Cows Help Bring Land Back in Balance

By Susan Hess.

Dalles Mountain Prairie Restoration: from Cows to Wildflowers 

Rancher Pat Bleakney planted 200 of the 6,200 acres in Snake River wheatgrass. That pasture looked, if this were Hawaii, like a pineapple field: neat rows of spiky tufts. He retired in 1993 and sold the ranch to the State of Washington.

The old ranch, five miles north of Washington Highway 14, became the upper section of Columbia Hills State Park. Park staff constructed hiking trails.Wildflower lovers, hikers, photographers flocked to the park?s fields of yellow balsam root, purple lupine, red Indian paintbrush, yarrow, and mats of pink phlox. But the Snake River wheatgrass section sat unchanging and undisturbed for 18 years.

Why then Parks chose in 2007 to restore the 200 acres to native prairie is uncertain, because it would not be easy. The method they chose would cause an eruption of criticism.

A contentious test

Park staff asked Steve Van Vleet, Regional Extension Specialist at Washington State University, to come up with a restoration plan and gave him a five year permit to try it out. Van Vleet works around the world restoring prairies.

He proposed that they use cattle to graze down the wheatgrass thatch. State Parks had long wanted to incorporate grazing on the park, so visitors could learn about historic ranching.

Van Vleet started by bringing together people who wanted a say in the outcome: ranchers, park staff, Native Plant Society, birders. The early meetings were angry shouting matches.

“The only way we could do it,” he said, “was with cooperation and collaboration, but it’s tough.”

“When I first heard they were going to graze cattle on a state park,” said restoration volunteer Bob Hansen, “I went ballistic.”

Van Vleet says mildly, “Much opposition!”

It’s easy to see why. Across the arid west, millions of cattle over a century have decimated native vegetation, overgrazed land, damaged soils and streams.  

But Van Vleet stayed calm. He showed them a 50 year study that indicated with careful management, cattle improved this type of grass monoculture. He proposed dividing a 180 acre parcel into fenced pastures. Cattle would graze three to four weeks in the fall. Each year cattle would be rotated to a different pasture. One pasture would be left ungrazed as a control plot.

The grazing plan was good news to nearby ranchers Jim and Nancy Sizemore, who were asked to be part of the experiment. There would be no grazing fee for them nor would they be paid. Sizemore had advocated for grazing from when Parks first bought the property. “We wanted to show that ranchers can manage grazing that can be beneficial. It gives us an opportunity to build trust with the environmental public.”

 Dalles Mountain Prairie Experiment  

Prairies (grasslands) are being wiped out worldwide at a rate scientists liken to the loss of tropical rainforests: converted to roads, mines, subdivisions, and agriculture. A prairie is a thriving ecosystem: hundreds of plant species fill every inch, providing food and habitat for insects, birds, reptiles, rodents and other mammals—grazers and carnivore—in a continuous cycle.

Prairie plants create an extensive root system, often reaching a meter deep for water, preventing erosion. They store vast amounts of carbon dioxide.

“The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart?”   – Prairie by Carl Sandberg

“Prairie birds,” the National Audubon Society writes, “have shown the most sustained population declines of any bird group in North America.” Since 1966 the western meadowlark population, whose melodic songs fill the air along Dalles Mountain Road, declined nationwide 48 percent.

The Snake River wheatgrass section was “a kind of biological desert,” said Robert Fimbel, Natural Resources Stewardship staff for Washington State Parks. “There’s not much diversity. There’s not enough wildflowers for bees and butterflies. Rodents used it, but Secar [wheatgrass] doesn’t put out a lot of seed head, so there was never a lot of food even for rodents.”

“The rancher tried to do the right thing,” said Bob Hansen, who became a key person in this experiment – in addition to his numerous volunteer efforts coordinating bird migration and Christmas bird counts for about 20 years in Klickitat County.  

Hansen said the problem was that the rancher tilled the 200 acres, it destroyed the root systems of the native plants. Then he planted a monoculture of grass native to Idaho. The grasses grew tall and for 20 years as old grass blades died, they fell and created a thick thatch where native grasses and wildflower seeds could not sprout.

A show-me start

By 2009, everyone was finally ready to give the plan a try. That November the Sizemores saddled horses, called their dogs, and drove 120 cattle over Dalles Mountain Road from their Centerville ranch and let them graze Pasture 1 for three weeks.

