Post-Fire Grazing and Forage Management

Dr. Laura Goodman, Associate Professor and Rangeland Specialist at Oklahoma State Univeristy Author

08/29/2022 Added

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Dr. Goodman discusses post-fire livestock grazing and forage management at the 2022 GSL Open House.

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[00:00:00.190](upbeat music)
[00:00:07.230]Dr. Goodman is an associate professor
[00:00:09.630]and Rangeland Extension Specialist at Oklahoma State.
[00:00:12.990]There is where she teaches
[00:00:14.760]principles of rangeland management
[00:00:16.410]and range and pasture utilization,
[00:00:18.840]and has previously taught herbaceous plants
[00:00:20.940]of Oklahoma and rangeland source planning.
[00:00:23.580]Her extension to research programs focus
[00:00:26.160]on finding innovative ways
[00:00:28.140]to sustainably graze and control invasive plants.
[00:00:31.770]Her current projects include
[00:00:33.300]prescribed fire and patch burning,
[00:00:35.520]multi-species grazing
[00:00:37.380]and virtual fence technology.
[00:00:39.720]I will turn the floor over to you.
[00:00:41.100]Great, thank you.
[00:00:43.590]So, my name's Laura Goodman, like she said,
[00:00:46.350]I'm the Oklahoma State Rangeland Extension Specialist
[00:00:49.200]and I do teach a couple courses.
[00:00:51.150]I'm based outta Stillwater.
[00:00:53.160]We don't have any range folks in other parts of the state
[00:00:57.450]and so I cover the whole state.
[00:01:01.710]I'm originally from Minnesota
[00:01:03.390]but I studied and worked on rangelands in Texas
[00:01:07.410]and then New Mexico before I came here.
[00:01:10.290]And so it's fun to be here.
[00:01:12.600]I knew Mitch and Casey and Travis in New Mexico.
[00:01:17.130]So I was excited to come up and get to see them
[00:01:20.520]and see your beautiful rangelands.
[00:01:21.930]It was a gorgeous drive from North Platte
[00:01:24.540]So I was excited to see all this grassland that's intact
[00:01:27.780]because if you saw those maps in Oklahoma,
[00:01:31.020]we don't look like this anymore.
[00:01:34.230]So I'm gonna talk about
[00:01:35.490]post-fire grazing and forage management.
[00:01:38.460]Since I've been in Oklahoma for seven years,
[00:01:42.540]we have had wildfires, I think every year but two
[00:01:45.630]and I'm only really counting significant wildfires,
[00:01:49.740]large ones in that number,
[00:01:53.160]so I don't know if I skipped one.
[00:01:55.410]So today we're just gonna talk about some soil responses,
[00:01:58.980]plant responses, grazing after fire,
[00:02:02.130]and then the pasture management after wildfire.
[00:02:05.190]Just some things outside of grazing
[00:02:06.840]that you might think about
[00:02:08.490]when you're managing after wildfire.
[00:02:11.610]I'll get back to these pictures in a little bit,
[00:02:15.090]but this is a wildfire,
[00:02:17.030]it was called the Anderson Creek Wildfire,
[00:02:19.290]I'll show a map of,
[00:02:21.442]it was in Northern Oklahoma, up into Kansas,
[00:02:24.510]most of it was actually in Kansas.
[00:02:26.010]This was a huge fire,
[00:02:27.780]and these are pictures that were taken
[00:02:30.360]one week after wildfire
[00:02:31.950]and then eight months after wildfire
[00:02:33.720]in November of the same year in this area.
[00:02:39.030]Okay, so I wanted to start with some notions that we have
[00:02:44.490]about grazing after fire
[00:02:46.380]and maybe where those came from initially.
[00:02:49.380]So this is the US Forest Service post,
[00:02:51.390]fire grazing recommendation.
[00:02:53.670]And what it says is that re-vegetated areas
[00:02:56.400]and areas that have been burned out but not re-vegetated
[00:03:00.660]will be closed to livestock grazing
[00:03:03.060]for at least two growing seasons.
[00:03:04.500]So they said areas that had re-vegetated
[00:03:07.860]and areas that had not re-vegetated,
[00:03:10.410]they would both have no grazing for two growing seasons
[00:03:14.370]following the season in which the wildfire occurred
[00:03:18.720]to promote recovery of the burned perennial plants
[00:03:21.120]and or facilitate the establishment of the seeded species
[00:03:25.380]and we'll get into that in a second, I'll keep going.
[00:03:27.810]Livestock closures for less than two growing seasons
[00:03:30.600]may be justified on a case by case basis
[00:03:33.000]based on sound resource data and experience.
[00:03:36.540]So there's a couple of little assumptions in there.
[00:03:42.450]One of the reasons that they had this was that
[00:03:44.580]there was the assumption
[00:03:47.310]that there was an increased risk from soil erosion
[00:03:50.070]because of the loss of litter
[00:03:51.450]and plant material above ground.
[00:03:54.330]We'll talk about that a little bit.
[00:03:56.100]The second assumption was that the fire killed plants
[00:03:58.830]or reduced their bigger production
[00:04:01.350]and that's the big one.
[00:04:03.120]That's a big one for the great plains
[00:04:05.100]and so we'll talk about how some of these plants
[00:04:07.530]actually do respond to fire
[00:04:09.630]and what happens if you raise them or you don't raise them.
[00:04:13.260]So, we'll also talk about maybe a little bit
[00:04:17.100]where this idea that you needed to defer for two seasons
[00:04:21.060]came from initially.
[00:04:24.450]All right, so let's start with soils.
[00:04:27.750]You know, working in Oklahoma,
[00:04:30.270]the dust bowl is always on everyone's mind.
[00:04:33.330]So, even though we know that the dust bowl was primarily,
[00:04:40.020]the soil movement was happening because there was areas
[00:04:42.690]that were cropped that shouldn't have been cropped, right?
[00:04:45.810]We were farming everything.
[00:04:47.850]There's areas in Oklahoma that were in alfa, or not alfalfa,
[00:04:53.130]that were in cotton for a long time
[00:04:55.200]that now you look at and you're like,
[00:04:56.703]they grew cotton here?
[00:04:59.910]But we did.
[00:05:01.050]And so a lot of times when we have wildfire folks think,
[00:05:05.400]man, we're gonna have a dust bowl now
[00:05:06.660]because we've had this fire,
[00:05:08.100]all this plant material has been removed,
[00:05:10.770]but there's something different
[00:05:12.000]that's happening in the picture on the left
[00:05:14.430]versus the picture on the right.
[00:05:17.010]And what's different is that we have,
[00:05:21.330]it's pretty hard to see, this picture's dark,
[00:05:23.760]but there's crowns of plants that are remaining
[00:05:25.950]in the picture on the left
[00:05:28.050]and those plants aren't dead, they're alive.
