FE5.8 - Home on the Rangelands: The Beef and the Butterflies (Part 2)

All right, here we go.

Okay.

Welcome back. I'm Adam. And this is Mendel.

Hey!

And today we are continuing our discussion of rangelands in the West, focusing on my home state of Cowlifornia.

So if you haven't yet, you want to catch up with the first episode in this series, where last time around Adam, you were 100% pro livestock, basically unrecognizable. How are you feeling about cows today?

Well, today, I am basically on the fence.

Are you going to come down on the grazed or the ungrazed side of the fence?

I mean, I always thought that I wanted to be on the ungrazed side of the fence. And certainly, in places like Cache Creek, which we covered earlier this season, I'd say that I firmly want to be on that side of the fence, because that is the side of the fence with all of the wildflowers.

Right, yeah cows were not doing that landscape any favors.

I don't think so. But down here in California, I'm just not quite so sure anymore. Because it seems like sometimes, the wildflowers and all of the rare species might actually be on the grazed side of the fence.

That would complicate your very wildflower-centric worldview.

It does! And learning about how livestock can be used for all sorts of benefits on California's highly invaded rangelands has definitely rocked my world. But at the same time, you know, in the back of my mind, I'm still thinking, that's great and all on private range lands, but on our public lands, can't we do better? Can't we be using other tools? Do we have to be sharing our public lands with cows?

Right... you'd think on public lands, we could find a way to have our wildflowers without relying on an introduced ungulate.

That's been my contention. But of course, there are a lot of important values out there on the land, and wildflowers aren't the only one.

Hmmm that's surprisingly broad minded of you, Adam.

I would take credit, but sadly, I can't. It's when I put the question to podcaster Ashley Ahern, whose work helped catalyze this series, that she reminded me of that.

Well, as you know, much of the American West is public lands, and the people who can afford to own tracts of land large enough to support sustainable ranching — again, there's a right way and there's a wrong way; there's a harmful way, And there's a less harmful way to have cows on a landscape. One key factor is the density of the cows over the the acreage that they are grazing — So to have enough acres to graze enough cows to make a living in the system in which we live, you

Hmmm... while you and I might be focused on the ecological outcomes, Ashley is here to remind us that there are also huge cultural and economic dimensions to the issue.

Yes. For her, irrespective of the potential ecological benefits that livestock can provide on public lands, we should be considering the ranchers themselves.

Without the access to those acres, literally just just the the space to do this job, it's not possible. It's not as simple as just saying public lands belong to everybody. We need to keep cows off because they're bad. Again, it's how do we have cows on these public lands in a way that does not prevent everyone else from enjoying them in the various ways that they want to enjoy them, whether it's hunting, whether it's mountain biking, whether it's hiking, or

Yeah, that's fair, I think. And even for those of us who are focused on ecological outcomes, if small ranchers can't make a go of it, then using cows for conservation really just won't be an option.

Exactly. If we want the benefits livestock can provide in certain circumstances, then we need to keep small ranchers in business. And those small ranchers often rely on public lands. That's the argument And if you accept that argument, then the devil is in the details, or rather... it's in the weeds.

Okay, if we're having cows, how much does it cost per cow per acre, right? Or how many cows are allowed? Or at what times of year? And how long can they be on a certain chunk of public land? Those are really really thorny debates. And it's where very different perspectives, lived experiences clash.

So today, we're going to have some thorny debates about what it means to have livestock on public lands, or at least on public lands in coastal California. And we're going to look at a specific piece of public land where livestock are being employed to give some endangered species a new lease on life. From Future Ecologies, this is Home on the Rangelands, part two — The Beef and the Butterflies.

Okay, where do we begin? In the thorns or in the weeds?

We're going to begin in the weeds, at Tulare Hill.

Hi how are you?

Good morning, how are you?

Doing well. I'm Christal.

Nice to meet you, I'm Adam. Thank you so much for coming out and meeting me here this morning.

Yeah, this whole hill is fascinating. It's very different.

So we're starting in the weeds with a case study. Who is this? And where are we?

My name is Christal Niederer, and I'm a senior biologist with Creekside Science. I've been working here 17 years now. And one of the first places that I started working out here was this site here, which is Tulare Hill. We're in South San Jose.

Uhh... South San Jose?

Yeah. So a brief California geography lesson that will be important later, I promise. The Bay Area, where I'm from, is basically a gigantic urban sprawl wrapped around the San Francisco Bay on the central coast of the state. There is San Francisco out on the peninsula, Oakland across the way, and at the south end of the bay, a city that is actually larger than both of those, the city of San Jose.

Okay, so a lot of people. How many, exactly?

Well, depending on how you define it, there are about 8 million people in the Bay Area. And at the southern tip of this region, just south of San Jose, is this little nub of land called Tulare Hill. And Christal and I are standing on top of it, looking out through the midwinter haze over that urban sprawl.

