Two years ago today, Sonoma County residents awoke to fire spreading through urban and wild lands across our county, a dark cloud of smoke covering the sky, and ash blanketing the ground. There continues to be much work for our community to collectively recover from the fires--most of it is hard and heavy work, whether it be emotional work, community work, economic work, environmental work. UCCE Sonoma's Produce Safety after Urban Wildfire: Citizen Science Initiative is just one small piece of that body of work.

The project sought to find out if garden and farm-grown produce exposed to ash was safe to eat, mobilized community in the days and weeks after the fire to collect leafy greens from sites across the county for later analysis, formed a unique partnership between UCCE Sonoma, Petaluma Bounty, and a passionate public health researcher, Vanessa Raditz, and ultimately led to a workshop series, a newly published scientific report, a forthcoming toolkit for other communities affected by wildfire to assess the safety of their own unique context, and a collaboration with researchers from UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine to investigate the safety of backyard chicken eggs in fire affected counties.

Today we honor the terrible toll of the fire on this community, and we welcome your participation in our upcoming Post-Fire Food Safety Workshop as a small piece of recovery and learning for the future. The workshop will be held on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019 from 6:00pm-8:00pm at the Environmental Center of Sonoma County, 55 Ridgway Ave., Santa Rosa, CA 95401. Refreshments will be provided. RSVP at ucanr.edu/postfirefoodsafety10.17.19

UCCE is looking for growers interested in collaborating on a study of vineyard irrigation water use to help provide more accurate usage rates to the Groundwater Sustainable Agencies (GSAs) whose current modeled volumes overestimate actual use based on site variability and deficit irrigation practices.

Learn more here

 

Raising backyard poultry and livestock is a growing phenomenon in the United States. The recent changes in legislation (e.g. VFD and SB-27) increases the importance of developing a Veterinary-Client-Patient-Relationship (VCPR) between backyard producers and veterinarians in order to maintain access to antimicrobials. One of the most recognized challenges faced by small-scale livestock producers is the lack of access to technical information and veterinary oversight.

As part of the UCCE's commitment to helping build a more resilient community, the UCCE is partnering with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine to hold a series of workshops throughout Northern California to provide backyard producers with information on animal health and biosecurity, antimicrobial use, and ways to comply with new federal and state antimicrobial regulations. This work is being funded by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA).

We are conducting a survey that is part of the Healthy Animals, Healthy People workshop series on animal health and antimicrobial use for backyard producers. This questionnaire asks about the specific practices and perceptions that you apply to your animals' health, husbandry, and antimicrobial use. This survey also seeks to identify whether your knowledge about these topics changed after attending the regional workshops.

The survey will take approximately 15-20 minutes of your time and the provided information will be kept strictly confidential. We will not connect your name with your responses. This study is being conducted for research and outreach purposes. You can choose not to participate or can quit the survey at any time. 

This research has been reviewed by an Institutional Review Board (“IRB”). You may talk to an IRB staff member at (916) 703-9151 or IRBAdmin@ucdmc.ucdavis.edu if you have questions about your rights as a research subject. If you have any other questions, please contact the questionnaire administrator, Jasmin Bardales, at jabardales@ucdavis.edu, or the principal investigator, Dr. Alda Pires.

Small-scale and Backyard Livestock/Poultry Survey

Working landscape ecosystems provide benefits to the landowner and to all life forms living or passing through that land. Neighbors benefit with open viewscapes, to clean water and air, and carbon sequestration from well-maintained working landscapes – rangelands, grassland, and open space. There also a potential health benefits received from working landscape from properly managed vegetation removal to reduce the fire fuel loads. However, there are many challenges for landowners to control excessive vegetation on working landscapes, including vast roadless areas that limit access for weed control and lands of low economic value that make chemical and mechanical control impractical. These challenges favor biological control methods; such as insects and microbes for biocontrol, which can be effective but are difficult, expensive, and time consuming to develop. There is, however a readily available and under-exploited tool that has gained interest to manage vegetation – livestock grazing.

