Cattle Grazing and Conservation: Rangeland Research at the Gudmundsen Sandhills Lab and Barta Brothers Ranch

Mitch Stephenson, Rangeland Management Specialist Author

01/07/2025 Added

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The UNL Gudmundsen Sandhills Lab and Barta Brothers Ranch have provided a valuable working landscape in the Sandhills to conduct rangeland research. This presentation will highlight past and present rangeland research at these locations.

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[00:00:00.720]The following presentation is part of the agronomy and horticulture seminar series
[00:00:05.760]at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:00:07.840]All right, hey, thanks everybody for being here today and thanks for everybody for joining online.
[00:00:15.120]I have the pleasure of introducing our colleague Mitch Stephenson. Mitch is an associate professor
[00:00:22.960]in rangelands and still associate director at the Panhandle Research Station too, right?
[00:00:28.880]So yeah, he was kind enough to come all the way in from Scotts Bluff, which is about a state away.
[00:00:33.360]We couldn't make it farther from him if we tried. Mitch got his master's actually from University
[00:00:40.720]of Nebraska, PhD at New Mexico State before we were able to hijack him and bring him back up to
[00:00:46.080]Nebraska. Mitch I always see all over the state. He travels well, he's a good leader for us in rangelands,
[00:00:52.400]really well known for his extension and research program. So with that Mitch, I'm happy to turn over
[00:00:57.920]for you. Thanks for joining us today. Please everybody help me welcoming Mitch. Thanks.
[00:01:04.560]Yeah thank you for the introduction, Drock, and yeah thanks for the invitation to come and talk
[00:01:12.320]about some of the things that we have going. I was able to to have speak with with Drock
[00:01:17.760]at a meeting this summer. It was it was called the Trust in Beef Tour and they did
[00:01:22.640]events from Oklahoma all the way to North Dakota stopping in each state along the way.
[00:01:27.840]At different ranches we were at Homer Buell's the Shoveled Out Ranch and then that's right
[00:01:32.880]down the road from Barber Brothers and so they'd asked if I could give a little bit of an update
[00:01:36.720]on some of the research that's been happening at some of these research facilities. These
[00:01:41.520]wonderful research facilities that UNL has in the Sandhills and so that's that's kind
[00:01:46.800]of where I'm going to focus the talk. So I'm going to be highlighting a little bit of work
[00:01:49.600]that's been done by a lot of our colleagues here both both past and present and so if
[00:01:57.680]if there are any questions we might have to call them up and get them back in here to answer them
[00:02:02.400]but I'll try to do my best. But the focus of this is going to be on work happening at the
[00:02:07.200]Vaughan Brothers Ranch and the Goodmanson Sandhills Lab we have and if you're not familiar I know many
[00:02:13.760]of you probably are just the importance of the Sandhills not only for our state but but for the
[00:02:19.200]Great Plains region as a whole. It's a very unique landscape especially in terms of its intactness
[00:02:27.520]but also the nature of how it's managed for livestock production offers up a lot of other
[00:02:36.020]ecosystem services wildlife soils other things of that nature water that are that are vitally
[00:02:43.080]important for the Great Plains and Nebraska as well. And so these are the locations of the ranches
[00:02:51.700]and so the Barter Brothers Ranch located in between Brown and Rock County in the eastern Sandhills the
[00:02:57.360]Goodmanson Sandhills lab located in Grant Hooker and Cherry County all come together. Barter Brothers
[00:03:04.160]Ranch is roughly about four hours I believe from Lincoln here it's about four and a half hours from
[00:03:09.200]Scotts Bluff and so they have it's it's nice as we all work together we kind of meet in the middle
[00:03:15.020]there and are able to do a lot of that work. I think Goodmanson is probably closer to about five
[00:03:19.660]five and a half it's about two and a half hours from Scotts Bluff there. And so starting with the
[00:03:27.200]Barbrothers Ranch so the the Barbrothers Ranch was donated by James and Clifford Barta. They were
[00:03:32.700]they were brothers that's that's how it gets its name. They lived there I believe their whole life
[00:03:38.220]and and they'd given the ranch to the university in 1996. And when you look at the agreement really
[00:03:45.500]the ranch was supposed the ranch is proposed to be a property or a model ranch that would
[00:03:51.700]demonstrate proper methods of conservation grazing and improved range management practices.
[00:03:57.040]The property provides the ideal location for a variety of applied ranch unit research on
[00:04:02.180]problems important to the eastern sandhills. And so as a about a little over 5,000 acre ranch
[00:04:08.040]there's a lot of opportunities to to look at things that at somewhat larger scales.
[00:04:13.100]This is an example where you see all these different colors of pastures. This is where
[00:04:18.240]Walt and Jerry started a study in in in the late late 1990s looking at different grazing management
[00:04:25.700]strategies and each of these different colors of pastures. And so the property provides the ideal
[00:04:26.880]of these different pasture groups with a certain type of rotation of grazing and they tracked that
[00:04:32.080]through through about 10 years of data collection. So so long term as well as as well as fairly broad
[00:04:39.500]spatially as well. And I'll talk a little bit about that here in a minute. And so as I was
[00:04:44.900]thinking about this, breaking down what we would have learned at Bar Brothers Ranch over the last
[00:04:50.140]about about two decades, a little bit more, was was really thinking through this understanding Sandhills
[00:04:56.720]plant communities and ecology, testing cattle grazing strategies, and our current direction,
[00:05:03.580]which is a collaborative adaptive management project that Dan and Dan Union, Craig Allen,
[00:05:10.860]Winder Meredith and others, that Walt was also involved in, Walt Schacht was involved in getting
[00:05:15.880]it started, have been doing over the last four years looking at prescribed fire and grazing.
[00:05:21.420]And so, so understanding plant community, one of the, I think the, the,
[00:05:26.560]the important data sets that we've been collecting over the last 24 years now is, is plant production
[00:05:32.540]data sets. And so several of these grazing exclosure cages are scattered throughout the
[00:05:37.980]ranch. And so as we've collected this over the years, we've able to come, I feel a very robust
[00:05:43.500]data set. These data sets are fairly rare across the, across a lot of states. There's, there's
[00:05:50.280]some in North Dakota, there's some in Kansas, there's one in Colorado, but we kind of are able
[00:05:56.400]to leverage a lot of this data in some of these broad scale experiments and studies using plant
[00:06:02.460]biomass data across the regions. And so, but it's also able to help us answer some very localized
[00:06:07.260]questions as well, in terms of the diversity that's on these landscapes. So when we look at
[00:06:12.060]our Sandhills grasslands, these are upland Sandhills grasslands, we're looking at about 41%
[00:06:16.500]C4 warm season grasses, about 29% cool season C3 grasses, and then an intermix of sedges, shrubs
[00:06:24.040]and forbs as well.
[00:06:26.240]We're also able to look at this in terms of this plant production curve where we can model
[00:06:31.520]and predict how much growth that we would have in mid-June when we collect, and then
[00:06:36.780]we also collect in mid-August during our collection period.
[00:06:40.580]So it provides a fairly robust data set, but we can answer a lot of questions as folks
[00:06:44.440]come to us and we think about predicting what our biomass production might be, as well as
[00:06:49.740]legacy effects of multiple years.
