Grazing For Wildfire Control
Using cattle, Sheep, and goats is an established business for our foothills. We use machines and weed whackers to chop grass to 4″. Last few years we have chopped twice on properties in Paradise, CA. It’s the law 4″ high, taller up to 3 ft, and 80 ft away is chopped after grazing. This is wrong, and there is a better way.
Agriculture managers of rangeland, irrigated pastures, cover crops, and other crops for RDM (residual Dry Matter) green forages need to determine the weight per square foot using round loops measuring one square foot or more, 45,560 square feet per acre. Several samples of square ft times 43,500 square ft lbs/acre refer to publication 8092
flame length and grazing. Hand crews can fight fire on the ground if the flame length is below 4 feet. We wanted to see how high flames would be on different RDM levels. What we found was light to moderate grazing levels (from 2500 to 1250 lb/acre) would probably keep flame length around 4 feet, but there would be a higher chance the wildfire would keep burning. Moderate to heavy grazing (1,250 to 400 lb/acre) would keep flame length below 4 feet and would allow hand crews to stop the fire. Moderate to heavy grazing will have a patchy appearance, giving hand crews a better chance of stopping a fire.
With experience, you can estimate RDM on land in Paradise, saving time and money and leaving soil overgrazing (4″) behind