It's a little bit foggy and smoggy right now. So you don't see the whole bay area from here. But you can see we've got a city here.

This is such a California view. You get the there's a highway, there are subdivisions. There is a natural gas power plant. There's agricultural fields, large ones.

A solar farm

And there's a solar farm. And then of course, the the rangelands on the hillsides. I mean, it's quite a quite a slice of this place, isn't it?

Yeah. Over to our right, we have the Mount Hamilton range, kind of the Inner Coast ranges. And then on the other side, we have the Santa Cruz Mountains, which goes all the way out to the Pacific Ocean here. And so this spot right here... I kind of call it The Plug. It's sort of where these two mountain ranges converge. It's kind of an interesting stepping stone or wildlife corridor between these two mountain ranges.

So picture two mountain ranges, one on either side. On the coast side, the slopes are green and forested. And on the inland side, they are drier and grassy. And then there's this little stepping stone of a hill in the gap between them.

Okay, and that's Tulare Hill.

Yep.

Why does she call it "the plug"?

Yeah, so we're on the plug. So what on earth does that mean? I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to that take a little while.

That... that could be the description for our whole show. But what is actually special about this place?

Well, for starters, Tulare Hill is special because it has serpentine soils.

Serpentine is California's State rock. But what's interesting about the serpentine soils, it's chemically very strange. And so it's actually a very difficult environment for plants to grow in general. So you have low nitrogen, low phosphorus, generally. And so you think of like your NPK, those three numbers on your fertilizer bag that plants want. This is really low in those.

Yeah, we talked about serpentinite soils, way back in episode 1.3. But if I remember correctly, they're not only low in the sort of nutrients that plants need. But they're also just kind of toxic. Right?

Yeah, it can have a lot of toxic heavy metals like nickel and chromium, things like that. There could be very different chemical compositions from site to site. But yeah, it's a very harsh environment. And so a lot of people think, oh, that sounds really bad. Like that sounds like a bad place for plants. But it's, it's just... it's different. It's a difficult environment. So we have different kinds of things. So

Now I see why you chose this place.

Well, I wasn't actually there at the right time for the show. So honestly, the place was a bit drab.

I mean, yeah, most people don't get that excited about it. It's a rocky little hill. It's a very rocky little hill.

But in the right season, I'm sure it's spectacular.

Right. The point is that because of the soils on this site are uniquely terrible. Those introduced grasses that are so pesky throughout California, they can't get a foothold.

That's it.

The Serpentine soils are very low in nitrogen. And traditionally, historically, they've kind of kept a lot of these non native invasive grasses out it's just been a little bit too tough of an environment for them.

The serpentine soils keep out most woody vegetation too. So the site stays open. It's a perfect place for wildflowers and all those other rare species that like open ecosystems, on the other hand, not a great place for grasses. So that's why it was so jarring when crystal introduced me to a special someone.

This is Dottie the cow. She's been decomposing here for... boy, how many years now... several years. But we were out here when she was freshly... freshly no longer with us. And now she's just a scattered pile of bones.

Dottie... is a cow... skeleton.

Yes. And it's not just bright, bleached white bones scattered across the top of Tulare Hill.

Yes, we are walking through lots of dried cow patties.

So even on a harsh site like this one, there are livestock. Why?

If this area is not grazed, it just really grasses over to the point where it's hard to walk in here because you can't see the rocks.

But I thought the whole point was that serpentine soils, keep the grasses away. What's going on here?

Well, to answer that question, might I introduce you to Stuart Weiss.

So I'm a conservation ecologist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stu has worked on a lot of issues, but he's probably best known for his work on butterflies.

I started chasing Checkerspot butterflies, the Bay Checkerspot in particular, back in 1979 When I was a freshman, and I found myself up on Jasper Ridge biological preserve with a butterfly net in hand, chasing butterflies through incredible

And butterflies aren't just a pretty face. They're a serious business.

Yeah, I consider them to be a pretty strong indicator of the state of an ecosystem because the vast majority of diversity is in the insect world. And butterflies are our window into the insect world because they're large, they're easy to tell apart... most of the time.

So Stu is out there, chasing rare butterflies and studying their ecology, which is challenging because butterfly populations are super dynamic.

The volatility of these butterfly populations is really a function of very high reproductive output, and really high mortality. So when part of the population is doing well another part may be doing really poorly. But then a few years later, it will switch.

There are these really strong fluctuations across landscapes based on things like topography, and vegetation, connectivity, all of these different factors. Anyway, one of Stu's subjects is the Bay Checkerspot butterfly, which today is really endangered.

And I would venture to guess that the Bay Checkerspot may at one point have been one of the most common butterflies in the grasslands in the Bay Area. And then suddenly, you get this massive transformation and it's now isolated on these serpentinite outcrops. Then those, especially on the San Francisco peninsula, they get progressively developed. So now we're looking at like remnants of remnants.

