The Sentinel

How cattle grazing protects and benefits the land

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(Brandpoint) - With cattle ranching featured front and center in America's living rooms due to the popularity of shows highlighting the western lifestyle, and with Climate Week piquing interest in sustainability, it's a good time to raise awareness about how farmers and ranchers - and their cattle - do a lot more for the country and environment than just being the backdrop of a popular western drama series.

According to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, a contractor to the Beef Checkoff, it's about ranchers as stewards of sustainable land management, their cattle playing a crucial role in mitigating climate change and wildfires, and beef's role in a healthy, sustainable diet.

New research links cattle grazing to wildfire mitigation

New research by the USDA Agricultural Research Service recently reported some surprising findings: Grazing can benefit invasive sagebrush communities and more than that, can combat wildfires. With much of the western U.S. beset by wildfires in recent years, it is crucial for people living in those areas to understand that cattle grazing actively mitigates the effects and spread of fires by consuming plants that would otherwise act as fuel.

Outdated dogma suggests livestock grazing in the sagebrush steppe in western rangelands negatively impacts those ecosystems. This new research, published in the scientific journal Ecosphere, found the opposite is true. According to the report, the ARS discovered that "strategically applying livestock grazing prior to the occurrence of climate-induced wildfires can modify sagebrush steppe characteristics in ways that decrease fire probability in the communities, promote biodiversity while reducing postfire annual grass invasion, fire-induced loss of native bunchgrasses and fire damage to soil biocrusts."

In plain language, it means that if cattle graze on the sagebrush steppe regularly, it will induce shorter flame lengths if a fire occurs, slow the rate of fire spread and prevent invasive grasses from popping up after the fire moves through. That's because, when cattle graze, they're munching away on grass and plants that could otherwise act as fuel during wildfire season, and they're doing so on land that is most often unsuitable for growing crops.

How cattle grazing can benefit the land

"As we talk about climate change, and the dryness that we see, cows are a great mitigator of wildfires," said Janey VanWinkle, a fourth-generation cattle rancher in Colorado. "In a lot of areas where there are invasive plant species, for example, cheatgrass, cows will eat that forage down, which slows the burn once a wildfire is started."

Ranchers like the VanWinkle family are conservationists. While caring for their animals, they're also caring for the land.

"When talking about land use, you could ask, 'Could this land be used for producing crops and other types of food?' and the answer is, most likely not where I live, with one of the limiting factors here being water," VanWinkle explained.

The ways cattle grazing can benefit the land go even deeper than preventing wildfires. According to 2024 UC Davis research, grazing:

* Decreases the potential for soil erosion and regulates the return of nutrients to the soil

* Promotes plant diversity and abundance by regulating weed growth

* Preserves open space and regenerates soil and plant life to promote carbon sequestration through the biogenic carbon cycle.

Cattle and bison have been grazing on U.S. lands for centuries. With careful stewardship of ranchers like the VanWinkle family, they can be helping the planet for centuries more.

"Cattle grazing truly is the best use of this land as it provides wildlife habitat and a very high-quality source of protein," VanWinkle said. "What really matters is protecting our landscapes. I assure you that I want my grandchildren to know what it's like out in nature and on the ranch."

Why the Far-Right lies about immigrants

Photo: StockSnap/Pixabay

by Peter Certo
OtherWords

When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.

Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.

Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base — and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.

Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers.

Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.

It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing — and infrastructure built to support larger populations — can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.

So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”

One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.

Some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.

Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.

“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”

In fact, it was earlier waves of migration — including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad — that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.

But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.

“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”

So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls — that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.

It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.

“According to interviews with a dozen local and county and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride” — who are about as lovely as they sound.

“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes, and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.

Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else — like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Springfield in the first place — all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.

Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.