from the San Jose Mercury News
CATHEYS VALLEY, Calif.-Seth Nitschke spent his early 20s working at the country’s biggest feed lots before he returned home to start a business raising beef cattle fed on the grasses of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Nitschke, 31, who makes his living herding heifers through pastures near Yosemite National Park, would never call himself an environmental activist, though he’s planting saplings to protect nearby streams and runs a light herd to let his pastures breathe.
Unlike some of his conservative counterparts in traditional livestock production, he and a new crop of cattlemen are quietly working to minimize their industry’s ecological footprint, and are forging unlikely alliances with environmental groups.
“Look at this grass. If I don’t take care of it, that’s my livelihood,” Nitschke said, kneeling as he examined foxtail shoots popping up near a grove of black oaks. “We dress differently than the eco-folks, we probably vote differently, but in the end there’s a lot of ways in which our core values are really close.”
Throughout the West, cattlemen and environmentalists have locked horns over grazing practices for decades.
But increasingly, ranchers are buying into the idea that they have a role to play in protecting open space, be it through preserving private wildlands or promoting sustainable grazing techniques that help endangered species flourish.
Near Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, the World Wildlife Fund has recruited a group of ranchers to build ditches on their lands to improve wetlands habitat for threatened and endangered birds like the wood stork and crested caracara.
In Wyoming, the Audubon Society is trying to convince oil and gas companies to pay ranchers to maintain sage brush expanses key to the survival of the native, chicken-sized sage grouse. Ecologists fear without the ranchers, gas exploration could do away with the bird’s habitat.
In California, 75 ranching organizations, environmental groups and state and federal agencies have signed onto a common strategy to enhance the state’s rangelands while protecting its ecosystems.
“This new generation of ranchers knows they have to work on the environmental part of it to survive,” said Neil McDougald, a rancher at the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Madera County. “I’ll guarantee you the guys driving cows today have a better environmental conscience than the ranchers who were riding around holding up stage coaches.”
Still, a history of bad blood between those who live off the land and those who seek to protect it hasn’t made coalition-building easy.
Recent research from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization shows that the world’s large-scale livestock operations are causing environmental problems ranging from land degradation and air and water pollution to loss of biodiversity.
Full Story: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_8254280