The blueprint

“Different tools are to be used for different places: livestock, herbicides, tillage fire.” Van Vleet picked cows because they feed 70 percent on grass. The benefit of cattle, he says, is that they provide the disturbance that fire might have produced 200 years ago before European settlement.

Cattle graze the smothering grasses opening bare soil, thus giving places for seeds of native plants to sprout.

The restoration plan:

• Each fall a different pasture is grazed. Fences keep cattle to designated sections.
• Salt blocks and water for the cows are placed to minimize damage and are rotated to a new location every year.
• The only plants reintroduced are those growing naturally within a few miles of the site.

It was hoped they could drill seeds in, but the entire project operated on a half-a-shoe string budget. Van Vleet used grant money from related projects. Hansen wrote grants. They each put in their own money. State Parks contribution was letting Van Vleet stay in one of their facilities, providing a crew to collect wild seeds, and erect fencing.

Volunteers like Hansen have been the main labor force, gathering a mix of wildflower and native grass seeds along the roadsides of Dalles Mountain Road: Oregon sunshine, cut leaf penstemom, grindelia (the bright yellow gumweed), balsam root, yellow bells, lomatium.  

“We’re trying to tip the balance,” Hansen says, “to a natural diversity.”

Lupine and yarrow needed no introduction, the minute bare soil opened up they moved in, set down roots and got busy colonizing. Some seeds had lain dormant under the Snake River thatch and sprouted once it was removed.

The volunteers also planted a hundred native mock orange, grey rabbit brush, and wild rose. Hansen watered them for the first years during the hot summer weeks. Only twenty survived, but are doing well.

The problem with projects that depend upon volunteers is that restoration projects succeed only with attention over time, and most volunteers lose interest in the less glamorous work of monitoring and maintenance. Dalles Mountain prairie lucked out with the people it attracted. Bob Hansen comes every two weeks February through October to monitor, re-seed and record when plants bud, leaf, bloom, reach their peak, and go to seed. He’s frequently accompanied by local birdwatcher Stuart Johnston and native plant expert Barbara Robinson. “If we weren’t doing it,” she said, “it wouldn’t get done.”

Eight years in

The experiment is starting its eighth year. “What we have done is absolutely amazing,” Van Vleet says. “We’ve increased species diversity, increasedperennial forbs (wildflowers), and the coverage of those perennial forbs, and reduced the grass impact. We still have grass everywhere, but now it’s healthy grass; it’s not as thick and dead. It’s remarkable.”

The ranchers gained forage acreage. The Sizemores had to supplement feed for their cattle at first, because in the first few years the protein level in the old grasses was low. “The protein of the grass is now forage quality for livestock, deer, birds,” Van Vleet says. “The dead grass had five percent protein. Now, due to grazing, the new growth has 6.5 to 7.8 percent protein. Seven percent protein is the level cattle need in fall so ranchers don’t have to supplement.”

The rancher would like to see increased grazing. “I believe we should—one out of four years or one in five years—graze in spring, a light early spring graze,” Sizemore said. “Varying the time of use would benefit the area. It’s more natural, like the way Mother Nature does.”

Robinson disagrees, “The goal of the project is to increase diversity in this planted grass monoculture by increasing the spring wildflowers. With spring grazing, cattle eat the few wildflowers there are, which is counter to this goal. In fall the cattle eat the grasses, since the wildflowers are dried and dormant.”

Other area ranchers received permission from Parks to expand the project to land across the road. Again Parks did not put up any funding. This concerns Hansen because the results aren’t being monitored.

Van Vleet is moving on to other projects. He’s a person who speaks carefully, but he is passionate about prairie restoration, because he’s seen places where land was abused causing the loss of arable soil and with it disruption of society. He’s confident that the Dalles Mountain Prairie Restoration is in good hands. Klickitat County WSU extension agent Hannah Brause has offered to take over Van Vleet’s role.

Oregon State University’s Institute of Applied Ecology is joining the work thanks to a private donation and a grant from Columbia Gorge Environmental Foundation.

Bob Hansen, Stuart Johnston, and Barbara Robinson are committed to this place. “I take people out so they can see that grazing is not harming the land,” Hansen said. Johnston shows visitors birds that come here to nest and feed: the long billed curlew, horned lark, magpies, grasshopper sparrow, and western meadowlarks.

“This project is a positive model for ranchers, government, and environmentalists on how to work together,” Hansen says. He likes to show it off in spring when the once sterile landscape blooms with grass widows, lomatium, lupine, shooting stars, yellow bells.