Holistic Management Handbook: Healthy Land, Healthy Profits

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This is a prodigiously documented textbook of scientific information concerning every aspect of management 'where the cow and grass meet'. Voisin's 'rational grazing' method maximizes productivity in both grass and cattle operations.

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Grazing Dairy Cattle.......2007-03-16

An excellent source of information for anyone interested in grazing dairy cows. Best suited for the beginner but valuable observations that everyone grazing cows can benefit from.

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West

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Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching
Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species
Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building
Not so great
One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West
George Wuerthner , and Mollie Matteson
Manufacturer: Foundations for Deep Ecology 2
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1559639431

Book Description

In the American West, the sky is wide and the mountains are grand. Everything is on a big scale - including the debate over livestock production on the nation's public lands.

For more than a century, ranching and its associated activities (such as the growing of irrigated feed crops) has been the major land use over most of the western states. While many Americans think of cowboys as heroes and the "Wild West" as a place for cattle roundups and rodeos, others see livestock as a scourge upon the land. What is most disturbing to some activists is that ranching activities occur not only on private property but also on public lands - more than 300 million acres of federal, state, and other publicly owned lands are used by private ranching operations. For the most part, the ranching operations pay very low fees to run their livestock on these lands, and also receive numerous government subsidies including range improvements, fencing, and predator control.

Welfare Ranching presents one side of the debate over public lands ranching, offering a graphic look at the negative consequences of livestock production in the arid West. The authors highlight changes in the region that they see as being caused by ranching, and examine what they feel are problems associated with using tax dollars to support environmentally questionable activities. Through photographs and essays, the book shows examples of overgrazing along with what the authors argue are more subtle signs that indicate large - scale ecological disruption. The authors also discuss changes that could be made to help solve some of these problems.

Welfare Ranching gives one view of the cultural and historical causes of the current situation and offers a vision of possible renewal.

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Science Speaks the Truth in Welfare Ranching.......2007-02-02

Welfare Ranching provides the data and insight into the public lands livestock industry that has long been needed. Here in the West the damage is seen on hundreds of millions of acres of our public lands. What is amazing is the lack of attention among our public officials at the tremendous cost of this outmoded practice. The lost soil, polluted streams and destroyed wildlife habitat have value in the billions of dollars on an annual basis that so far outweighs any possible economic benefit of livestock production, it is necessary for the public to become educated on this issue so they will pressure our lawmakers and public officials to make and enforce ecologically sound regulations and practices to restore this land. A final note, the soil loss and plant community losses are a loss in carbon storage - this is going to become a critical issue as we at last deal with greenhouse gases. Finally, let's not forget the history of the sheep and cattle industry in their efforts to have our public lands turned over to the States and then sold to ranchers for 10 cents an acre in the 1940's. This continues today with the farm and ranch lobby and their henchmen in congress who constantly are working to undermine environmental protections and have the land sold off to industry.

