The dubious Ventenata dubia

Ventenata dubia (blonde colored grass in distance) spreading across a hillside in Carbon County, MT.

Ventenata dubia is a grass that appears to be rapidly spreading throughout the northwestern United States and is gaining a proportionately growing degree of attention in conservation organizations and agencies. Native to Mediterranean Europe and Africa and surrounds, the grass seems to have gained a foothold the some years back but there has been a groundswell of interest in the last five or so years. I thought I’d share some thoughts and ideas from my perspective as a grazier.

We first became aware of this grass last summer, around the time when annual range grasses mature and senesce, demarcating them from their still-green perennial cousins. It’s likely the grass had been on this particular ranch for some time, but I was unaware of this as I just began managing yearling cattle there last Spring and am still learning these Montana plants. Since then, we have been learning all we can about the plant, and lucky for us, it appears agency, university, and conservation organizations are doing the same.

Unlike similar “noxious” grasses like Meduseahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) and Cheatgrass, which seem to grow more directly in response to management factors and which still offer cattle and wildlife some kind of meaningful forage prior to maturity, Ventenata does not seem to appeal to ruminants at all. Worse yet, it can spread in pastures that at a glance appear diverse and healthy.

The only time I have observed livestock grazing the Ventenata was in a moderate-density pasture (cattle were in there for about 4 days). Cattle did seem to graze the tips of the Ventenata a bit. Did this have to do with the density? Was that particular pasture size and grazing period just-so, incentivizing grazing of all species while still allowing enough selectivity that they could somehow utilize this bitter-tasting plant? Was it just a handful of steers who grazed the area I saw? And, or, did their grazing it have more to do with the mineral tub I placed nearby? If so, were they somehow able or incentivized to utilize the plant because of something in the mineral? Or was it sheer proximity?

Questions like these run through my mind all the time when it comes to this plant. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Ventenata is that it seems to be able to grow in a wide range of soils. I have racked my brain trying to find clearly consistent patterns in where the grass proliferates, and so far I’ve only found a few:

- The grass will grow on east, south, and west slopes, but I’ve seen little to none on north slopes:

- The grass seems to grow taller and thicker this year, a year with less consistent rain and more heat, than last year, when we had a long but cool and slower growing season.

- Other than north slopes, the only places I’ve not seen the grass gain a foothold are areas that are extremely productive. These include irrigated hay meadows and lush areas along creeks and waterways that are grazed for short periods once or twice a year.

- The plant seems to propagate initially by small, independent stands of 1 - 3 feet circles that then grow and expand as these annuals reseed each year. The perimeter of the cover appears to iteratively expand until it simply fills in.

- Western wheat grass and a few tall-growing forbs like prairie coneflower, sweet clover, and alfalfa, are the only plants that seem to kinda-sorta grow through it. It’s hard to say if these are just the last plants to release their grip in an area, or if some—especially prairie coneflower—actually are doing well despite or even because of the Ventenata. What can these plants tell us about Ventenata?

Some of the following is likely answerable by further google searches and lit reviews, but for now, these are my primarily questions so far:

This grass seems to have an aggressive propagation strategy (germinate early in its own thatch, cool season annual that smothers other plants, short-lived abundant seed, little energy invested in developing root system) but what is its growth strategy? In other words, do areas monopolized by Ventenata simply persist as a monoculture of this plant indefinitely, or do other plants begin to propogate within it?

Does the hoof impact required to incorporate the Ventenata thatch simply exacerbate the problem by creating compaction? Or could this be a viable strategy for allowing other species to re-enter a stand of Ventenata?

Is Ventenata chemically allelopathic or simply structurally/mechanically limiting to other plants?

Ventenata seems to propagate successfully in its own thatch, yet I have seen it described as a plant that invades disturbed areas. What is it that makes this simultaneously true?

What do we know about how soil type, deficiencies, parent material, and bacterial:fungal ratio affect Ventenata?

Can the palatability of Ventenata be changed through some foliar application or fertilizer, thus causing cattle to want to graze it? One of the key challenges of this plant is that the only thing cattle seem to want to do with large monocultures of it is lie down in it, so the hoof impact on any given area is limited. Over time, cattle simply cease to interact with areas of the pasture altogether.

Post-senescence V. dubia with many species of flowering tall forbs successfully growing through. What will happen in this area next year?

