, there's a lot of people working on uh those those grazing regulations and uh, most of my experience has been on private land than than the the public landscapes. But I know that there's a lot of people working on uh outcome based strategies to increase those beneficial outcomes for both the rancher and the and the and the the range land landscape, working on ways that that there can have more flexibility in some of those regulations to provide the rancher more flexibility in their operations by still by still maintaining the function and the stewardship of the landscape. And so they're working hand to hand every day, UH, trying to do the best job that they can. 00:30:00 Speaker 1: And I would imagine though, like that multiple use mandate of public lands more or less BLM words, it a little bit different, but. 00:30:12 Speaker 2: That has to just add some complication. Two things like you have. 00:30:17 Speaker 1: The the the big ranch that's managed by a board of directors where you may get a few more questions on your management plan and maybe have some sometimes where things come to an impasse. But you know, it's still a different can of worms than than on the the. 00:30:38 Speaker 2: Federal public landscape. 00:30:40 Speaker 1: And you know I think noxious weeds, noxious uh or invasive plant education for the general public. Like, there's nothing in any state I've ever hunted that says, hey, in order to go out there and enjoy yourself, you better be aware of noxious weeds. We're certain parts of Montana you talk to producers and they're looking at your license plate to see what county you came from, and they're like, did you wash your truck? Like stay on the gravel roads, don't take the two tracks, and and that can be a fire conversation too, But a lot of times it's trying to reduce the spread of weeds or grasses that are going to be detrimental to that that grazing plan on that property. 00:31:33 Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that there's certainly that's certainly a concern for for public landscapes. You know, cheap gas is a big one too, and in that part of the world, you know, it's a sort of you know, it's an invasive annual grass that can be susceptible to wildfire and things of that nature. Noxious weeds are are are a big one some of the you know, the federally named you know, I think I think from that perspective, you're right, it is. It is different. On the private side. You know, you've got privatey proper private property rights. I mean the landowner can ultimately, within most bounds, manage that property. How are they want to When you get into the public side, there are federal regulations. There's federal regulations on on you know, how many how many animal units they can take, how many how they graze those and so there there are there's a there's an added level of restriction. I think for the most part. The good thing about that is that we're seeing landowners and conservation organizations and the federal government work together more in recent history than I've seen than than certainly was you know, ten twenty thirty years ago. I think they've become more collaborative than not. That's a good thing. Anytime we got more people at the table and and we're listening to each other, that's probably step number one. 00:33:05 Speaker 1: And how do how do we get the public more involved? Like how do we get folks to look at a big chunk of range land that's quote unquote not doing anything and understand that it's actually providing everyone a lot, whether that's you know, drought tolerance or having that that that sell healthy native ground system. Sorry I'm spacing out on the word here, but having that community on the ground, that's that's not going to let in invasives after a fire. Like, how do we tie people back to the fact that this stuff is going away real fast and it's it's really important and it's and it's it's providing us a lot of benefits. 00:33:59 Speaker 3: Man, that's the gold in question. 00:34:01 Speaker 1: I mean, I had a Montana produced brisket for Saint Patrick's Day from from Montana and it was full of fat and it was amazing For a guy who eats a lot of wild game. 00:34:15 Speaker 3: It was glorious, wasn't it. 00:34:17 Speaker 1: It was it, really, it really was. My girlfriend's not the biggest fan of Irish dinner, but I make it a little fancy. 00:34:25 Speaker 2: For her and she gets over it. 00:34:26 Speaker 1: But like, is telling people to eat eat locally produced beef enough or what are the things? 00:34:35 Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's a lot. I think it's a sort of a multi dimensional problem we've got. I think I think our food system is certainly one of those. And that's you know, that's something that this new administration is keenly focused on, is the food system. And uh, I think there's been a movement that we've all seen over the last several years of uh you know, promoting local, you know, promoting healthy food choices. And I think our industry UH has We could always do a better job at telling our story, right, But I think we've done a lot better job in the recent history to tell the story of the beef industry for instance, or you know, and providing a wholesome, clean, effective protein source for the American public. I think I think we could always do a better job. I think tying in it's not just