[00:06:53.440]And so this is what that 24 years of data looks like.
[00:06:56.080]We've broken it down by year and collected these different functional groups.
[00:07:01.320]We see that there's a lot of variability when we look at our driest year was in 2002.
[00:07:07.000]That was kind of a period where it was 2001 was also dry, so it was a multiple year drought
[00:07:13.500]that we've seen.
[00:07:14.500]We haven't really seen that combination since then, though.
[00:07:17.860]We've seen dry years like 2012, 2006, 2017 was actually when we look at it below that
[00:07:25.920]75% of average, and we haven't seen a really, really strong multiple year, several year
[00:07:32.460]drought, which is kind of interesting, but we've also seen some extremely wet years,
[00:07:38.140]so like in 2019, for example, 2009, both of these years were just extremely wet, and we
[00:07:46.300]saw just a tremendous amount of production.
[00:07:48.580]The other thing that we've started to really key in on are some of these patterns, and
[00:07:52.920]so, you know, in these last years, you look at cool season grasses especially.
[00:07:55.760]We tend to see this pattern of production.
[00:07:59.600]In wet years, they go up, in dry years, they go down, and so there's a cycle in terms of
[00:08:05.000]the production that we're seeing in some of our cool season grasses, and we've seen this
[00:08:09.140]in other ranches, too, that we've been able to kind of model that to look at the predictive
[00:08:14.580]ability of looking at dry years following dry years or years following wet years, and
[00:08:19.180]cool season grasses tend to respond to that as well.
[00:08:22.400]Forbs are another one that we've tracked.
[00:08:25.600]So forbs, in general, after a dry year, we tend to see a flush of forbs, too, which makes
[00:08:31.140]a lot of sense.
[00:08:32.140]And so there are predictive patterns in our biomass that are really neat, and we wouldn't
[00:08:36.920]be able to see that unless we had this really kind of robust multi-year data set that we've
[00:08:41.380]collected since 2001.
[00:08:43.580]And as I kind of mentioned before, a lot of this data has then been used in multiple publications
[00:08:50.140]that have looked at things across the Great Plains and the Sandhills as well.
[00:08:55.440]GrassCast, all this data was used in some of that model validation process, along with
[00:09:01.760]some other long-term data sets across the Great Plains.
[00:09:04.300]We're also able to then take that data and look at some of these ways of predicting.
[00:09:09.920]And so this is an example.
[00:09:12.380]This is what I often share with some of our stakeholders and producers, just because it's
[00:09:16.280]easy for me to get my mind wrapped around.
[00:09:17.900]You know, if you can count the number of times you had at least a tenth of an inch of
[00:09:21.260]precipitation, that's a pretty strong relationship.
[00:09:25.280]That we have in terms of predicting the amount of biomass.
[00:09:28.060]Now, you know, we see that there is quite a bit of variability.
[00:09:31.500]For example, 2024 was well outside of where we would have predicted it would be this year.
[00:09:38.460]And then the interesting, it was interesting because we had a lot of early precipitation.
[00:09:42.800]So early, late April, early May, June.
[00:09:47.200]June was also very, very above average in terms of precipitation.
[00:09:52.080]But then about the mid part of June, it shut.
[00:09:55.120]It shut off.
[00:09:55.700]Like rain, July only had about a quarter of an inch of precipitation.
[00:10:00.180]So it was a really unusual year.
[00:10:02.560]I talked to some of the producers up there, and they were saying they hadn't seen a year like this in a long time,
[00:10:06.640]where we had so much growth early on, and then it really shut off.
[00:10:10.800]And there was, in general, there's been really a reduction in livestock performance because of that.
[00:10:17.460]A lot of that grass really lost its quality.
[00:10:19.600]Even though there was a lot of it, they really weren't gaining as well.
[00:10:23.060]And we saw that in some of our data as well.
[00:10:25.020]So understanding that plant community, understanding how biomass is grown in the Sandhills, I think is critical for helping us better understand some of the questions that our producers are asking and some of the things that they can use to make decisions on their own place.
[00:10:40.500]We've also used the ranches, both Barter Brothers and Goodmanson, in these kind of Sandhills-wide studies where we've gone out on a number of different ranches and looked at how plant communities shift from the west to the east in the Sandhills.
[00:10:55.000]This was a graduate student, Travis Milliken, that did this, along with Saurav Das, who did a lot of this work as well.
[00:11:02.500]But really what we're seeing here is that we can predict or separate out the ranches that are in the western Sandhills, those that are in the middle, which is the orange, and the eastern Sandhills, which is the green, in terms of what plants are the most frequently observed in those areas.
[00:11:19.360]And so in the west, which is the purple circle, we tend to see more blue grama, more sandhills.
[00:11:24.360]More sand drop seed, more prairie sand reed as a whole.
[00:11:27.700]As we get farther into the central and east, we see more Scribner's rosette grass.
[00:11:33.100]We see more western ragweed.
[00:11:35.740]And the main characteristic as we go farther east into the Sandhills is we see more little blue stem.
[00:11:41.300]And so we kind of highlight that in these figures, showing the blue diamonds there shows little blue stem just becomes much more frequently observed in the Sandhills plant community.
[00:11:52.420]Whereas prairie sand reed and sand drop seed especially tend to drop as you go from west to east across the Sandhills.
[00:11:58.880]And then similarly, needle and thread, pretty consistent across the Sandhills.
[00:12:03.200]Also sand blue stem, pretty consistent across the Sandhills in terms of what we're seeing.
[00:12:07.720]So we can look at things at the whole Sandhills level, but I think a lot of stuff at the Marty Brothers Ranch especially is focused on that differences across the topographic position.
[00:12:18.460]There's a lot of topography in the Sandhills.
[00:12:21.320]And so this was a study that Walt did shortly after the ranch was acquired where they went out and they set up a lot of long-term transects.
[00:12:28.460]And so they were looking at differences in north-facing slopes, south-facing slopes, dune tops, and then interdunal swells between the slopes.
[00:12:35.640]And just to highlight, there's a few that really stuck out, things like switchgrass, much more prevalent on the interdune positions than on the slopes.
[00:12:44.180]Things like little bluestem, very rarely was it seen in the interdune positions, but it was very common.
[00:12:51.260]Throughout the slopes. And then other things like bluegrass, Kentucky bluegrass is invaded into some of those sites.
[00:12:58.500]And so bluegrass was very prevalent on the interdunes, but rarely seen on the slopes.
[00:13:03.980]And so we just kind of learned that there's a lot of variability, inherent variability across these landscapes.
[00:13:10.540]Now, the combination of the plants are all there in a lot of these sites, but the combinations tend to shift based on some of these microclimate environments.
[00:13:20.380]And so we took some of this long-term data set and we decided we were going to look at that because we have several of these grazing exclosures spread across the topographic positions.
[00:13:29.200]And so what we were really after is looking at how does growing season precipitation affect that?
[00:13:33.960]Do they all respond the same to growing season precipitation or is that variable depending on what topographic position?
[00:13:39.500]And so it's somewhat intuitive, but as precipitation increases in a year, the inner dunes tend to respond much more positively to more precipitation.
[00:13:49.500]Then our slopes and dunes. And so they are a water inflow site.
[00:13:54.840]Soils there tend to be a little bit a little bit firmer, more organic matter, more nitrogen and phosphorus as well.
