After a wildfire spread across western North Dakota in 2021 and just missed the popular tourist town of Medora, some saw an opportunity in the ashes.
Now fire is set to make a comeback — though in a much more controlled manner.
“We were all pretty concerned, but I made a point to go back a year later, a couple years later to study (the land) and I could see that the fire did a lot of good. It might have been one of the better things to happen to the pasture,” Ted Tescher, who ranches in the Medora area, said of the wildfire.
North Dakota Wildlife Foundation (NDWF), a nonprofit, recently received a $200,000 grant from the Industrial Commission to help ranchers like Tescher administer prescribed burns in the southwest corner of the state.
State, federal and tribal conservation agencies have embraced the practice of prescribed burning in recent decades to manage invasive species, weaken the potential of wildfires and improve the vitality of grasslands, but the practice has been slower to catch on among private landowners in North Dakota, according to Cara Greger, NDWF’s western conservation coordinator. Over 90% of land in the state is privately owned.
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Attitudes around burning are now starting to shift, she said. Her group is just one of many working to promote the use of the land management practice across North Dakota.
Kelli Kuska, burn coordinator with the North Dakota Prescribed Fire Cooperative, said when she started her job she was told, “Nobody in North Dakota wants to burn.”
“I am a year and a half into this program and I’m finding out that is changing rapidly. I probably get five to six people a month just wanting more information, wondering about classes,” Kuska said. “People look at how their grassland has changed and they want it healthier. They see that it’s not healthy. Wildlife hasn’t returned like it did a decade ago.”
For more than a century, fire management across the U.S. has mostly revolved around suppression. While these efforts often kept people and property safe, they interfered with the traditional role that fire — both set by humans and naturally occurring — has played in shaping and maintaining the ecosystems of the Great Plains, according to Dr. Julie Courtwright, a history professor at Iowa State University, who wrote a book on the subject.
“There’s a long tradition of burning going back to the Native Americans; they burned extensively,” she said. “In fact, it’s believed they pushed the prairie outward using fire because they burned in (places) that in a lot of years do get enough rain to grow trees and other woody plants.”
In areas like southwestern North Dakota, the lack of fire has led to an overabundance of Rocky Mountain juniper and creeping juniper trees, Greger said.
“They are native to this area, but what happens with fire suppression is that they start to creep out of normal area,” she said. “It’s just starting to take over.”
The trees’ water demand can dry up creeks and outcompete grasses and other plants that livestock and wildlife feed on, Greger said.
That is something Tescher is hoping to address on his land through burning.
“I’ve cut several hundred acres of junipers now and I realized that’s not the complete answer,” he said.
Too many junipers also likely played a role in intensifying the severity of the 2021 wildfire.
“It’s pretty explosive fuel once it starts (burning),” Greger said.
Clearer benefits
It is not just western North Dakota that could stand to benefit from more fire, according to Dr. Kevin Sedivec, a professor of rangeland science at North Dakota State University.
In recent decades, Kentucky blue grass and smooth brome have engulfed native prairie grasses in North Dakota, he said.
Blue grass makes up an estimated 50% of the grasslands in the North Dakota, a drastic increase from less than 5% in 1990, according to Sedivec. Its spread poses specific problems for the livestock industry.
As weather variability becomes more intense due to a warming climate, reduced biodiversity means less resilient grasslands and a lack of stability for livestock producers, he said. When drought hits, it can slow or stop the growth of blue grass.
Prescribed burns do not completely do away with the problem, but it can help.
“We’re not going from 50% (invasive species) to 10%, but we do increase diversity,” he said.
Until recently, Sedivec said, the risk of burning appeared greater than the rewards for many ranchers, but research continues to show that burning is not just good for the grassland ecosystems — it can also be good for a rancher’s pocketbook.
“You get better livestock performance, it’s not even close,” he said. “You get all this lush growth. The cows just kind of camp on that lush growth, and then they can go walk to an area where it wasn’t burnt, and you get this diverse diet of some fiber and the lush growth.”
Native people who burnt their lands on the Great Plains prior to European settlement saw similar benefits, Courtwright said.
“The bison are attracted to recently burned prairie where there is new growth. If you burn in the area and you wait a couple of weeks, a lot of times the bison will migrate to this growth so it helped make hunting more predictable,” she said.
As farming took off, and ranches became fenced in during the 1800s, the broader U.S. culture turned against setting fires, Courtwright said. But the practice never really went away in parts of the country where ranchers could clearly see the benefits.
“In the 1950s, my grandmother ran a grocery store out in rural Kansas … these ranchers would come into my grandmother’s store and they would give a wink and a nod and say, ‘Yeah a fire accidentally got started on my land the other day,'” she said.
Craig Larson, a banker who ranches cattle in Sheridan and McLean Counties, has routinely done prescribed burns for over a decade. He said fire brought new life to his land, including the return of upland sandpiper birds.
“We’ve seen some amazing variety of plants show up that you would never have thought might be there. We don’t follow a fire with a seeding, we just let mother nature do its thing,” he said. “The fire sets the stage for what’s already there in the soil to grow and express itself.”
