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Woven Together by Water: Ecosystems, Communities, and Irrigation in the Klamath Basin
“If we have an adequate water supply in the Basin, we can make a lot of habitat available for wildlife.” Luther Horsley, Klamath Basin farmer Growing cereal grains, like growing any other crop, takes time, patience, and hard work. For generations, farmers in the Klamath Basin have produced grains like barley that are used for…
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Beyond the Banks: Collaborative Conservation in Montana’s Big Hole Valley
Ranchers don’t really raise cattle, according to John Richardson. They raise grass. Richardson, who owns the Hat Creek Ranch in Montana’s Big Hole Valley, said he knows that healthy grass means healthy cattle, and healthy grass, of course, comes from healthy soil and water. Richardson said he keeps soil and water health at the forefront…
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Farming and Wetlands Coexist in the Klamath Basin
From the top of Wild Horse Butte in southeastern Oregon, the Klamath River snakes through tule bulrush and cattails on Furber Marsh to the north. In the opposite direction, Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) stretches out to the mountains on the southern horizon, its flooded parcels glinting in the afternoon sunlight. This vantage makes…
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Added NRCS Capacity Helps San Luis Valley Partners and Farmers
For farmers and ranchers along the Rio Grande in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, sometimes the only thing that stands between the river and getting water to their fields is an outdated and faulty headgate. The problem comes when their headgate project is in the middle – or at the bottom – of a lengthy list…
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Outcome-based Grazing: Meet the Participating Ranches
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is implementing a relatively new initiative known as Outcome-Based Grazing Authorizations (OBGA). It is designed to offer a more collaborative approach between the BLM and its partners within the livestock grazing community when issuing authorizations to permit grazing on public lands. A handful of demonstration projects testing out outcome-based…
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The Conservation Guardians
This article is a partnership production of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program—Mountain-Prairie Region and Intermountain West Joint Venture. Click here to read all four stories in this series. By Kristen A. Schmitt Jagged snow-capped mountains frame farmland along the Bear River where a herd of cattle graze on phragmites,…
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Arctic Grayling Revival
This article is a partnership production of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program—Mountain-Prairie Region and Intermountain West Joint Venture. Click here to read all four stories in this series. By Kristen A. Schmitt The Big Hole River, a well-known fly-fishing paradise, winds between the Anaconda Range and the Pioneer Mountains,…
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Trust in Conservation
By Paul Souza, Regional Director Pacific Southwest Region, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service The following article was originally published on September 19, 2019, in the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific Southwest Employee Newsletter. It is reposted here with permission. I had the opportunity to see up close some first rate conservation accomplishments and to…
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A Brief History of Three Nevada Conservation Collaboratives
The following is a guest article written by Robin Boies, a rancher and member of multiple collaborative conservation groups in Nevada. Hardline stances and high profile public land issues in the West often capture national and regional media attention. In contrast, or perhaps in answer to the divisiveness and controversy over the shared use of…
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High Noon for Low-stress Livestock Handling
Time and Money Saving Approaches to Managing Cattle and Maintaining Functioning Ecosystems Guest article and photos by Julia Babcock, National Policy Consensus Center Low Stress, High Returns A cadre of cowboys driving steers and spooking the herd with raucous fanfare and whips cracking is a familiar scene in old westerns. The dated profiles of cowboys…
