Related questions How can grazing-management and range-improvement techniques help sustain rangelands? What is the relationship of overgrazing to desertification? Why would there be desert in North Africa? How can rangeland be degraded? How can rangeland be improved? How does overgrazing affect rangelands? How can we conserve rangelands? What are federal rangelands?
In the beginning of spring season, there is a heavy pressure on grazing due to shortage of feed in winter. Facebook Count. Twitter Share. Read more. On DawnNews. Latest Stories. Most Popular Must Read.
Kumail Zaidi. The Green Shirts' dream to recapture T20 glory ends in dismay but it had more than a few highs along the way. Faisal Bari. How many doctors have been barred from practising or censured by the medical fraternity? Riaz Riazuddin. Amin Valliani. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar. Huma Khawar. THESE past few weeks have been quite rough for the government. But no instance has been as embarrassing as the California ranchers turned their attention to sheep, which they hoped would be better suited to the weather conditions of western rangelands, but this caused a debate among people who used rangelands, with cattle ranchers contending that sheep depleted all palatable grasses.
Weather problems such as drought, blizzards, and storms plagued the rest of the southwestern range in the late s, devastating cattle production. The boom-and-bust period for the beef industry coincided with an increase in the human population west of the Mississippi River. This introduced a transition for rangelands as the land was quickly converted to cropland.
In the 30 years between and , farmers brought more new land into cultivation— million hectares million acres —than had been brought into cultivation in the years since the settlement of the Jamestown colony in Virginia Athearn, The Homestead Acts, which began in , encouraged settlers to cross the Great Plains, taking with them farming methods better suited to east-em soils.
Farmers plowed over natural short grasses to plant wheat and other grains and cereals. A few years of favorable weather and good yields bolstered enthusiasm for crop production, and farmers seemed to.
They also lacked the experience and knowledge needed to use properly the arid lands of the western United States. The number of livestock on U. The combination of too many livestock, improper management practices, and drought accelerated the rate of soil erosion; depleted the amount of forage; and altered the species composition, density, and production of rangeland vegetation over extensive areas of the western United States.
This early crisis on U. He proposed two alternatives: small irrigated farms or large grazing farms with small sections that could be irrigated Powell, But his report was largely ignored by policymakers who did not understand the arid western landscape. In California, more farmers turned from cattle to crops, and by , California was second only to Minnesota in the production of wheat Paul, Planting of as much as 4, hectares 10, acres per farm became more common as the work was eased by combines hauled by steam-powered tractors.
Low property, values and minimal taxes on unimproved land encouraged farmers to plow and plant. Finally, by the early s the Great Plains had suffered through a decade of drought and people began to realize that they needed to manage and conserve the land better. This was the third period of human interaction on the rangeland, which was a time of reassessment of the land and its resources and debates over its use. Hyde spoke of the need to use better land management practices.
Three years later, the Taylor Grazing Act established the federal administration of about 32 million hectares 80 million acres of rangeland. President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, such. Changing perceptions of which values of rangeland ecosystems are most important have stimulated new debates over whether these public lands should be used to produce livestock, to support wildlife, to improve water quality, or for recreational purposes and how much of each of these uses was appropriate.
The Great Plains Drought Committee was formed in , the same year that the secretary of USDA wrote to the Senate, highlighting the need to revitalize the rangelands while acknowledging changing demands for the land, including watershed and wildlife protection and the provision of recreational space. The national parks were established, although they, too, frequently inspired debate, as with the creation of the Jackson Hole National Monument in Wyoming. The federal government wanted to buy up land for the monument, but local landowners complained that the project would unfairly deprive them of rangeland.
As a compromise, the government reduced the size of the proposed project but bought more land to add to nearby Grand Teton National Park Athearn, During the post-World War II year, the tourism industry flourished in the western United States because of the favorable, dry climate and scenic attractions. Through the persistence of conservationists, who fought to keep much of the western land for public use, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act of Since passage of the Wilderness Act, millions of hectares have been set aside as wilderness areas.
Today, many of those lands, as well as most other federal rangelands, are used for a variety of recreational enterprises, such as hiking, camping, horseback riding, and skiing, and they are still grazed by a restricted number of livestock. Although most observers agree that rangeland degradation was widespread on overstocked and drought-plagued rangelands at the turn of the century; the current conditions on U.
Some reports have concluded that widespread historical degradation of rangelands has been halted and that rangelands, for the most part, have been recovering in the latter half of this century. For example, Box applied his professional judgment to data on trend a change in a certain characteristic of rangeland over time in range condition SCS and ecological status USFS and BLM ratings; he concluded that widespread degradation had been halted by the s and that the trend in range condition SCS has generally been upward since that time.
See Chapter 3 for discussions of range condition and ecological status. In its most recent report on the state of the public rangelands, BLM U.
It also reported that the current trend is stable or improving on more than 87 percent of public rangelands. It reported an improvement on 15 percent, a decline on 14 percent, and no apparent trend on 64 percent of the lands administered by BLM. Comparable data for lands administered by USFS were 43, 14, and 43 percent, respectively.
The respective values for non-federal rangelands were 16, 14, and 70 percent. Other reports have described the continuing problems of rangeland degradation. For example, the National Resources Inventory, which is conducted once every 5 years by SCS, reported that in about 20 million hectares 49 million acres of nonfederal rangelands 12 percent were eroding at greater than the soil loss tolerance level and that over 11 million hectares 27 million acres were eroding at twice the soil loss tolerance level U.
The soil loss tolerance level is the estimated maximum annual rate of erosion that can be tolerated without damaging soil productivity. These data included rangelands eroding because of water-caused sheet and rill erosion only. Sheet erosion is erosion caused by water running off unprotected soil in thin sheets; and rill erosion is that caused by water running off unprotected soil in small channels called rills.
Other forms of water erosion, such as gullying, combined with wind erosion, undoubtedly damage millions of acres of rangelands as. No comparable data are available for federal rangelands, but there is no reason to assume that erosion is less severe on federal lands. Forest Service, b; U. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, c , the spread of introduced weed species U. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, b , reduced water quality and wildlife habitat U.
Forest Service, a; U. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, a,b , and degradation of riparian habitat U. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, a, c. The U. The first one U. It reported that 19 percent of the BLM and USFS grazing allotments may be threatened with further degradation because of overstocking and that the condition of 8 percent of the grazing allotments was actually declining.
The second report U. General Accounting Office, a , which was based on available data for riparian areas, reported that although some riparian areas were successfully restored, many thousands of kilometers of riparian habitat were in. FIGURE Categorized by land use, the chart shows figures for percentage of land eroding, by sheet and rill erosion alone, at higher than soil loss tolerance levels. Source: Adapted from U.
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