After having relieved ourselves of the burden of caring for livestock, we are free to load up the horses, lock the gate, and leave for our private "horse camp" in the middle of the Oregon high desert.
In the process of evolving to this state of freedom, I thought I had abandoned my keen interest in soils and grasses, until having to purchase hay from the Oregon high desert made me realize that the health of my horses continues to center around growing mineral rich, low carbohydrate hay for them. Our haying weather was particularly bad this year and spoiled our crop. We have some management issues to tweak on hay growing, but in general, I thought my "research" had come to an end, since we were no longer grazing ruminants.
Things changed when I got to looking closely at our newly relocated campsite on our ten acres.
This year we relocated the "home site" to a somewhat more picturesque and secluded spot on the ten acres (which is located at 3900 ft elevation and receives about 10 inches of rain per year.)
The new site overlooks this dry stream bed (left side). This streambed is heavily forested with large juniper trees, giving the feeling of being in a more alpine setting when looking west (to the right). To the south are high buttes (soon to be populated with wind turbines). The east view is especially beautiful on a full moon night, watching the moon rise over the buttes and struggle through the juniper tops.
After a hard week of preparation and a long drive, I was really disappointed when I laid eyes on the place this trip. It looked decidedly bleak. Once we had the horses settled in, we drove up to the old site to fetch water from the cistern. I looked around at where the horses had been before and I thought, gee, it's so pretty here! Why did we think the new site was better?
The difference became evident as we made our way around the new site. We'd never really explored this part of the property before. The ground is literally covered with dead and dying sagebrush. It gets about 18" tall then begins to die from the outside in. The dead branches simply fall over and never go away until a fire consumes them.
This stuff is EVERYWHERE. It is like trying to walk through piles of deer antlers, grabbing and snagging your pantlegs and tripping you.
Here is a healthy little sage bush. These more robust plants are extremely scarce.
This area was once an epic grassland before overgrazing destroyed the fragile, sandy ecology of the area. Opportunistic sagebrush and junipers now create a vast sea of water guzzling scrub. I learned after I got home that the decaying leaves of sagebrush release a toxin to other plants, preventing them from becoming established.
Most of the blame is laid on the juniper trees. But wherever people have limbed up their junipers and eradicated the brush, the grasses seem to thrive. Unfortunately, much of the grass is non-native cheat grass, which forms seed awns which penetrate the gums and other tissues of grazing animals. How can the natives re-establish if they have been gone for over a century?
I began to think I was witnessing a terminal event. There is sagebrush every, but it is very short and most of it is in the process of dying. It seems to be a model of over-competition.
The soil here is very fragile, consisting mostly of sand. Even in this environment of clump grasses, dying sage and random rabbit brush, there is a vast network of filamentous roots just beneath the surface of the soil, waiting to capture every drop of moisture before another root can seize it first. The desert perennials, such as sagebrush and juniper trees, fill the sandy soil with these moisture robbing roots, dominating the landscape, and by various other survival mechanisms, assure that grass won't be sharing the landscape.
The juniper trees lining our streambed are enormous by juniper standards. If one considers the hundreds, perhaps thousands of junipers that have tapped into this resource all the way to the stream's source, one wonders just how much wateflow one could restore to this stream if the robber-baron junipers were brought to heel.
All of a sudden I have a whole new fascination for exploring rangeland rehabilitation on our tiny parcel, beginning with the area around the campsite.
The BLM, which owns much of the sourrounding land, attempts to restore grassland by simply cutting down the juniper trees.
I wonder if they think that native grass, which hasn't graced the landscape for over 100 years, is going to spontaneously regenrate just because they've eliminated the main water guzzler. Now that we know that sagebrush is toxic to other plant life...well, I do not know the BLM's policies well enough to really criticize them.
However I have noticed that where there is disturbed ground, such as along the sides of the roads, non-native species such as Russian thistle are invading. Most of the invaders are noxious.
One thing that is missing from the holistic view of reclamation is intelligent and timely animal pressure. In earlier times, brush was kept at bay by fire in this region, both naturally set and artificially managed by native peoples. Now 100% fire suppression is the goal. If fire is no longer a grassland tool, perhaps something can be learned from managed grazing models.
Here is a picture of a clump of grass that looks fairly successful.
Observe that the dry grass is standing, and will stand, until it finally oxidizes, breaks off and blows away. there is nothing to push this "decadent" dry grass down into contact with the soil, where it could decompse. Rather it is dessicated - preserved above ground - where it has no hope of becoming humus, or being enhanced by being cycled through a ruminant's digestive system.
As it lives out its life in an unbalanced ecosystem, it begins to die from the inside of the crown outward.
Here is a picture of an end-stage grass clump. You can see some golden stems around the outside edges of the crown, while the center is all gray and dead. These crowns literally turn to dust when you drive a mattock into the middle.
According to Allan Savory, who devotes his life to ending the desertification of the world, and the major forces in the grazing world, clump grasses like this benefit from carefully applied animal pressure. The sharp hoof chips and breaks up the clump, forcing it to create new growing points. This revitalizes the clump and helps to keep it spreading and healthy. The hoof also pushes the decadent, dry material into the ground, where it can be properly digested by microbes. The third benefit is the processing of the plant material through the ruminant digestive system.
In this environment, however, the manure simply stays on the surface and oxidizes. It is virtually permanently preserved. The manure must also be pushed into the ground by the hoof. This is the synergy of the massive buffalo herds in the plains. Obviously this is not possible here as there are no giant migrating herds, and the rain is so sparse.
But what can I do with my own "grazing herd" (two horses) and rotational grazing on our occasional visits. I aim to find out. I certainly have nothing to lose by playing with it.
The horses occupy a modest sized corral. I clean it up daily and stack the manure for composting as best I can. Two horses produce a wheelbarrow full per day.
I have been wondering what would happen if I buried it just under the surface, wherever it lands. It would be out of the dessicating rays of the sun, in contact with the soil microbes, and be occasionally mixed with the sand by hoof impact. There are no earthworms to pull it underground. It takes about two seconds to shovel a hole in the sand large enough for a pile of horse manure.
Our plan for the future is to fence off areas for the horses to graze for appropriate amounts of time each day, which will depend on the impact to the existing grasses. In about five days in the new corral, the horses had completely recycled all the decadent grass, and successfully broken up many dying grass crowns. The corral is a sacrifice area - the real work will be in the rotational paddocks.
I collected a soil sample for analysis. I doubt we can do much with balancing soil chemistry out there, because there is little hope of incorporating amendments, but there may be some clues as to what we can do to encourage native grasses. We will also be re-seeding with native grass and wildflower seeds.
We have a tremendous amount of cleanup of dead sage brush, for fire suppression as well as a step in creating a meadow, and will start with the area around the camp site. It's going to be a long, cold winter, but a whole new ecology awaits discovery. I can barely wait to get started!
