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Grass Banks and Drought
Bill deBuys, June 2005
Among the challenges central to ranching, none is more daunting than drought. A ranching family strives for consistency in its operations; it builds a herd adapted to its country; it sizes the herd to what that country will "normally" carry. But then the weather changes, and the grass fails to grow. When the hard and painful work begins of readjusting herd size, "normal" becomes the punchline of a wry joke.
All agriculture-but especially ranching-involves a struggle to wrest economic stability from a dynamic environment. Not even Las Vegas has generated as many systems for beating the odds. But, while few of those systems work successfully over the long term, some tools do help, and grass banks are one of them. They can help bridge the gap between what ranchers need and what rainfall provides.
The stakes are high. Research shows what common sense suggests-that overgrazing damages rangelands most severely during times of drought, and in some cases the damage can be permanent. And there is no escaping drought. If you accept the Society for Range Management's 1989 definition, drought is "prolonged dry weather when precipitation is less than 75% of the average amount." Using that standard, drought occurred in the northern Great Plains nearly a quarter of the years (23%) between 1944 and 1984. During the same forty years the Southwest experienced drought a stunning 43% of the time. If you do the math, this means that "average years"-neither droughty nor unduly wet-occurred about 14% of the time, or 3 years out of 20. So much for "normal," except to the extent that normal connotes variable.
The challenge for ranchers, then, is to develop grazing systems that are as flexible as the weather is variable.
When the Conservation Fund, Forest Service, Northern New Mexico Stockman's Association, and Cooperative Extension Service organized the Valle Grande Grass Bank in San Miguel County, New Mexico, in 1997, our idea was to trade the forage of the grass bank for hard commitments for range improvement work on the home allotments of the ranchers who brought their cattle to the grass bank. The improvements we mainly had in mind were forest thinning and prescribed fire: a pair of linked strategies for restoring a more natural balance between grass and woody plants on hard-used lands. The next year, however, was the driest in many. The year 2000 was worse, and 2002 was worse than that. Things didn't get much better until late in 2004.
Those dry years taught us that large-scale landscape rehabilitation was extremely hard to accomplish when rain failed to fall: the grass could not grow to take advantage of improved conditions. And making conditions better was harder than ever because prescribed fire was often too dangerous to use-witness the prescribed Cerro Grande fire, which blew out of control and burned several hundred homes in Los Alamos.
The dry years also taught us, however, that using the grass bank for drought relief made sense. The ranchers we worked with still had to reduce their herds, but they didn't have to reduce them as much as they otherwise would have. In this way, through a combination of herd trimming and grass bank use, they achieved the level of flexibility necessary to navigate drought without punishing the land.
Now that wetter conditions have returned, the grass bank (recently renamed the Rowe Mesa Grass Bank and now managed by the Quivira Coalition) can resume its land restoration efforts with a broadened purpose: drought relief when necessary, land improvement when possible.
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