So... Bay Checkerspots are now just in a few places.

And one of those places is Tulare Hill. You really only find them on serpentinite sites these days, because that's where their host plants live.

Plantago erecta, which is the most important plant in the world, believe it or not.

Is that a fact?

Well, the jury is still out. But I do have to admit they're kind of cute.

Is this a plantain?

Yeah, it's a plantain. Christal showed me some in the field.

It's actually kind of hard to tell what we're looking at this time of year. To me this almost looks like a little bit of like the fake lawn, you know the little astroturm or something — these little tiny short guys, but this isn't grass. Some of this is Plantago erecta. So that is California dwarf plantain. That is the host plant of the Bay Checkerspot butterfly. And so you can see where grass... a non-native annual grass you know can easily be as tall as your

Mendel, these guys are real small, like itsy bitsy, teeny tiny plants.

Why would this butterfly choose such a tiny plant as a host?

So Bay Checkerspot butterflies are incredibly specialized. So they want to eat the Plantago erecta and some similar species that have iridoid glycosides in them

Iridoid... glycosides.

Yeah, the iridoid glycosides. They accumulate them in their in their body and they make them taste bad, basically.

Okay. Are you up for a bit of butterfly biology?

Is that a real question?

That's, uh...

Of course I am!

Okay,so in California, we have a kind of weirdly inverted seasonal calendar, where our kind of winter rainy season is when things start to germinate. Christal and I were standing on Tulare Hill in mid December.

So right now, when things start to germinate, that's sort of a cue to the caterpillars. The caterpillars have been in a dormant stage called diapause — over that long, hot, dry summer, they've got nothing to eat.

And like clockwork, they're coming out of dormancy.

So they're going to be coming up waking up and starting to eat this plantain that's all over the place. They're tiny. They're probably a quarter inch long, maybe. Little blackish gray buddies

With orange spots on them.

They're just absorbing all that heat with their little black bodies. And then the orange spots are kind of a little bit of a warning coloration like "hey, birds"

"I taste bad. Don't eat me."

"I can lay out here I can actually bask in the sun in full view of the world." It's a huge advantage for them to be able to just lay out and get the sun. You know, they're Californians — they're working on their tan, and they're enjoying the sun.

Aw...

And their job right now is just be the Hungry Caterpillar and eat as much as they can bask in the sun just really absorb that energy.

And so they eat and they grow, and they eat, and they grow. And eventually they get fat enough, hopefully, to form a chrysalis.

And they'll do that right on the ground or kind of in some vegetation.

Once they break out of that chrysalis, they're full fledged butterfly adults. And immediately, first thing they do when they are adults, can you guess?

Uh... they buy alcohol?

No silly, they mate immediately!

Oh of course.

And then of course, the females lay the eggs in a big clump.

Which is interesting, because some species will do it one at a time. But these will do it in a big clump of you know, like maybe a couple hundred eggs even, right off the bat.

And that's it, they've gotten it out of the way. Now they can just fly around for a few days until they die.

They only live about a week, maybe 10 days as an adult butterfly.

It's kind of funny that we call them butterflies when they're actually just caterpillars most of their life.

I know, right?

So then what happens?

So they lay the eggs. The eggs, again, take probably another week to 10 days or something to hatch, and then the race is on. So at this point, things are generally starting to dry up. And probably about 99% of them are going to die of starvation. It's crazy. But again, if you're putting out a few 100 eggs, you know, they can't all survive, or we'd have too many Bay Checkerspot butterflies.

And if they're lucky, they can eat enough vegetation before everything dries out to survive the summer, through dormancy — diapause

They get in little cracks, might be under a rock, something like that. They're just sort of on the soil and they just kind of shut down and they wait for it to rain like about the timer and now or things start to green up and the plantago starts germinating and something there signals them — it's time to get up start eating and laying the sun.

And then the cycle starts all over again.

Okay, so this little endangered butterfly, which is actually really mostly a caterpillar is super reliant on this tiny little native plantain, and therefore the open serpentinite sites on which it grows.

Yes. And of course, the butterflies are just one of many species reliant on sites like these. Just on my visit, we saw several endangered plants, a jackrabbit, raptors, and also signs of other inhabitants.

You and I both know there's a ton of wildlife living in there, like you said, birds, there's insects, there's mammals, all kinds of things live in grasslands.

So sites like these are super important for biodiversity. But butterflies are a key indicator. And back in the 1980s, Stu started noticing something strange and kind of alarming.

I've been working on some of these populations for nearly 40 years now, so I've seen the booms and busts. We have a good fix on the historical range of variability. But then we saw these changes in the habitat when the livestock — the cattle grazing — was removed. Suddenly, the field of wildflowers over the course of a couple of years turned into a... just a sea of non-native annual grass. And the populations just nosedived or went extinct in areas that weren't being grazed.

