- Author: Dan Macon
While wildfire has always been a part of our foothill and mountain environments, the scope and intensity of recent fires are well beyond anything most of us have experienced. In the last decade, incidents like the Rim Fire, the Butte Fire, the King Fire - not to mention the North Complex Fire and the Dixie Fire - have severely impacted foothill and Sierra ranching operations from Mariposa County to Lassen County. More locally, the River Fire (on both sides of the Bear River) resulted in evacuations of several farming and ranching operations during the 2021 fire season). Other ranchers in Yuba, Nevada, and Placer Counties lost forage to smaller fires. With fire season starting earlier - and lasting longer - we all need to be better prepared!
To kick off this effort, we are collaborating with the California Cattle Council and the UC Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center (SFREC) to host a Ranchers Wildfire Field Day on Friday, Feburay 18, 2021 at SFREC in Browns Valley, CA. Our agenda will include rancher panel discussions, presentations on fire behavior, wildfire preparation, prescribed fire, and sheltering-in-place options, and policy updates from the California Cattlemen's Association, California Farm Bureau Federation, and California Wool Growers Association. Here's a quick overview of the day:
- Surviving a Fire (Rancher Panel) - Dave Daley, Brian Kingdon, and Kevin Pharis
- Ranch Hardening and Fire Planning - Dan Macon, UCCE
- Fire Tools and Fire Behavior Basics - Chris Paulus, CALFIRE (retired)
- Using Fire as a Tool - Prescribed Fire on Working Landscapes - Jeff Stackhouse, UCCE (invited)
- Evacuate or Defend: Making Resilient Wildfire Response Plans in Ranching Communities - Dr. Amanda Stasiewicz, San Jose State University
- Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (Rancher Panel) - Mike Guerry and Rob Oxerango, Idaho Ranchers
- Policy Updates - CCA, CFBF, and CWGA
- 2022 Wildfire Update and Working with CALFIRE - local CALFIRE representative
Lunch will be sponsored by the California Cattle Council! Registration is just $5/person - register at http://ucanr.edu/2020_ranchers_wildfire_field_day
- Author: Dan Macon
On to the Next Phase
We've reached a new phase in our effort to learn how to bond a livestock guardian dog with cattle. As we described in previous blog posts, we are learning that we need to bond Sam, our 7-month old LGD puppy, with cattle – and vice versa. The cattle need to be as comfortable with Sam as he is with them – and so we'll be trying Sam in a new setting, with new cattle, after the first of the year.
The ranch we'd been collaborating with was planning to try Sam with a group of bred heifers they're keeping in close to their headquarters (they're due to start calving next month). The heifers, we were thinking, were more curious than older cows, which would hopefully help them accept Sam more readily. For the initial part of this new phase, we planned keep Sam fenced in an electronet paddock in the midst of the heifer field – the heifers would be fed and access water in close proximity, but the electric fence would prevent direct contact initially.
But then the ranch received about 10 inches of snow….
Snow is hard on electronet fencing – the weight knocked down sections of the fence, allowing the calves and Sam to get out into the larger pasture. On the plus side, Sam clearly demonstrated that he preferred being with the calves. While he'd come up to the ranch buildings when there was activity, he always returned to his calves. On the negative side, however, the ranch felt that our plan to keep Sam in electronet fencing in the heifer pasture was not workable with more snow in the forecast. On December 20, I traveled to Likely one last time and retrieved Sam. We'll move on to a new phase of the project!
I should note that Sam traveled well – the ranch trained him to walk on a lead and to be tied out, and he made the 4-hour trip in a dog crate without soiling the crate, crying, or barking.
For the short term, this new phase involves putting Sam with a handful of rams at our home place. He's also with our oldest and best dog, Bodie. We don't typically put a small pup with an older dog (as we want the pup to bond with livestock first). As a pup matures, however, an older dog can help reinforce the importance of respect for the livestock - Bodie has already corrected Sam several times.
While Sam continues to mature physically, he also continues to behave like a puppy on occasion – a puppy who weighs 80 pounds or more! In Likely, Sam demonstrated that he still liked to play with the orphan calves he was pastured with. This behavior included licking and sometimes gently biting their ears and faces, and bounding up to the calves if they were grazing at a distance. While the ranch corrected this behavior when observed, Sam couldn't be observed around the clock. Similarly, he was initially overly enthusiastic about the rams he's with now - so we're trying a tool that I've used on other young dogs that were exuberantly playful.
