sustainable, and which is why we’re seeing so many farms fall.” She says she talks a lot about the ground when explaining holistic farming because that’s what you’re really looking for in your outcome. “When I run sheep across it, when I run cattle across it, that grass is going to save me some money on feed, and the more productive it is the less I’m having to input to get a finished product,” she says. Carlson says they don’t overgraze any particular area. They section off areas and create high intensity grazing situations and then move the animals to another area. “That sort of mimics the herds of the grassland prairies from long ago,” she says. “That stimulates the root growth of the plant life.” “Most grazing operations this time of year are focused on getting those grasses down, getting the fuel height lowered and then limbing up a lot of the trees and branches to make that break from the ladder fuels,” Carlson says. “A lot of times when we come in for a first-year client, they’ll have some really tall, noxious stickers and the wild oat is 6- to 8-feet tall—you can just tell it’s under grazed,” she says. In this situation Carlson encourages them to seed it with native low-growing grasses after it has been grazed. She explains that flames can be three times the height of the grasses or even higher if the wind is pushing the flames. “If you have a low-growing clover or an annual rye it might get 8-inches tall,” she says. “Triple that and you’re at 2 feet— that’s a manageable flame that we can deal with. But you get these wild oats, these mustards, these purple-headed thistle. They’re 8-feet tall sometimes, and you start looking at that and there’s no way to keep it from getting fire into the canopy.” During the 2017 and 2020 wildfires they lost close to 80% of their oak trees in areas that hadn’t been grazed. Carlson says she’s hoping they can slow down the loss of the beautiful North Bay habitat through grazing and stresses the importance of the well-established native trees to the local ecosystem. “Without those trees that ecosystem changes fast,” she says. “We’ll start looking a lot more like Southern California. It breaks my heart when an oak tree comes down, because you won’t see that size of an oak there again in your lifetime. It’s gone.” The City of San Rafael grazing operations In Marin County, the City of San Rafael has turned to grazing to mitigate fire fuels in city open space parcels. The City of Santa Rafael Fire Department took over the grazing program from the Department of Public Works after the passing of the county’s Measure C, a parcel tax which gives additional funding to fire agencies for wildfire mitigation. The fire department has been overseeing the program for four years. “So we’ve been grazing,” says Calvin Schrader, a senior vegetation management specialist and master arborist working for the San Rafael Fire Department. “We’ve selected up to 99 sites, which total up to about 180 acres of vegetation, near homes and high-wildfire-risk areas. It’s being funded entirely through Measure C funding.” Schrader says the rest of the city’s 1,000 acres of open space
Cori and Casey Carlson of Napa Pasture Protein, with their two children on the family farm. The Carlsons found that adding a grazing operation is helping to keep the farm more profitable. [Courtesy Cori Carlson]
Napa Pasture Protein For those farmers who are providing grazing animals as a business, it’s also become a way to save the family farm. Cori Carlson and her husband Casey own Napa Pasture Protein, a family farm incorporating holistic farming methods to ensure the health of its animals and the land. They also do consulting and education work to help others embrace these practices. A big part of maintaining the health of their farm is by ensuring that it is as fire resilient as possible and grazing animals have been the key to that success. Carlson says they realized after the 2017 wildfires that grazing was a great way to create a landscape that could deter flames. Areas around the farm that had been grazed survived while other areas burned. They’ve since added a grazing business into their farm’s operations and it’s helping to keep the farm going during challenging economic times. “It’s very difficult to be profitable on a small scale in farming operations and the grazing has helped sustain the farm,” Carlson says. “That’s sort of the only part that has really sustained it.” Without the grazing, their farm wouldn’t make it, she says. “I would be pretty much stuck with a lot of the conventional farming aspects that, in my opinion, monetarily are not
42 NorthBaybiz
July 2024
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