Grass.... growing on serpentinite... Why? How?

We will get to that, right after the break.

Hey, me again. If you're listening to Future Ecologies, and well, here you are, I'd bet that sustainability is something that matters to you. And more than that, you've probably asked yourself, "what does that word sustainable mean, anyhow? How do we get there? What's my part in it?" You know, the big questions. Questions that, as we're discovering in this series, and in all of our episodes, have answers with no shortage of nuance, or complexity. And that's exactly

Okay, Adam

Mendel. This is Future Ecologies. And we're about to find out why introduced grasses started growing on serpentine soils in California, putting all the rare species that have been surviving in these little refugia at risk.

Yeah. And there's actually a pretty simple answer, but Stu wasn't able to make the connection until the early 90s When he learned about something called dry nitrogen deposition.

And it was suddenly like, Oh, now I know what's going on. You know, like a proverbial light bulb. Took about five years to learn enough about nitrogen. The nitrogen cycle is like the most fiendishly complex part of biogeochemistry. But after about five years, I've published a paper called "Cars, Cows and Checkerspot Butterflies".

And this paper, "Cars, Cows and Checkerspot Butterflies", has become a bit of a classic in the field of ecology. The gist of it is that, and I don't know if you know this, Mendel, California is known for its car culture.

Oh really?

And as a result for air pollution. And many of those pollutants contain nitrogen, which eventually settles out onto the land.

Smog is fertilizer, it acts as nitrogen fertilizer on ecosystems exposed to it. For about a decade, I've been staring at this brown cloud over the southern part of Silicon Valley, that was all blowing towards me on the prevailing winds. We start dumping large amounts of nitrogen on these habitats, you know, on the order of 10 to 20 pounds per acre, or kilograms per hectare, per year. And we do it for decades, the nitrogen limitation of the soils just goes away. And the grasses invade.

The nitrogen in the air pollution is fertilizing the grasses. But I thought air pollution causes acid rain. What is dry nitrogen deposition?

I mean, to simplify things dramatically, basically, acid rain is when nitrogen or sulfuric compounds are deposited on land through rain. So when it's wet, and then dry deposition is when they settle out in particulate matter... when it's dry. Dry deposition also includes absorption of gases on the surfaces and directly into the leaves of plants through their stomata. So California is mostly dry, we have mostly dry deposition.

You know, I've been trying for a few decades now to kind of get the nitrogen deposition on the map for biodiversity conservation. And it's been like really hard. It's the biggest global environmental change that very few people are talking about. So the nitrogen cycle is more disrupted than the carbon cycle.

And by the way, the implications of nitrogen deposition go way beyond grass and butterflies. In addition to this kind of terrestrial eutrophication, Stu points to coastal dead zones and major health impacts, both direct and indirect.

But in one sense, we're more addicted to using large amounts of nitrogen than we are using fossil fuel because we have to feed the planet, which requires large amounts of nitrogen for high intensity agriculture.

Curse you, Fritz Haber!

I mean, this is probably far from the worst thing that Fritz Haber did, but it still does have lots of consequences. For example, I have super terrible grass allergies, and so do a lot of other folks.

Even in non-serpentine grasslands, the nitrogen deposition makes the grass grow a lot more. Annual grasses love nitrogen. Well increased grass growth means you're gonna have a lot more grass pollen in the air. And the biggest allergy problem in California is annual grass pollen. So you think about the billions of dollars of direct cost, morbidity, some cases and maybe even mortality just from respiratory distress, but then simply the unquantifiable amount

So for everything from allergies to ocean dead zones, nitrogen is the culprit.

Guilty as charged. And on California's serpentinite soils, it allows grasses to move right on in.

You need some way of cropping the grasses keeping them from taking over. And that's where the cows come in. They don't go after the wildflowers unless there's no grass around. And they're quite good at it.

So back in the 1980s, when cows were bad, and lots of land managers were pulling them off of public lands, it revealed a problem that no one had been paying attention to.

We sort of took the empirical observation that "Oh, when we remove the cattle, we get the grasses coming in," then found the driver of that from the smog.

So in the last episode, when Clayton and Lynn were talking about how we really only realized all of the benefits of cattle grazing for conservation in California, after we lost them, they were referring to situations just like this.

Just like this one.

Yeah, there's been this huge turn around with the majority of the conservation community. With regard to cattle grazing. We saw the consequences of pulling the cattle off of this novel California annual grassland ecosystem that's just like a mix of native and non native species, the non native species are now naturalized and they're not going away. So we have to manage them. So we saw the consequences of the no grazing paradigm. And it doesn't work.

Okay, doing nothing doesn't work. But we do have tools other than grazing.

We do. And I did push them on this. Like, aren't there other ways to remove these grasses that don't involve livestock?