[00:05:31.830]So they have a root system,
[00:05:33.120]the crown of the plant that's remaining,
[00:05:35.700]and they have this huge root system below ground
[00:05:38.850]that is still alive and actively growing
[00:05:42.840]and that's a very different system
[00:05:45.390]from an area where you've had tilling,
[00:05:48.450]where there's no perennial roots from any plants growing
[00:05:52.110]and it impacts soil movement much differently
[00:05:56.280]than if you're in a system that is cropped.
[00:06:02.010]So, sandy soils can be a blessing and a curse.
[00:06:08.520]I put together just some of the negatives and the positives
[00:06:11.070]of having sandy soil.
[00:06:13.710]The negative would be that
[00:06:14.760]we have very little soil aggregation, right?
[00:06:17.040]The soil doesn't hold together well
[00:06:19.470]and so it's fairly easily eroded.
[00:06:23.130]Another negative is that it dries out fairly quickly, right?
[00:06:27.360]We get water infiltration happens rapidly
[00:06:31.650]and so those soils can dry out quickly,
[00:06:34.860]but there's positives to having sandy soil as well.
[00:06:39.240]And one is that we do have that rapid infiltration
[00:06:42.510]and very low runoff.
[00:06:44.130]So we don't lose a ton of water on sandy soils,
[00:06:48.690]even when slopes are steeper than
[00:06:51.450]if you were on a tighter soil to have more clay.
[00:06:54.570]Another plus to sandy soils is that
[00:06:57.450]we have water that's accessible to the plants
[00:07:00.450]and that's really why we can grow tall grass species
[00:07:03.330]in areas that really only get 15 inches of precipitation
[00:07:06.360]on an annual basis.
[00:07:08.160]That's not normal to grow these tall grass species
[00:07:12.990]in 15 inch rain fall zones doesn't usually happen
[00:07:16.470]on our clay soils.
[00:07:18.840]So we see this in some of our rangelands in Oklahoma
[00:07:21.450]where sandy soils will have sand bluestem
[00:07:24.870]and on our tight clay soils,
[00:07:26.310]we'll have buffalo grass and blue grama.
[00:07:28.680]So buffalo grass and blue grama
[00:07:30.210]of course are short grass species.
[00:07:32.820]And then, and the sandy areas,
[00:07:34.860]we're growing 4,000 pounds,
[00:07:38.012]1,000 pounds on the clay soils.
[00:07:40.050]So there's this drastic difference
[00:07:41.640]because of that availability of moisture
[00:07:44.130]because of the differences in soil.
[00:07:46.050]So I wanted to address that a little bit because
[00:07:49.740]although there's negatives, we have positives too.
[00:07:53.760]So, what happens if you graze following fire?
[00:08:00.210]Well, there is a research project that was done
[00:08:03.720]in Western Oklahoma near Woodward.
[00:08:07.230]They did this on Cooper Wildlife Management Area.
[00:08:10.500]If you're familiar, there's an ARS station out of Woodward
[00:08:14.340]that's done a ton of native grass breeding
[00:08:18.120]and grazing research.
[00:08:20.250]Anyway, this is right near one of that research station.
[00:08:23.970]Western Oklahoma,
[00:08:25.530]this is an area that has loamy fine sandy soils.
[00:08:30.150]They get 23 inches of rainfall annually.
[00:08:34.830]And what they wanted to do was see what happens
[00:08:37.980]if we burn with as much severity as we can,
[00:08:41.550]we graze as severely as we can,
[00:08:44.940]what happens to the soil movement in this system?
[00:08:48.930]So they burned with very intense fires,
[00:08:51.060]they weren't prescribed fires,
[00:08:52.170]but they were burning with low humidity,
[00:08:55.590]higher winds than you normally would
[00:08:58.860]to try to emulate what a wildfire condition would be like.
[00:09:03.270]Then they only did this in small portions of the pasture.
[00:09:08.220]And then they stocked that pasture
[00:09:09.960]at the regular stocking rate.
[00:09:13.140]So, about 2% of the pasture is actually burned
[00:09:18.420]and those animals targeted those burns intensively
[00:09:24.090]and they grazed,
[00:09:25.170]the utilization rate was 78% utilization rate.
[00:09:29.580]So animals used these burns and then they tracked
[00:09:33.990]what happened with soil movement across these pastures.
[00:09:38.580]They basically tried to make the very worst case scenario
[00:09:42.270]to try to emulate what we have going on
[00:09:44.130]in a wildfire situation.
[00:09:46.800]And so this is showing,
[00:09:48.690]it kind of cut off the left side.
[00:09:50.040]This is sediment movement,
[00:09:53.520]the sediment that they caught at two different heights,
[00:09:56.850]20 centimeters and 40 centimeters.
[00:09:59.760]The light bars are that 20 centimeter height
[00:10:01.950]and the 40 centimeters is the dark bars
[00:10:05.400]and they tracked this over two seasons.
[00:10:07.350]They had in 2000 and 2001,
[00:10:11.070]they were catching all this sediment
[00:10:12.600]and trying to see what happened.
[00:10:15.150]And what they found was you can see that
[00:10:17.160]there's a lot more sediment
[00:10:18.480]that was caught on the left side in 2000 versus 2001.
[00:10:26.040]And they're like, well, why did that happen?
[00:10:28.020]What was the difference between those two seasons?
[00:10:30.930]And what it was was that there was only two inches of rain
[00:10:34.920]that fell from March through May
[00:10:37.740]and it was a moderately windy winter.
[00:10:42.840]And then in 2001,
[00:10:43.920]they got 7.5 inches of rain from March through May,
[00:10:47.070]but it was windy.
[00:10:49.740]So, it being windy or not windy,
[00:10:52.080]actually didn't end up mattering that much,
[00:10:54.180]it was how wet was that soil
[00:10:57.210]'cause the moisture helped to keep the soil in place.
[00:11:00.480]So wetter soils had less wind erosion,
[00:11:03.840]wetter soils also had more plant regrowth after that fire,
[00:11:08.400]which led to less wind erosion.
[00:11:11.610]Even with all of this,
[00:11:13.500]they've had no blowouts or drifts in this system.
[00:11:17.310]If you've ever been to this part of Oklahoma, we have,
[00:11:23.190]it can be pretty duny actually,
[00:11:25.950]I mean it's very sandy area
[00:11:29.160]and to have no blowouts or drifts on those areas
[00:11:32.400]where they had those fires
[00:11:34.560]and then that intensive grazing is pretty remarkable.
[00:11:39.780]They also had no reduced production
[00:11:41.640]due to erosion on those burned plots.
[00:11:44.880]So, that's a good thing to know, right?
[00:11:46.494]We didn't have a huge negative impact from doing that.
[00:11:55.110]So, what I take away from this research project
[00:11:58.980]was that early spring,
[00:12:03.902]I never pulled out this information, I'm sorry.
[00:12:06.420]So they had two timings that they did fires.
[00:12:08.430]They did autumn fires and then they did spring fires.
