Ranching in the Pacific Northwest means you get comfortable with extremes.
High elevations, severe winters, large allotments and mountainous, rocky surfaces intermixed with timber forests – all of it adds up to an ecosystem that can put up a fight to infrastructure-building for effective grazing management.
And that’s before you add in the wildfires.
In 2024, 1.9 million acres burned in the state of Oregon alone – the state where Dean Defrees manages his generational ranch.
Each fire season, Defrees watches the wildfires around him inch closer and closer, remembering the one year where they destroyed nearly everything.
“In the ‘80s, we were logging our timberland — about 1,100 acres,” he recalls. “In 1986, the part we had not harvested yet was burned in a forest fire and it wiped us out timber-wise. That really got us interested in fireproofing the rest of the property a bit more.”
Firefighting Cattle
Defrees put his cattle to work, factoring in his 1,500-acre timberland forest allotments into his whole-ranch rotational grazing plan.
Now he works to ensure that brush, which can act as kindling in a wildfire, is managed.
“I graze the timberland in June and have it pretty well grazed down by July, which gets rid of a lot of the fine material on the ground where the fire won’t spread nearly as bad if it comes,” he says. “In fires, you see a big difference in ground that has been grazed compared to ground that hasn’t been grazed.
“Sometimes, no matter what you do, you can’t stop it. But it certainly does help to get as much fuel off the ground as you can early in the season.”
Without a sawmill left in the region to market his timber, Defrees is using financial and technical incentives from USDA-NRCS to further manage his forests, keeping them suitable for grazing and manageable for fire prevention.
“With EQIP, I’m going through and removing pretty much everything under 9" in diameter, which allows the bigger trees to keep growing, but it also opens up the understory for grazing and makes it much more fire resistant,” he says.
The federally funded program is largely offsetting the costs for the work.
“I probably wouldn’t be able to do it without their help, at least to the scale I’m doing it. I’m not making any money off of it, but I am paying my expenses,” he explains.
Restoration Cattle
Defrees knows he won’t be able to keep the fires at bay forever from his 100-plus year family land. He’s seen his neighbors lose their land, their cattle and their livelihoods because of them. In 2024, the Durkee Fire nipped at his heels and became the largest active blaze in the country, devastating more than 268,500 acres of land in its path.
His daughter, Dallas Hall Defrees, now works with a non-profit organization, Sustainable Northwest, to help ranchers prepare for and battle back after these devastating wildfires.
She says the key to the ecosystem restoration needed in the wake of a fire is deploying cattle with effective grazing management practices.
“This is invasive annual grass country, so that’s one of our biggest threats out here, especially after these ranchland fires,” Hall Defrees says. “Studies have shown that through targeted grazing you can actually reduce the prevalence of those grasses. If you target those and then get off of that area when the perennial grasses are coming in and recovering, it can be really beneficial.”
But, letting cattle graze in areas burned by fires is tricky. In most instances, the fire has not only decimated the grassland, but it has stripped the allotment of reliable infrastructure as well. When wildfires spread, it can take with it miles of hardwire fencing, making grazing difficult.
That’s where virtual fencing has become a game-changer, according to Hall Defrees.
“What you don’t want after a fire is for cattle to come into a heavily burned area or a stream or riparian area that needs a little bit more recovery,” she says. “Before, with hard wire fencing, you’re either on the allotment or you’re off of it. You can’t really cut the allotment into a whole bunch of different pieces. But now with virtual fencing, we can hit those areas that would actually benefit from the targeted grazing and exclude those areas that might need a little bit more rest.”
Vence, a virtual fence management system from Merck Animal Health, has seen their technology play an integral role for many ranchers both during and in the aftermath of disasters.
“We’ve had ranchers use Vence to protect their herds from hurricanes to wildfires to blizzards,” says Allison Burenheide, Vence marketing lead. “One of our Florida ranchers was able to move cows inland and away from highways as they saw a hurricane approaching, and we had a rancher in Washington last year experience a devastating wildfire, and we were able find all their cattle with the Vence GPS collars and move them down to where they could gather them and move them to safety. Without Vence, they would’ve had to ride through the fire to find cows, drop a fence and hope for the best.”
Sustainable Northwest is working with ranchers to remove cost barriers to virtual fencing technology and enhance technological awareness of the innovation’s benefits. She believes that, though fires may forge the need, many ranchers are reaping the full reward of adoption and then sharing it with their peers.
“There’s a snowball effect that’s certainly there,” she says.
A Marketable Advantage
At Defrees Ranch, the intensive land management is about more than just fire protection – it’s a holistic stewardship mindset that amounts to a marketable advantage for its cattle.
Defrees became part of the Country Natural Beef Cooperative early in its growth trajectory and has never regretted the decision.
“Through the cooperative, the tenants arose that we want to differentiate ourselves as good stewards who take care of the land, who take care of families, who take care of community, and take care of our cattle,” Defrees says. “The great thing about the group was everybody was so excited about those. The exciting thing is now we’re into the regenerative program, which really gives us a lot of tools to measure what we’re doing and make sure we’re doing the right things while giving us some latitude to experiment.”
At Country Natural Beef, their Grazewell program leans on regenerative ranching practices to help ranchers be better stewards of their people, land and animals.
“Good grazing practices and land stewardship are not just about managing cattle. They are about enhancing the health of the ecosystem itself,” says DelRae Ferguson, ranch program manager, Country Natural Beef. “This proactive approach sets our ranchers up to successfully navigate the certain challenges that are now the norm in the arid West — namely drought and wildfire— and our commitment to superior land stewardship moves all cooperative members beyond simply being reactive to environmental threats and establishes ecological and economic resiliency.”
Country Natural Beef uses the program to gain marketable advantage through their branded beef products.
“Increasingly, people are viewing their purchases, whether food, clothing or vehicles, not as status symbols but instead as a reflection of their core values,” says Valerie Rasmussen, Country Natural Beef vice president of marketing and communications. “For us, that movement started 40 years ago when we began our co-op and started selling all natural, no antibiotics/no added hormones and animal-welfare certified beef. Beef raised in a regenerative system is the next frontier for us as a beef company. We have plans to make regeneratively raised beef available to our shoppers so that consumers can be part of a food system that works to improve the planet we all share.”
Trust In Beef™ works to secure the future of American ranching by providing the information ranchers need to make the decisions that impact the resiliency, profitability and resource management of their working lands. Learn more about Trust In Beef and their Sustainable Ranchers Tour by visiting www.trustinbeef.com
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