about it. I think the food's a great angle, and I think it's an angle that we need to spend more time and effort on. But I also think we have to tie in those more intrinsic values that we often overlook, and it's those ecosystem services that we were mentioning earlier. There's a couple out there that are harder to translate to the public than others. And so when you talk to somebody about organic matter and soil carbon, it's hard to take that to someone in the city and say, look how important this is. But if I take a glass of water and I hold it in front of them, everybody relates to water. I think water is going to be a huge one for us in the future. It already is. I also think I think wild spaces and wildlife habitat is a huge one for us too, because whether or not they're a hunter, when you look at that one hundred and eighty five billion dollars of recreational revenue, a significant portion, if not the majority, is wildlife watchers. It's people that just want to go birding or just want to see wildlife and know that that you know, they have habitat to you know, sustain and thrive, and so I think that's another key important piece is is but but it's the coupling of all those it's telling the story that we can have the wise use of these landscapes. We can graze landscapes and produce and and many many times increase uh the effectiveness of a habitat for a specific species by using the right management at the right time, for the right reason. And so so taking all those things and putting them together in a package is man. That's that's something a lot of us are working on. How do we how do we better tell that story? I think one of the reasons one of the best ways that we're doing it nowadays is podcasts, just like this one. It's podcasts, it's social media. It's uh, I mean, that's that's the way most people are getting their information nowadays. It's they're not seeing it and there, they're not reading it in the newspaper and so and so having that compelling story and making it relatable to someone in in an urban environment is probably the key. 00:38:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not just the beef. It's What's for Dinner campaign, it's the which I love because I'm a Sam Elliott fan. But my stepdad, it's been in the beef industry for generations, always shook his head at that thing because he just didn't didn't think that that was the the the all the information that we needed to get out there. But yeah, Native Habitat, I see some really fantastic accounts that I love to follow, like a Native Habitat project where they talk about the importance of fire on the landscape that native community and the benefits that it provides soil health, certainly on the wild life side of things, pollinators and all of these native birds, where everything else can be right for a turkey, a pheasant, quail, but if that soil isn't alive enough to produce those invertebrates at the right time of year. You're just not going to have birds despite the great thermal cover and the great nesting cover and the and the water. Right, it is a big community that I certainly don't know well enough despite loving it. So yeah, it's making those inroads. Jordan, he had a question earlier about that I think would like tie into some of these ecosystem benefits regarding like the disturbance ecology. 00:39:57 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I wanted to take us BA a little bit and dig in a little bit to what specifically are the benefits of those disturbances that you mentioned, of fire and of grazing. Why are those good things? And exactly how does that help the rangeland be healthier and promote the habitat that we've been talking about. 00:40:26 Speaker 3: Great question, and so let me take them one by one, and so let's talk about fire first. We get this often just gut reaction. Some people either think fire is great, some people are scared to death of it. And it's because of this sort of perception that fire is bad. All fires bad. You know, there's there's smoky the bear campaigns that were super effective right at fire is a bad thing. And I'm not saying well fire is good at all, but the application of prescribed fire in the right context is absolutely a good a good thing. And so it's it's it's trying to in a very prescriptive way plan for you know, the management of a rangeland landscape. So let's take, for instance, uh, the Great Plains. One of our key resource concerns is woody encroachment. Most of that woody encroachment is a is a juniper species, eastern red cedar, and so that's a non root sprouting species. So if you take off the top with a fire or mechanically that that plant's done right. Uh. And so we've talked about some of the reasons why woody encroachment's bad. It's it's it can impact wildlife habitat, It certainly impacts forge productivity. And so so fire is beneficial from uh, for maintaining a particular plant community that a land owner wants to maintain. It also cycles nutrients, and so we're cycling much of that that those those micro and macro nutrients back into the soil. You know. One of the things, one of the one of the rocks that's thrown at fire and is around carbon, right, because we're losing a lot of the carbon to the atmosphere. There's been a number of work that's that's been done in Texas and other states now, but I'll speak particularly to a