We’re learning about this plant alongside everyone else, and invite discussion, curiosity, research interests, and so on as we explore how our management and decision-making can move the needle away from a Ventenata monoculture and towards a productive AND diverse grassland. For now, this is our approach:

1. Ad-hoc monitoring of changes in grassland and pasture composition via Solocator, a phone app that records the exact location and direction of a photograph, logs it on a map, records customized notes right on the photograph, and uploads them to your icloud account. I can’t say enough good things about this app. I didn’t use it last year, and really regret it. This year, in particular in July when the Ventenata had browned out but other grasses were green, I took many photos with this app and will use them to compare with the Ventenata spread next year.

Ideally we’d have test plots all over the place, but we’ve not had capacity to do this yet, and feel that Ventenata is obvious enough in its spread that basic and consistent photo monitoring will tell us a lot.

2. Grazing: we practice management-intensive holistic planned grazing with relatively short grazing periods and long recovery periods. This year we had fewer cattle at this ranch so some of the grazing periods were longer than usual, but in general cattle are not in any given cell or pasture for more than a few days during the early growing season up to a few weeks as things slow down, grasses mature, and we’re in pastures we’re not coming back to this year. The ranch seems to be responding positively to this.

We are also doing a few experimental things like fencing out areas of Ventenata altogether, and we did one experiment where we put about 350 6-weight steers on a 3/4 acre of Ventenata-dominant grass for 8 hours in somewhat wet conditions. The change in that stand of grass has been profound, but what will grow next year, and how can we get similar value with a more practical level of density?

3. Biological and chemical applications: This fall, we are hiring out to spray just a few acres with Rejuvra, the version of Esplanade herbicide licensed for rangeland use. I am not a fan of herbicides as a rule, but I am a proponent of rangeland health, experimentation, and openness to new ideas, so it seems worth a shot.

We’re also going to try an experimental application of hydrolyzed fish fertilizer and calcium, as advised by soil scientist Nicole Masters. I’m intending to do this both is a combination application and separately, to compare. The idea here is to address calcium deficiency in the soil and also feed the existing and emerging plants and microbes with the fish fertilizer. We don’t know if this will just grow more Ventenata, and we have not done soil tests yet to determine if this ranch is deficient in Calcium, but I understand it to be a common missing-link in soil health on many ranches in our area.

In the coming years, this plant will command countless resources in an attempt to understand its behavior and impact on rangeland in the US and perhaps beyond. Conference panels will convene, university research teams will require grant money to study it. Thousands of gallons of fuel and millions of gallons of water will be deployed in an effort to spray pre-emergent herbicides on the plant. In the near term, hundreds of thousands of acres (at least!) of rangeland and pasture will likely see a significant reduction in forage for livestock and wildlife alike. People will dismissively say that we should just wait it out, others will say we should treat it like an alien invasion. Beyond the specificities of this new invasive grass, I hope we can also maintain an investigative and observant spirit around the broader question of how humans make decisions and use resources in pursuit of their goals. Noxious weeds hold up a mirror to our species and our minds, and I think it’s worth taking the time to monitor ourselves alongside our pastures.

Holding rodear in mid-may on V. dubia. We were interested in the effect of animal impact on Ventenata thatch.

Other Lands

Whether or not to eat meat, and what meat to eat if one chooses to, is a matter of frequent debate these days. As someone intimately involved in the life and death of beef cattle, these discussions often feel disembodied and abstracted. We reduce the question into a static list of stacked pros and cons—a game of rhetoric isolated from many forces that govern the world. But to me, meat eating (or not) can best be understood in relationship—and this implies movement, dynamism, cycles… a series of expanding causes and effects that are complex and unwieldy.

What’s often left out of the discussion is the opportunity cost of abstaining from meat. Unless one is starving themselves of essential nutrients, one who does not obtain their protein and nutrition from the fruits of an individual’s life and death—say, pastured protein or wild game—must be finding it elsewhere: in what the plow furnishes, in what straight lines and long rows have to offer, in the canopy of almond monocultures towering over bare ground. Home gardeners and those who manage to grow or acquire their sustenance from non-animal sources from ways that nurture soil should be commended, but also must recognize that this is not the metabolic reality for the majority.

It’s no big direct death. The blood of field mice, of coyote pup, and gopher snake and grasshopper sparrow are spilled in ounces in these systems that depend on cultivation, and the crop is a canvas for a pointillist picture of a trophic system gone awry because it goes unseen. Only when we zoom out sufficiently and see not just the lives lost, but the lives that are absent, do we begin to get the picture. And only when we sidle up close enough do we feel the loss.

