In late May, Sage Steppe Wild convened a training workshop lead by a wide range of experts in western ecology, with a focus on how citizens can be more effective advocates for our public lands.

The How Not to be Cowed workshop was a great success, and about 20 people traveled to this remote rangeland in northern Nevada to learn about sagebrush steppe ecology and how better to monitor public lands grazing. The group was full of students, attorneys, retired Bureau of Land Management staff, and many long-time public lands experts and volunteers who have worked over decades to try to conserve the wildlife and habitats of the Western U.S.

We estimate that the teachers and participants had well over 200-years-worth of collective experience on public lands grazing!

Sage Steppe Wild’s Jonathan Ratner organized the workshop and led the group through an in-depth class of presentations and fieldwork on public lands livestock grazing management, policy, law, ecology, and how to monitor grazing allotments.

The training covered cutting-edge rangeland monitoring theory and methods. The training covered not only How to monitor public lands grazing, but Why we are monitoring: to understand the past in order to be able to restore the future of healthy, thriving sagebrush, riparian, woodland, and grassland habitats.

The first day began with a presentation by author and ecologist George Wuerthner on a summary of livestock impacts to public lands, based on his decades of personal observations and travels. This was an excellent introduction to the issues surrounding public lands livestock grazing. George’s numbers were eye-opening:  1.9 Billion acres of private and public lands in the U. S. outside of Alaska are grazed by livestock. 770 million acres of rangelands (not including pasture lands) are grazed by livestock, 43% of which are public lands. In the Western U.S., 90% of water goes to irrigation for cow forage.

Next Laura Cunningham of Western Watersheds Project gave a presentation about grasses: an introduction to the identification, ecology, and responses to grazing of several native and introduced grass species found across most of the West. Basic range management concepts were discussed, such as palatability, warm-season and cool-season plants, decreasers and increasers with grazing pressure, and successional stages. The importance of Reference Sites was emphasized (how did sagebrush-steppe plant communities appear before European contact?). The participants then went out into Karen Klitz’s amazing sagebrush steppe restoration project, which is growing beautifully with no cattle grazing, to look at different grasses in hand. 

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Laura Welp of Western Watersheds Project gave a presentation on whether vegetation treatments work or not, using pinyon-juniper cutting on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as a study case where she collected years of field data. This was an excellent presentation on the agency short-comings of serial vegetation treatments, how forbs are not restoring after treatments, and how grazing exclosures and more monitoring are needed. Jonathan pointed out that after using tree-corers, they found some pinyon and juniper trees to be 160-375 years old (or older) based on tree ring counts–indicating that these old-growth forests were not “encroaching” and need to be conserved.

The next day was a deep download of Jonathan Ratner’s extensive knowledge and experience working on conserving public lands and pushing back against livestock grazing and agency corruption. Gigabytes of files and references were handed out in thumb drives to each workshop participant, on monitoring, policy, law, science, and agency-speak.

Some of the main  points covered included:

• How to visit places to monitor
• Be a detective
• Tactics

The presentations covered much more, including how to use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to help you monitor federal grazing allotments, the importance of Ecological Site Descriptions, the pros and cons of different agency methods for measuring utilization, how to challenge federal agency decisions in the Interior Board of Land Appeals, how to read Resource Management Plans (Bureau of Land Management), US Forest Service plans, Allotment Management Plans, Annual Operating Instructions for grazing allotments,  and much more. This was a compilation of nearly a quarter of a century of experience and expertise.

Next the workshop went outside with Roger Rosentreter, retired Bureau of Land Management Idaho staff and expert on Biological Soil Crusts (BSC). The participants looked at mosses and lichens associated with restoring sagebrush steppe plants and learned more about the ecology of these important soil species. BSC are commonly overlooked but their importance to ecosystem function in arid systems is foundational.

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Next, Jonathan demonstrated how to clip and weigh forage plants inside and outside of a grazing exclosure in one monitoring method called “paired plots.”

This is the primary agency method to quantitatively determine vegetative condition and production.

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Jonathan clips and weighs forage grasses inside and outside the grazing exclosure on BLM lands, and gives a quick run-down of what you can expect (taking account that this is a quick demonstration example of estimating water content of grasses and current and previous year’s growth) to measure utilization: 

1. In the cattle-grazed allotment outside of the fence the grazed grasses were measured at about 133 pounds/acre.
2. Inside the cattle-free exclosure (with 7 years of recovery showing abundant and lush native bluebunch wheatgrass free to grow and recover without cattle impacts), the quick demo measures were approximately 800 pounds per acre!

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The third day was a field trip to Trout Creek on the BLM-managed allotment, where we observed a deeply-incised stream, with historic and modern cattle erosion impacts causing extreme streambank erosion and collapse. The stream is now disconnected from its original floodplain. We covered this in educational modules, but here we can see it with our own eyes, how chronic cattle grazing has caused such significant changes to this stream and the floodplain. 

Just to the left of the edge of this photo sits the remnant of a beaver dam that existed prior to the hydrologic destruction caused by the introduction of livestock grazing. So what is now sagebrush 20 feet above the current stream level was the flood plain before livestock destroyed the hydrology. So not only has all that soil been flushed down the toilet, all the water storage capacity of that soil is now gone. Just imagine the difference in summer flows before this destruction.

Compare that to downstream where livestock still have access. Notice a difference? Both photos were taken from the exact same spot.

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We expect to hold How Not to be Cowed! 2025 in May. We look forward to seeing you there.