study that was done in Texas where they were they were implementing fire and cool season fires, and and the carbon that was lost in the in the fire and through combustion was re sequestered in a in a cool year or a wet year, UH in twenty eight days, and in dry years it was something like eighty days. And so certainly that first year you got the benefits of the fire and all of that carbon was resequestered back into the ground. And so there's there's a number of benefits there of properly implementing UH prescribed fire on the landscape. I think I think coupling that with proper grazing management and so so historically we've talked about the bison and their their broad scale impacts from a from a cattle grazing perspective. Really it's about again it's about managing UH that that plant community too, and so when we see grazing removed from an environment. Those those plants evolved under grazing too, right, so they produce about twice what they need to sustain themselves, to sustain a healthy root system. And when we start to take grazing out of an environment, that plant begins to to to that community will tend to degrade over time. So look at environments in the West where there's no grazing at all, you'll see you'll see pocketed plants, You'll see more bare ground. Typically, you'll see uh oxidized gray plants that that that organic matter hasn't been you know, converted back into uh to organic matter and back in through that whole carbon uh sort of regeneration process. And so by grazing properly, we utilize some of those forages and uh we we we we stimulate tillering, UH we stimulate function. Uh we help. Another benefit is is the dispersion of urine and manure through grazing, helping through uh you know, from a from a nitrogen and a nutrient perspective. And so there's a number of benefits to to grazing. I won't say it's all done right. I mean, there's certainly landscapes that you can drive in any direction, and you can see areas that have been over grazed, but you can also sea land that's very well managed that have very successful habitat components that support wildlife, both grassland birds, and you know, the sort of non game versus game species, and so there's a ton of different benefits. The point is most of the landscapes that we manage evolved under some type of fire frequency and some type of grazing frequency. So if I were to put both of those together, managing the timing, intensity, frequency, and duration of both of those things or what created and helped the great planes stay the great planes. The same can be said for Western landscapes, although the fire frequencies were much longer, but they did have some level of fire frequency. 00:45:54 Speaker 1: You know, kind of looking at our whole big picture, kind of zoom out again where we at in rangeland ecology. Right, So we've gone through a semi wild humans on the landscape, implementing some burns, but essentially zero fragmentation of the landscape, connected ecosystems to ranching comes on the scene, barbed wire comes on the scene, Jeffersonian grid system, lots of different management types on the landscape, and now all of a sudden, you know, here here we are, and we have like new threats beyond fragmentation, which would be development, right, like you don't have the option to convert it back to anything anymore. Like where I guess where we act in the rangeland landscape right now? 00:47:04 Speaker 3: Well, I think going back to that that earlier sort of point where we were talking about avoiding conversion, where we can there is a rangeland restoration pathway, I mean, we we can restore degraded rangelands. Uh. But I would say, I guess I would submit once once they go under the plow, you can seed them back to native species, but it's never going to be the same prairie that it once was. Right. That's a that's a defined ecology with multiple trophic levels and it and it certainly impacts the health and structure of the soil and the biological integrity of this oil and so stepping back, I mean, I think we are on a new frontier on uh, particularly the soil health front of better understanding how our management influences soil health dynamics and then these cascading benefits that we see from managing that way we're seeing. I would say that technology is becoming much more prominent as we as we look at the advances in remote sensing, using tools like light ar to help estimate cover changes, things like that, even virtual fencing, there's a number of research opportunities out there, a lot of scientists across the West looking at virtual fencing opportunities right and limiting infrastructure costs for producers. And so I think technology is going to play a key role in the future. But then stepping back, technology is not going to be the solution to everything. We have to be grounded in the and understanding the eclog and those ecological impacts of our actual management on the land. And so if we make sure that we understand that technology is a tool to help us move forward from an ecological perspective, I think we're in a good state. If we look at technology as the only answer, I think we're in trouble. It's part of the story, but I think I think there's been a keen focus on understanding those ecosystem services and not only understanding them, but but quantifying them. They're hard to measure, right, and so there's been a lot of work on the measurement and the verification of those ecosystem services to help us tell that story we were talking about earlier. 