Angus VNR: Room for Growth
Whether your lawn or cow pastures, cutting off the old allows fresh growth.
“They'll fence off a plot of ground to show you how much damage the cow's doing and in about 10 years or so, everything inside the fence is dead because you've got all that old grass. Why do you mow your lawn? You mow your lawn to make it come better, and prune trees and whatever. If you just let these plants do nothing, then they're going to do nothing. These cows are a way to utilize that and keep it as good as it can be and not be the fire hazard” says David Rutan, owner and manager of Morgan Ranches in South Mountain, Idaho.
Juniper trees in the high desert of western Idaho became invasive to where USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service set up a program to clear them out and free up resources for other species.
“It's amazing what it's done for this watershed. And now that we're getting rid of some of them, then several of our neighbors that are doing it as well. Between the grass that we can improve by getting rid of them, and the watershed we can improve by getting rid of them. And then the sage grouse... Our son Dana, he actually started a year before we did. And he said that he had never seen the sage chickens out in these meadows before. After he cut the trees, he said he started seeing them,” Rutan says.
It’s not just birds and wildlife making a comeback, but water now flows through once-dry creeks.
“I was seeing out there today even, that these springs and stuff are coming back, where we've got all those trees and they're not taking all that water. It's a big picture thing. But with a lot of us doing it, I think we're achieving some good things out of it,” he says.