[00:12:11.520]And so in the 2000 data, they had very little,
[00:12:17.190]they had some differences between
[00:12:19.230]the height at which they captured sediment,
[00:12:22.740]but at the one height,
[00:12:25.710]there was almost no difference
[00:12:26.730]between autumn and spring burn.
[00:12:28.830]In 2001, they also compared those autumn and spring burns
[00:12:32.100]and they actually had more sediment caught
[00:12:35.340]at the lower height in the spring burn.
[00:12:38.520]Typically what we've found with our wildfires is that
[00:12:43.350]if the fire happens in the spring,
[00:12:45.690]we always get rain in May.
[00:12:49.681]We're not too different from you guys,
[00:12:52.770]we get a good amount of rain in May and June
[00:12:56.280]and then we kind of get a little bump in August, September.
[00:12:59.970]And if you have rain pretty quickly
[00:13:03.690]after you have a wildfire, the plants respond really fast.
[00:13:07.680]This year, we had a wildfire in Blaine County,
[00:13:10.410]which is Central Southern Oklahoma.
[00:13:16.530]And that wildfire happened in July,
[00:13:20.130]like the end of July.
[00:13:21.960]We were in a drought prior to,
[00:13:24.210]we had a wildfire,
[00:13:25.470]we've continued to be in a drought afterwards
[00:13:28.350]and that's been a much tougher wildfire to deal with
[00:13:35.490]than these fires that happen right before
[00:13:38.040]you're gonna get a bunch of moisture.
[00:13:39.360]Now, if you have a dry spring
[00:13:41.730]when you normally have a wet spring,
[00:13:43.290]that can be an issue
[00:13:44.130]and we're gonna talk about plant responses,
[00:13:46.140]but the longer that you have soil left bare
[00:13:50.910]is when you can start to have more issues.
[00:13:53.880]But if that soil is wet,
[00:13:55.410]it can help to hold it in place.
[00:13:57.870]So let's talk about some plant responses.
[00:13:59.730]I tried to pull different species
[00:14:01.170]that might be interesting for you.
[00:14:04.470]So there is a lot of research
[00:14:06.750]on how our native grasses respond to fire,
[00:14:09.840]massive amounts of research.
[00:14:11.970]And with these species it's difficult
[00:14:14.280]because they grow from Texas to Canada,
[00:14:18.360]so finding the information
[00:14:20.820]that's perfect for this situation,
[00:14:23.520]I tried to pull out stuff that was important for Nebraska.
[00:14:27.300]Anyway, we'll start with big and sand bluestem.
[00:14:30.450]This one is the most positive.
[00:14:33.960]So, typically it increases production
[00:14:36.990]following spring fires in some cases twofold.
[00:14:40.470]There's a reason that the Flint Hills
[00:14:42.240]is burned every single spring
[00:14:44.880]and it's because this plant
[00:14:46.590]is the dominant grass in that system
[00:14:48.870]and it grows a ton of forage if you burn it.
[00:14:53.880]With burned plants grow more leaves,
[00:14:55.950]shoots, flowering stalks, you know,
[00:14:58.770]they send out more rhizomes,
[00:15:00.330]most of these are rhizomatous grasses
[00:15:02.400]that have below ground runners.
[00:15:05.820]In some instances,
[00:15:07.080]fire may not increase big bluestem production
[00:15:09.630]or sand bluestem production
[00:15:11.490]in upland sites that are really dry,
[00:15:14.760]especially if you have summer fire followed by drought.
[00:15:18.090]So those are kind of the instances
[00:15:19.470]when you wouldn't necessarily get that boom in production
[00:15:22.230]following a fire on sand or big bluestem.
[00:15:26.670]Blue grama fires generally increase
[00:15:30.120]or have no impact on blue grama.
[00:15:33.090]This plant is super adapted
[00:15:35.370]to drought, grazing, fire, all of it.
[00:15:39.360]It grows as a bunch grass when it's burned or grazed a lot.
[00:15:42.990]It starts to spread horizontally
[00:15:46.200]and fire increases the seed production on this one as well
[00:15:50.310]and those rhizomes that help with the spread.
[00:15:53.550]Production may decrease for two to three years
[00:15:55.740]of the fire again is followed by drought.
[00:16:02.670]Little bluestem.
[00:16:04.170]Little bluestem is one that we were hearing from folks
[00:16:06.720]that they were really concerned about.
[00:16:08.940]Little bluestem is not rhizomatous,
[00:16:11.250]it's a bunch grass,
[00:16:12.180]it does not spread horizontally.
[00:16:14.490]So it was one that we were really interested in
[00:16:16.860]what happens with this grass when you have fire.
[00:16:20.520]Fall, winter, and spring burns
[00:16:21.990]generally increase little bluestem production.
[00:16:25.020]Summer burns can damage the plant crown.
[00:16:28.020]And what we've seen happen on a lot of our fires is that
[00:16:32.610]you'll find the crown of a little bluestem plant
[00:16:35.400]and the outside will be alive,
[00:16:36.870]but the middle might be dead.
[00:16:40.260]Now, whether the middle was dead before the fire or not
[00:16:43.890]is still a matter that's discussed a lot
[00:16:46.290]and nobody's actually tackled that as a research project.
[00:16:50.850]Spring burns can increase the flower stock production.
[00:16:54.090]And then I just wanted to show you some of the variability
[00:16:56.940]that you can get with these plants,
[00:16:58.740]this research that was out of West Texas
[00:17:01.110]and the mixed grass prairie on a dry year burn,
[00:17:04.290]they had a decrease of 42% total production
[00:17:07.740]with little bluestem versus a wet year burn,
[00:17:10.350]they had an increase up of 81% above normal.
[00:17:15.720]So, there's these huge differences
[00:17:19.530]based on what conditions you're dealing with
[00:17:23.670]around that burn, before and after that burn.
[00:17:26.670]So because little bluestem was one that folks were like,
[00:17:29.340]I'm telling you little bluestem
[00:17:30.630]is getting killed by wildfire.
[00:17:32.970]There was a research project that was done in Oklahoma
[00:17:36.720]where there's like, okay, if we're gonna do this,
[00:17:38.730]we're gonna try to make the little bluestem
[00:17:40.260]as vulnerable as possible.
[00:17:42.480]So they took little bluestem plants,
[00:17:43.950]they grew 'em into greenhouse.
[00:17:45.480]At 18 months of age,
[00:17:46.710]they started doing all sorts of stuff to 'em.
[00:17:49.020]They burned them, they clipped them,
[00:17:51.330]they burned down, clipped them
[00:17:53.220]to see what happened with the above ground production
[00:17:55.497]and the below ground production on these plants.
[00:17:59.340]This is showing the above ground production,
[00:18:01.980]the leaf production on these plants.
[00:18:04.650]We have the control over here
[00:18:06.570]that had nothing done to it,
[00:18:09.120]was unburned, unclipped.