[00:14:01.180]Some of our some research has seen and especially early growing season precipitation tends to be the most important.
[00:14:07.220]So spring early spring precipitation really drives an increase in cool season grasses.
[00:14:12.420]And that's what we see in the slope here. And so this becomes important as we as we talk about setting,
[00:14:19.020]appropriate stocking rates. You know, it's a really a diverse landscape.
[00:14:23.820]When we when we look at the differences amongst the lowlands and the uplands,
[00:14:28.060]you're making a lot of decisions and how those tie together in terms of matching the forage supply with demand.
[00:14:34.960]A lot of this research is helping us make better estimates across that that landscape.
[00:14:40.980]So so one of the things when I very first got here was in 2015 was to develop more of a models
[00:14:48.540]in terms of how cattle utilize this landscape. And so so we put GPS collars at Goodman's and Sandhills.
[00:14:54.520]We put them at Bar Brothers Ranch and then we had we had some data from my work in New Mexico and other places.
[00:15:01.520]And so I got with some of the folks that used the IRS in Colorado, David Augustine and others.
[00:15:07.520]And they had this idea of let's pull all this data together.
[00:15:11.520]And E.J. Rainers, folks may remember E.J. as a postdoc here. He pulled together this paper,
[00:15:18.060]which really the goal was to see is how well does topography predict cattle locations?
[00:15:22.060]Now, we always knew that it has an influence, but across different sites, across different areas.
[00:15:27.060]And one of the things that they found, I think, that was somewhat unique to Nebraska,
[00:15:31.060]is we had two very different management strategies on the two ranches that we were at.
[00:15:36.060]We had one that was fairly low stock density, large pasture, and then larger pasture, I guess that's it.
[00:15:43.060]And then one fairly higher stock density,
[00:15:47.580]but smaller pasture size. So more cattle, similar stocking rates, but higher stock density.
[00:15:55.580]And we had several pastures at both sites. These are just two examples.
[00:15:59.580]But one of the things that we came away concluding was that the higher stock density
[00:16:03.580]really affected that distribution across the landscape.
[00:16:07.580]And it tended to be more normal distribution in terms of how they utilize that pasture.
[00:16:14.580]And so a lot of the other ones were fairly low stock density,
[00:16:17.100]we saw very distinct areas where they were grazing and where they were not grazing in that context.
[00:16:24.100]But across the pastures and across all our sites,
[00:16:27.100]really the uplands and open slopes tended to be less utilized compared to the lowlands and flat plains.
[00:16:34.100]The only site that really saw a difference in this was in Florida.
[00:16:38.100]And that was just because the lowlands tended to get more wet, so cattle tended to use uplands a little bit more.
[00:16:46.620]A lot of things that have been done at the ranch over the last 20 years have really revolved around these concepts of grazing management strategies
[00:16:54.620]and really what levers we have to pull.
[00:16:56.620]Things in terms of the intensity of grazing, the timing of grazing, the frequency of grazing, and then the duration of grazing out on the landscape.
[00:17:05.620]These are some figures that show some of the different treatments that we've placed out on the land over the last 20 or so years.
[00:17:16.140]This is really, I think, had some insightful research that's kind of spread across a lot of disciplines.
[00:17:24.020]They did some dung beetle research there.
[00:17:26.140]They've done some soil research.
[00:17:28.180]Martha Mamo has done quite a lot of work in that space there.
[00:17:32.760]Really looking at how these different grazing, whether you go in multiple times or single visits.
[00:17:37.520]And then we've also looked at how does whether we graze it early in the season or late in the season have an influence on some of the plant communities there.
[00:17:45.100]And we've learned a lot of things.
[00:17:46.120]And there's some things we've learned that sometimes it really isn't that big of a difference in terms of how some of these grazing strategies might play into it.
[00:17:54.260]The Sandhills-Buyers Complexity Project is one that I think it's an important project that happened at Bar Brothers that we're still seeing some of the legacy effects of and still tracking some of these legacy effects of what it looks like to destabilize a dune.
[00:18:12.540]It's still fun to talk with producers.
[00:18:16.100]in the area about this project, because I think they thought that Dave and the crew that were out there causing these blowouts to happen, I think they were just like, why would you do that?
[00:18:27.760]This is good rangeland.
[00:18:29.260]Why would you come out here and try to destroy it?
[00:18:31.700]But I think it helped answer some really important questions, both on the geology side, but also on the ecosystem management side.
[00:18:41.820]The first being, when was the Sandhills last actively moving?
[00:18:46.040]And they did that through some dating on some of the sand that they pulled from some of these dunes.
[00:18:50.500]And then also, how long does it take for that Sandhills complex to actually start destabilizing?
[00:18:57.100]And the interesting thing with that is that it took a lot longer than they thought it might.
[00:19:02.520]And the big thing is that roots right underneath the ground tend to hold onto that soil, even after heavy, heavy disturbances.
[00:19:13.980]They use products.
[00:19:15.980]They use pulse disturbances of herbicide, and then they also use some where they would go out with the light disking on some of these areas as well.
[00:19:22.700]But really what they found is it oftentimes took multiple years of heavy disturbance to really start to see that sand hill start to shift away from that grassland.
[00:19:32.020]I think it's an attribute to the importance of that rooting structure underneath to hold that sand and really helps us better understand what destabilizing a dune looks like, but also what recovery might look like on there.
[00:19:44.520]And I really.
[00:19:45.920]Appreciate Dave's comment in this crop watch article, you know, is that that this is what our brothers ranch for and a lot of our research sites are for is for people to take risks and to basically do things they wouldn't do on their own place so that we can answer these fundamental questions to help them better understand their, their, their properties and what they're, they're managing with their cattle grazing.
[00:20:10.400]And so, so that kind of led us into our next.
[00:20:15.400]Our next iteration of what what work is happening now. And we titled this project the collaborative adaptive management project and and and the reason is is is our focus has been in the past to kind of set up these treatments to get stakeholder input we've always been big and getting stakeholder input, but this one was, it was where we asked the stakeholders to play a more active role, where we wanted them to give continuous feedback throughout the project, and, and to really make sure that that
[00:20:45.380]that we were setting up treatments that they wanted us to look at.
[00:20:49.080]So we, we invited a group of stakeholders, they were there, they're, they're heavy on the ranchers, probably about 40 or half are about ranches 40 to 50% of the people on their ranches.
[00:21:01.920]We have some NGOs, we have the Nature Conservancy, Sandhills Task Force, others that are part of it, several, several university research here and then then folks from like the NRCS, the Nebraska Forest Service, Nebraska Game of Parks.
[00:21:15.360]And so what our goal is, is to bring them together at least a couple times a year. We get them out, we show them our treatments that we've done. And we try to do this in a structured format, as what you see here, where we try to identify, define problems, identify objectives, estimate outcomes, talk about trade-offs, decide what treatment or what management we're going to do on the ranch. And then as we implement those, we monitor, evaluate, and then we bring the group together every year to talk about what
[00:21:45.340]are we learning, what do we need to change, what's the next step. And so in the current
[00:21:50.880]structure, we selected a four-year cycle that we were going to look at. And so we're on
[00:21:56.900]year three of that four-year cycle. So many of you might know Dr. Gwenda Meredith in our
[00:22:02.420]department. She's been pivotal in looking at things in these mental models that we've
[00:22:09.960]had as the group met together and trying to pull in uncertainties, trying to pull in X
[00:22:15.320]expectations of where things might go under different management practices. And some of
[00:22:20.720]the things that folks really keyed into as some of the things, either uncertainties or
[00:22:26.840]things that they would really like to know more about. Doing stability was one that was
[00:22:31.140]frequently brought up. Things like biomass production was something that was a concern.