Larson said fire has also benefited his livestock operation.
“I think fire and livestock really go hand in hand. Those two practices are really good for grass. I can put cattle on a pasture 60 days after a fire burns through, and there’s plenty of grass if there is normal rainfall,” he said.
Pete Kronberg, whose ranch in Dickey County straddles the South Dakota border, has done small controlled burns for the last few years. He said he set out to burn his land with a specific goal in mind: growing more flowers.
“Most of the research that’s done shows when you burn a chunk of native ground you’ll get a flush of flowers, and I wanted flowers more than just for being pretty,” he said. “Sheep have a liking for flowering plants.”
Kronberg’s burns have not yet yielded many flowers, but he has been impressed with other results. The practice helped route out Kentucky blue grass, allowing native grasses to swell in growth on his land.
“It’s hard to explain how ridiculous and impressive it is until you walk out into it. You can’t see out of it, it’s like a jungle,” he said.
Kronberg plans to keep experimenting with burns, but he said he does not see it as a magic bullet for keeping land in good shape.
“If you don’t try to make healthier grass for the rest of the year when you’re not burning, I think it’s just a waste of time,” he said.
Still, skeptics
Doubts about benefits from prescribed burns are still common among ranchers that Kronberg speaks with in southeastern North Dakota, he said.
“They view fire as wildfire, something uncontrolled and unmanageable. A prescribed fire really isn’t that way if you’re actually paying attention and making good decisions. It’s actually a lot of fun to do,” he said. “(There is) also the conception that you’re just wasting a whole bunch because you burn it. And, you know, stuff I’ve seen in my place, that’s really not the case. But me telling people that doesn’t matter much. That’s something best seen.”
Chris Gordon, fire manager with The Nature Conservancy, administers and promotes controlled burns in central North Dakota. His group lets ranchers graze on properties it burns at the Cross Ranch.
Expanding burns in the area is still an uphill battle, Gordon said.
“We have tenants who see the effects. They see they healthy prairies, they see the extra pounds going on their cattle when they come onto our property and graze, yet they’ve not been open to those changes on their own land,” he said.
Regular burns will be necessary to more fully address the issue of invasive species, Gordon said, though exactly how frequently they are needed is still a topic being studied.
Other factors can sometimes interfere with how frequently fires are administered, he said.
“With the drought conditions from 2017 and again in 2021 those were years we didn’t do burning because the county restrictions prevented it or we just made the decision not to burn for safety purposes,” Gordon said.
Some prescribed burns in the past have become wildfires after “escaping.”
That is a concern Greger with the Wildlife Foundation has run into in southwestern North Dakota, but she said there are ways to work around the risks.
“You can avoid escape by picking the right day, the right conditions, having enough staff to work on the burn, having good burn breaks,” she said. Burn breaks are spots where vegetation is removed, which prevents fire from spreading beyond the desired area.
Greger said the large grant from the state will give her group resources — such as extra training and equipment — to ensure that burns can be carried out successfully.
Smoke negatively impacting air quality is another worry that Greger has heard, but she said when a prescribed burn is done right, that can be mitigated.
“You can contact people ahead of time, let them know, and you can plan to make it blow away from areas that are more sensitive,” said Greger. “With a wildfire you can’t control that.”
Tescher, the rancher from near Medora, said these issues are also on his mind, and he will only burn if he can be confident it will not negatively impact his neighbors.
“There’s been some controlled burns that got away and that’s what people are scared of,” he said. “I don’t think that it’s going to be a real popular thing, but I do think it’s right.”
Worries about fire on the plains over the last century are rooted in some historic tragedies, including in North Dakota, Courtwright said.
In the early 1900s, locals in southwest North Dakota were scarred after a prairie fire burned down a school near Belfield. A few decades before that, the editor of The Bismarck Tribune wrote, “Prairies should not be burned, except for special reasons and then in small quantities,” her book recounts.
But dealing with fire on the plains and prairies is inevitable, and using it as a tool is longstanding practice, Courtwright said.
The growing interest in prescribed burns can be seen as part of a cycle that communities on the plains undergo as their economies and views of nature shift, she said.
“It also might have something to do with the vanishing prairie,” Courtwright said. “The plains and prairies are some of the most altered ecosystems on earth, and part of that alteration is the suppression of fire.”
Prescribed burn associations are proving key to conservationists’ effort to restore a longleaf pine range that once encompassed 140,000 square miles across the southeastern United States. The eclectic groups of private landowners intentionally set fires to prevent uncontrollable wildfires by depriving them of fuel. Longleaf pines also need fire to shave unwieldy undergrowth off the forest floors so their seeds can germinate on bare soil. Stakeholders who want to hit 12,500 square miles of longleaf pine are refocusing their efforts on private property holders who own the bulk of forested land in the region. They need to convince thousands of these landowners to join the cause, and new burn cooperatives are filling service gaps one blaze at a time, connecting people to their land and their neighbors.
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Publish date : 2024-08-24 01:02:00
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