By the late 1800s it was apparent that there was a need to restore overgrazed rangelands. The effort to restore overgrazed rangelands, especially Great Basin rangelands, did not receive much attention until the mid-1900s, so why did it take half a century to attempt rangeland seedings to restore Great Basin rangelands?
Four major problems hindered the development of seeding technology; 1) the leading conservation agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, believed that rangelands could be restored through management without seeding, 2) the equipment necessary to control competing woody vegetation and to seed degraded big sagebrush rangelands was not available, 3) early seeding efforts on rangelands, which largely had been conducted by the Forest Service, had almost entirely been perceived as failures, and 4) it took a long time for the majority of ranchers, and even longer for politicians, to conceive that something was wrong with the western range.
The Forest Service was created in 1905 to administer the nations existing forest reserves, formerly managed by the U.S. Department of Interior. These lands were generally higher quality rangelands in terms of environmental potential for plant growth. Prior to the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934 and the Presidential Decree closing the remaining vacant federal lands in the west to homesteading, no U.S. Government agency managed the desert nor the foothill ranges. Afterward, the Grazing Service was charged with managing the arid and semi-arid winter and spring ranges. By this time, these rangelands had experienced 3-4 decades of grazing abuse after the National Forests were established and closed to unmanaged grazing. Also, these arid and semi-arid rangelands had far less environmental potential to restore themselves. Certainly, some individual ranchers exercised high-quality stewardship over the grazing lands located on vacant federal lands that they considered their home range. They were handicapped in their efforts to pursue natural resource management because the vacant rangelands were legally open to anyone to graze, and several ranches actually shared most ranges. In the Great Basin, virtually the only fenced rangelands were areas where hay was produced. Those who practiced conservative grazing management were likely to see the forage eaten by their neighbors’ livestock. Combined with the growth of the tramp sheep industry on western rangelands during the early 1900s, this situation was the prelude to cheatgrass dominance on millions of acres of rangelands.
In 1924, the National Wool Grower published an article authored by Utah State University researcher Glenn Bennion that blamed the Government indefensible free-range policy for the badly degraded rangelands and that “sagebrush came when the wasteful, destructive methods of range exploitation , developed as a result of the Government’s indefensible free-range policy destroying the native grass and allowing sagebrush to become dominant, thus permitting those forms of vegetation that stock can not eat to take the place of grass.” Dr. Bennion also suggested the answer to restoring bunchgrasses on degraded rangelands was to burn the ranges during the hot summer months, rest the burned areas from all grazing until the grasses had a chance to recover, and then use moderate stocking rates with seasonal, managed grazing. He offered evidence that many sagebrush-bunchgrass ranges still had enough remnant perennial grasses to restock the ranges, especially if the competing woody species were removed and grazing was managed.
The basic problem that stifled restoration of big sagebrush rangelands in the Great Basin was the overabundance of big sagebrush. Range managers faced the daunting task of removing tons of woody material from each acre to make room for restoration seedings, which was exacerbated by the thousands of acres that needed restoration. One of the major problems that faced range managers, was that these overgrazed rangelands, prior to cheatgrass explosions, simply did not have enough fine fuels to carry fire through these sagebrush rangelands as suggested by Bennion. Even if fire was an option, at that time the entire forest and range conservation movement in the western United States was based on the total exclusion of wildfires from wildlands. Another obstacle range managers faced was the lack of success in restoration trials by early Forest Service researchers which did not instill confidence since the recommendations were to control weedy species and protect perennial grass seedings, that they rarely were successful in establishing. This was an increasing problem in restoring big sagebrush/bunchgrass ranges due to the lack of an adaptable perennial grass to replace native perennials. Various scientists collected seeds of the dominant rangeland perennial grass, bluebunch wheatgrass, and seeded rangelands with this species, which usually ended in failure as seed germination of many collections was low and the seedling vigor was weak. There was no native plant seed industry at the time, and seeds of native perennial grasses were impossible to buy.