[00:22:37.640]They didn't want to see any biomass production go out of the system. They wanted to see
[00:22:41.120]livestock production continue at a certain scale.
[00:22:45.300]Density of wildlife, heterogeneity was brought up several times, especially by some of our
[00:22:50.140]NGOs that were there. Some of the agency was important. All these things really helped
[00:22:57.920]us think about what do we want to apply in terms of our treatments that are out there.
[00:23:02.760]I love the conversations we had in there. Oftentimes, there were things that were brought
[00:23:10.200]up that were like, I want to do this. Others said, I don't like that idea.
[00:23:15.280]We had to come to some consensus on a few of these things. This is one interaction that I
[00:23:21.220]thought was just really neat because the one participant was saying, maybe you're too nice
[00:23:27.900]in your treatments. Maybe you aren't pushing the system hard enough. I don't want to do this on my
[00:23:33.560]place, essentially, but I want you to do this at the ranch here. That's what we're here for,
[00:23:38.460]is to try to push things a little bit so that people can learn something astounding.
[00:23:45.260]Another participant said, well, that really makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand,
[00:23:50.680]because I want you to do things that I think are more in line with what would be a good
[00:23:59.320]conservative management practice that's out here. This is how I want to tell our people that we
[00:24:05.100]work with or others that this is probably the better way of managing in far as these conservative
[00:24:09.780]nature. That's what I think has been really valuable. When we started this, and I'll get to
[00:24:15.240]where we go through what we're doing, but when we started this, Dan and I were just talking about
[00:24:20.400]this this morning. There was some pushback. There was calls from some of our stakeholders being like,
[00:24:25.380]oh, no. I don't know about this idea of doing this. Why don't we do something different?
[00:24:30.760]We had to go back. We decided that we needed to look at these things. This is where we're going
[00:24:37.320]to go. I think it was a lot of learning, not just from our stakeholders that were involved,
[00:24:43.160]but also from us as researchers.
[00:24:45.220]I think that's been a lot of fun and challenging on some aspects too, but a lot of things that we
[00:24:51.140]come together and learn as a team. That's been, I think, a really beneficial thing for me in this
[00:24:58.020]process. I hope it has been for the stakeholders too and what we've learned. We walked away with
[00:25:03.100]identified objectives through several meetings that started in 2021. One of the things that
[00:25:08.240]they said needs to happen at the Barber's Ranch, we need to address the woody encroachment.
[00:25:12.040]There's a lot of trees on this ranch. I'll show it.
[00:25:15.200]I'll be right here in a minute to highlight that. But the Barber's were prolific windrow
[00:25:19.980]planters. Several of their pastures were almost entirely circled, miles of four-row eastern
[00:25:26.860]red cedar. And Duroc has made a career out of showing us what that can do to our rangelands
[00:25:33.460]now. But at the time, they were planting a lot of those. It was maybe more than less
[00:25:40.240]clear that there might be some risk there. So we were seeing quite a lot of encroachment
[00:25:45.180]out into our pastures that we've dealt with since the university has owned the ranch.
[00:25:50.340]So that was number one thing that we had talked about. The next was to increase heterogeneity
[00:25:54.880]across the landscape. So they wanted to have a better understanding of what that inherent
[00:25:59.620]heterogeneity is on the landscape, but also what the disturbance-driven, whether it was
[00:26:04.780]fire, grazing, or other management, to increase heterogeneity or visualize that across the
[00:26:09.480]landscape. And lastly, the goal was we want to keep this as a ranch. We
[00:26:15.160]want to see that livestock production is being maintained or improved, and we want to make
[00:26:20.400]sure that that's always in the equation, because we want to make sure that we're moving that
[00:26:24.400]direction for our producers as well. And the producers were heavy on that, too. And so
[00:26:29.320]with these three objectives in place, we said that the patch-burn grazing-type management
[00:26:38.100]was probably going to be one of our best opportunities to address all these different things. Now,
[00:26:45.140]particularly new, there's been a lot of research in different places about this, especially
[00:26:51.180]in Oklahoma and Kansas, where this is a common management practice where you burn a portion
[00:26:57.460]of the landscape. In this scenario, it would be like 30% of the landscape cattle are attracted
[00:27:03.360]to that area. And then over time, it sets back the grasses. You see more forbs, more heterogeneity.
[00:27:08.780]And then over time, though, those grasses again come back into the area. And so this has moved around
[00:27:15.120]the landscape in a way, for one, control woody encroachment, two, increase heterogeneity,
[00:27:20.520]and then three, the idea would be, does it maintain or improve livestock production?
[00:27:27.060]And so we presented this to the group and said, hey, this is probably a management that can meet
[00:27:31.720]our objectives. And it was mixed reviews, I would say. Like I said, before we did the first fire,
[00:27:39.260]the neighbor called me and kept asking me if we really want to do this, if we really want to do this
[00:27:45.100]is this really what you want to do? And I said, I think we got to try it. And he said, but, you know,
[00:27:53.200]the first fire we had out there was in 2022. There hadn't been a fire on the Barber's Ranch
[00:27:58.300]prescribed fire since the mid-2000s. They did a small area there. And so it was somewhat a new
[00:28:07.060]direction for research at the ranch and one that we very much needed to
[00:28:11.100]address some of the Eastern Red Cedar encroachment that's there.
[00:28:15.080]Now, the Nature Conservancy, Chad Blato, and the group up there were pivotal in this.
[00:28:22.120]We went and talked with them and they've given us so much help in making sure that we can do this
[00:28:27.800]and making sure that fires can get conducted safely. There was a lot of capacity that we needed
[00:28:32.720]to build at Barter Brothers Ranch in terms of just having the right equipment out there, having the
[00:28:37.100]right expertise, and getting everything we needed to conduct a fire safely and understand what
[00:28:45.060]the management practices are involved in that. And I think we built a lot of capacity up there.
[00:28:49.820]Jacob Harvey is our ranch manager up there now, is doing a phenomenal job, as well as Ryan Benjamin
[00:28:55.800]and Bethany Johnson are extension educators in that area. They're doing a lot in this space up
[00:29:00.060]there. And so it's been really fun to be able to work with all them up there. And so our goal of
[00:29:04.940]this is that we would burn a quarter of this area. So we would move that around. So 25% of the area
[00:29:11.920]would be burned each year, and then cattle would have access to the area. And so we would have
[00:29:15.040]access to the whole area, and we would move that around over the years. And so this is where we're
[00:29:21.300]at now. So we have, this is the ranch, and this is our burn area here. It's about 600 acres
[00:29:29.760]that we were managing. So burns are about 140 to 150 acres each year. And then we're comparing it
[00:29:37.140]to a system that's our standard for pasture deferred that we've always done up there. And
[00:29:45.020]that's been our standard. So they said, we want you to compare it to our standard. And so
[00:29:49.420]we went with that. So we're in year three of this study. There's been some challenges with
[00:29:55.320]fire bans and drought that led to fire bans. So we didn't burn until really late in May,
[00:30:01.440]which was kind of interesting. But this last year, I think, was where it kind of all came
[00:30:06.700]together. And we probably had the best burn we've had in terms of we hit it at the right time. And
[00:30:11.340]it was kind of where we wanted it to be. And this last year,
[00:30:15.000]was also the pasture that had the most cedar encroachment in it as well.