Along with prescribed fire, grazing of domestic livestock may be the earliest vegetation management tool employed by humans. We suggest that the challenges of vegetation management on working landscapes may be addressed with the careful sharpening of this old tool. Prescription grazing is the application of livestock grazing at a specified season, duration and intensity to accomplish specific vegetation management goals. Controlled grazing of this type is being employed throughout California on public and private land and is proving to be a promising tool in reducing the fire fuels and unwanted, excessive vegetation.

Furthermore, livestock grazing has one distinct advantage over other control methods; in the process of controlling an undesirable plant, grazing animals convert it into a saleable product.

Steps in Developing a Grazing Prescription

Formulating an effective grazing prescription requires a solid understanding of plant ecology, animal behavior, and plant-animal interactions. A grazing prescription should include specific information on the season and intensity of defoliation, the species, breed, sex, and age class of animal to use, and the stocking rate that will result in the most harm to the target plant and still maintain healthy rangeland ecosystems. A successful grazing prescription should: 1) cause significant damage to the target plant; 2) limit irreparable damage to the surrounding vegetation; 3) be consistent with livestock production goals; and, 4) be integrated with other control methods as part of an overall weed management strategy.

Selecting the Right Species

The species of livestock best suited for the specific vegetation management goals depends on both the plant species of concern and the production setting. Cattle have large rumens that are well adapted to ferment fibrous material and are classified as grass and roughage eaters. They are therefore generally superior to goats or sheep to manage fibrous herbaceous vegetation such as dormant grasses. Goats have narrow and strong mouths well designed for stripping individual leaves from woody stems and for chewing branches. Goats also have a large liver mass relative to cattle or sheep and may therefore more efficiently process plants that contain secondary compounds such as tannins or terpenes. Sheep are generally considered an excellent species to accomplish control of herbaceous weeds. Sheep possess a narrow muzzle and a relatively large rumen per unit body mass. These characteristics allow them to selectively graze and yet tolerate substantial fiber content, and results in diets generally dominated by forbs. Sheep are also small, sure-footed, and well suited for travel in rough topography which may not be easily accessible for chemical weed control.

Grazing Workshops for Working Landscapes in Sonoma & Marin Counties

Creating resiliency in the rural landscape of Sonoma and Marin Counties is critical in preparing for the next natural disaster, managing biodiversity or achieving ecosystem service goals such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat and viewsheds.  This growing recognition of the ecological benefits livestock grazing is important to our County's resiliency. However, grazing can be difficult to landowners that have never grazed their properties before.  UC Cooperative Extension will hold several workshops on prescriptive grazing techniques to address the sustainability of our working landscapes while reducing the vegetation that leads to catastrophic wild fires.  Private land owners manage the majority of the open spaces in Sonoma and Marin Counties and these workshops are aimed at those private citizens and other public land owners that are interested in using grazing as a vegetation management tool. Increasing the number of agriculture land grazed will benefit both public and private open space and the residents that benefit from them.  The goal of the workshops is to increase understanding, interest and acceptance of using grazing as a vegetation management tool. Upcoming workshop held at SRJC Shone Farm: 

DAY 1 – FRIDAY, May 17 (8:30 am - 7pm)

• Setting Achievable Grazing Goals
• Basic Principles of Managed Grazing
• Animal Nutrition, Body Condition Scoring 
• Selecting the right grazer
• Animal Husbandry Basics
• Grazing 101
• Electric Fencing
• Drought & Flood Management

DAY 2 – SATURDAY, May 18 (8: 00 am - 5 pm)

• Graze Planning 
• Infrastructure
• Pasture & Range Ecology
• Livestock Protection Tools
• Health Issues-Parasite Control
• Livestock Economics, Leasing
• Carbon Plan
• Monitoring, meeting grazing goals

Register online for 
Grazing School for Vegetation Management & Wildfire Vegetation Reduction.  

Sonoma and Marin County's working landscapes, properly managed with prescription grazing, could prove to be a winning solution for all parties involved. Grazing not only provides a service to land owners and managers that may not be easily achieved in other ways, but it can also provide an income stream to aspiring livestock grazers just starting their grazing businesses.  These workshops will provide educational opportunities for all parties to learn the “how to” in grazing, landowners who what to graze themselves, landowners who want to hire grazes and grazers who are looking to start or increase their grazing business enterprise. Let's work together to sharpen the “old” tool of “livestock grazing” into the “new vegetation management tool” for working landscapes.