A&M Conducting Ranch-Scale
Study Thanks To Waggoner Ranch

By Colleen Schreiber

VERNON — Better understanding the intricacies of rangelands is a critical part of any successful ranching operation. Volumes and volumes of range-related research have been conducted over the last 50 years. That research, however, has primarily been conducted on a small scale, and in the end it is sometimes hard for the ranching community to relate to.

Researchers at the Texas A&M Research and Extension Center in Vernon have been given an opportunity to do research at a scale ranchers will relate to. In 1993, the Waggoner Estate partnered with the A&M system on 35,000 acres of their property. The Waggoner Estate has long cooperated with the Vernon center but on a much smaller scale.

"We've been given an opportunity by the Waggoner Estate to build on previous research done in this part of the state and bring that knowledge up to the whole ranch level to get closer to the way ranchers operate," Dr. Richard Teague, ranch systems ecologist, told listeners at a recent field day on the Waggoner Ranch.

"This research will hopefully, in the end, be more valuable to you, the ranchers. We also want to make this research applicable and transferable beyond the site where it's being conducted."

Before starting the project, researchers visited with a group of ranchers in the area for input as to what kind of research they felt was most critical to their operations. Brush management was the resounding vote. Based on that input as well as input from the Waggoner Estate, researchers designed a project with brush control in mind.

The ongoing experiments are being conducted on the area known as the Kite Camp. Here in this part of the Rolling Plains, the average annual rainfall is 28 inches. However, since the project was initiated in 1995, drouth has been the norm four out of the last five years.

There is very little virgin mesquite on the ranch, researchers noted, and in particular on the Kite Camp. Most all of the brush had either been treated with 2,4,5-T or by chaining, and then a wildfire swept across the camp in 1983. Consequently, the mesquite is mostly regrowth, that's six to eight feet tall.

Prior to the initiation of the study, the Kite Camp was grazed at a moderate continuous level. At the start of the study, the Camp was divided into different management units, each 4000 to 5000 acres in size. They include two continuous grazing units with no brush treatment; two four-pasture, one-herd rotations where one pasture is rested for four months each year and either burned or grazed; and two eight-pasture, one-herd rotations where two pastures are rested and either burned or grazed. Two four-pasture, three-herd systems were also used.

Researchers first asked a few questions about various brush treatment options: If no treatment is applied, how much does productivity decrease and over what period of time does it decrease? How much do these various treatments improve the bottom line and how long does a treatment last? Finally, at what point is one treatment more economical and at what point is it time to move into another treatment?

"If you don't deal with your brush, it may not be costing you in terms of actual dollars," Teague explained, "but it's costing you in terms of production. Same thing goes for range condition. If you're managing in such a way that you're allowing your range to slide, it's not costing you in dollars per se, but it is affecting your ability to produce, which in turn affects your bottom line."

To further explain that, Teague presented baseline data gathered for the Kite Camp project for the years 1995 through 1998 on areas where nothing was done to control the mesquite. It showed that on the clay flats, where most of the taller mesquite grows and where the biggest problem generally occurs, aerial cover increased from 18 to 31 over a three year period.

"Previous research indicates that up to 20 percent mesquite aerial cover won't affect carrying capacity," Teague explained. "Above that level, production begins to fall. If you move from 20 to 30 percent mesquite cover, you move to 70 percent of your productive potential, and when you get to 60 percent aerial cover, you are now at 44 percent of your carrying capacity or productivity.

To give field day participants an idea of the costs of various treatments and the returns they might yield, he presented analyses of "Net Present Values" over a 30-year period for various brush treatments and compared those costs to doing nothing at all. These results were based on "best guess" projections and not actual data.

"Because rootplowing costs so much, on average $80 to $90 an acre, and requires treatment every 15 years, after 20 years you would be minus $20 an acre in the hole with a cost benefit ratio of 37 cents back for every dollar you spent.

"You can only do that if you have a tax problem," Teague quipped.

Using Remedy, a good topkilling mesquite herbicide but a relatively low rootkiller, projections showed an NPV of 3.1 and a return of $1.30 for every dollar invested.

"At least you're on the right side, but it's a pretty close margin," Teague said.