[00:18:12.510]The dark bars are the plants that were burned and clipped.
[00:18:18.660]We have the zero, they were not clipped,
[00:18:21.480]that clipping was supposed to emulate grazing.
[00:18:24.150]And then we have the burned and clipped once or twice.
[00:18:27.600]And then we have the light gray bars
[00:18:29.670]which were unburned, but clipped.
[00:18:32.220]So it was supposed to be grazing but with no fire.
[00:18:35.190]And what you'll see here is that
[00:18:38.250]the burned and clipped plants
[00:18:42.030]had more above ground production
[00:18:44.550]than the plants that were only clipped, only raised.
[00:18:49.740]And so there's something going on with these plants
[00:18:54.450]that's creating a positive feedback to the plant
[00:18:57.270]when it's burned.
[00:18:59.400]And there's been some research done in Texas looking at
[00:19:02.190]at what happens when you burn these plants,
[00:19:03.960]they increase the bud formation that they have
[00:19:07.440]in the crown of the plant.
[00:19:08.940]There's been some folks that are trying to start look at,
[00:19:14.220]there's hormonal feedbacks that are happening,
[00:19:16.140]that's making these plants respond
[00:19:17.820]so positively to the fire.
[00:19:20.940]It's really fascinating.
[00:19:21.840]So that's above ground.
[00:19:23.430]They also measured the below ground biomass
[00:19:26.190]of these little plants.
[00:19:28.290]And so again, we have the control,
[00:19:29.910]we have the burned and then the clipped only,
[00:19:36.120]and again, the below ground production was greater
[00:19:41.100]for plants that were burned and clipped versus just clipped.
[00:19:45.720]Well, if you have a greater below ground root biomass
[00:19:51.390]and you go into a drought,
[00:19:53.160]you have that much more ability
[00:19:55.440]to capture resources when you need them.
[00:19:58.260]So, nobody's taken it to that next step,
[00:20:02.190]but I suspect that if you had a plant
[00:20:04.410]that had a higher root production,
[00:20:06.930]they would be more resilient during drought.
[00:20:09.420]They're also better at holding soil in place.
[00:20:11.520]There's a lot of benefits
[00:20:12.540]to having a lot of root production, right?
[00:20:14.850]So this is just really fascinating
[00:20:16.440]and these are, you know, like I said, young plants
[00:20:20.040]that they were doing this too
[00:20:21.090]in a plant that we suspected was the most fire vulnerable.
[00:20:26.970]Okay, so prairie sandreed, response to fire,
[00:20:30.120]fire increased cover,
[00:20:31.740]fire increased seedhead production,
[00:20:34.500]burned prairie sandreed,
[00:20:35.610]had similar production
[00:20:36.870]one growing season after in October wildfire
[00:20:40.020]that was in Arthur County,
[00:20:41.250]that's the closest thing I could find.
[00:20:42.930]I was really excited to find that one.
[00:20:46.500]Burned plants grew more than unburned plants
[00:20:48.750]in June and July
[00:20:49.950]and then by the end of the growing season,
[00:20:52.140]the unburned and the burned plants
[00:20:53.430]had about the same amount of production.
[00:20:56.250]So it seemed to have some kind of stimulation
[00:20:58.440]on the growth in those early month
[00:21:00.180]and then they kind of evened out
[00:21:02.310]between the burned and the unburned plants there at the end.
[00:21:06.600]Western wheatgrass.
[00:21:09.210]There's a note effective fire
[00:21:10.800]or increased production in most of the research.
[00:21:13.650]So, I'm trying to pull together research
[00:21:15.843]that there's on some of these plants,
[00:21:18.660]there's been 10 or 11 papers
[00:21:20.730]that people have looked at these,
[00:21:23.970]how they respond.
[00:21:26.700]With Western wheatgrass,
[00:21:27.720]typically you'll reduce the plant height,
[00:21:31.380]but spring and late summer burns increase the density
[00:21:34.080]in the abundance of Western wheatgrass.
[00:21:36.990]And then in rare occasions
[00:21:39.870]when it decreased after fire,
[00:21:42.030]it was typically recovered by two years after fire.
[00:21:46.260]So again, this is another one that
[00:21:50.302]is very well fire adapted,
[00:21:52.680]one of our cool season plants.
[00:21:54.960]I didn't put, I don't know,
[00:21:56.430]do you guys have a lot of Scribner Panic 'em up here?
[00:21:59.700]That's another one that we see increase
[00:22:01.590]in a lot of our pastures when burning.
[00:22:03.270]I didn't do a slide on that one,
[00:22:06.960]but our cows love that plant
[00:22:09.120]and it tends to increase in most of our pastures
[00:22:11.460]when we start burning.
[00:22:14.220]So, let me orient myself.
[00:22:17.610]So this was from data from an April wildfire
[00:22:21.030]in Northwest South Dakota.
[00:22:24.690]This area gets between 16 and 18 inches
[00:22:27.690]of precipitation annually
[00:22:29.550]and they had a couple different sites
[00:22:31.620]one that was more loamy and one that was a sandy loam
[00:22:36.060]and this research project was actually set up
[00:22:39.750]to tackle the problem,
[00:22:41.939]this idea of deferment following grazing.
[00:22:46.080]So, the titles down here, if you're interested,
[00:22:50.547]Lance Vermeire on couple of these papers
[00:22:52.020]'cause he does pretty cool research,
[00:22:53.760]especially with what to do after fire.
[00:22:56.610]The title is reconsidering rest following fire,
[00:22:59.820]Northern mixed grass prairie is resilient to grazing
[00:23:02.160]following spring wildfire.
[00:23:03.720]The reason I picked this research for you guys is
[00:23:06.240]it has a lot of species
[00:23:08.670]that I thought you might be interested in.
[00:23:10.800]And so they had areas that they rested after the wildfire
[00:23:14.880]and areas that they grazed.
[00:23:19.500]The grazing that they did was from June through October
[00:23:23.730]and the utilization got cut off at,
[00:23:25.497]the utilization rate that they had
[00:23:27.360]was 47% on the grazed areas.
[00:23:32.400]The results were that the yearly biomass production
[00:23:37.050]was equal in the rested and the grazed plots.
[00:23:42.300]So when they accounted for how much had been used
[00:23:44.640]by animals and everything,
[00:23:46.350]they actually figured out that
[00:23:49.081]the production of those plants had been the same
[00:23:51.780]in year one and year two.
[00:23:53.940]There were a couple plants that they found differences.
[00:23:57.570]The plants that had differences,
[00:23:59.010]I put little stars right here.
[00:24:02.220]So, needle and thread grass grew,
[00:24:05.640]this is cover, this is percent cover
[00:24:08.610]was less in the grazed area versus the rested area,
[00:24:12.390]but Western wheatgrass, prairie junegrass,
[00:24:15.630]blue grama, purple threeawn,
[00:24:18.180]those were all similar,
[00:24:19.890]there was a lot of variability.