The final impediment to restoring western rangelands was apathy, both public and political. Western rangelands were endless, bountiful, eternal, and most importantly, free, therefore, no valid reason to spend taxpayers’ money on rangelands. P.B. Kennedy, an early range investigator, shared or perhaps warned his insights in the early 1900’s; “Perhaps one group of men holding one portion of the public range by force of arms may decide also not to overstock their ranges and to improve it by sowing seed of valuable grasses and forage plants. This is not likely to occur, because the reseeding of a large tract is a costly undertaking, and one still so largely an experiment whose results cannot clearly be foreseen that no stockman will likely undertake the reseeding of lands not his own. How, then, should the open ranges of the public lands be made fully productive again? A socialist has suggested that this should be undertaken by the general government as a public work to be paid for by taxation of the whole people; that seed should be collected, enormous grass farms planted, and that the seed raised on these farms should be sown far and wide on the ranges, and that the cost of all of this enormous undertaking should be borne by the general government.” The droughts and the economic upheaval of the 1930’s furnished the catalysts for change. The northern Great Plains were almost destroyed by these droughts, erosion was significant and had tremendous impact on public opinion concerning conservation of natural resources which resulted in the formation of the U.S Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service (SCS) (now the Natural Resource Conservation Service). The conservation practice that the SCS introduced included plant material centers that produced plants and seeds for use in conservation plantings. This was followed up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which established agencies that provided manpower for conservation projects. The new Civilian Conservation Corps provided young men to fight wildfires, build check dams and access roads, and attempt restoration seedings.
One of the first perennial grasses to be collected and developed by the SCS plant material centers was crested wheatgrass, a perennial grass imported from Russia. The first known range seedings of crested wheatgrass in the Intermountain Area occurred in 1932 near American Falls, Idaho, and on the USDA Sheep Experiment Station near Debois, Idaho. The stand of crested wheatgrass on the Sheep Experiment Station was moderately grazed for decades, and after 30 years was still producing more than one ton of air-dried forage per acre. The success of these early crested wheatgrass seedings increased the confidence of range managers to be successful in establishing perennial grasses on degraded rangelands. At the time crested wheatgrass was introduced into the Great Basin, the primary requirement was the potential to establish and persist through droughts and grazing. Improved seedbed preparation and planting techniques promoted the establishment of crested wheatgrass, which persisted under most circumstances other than extreme year around grazing. Most importantly, crested wheatgrass provided forage in the early spring when it was desperately needed, and native perennial grasses were most easily harmed by grazing. By the late 1930s and early 1940s researchers established nursery trials with native and introduced plant materials throughout the Intermountain Area and started the search for equipment that could be used to convert degraded big sagebrush sites to perennial grasses. These early scientists instigated the Interagency Range Seeding Equipment Committee to develop range weed control and seeding equipment. Initially, they tried to plow under big sagebrush using wheatland disk plows pulled by track laying tractors. The disk plow worked fairly well until ran into rocky sites or too large sagebrush trunk sizes, which experienced significant breakdowns. Early University Nevada Reno Researcher, Joe Robertson, was tired of this wheatland disk plow breaking down every day during his research in northeastern Nevada and therefor imported what was described as a “stump-jump plow” from Australia, redesigned it to meet the specific needs of western rangelands and was then manufactured by Interagency Rangeland Seeding Equipment Committee, now famously known as the ‘rangeland plow’ (Figure 1). The new success of this piece of equipment, in combination with the performance of crested wheatgrass on arid Great Basin rangelands resulted in more than 1 million acres of degraded big sagebrush-bunchgrass plant communities being disked, fallowed and seeded to crested wheatgrass (Figure 2).
How much of that 1 million acres of seeded crested wheatgrass could be successfully seeded with perennial grasses today? Probably very little. Today, seed banks dominated with cheatgrass pose added difficulties in establishing perennial grasses in the face of cheatgrass competition. (Figure 3a and 3b).
Although the disk and fallow method has experienced good woody species control, invasive annuals such as cheatgrass require added control methods. Our research has reported as much as 82% reduction of cheatgrass using the disk and fallow method, the remaining cheatgrass can cause significant competitive disadvantages for native and introduced perennial grasses at the seedling stage, especially the aridity experienced throughout the Great Basin. Cheatgrass infestations require new approaches and new research which will come through old and new scientist with the ability to build partnerships and swallow their scientific pride to improve degraded rangelands. Lessons of past researchers provide a trove of treasures to improve innovation and productivity on degraded rangelands.
By Charlie D. Clements, James A. Young and Dan Harmon