A dangle stick is a device that hangs from a dog's collar and makes running and jumping uncomfortable. Comprised of a piece of wood, short pipe, or weighted piece of PVC attached to a chain, the dangle stick hits a dog in the mid-leg area, making this activity uncomfortable. This discomfort, which is alleviated when the dog is walking calmly, corrects the unwanted behaviors – in other words, it makes the right behavior easy and the wrong behavior difficult. The dog can correct himself!
When we first attached the dangle stick to Sam's collar, he was annoyed by it – he chewed on the chain. Within several minutes, however, he accepted it and learned how to navigate the pasture with it. Over the last several days, I've watched Sam bound after the rams, only to have the stick knock against his legs. He stopped running and walked up to them calmly – just the effect we were looking for. Sam will wear the dangle stick for several weeks – and then we'll assess his behavior without it. If he reverts to his old puppy habit of running up to the livestock, we'll put it back on.
After the holidays, we'll place Sam on another cattle ranch here in the Sierra Foothills. This new ranch is a bit smaller (both in terms of acreage and livestock), but is having significant coyote issues during calving. We'll work with this new outfit to introduce Sam to the cattle and vice versa – with the hope that Sam and the cattle will eventually accept one another. While Sam still needs to prove himself, we hope that controlling his interaction with the cattle in a new operation will help further his training. I've observed similar challenges in bonding naïve sheep with LGDs – sheep that have been raised to be afraid of dogs don't immediately trust these big white dogs. In my experience, this is where the dog's submissive behaviors are so critical. While play behavior can be excused, aggressive or dominant behavior can't be. We'll be watching Sam for continued submissiveness as he moves into this new environment. We'll also be watching the cattle to see if they begin to accept this big white dog in their pasture. And as always, we'll be monitoring Sam's desire to stay with livestock. Stay tuned!
- Author: Dan Macon
Like many of you, I expect, I've recently debated whether to keep my social media accounts - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram sometimes seem like a bottomless pit of advertising and argument. But then something like this happens....
Last week, I wrote about the idea of an "ecological calendar" - a way to think about our production calendars from an ecological perspective (read the post here). I included my first rather awkward attempt at graphically displaying my own sheep production calendar - and shared the graphic on Instagram.
Within several hours, I had the most wonderful response from someone who listens to our Sheep Stuff Ewe Should Know podcast - complete with an actual, real-world ecological calendar from a famous sheep-producing region in France! Yeva (@why_suarez on Instagram) shared this:
"The inner orange circle says “troupeau en montage” (herd in the mountains) and troupeau en crau (the Crau is a geographical area). Most sheep farmers in the south of France move their sheep to the mountain areas (like Haute Savoie, the mountains between Italy and France. Pyrenees is another system yet again) as there's not enough green pastures available, because of the high temperatures that dry out the land and/or because the irrigated areas are used to produce hay (there are more reasons, but that's the short version!). Wolves are a big issue, they will be guarded by a shepherd throughout the summer. But back to the calendar.
"You see two blue lines pass through all the circles, one: mid-June; one: beginning of October. That's when the sheep are away, which matches with the outer circle that says “estives dans les alpages.” Estives means summer pasture. Most of the sheep will be taken there, represented in the tiny sheep symbols. Outside that period is says in the circle “enneigement en montagne,” which is basically snow in the mountains!
"The arrows show the movement of the sheep to the different kind of pastures. In the Crau, you basically have two kinds, the green one that is irrigated and produces the hay and the dry one or the “Coussouls” that have a very specific kind of biodiversity and is known for its many rocks.
"It's a bit complicated to explain because it's a circular system, so it's all linked – which also makes it very cool, because the entire calendar is pasture and hay based, including lambing dates, etc. But basically, Foins de Crau is a very famous hay that's produced with a complicated irrigation system and is subject to many rules if it wants to qualify as “foins de crau,” as it's known for its very high quality. They cut it three times a year (in the calendar it says “1ere coupe = first cut, etc.). Each “cut” has a different nutritional component and is marketed differently. The fourth cut is not actually cut; it is eaten by the sheep when they return from the mountains. That's why you see the sheep symbols between October and February in the same circle as the “cuts” – we call those kinds of pastures the “prairies.”
"Half February (the blue line only overlaps the prairies and coussouls) they are then moved to the coussouls. The prairies will start growing again for the first foins de crau cut and the cassouls offer enough food. Some other shepherds bring sheep to hill areas nearby instead of the coussouls – it tends to depend on the particularities of that farm. The amount of sheep symbols has grown in the cassouls circle, because the herds tend to be much bigger as this calendar reflects an autumn lambing period, which is the overall tendency here.
"Outside the inner circle is a smaller blue one that shows when the prairies are irrigated with water and when not (“arrossage de pres”). The specific timing of the movement of the herds would be a much longer story! But I hope the different layers of the calendar are clearer now and why they are linked."