Grazing Public Lands - Decline in Habitat for Native Species.......2005-05-05

Welfare Ranching is a beautiful book, full of full-color photos and articles by dozens of scientists and concerned biological conservationists regarding the destruction of the American West by cattle ranchers. Wuerthner and Matteson point out that there are 525 million acres of land in the Western United States which are used for livestock grazing. That only eleven percent of U.S. cattle producers are in the west, but their grazing area equals twenty-five percent of the total land area of the lower 48 United States and most of that is public land. These lands are often over-grazed, degraded, and denuded of plants. The water sources are manipulated by the ranchers to provide water for their livestock, thereby removing the water from access by native plants and wildlife. The introduction of livestock into the arid lands of the American west is like introducing an exotic species into a community. The livestock completely undermine and degrade the ecosystem and their presence is linked to the decline in native bird and vegetation populations. It has been noted that by raising domestic animals which demand large quantities of water and forage in a place that is dry, and by favoring slow-moving, heavy, and more or less defenseless livestock in terrain that is rugged, vast, and inhabited by native predators, ranchers have put themselves in a position of constant warfare with the land. Nearly all public lands [in the Western U.S.] that have any forage potential for livestock are leased for grazing. This includes 90% of Bureau of Land Management land, 69% of U.S. Forest Service land and a surprising number of wildlife refuges and national parks. Three hundred million of these acres have the potential for large-scale ecosystem restoration by terminating domestic livestock production on public lands
Bird species need water and vegetation to survive, and many are threatened or driven into extinction by the ubiquitous livestock grazing which destroys their habitat. Birds generally do not respond to the presence of grazing livestock but to the impacts on vegetation as a result of grazing. Breeding Bird Survey data suggest that grassland birds as a group are showing greater population declines than any other avian assemblage in North America. This is attributable to habitat modifications including livestock grazing, fire suppression, prairie dog control, cultivations, and exotic grasses.
Livestock grazing harms native species and promotes alien plant growth. The hundreds of photos in the book, Welfare Ranching, document the denuded, degraded land and polluted, manipulated water sources which result from cattle grazing. Some ranchers suggest that since bison used to naturally live on the grasslands, cattle are a good modern day substitute, but cattle and bison are not similar animals. Bison moved around a lot, effectively grazing on plants only once before moving on, and bison also lived in drier areas and ate drier plants than cattle do; domestic cattle spend most of their time within 400 meters of water. Cattle ranchers also suggest that the grasslands need to be grazed by cattle in order to be healthy, but in a native grassland there is a wide variety of animals that naturally graze in a sustainable way, such as nematodes, grasshoppers, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, elk, and bison.
Livestock grazing is the most common land use in western North America. It is difficult to study in a controlled manner as there are not many large areas free of grazing because approximately 70% of the eleven western states is grazed. A study comparing Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northern New Mexico, one of the largest grazing exclosures in the American West, with six grazing sites, found that plant species richness was higher in the protected areas than in the grazed areas (Floyd et al. 2003). Recent paleo-ecological studies on the Colorado Plateau determined that the most severe vegetation changes of the last 5,400 years resulted from livestock grazing during the last two centuries (Cole et al. 1997).
It is apparent that many species of grassland birds, and neo-tropical migratory birds have declined drastically in the past few decades. Much of the research on this subject has found that the decline in bird species is correlated to the decline in habitat and vegetation which is directly linked to grazing livestock on the majority of land area in the western United States. Over half of the grazing is done on publicly owned lands which, due to the time-honored traditions in the West of allowing cattle ranchers full access to any lands they want, and because these ranchers and their grazing interests have been very important in the political and social life of the West for over a century, and because, until recently, grazing on public lands has been an accepted practice with no special attention paid to it, the question of closing off public lands to grazing has become a power struggle and a contentious issue between conservationists, ranchers, the government, and land managers. There is enough documented evidence that grazing has many deleterious effects on the land such as: damaging the soil, polluting the water supply, destroying native vegetation, encouraging alien species, and that ranchers and land managers have altered the ecosystem by: controlling fires, diverting the scarce water supply to cattle use only, and actively killing many native animal species that they consider inconvenient or dangerous to their interests.
It is obvious that livestock grazing on western lands is not a sustainable operation. It is environmentally damaging and causes great loss of biodiversity. It is sustained only through the political influence of cattle ranchers and the ignorance and indifference of the public. The great wave of new research which is being done by conservation biologists and environmentalists will help change this devastating scene in the future when students begin to inform themselves by reading these research papers, and when the popular media brings the desolation and waste to the notice of the people, that their land is being appropriated by private interests who are destroying the environment and profiting at the expense of thousands of plant and animal species each year.
Welfare Ranching, The Subsidized Destruction of the American West, brings these facts to the people in the form of a beautiful well-documented book full of great photographs. Most of the information in this book is taken from scientific articles and journals. How many of us spend our time reading dry scientific journals? If you would like to have a combination of fact and photos, in an interesting to read and understand format with articles published by well-known conservation biologists and others whose main concern is to save our lands and our native plants and animals, then Welfare Ranching is the book to have.

Major Setback for Resource Coalition-Building.......2004-02-02

I found this book while browsing at Cody's in Berkeley last week. It's big. It's colorful. It's angry. And sadly, it's packed full of deception. The problem is that if you live in Staten Island, NY you won't know that you're being decieved unless you've spent a lot of time visiting Nevada's Great Basin and watching the seasons change.

Two examples (among many):
- Lots of close-in photos of range cattle in late-summer condition standing near a water tank with cowpies scattered all over the bone-dry vicinity and not a blade of grass in sight. The fact is that if you zoom-out about 50 yds. you'll see a major difference between the heavily-tracked barren ground surrounding the water trough and the grazing allotment outside of the perimeter. Ditto for a different time of year. The perception is that the entire range is bone-dry, overstocked, and full of cowpies. Not true. The stocking rate on that sort of range is 1 cow for every 250 acres. Lots of room for a cow, her calf, and a few of their cowpies.
- An aerial photo designed to discount the idea of ranching as a natural defense against urban sprawl is taken high above the Gallatin Valley in Montana - the source of urban sprawl would be Bozeman. The photo shows several thousand acres of ranches, mainly irrigated alfalfa farms. The point of the photo is, "well, obviously there's no sprawl here." The problem?Bozeman isn't even captured in the photo! So, the photo is a lie that would make even George Orwell blush.