I’m a grassland person. It’s simply my habitat: where I find my sustenance, my vocation and my happiness. The longer I raise cattle in these environs, the more I see the well-managed bovid as being in service to all of the other inhabitants. The other day, languishing in the three o’clock heat while fixing my last stretch of old boundary fence, I flopped onto the grass for a reluctant nap. My dog curled up next to me, having just trotted back from a moment of sensible disobedience, soaked to her shoulders in water from a nearby coulee. I closed my eyes and awoke ten minutes later to the sound of a mouse chittering near my ear, and the chortle of a raven on a nearby fence post, perhaps hoping I was digestibly dead. Bugs pestered my skin, and a band of buck white tail lingered in the distance.

In these moments of sharing space with the my fellow teemers I feel all at once humbled, humanized, and ennobled. It’s not so bad to be brought down to earth, truly leveled, when our fellow inhabitants are so magnificent in their own right. At these times I most feel the pinch of offense at the thought of lands like these being counted in land use statistics and ag census as just “pasture,” and moreso at the possibility of this land being one day plowed and planted.

So I wonder about these other lands—the ones from which people build their bodies of plant-based proteins when they stave off meat. When a land is kept in the simple state of a two or three crop rotation, a lot of animals just give up and move on. The little ones may remain—the ones whose blood we spill ounce by ounce, and who are disked into the soil in shallow graves. The big ones, the ones who bleed in gushing liters, mostly learn to stay away and in time their populations diminish.

It’s this cost that really gets to me the most. Not the deaths, but the lives not lived. Because in a time when we are losing species in large part because they simply lack a place to live, it seems logical to consider habitat lost to agriculture as a direct threat to our shared survival. Maybe it’s time for land kept in a state of arrested development through annual cropping to grow up a little. So how do we eat to make home?  

It’s this apparent comfort with what happens out of sight that I find most contradictory about veganism. We’re assured by evangelizing vegans that there’s plenty of options for us: we can gain our macro- and micronutrients from myriad sources, many of which come from far-off tropical lands and would perhaps be best used to feed the people who grew and picked them, rather than turned into a commodity to be shipped to Westerners. At the same time, I must also acknowledge that in my own industry of raising cattle destined to be eaten as beef, there’s plenty of real and psychic distance that we don’t talk much about. 

This year I’m raising yearling cattle. Between my partner and I, we’re caring for over three thousand head, in four herds on two ranches. We’ve had one full day off since our season started in May. We care for these animals intimately, risking our own safety when we go to treat a sick one. We teach them to gather and drive afoot, horseback, and with dogs; to calmly load, lead, and follow, so that we can move them well now and so they’ll have more peaceful lives once they leave us. And we work with them as a means of caring for the land they graze all season.

With the way the world is currently arranged—property rights and the economy as it is—we couldn’t presently find a better way to tend these grasslands without these cattle. I’ll emphasize “as is,” because everything changes in time but only with vision and effort will it change in a direction we want to see. 

At the end of this season we’ll load them onto trucks to go places we know a little bit, and some we don’t know much at all. They’ll be handled by people we’ve never met, and they’ll be separated from some of the friends they’ve made in their herd and they’ll scramble to make new ones. And they’ll finish their lives in a feed yard, eating a grain and forage ration that came from other lands, with little lives ended or interrupted with each seasonal pull of the plow, and big lives that have long moved on. After all, it’s not just vegans and vegetarians eating grains and legumes grown in faraway fields.

 I know these fields have their place, for now. For now, feedyards do too. But no change for the better can happen without seeing the world as it is, and also seeing how it could be. And so I’m coming around to the idea that my closest kin in the work to reform how we eat and relate to our environs aren’t those who advocate for a specific diet, but those who work on helping us see the unseen lands that sustain our lives.

Morris Creek on the Lazy E-L Ranch in Montana, grazed one to two times annually with approx 1200 head of yearlings for a few days. Thanks to planned grazing and the engineering of beavers, this wetland serves as a heron rookery each year.

Tomorrow's Grass, Today: Temporal Discounting on the Landscape

In my grazing practice, I'm a student and observer of Holistic Management, an approach to ranching and land management that helps producers orient their daily decisions to support their long-term social, ecological, and economic aims. 

These aims are referred to as one's "holistic context," and there's a guided discovery process that holistic managers use to identify what kind of business, environment, or lifestyle they want. But regardless of all the subjective variations, at the crux of one's context is the health of the ecosystem, because no human endeavor can be sustained for long if its very environment is compromised.