00:49:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like I have a great deal of empathy for every person who's still doing the jobs that I did growing up. 00:49:53 Speaker 2: Right, Like we pushed cattle on weekends, we branded, we sorted ar intended. I did carpentry, i'd framed. I did a little little plumbing, a little low voltage electrician work, landscaping, kind of you name it, right, So I when I hear about issues and things that affect these things, I'm I'm I'm generally in a spot where I'm at least willing to learn more because I've I've seen it from that point of view. Not everybody has had that opportunity. They were probably smart enough to put more money in their bank account early on versus myself, but they they've deprived themselves of understanding in this case, like a landscape and what goes in to preserving that landscape in a way that it still provides all these these benefits. Right, You're right, like that's that's probably never going to go away. In fact, we probably don't want people out tramping all over all this stuff to to really understand it the way that those of us on this podcast right now may right, but we do have to like get across the why the benefits of what undeveloped natural landscapes do for us for us, all right, And that's that's just gonna be a tough job. 00:51:31 Speaker 3: It is, I you know, but I mean that's why most of us that that work in the rangeland discipline, I mean, that's why we wake up every day, is to we want to make sure that not only the stewardship of those landscapes continue. And I use that word because it invokes, uh, the idea that the job is done by the steward right, and so so it's it's work working with in in our our case, private landowners to make sure that that stewardship happens, make sure they have the tools, uh, make sure that that that they have the knowledge that that they need to effectively steward them in the same same way would be could the same thing could be said for our public landscapes, ensuring that that we have a you know, a trained workforce that can can work with those the permittees and the ranchers that are that are managing all those landscapes as well. And so you know, I think again. Uh, stepping back, it's it's uh, it's a right and a privilege to work with these these wonderful range lands, and I'm just I'm just proud to play a small minute role in it. 00:52:50 Speaker 2: Heck, yeah, well I appreciate what you're doing. Uh, and you know, hopefully. 00:52:56 Speaker 1: We'll get to a spot where everybody does because it is important. And once we turn this stuff over, it's not coming back. 00:53:07 Speaker 3: So I agree, I agree, we were Uh. You know, I mentioned this a little bit earlier. I think, uh, I think the importance around the ecosystem service is important water specifically. I mean that's a driver for for all terrestrial agriculture, right, but it's also a driver for for populations and cities. We got all we all have to drink and and and and provide habitats for those lands for those wildlife species. And so that's one that's easier to get our hand around. I think we're at a position right now when there's probably more eyes on range lands from a private perspective, a public and a corporate perspective. There's there's a there's a lot of focus on on how we're managing both private and public landscapes and we have an opportunity to do it right and at least do the best we can with what we have in front of us, and that's what we're trying to do. 00:54:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, and I just hope folks like yourself get the opportunity to say, hey, this is what we really do, this is why it matters, because we know there's folks out there who haven't taken the time yet to understand yep, Yeah, Jeff. Where can folks go to learn more about the role of rangeland ecology and why it should matter to us? 00:54:36 Speaker 3: Yeah. So we're site for range managements on all most of the social platforms. We have a you know, we're on Facebook and Instagram. We have our website is rangelands dot org. Feel free to go and take a look at our website if you If you're really interested and really want to come, we haven't. We host an annual meeting every year. Next February, we'll be in Monterey, California, where all of the range land from professor from around the country will come and we'll be sharing science and community and discussing listening to to ranchers and academics. I like talking about how we're trying the best Steward drange lands. 00:55:13 Speaker 1: Heck, yeah, well, thank you very much for joining us, Jeff, Grasslands, range Lance. They matter a whole lot and we're only in to keep them if we remember that and share that education education with others. So thank you very much. That's all I got for you this week. Remember to write in to a s k C A L. That's Askcal at the meteater dot com. Let us know what's going on in your neck of the woods. And if you have additional questions for Jeff, we'll either get them back on here to answer them, or we'll answer them with his tutelage on the main podcast. Thanks again, we'll talk to you next week. 00:55:55 Speaker 3: Thanks for having me 00:56:00 Speaker 2: The n sen at very pressure.