I shared this calendar explanation with my friend Dr. Hailey Wilmer, who is the Research Rangeland Management Specialist at the U.S. Range Sheep Production Efficiency Research Unit, in Dubois, Idaho. Her observation was that "calendars can help tell stories across landscapes." I agree - looking at the calendar Yeva shared, and the explanation she provided, helped me look again at my own calendar. I asked myself these questions:
- What is the heart of our sheep operation in terms of nutrition and forage? For us, I think, it's the annual rangeland we use in the winter and again in summer.
- What is the second most important forage resource? In our case, it's our irrigated pasture. Pasture is more productive - and also more costly. With sheep, we could probably figure out how to get along without it.
- Finally, how do our production needs (vaccinations, shearing, lambing, etc.) fit within these underlying forage cycles?
All of this brings me to a question for you! How does your production system fit the ecological cycles in your region? I hope you'll share! And I guess I'll keep my social media accounts for now....
- Author: Dan Macon
Over the last ten years or so, I've had the opportunity to help teach farm and ranch business planning courses (first, as a collaborating producer; more recently, as an extension advisor). One of the exercises we've used to help producers relate their cash flow budgets to their production calendars is to create an operational timeline that includes key management activities - as well as the associated inflows and outflows of cash. While this timeline has been a useful teaching tool - it always seemed a bit flawed to me. The work of ranching, after all, is cyclical rather than linear. During our most recent Beginning Farming Academy, I tried a new approach - a circular calendar rather than a timeline. And it so happens that a recent article in Rangelands (the non-technical journal published by the Society for Range Management) puts a name to this approach. Karim-Aly Kassam, of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University, calls these "ecological calendars" - calendars that provide a systematic way to measure and give meaning to time based on our observations of the habitats in which we live.
As I read this paper, I realized that my approach to raising sheep largely revolves around this idea of an ecological calendar. Our sheep year starts and ends with the forage cycle here in the Sierra foothills. My starting point is to match our period of greatest nutritional demand (late gestation and early lactation - lambing season, in other words) with the time period when Mother Nature provides the greatest quantity of highly nutritious forage (the "spring flush"). This decision point gives us the ability to adjust our stocking rate to seasonal changes in the carrying capacity of our rangeland and irrigated pastures. We wean the lambs as the annual rangeland forages dry out. We manage our irrigated pasture to be sure we have quality forage prior to and during breeding season. Our ewes have their lowest nutritional demand during the late fall months. In many ways, our approach reflects an emphasis on the productivity of the ewes rather than the weaning weights of individual lambs - we're optimizing our ewes' ability to turn forage into fiber and lambs.
Our decision about when to lamb sets up other key dates in our production system, as well. We shear the ewes when the youngest lambs are 4-6 weeks old - in early May. The ewes shear better then, and we avoid some of the stickers that can contaminate our wool. We dry the ewes off (wean the lambs and end the ewes' lactation) on dry forage in mid-Summer - which allows us to rent the ewes out for fuel-load reduction on unirrigated rangeland. We flush the ewes (prepare them for breeding) in September, when our irrigated pasture begins to recover from the heat-induced summer slump in productivity. We turn the rams in with the ewes in late September, and the entire cycle starts again!
But as I've thought about our approach through the lens of an ecological calendar, I've realized that the key dates in our system have nothing to do with the chronological date - and everything to do with the annual cycles of weather and forage production. Rather than the names of the months, the headers on my ecological calendar are events - Germination Day, the Onset of Rapid Growth, the Summer Slump, the Autumn Rebound. Unlike the rigidity of the Gregorian calendar that most of us use, this ecological approach to our production schedule is incredibly flexible! Weaning day happens when the grass dries out, for example - which could be late May or late June, depending on the year. Longer-term flexibility is also possible - if we begin to see that our moisture and temperature regimes in the late winter and early spring change the timing of the spring flush, we can adjust our lambing date (by adjusting the date on which we turn the rams in with the ewes).
I suppose some will say that we're simply ranching with nature - that we're just adjusting our production to the cycles around us. But giving meaning to time based on my own observations of the world around me seems deeper than simply picking a lambing date to coincide with spring growth. Keeping track of how the world around me changes in response to things like the timing and amount of rainfall, the temperature of the air and the soil, the humidity and wind here in the foothills - all of this helps me adjust my interactions with the natural world. All of this helps make adapting our sheep enterprise to ever-changing conditions easier!