The big three I feel like people talk about in managing grasslands are going to be grazing, fire and mowing. And it's... whichever site you're on, you know, one is gonna make more sense than the other. It's really hard to burn here. Just logistically we have... nobody, nobody wants their house burned down.

So prescribed fire, while it can work really well, it's pretty challenging in urban area, right? As we discussed in the last episode, because people are both super sensitive about fire risk, and also about air quality.

That's kind of ironic, given that it's air pollution that's causing the problems in the first place.

It sure is. So prescribed fire is just not going to happen on this site, and mowing. Well, Christal and Stu actually do mow some of their sites.

Woof! You know, you wouldn't want to mow this 300 acres, super steep, rocky area. You're making a frowny face there, like, it would just it just wouldn't happen. Like if you... just it would be... to make it happen would be, you know, an enormous amount of money.

And, you know, working for a small conservation organization, I can tell you just how compelling those economic incentives can sometimes be.

There's an economic incentive to have cattle, somebody's making money off of raising cattle. A lot of these sites the grazer actually pays to have their cattle on here versus if I wanted somebody to mow this. They're not gonna pay me to mow this. So it's just it's great for us, who are these Bay Checkerspot butterfly biologists — we're like "this is the perfect tool" because these cows just really want the grass and they don't want the specific Bay Checkerspot plants.

Which from this perspective makes cows even better than fire or mowing, because they're more selective.

That makes practical sense. But, like, really, let's be honest here. Can cows be a substitute for a natural process like fire?

That is the million dollar question. And you know, I asked the rangelands, folks, and they told me, "yes, not a perfect substitute. But yes." And, you know, the reason I first got interested in Tulare Hill, is that there was a wildfire there in 2004 and It burned through both grazed and ungrazed areas on the site that Christal and Stu and others were actively studying.

Huh! Okay, so it was like a natural experiment?

Yeah.

What did they find?

We saw fire results that were very good. We see, you know, the grazing results are very good. And when I say very good, we have lower non-native annual grass cover. We're generally wanting to shift from grasses to forbs — to the wildflowers. And you know, the grazing, the burning the mowing will do that. So it's kind of a matter of how long is that effect going to last? Can you... Can you do this every year? Can you afford to do it every year?

To summarize, both the wildfire and the grazing had similar positive impacts on the site. But those impacts were ephemeral. They just didn't last. The grasses would creep back in to dominate after a couple of years, it was only in the areas that were continuously grazed after the fire, that the effects were lasting. I mean, you'd have to burn once every year or two to substitute for the cows, and both Stu and Christal feel that that's just not possible for this site.

You know, we get this great result for a couple of years, but then the grasses just come roaring back unless you have the cattle on there. And it might be changing, but the ability to consistently pull off prescribed burns at the right frequency to manage habitats. That is so far from the current situation.

And apparently Bay Area firefighters are really type A about putting wildfires out, even when land managers are literally begging them to have a lighter touch.

They bring in the air tankers. And the air tankers are dropping diammonium phosphate, which is like the ultimate fertilizer for something like serpentine grassland.

They bring in the air tankers. And the air tankers are dropping diammonium phosphate, which is like the ultimate fertilizer for something like serpentine grassland. Oh, whoa... so in putting up the wildfire, the firefighters are just dumping fuel on the other fire, which is the introduced grasses.

Yes, if fuel was fertilizer, that is exactly what they're doing.

Okay, so fire is great. But we're back to grazing.

Yeah, I just... I don't know, any method that can work at a landscape scale to keep the annual grasses in check, other than cattle grazing.

So we might say that Tulare Hill is a sort of poster child for using cows in conservation — in California, at least. But it's also the poster child for something else, because it put a new spotlight on nitrogen pollution.

Back in 1999, just when the paper was in press, there was a proposal for a 600 megawatt gas fired power plant just right next to Tulare Hill.

A gas fired power plant... that means even more nitrogen!

Yeah, speaking of adding fuel to the fire. And after some public criticism, the company behind the power plant proposal decided to develop a mitigation plan. And they ended up hiring Stu to help.

I wanted to establish a precedent for mitigating for the nitrogen deposition. They wanted to set a precedent of "we can actually build a new modern, gas fired power plant in California." This was the first one that had been proposed in decades.

And there it was, at the base of Tulare Hill.

We're on the Metcalf Energy Center Ecological Preserve.

Is that what that is?

That is the Metcalf Energy Center right there. It's a 20 year old plant. It is a natural gas plant. What is interesting about this plant is this is the first that had to mitigate for its nitrogen impacts. That power plant is down in the valley on the rich soil. It's not wrecking the... it's not physically on the serpentine. It's not, you know, like a bunch of condos on the Serpentine. But it's still impacting something next to it. And that set the precedent for

Oh, she calls it "the plug" because it's kind of at the bottom of a funnel of these mountain ranges... catching all of the nitrogen coming from all of the air pollution from the entire Bay Area.

