A SPECIAL PRODUCERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ® CALIFORNIA Dairy & Livestock ®
Beef cattle belonging to Corral de Tierra Cattle Co. in Monterey County are managed using a rotational grazing program designed to promote the natural diversity of the mountainous landscape.
Central Coast ranchers promote sustainable grazing By Caitlin Fillmore
landscape. The grasses also add more protein to the landscape, Mundell said. “We can use animals to enhance the ecosystem, to enhance this landscape and California as a whole,” Mundell said. Regenerative agriculture, whether applied to farming, forestry or ranching, contains a few basic components: soil health, biodiversity, water management and overall farm resil- ience, said Wendell Gilgert, director emeritus of the Working Lands Program at Petaluma- based Point Blue Conservation Science. With cattle ranchers in his family since 1851, Gilgert said California suffers today by not mimicking the ecological processes that occurred “for millennia.” “It’s not necessarily shifting the mindset away from a myopia of production, production, production,” Gilgert said. “It’s widening goals to embrace an ecological goal. When you apply ecological principles along with production goals, you come to a different mindset.” Gilgert said viewing animals as part of the solution is similar to when creatures such as elk and bison helped manage and sustain the landscape. “There has to be a broader recognition that cows are not the problem,” he said. “They are surrogates for herbivores that used to roam California’s landscape. We need them.” But amid heavy atmospheric storms this year, the regional landscape and microclimate
Jeff Mundell, ranch manager at Gabilan Cattle Co., juggles diverse microclimates and geography across 11,500 acres of the mountainous Gabilan Range on the Central Coast. The grassland plateau straddles Monterey and San Benito counties and includes the nearly 3,200-foot Fremont Peak. The Gabilan Cattle Co., with its 350 head cows-calf op- eration, serves as the headwaters for Gabilan Creek and Bird Creek, which respectively empty into the Salinas and Pajaro rivers. The cattle company and some Central Coast livestock operations have embraced regen- erative agricultural practices that seek to improve soil and animal health, with the goal of sustaining the environment in which they operate. Mundell uses strategies such as intensive grazing in which cattle graze in selected areas and then are moved to allow regrowth for at least a year. Regrowth took off after heavy rains this spring, as dormant seed profiles underground sprang back to life. Native plants such as purple needlegrass, giant creeping rye, California oatgrass and blue-eyed grass established new footholds. “Some of the plants we haven’t seen for 50 years can start to express as the soil changes with herd impact,” Mundell said. “The relationship between (grazing) impact and rest can push back a lot of invasive plants and allow native plants ability to express themselves.” Perennial grasses have tripled on the ranch, adding deep-rooted plants into the
See GRAZING, Page 12
August 2, 2023 Ag Alert 11
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