Ranchers practicing holistic management are as varied as the day is long--they may be traditional pastoral herders in Zambia, conservative Christians in Alberta, California coastal queers, or fifth generation Arizonans, but central to all of their contexts, by design, is to manage for an ecosystem with an increasing plane of balanced productivity and ecological health (as measured in things like soil carbon, species biodiversity, wildlife habitat, etc).

Core to the holistic management of livestock is the grazing planning chart, which was developed by Allan Savory after years spent not only managing large wildlife reserves but also serving in the Rhodesian military. It was the latter experience that helped him see that the complexity of managing land, animals, and people, with the added variables of extreme weather and market volatility, is not unlike a military operation, and no operation would ever be conducted without a detailed plan. I know very little about the military (any military!) but I do know that there's often a days- or weeks-long set of actions that must happen in a particular sequence in order to achieve the desired end result of a specific operation or campaign.

Savory adapted the planning process he successfully employed during his military career to the work of land management when he observed that ranches, game parks, and wildlife reserves may have a specific set of desired outcomes, but without a clear plan that informed their day-to-day, the abstract and distant goals ("more wildlife," or "healthier streams") were almost unnoticeably compromised due to daily decisions that incrementally chipped away at the health of the environments.

Plant recovery periods are not only a great example of how this works, they're also the foundation of an environment on an increasing plane of health. Without an articulated plan to not put livestock back on an area of ground until a certain amount of time has passed (with time correlating with stage of plant development) it's very easy to begin moving livestock willy-nilly, making decisions for the sake of convenience over and above the health of those little grass plants. 

Someone can do this for a few years and barely notice a change unless they are looking closely, but repeat this often enough and soon all of the plants who form the foundation of a healthy grassland are shrinking in size and failing to reproduce. From there, the environment begins to slip at a more noticeable rate. 

All of this underscores the elegance of holistically planned grazing: it overcomes a really common psychological bias sometimes called "temporal discounting." Temporal discounting is the human tendency to weigh near-term gains well above long-term gains, to the extent that "less, now" is valued more highly than "more, later." That which can be experienced now is more tangible and easily acted-upon than future gains, which seem too abstract to appreciate if not framed concretely.

Temporal discounting has to do with why it's easy to spend one's money fast shortly after pay-day, decreasing steeply as funds run low, or why we may have a stated aim of losing weight but drinking a beer every night persists as a habit.

Here in California, the value of the grazing plan becomes especially clear in about mid-June. That's right on the heels of when the bulk of the vegetative growth for the year (in weight) has just occurred within a 2 month period, and forage begins to shift dramatically from being very high in protein to much higher in carbohydrates - and just taller and denser, period. As a result, cows go from having to eat quite a bit of watery, thin feed to meet their daily nutritional needs to significantly less (by volume). The "burn rate" thru pastures for a given herd size slows up, and all of the ranch's feed is in front of us. 

During those times, it's really tempting to look at the oceans of grass and think one will never get through it all. One feels the urge to add units and stock up. And indeed, too much growth can be a double-edged sword, if the vegetation is so thick that cows walk on far more than they eat, both wasting its feed potential and laying it down as thick thatch rather than smaller bits of litter. 

But spend a little time on the grazing plan, and one quickly begins to realize that they might need every bit of that feed in the months to come--that in fact, only very deliberate grazing every day will result in there being enough feed many months down the line when one needs it. Careless grazing of that feed too soon in the season will result in greater difficulty in utilizing that feed in the months to come. And a pasture that is grazed sloppily may see all of its perennials eaten up, with plenty of standing annual grass that's nonetheless off-limits to cows because grazing them on it might mean they are over-grazing the perennials that are just starting to recover. 

All of this is to say, the holistic grazing plan helps us budget. It makes the needs of the distant future (recovery days needed for plants, metabolic needs for lactating cows, etc.) inform the actions of today. 

Ranches that don't practice this can luck out or hobble along for a while, but eventually the lack of comprehensive planning will come home to roost. The good grass gets eaten up too soon and cows need expensive supplements. Water isn't in place when it's needed, and a hastily put together plumbing work-around breaks and drains the tanks. Owners begin to feel financial strains, and employees feel overworked and under-appreciated.

This kind of contraction puts so much psychic pressure on decision-makers that the moments when they most need clear-headed reasoning (to bail out the sinking ship) coincide with the times when their cortisol levels handicap sound thinking.

Hence, good grazing planning is not just about improving on ecosystem health and a ranch's productivity, but also aids in maintaining intact psyches amidst an agricultural economy that is historically extractive by design.