[00:30:19.160]well and so so uh kind of jumping in a little bit to results here but this is uh this is uh this this
[00:30:26.920]this pasture about 140 acres had about 1600 trees and we know that because hannah went out and
[00:30:33.640]counted all of them this last summer and and uh to get this data and so really appreciate the work
[00:30:38.900]that she did on this but um you know when we put this fire through you know we looked at a lot and
[00:30:43.900]you could see from the we looked out and you saw a lot of trees like this right after the burn now
[00:30:47.920]these are these are fairly you know five foot tall uh eastern red cedar trees and you know you
[00:30:52.480]could see those they're very very visible across the landscape and we were a little bit disappointed
[00:30:57.560]even after we'd go back here like we missed a lot of trees out here as we burned this uh but
[00:31:03.060]one of the interesting and it's it's very you know it's very predictable you know as the trees
[00:31:07.760]got bigger uh our our success and kill got much less you know if they're over three feet we only
[00:31:13.600]had about a little over twenty percent of those trees that that had mortality to them
[00:31:17.620]um and so it's a little bit disappointing there but what we did what we did see though is that
[00:31:21.900]a lot of these trees that less than one foot though we got that we had a pretty high mortality
[00:31:26.800]on you know we're up in the high 80 percent mortality on those small trees and so you know
[00:31:31.660]it would take the right conditions i think to really get some of these trees burned a lot
[00:31:36.620]more forward than what we had maybe and uh in the right burn or much less in terms of relative
[00:31:41.360]humidity to get those burned but but in the in the context of our management that will reduce
[00:31:47.320]the number of trees that we're going to have to go back to uh and mulch in in uh in let's say five
[00:31:52.780]or ten years because we took out a lot of these really small ones which were which were much more
[00:31:57.240]prevalent in the understory and be hard to see and so uh so we had a great discussion here last
[00:32:03.660]week about that and you know what other people had seen what what are their thoughts on that
[00:32:08.240]and and how to how how burning fits into that situation one of the big questions that were
[00:32:13.480]was always asked from the get-go was if i burn in the summer how's
[00:32:17.020]that affecting my plant production that summer you know the current year plant production
[00:32:21.900]and uh so we've tracked that over the years uh you know this is this is this is a aggregate
[00:32:26.100]of three years of data compared to our long-term data set that's not burned up there and really
[00:32:32.520]it's it's it's phenomenal how closely they came out in terms of looking at that difference
[00:32:37.340]of current year so basically we didn't see any difference in terms of the amount of biomass
[00:32:41.500]that's out there uh in the current year um and and so uh so it's been it's been really
[00:32:46.720]fun to kind of talk about that and and i think some folks have have changed their paradigms
[00:32:51.840]a little bit in terms of that how that fire might affect that plant community uh we've
[00:32:57.060]tracked cattle uh we graze this with annually uh with with uh yearling spade heifers and
[00:33:02.420]so we have gps collars on them and as you can see they have access to this whole area
[00:33:07.140]here uh this is that biocomplexity project it's fenced out in the middle we had a couple
[00:33:11.360]of cattle uh get out here this last summer for a few days into there but uh generally
[00:33:16.420]what we've seen it's followed the what we expected is that there's higher use on that
[00:33:21.240]burn patch compared to the areas that haven't been burned across the landscape and so at
[00:33:27.060]31 over the whole growing season it was about 32 percent of the time those cattle spent
[00:33:31.900]in there and then and then as we look at the each individual burn patch which i've separated
[00:33:36.760]out as pastures and so n8 was where we burned this last year uh you can see that that that
[00:33:42.360]percent of the time that those those heifers spent in that really in june and july and
[00:33:46.120]july uh was was was where they spent a good majority of their time however by by august
[00:33:52.560]uh that really dropped down and then on into september they were making decisions to graze
[00:33:58.020]elsewhere and so it loses that attraction fairly early in the growing season or about mid-growing
[00:34:03.660]season is what i would say this is some of the selection ratios that we put together on that and
[00:34:08.980]this is preliminary data but but really looking at that in june you know the selection ratio is
[00:34:15.820]more in july it's about 1.4 times more that they're grazing on that burn patch
[00:34:20.580]but by august there's really no difference in their selection of that
[00:34:24.480]so we're also looking at utilization in that burn patch and and and so so the way we're doing this
[00:34:32.920]is we collect uh large biomass samples inside cages that we have out there we also collect
[00:34:37.700]them outside of the cages as well and so you know really the the big the big takeaway here i think
[00:34:43.900]is is that by august
[00:34:45.520]of a year that utilization on warm season grasses tends to be uh you know either either at or above
[00:34:52.760]that 50 percent level and oftentimes the rule of thumb is is to leave 50 percent of that biomass
[00:34:57.320]out there for the plant and so so they are getting in there and grazing those warm season grasses
[00:35:02.900]pretty heavily the cool season grasses tend to around that 20 to 30 percent utilization so even
[00:35:08.740]though we're burning they're not hitting the cool season that's probably because we're turning out
[00:35:12.220]later in the year we don't turn out till uh about
[00:35:15.220]uh the about mid to late may and so the cool season grasses have got to jump on them and
[00:35:20.180]that's probably why we're seeing uh the the lower amounts of utilization on those cool season grasses
[00:35:25.140]and this is kind of what we've seen a lot of and and so if you know the sand deals as i mentioned
[00:35:32.500]before uh little blue stem is is is is kind of a one of the dominant species that we see out there
[00:35:38.820]across the landscape and we get a lot of these clumps a lot of standing dead within that little
[00:35:43.300]blue stem plant and
[00:35:44.920]so as we've gone out and done these analysis we see a lot of these burned areas have little blue
[00:35:49.320]stem like this and uh and has been doing some work in that space too and showing that uh a high
[00:35:56.120]percentage of those little blue stem plants are grazed when we burn it if it hadn't been burned
[00:36:01.160]even if it was burned last year that percentage goes way down in terms of the the number of those
[00:36:07.000]plants have been grazed so in a system like this uh some of these little blue stem plants
[00:36:12.040]aside from around the outside of them
[00:36:14.620]may not have been grazed much at all over uh over over several years in this context
[00:36:20.080]so so heifer performance uh we've tracked every year we look at it uh in the so we we weigh them
[00:36:28.020]when they go out in mid-may we weigh them again in mid-july and then we weigh them again in in
[00:36:32.760]in mid-september and uh this is the average daily gain uh that we've been seeing on those and uh
[00:36:39.000]you know we've seen a little bit of variation depending on year but overall uh you know uh that
[00:36:44.320]uh that two pounds early give or take what 1.75 to 2.2 pounds is what we've seen uh early the
[00:36:51.120]second one 1.1 to 1.1 and a half roughly and then over the whole we see about 0.4 pounds per day
[00:36:58.300]gain difference on that burn graze herd as we do the deferred rotation now there's two things that
[00:37:04.860]are happening with that though uh first is that it's likely they're getting more quality and more
[00:37:10.540]more grazing out of that burn patch but it's also that the the
[00:37:14.020]stock density is about uh about a quarter of what it is on that deferred rotation and so that plays