Using Remedy and Reclaim at a quarter and a quarter, which is the current herbicide recommendation for mesquite, at a cost of about $25 an acre followed with burning, produces about the same economic results.

Teague also looked at the economic projections using fire under two scenarios; once every five years or once every seven years.

"With fire we see a huge jump in your returns compared to doing nothing," Teague said, "and fire offers significantly improved returns in a normal rainfall year over a herbicide treatment option, primarily because it costs less to apply."

Because fire appeared to be the most cost-effective treatment, the experiments were designed to assess the effectiveness of prescribed fire in controlling or managing brush using rotational grazing strategies.

The Waggoner Estate set as their primary objectives these goals: to enhance herbaceous yield and composition; to decrease chemical and mechanical inputs and instead find an optimum balance between these treatment methods and alternative methods like prescribed fire; to lesson runoff by improving grass cover; and to enhance wildlife habitat to improve economic sustainability of the people living on the land ranching, Teague told listeners.

The field day consisted of various stops throughout the Kite Camp. At the first stop, Dr. Jim Ansley, fire ecologist on the project, shared some of their burning results as participants surveyed the results for themselves.

The prescribed burning project was designed in such a way that 25 percent of a particular grazing system was to be burned annually, and rotation of cattle was used to provide pre-burn and post-burn deferment. Reality in the form of drouth, however, prevented that from happening.

"In a nutshell, we should have burned about 30 burns in the last three years, but we were unable to burn in 1999, and in 1997 we only burned one pasture in 1997 because of the drouth in 1996," Ansley said. "Up to this point, we have only completed 12 of the 30 burns. We had hoped to have completed a full cycle of burning in all the paddocks by now so that by this next winter we should have been burning the first paddocks the second time. We haven't come close."

That said, Ansley expounded on the fires that had been conducted. The particular pasture where the first stop was scheduled, about a section in size, was burned in February 1998. The fire was described as a high intensity one. The management goal there was to get a good topkill, Ansley said, and that objective was mostly achieved. There was little actual mesquite mortality, however. That was evident based on the regrowth that could be viewed across the pasture two years after the burn.

"We don’t expect fire to be nearly as effective as herbicides, but our objective is to burn frequently, every four to five years, so we can keep mesquite suppressed," Ansley noted.

Ansley also talked about another burn conducted in 1998 in one of the eight-pasture, one-herd systems.

"We were trying for a top kill, but the conditions we had in 1998 were quite different from the conditions in 1996. In the winter of 1996 we were in a drouth, and in January and February 1998 we had unprecedented rains. There were only three or four days in those two months in 1998 that we were actually able to get out and burn. The season was so warm and mild that the brome grass and the Texas wintergrass was so green that we were unable to carry a fire any distance," he explained.

Teague followed up with the burning results across the entire project. In the first year the aerial cover of mesquite was 15 percent. After the first burn, cover was reduced to six percent. By the following year it had increased from six to seven percent.

On the unburned site however, in a year’s time, aerial cover of mesquite jumped from 15 to 18 percent, and by 1998 it had increased from 15 to 19 percent cover and the burned area had increased from six back to 10 percent, Teague said. He noted that different soils affect the rate at which mesquite comes back.

"These are the rates of increase that are really vital to understanding the rate of fire needed to calculate the economic affect of killing the brush," he explained to listeners.

He pointed out some of the negative effects associated with fire, one being an increase in the amount of bare ground. In the first year following a burn, the amount of bare ground was 32 percent versus 20 percent in the unburned areas. He noted that it took two years for the burned areas to recover to get back to the original 17 percent bare ground that the area started with prior to the burn.

Teague noted that though the first year after the first burns were completed was bad due to drouth, by years two and three, researchers recorded double the number of grazing days in the burned pastures. That increase was attributed to a decrease in brush and an increase in the vigor of grasses.

Another positive attribute of the fire was an improvement in livestock gathering ability.

"One of the big problems the Waggoner ranch had when they first came to us was that the brush had gotten so thick they had to use a helicopter to gather the cattle," Teague told the group. "In some areas the brush was so thick that the helicopter wasn’t even able to gather effectively.

"After one year of burning, we gathered with six cowboys and had a 100 percent gather for branding. A couple of days later on a pasture south of the Kite Camp, they tried to gather on horseback because the helicopter was down and they couldn’t put any cows in the lot," Teague said.

