Episode 02: Ranching and Water in California
“In my lifetime, I have certainly seen a shift in when we can expect rain in the winter time. When we can expect wetter vs. drier months has changed to some extent, which has a huge impact on the amount of grass available to us.”
Dan macon
A conversation with Dr. Leslie Roche and Dan Macon about livestock, water use, drought, and ranching communities in California. Recorded April 21, 2020.
guests on the show
Dan Macon
Dan Macon is the livestock and natural resources advisor for Placer, Nevada, Sutter and Yuba Counties. Macon is also a partner in Flying Mule Sheep Company, a small-scale commercial sheep operation in Auburn, California. He holds a master’s degree in integrated resource management from Colorado State University and a bachelor’s degree in agricultural and managerial economics from UC Davis. He currently serves as president of the California Wool Growers Association and is a past president of the California-Pacific Section of the Society for Range Management. To learn more, check out his blog or find him on Twitter @flyingmulefarm.
Leslie Roche
Dr. Leslie Roche is an Assistant Cooperative Extension specialist in Rangeland Science and Management in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis. Dr. Roche completed her Ph.D. in ecology at UC Davis and was a USDA-NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Plant Sciences before joining the faculty in 2015. She works with a variety of stakeholders to integrate management expertise and applied research to address key challenges on grazing lands, including managing for multiple agricultural and ecological outcomes, as well as coping with and adapting to drought. To learn more, check out her website or find her on Twitter @UCDRange.
Transcript
Mallika Nocco
Welcome to Water talk from the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. I'm Dr. Mallika Nocco, a cooperative extension specialist in soil plant water relations and irrigation management.
Sam Sandoval
Hi, I'm Sam Sandoval. I'm a faculty and extension specialist in water resources.
Faith Kearns
And I'm Faith Kearns, the academic coordinator for the California Institute for Water Resources.
Mallika Nocco
All right, well, let's get started then. I would love if the two of you, Dan and Leslie, could provide a short introduction of who you are, and what you do.
Dan Macon
I will defer to you, Leslie, who are you?
Leslie Roche
Okay, who am I? My name is Leslie Roche, and I am a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in rangeland science and management with the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. And basically my research and extension program is at the intersection of agricultural, environmental, and social aspects of ranching and livestock production on California's rangelands and pastures.
Dan Macon
I'm Dan Macon, I am the Livestock and Natural Resources advisor for four counties in the foothills in Sacramento Valley. I cover Placer, Nevada, Sutter, and Yuba counties. And in a weak moment, also became the county director for Placer and Nevada counties as well. So I've got some administrative responsibilities. I'm also a sheep producer. We have a small scale, commercial sheep operation, just outside Auburn. So like a lot of bald guys wear several different hats and that was one of them.
Mallika Nocco
Wonderful. So do you refer to yourself as a shepherd then? Is that something that still exists? Or is that the right terminology?
Dan Macon
Yeah, I do. In the West most of us are referred to as sheep herders. But I like shepherd better and certainly I am a shepherd by avocation and farm advisor, as well. So it's nice to be both.
Mallika Nocco
Thank you so much for joining us just to get started. So, a little bit about me, I am a transplant to California from the Midwest. I thought of ranching as a very specific activity involving livestock. I just was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what a ranching operation in California is.
Leslie Roche
I guess I'll start. So there is quite a bit of diversity of how individual ranching operations are structured. And that's partially because the cattle, the landscape itself is so diverse, it's incredibly biologically diverse over space and time. And so we have a lot of these family based operations, they're third generation or more and ranching. And typically median in terms of cow calf -- a lot of what I do is coming from the cow calf perspective -- which is a typical operation structure for California and Dan of course can comment on the sheep and even goat operations.
Dan Macon
I would just add that since I am a livestock producer, as well as as an extension guy, for all of my friends that call their operations ranches, but don't have livestock, I have to tell them they're wrong.
Mallika Nocco
Okay, okay (laughing).
Dan Macon
Just to build a little bit on what Leslie said, I think one of the unique aspects of the sheep and goat business here in California, is that small ruminants can really take advantage of a wide variety of forage resources. We see a lot of sheep and goat producers that take advantage of crop residues and alfalfa stubble and grain stubble and things like that. Because we can put them in places that maybe it takes more infrastructure to run cattle. And I think that's a real unique aspect of the sheep and goat business here in California.
Mallika Nocco
What are all of the ways in which ranchers use water?
Leslie Roche
So for typical cow calf operations in California, they have 365 days a year support cows, and produce an annual calf crop. And so we think of this as the annual forage clock of supply and demand. It's how I think of things in terms of the demand of the animal and then the supply of the forage. And so typically, starting in the fall, during the dry annual range with calving, animals are grazing that dry residual forage from the previous growing season and they're just now coming into germination of new green grass with those first fall rains. Then as we move into winter and spring when we receive most of our precipitation, because this is predominantly rain fed agriculture, we get some forage growth, it's slow at first and then increasing pretty rapidly into the spring.