I'm an environmental activist. I think there's no more important issue facing our time than preventing a head-on collision with ecological catastrophe. So, it disappoints me greatly when a book like this is bankrolled and released by someone like Doug Tompkins, co-founder of Esprit, especially after his success with "Fatal Harvest".

His credibility on this particular issue has been lost. More importantly, much of the hard work of building consensus among stakeholders in public lands coalitions has been vanquished because one green element decided to lie shamelessly to further its agenda of removing livestock from public lands. The hurt feelings and distrust will take years to mend, I'm afraid.

This book should remain on the shelf.

Not so great.......2003-09-26

This book is deceptive -- so readers be wary. A picture of a mountain meadow and something along the lines of: "This is the way it could be" and then a picture of a desert - "this is the way it is." The pictures are taken in two entirely different ecosystems! And yet the editors imply that if cows were not present, picture 2 would look like picture 1. Not true.

Some interesting writing. Too bad, though, that it was framed by deception.

One Picture Tells 1,000 Lies.......2003-07-21

I'm afraid that most readers will only look at the pictures and read the captions and headlines. That's the point. No one sits down and reads through a book like this, so the message is as broad, blatant, and one-sided as a billboard. It is meant to seduce anyone who gives it a superficial glance. Leaf through it casually and discover that cattle are bad for just about anything you care to name. Are they good for anything at all? No. This is propaganda at its best (or worst).
"Welfare Ranching" is filled with pictures that are captioned to manipulate, rather than instruct. For every lush "cattle-free" area shown in the book, a barren area-just as "free"-could easily be found. The same is true of pictures showing cows on dry, dusty land. The photos are carefully chosen to show a single perspective.
On page 275 is a photo captioned "Campground full of cow manure, Nevada." It shows a flattish clearing dotted with sage and grass and a few old, dry cow pies. In the background are tall brush and trees with the hint of a mountain in the distance. It could be Nevada. Someone might camp there, if they chose to. It could also be someone's back pasture. Page 45 is a full page picture of "Severely eroded land." OK. What eroded it? We are meant to believe it was cattle, but even the author won't stick that label on. A horrifying photo of a cow carcass in a river occupies page 193. It probably smells as bad as the deer carcasses I used to find in the creek behind my grandmother's Connecticut farm.
The footnotes are probably not meant to be read, either. Otherwise, why would the author cite himself so often? Can a serious, reasonable argument against cattle ranching can be made by someone whose reference is a book called "The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory?" The chapter on the health implications of meat consumption is written by the author of "The Vegetarian Way." The chapter on livestock raising from a global perspective is co-authored by an "environmental activist" advocate for wolf recovery and a math professor who authored "Judaism and Vegetarianism."
The "factual" parts of the book are a clever mixture of half-truths, excerpts out of context, skewed statistics and a grab-bag of factoids winkled out of scientific papers to fit the situation. For instance, on page 13 the author states that "ranching and associated activities provide very few jobs...most ranch operations...are not highly profitable...ranch families depend on [outside] jobs (to) help keep the ranch financially afloat." On page 15 the author argues that ranchers dominate Western politics because: "low salaries [of public office] rule out participation by people without other sources of income. Yet ranchers...having the financial latitude to engage in off-ranch pursuits-are able to hold office with less sacrifice than the work would require of others." The statement is made that "Vermont produces more beef than all the public lands in Nevada." USDA statistics show 500,000 head of cattle in Nevada in 2002, 285,000 in Vermont. Nevada has fewest cattle of any western state except Alaska.
Then there are all those questionable critters that cows are accused of threatening. There are snails the size of a pinhead, cave bugs and tiny fish. I couldn't help wondering how many insects and reptiles survived the sprawl of Phoenix or Seattle? Shouldn't we get those people "off the land" too? Abundant dinosaurs roamed where Los Angeles is now. Maybe we should try to "restore" them? There's more than a hint of wanting to "play God" in all this fervor over weeds and worms.
As for the cows, a "shift away from animal foods is not only an important individual choice, but also imperative for the well-being of humanity, and the ecological systems of the earth." (page 285)
"Welfare Ranching" is not simply a vegetarian tract. There is an underlying, more sinister agenda-The Wildlands Project. That includes a wide swath of land from the tip of South America to Northernmost Canada that is to be free of all human activity. The author of this extreme fantasy is Reed Noss, cited more than half a dozen times in the footnotes. Buried in the text are lines like this: "The majority of the West is directly or indirectly influenced by livestock production, either as rangeland, as cultivated land or pasture growing feed for livestock, or as delimited reserves of nature where naturally migrating wildlife are persecuted the instant they step outside the boundaries people have imposed on them." (page xiv) So, if you take away the rangeland, cultivated land and pasture, "migrating wildlife" will no longer have those boundaries.
In case anyone misses the point, in the next sentence the author adds the "hundreds of millions of acres of farmland in the Midwest" to the "total physical and ecological footprint of livestock production." When all that Midwest farmland is out of production, there will be room for all the westerners evicted from the Wildlands Project to live. (What they will eat might be a problem.)
"There is no single conservation opportunity for rewilding...300 million acres as ending livestock grazing on all public lands." (page 324). Rewilding is the agenda. Concluding with "Our Vision" the author says: "We dream of a landscape where bison, pronghorn antelope, wolves, and grizzlies are free to roam...in which landscape-scale ecological processes can operate with a minimum of human interference. The elimination of livestock production from our public lands will set us on that pathway."
It's not just a "pathway." The Wildlands Project calls for one half of the land area of the 48 states to be encompassed in core wilderness reserves and inner corridor zones (essentially extensions of core reserves) within the next few decades. What's left over is where people can live-within the boundaries set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

