Addition by Subtraction

I migrated from farming into livestock grazing in large part because of my deep love for land and wildlife, and my desire to address global issues on a practicable scale. Yet a common misconception I often face in my work is the idea that the cows are in the way of wildlife, both directly and by taking their food. If this were true, my work would be highly contradictory and misguided. Note that I work primarily with cattle but much of this applies to other ruminants... and wild species as well. 

Livestock eat grass, but you can bet that because we're talking about relationships within a complex trophic web, this is not a zero-sum activity. Most grasses exhibit a response to grazing and animal disturbance that is often overlooked by those who aren't. We talk a bit about how grass benefits from having old, dead material cleared off to allow light to reach new growth points. And we talk about the nutrient-cycling benefits of grazing animals (wild and domestic): animals yield that dead material to the soil, where it can break down biologically in the soil instead of oxidize chemically into the air, and grazing animal disperse fertility across fields and add their own fertilizing urine and biologically active manure to the mix. 

But it's critical to also acknowledge that when plants are grazed appropriately during the active growing season (which in coast range California is approximately mid-March thru May, depending on seasonal variation in precipitation and temperature), the plants will not only recover quickly but will actually be stimulated to put on more growth than they otherwise would. Provided they aren't grazed too soon in their development, or grazed down to a nub, even with a significant removal of vegetation the plants will regrow bigger and better than they would with no grazing at all. 

What's more, the plants continue photosynthesizing longer than they otherwise would. Below is a photo where I installed a temporary fence in the same place twice this year - in late January and again in late March (a 60 day recovery). The green side was grazed twice during the growing season, and the brown side not at all because there were certain species we wanted to express without animal impact this year. On the left, the grasses have already senesced (set seed and died), whereas the grasses on the right are just beginning to flower. 

At left, no grazing from mid-October. At right, two quick grazes with 60 day recovery period during the growing season. 

The difference is pretty stark. I should note that the fenceline also approximates a slow change in soil depth, because the flowers we were protecting grow in thinner, rockier soils. But the abrupt change has at least as much to with grazing, and the sharp line in the grass is exactly where I built my fence.

When viewed from above, the grasses grew back denser and more lush on the right side than on the left. And most importantly, they continued to grow for at least a week longer than the ungrazed grasses. This means more energy was created through photosynthesis, and more calories made available to surrounding biota. That green grass is edible sunlight.

The longer a pasture can photosynthesize, the more it's yielding to its environment. With the help of big animals, we can keep grass plants photosynthesizing for longer, literally making more life for all entities above and below ground.

Land Marks

I don't understand everything I'm involved in.

- Wendell Berry

Photo by Patrick Baz

Why do we destroy what we love? 

I grew up in a ratty, rural stretch of North Carolina surrounded by farm land, and I did a lot of rambling. One day I set off on a familiar shortcut through the woods but soon discovered my pathway blocked by mounds and mounds of ... trash. Old microwaves and TVs, sofas and mops, bottles of Windex, and the shapeless and neon plastic miscellany that accumulate over a modern lifetime.

As it turns out, our neighbor's old mother had died, and rather than pay the dump fee at the county landfill he emptied the contents of her house into the woods--his woods. 

I've cited this experience in intelligent circles, thinking it underscored a clever point: that people can live close to the land and still destroy it. Trash it, mine it, graze it into dusty and compacted oblivion.

The stereotypes are readily at hand--the "white trash" tendencies of shabby rural abodes to accumulate junk comes to mind. I thought it meant that those people just weren't thinking correctly. Maybe they didn't read enough Wendell Berry.

But maybe I had it wrong. There is an an implicit ethic in rural areas of dealing in tangible materials. Could there be an intimacy to scattering one's belongings across generational land, to be slowly subsumed in the humid forest for generations yet to come? Maybe there's something dear about mining my mountains--about yielding a lifetime of possessions into my forest. 

Recently I've been reckoning with my own rural roots, and have realized the degree to which I've strangely identified as a middle-class suburbanite, despite growing up with marked financial deficits and never living in the suburbs. I grew up relatively isolated, not attending school until college, so I never claimed "country folk" as my people, and subsequent friendships with more urban and well-off peers have no doubt shifted my cultural locus geographically and economically far off its real center of gravity.

Reviewing my upbringing with a native eye, I find I understand a lot more of it than I thought possible. There is a grounded sensibility within rural mindsets that is difficult to describe. 