[00:24:21.870]So the statistics didn't pick out
[00:24:24.450]any differences between these numbers.
[00:24:29.550]Broadleaves, there was more broadleaves
[00:24:30.933]than the gray spots.
[00:24:32.340]I mean, you'd expect it.
[00:24:34.170]If you have grazing after fire,
[00:24:36.780]you will have more broad leaves,
[00:24:38.280]that's just the reality of it.
[00:24:40.080]There's more spots for those seeds,
[00:24:42.530]those seeds germinate really quickly
[00:24:46.920]and so you do end up with more broad leaves.
[00:24:49.350]Then they lumped all the cool seasons
[00:24:51.060]and all the warm seasons.
[00:24:52.980]So here's another one where there's a difference.
[00:24:55.470]When you lumped
[00:24:56.303]all of the warm season plants together for cover,
[00:24:59.220]they actually had higher cover of warm season grasses
[00:25:02.190]in the gray flats versus the rested flats.
[00:25:07.110]Litter, they didn't detect a difference in the litter
[00:25:12.120]and they didn't detect a difference in the bare ground.
[00:25:15.720]So, that was after a wildfire,
[00:25:18.930]not in a simulated wildfire, a legitimate wildfire
[00:25:21.930]and they tried to do what the Forest Service
[00:25:27.840]had in the recommendation.
[00:25:29.820]And you know what has really been adopted
[00:25:31.860]by most of our federal agencies.
[00:25:34.440]So, Forest Service has that,
[00:25:36.630]BLM has a similar statement,
[00:25:39.300]NRCS in most cases also recommends deferment.
[00:25:44.220]So, we'll discuss where that came from,
[00:25:50.760]but I wanna show you first.
[00:25:52.020]So this is where the Anderson Creek Wildfire happened
[00:25:54.150]right here
[00:25:56.730]and this was in March of 2016.
[00:26:00.142]It was a big fire,
[00:26:01.770]but it happened at a time of year
[00:26:03.390]that actually wasn't horrible for us
[00:26:04.980]because we always get that rain in May.
[00:26:07.290]And so what happened is we had a nice wet May
[00:26:10.950]and here's another picture from another location.
[00:26:15.360]Again, one week after wildfire
[00:26:18.030]and then eight months after wildfire,
[00:26:20.490]most of this is sand bluestem that you can see
[00:26:23.970]on the right side,
[00:26:25.080]lots of sand bluestem,
[00:26:25.920]but there is some indian grass in there as well.
[00:26:35.340]Oops, I got impatient.
[00:26:37.560]Another picture one week after wildfire
[00:26:40.740]and then eight months again.
[00:26:42.150]And you can see that there was some impact on the woodies,
[00:26:46.710]which is what we always want.
[00:26:48.210]So yes, kill those cedar trees.
[00:26:54.720]But yeah, these areas recovered really, really well.
[00:26:57.270]So grass response after fire, what was the,
[00:27:01.950]I think there's a lot of questions we need to ask ourselves.
[00:27:04.020]What was the condition of that site
[00:27:05.430]before we had the wildfire?
[00:27:07.080]Was it grazed hard prior to the wildfire?
[00:27:10.170]Well then it's gonna take a while for it to recover.
[00:27:12.810]Was it already covered up in cedar trees?
[00:27:14.670]That happens in a lot of Oklahoma.
[00:27:16.140]We have a lot of areas
[00:27:16.973]that are just covered up in cedar trees,
[00:27:18.240]they have a wildfire and then they're like, man,
[00:27:20.070]it's not recovering.
[00:27:21.180]Well, it's been covered up in cedar trees
[00:27:25.230]for 20 years anyway.
[00:27:26.520]So, the recovery is gonna take a bit
[00:27:30.720]because the fire intensity that the soil is getting
[00:27:34.110]and the plants are getting below those trees.
[00:27:36.240]If there's any under,
[00:27:37.110]there is much more intensity
[00:27:38.910]than if it had been an open grassland.
[00:27:41.280]When did the fire happen?
[00:27:42.780]Spring is an excellent time
[00:27:44.490]if you have a wildfire, if you have one,
[00:27:47.700]'cause there's just less time
[00:27:48.690]for that bare ground to sit there and possibly erode.
[00:27:52.440]What are the conditions after fire?
[00:27:53.970]Are they normal?
[00:27:55.380]In most of the great planes,
[00:27:56.640]our grasses have a neutral or positive response to fire.
[00:28:00.390]And so if you have normal conditions,
[00:28:02.940]they're not gonna be hurting very badly.
[00:28:04.830]It's just the reality, these plants respond positively.
[00:28:08.070]And then if you do have drought,
[00:28:10.020]you may have a decrease in production
[00:28:12.030]for one or two growing seasons.
[00:28:16.110]So, what I put on, oops,
[00:28:19.800]I put a video on here.
[00:28:23.520]Let me see if we can get it to play.
[00:28:26.172]Oh, I never know if it's in presenter mode after all.
[00:28:31.410]Respond to my, no,
[00:28:36.180]just is advancing.
[00:28:43.650]If I do...
[00:28:57.450]How did you do it?
[00:28:59.850]Oh, gotcha.
[00:29:14.160]So this is some video from one of our pastures.
[00:29:17.550]I'm gonna talk about patch burning next.
[00:29:19.350]We don't pull animals out of our pastures
[00:29:21.000]when we do our burns and our cows are,
[00:29:24.960]they know that that's where the feed's gonna be
[00:29:27.180]and they know it so much that they won't leave it alone.
[00:29:31.920]They're in the burn units when we're trying to do burns,
[00:29:35.760]I'm hoping that nobody,
[00:29:38.130]no IA cook person comes and gets me
[00:29:41.190]for showing you this video.
[00:29:42.480]But the reality of it is
[00:29:43.650]this is what happens in our pastures.
[00:29:45.540]We have deer in these burned patches,
[00:29:47.490]everything's coming into these burned patches immediately
[00:29:50.070]because they know that black means
[00:29:53.160]there's gonna be yummy stuff growing there soon.
[00:29:56.310]And so during normal years, we graze normally.
[00:30:00.420]We do not change how we graze these pastures.
[00:30:04.080]During dry years,
[00:30:05.010]you may have to defer grazing and that's gonna...
[00:30:08.790]I can't tell you how long that's gonna have to be
[00:30:10.800]'cause it depends a lot
[00:30:11.760]on what that state of that pasture was prior
[00:30:14.340]and if it's a drought or non drought year.
[00:30:22.770]Oh, now I need to come back over here.
[00:30:26.370]I don't know what to do, Casey.
[00:30:36.840]The clicker.
[00:30:44.460]Forward arrow.
[00:30:51.990]Okay, so you already saw this map.
[00:30:54.360]Dylan showed it to you.
[00:30:55.710]This is a map that was generated
[00:30:57.750]where they were trying to map,
[00:31:00.240]they were trying to figure out
[00:31:01.073]what was the historic fire return interval.
