Range Recover: Raising grass from the ashes

The 22,000-acre East Fork Fire burned range land for many Bear Paw Mountain ranchers and threatened that of many more, but burned areas in the longterm could be beneficial to the range land and some relief may be available for ranchers in the short term, said a range researcher at Montana State University.

Although the fire brought immediate pasture devastation and financial hardships, the outcomes for range lands can be good if affected producers can find a way to keep the stress off burned areas until they recover, Clayton Marlow, professor of range sciences at MSU, said.

Right now, landowners can get an idea of the damage to their pasture and start formulating a recovery plan based on that assessment, starting by looking at the ash left by the fire because this indicates the temperature and duration of the fire.

“Any place you have gray and white ash it was hot,” Marlow said, but “black ash? OK. No problem.”

The black ash indicates the fire went through with some degree of speed, and fall moisture will likely bring on some green sprouts, he said.

Ted Crowley, who owns the Crowley-Young Ranch with his wife Barb in the Clear Creek Drainage, said that after the one and eight-tenths inches of rain they received Sept. 14-16, he has already found green sprouts of new grass in some of the 8,500 acres that burned on his place. This growth has come despite the severe drought conditions which hit even before the wildfire took about 45 percent of his pasture — almost all of his fall and winter pasture, which he said hadn’t been grazed much yet.

The white and gray ash in an area, though, means extensive damage was done to the native plants, Marlow said.

These are likely areas with thick brush, close-growing trees, and buildup of grassy bunches of what Marlow calls litter, dried plant matter that was either blown in or grew and died there in clumping grasses.

“The more severe the area has burned the more weeds you’re going to get,” he added.

Aside from any weeds that might have been growing there already, producers are likely to see cheat grass, mustard, some brome or maybe yellow-blossom sweet clover. Though these severely burned areas may need to be reseeded, Marlow said, he cautioned against disturbing the ground unnecessarily because that could cause worse weed growth.

“My experience has been, in most of Montana, if you can keep the plow out of the ground, you’re not going to deal with weeds,” he said.

The key is to give the areas of low damage two years of rest — with only brief, light grazing if the grasses are coming in well — and at least three years rest for areas with heavy damage.

If the pasture is northern mix grass, “you can burn a pasture in mid-summer of 2017 and be back on it in fall of 2018 without any negative impact. One study showed that you can even go in in spring with light grazing and not set it back,” he said.

“(The weeds) will come in pretty quickly after the fire and that’s why you really need to give those native grasses that first couple of springs without any grazing, so they can recover, regrow and push the weeds out, and by the third year you don’t have much of a weed problem,” he added.

Aside from not working the ground, Marlow’s only other major caution was about fertilizing.

“Absolutely do not fertilize,” he said “because if you fertilize, all you’re going to end up with is cheat grass, and brome and mustards — because cheat grass really likes free nitrogen and after a fire there is a lot of free nitrogen. Native plants evolved without nitrogen.”

Ecology 101

What native plants did evolve with, Marlow said, was fire as a natural part of the grazing rotation, but since the homestead days, when ranchers and farmers built homes, barns and fences that they wanted to protect, the natural and healthy cycle of range rejuvenation has been disrupted.

“Contrary to what some people say, bison have the same impact cattle do. They just had 40,000 square miles to graze, and we make cattle graze on 4,000 acres,” he said, adding that “technically, with good rotation grazing or deferred rotation with cattle, you can do the same thing.”

When bison roamed the area, nature had its own rest-grazing rotation system, he said. Bison would move into an area with strong new grass growth, graze until the the grass got ahead of them with accumulated old growth, then fire would clean out the area and the bison would move on to the next area that had recovered enough from the last wildfire to have good, strong new growth. This pattern repeated.

The fires would come through quickly and lightly because the area didn’t have enough time to accumulate litter in grassy bunches and brush, and this meant that the grasses came back quickly, he said.

Marlow, who has done range work in the Bear Paws, said grasses, like rough fescue or Idaho fescue, that grow in the area can build up enough litter that when old-growth, ungrazed, plants finally burn, it can be devastating to pastures

“And those great big clumps of rough fescue that don’t get grazed you could probably go out there right now and find craters in the ground where these plants burned so hot that it burned clear down in their root system, so now those plants are completely gone,” he said. “And in those circumstances it’s going to take five and six years of almost no grazing. And possibly, where it burned really hot they’re going to have to go in and reseed it.”

Overgrazing is another issue Marlow said makes pastures more vulnerable to fire, but not just in the sense of keeping livestock on a pasture so long that vegetation is grazed down to the ground.

Overgrazing of another kind occurs when livestock are turned onto specific pastures during the same time of year, every year.

“You’ll probably have your tires slashed and I’ll get hate mail, but calving pastures are a good example,” he said. “Year after year after year we use that pasture at the same time every year and that sets the plant community back, so now when the calving pasture burns there’s really nothing to come back, whether it’s a long time or not.”

Areas grazed to poor ecological condition will have a hard time recovering from fire damage, he said, but producers can emulate that natural grazing rotation from the free-roaming bison era to improve pasture growth.

Rotation

In a normal situation, Marlow said, he likes to think of grazing rotation in years rather than seasons.