Bingo.

The prevailing winds pretty much come down from San Francisco, they go through the Gate, they take a right hand turn down the San Francisco Bay, and then they kind of get blocked right here, because this is that little stepping stone, that little tight spot between these two mountain ranges. Everything kind of just halts a little bit here. So this site gets a lot more of the nitrogen pollution than a lot of other sites regionally.

Hence, the plug. And the precedent set by this rocky little hill has translated into hundreds of millions of dollars of mitigation funding for conservation in the Bay Area. And it helped spur the creation of the Santa Clara Valley Habitat Conservation Plan.

That's gonna target 42,000 acres, of which about 12,000 is Serpentine grassland and Bay Checkerspot. Rest of the land base is for California Red Legged frogs, California Tiger Salamanders. There's like 19 species that are covered under the plan.

Yeah, and we can all have our nice city and our big economy and all our businesses, and still have, you know, open space and a lot of conservation and all these rare species that we're so interested in.

So today, Tulare Hill is protected by a mix of public and private landowners, and managed for conservation and mitigation. But the nitrogen hasn't stopped falling from the sky.

Forecast today, same as yesterday — 100% chance of nitrogen

This whole question about mitigation and cows, really begs the question of... is this just a bandaid for all the other things that are going wrong? Or is it actually a way to deal with the root problem?

I mean, what I hear from Christal there is this sort of articulation of kind of like status quo environmentalism. And I feel about this statement, kind of like how I feel about the use of cows and conservation in general, right? It sort of is a comfortable idea that we can have our status quo way of doing things, we can have our status quo economy, we can have our status quo land management vis a

And then on the flip side, maybe it's simply the most practical way of dealing with the situation that we have under the condition of a really urbanized space with lots of cars, and lots of people, and lots of... lots of impacts.

Maybe, Mendel... maybe. I'm a... I'm a strong maybe.

Well, okay, I guess now that now that we've got the weeds out of the way, and it turns out, the cows are eating all of them. I'd say it's time we get to those thorns, shall we?

Yes. For all of you anxious listeners who have been suffering through over 90 minutes of pro-cow content at this point, I think it is time to take the bull by the horns. Or maybe to take the bull by the thorns?

Ok ok ok, before you go any further, I think we have to talk a little more about the elephant sized cow in the room.

What do you mean?

We kicked off this series with the preface that livestock agriculture emits greenhouse gas and results in deforestation and that we should all collectively eat less meat.

Yes, those are the facts that I was hoping would frame this conversation. And, you know, I want to reiterate that, in this series, I'm looking at a pretty narrow topic, which is the benefits and the drawbacks of small ranchers grazing livestock on public conservation lands — that are already open ecosystems, critically

Yeah.

And even within this discussion, obviously, there is a lot of disagreement.

I get you have a more narrow focus with that, but I think it is important that we take those starting facts and put a little bit more meat on those bones.

Sure, yeah. Okay, let's do it.

So just the hard numbers — livestock agriculture, globally, accounts for about 14 and a half percent of all human caused greenhouse gas emissions.

That sounds about right. Although the number might vary a bit depending on what you're including.

Right, and cattle for beef and dairy account for 60% of that total.

Sixty percent!

About half of those emissions are related to feed production, deforestation, and transportation.

In other words, all the carbon associated with clearing land for cattle, and growing and shipping crops to support them.

Yeah.

And most of that land clearing is happening in South America, by the way.

The other half of those emissions are attributed to enteric fermentation.

Cow burps, the side effect of the rumen.

And from manure management.

Right, there are problems at both ends.

To say the least. So just to put this all in perspective, beef requires about 20 times as much land and produces about 20 times as much greenhouse gas as an equivalent plant protein.

Right, which just underlines the point that most of us should be eating less meat, and especially less beef.

Definitely. And it's about to get even thornier because we've been exclusively discussing grass fed, or free range livestock.

Actually, that's that's not entirely the case, Mendel.

Uh...?

This gets complicated, but most beef cows in North America are raised on pasture for some portion of their life, and then finished on grain, often on a feedlot. When you're picturing, you know, like industrial agriculture, that's what you're picturing.

Yeah.

Beef that are sold as grass fed, comes from cows that live out their entire lives on the ranch, but that's not very common. Clayton's ranch, for example, advertises itself as grass fed, and grain finished. So it's not as if ranchers who graze their livestock on conservation lands are exclusively grass finished. Some are and some aren't. Some of these cows are destined for the feedlot.

How do grass and grain finishing stack up in terms of climate?

That is a very complicated question. My understanding is that grain finished cattle mature faster, and get bigger faster, and so require less pasture. And that means that proponents often claim that they produce less

Yeah, classic. Intensifying production will create efficiencies in some places, while also concentrating and exacerbating the problems in others.