- Author: Dan Macon
Working in partnership with CALFIRE Nevada-Yuba-Placer, sheriff's offices, and offices of emergency services in Placer, Nevada, and Yuba Counties, the livestock community established a 3-county Livestock Access Pass program for commercial livestock producers. While the system was not formally tested in 2021, we have established a systematic approach to helping livestock producers gain safe access to their operations during an emergency. This post summarizes the 2021 efforts and identifies needs and opportunities moving forward.
Steering Committee
The Placer-Nevada-Yuba Livestock Access Pass Program was created by a steering committee comprised of ranchers from all three counties and the Agricultural Commissioners from all three counties, facilitated by UC Cooperative Extension.
Members
Joe Fischer (Placer County Rancher) Roger Ingram (Placer County Rancher)
Laura Barhydt (Nevada County Rancher) Kevin Pharis (Nevada County Rancher)
Carrie Richards (Yuba County Rancher) Justine Dutra (Yuba-Sutter Farm Bureau)
Josh Huntsinger (Placer County Ag Dept) Chris deNijs (Nevada County Ag Dept)
Steven Scheer (Yuba County Ag Dept) Dan Macon (UCCE)
Commercial Livestock Production
The steering committee established the following criteria for determining whether a livestock operation is commercial in nature (for the purposes of the program):
- Qualified Commercial Livestock Operator: For the purposes of this program, a commercial livestock operator is defined as an owner of livestock consisting of 50 head of livestock (including in utero, e.g., 25 bred cows), 100 poultry or rabbits, or 50 beehives or more that reside in Placer, Nevada, or Yuba County for at least a portion of the year, or a person who, through an agreement with that owner of livestock, has authority and is responsible to oversee the care and well-being of the owner's livestock.
- Livestock Species Covered by Program: This program applies to commercially raised species of livestock, including cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, poultry, rabbits, llamas, alpacas, and bees. “Commercially raised” means the livestock are raised as part of a business.
- Application for Registration: To become enrolled in the program, a Commercial Livestock Operator must provide contact information, APNs and/or physical addresses of grazing sites, general season of use, livestock description and count, and other information by completing an online form. Producers without internet access were able to enroll with assistance from UCCE.
Coordination with Other Agencies
The steering committee coordinated with CALFIRE, county sheriff's offices, and county offices of emergency services. Through this coordination, we identified communication needs, a system for integrating the program into the incident command system, and producer training needs.
Producer Training
UCCE and CALFIRE collaborated on organizing an initial four-hour training session in each county. Each session included an overview of the program (UCCE), a discussion about emergency management and the incident command system, a presentation on fire behavior and fire safety (CALFIRE), a presentation on disaster planning at the ranch level (UCCE), and a general discussion about rancher experiences with evacuations and other emergencies. At the conclusion of each training, each producer was photographed for inclusion in their Livestock Access Pass. The Placer County training was held in early August. Due to an increase in wildfires in August and September, the Nevada and Yuba County training sessions were not held until late October.
Producer Demographics
|
|
Placer County |
Nevada County |
Yuba County |
Total |
|
Producers registered |
21 |
41 |
24 |
86 |
|
Producers trained |
11 |
24 |
13 |
48 |
Operation Characteristics (registered producers)
|
Beef Cattle |
Sheep |
Goats |
Swine |
Dairy |
Poultry |
Rabbits |
Bees |
Other |
Average # of Species |
|
56 |
31 |
21 |
15 |
6 |
20 |
2 |
8 |
9 |
2.02 |
|
67% |
37% |
25% |
18% |
7% |
24% |
2% |
10% |
11% |
|
Pass Creation and Distribution
Following each workshop, UCCE staff created an individual, personalized pass for each participant. These were then mailed/delivered to the county agriculture department (in the producer's home county) for signature and sealing. Passes were returned to UCCE and mailed to participants.
Observations and Ideas for 2022
- Given the time it took to develop the program, we were fortunate to complete training sessions in all three counties. Ideally, the training should occur in the late winter or early spring in future years.
- Having Nevada County OES and Sheriff participate in the workshop in Nevada City was outstanding. We will make sure that OES and Sheriff representatives are available for future trainings.
- There are many more producers who we need to reach. We advertised via local cattlemen and farm bureaus, as well as through my newsletter list, but we still missed many producers.
- We'll be offering a 1-hour refresher training for current participants and a 4-hour training for new participants. While tempting to do both virtually, there is definitely value in an in-person interaction with CALFIRE and local agencies.
- Our programs are consistent with the provisions of the new state program created by Assembly Bill 1103 (Dahle). The state program does not necessarily require board of supervisors' endorsement, but we should think about formal presentations in each county.
If you're interested in participating in the Livestock Access Pass program in 2022, contact me at dmacon@ucanr.edu or call (530) 889-7385.