As an example, a producer might do calving season and weaning in pasture A; summer grazing in pasture B; fall in pasture C; and winter in pasture D, then do this the same way the next year.

Marlow would recommend first that pasture A be split in two — or two pastures be set aside — so that in above example calving would occur in pasture A1 and weaning in A2. The following year, that would swap to have calving in A2 and weaning in A1, and rotation in the other pastures would move summer grazing to pasture C; fall grazing to pasture D; and winter to pasture B.

This way, no pasture grasses are stressed at the same time in their growth pattern each year, allowing for a more well-rounded array of native plants to thrive.

“Here I’d really appreciate if you’d put in capital letters if you could, regardless of all of this, if we use each pasture at a different season each successive year — one year we graze it in spring, one year graze it in summer, another in fall another year in winter — then we’re getting into that rotation pattern where the pastures themselves are healthy enough to withstand wildfire.”

But once a pasture is hit by wildfire, it changes everything for a while until the ecology is healthy again, he said.

In general, livestock should be kept off the burn areas for two years, he said, or longer in areas burned more deeply. The exception to this is in pastures with northern mix grasses that burned quickly and start coming back next spring.

“If we stay on the northern mix grass you can burn a pasture in mid summer of 2017 and be back on it in fall of 2018 without any negative impact,” he said. “One study showed that you can even go in in spring with light grazing and not set it back.”

But some pastures might require spot fencing of small areas that cattle need to stay off of for a longer period.

In riparian areas, by the third year producers can put cattle on the pasture in a rotation, such as in late June graze 35 percent of available forage, pull livestock out of the pasture for a minimum 45 to 60 days in July and August then can go in and take another 35 percent in September, Marlow said. This effectively grazes off 70 percent of the pasture, “which is good for my cattle and good for my billfold, but, because it did it in these light grazing bouts with sufficient recovery time between them, the riparian community comes blasting through.”

In the end, Marlow said, he recommends adding pasture burning to the normal way of doing business as a way to keep rangeland healthy by mimicking the bison/wildfire grazing rotation system that the native grasslands evolved under over the millennia.

His recommendation is to do controlled burns in late March or early April when pastures still have a little snow in the shadows behind clumps of grass or sage brush, and the ground is wet or, if there is no snow, when kneeling on ground still creates a wet spot on the knees. The moisture protects vegetation.

Wildfires come, though, in their own time, but once the land recovers from wildfire, producers can start introducing burning as a way to keep pastures healthy, and a way to mitigate the effects should a wildfire come again in the future.

“They know their property, they know their weather patterns, they can start experimenting with a 20-acre patch with their cows and fire,” Marlow said, “and pretty soon they’re burning a third of their ranch and making it work.”

Erosion

If the area wasn’t badly overgrazed before fire or badly under grazed with lots of litter to burn producers will see a little increased erosion first year, a little less the second year and by third nothing dramatic, Marlow said. He recommended letting erosion go as long as it wasn’t threatening a waterway or structure.

In badly burned areas landowners will see erosion, probably have to look at measures that will protect structures like culverts and stop head cuts in drainages, but out on the range still let it go because protections like straw mats will promote weed growth.

Prevent weed spread from donated hay

From U.S. Department of Agriculture

Hay donated to wildfire areas — or hay purchased from an outside source — can contain noxious and invasive weed species, insect pests, and plant diseases from other locations in Montana and from states where it was grown. Use the following resources to identify unknown plants, insects and disease and prevent their spread.

Best Management Practices

se donated hay in an area that can be easily monitored for new weed species.

Document where new weed species are located, then follow-up with weed control and monitoring; monitor for several years.

Treat weeds before they produce seed.

Remove and dispose of weed seed that become established.

Defer moving livestock through an area with a new weed species until it is removed or contained.

Ask where the hay was grown/donated from, if possible.View distribution maps of weeds in Montana and the West to get an idea of potential weed threats from donated hay. https://www.eddmaps.org/west/distribution/

Use certified weed free forage, if available.

Collect unknown plants for identification (collect the entire plant and roots). For help with identification, take the plant to your county weed district, Natural Resources Conservation Service office, Extension agent, Montana Range Partnership, or submit a sample to Montana State University Schutter Diagnostic Lab for identification. This is a free service for Montana residents. Find contact information, submission instructions, fee information, and forms online at http://www.diagnostics.montana.edu.Insect pests and plant diseases can also be sent to the Schutter Diagnostic Lab for identification.

Identify Montana Noxious Weeds. See this guide to Montana Noxious Weeds as a reference. http://msuextension.org/publications/AgandNaturalResources/EB0159.pdf

For More Information

Natural Resoures Conservation Service field office in your county — https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/mt/contact/

County Weed District — http://mtweed.org/find-weed-coordinator/

County Extension Agent — http://msuextension.org/localoffices.cfm

Montana State University Schutter Diagnostic Lab — http://diagnostics.montana.edu/

Hay Hotline, Montana Department of Agriculture 406-444-3144, [email protected] or http://agr.mt.gov/Hay-Hotline

Montana Weed Seed Free Forage 406-444-7819 or http://agr.mt.gov/Noxious-Weed-Seed-Free-Forage

Montana Rangeland Partnership [email protected] [email protected] http://www.montanarangelandspartnership.org

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Montana Department of Agriculture and Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service collaborated on this release.