[00:37:20.800]into it a lot too uh just because they have more access more selection that they can go to
[00:37:26.480]uh in this season long uh deferred rotation type pasture so there's a couple things at play there
[00:37:32.500]but i think we're learning more and more about what that looks like uh with the current prices
[00:37:37.160]of cattle this is equated to anywhere between about 75 and 120 dollars per
[00:37:43.720]head per year to manage them in the burn graze as opposed to the deferred rotation when they're at
[00:37:49.420]the settle barn uh so so pretty substantial differences in terms of uh some of the gain
[00:37:54.420]on some of these different animals um we've also done done some work one of the big things was
[00:38:00.880]was what does erosion look like um right and so several of these pastures we put erosion pins out
[00:38:07.040]uh because because the producers were really concerned about well if you burn it in the
[00:38:13.420]look like moving forward uh nolan side did some work uh he found that there was it was less than
[00:38:19.560]0.27 centimeter difference between burned and unburned rangelands now there were some areas
[00:38:23.960]that that blew and there were some areas that deposited uh but over over the whole landscape
[00:38:29.700]uh really the the it was negligible the amount of erosion that happened uh after you know in a burned
[00:38:36.180]area also did several burn uh bird counts uh that we do we saw a few differences we're still kind of
[00:38:43.120]some of those in terms of what what birds we see uh in in the different areas horned larks was one
[00:38:48.460]of them that seemed to just like to be on the the burned uh burned patches much more as one that
[00:38:54.440]that stood out um dan and others are doing some work in uh in remote sensing uh i think we've
[00:39:02.760]got a just a phenomenal data set of the area now uh that really starting to pull out some of this
[00:39:08.880]variability and vegetation based on topography some of that heterogeneity
[00:39:12.820]some of that biodiversity i think that we can start picking out with remote sensing
[00:39:16.340]as well as some of the things like the burn uh you can see it becomes pretty clear in some of
[00:39:21.360]these images how that how that shakes out uh when when burn happens like temperature of the burn
[00:39:26.300]patch in n5 there uh it was was it was was it one one that really showed up more in that space
[00:39:32.880]and so so eastern as i kind of pointed out eastern red cedar encroachment's really been
[00:39:39.800]uh taken off at the ranch uh these are
[00:39:42.520]these are all the you see the bars this is about 200 and 400 yards spread away from all the
[00:39:48.420]tree seed sources that are at the ranch uh so you can see there's some really long wind breaks that
[00:39:54.480]are happening there but there's also several of these little pockets of cedars and they just went
[00:39:59.380]out and put in like maybe a tenth of an acre uh there was a blowout or something you know
[00:40:04.200]disturbance there and so they put those in and so jacob harvey the ranch manager is uh is also
[00:40:09.920]working on his phd and one
[00:40:12.220]of the things uh uh that that we're starting to look at uh with the mcintyre stennis funded
[00:40:17.040]project is what does it look like if we take some of these out and so in terms of their recovery
[00:40:21.880]uh and so so he had a crew out there mulching a little about a month ago i guess is when it was
[00:40:28.060]um and and several of these little little red dots have have since gone away and we're going
[00:40:34.180]to follow those through to see what recovery looks like is one of his projects that he's
[00:40:38.880]going to be working on and so i've been a lot of work he's he's
[00:40:41.920]he's he's lined up a lot of a lot of folks to manage these mechanically we're doing the
[00:40:46.660]prescribed fire and so we're just going to keep working at that systematically across the ranch
[00:40:51.620]and then we'll probably have to start start again as we get through them because just there's just
[00:40:56.660]such a tremendous seed source out there there's quite a lot of other other students that have been
[00:41:04.580]there this is a estimate of accounts at least 26 master students four phd students have been
[00:41:11.620]involved in research at the ranch and and numerous interns have spent their summer out there
[00:41:16.260]and and so I think that's that's been a motivation and a mission of the ranch is to make sure that we
[00:41:22.880]are we are educating students and as we as we can as we conduct that research across the ranch
[00:41:29.380]so I just have a few minutes left so I'm going to go through this one really real quick but
[00:41:35.140]the good miss the sandhills labs another location where we've been doing some research this is this
[00:41:41.320]is a little bit bigger operation has both sub-irrigated sandhills meadows and upland
[00:41:47.180]sandhills range that is there a lot of animal science really foundational animal science
[00:41:51.800]cattle production research has come out of there looking at timing of calving as well as nutrition
[00:41:57.040]but also a number of projects looking at rangelands especially sub-irrigated meadows
[00:42:03.400]and so sub-irrigated meadows account for about seven percent of the total area but
[00:42:07.660]production wise they bring a lot of they bring about two to three
[00:42:11.020]times more production as well as a lot of heterogeneity across the landscape important
[00:42:16.240]wetlands a lot of those things and so a lot of historic research has been done looking at
[00:42:20.280]either haying grazing you know everything from cattle production to how that affects the landscape
[00:42:26.400]as well one of the projects that we've really started been pushing is is this idea of options
[00:42:33.380]for grazing management and pal reese who was my predecessor there did some work on this was a
[00:42:40.720]field day where they talked about electric fence and how important electric fence could be in a
[00:42:46.300]system and how how to set up a system like that and and that was in 1989 we we kind of started
[00:42:53.780]looking at i think what's what's kind of the newest option for managing where cattle grazing
[00:42:58.260]and that's these virtual fences that companies are starting to produce now and we're looking at
[00:43:04.500]how effective those can be this was this was dean anderson who did a lot of early research
[00:43:10.420]i love how he titled these the proto platform appears clumsy but was remarkably robust and
[00:43:17.200]then he said they basically worked is what he said and now we've got it to where it's they're
[00:43:22.120]much more condensed the technology's caught up the cost is caught up and and these are these are
[00:43:28.100]becoming commercially available there's four companies now in the united states that are
[00:43:32.420]selling these options and i'll just i'll show this one here this is an example of us keeping cattle
[00:43:40.120]riparian area which it did very well we were able to to show that the white line is the audio cue
[00:43:47.580]the red is the the the where they receive an electric cue and but you know it's still
[00:43:55.040]technology still has some of its challenges and so so one of the one of the first questions that
[00:44:01.760]we had been getting is is how much stress does this cause an animal if you have a if you're
[00:44:05.660]always worried about getting shocked right it might cause a little bit of stress and so we
[00:44:09.820]we put a heart rate markers on these animals to measure acute stress levels caitlin dosler
[00:44:14.860]did did a lot of this work and um and and so what we did is we we tracked them and then we
[00:44:20.540]were able to time up their heart rate with when they received an audio cue or an electric cue
[00:44:24.740]as you can see here's some examples of a cow if they stay within the electric cueing zone
[00:44:30.360]they might get shocked more than once uh then that's what happened to this animal and it's
[00:44:35.000]it had an elevated heart rate over a baseline that we established for each cow
[00:44:39.520]for about about four minutes uh the most of them ended up being more like this about 30 to 60
[00:44:46.240]seconds their heart rates would elevate once they leave that the stressor their heart rate goes back