Then as we move into summer, we enter this dry dormant period for most of the valley and Foothill regions, and the forage kicks in and we start seeing those characteristically golden hills that California is so well known for. And this is when we see a lot of cattle moving to literally greener pastures, including irrigated pasture lands and mountain meadows. And so, as we complete the annual forage clock by end of summer, that annual calf crop is sold or it's moved to other parts of the operation depending on the structure of the operation and then those cows are moved back to dry land range.
Another way water is used in these operations is as a management tool. We use target cattle in certain areas for conservation restoration goals, things like protecting sensitive habitats or controlling invasive weeds or reducing fine fuels, using water and other distribution tools in that manner. And Dan can definitely talk more about that as it relates to the sheep and goat operations in the state.
Dan Macon
To drill down a little deeper into the small ruminant end of things. One of the advantages that we often have with small ruminants, sheep and goats, is that we can move water to them, rather than having to supply water on the landscape. And that gives us a lot of flexibility towards targeting our grazing to meet particular vegetation management goals. There's a real increase right now in using sheep and goats to reduce fuel loading and fire danger for example, and certainly that has an impact on watershed health and quality as well.
Here in the foothills, much of our water system is a remnant of the gold mining era. And so we actually irrigate the pastures that we summer our sheep on out of a canal that was actually hand dug or horse dug during the Gold Rush area and still delivers water out of the Yuba watershed into Placer County here. That's fairly typical in the northern foothills, we still have a lot of the remnants of that system that was originally developed to hydraulically mine and then was over the course of years changed into an irrigation system that that irrigated crops and pastures. I think the other issue that we see here in the foothills is that unless we can put water out on our pastures using gravity, we probably can't afford to irrigate pasture. If we've got a pump, we've got to be growing something that's higher value, and more intensively managed than irrigated pasture.
Faith Kearns
So as a follow up question, I mentioned in our first our intro episode that I often look to you for sort of these early indicators of what's happening drought wise in the state. Because, especially, early on during the 2012 to 2016 ish drought that we had, Dan, the way that I first encountered you was your blog post about the emotional toll of drought. You continued for many years to write about what it's like to experience, any given precipitation here, and the kind of anxieties that you go through around it. I'm wondering if you could just outline why it is that ranchers tend to feel those early indicators of drought and what some of the short term impacts of drought, the near term impacts of drought, are on the ranching community.
Dan Macon
Leslie outlined the typical forage calendar, which is a good place to start, I think, because we operate on these rain fed systems. And we're in a Mediterranean climate. We kind of look to that, actually, I think that we should make germination day a national holiday, on rangeland. But we look for that first three quarters to an inch of rain in the fall that's going to get the graph started and kind of relieve that dry spell and the fire danger that goes with it in the fall. But then we also need continued rain through what is typically our rainy season and that, I think, in my lifetime, certainly seen a shift in when we can expect rain in the wintertime. It seems like we've changed when we can expect wetter months versus drier months to some extent.
I think that has a huge impact on the amount of grass that we have available to us in our particular operation. We time our lambing to coincide with the onset of rapid grass growth. Our sheep will eat almost twice as much grass when they're nursing a lamb as they will when they're not lactating. And so we really want to time our whole production system around that rapid grass growth that typically starts in late February here in 2013, as you'll recall, we went through a period with no rain at all leading up to that time when we were going to lamb and so that that certainly induced a lot of anxiety for us. Having ranched through that millennial drought, I find that I have a lot more anxiety when it quits raining in the rainy season than I did then. And so these last several years, we've had a fairly good dry stretch during the course of our rainy season that all of us get a little nervous about. And I think that would not have been my approach or my feeling prior to the 2012 to 2015 drought.
Faith Kearns
You're speaking to kind of what you can learn over time. And Leslie has done, and your group has done, some interesting work on the difference between ranchers that come from multigenerational ranching families where there is knowledge passed on, versus first generation ranchers. And so Leslie, for example, as you both noted that a lot of the first generation ranchers are raising sheep and goats, and they're doing things like thinking about using grazing practices to reduce fire risk. So can you talk a little bit about what you're finding in that research about how first generation ranchers are coping with drought and climate change?
Leslie Roche
Yeah, sure. So, this was a question we had several years ago, actually, was in collaboration with a former graduate student, Kate Munden-Dixon, who was really interested in these new folks that were working on these rangelands and some of our preliminary work, we actually pulled from some cross state survey work that our group did almost 10 years ago now. And there were actually quite a few first generation ranchers that we had surveyed then and some of the results that we had were suggesting the first generation folks, compared to their multi-generational counterparts, had more limited networks, so more limited social information networks, related to agricultural and natural resources management. They had less access to resources and fewer adaptation strategies available to them, or at least the ones that were typical or traditionally used by those larger multi-generational operations. And so potentially that was pointing out that they were more vulnerable to climate and environmental change. And so this was a very concerning finding that we had.