[00:31:05.130]This is teeny, teeny-tiny,
[00:31:07.020]but this is like every two years,
[00:31:10.260]every two to four years, four to six years.
[00:31:15.450]Anyway, the point is,
[00:31:17.640]is there was a lot of fire happening here
[00:31:20.130]and that's actually what made our great plains grasslands.
[00:31:23.520]That's why they are grasslands.
[00:31:25.770]And so these plants are adapted to that.
[00:31:29.460]And in addition, there were wild,
[00:31:32.040]there were wild ungulates,
[00:31:34.050]bison, pronghorn, elk, deer
[00:31:38.610]that we're targeting those burns.
[00:31:41.340]We know that, they still do it today.
[00:31:43.230]If they have access to an area
[00:31:44.760]that has burned grass versus unburned,
[00:31:46.980]they will go to the burned.
[00:31:48.270]And so this has always been happening
[00:31:50.100]and that's why these plants are adapted for it.
[00:31:54.240]So where did those Forest Service recommendations come from?
[00:31:57.480]Why are they saying to defer for two years?
[00:31:59.730]They're saying this because of some research
[00:32:02.100]that came out of the great basin.
[00:32:04.800]Well the great plains aren't the great basin.
[00:32:07.050]I love the great basin,
[00:32:08.130]but as far as fire resilience and resilience to grazing,
[00:32:13.025]that's like Mars,
[00:32:14.760]it's a different place than the great plains is.
[00:32:18.000]And so I would,
[00:32:21.840]I don't feel like those are fitting
[00:32:24.060]for where we're living and managing land.
[00:32:27.570]And so we just have to rethink those recommendations.
[00:32:31.020]So, another question I feel like
[00:32:33.750]we maybe need to talk about is
[00:32:35.220]what do you miss if you don't graze after fire?
[00:32:38.220]And the reality of it is, is there are for,
[00:32:40.860]some of our really dominant forage grasses are not meeting,
[00:32:44.850]don't even meet a cow's needs
[00:32:48.720]for more than a month or two of the year.
[00:32:51.030]So, we've tracked forage quality
[00:32:53.370]of some of our forage species,
[00:32:54.630]little bluestem was one that was shocking to me.
[00:32:57.360]It only meets a cow's requirement
[00:33:00.090]for one month, maybe two months,
[00:33:01.680]depending on how much rain we get in June,
[00:33:04.170]May is pretty much it.
[00:33:05.820]If you burn it,
[00:33:07.350]you lengthen how long that that plant is meeting the needs.
[00:33:12.000]And so this is just showing
[00:33:13.770]the crude protein over time since fire
[00:33:17.700]and basically forage quality is highest
[00:33:19.530]for that first 150 days following fire.
[00:33:22.680]That's why the animals are drawn to those burns
[00:33:26.310]and that's how we can use fire
[00:33:29.670]for our benefit for livestock production
[00:33:32.040]if we do it in a way that's sustainable.
[00:33:36.570]So, approach that we use a lot in Oklahoma
[00:33:40.020]is called patch burn grazing.
[00:33:42.240]This is an approach where you have a big pasture,
[00:33:45.900]you cut it into multiple burn units,
[00:33:49.260]you burn one patch
[00:33:51.330]and allow animals access to the whole pasture.
[00:33:54.510]They're stocked at the normal stocking rate.
[00:33:57.180]They're gonna target their grazing on this area,
[00:34:01.200]as you saw from my video.
[00:34:04.470]And then we're going to burn another spot
[00:34:07.590]and they're gonna move over to this area
[00:34:10.350]and then we're gonna burn another spot
[00:34:12.090]and they're gonna move to this area.
[00:34:14.040]And we're effectively rotating animals around the pasture
[00:34:17.370]without any additional fence
[00:34:19.440]and they get to choose,
[00:34:21.600]do I wanna eat tall grass or short grass?
[00:34:24.510]They get to pick the best diet for themselves.
[00:34:29.160]And the big thing is that they have to be able
[00:34:32.130]to have access to all of it,
[00:34:33.930]you can't fence it off.
[00:34:35.640]Another benefit of this is that
[00:34:37.410]we know now that we are stockpiling,
[00:34:39.690]once they move to this patch,
[00:34:41.490]they're not gonna come back to that patch
[00:34:42.900]till we burn it again
[00:34:44.400]and that will get rest until we burn it.
[00:34:47.220]So some cases that's two years
[00:34:49.890]and we're stockpiling forage in here,
[00:34:52.020]we're stockpiling forage for drought,
[00:34:54.330]we're stockpiling for whatever we need it for,
[00:34:56.430]for the next burn so we have fuel,
[00:34:59.340]lots of benefits to doing this.
[00:35:02.250]We have ranchers that are using this on huge ranches
[00:35:05.190]and this is their drop management plan.
[00:35:07.290]This is how they're stockpiling on their native pastures.
[00:35:12.360]Okay, let's see.
[00:35:16.620]I can't see myself,
[00:35:18.270]I'm over there.
[00:35:26.610]So I just wanted to show you,
[00:35:27.750]we collected some forage quality data
[00:35:30.210]on a one of our patch burn pastures
[00:35:32.190]and I wanted to show you what that looks like.
[00:35:50.190]So we burn in August one of our patches.
[00:36:09.060]We have another patch that we burn
[00:36:10.440]typically in March or April.
[00:36:17.520]So we have a burn patch every six months.
[00:36:19.740]And that's because we know that that forage
[00:36:22.560]is the best for 150 days.
[00:36:25.560]So then we went out there
[00:36:26.730]and actually we put up a time lapse camera
[00:36:29.400]to track the regrowth
[00:36:31.230]and then we also clipped to measure
[00:36:33.330]what the quality and the production on those areas were.
[00:36:42.720]So, 19 months since fire on the left,
[00:36:45.090]two months since fire on the right.
[00:36:47.700]Crude protein was 11% in the end of October,
[00:36:53.220]TDN of 55% in the recently burned patch.
[00:37:07.710]So, in the Flint Hills
[00:37:09.540]where they're burning everything off every year,
[00:37:12.210]they're not setting themselves up for a,
[00:37:15.600]if there's a drought, right?
[00:37:16.620]Because you just burned everything.
[00:37:17.700]Well, what if you go into a drought that year
[00:37:18.990]then you don't have any forage growth.
[00:37:20.940]And so this provides you with a little bit more flexibility
[00:37:24.570]because you have a burn happening every year
[00:37:26.067]and the animals have excellent forage to consume,
[00:37:29.400]but they also, you are also stockpiling
[00:37:32.460]in the eventuality that you do have a drought.
[00:37:34.860]And so that's how we're using this.
[00:37:37.530]It's a management strategy
[00:37:41.220]that has had over 130 studies done on it.
[00:37:44.970]In the US, there's 96 sites,
[00:37:47.550]it's been researched for 50 years.