[00:44:51.160]down you know we concluded that in general if you look at over a 30 minute period give or take that
[00:44:56.860]there really wasn't any added stress uh to the animal uh compared uh to to not having that that
[00:45:03.680]virtual fence on the biggest stress this is this is over several hours here as you can see the
[00:45:09.220]biggest stress for that animal by their heart rate would have been when that cow was in the
[00:45:13.360]chute actually getting the collar on it spiked during that time the other times it was quite
[00:45:17.980]variable but you can start picking up things like when the cow was turned out to pasture and also
[00:45:21.760]when that cow was resting based on their heart rate that's there so that's been kind of some
[00:45:25.360]fun data set um in in animal science uh precision specialist livestock specials over there also doing
[00:45:33.400]some work together we're looking at how effective is it keeping her groups separated so can you go
[00:45:38.920]out there and basically say I want to separate these herd groups out and so and keep them
[00:45:43.420]separated on different sides of the pasture actually been doing quite well in that regards
[00:45:48.100]uh very effective with that um it seems um so I'm just gonna uh jump a little bit to some of
[00:45:57.340]the things that that uh this is really where we're hoping to go more and more with this uh we have
[00:46:02.620]we have excellent remote sensing technology from a lot of just I think phenomenal uh uh research
[00:46:08.620]and technology that's been coming out that's allowed us to look across the landscape the the
[00:46:13.640]collars and other sensors are becoming cheap enough now that we can put them on a lot more
[00:46:17.400]cattle even producers can start putting them on cattle is to start thinking about how we how we
[00:46:22.060]link these all together in terms of asking questions and managing cattle in a way that
[00:46:26.800]that can be most meaningful for specific objectives uh across the landscape um you know this is this
[00:46:33.180]is some work that we've been doing over several years at the Goodmanson looking at uh heavily
[00:46:38.320]grazed and lightly grazed areas in a continuously grazed pasture there and so this is multiple years
[00:46:43.180]of GPS we've seen shifts in plant community as we kind of would expect more more of like Western
[00:46:49.660]Ragley other Forbes uh in in some of the heavily grazed areas the the dark purple uh some of these
[00:46:55.840]other uh taller growing vegetation in some of the the lightly grazed areas and uh tying it back to
[00:47:02.800]I think some of the early work like John Weaver was doing some of this stuff here in Lincoln uh
[00:47:08.020]looking at pastures that that he would go out and have students dig out little blue stem plants in
[00:47:13.480]heavily grazed areas and then also lightly grazed area the pastures they'd come I'd go them out for
[00:47:18.420]I think this was like six or eight weeks and then wash them all off and take pictures of the roots
[00:47:22.680]like this and I think it's it's really neat to be able to see these kind of connect to each other
[00:47:27.340]and how uh grazing can have an influence on the landscape and cause some of that heterogeneity
[00:47:32.300]based on its distance to water or uh places where cattle really like to use in there
[00:47:37.720]um so moving forward uh this is my last slide uh you know just just received this this funding
[00:47:44.800]this is Galen Erickson that led this project uh it's known as adapt or uh advancing development
[00:47:51.100]of assessment practices and tools uh in climate smart beef uh so so this was a grand challenge
[00:47:58.080]grant here at the university and then the goal of this uh several partners uh several
[00:48:03.020]several uh uh on the team is to get a better understanding
[00:48:07.420]of what greenhouse gas commissions look like for cattle in the sandhills so eddy covariance
[00:48:13.840]towers other tools remote sensing is is heavy in this and so we're working to get those
[00:48:20.280]set up across the ranches so that we can come and have good estimates of what this looks
[00:48:25.960]like the the advisory board for the beef innovation hub i think really pushed for this they want
[00:48:32.500]they said the university is a place that can get us this data and we need this data to
[00:48:37.120]understand the impact of beef on our environment and so really excited to see what this looks
[00:48:41.620]like moving forward as we tie more of this the what we've known on these ranches into
[00:48:47.460]some of this new technology or new understanding of cattle grazing
[00:48:53.120]and so a lot of people involved in all these projects great great support from different
[00:48:59.660]different grants as well and with that i'll open up to any questions
[00:49:04.520]really good seminar mitch i appreciated it um when i saw the slide there on the
[00:49:24.020]adaptive management all the different things that uh guinness had put together there are
[00:49:29.760]different ideas there one thing that i saw seemed to be missing there and i was
[00:49:34.420]wondering if you could talk a little bit about that one thing that i saw seemed to be missing
[00:49:34.500]if it had been discussed by very many people was labor i didn't see labor anywhere in there and
[00:49:42.480]i guess in my experience including on my own place labor becomes oftentimes one of the biggest
[00:49:51.520]factors that influence what's going to be done in various situations so
[00:49:56.780]was there any discussion regarding that with all these various uh situations yeah um it's come up
[00:50:04.480]and and you know we the it's come up at like the beef innovation hub meetings quite a lot i mean
[00:50:11.460]that's oftentimes one of the we actually i think that this last time they had like a section that
[00:50:16.640]was talking about that you know how do we train the next how do we find folks that are working in
[00:50:21.700]this these sectors um at the ranch it didn't it came up but it didn't probably come up as much
[00:50:27.980]mainly because we asked them to to think of three three things that we can address right labor is
[00:50:34.460]if we can fully address that challenge at the at the basis of the ranch but very much when we
[00:50:40.160]started this jacob hadn't started at the ranch uh you know and and uh and and dan and i had spent a
[00:50:46.260]lot of time talking about you know like man we got a lot of stuff that we got to get done up there
[00:50:50.640]um you know i drove up to mow the fire line and uh i found the pto shaft had been bent on the
[00:50:57.360]mower you know and so i'm running to town back and forth getting the tractors you're running
[00:51:01.060]you know and then they were clay kachera has been they've been just wonderful
[00:51:04.440]partners at the ranch for years uh that they they leased the grass there and uh but uh but yeah i
[00:51:11.280]mean i think it's come up a lot it's just we haven't looked at it vocally because it's not
[00:51:17.020]something that we could probably address in terms of research there that was very nice i have a list
[00:51:29.020]of four questions and vogel over here it's got four or five so i've got the microphone right
[00:51:34.420]now but in your burning studies what are you losing in terms of nutrients when when you burn
[00:51:42.840]when you burn what what what are you losing that's that's a good question uh i don't think i can give
[00:51:50.860]you the answer to that right now okay as you go forward get a hold of some burning sticks
[00:51:58.020]there are temperature sticks and you can get the temperature of the fire to see if you're losing
[00:52:04.400]you're probably not losing that but you're you're losing nitrogen
[00:52:07.980]yeah i i guess i will say though we we have been taking soil samples throughout and so you know
[00:52:15.740]we haven't seen too much difference in terms of the soil samples between burned and unburned
[00:52:21.400]but we are trying to to to at least at least try to to have some metric of that i guess
[00:52:27.300]in general how much of the forage up there is processed through the cows the animals versus
[00:52:34.380]mowed and baled and this sort of thing yeah so so there's they're only about at the barbara
[00:52:40.780]ranch in particular only probably five percent of the ranch is sub-irrigated meadow that they hay
