07/19/06 Grazing to the rescue

Grazing to the Rescue Grazing has been documented time and again to restore beneficial vegetation. I'm Jeff Keane; I'll be right back in one minute with some examples. Proper grazing management has proved it can return depleted ranges and grasslands back to productive, healthy areas many times. It has even been proved in lawsuits, tried in courts of law, and it has been scientifically documented by federal agency employees, but some radical environmentalists still won't accept the facts. In 1996, two BLM range staffers, Rich Benson and Earl McKinney in Nevada's Carson City District, a husband and wife ranching couple, and a team of true environmentalists documented grazing treatments on a local watershed. Within three years, monitoring showed a 140 percent increase in native ricegrass and a 400 percent increase in beneficial winterfat shrubs. Next the team took on the degraded Marietta Wild Burro Range. Years before, the BLM had reduced the number of burros from 400 head down to 56 head over a five-year period, but usable grasses and shrubs continued to decline. The area was divided in half; one half was left as is and the other half received three different grazing experiments. That's experiments with controls, you know, true science. The three experiments improved grass seedlings by 1,860 percent, 2,000 percent and 3,100 percent over baseline seedlings numbers. The control plot produced no new seedlings. What would ever stop results like this? I'll tell you tomorrow. I'm Jeff Keane. Range Summer 2006