[00:37:49.620]We've been doing research
[00:37:51.870]for more than 20 years in Oklahoma on it.
[00:37:54.720]It's something that's not new,
[00:37:57.480]we just haven't communicated it effectively
[00:38:00.030]with land owners.
[00:38:02.250]We know that in many cases,
[00:38:04.320]that fire increases the forage productivity.
[00:38:08.070]We know for sure that it increases the forage quality.
[00:38:12.330]And with stockers,
[00:38:14.190]there's an increase in weight gain
[00:38:16.560]over the course of the season.
[00:38:17.760]So if they're grazing from May through September,
[00:38:21.780]we'd expect to get about 40 more pounds again
[00:38:24.990]on those stockers that are grazing on
[00:38:27.120]burned pasture versus unburned
[00:38:28.800]and that's been documented
[00:38:30.030]in least four or five different papers
[00:38:32.010]from Kansas and Oklahoma and other places.
[00:38:34.980]Other things that we know is that
[00:38:38.280]we've reduced winter supplementation on our cowherd.
[00:38:41.220]We are historically supplementing for five months.
[00:38:43.950]We've bumped that back to three months
[00:38:45.630]because we have those fires happening
[00:38:48.090]in the spring and in the fall.
[00:38:50.580]So we don't have to provide supplement
[00:38:52.380]for as long during the winter,
[00:38:54.300]you're mitigating the effects of drought
[00:38:57.000]and then external parasites,
[00:38:59.850]horn flies, ticks, all of that.
[00:39:02.850]We have less ticks and less horn flies on our animals
[00:39:06.120]when we use fire and specifically patch burning
[00:39:09.480]because they're spending most of their time
[00:39:11.610]on short vegetation
[00:39:13.650]and so that keeps them from getting
[00:39:15.090]nearly as many ticks as they do
[00:39:18.120]when they're just grazing in our nice tall pastures.
[00:39:22.110]So, how do you do it?
[00:39:23.430]You burn part of the pasture,
[00:39:25.050]typically pick the number of patches
[00:39:26.790]based on the fire each interval.
[00:39:28.470]If we wanna burn every four years, use four patches.
[00:39:31.530]If you wanna have two fires a year,
[00:39:34.230]then you'd just double that, you'd have eight patches.
[00:39:37.980]Use your natural fire breaks,
[00:39:39.420]it doesn't have to be perfect squares or anything,
[00:39:42.900]we use streams, ranch roads.
[00:39:46.950]We use a lot of mode wet lines.
[00:39:51.030]In Texas, our fire folks down there,
[00:39:53.880]they've gotta do mostly dose lines
[00:39:55.350]'cause it's pretty rocky in most places.
[00:40:00.120]Allow livestock to graze the entire pasture immediately,
[00:40:03.270]use the stocking rate that you normally calculate
[00:40:05.370]for the whole stocking rate
[00:40:06.780]and then you've gotta follow up with another burn
[00:40:09.090]so that they move to another spot.
[00:40:13.980]And the last thing I just wanted to show you,
[00:40:15.810]I'm sure you've heard,
[00:40:17.040]I know Dylan talked about it.
[00:40:19.650]The Rangeland Analysis Platform,
[00:40:21.930]patch burn grazing doesn't work
[00:40:23.430]if you don't have a sustainable stocking rate.
[00:40:26.640]So, if you're already overstocked,
[00:40:28.350]it's not going to work well.
[00:40:30.660]So, how do you figure out
[00:40:31.770]what the right stocking rate for you is?
[00:40:33.870]The Rangeland Analysis Platform
[00:40:35.370]is an excellent tool to do that.
[00:40:37.200]It's a web-based app,
[00:40:39.360]you don't have to download anything, it's free.
[00:40:43.260]You can look at the cover of perennial grasses,
[00:40:46.380]trees, shrubs, whatever you want,
[00:40:48.180]but you can also use their production explorer
[00:40:50.850]to actually look at
[00:40:51.690]what the production estimate is for your pasture.
[00:40:54.870]So you delineate your pasture or your whole ranch,
[00:40:57.510]whatever you wanna delineate,
[00:41:00.600]then you input the cow size,
[00:41:02.520]how long you want 'em to graze,
[00:41:04.410]you estimate their intake
[00:41:07.741]and it'll give you a graph that shows
[00:41:10.830]what the productivity of that area is.
[00:41:13.500]So this was the research station
[00:41:15.510]that we have in Western Oklahoma,
[00:41:17.010]2,200 pounds per acre on average over 30 years
[00:41:24.000]and it will also give you
[00:41:25.590]once you put the animal information in,
[00:41:27.900]how many animals that could have supported
[00:41:30.570]in those different years.
[00:41:32.250]And so it gives just the number of,
[00:41:34.622]I think I had 1,300 pound cows year round,
[00:41:37.740]I think is what I had put in there.
[00:41:39.210]How many of those animals
[00:41:40.320]it would've carried in every one of those years.
[00:41:43.110]And so it just gives you information that you can then use
[00:41:45.720]to make your management decide on your stocking rate.
[00:41:49.980]You know, these are estimates.
[00:41:51.150]So, but it's better than clipping, I'll say that.
[00:41:56.280]I mean, it's better than having to go out
[00:41:57.810]and do the clipping anyway.
[00:42:00.450]So that's another tool.
[00:42:01.350]The other thing that's really fantastic in it
[00:42:03.570]is it gives you every two weeks
[00:42:05.820]or maybe every 16 days, I can't remember.
[00:42:08.010]It gives you an estimate of where you are as far as
[00:42:13.110]what percent of normal have you grown.
[00:42:15.810]And so this curve is showing that
[00:42:19.320]I did this in June on a property
[00:42:22.110]that we have in Southern Oklahoma
[00:42:24.267]and we were about 75% of normal production at that point.
[00:42:28.020]So, that's the last tool I wanted to show you.
[00:42:32.970]That's really, really excellent to use called
[00:42:35.250]the Rangeland Analysis Platform.
[00:42:39.690]The last thing, after wildfire,
[00:42:42.030]there's a couple different things you can do
[00:42:43.800]that really help to boost your pasture,
[00:42:47.280]kill remaining cedars.
[00:42:48.780]If you have some that the fire missed, kill 'em.
[00:42:52.260]Try to get rid of all of those seed sources.
[00:42:56.190]We've worked with ranchers
[00:42:57.300]where we've had a lot of wildfires
[00:42:58.980]with chaining cedar skeletons that can,
[00:43:03.060]there's pluses and minuses to chaining,
[00:43:04.770]it gets it done quickly.
[00:43:05.790]You can have some soil disturbance with that,
[00:43:07.890]but that's a way that you pull this huge anchor boat chain
[00:43:11.490]between two dozers.
[00:43:13.080]It works great where you have steep topography
[00:43:15.510]in areas that you can't really tell in this video,
[00:43:17.730]but it's pretty steep right there.