And you really do have people making arguments in both directions. You know, people arguing that intensive feedlot associated cattle production is better for the climate and people arguing the exact opposite based on the data available. And then of course, you have to take into account the climate opportunity cost of devoting farmland and rangeland to livestock production, which is something that I'm planning on covering in depth in the next episode, by the way.

Hmmm well that's good. But I guess what I'm saying is that we actually need to be taking the climate crisis into account even just within this narrow discussion.

Okay.

Well, because we've heard arguments that livestock can help fight climate change by preventing wildfires and promoting soil carbon sequestration. But the reality is that it's just hard to quantify those benefits or be certain that they are lasting.

Right in carbon lingo you would say that it's hard to guarantee their additionality and permanence. But

But we can quantify the climate impacts of cattle. And they are massive, we just have to reduce the emissions associated with livestock agriculture in order to mitigate climate disaster. And that's not going to happen just through intensification or feeding cows seaweed. There just need to be fewer cows, period. Yeah. And just because you see some happy looking cows grazing in a nice oak woodland, doesn't mean they aren't part of that problem.

We are on the same page. Also, Mendel speaking of happy cows, we haven't even touched on the issue of animal cruelty within industrial agriculture.

Right. Yeah, that's... that's a whole other issue. And no doubt there's a seriously dark side to all meat production

And feeding cows grass doesn't necessarily sidestep it. All of the cattle that we're talking about whether grass fed, or grain finished, are destined for the slaughterhouse.

Yeah, that's an unavoidable reality.

And that's because cows aren't native to North America, they are only here because we find them useful and tasty. So as long as most humans remain omnivorous and like to eat beef, I think that it is fair to assume that the best life that a cow can hope to have in this part of the world, at this point in time, is living in herds on public conservation lands.

At least relative to the typical alternative.

Yes.

Okay. Well, well, those are the big thorns in the background of all of this. Maybe now we zoom back to just the negative impacts that livestock can have on the land itself.

Yes, let us get back to the incredibly complex and controversial conversation I was intending to have with this series.

Yes, please.

Frankly, the list of impacts that cattle have on the landscape is long. There's soil compaction, erosion, destruction of riparian areas, grazing on desirable species, spreading weeds, and undesirable species, water quality issues associated with manure runoff, and preventing other wildlife from using the landscape, either due to their physical presence, or the fencing or hunting that often accompanies their presence on the landscape.

What do the rangeland people have to say about it?

Well, among the rangelands folk that I spoke to, there were some common refrains. For example, "no solution is a silver bullet," right? Here's Stu again.

Everybody always wants there to be like, "Oh, here's the perfect solution that has all positive impacts and no negative impacts. And that applies everywhere." And it's like, it just doesn't work that way.

And when I asked Lynn and Clayton from the last episode, they did admit to some of these downsides. But they framed them as mostly having occurred in the past.

Oh, it could have been previously damaged by livestock. You know, at some point, there were too many in the state as a whole. Because after the gold rush, everybody left, leaving these herds of cattle that in brought in to feed miners, you know, behind. So we had kind of an excessive number.

During the 60s and 70s and 80s, there was probably some grazing practices that went on that weren't necessarily beneficial — Potential damage to riparian corridors, to some aquatic habitat. There was probably some overstocking. I prefer to use the term overstocking as opposed to overgrazing because it's, you know, poor management practices by the operator. He had too many cattle on the property.

As far as admissions of downsides go, I have to say that those are pretty weak. I mean, can you seriously say that cattle haven't still been overstocked in some places or allowed to overgraze more than occasionally since the 70s. I mean, let alone the gold rush.

I tend to agree with you. From my perspective, both Lynn and Clayton are waving away ongoing issues that, you know, are pretty apparent. But I suspect that it's because they're sensitive to the fact that cows still have a bad reputation in many environmental circles, you know, myself case in point. Despite the benefits that, you know, folks like Lynn have spent their careers demonstrating.

Yeah, no doubt, they're touchy about it.

It's understandable. The other thing that all of the rangelands proponents I spoke to told me is that almost all of the downsides I just listed, are result of bad management. And that well managed cattle can provide pretty much all the benefits that we've been discussing, while also mitigating away most of the negative impacts. They also emphasized that not all cattle grazing has a conservation benefit. So whether the benefits outweigh the costs

A lot of people really, you know, "cows are bad." And it's like, well, it's not... it's not that simple. So I mean, cows change vegetation. So how are they changing it? Are they changing it in a way that's helpful for, you know, what you want for the biodiversity there? Or are they not? And that's really specific to the site?

And here's Lynn again.

Well, I think we need to realize that the future ecology is one of increasing trade offs. I really believe that. I've seen that all this time. Cattle or sheep or goats, all of those things, they're not to blame, right for anything that they do that really is damaging. They are subject to the management of people. And one of the reasons why managers value them is because you can graze them some places and not graze them others, you can take them off and they're causing trouble.

