Beyond sustainability: a regenerative ecosystem management approach integrating prescribed livestock grazing, ecological monitoring, and land stewardship
Abstract
In agricultural lands worldwide there is an urgent need to promote on-farm conservation practices that sustain and regenerate working land livelihoods while improving soil health, water quality and quantity, and wildlife habitat. This need is acute in grazed ecosystems, such as the 63 million acres of rangeland in California that comprise >50% of the state's working lands. Integrating regenerative approaches to sustain production, livelihoods, and thriving ecosystems are critical given that livestock production is foundational to agricultural communities (e.g., Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys) that have disproportionately high populations living below state and federal poverty lines. Additionally, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has documented that many of these same communities are disproportionately affected by pollution, including nitrogen runoff from fertilizers, pesticides, and carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases.
Access to technical and financial assistance offered through Farm Bill programs, and ecological monitoring data, are imperative to increase adoption of on-farm conservation in vulnerable communities, and increase understanding of relationships between conservation practices and outcomes for land stewardship and livelihoods. We reviewed 1021 Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) contracts implemented 2011-2018, including 72 contracts with prescribed grazing as a contracted practice. Prescribed grazing was most often contracted together with a suite of other conservation practices, which allowed us to analyze relationships among types of on-farm conservation practices used. There was a significant, positive relationship between prescribed grazing and fencing and water. There was a significant, negative relationship between prescribed grazing and other types of habitat planting. Neutral associations existed between prescribed grazing and practices such as irrigation water management and structures designed to enhance wildlife habitat. Finally, we examined relationships between grazing intensity, measured as animal days per acre (ADA), and the number of overall conservation practices contracted. We found that ranches with the lowest ADA reported the most conservation practices.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B41B..04G
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES