7-25 IAN Grazing and Cheatgrass

 Land management options outlined to address cheatgrass invasion.

I have  been unrepentant  in interviewing people such as Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson and his spokespeople along with  Idaho Farm Bureau range manager, Wally Butler with regard to private cattle producers using public lands to graze on. One of the recurring themes has been that as cattle graze, they reduce the fuel of wildfire by eating cheatgrass.  Oh-Oh. A new study suggests that overgrazing and other factors increase the severity of cheatgrass invasion in sagebrush steppe, one of North America’s most endangered ecosystems. 

The research found that overgrazed land loses the mechanisms that can resist invasion. This includes degradation of once-abundant native bunchgrasses and trampling that disturbs biological soil crusts. Michael Reisner one of the researchers from  Augustana College in Oregon.  “That is definitely what we found. What we look at was cheat grass dominance in terms of percent cover at a site and we found, contrary to the hypothesis that it would reduce cheat grass when you had heavy levels of cattle grazing, we found no evidence to support that. To the contrary we found that it actually increased the dominance of cheat grass. Cheat grass has a lot of adaptations to grazing. It is relatively fast-growing. When it is  defoliated it will rapidly respond to that by sending up another tiller and producing a seed so it is very difficult to really knock it back because of that.”