Kate led some more recent interviews with what we call new early career, first generation ranchers so we can dig in more and what she's finding is that they may not be using some of the traditional drought management practices that we're familiar with and extension works with folks on. But what they are doing is they are trying to experiment with different ways of doing things because they really are starting from scratch. Some of those traditional drought management practices, such as setting conservative stocking rates and integrating multiple classes of animals, really aren't logistically feasible within their types of operations. And so trying to think about and develop livelihood strategies that will help them in sustaining and building their operations. And to these include things like targeted ecological restoration, grazing or integrated crop livestock production, or even diversifying their household income sources to support this livelihood that they want to pursue. And so some folks, actually quite a few, are working as livestock managers for other ranches. And they really see themselves as stewards of the land who are using grazing animals to restore watersheds and habitats. And creating these more resilient communities. That's not to say that multigenerational operators don't see themselves that way, they do as well. It's just it was really strong in these interviews.
Mallika Nocco
That is just getting at how these different communities of ranchers, whether they're first generation or they're multi generation, how are they sharing and exchanging knowledge and tools? And I'm really curious, because Dan, you started a Facebook group during the drought called the Farmer Rancher Drought Forum in 2014. And there are over 800 members in this group, and it's a closed group, because I was curious about maybe joining and then creeping on there for a little bit to see, see what I could see. But you have to be a rancher to be in the group.
I was just really curious if you could tell us a little bit about how this Facebook group has provided support for the community. Have there been challenges with moderating such a large group and then what are these interactions like between all of these different ranchers who were coming into it from different places. And you know whether they're multigenerational or just getting started?
Dan Macon
That's a great question. And actually, I will add you so you should apply. We started it as a place for producers and ag professionals to come together and share information. And in some cases, just commiserate, I think early on in 2014. That was, that was a big part of it. But we wanted it to also be a safe place where people could ask difficult questions or share difficult decisions that they were dealing with. What was appropriate to ask, what were the types of things that people wanted to discuss? And we discovered that it was easy for politics to get in the way of the real world. Early on, we limited the political conversation that happened in that group, which I think was good and really haven't had to limit it since.
I think from that there's been some other, perhaps more grounded communities develop in some places. So here in the foothills, we've got an informal group that we refer to as our grazing geeks group. And it's a group of people who are all in ranching in one form or another who get together on a regular basis, just to talk largely about drought strategies. And out of that group has come some opportunities for people to build networks where they've collaborated. For example, we were short of feed last fall and one of the members of that group had contracted to graze alfalfa stubble in the valley. And so they took all of our sheep for six weeks at a time when we didn't have much forage here in the foothills.
Sam Sandoval
You have the three last minutes of this conversation. What would our guests like members of the public to know about their work? What are the ways that the public can support them? What kinds of info should extension folks who are not the experts be sharing in social platforms?
Leslie Roche
I'll start and then Dan can wrap up everything I miss. Thinking about, what do we want the public to know. So, rangelands, they really are these multiple use landscapes, and they do hold immense social, ecological, and economic value. And, like we said, and actually from some of the work that Faith has done, we know that climate and related resource impacts will increasingly challenge these operations and these landscapes because we know that rising temperatures, greater precipitation variability, and more frequent and intense droughts, those trends are expected to continue. And so we're thinking about how we can advance agricultural adaptation. This is going to require a number of things, thinking about collaborating with these folks who are working on the ground who are basically living these experiences in science management partnerships, and then also thinking about local state national policy and program support that will support these proactive management solutions that come from management and science partnerships. And this is what a lot of work that I do is focused on.
Supporting these programs and these organizations and even policies that provide resources and provide technical assistance for sustaining these working lands, I think is really important. Obviously, my bias is supporting organizations like Cooperative Extension. You know, there's a local Cooperative Extension office in just about every county in California, and so there's a lot of counties doing a lot of great things on the ground. Dan is a great example of all that with what he's doing for his region. And so I think, for folks on social media platforms that are thinking about these landscapes, just continue to educate yourself and really think critically about the things that are that are put out there. And, consider the source and consider really the whole picture, the cost, the benefits, the tradeoffs, and the win win type scenarios and what is kind of the net benefit of whatever scenario we want for these landscapes.
Dan Macon
I don't have a whole lot to add to that. I think that covers much of my perspective as well. I think what I would add is that adaptation at the ground level requires flexibility and creativity and to the extent that we can through extension and through applied research help folks find that flexibility we will facilitate that adaptation. I also think and obviously, I'm biased as a as an extension person as well. But there's so much of this in rangelands in particular that nobody else can or will do. And I think it's really important to maintain that county level work that's focused on questions that our communities have relative to rangelands and rangeland agriculture. And in that regard, I think it's different perhaps than other types of agriculture. And that if it doesn't happen in extension, it's not going to happen on ranchland. And I think that we're lucky to have that system so well embedded here in California with connections to campus and connections to local folks.
Sam Sandoval
I have traveled around the state with Leslie or at least a couple of two three field trips, and it has been very enlightening how to understand the rangeland cattle operations, and I do think that sustainable landscape sustainable agriculture include animals.
Mallika Nocco
Thanks for listening and join us next time on Water Talk.