In contrast to it, the consumer hypocrisy of progressive, educated, urbanites has been fodder for many a hot take. It's not my intention to recapitulate that in full, but there are a few things I've got to say, hopefully without trafficking much in tropes.

The first is that the urbanist mindset--by which I mean the mental state that allows us to navigate urban life without suffering too much cognitive dissonance--is one of NIMBYism-by-design. Generally speaking, cities are hubs of extraordinary abstraction, where the material implications of the ideas and products exchanged in the urban market are not readily apprehended. It's simply not the job of cities to respect natural boundaries, because cities were built by and for the surplus of natural boundaries transgressed.

Dealing with resources in rural areas means we confront our consumption more directly. But much of American society is both obsessed with and made uneasy by consumption. With our national DNA rooted in Englightment thought, it's no surprise that we are uncomfortable with the more atomic and base nature of our being.

We're fabulous consumers of packaged and assembled market goods, yet we're not very accountable to our primary resources--of the blood, the flesh, the oil, the bile, the semen, and the water we depend on to survive. We talk a good game about clean energy while making relatively few personal efforts to achieve such, and view coal companies and their employees with smug disdain. We say we don't want to kill animals to eat them, so we source our protein from remote places whose histories we cannot know, whose extirpated animals we cannot recall, and whose land injustices we remain oblivious to. We all use wood and paper and we rage when our national parks are opened to logging companies.

The hypocrisy is real--so real as to be banal and commonplace--and we all know it. It may not be by design, but it's a byproduct of design: what could be better for a capitalist economy than for people to be able profess their precious moral code publicly, while privately contradicting it without consequence? We can easily achieve secure the cache of being progressive and informed, but without demanding the systems of production to actually change. 

Where can we go, if we maintain that we have already arrived?

This is something that folks living far removed from nature may have trouble reconciling: the sense of accountability that causes us to brazenly spoil the land near to us. Progressive city folk celebrate local food, while some of their poorer and more rural counterparts re-localize their trash.

Yet consider how we get piercings and tattoos on our own volition, but would reject and feel violated by anyone else having such designs upon our flesh. There's a transpersonal identification that happens when you feel you belong to a place. It's hard to explain, and impossible to justify the ugly ways in which it's expressed. But it's there.

I'm not justifying our abuses of land. There's plenty wrong--plenty that is simply dysfunctional. Notions of ownership is a double-edged sword. Yet maybe it's my own feral and rural-raised brain talking, but desecration of a landscape through scattered trash, and anointing it with consecrating objects, seem like two points on a circle.  

The Intervention Interval

A few weeks back I was talking to my friend Jason at a biological monitoring workshop. Jason is a rare breed: a SoCal surfer turned first-gen rancher, and a seemingly pretty successful one at that. In any given year, he's is buying, grazing, and selling thousands of head. He's found his niche, and is expanding it. But after learning what a lean operation he runs, I assumed he was chasing his own tail to keep up with everything. 

"So you must be stretched pretty thin, huh? How much do you work?"

"Nah - I take time off." Jason went on to explain that when emergencies arise, and it seems like he needs to be in a dozen places at once (those of you who have run stockers know how fast shit can hit the fan), he just turns off his phone for a couple of hours, hangs out with his wife, and tunes back in to find that a lot of the time, most of the problems have solved themselves. That which remains a real problem will persist, and he can address it free and clear.

Jason has learned to be a good judge of the intervention interval. Involving himself in a situation too soon and creates a dependency on his involvement that's tough to break: staff will look to him for answers instead of hashing through problems on their own. Animals that would have found their way back to the herd after an afternoon of adventuring are apprehended while they're still in hungry wander-mode. 

There is an arc to problems: often, what goes up must come down. I'll never forget a moment a few years back when I accidentally chased a calf into a canyon, stranding it irretrievably as I moved the rest of the herd far away. Had I slowed my tempo, moved less and observed more, perhaps I would have noticed the physics of the situation: the calf would have dawdled towards mom eventually, and she too would have gone looking for her offspring after filling her belly of fresh grass. Instead, I assigned that calf to be coyote or mountain lion dinner, at best. A rookie mistake--and one that comes, again, from having no sense of the right intervention interval.

The longer I work in touchable living systems, the more I understand that good judgement about when to intervene comes is rooted in physically representing the world beyond view within my own body. I just get a sense when something is wrong.

I think this is because my line of work is relatively similar to how humans evolved: in close relationship with herds of prey, whose behaviors are subject to many of the same factors we can physically experience--variations in temperature, wind, rain; the changing of the seasons set a mood in us, and so too with our animals.