A bibliography of riparian research and management: Fish, wildlife, vegetation, and hydrologic responses to livestock grazing and other land use activities (Contribution)

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A bibliography of riparian research and management: Fish, wildlife, vegetation, and hydrologic responses to livestock grazing and other land use activities (Contribution)
John S Van Deventer
Manufacturer: Idaho Riparian Cooperative, University of Idaho
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Grazing and Conservation Management (Conservation Biology)

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Grazing and Conservation Management (Conservation Biology)

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0412475200

Book Description

Grazing animals enjoy an ambiguous reputation in the field of nature conservation. Livestock are often treated as a scourge, yet native large herbivores form the prime attraction of many a reserve. This book gives the first comprehensive overview of the use of grazing as a tool in conservation management. Considering in turn the ecological and historical background, the impact of grazing on community structure, management applications and future prospects, this book examines issues such as the role of herbivores as keystone species, the assessment of habitat quality and the function of scientific models in advancing grazing management. Large herbivores are shown to be potentially powerful allies in the management of nature reserves, particularly in the maintenance, enhancement or restoration of biodiversity.
Grazing and Conservation Management will appeal to conservation biologists and rangeland managers, providing them with a clearer understanding of grazing and conservation management.

A grazing history of southwestern Idaho with emphasis on the Birds of Prey Study Area

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A grazing history of southwestern Idaho with emphasis on the Birds of Prey Study Area
Dana Yensen
Manufacturer: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: B0006Y9CKE

The Holistic Resource Management Workbook

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The Holistic Resource Management Workbook
Sam Bingham , and Allan Savory
Manufacturer: Island Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0933280696

Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats, and Conservation in the Western Himalaya (Studies in Social Ecology and Environmental History)

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Pastoral Politics: Shepherds, Bureaucrats, and Conservation in the Western Himalaya (Studies in Social Ecology and Environmental History)
Vasant K. Saberwal
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Vasant Saberwal explores the origins of the alarmist rhetoric on land degradation in the western Himalaya, which he finds to be unsubstantiated according to empirical evidence and ecological theory.

U.S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands: A History (Environmental History Series)

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U.S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands: A History (Environmental History Series)
William D. Rowley
Manufacturer: Texas A&M University Press
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9th Circuit rejects Fish & Wildlife's handling of incidental take permits. (Endangered Species).(Brief Article): An article from: California Planning & Development Report

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9th Circuit rejects Fish & Wildlife's handling of incidental take permits. (Endangered Species).(Brief Article): An article from: California Planning & Development Report

Manufacturer: California Planning & Development Report
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Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from California Planning & Development Report, published by California Planning & Development Report on January 1, 2002. The length of the article is 839 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: 9th Circuit rejects Fish & Wildlife's handling of incidental take permits. (Endangered Species).(Brief Article)
Publication: California Planning & Development Report (Newsletter)
Date: January 1, 2002
Publisher: California Planning & Development Report
Volume: 17 Issue: 1 Page: 9(1)

Article Type: Brief Article

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