[00:43:21.720]Wait to do any kind of brush control
[00:43:23.190]if you're spraying any resprouting witty plants,
[00:43:25.740]they need probably 18 months to recover after that fire,
[00:43:29.070]before you wanna try to apply
[00:43:30.630]any foliar herbicide application on them.
[00:43:34.140]I don't know if this happens here,
[00:43:35.460]but in Kansas and Oklahoma,
[00:43:36.990]we have a lot of sumac that comes back in areas
[00:43:39.600]that had a lot of cedar trees
[00:43:41.370]that then we had a wildfire come through
[00:43:43.290]and it can be very, very thick.
[00:43:46.170]So watching for sumac
[00:43:47.490]and then if your fences were unfortunately burn,
[00:43:51.060]at least burned,
[00:43:52.170]at least you can maybe think
[00:43:53.460]are those fences where I want them to be,
[00:43:55.080]or do I want to put them somewhere else?
[00:43:58.020]So those are all things just think about
[00:44:00.060]when you're managing after wildfire.
[00:44:03.240]This is me, we are active on social media too.
[00:44:07.380]We like to put lots of videos and visuals
[00:44:09.270]and stuff together.
[00:44:10.103]So with that, I don't know if I have any time left,
[00:44:15.090]I have no idea where I'm at.
[00:44:17.130]We've got time for one or two questions.
[00:44:21.510]We'll come over here
[00:44:22.860]and get you a mic right behind you, John.
[00:44:31.020]Well, did you,
[00:44:32.340]were you able to control cheap grass with the burns?
[00:44:36.150]So, we have cheap grass that grows in Oklahoma.
[00:44:43.230]It'll be there in May.
[00:44:44.820]In fact, sometimes we'll measure some areas
[00:44:47.400]and it'll be, you'll have a lot of cheap grass,
[00:44:50.130]but by the time,
[00:44:51.300]by the end of May, beginning of June,
[00:44:53.520]when our grasses really stopped growing,
[00:44:54.930]and then if you go back and measure it
[00:44:56.250]at the end of the growing season,
[00:44:57.840]it just doesn't compete with our grasses.
[00:45:00.180]It falls out
[00:45:01.860]and we just don't ever have problems with it.
[00:45:04.080]So, it starts growing before all of our,
[00:45:07.320]we're almost predominantly warm season,
[00:45:09.120]we have almost no cool seasons.
[00:45:10.410]We have Virginia wild dry, in Canada wild dry,
[00:45:12.300]but they're not dominant.
[00:45:14.700]So we just don't have that much problem
[00:45:17.340]with cheap grass in Oklahoma.
[00:45:18.810]And when you did those controlled burns
[00:45:22.050]in the pasture,
[00:45:22.883]how far east were you?
[00:45:24.960]How far east?
[00:45:26.190]So, we've done the,
[00:45:29.260]one of the video I showed you was near Stillwater.
[00:45:33.300]So, it's about 15 miles east of 35.
[00:45:39.690]We have other research
[00:45:40.950]that was done South of Clinton, Oklahoma.
[00:45:44.640]So that's far West Oklahoma,
[00:45:49.260]and that's in mixed grass prairie,
[00:45:50.640]so we got a lot more short grass species there.
[00:45:52.890]Actually that research is pretty cool.
[00:45:54.480]We put GPS collars on cows,
[00:45:56.730]tracked where they grazed,
[00:45:58.230]picked the spots where they avoided and burned them
[00:46:01.200]and then put the cows back in there
[00:46:03.210]and we increased their use
[00:46:04.290]of those avoided areas by 10 times.
[00:46:06.810]So, in August though, if you went very far east,
[00:46:11.490]you wouldn't be able to get it to burn, would you?
[00:46:14.310]Yes, you can get almost anything to burn
[00:46:16.770]if you have growth from the year previous that went dormant.
[00:46:20.250]So, if you have big bluestem or little,
[00:46:22.140]any of those grasses that are still there
[00:46:24.630]from the year prior,
[00:46:25.800]that's what's carrying the fire.
[00:46:27.570]It can be, we've burned in June,
[00:46:29.670]we've burned in,
[00:46:31.440]I mean, everything can be green,
[00:46:32.730]but you have to have that grass
[00:46:34.260]from the year prior to carry the fire.
[00:46:36.810]But isn't the Osage double stocked?
[00:46:39.090]I mean, it wouldn't be any carryover, would there?
[00:46:42.060]So it depends on, there's, I mean,
[00:46:43.440]there's tons of ranches in Osage County.
[00:46:48.420]There's a lot of folks that do intensive early stocking
[00:46:52.170]where you graze,
[00:46:53.430]they're only grazing from April through mid-July
[00:46:57.510]and you're right, they double stock,
[00:46:59.400]but they grace for half as long.
[00:47:01.200]So they end up not actually removing more plant material.
[00:47:04.620]And then from July to dormancy that grass regrows
[00:47:08.640]and then they have fuel for the next year.
[00:47:10.410]That's how they do that is like
[00:47:11.520]they have all the regrowth,
[00:47:13.230]actually it's really beneficial for the grasses to do that,
[00:47:17.130]but they're not even grazed in the winter,
[00:47:18.540]those pastures aren't even grazed,
[00:47:19.650]they're only raised for three months of the year,
[00:47:22.230]but they're grazed with a lot of stockers.
[00:47:26.670]I thought they grazed until the 1st of July,
[00:47:29.490]then they brought in two thirds as many cattle,
[00:47:32.040]the 1st of August and double stocked.
[00:47:36.240]No, I mean,
[00:47:37.740]there are some people that will use some of those pastures
[00:47:40.260]as emergency pastures in the winter
[00:47:42.300]if they have a cow calf operation
[00:47:44.070]in addition to having a stocker operation.
[00:47:47.400]But there's a lot of those ranches
[00:47:48.630]that only do stockers, that's only time.
[00:47:50.280]They don't even have full time cowboys
[00:47:51.600]because they're only doing,
[00:47:54.270]they're only doing stuff for three months of the year,
[00:47:57.660]but I mean, it just depends.
[00:47:59.040]There's a lot of variability
[00:48:00.570]in how people use that management,
[00:48:02.190]but, I mean, there might be some folks that do that,
[00:48:05.430]I just don't know them, but.
[00:48:07.489]There are in Kansas.
[00:48:09.050]I'm sorry.
[00:48:09.883]There are in Kansas.
[00:48:10.978]Okay, yeah, we now know that annual burning isn't ideal.
[00:48:17.220]It produces a lot of grass, but burning that much,
[00:48:21.270]always at the same time of the year
[00:48:23.850]isn't ideal for the grasses
[00:48:26.580]and isn't ideal for the system either,
[00:48:28.170]I mean, for the wildlife and the soils and everything.
[00:48:33.900]Thanks, John, for your questions.

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Post-Fire Grazing and Forage Management

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