Eastward view from Bennett Ridge showing new growth following the 2017 Nuns Fire. The foreground shows a recently grazed area.
The following is an interview with Sarah Keiser. Sarah runs Wild Oat Hollow in Penngrove, California, and helps communities throughout Sonoma County start their own grazing cooperatives. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. An audio version of the interview is also available.
“We need to change the way we practice land stewardship.”
Sarah Keiser on Sonoma’s LandSmart™ Grazing program, community grazing cooperatives, and collective visioning for healthy fire ecosystems.
An Introduction to Prescribed Grazing
CC: For people who may not know, can you explain what prescribed grazing is and how it works?
SK: In prescribed grazing, you control the number of animals in a certain zone and move them around so that you get appropriate impact to achieve your goals; ecological goals, vegetation management goals, fire fuel load reduction goals. This follows historical patterns of grazing, where ruminants and ungulates were very tightly packed due to predation as they moved across and heavily impacted landscapes. But then there would be a year of rest, and you’d see this huge bloom in recovery. Impact with rest is the critical piece for prescribed grazing with the goal of fire fuel reduction.
CC: How does prescribed grazing compare to other types of fire fuels reduction?
SK: Besides grazing, the closest tool is “good fire” – prescribed fire, cultural burns – because you’re actually consuming the vegetation. With mechanized weed whacking and mowing, you’re just cutting and leaving the dry browse. But animals and good fire will actually consume that vegetation, transform it, and leave nutrition on the soil. Grazing and fire have commingled forever. Together, they do a beautiful job of removing the “ladder fuels” because one problem is when the fire goes from the land into the trees. That’s what turns a good fire into a devastating wildfire.
CC: Your work has been supported by the LandSmart™ grazing program. Could you tell us more about the program?
SK: The LandSmart™ Grazing program was started by two Sonoma County Resource Conservation Districts – Sonoma Resource Conservation District and Goldridge Resource Conservation District. It started in 2017 when we had our first really big wildfires and was first funded through PG&E settlement funds allocated to vegetation management. The program facilitates prescribed grazing by reimbursing landowners for grazing done on their land and connecting them to local graziers. The RCDs brought me in when they realized there was this opportunity to fund whole communities grazing together. As we know, fires and ecosystems don’t stop at property lines. They integrated a rating system for project applications so that a group of neighbors grazing together is more likely to get funded. There’s a cattle rancher right next door to this rural residential community and all they needed was some fencing and the cows could graze in perpetuity. The program funded that fencing and now those cows can move through that community. The LandSmart™ Grazing program has grown to include public-private partnerships, bringing together preserves and parks and private landowners where really critical fire zones are grazed in perpetuity with a little bit of infrastructure support and collaborative vision building.
CC: How do you monitor the impact of LandSmart™ Grazing and where is the research headed?
SK: We are partnering with the RCDs for monitoring – not just immediately after the graze, but to understand the effects over years of grazing. Three years is the magic number when we start to see how many natives there are, how many bunch grasses, how the scotch broom has changed. It’s valuable to funders, because funders don’t want to fund something until they know what works, which is too bad. I would love to see more small pilot projects funded. Soil scientists from UC Davis are asking, “How do we look at public and private lands as ecosystems? What is an ecosystem – is it a watershed? A region?” What is the history of our landscape? What does a healthy fire ecosystem look like and what are we managing for? Is vegetation management to stop fires our goal? Or is our goal a healthy fire ecosystem where fires move across open spaces to do their job and can be stopped at infrastructure? What is a healthy ecosystem? We need to think about budgets because grazing is not cheap. But if we think in five years we don’t have as much risk, we don’t have all of this massive funding going to firefighting. Grazing isn’t cheap, but neither are burning buildings. People are losing insurance. We need to encourage our insurance commissioner to cover communities that are spending money [on grazing] year after year.
Promoting Community Grazing Cooperatives
CC: Could you tell us about one of the communities you’ve helped to start their own grazing cooperative?
SK: The Hunter Grazing Cooperative in Southeast Santa Rosa is a rural residential community. Everybody has 2-5 acres and they pass the sheep around. They have potlucks a couple times of year. Neighbors that have lived there for 20 years and never spoken are now super connected and taking care of eachother. They tan the hides and breed the sheep so that everybody gets a lamb in their freezer and has quality protein.
CC: What advice would you give to an Resource Conservation District (RCD), city, county, etc. that wants to facilitate prescribed grazing?
SK: To the RCDs: be creative about your funding [and approach]. I was just talking to the Butte County Fire Safe Council – where Paradise is. They don’t have a lot of graziers up there so I said, if you have a junior college, let’s partner with one of our graziers here and we can do a training program. To the cities: think big, start small. Look at your vegetation management budget and start with a pilot project. Bring in the right person, do community outreach and education, make sure your graze goes well and you’ll be very happy.
The Importance of Prescribed Grazing for Healthy Ecosystems
CC: CalCAN has sponsored a bill, SB 675, over the last two years to elevate and advance prescribed grazing as a wildfire solution. What are your thoughts on Senate Bill 675 (Limón)?
SK: I’m super excited about SB 675! SB 675 is going to encourage CalFire to begin funding [prescribed grazing]. [It shows that] at the state level, this is a tool that can help with our fire issues. A state policy makes that clear to everyone. So when we’re coming in with boots on the ground saying this is an applicable tool to be used, we have policy to back that up.
CC: Recent wildfires in Sonoma have catalyzed unprecedented collaboration and creativity, including a recentering of traditional ecological knowledge alongside contemporary fire and ecology expertise. What excites you about this emerging space?
SK: None of my work would have happened without the 2017 fires. This is the beauty of a changing system; it’s going to force change that would never have happened before. I tend to be a forever optimist. We have such capacity for evolution and transition. It’s opening doors and creating opportunities for collaboration and less isolation. When we have stressors, like fires or climate change, it brings people together. What we need as a community is human interaction and working together in that collaborative vision and not feeling so isolated and so self centered, because that makes people very insecure. We need interdependency, we need to bring our young people into this work, tending this forest, changing the way we talk about and do our land stewardship. I’ve learned a lot from Clint McKay and Peter Nelson. They say, “We don’t do burns to get the vegetation down, we do burns to heal our environment. We do burns because we love this land.”
Resources: LandSmart ™Grazing Program and stories of other community grazing cooperatives.
Want to support SB 675? Sign our letter to the Governor requesting he sign the bill.