[00:52:45.720]and so so most of it is is grazed historically we've stocked it at about a 25 to 25 percent
[00:52:54.160]harvest efficiency that's a very easy to hear but that's that's probably what we're looking
[00:52:59.620]at in terms of uh what's going through those animals are these operations self
[00:53:04.360]supporting meaning that the the rotation of animals and feeding and this sort of thing
[00:53:12.100]do they support your research or do you have to uh solicit other funds so so we we do need to
[00:53:20.280]have grant funding but there is support at the ranch and so so for example like like like jacob
[00:53:25.680]harvey who's the ranch manager he's he's funded through the ranch uh there's also a foundation
[00:53:30.780]account at the ranch that helps with some of that as well uh if
[00:53:34.340]infrastructure those types of things and finally coming in today i heard on the radio
[00:53:39.960]that um our president is now going to charge a methane fee for livestock
[00:53:47.700]any work on on what's being lost well that's what we hope to find out uh right so that's
[00:53:56.040]with this with this new uh new study that we're putting up there
[00:53:59.040]the idea is is that we should be able to look at at the whole system when cattle are on
[00:54:04.320]that pasture when they're not on that pasture what's that look like in terms of fluxes of
[00:54:09.300]carbon methane and and nitrous oxide at multiple sites and multiple different environments up there
[00:54:15.120]we're also doing some work uh we just barely unloaded it at the goodman's and sandhills lab
[00:54:20.620]but it's a a feeder that we can put out in a pasture that that will basically cattle come
[00:54:26.540]into it to to to have a treat a supplement and uh it'll measure methane and carbon and nitrous oxide
[00:54:34.300]from that animal in a pasture situation so we're hoping to get better at answering those questions
[00:54:39.940]there's been other places that have that have that data and so we're hoping to make sure that
[00:54:43.760]we know what those numbers look like for the sandhills or other nebraska rangelands yeah
[00:54:48.160]i'll make a comment about the methane while you have this grant
[00:54:53.320]i would advise you to also measure methane production by buffalo because i think the
[00:54:58.980]only thing that needs to be the difference is the difference between what buffalo used to produce
[00:55:04.280]before settlement and what livestock are producing now and that would be the only fair comparison we
[00:55:09.240]make so okay one question uh and i used to okay a lot of the economics in the sandhills
[00:55:20.220]always seem to be based on an animal basis for example you gave some profitability on a per
[00:55:26.660]animal basis but the biggest expense is land so i are you going to do some of your economic
[00:55:34.260]economics on a per acre basis on burning versus no burning yeah okay yeah yeah we haven't quite
[00:55:40.420]gone there yet we have one more year so this was just this was uh uh the third year and so
[00:55:44.780]yeah that's our that's our goal we've been we're trying to keep uh pretty good records of what that
[00:55:49.940]economics looks like in terms of cost to burn if we have to go back in the pastures and mulch
[00:55:54.640]if we didn't get all the trees that adds into it um and so we still have a lot of metrics that
[00:56:00.600]need to go into that but you're absolutely right having a good estimate of what that
[00:56:04.240]looks like on a per acre basis is important yeah that's good yeah you're looking at
[00:56:10.460]and then what's i'd like to know your definition of heterogeneity
[00:56:15.300]oh man uh hold on i actually have a slide i think it's it's it's down the road but
[00:56:22.000]but no it's you know i think it's i think it's you know looking at it in terms of uh
[00:56:27.240]differences amongst uh plant communities but whether that be topography based uh you know
[00:56:34.220]uh soil based uh or if it's disturbance driven uh so really i i guess i don't have a great answer
[00:56:43.120]you kind of caught me off guard with that but i can get you one but uh but i i think it's more
[00:56:48.720]more than anything i look at it as as the variability across the landscape right whether
[00:56:52.600]that be structure whether that be species composition uh and whether that be something
[00:56:57.320]that's established in the topography or the edaphic uh geology of the region uh or whether it's that
[00:57:04.200]that's what grazing or fire or plowing or any other thing happens across the landscape and so
[00:57:09.120]also scales right scales are important when you start thinking about that
[00:57:12.960]to me it's kind of like a term like diversity it's defense who's using the term that's fair
[00:57:18.420]that's very fair yeah just one last thing is all uh wood lines that one of your shelter belts and
[00:57:26.220]are you just going to flat out take those out i don't think so uh no i i you know and that's
[00:57:34.180]we were talking about this this morning is is uh it's it's people like their shelter belts right
[00:57:39.980]if you've ever calved in the sand hills on a cold march night that shelter belt is sure nice right
[00:57:46.060]and and and and and for livestock production probably critical that you have those right and
[00:57:51.480]so um you said no our plan is not to take them out our plan is to think kind of strategically
[00:57:56.960]as to which ones do we need in here and which ones are probably not really providing much value
[00:58:04.160]and and and are causing more risk into the landscape than we what we need we don't we
[00:58:09.320]don't need some of those seed sources and then some of them we've actually uh i think walt and
[00:58:13.480]jerry did this maybe 10 years ago uh but they went down the the tree rows and tried to identify all
[00:58:19.520]the females and just go in and knock out all the females within that so it creates a few holes but
[00:58:24.980]for the most part you have four rows you typically can can have a pretty good pretty good tree row
[00:58:30.240]there but no like that's the barter builders legacy there uh
[00:58:34.140]you know they were you know they that was that was something that they were just passionate about
[00:58:38.640]and so i we would i don't think we would ever take out all the tree rows there uh but but what
[00:58:44.140]we hope to do is is is get better at learning you know what management of tree rows might look like
[00:58:49.400]um how how does that affect some of the the distribution of where those cedars encroach from
[00:58:55.680]and um and and provide some insight of of if you do have some tree rows that
[00:59:01.480]maybe you're causing you more grief than or
[00:59:04.120]giving you benefit in terms of cedar encroachment what does it look like to take those out and
[00:59:09.440]recovery and of those of those sites that have a lot of those um they had a uh uh excavator come
[00:59:17.240]out that had a grinder and it was pretty fascinating how quickly it could work through
[00:59:21.580]one of those stands and just pull trees they're just all the way to the ground freeze um in that
[00:59:27.080]context so so we got time for one more question i think do we have anybody on
[00:59:34.100]line that's itching okay yeah tomah what do we have on there
[00:59:38.460]making me do it great
[00:59:44.640]uh okay so one question on here was mitch are you suggesting that clever patch burning
[00:59:56.120]can quote lure cattle to new pasture growth and eliminate need for cross fencing chuck uh yeah i
[01:00:04.080]that's the concept of the patch burn grazing is instead of uh instead of using fencing to
[01:00:10.020]move cattle around you're using this uh you're using an attracting uh nature of the grassland
[01:00:15.600]there to to pull them into an area if they're on that area they're not grazing the other areas so
[01:00:21.560]so yeah that's that's kind of the concept of using fire as a tool
[01:00:25.620]all right great hey please everybody uh let's give another round of applause for mitch
[01:00:34.060]Thank you.
[01:00:37.120]you

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Cattle Grazing and Conservation: Rangeland Research at the Gudmundsen Sandhills Lab and Barta Brothers Ranch

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