So one could manage, for example, to reduce soil compaction.

So much of that, I think, is stocking rates and seasonal use.

And you can reduce the pressure on riparian areas.

Well, with riparian zones... fence them off, and allow occasional grazing. Because sometimes it's good to muss up the ecosystem a little bit every once in a while, but try to avoid having the cows just hanging out in the riparian zones.

And, of course, Lynn told me, the key to all of this is monitoring,

To monitor, and then adapt. If your monitoring shows that grazing is doing bad stuff... I hate to say bad, I don't mean bad. If grazing is doing what you don't want, or protection is doing what you don't want, or fire is doing what you don't want, change it or stop it. You know, that's what we do.

Okay, to recap, cows are not inherently bad for landscapes. But poor management will definitely create negative impacts. Good management can mitigate those impacts, especially if you monitor carefully and adjust in response to any issues that arise.

That is the resounding argument that I heard from the rangelands folks. And you know, from what I saw, Tulare Hill is a good example of a place where cows might actually be the best tool for the job.

So good management is... good.

Amazing, right?

Yeah, I smell a Pulitzer. But there's no denying that there are places suffering the consequences of bad cattle management. What about all of those areas?

Well, in the next episode, I'm going to tell you exactly what I think about those areas. And beyond the areas where management is clearly poor, of which there are many, I'm also not willing to concede the argument that good management can sufficiently mitigate away all the negative impacts we've been discussing.

Adam, you've got me all mixed up here. On the one hand, we've been talking about all the ways that thoughtful land managers are learning how to use cows to help wildflowers and birds and amphibians and butterflies, basically, entire ecosystems. And then on the other hand, there's land conversion, and over grazing and erosion, and the climate, and industrial ag. Plus what sounds like it might be a whole heap of other issues we're going to learn about next time.

Are you not feeling particularly at home on the rangelands?

No! Not at all. I live in a basement apartment in the city.

That's fair. And you know, I live on an island covered in Douglas Fir trees. So here's what we'll do. Before we continue, I want to share one piece of my conversation with Ashley, that changed the way that I look at land that has been obviously damaged by livestock, the bad management areas. To be honest, she has seen a lot more of that kind of land than either of us have.

So, I guess I look at public land a little differently than when I lived in Seattle and wanted to come out and mountain bike on the weekend. Now, if I ride through a place where yeah, there's some cow patties around. I think, Gosh, I'm sure this rancher is pretty glad that he or she can have their cows out here. I wonder how many head they have. I wonder what their profit margins are? I wonder where they

What Ashley reminded me of here is that most ranchers do have the know how and the desire to keep their lands healthy, so that their businesses can continue to thrive. It's if nothing else, personal self interest. So if you're keeping that in mind, you do start to ask different questions about why some rangelands are so clearly hurting.

When you see land getting trashed. That is a symptom of something that is out of balance, a system that is out of balance, not just the ecosystem, the human system. That rancher is... is not doing well. And they're not dopes right, like they know they need that grass to grow back. If you let a cow eat it down to the nubs, that plant dies and then you have a dust pasture. Like, they know that. So when people depend on the land to make a living, they are not

I don't want to be callous in the face of suffering, but you know... part of me wants to ask. "So what?" You know, if they're going through problems, maybe personal ones or economic ones? Does that make it okay for them to pass along? All of that pain to the land? Does it make it okay for them to be bad stewards of shared spaces?

No, it doesn't. I think that Ashley's point is that when we see damage occurring on rangelands, the causes are complex and systemic and also sometimes human. So even as we're making our critiques, it's important to resist jumping to conclusions.

But that's the hard thing is like, I don't deny anything that you're saying or that people see when they go out on public lands. It's just there's always more to the story, right? There's always more there's always another angle. I think that's how I live my life is like that feeling of like, I'm missing something. What am I missing? What is the other layer here? Like what are the other factors that are at play here? How do I understand them? How do I help other people understand them?

Well, Adam, I appreciate you bringing us a compassionate way to think about these issues. And, you know, a good place to wrap it up for today. But next episode, let's take the gloves off, shall we?

Oh, we shall. We shall talk until the cows come home. We shall not be cowed.

Until then. Remember, only you can keep nitrogen out of the atmosphere.

Yes, and also...

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey.

But cows...

Cows eat grass. And for that at least, they have our thanks

This episode of Future Ecologies features the voices of Ashley Ahern, Christal Niederer, Stuart Weiss, Lynn Huntsinger, and Clayton Koopman, music by Saltwater Hank, Thumbug, C. Diab, Meg Iredale, and Sunfish Moon Light, cover art by Ale Silva, and was produced by Adam Huggins and me, Mendel Skulski, with sound design help from our intern, Brennen King. You can find citations, a transcript of this episode, and