Researchers concluded that the ensuing drouth had a large impact on their burning ability and in the burning results.

"Unfortunately, every year we’ve burned it’s been dry the year after we burned," Teague said. "This has meant that we’ve had half the number of grazing days on the burned area the year after we burned. That’s set us back considerably.

"We think the fire effects could have been better had it not been so dry," Teague continued.

"On the other hand, at least we're finding out what happens in drouth," he noted, "and drouth is a normal part of the picture."

Ansley agreed.

"We’ve been very disappointed in our ability to conduct fires, but in further reflection, had we started this project in the early 1990s under those good years and had we had this field day in 1995, we might have made fire look like it was the best thing and everyone might have tried to go out and burn everything, and then we would have gone into this drouth cycle," he told the group.

"I think this is a long-term project which we need more than five years to complete," he continued. "But starting it during a drouth gives us a real dose of reality as to the limitations of fire. We still want to see how good fire can do, but doing it now allows us to present results that are a little more realistic to all of you. You can take what we're learning and perhaps apply fire with a little more judicious nature than you might have otherwise."

At another stop on the tour, participants heard about some of the herbicide research being conducted. A series of herbicide plots approximately 400 feet wide and a quarter of a mile long were established in a pasture about a section in size which was not part of the Kite Camp treatments. Three different mesquite herbicide treatments were applied, and at some point half of each of the plots will be burned for comparison purposes, Ansley told the group. All plots were sprayed in July 1996, and each treatment was replicated four times.

"In heavier soils like the heavy clay loam, the soil temperature stays fairly cool well into the spring. That's one of the reasons why we wait and spray the last week of June or early July," Ansley explained.

The first test plot was treated with the rootkilling herbicide Reclaim, applied at a relatively low rate, a quarter of a pound to the acre at a cost of $15 per acre. This treatment option, Ansley told listeners, was not the best option for achieving high root mortality or even high topkill.

"This particular plot had a 58 percent topkill and 41 percent rootkill with this treatment," Ansley said. The mean for the four plots is a little different but not far off, 52 percent topkill and 29 percent rootkill.

"Most ranchers who are livestock-oriented and who are looking to improve forage production and clean their pasture of brush wouldn’t be satisfied with only a 52 percent topkill."

Calling it a "savanna-type herbicide," this treatment option, he told listening ranchers, might be more suited for those who have wildlife interests or a dual livestock/wildlife interest. That is because rather than completely topkill the trees they’re what he called "stem flagged." This simply means that a percentage of the foliage remains on the tree, and because of this the tree exerts "apical dominance," which in essence prevents the tree from resprouting at the base.

In the long run, Ansley pointed out, this might be more suitable because basal resprouts result in multi-stemmed mesquite which is harder to kill.

The second treatment plot was what Ansley called the "industry standard," a quarter pound of Reclaim and a quarter pound of Remedy.

Topkill with this particular treatment, Ansley said, was very high, 93 to 94 percent on average, and the rootkill averaged 51 percent across all the replicates, somewhat lower than what they had hoped for and lower than results in other experiments.

"Environmental conditions do affect the response," Ansley noted, "and the conditions here were fairly dry. We were pleased, however, that we got pretty consistent rootkills, and I think we can basically count on rootkills of about 60 percent with this treatment. Had we had normal precipitation years, we might have gotten mortality in the 70 percent range."

Teague also discussed the various grazing systems being used on the Kite Camp research project. These grazing systems, he noted, are management tools used to help them accomplish their burning goals, primarily accumulate extra forage and improve range condition.

In 1996 there was no real difference between any of the systems, Teague said, but in 1997 the four-pasture, one-herd system produced six percent more herbaceous production than the control and the eight-pasture, one-herd system produced 24 percent more.

"Unfortunately, we didn’t produce the extra amount of beef that we wanted," Teague said. "That remains one of our challenges today, to make sure that the extra grass that we’re producing on these systems actually produces more beef, and we’re trying to learn how to do that."

In 1998, it was dry again, but the eight-pasture, one-herd system produced 15 percent more than the other treatments, Teague said.

Researchers also hoped to show an improvement in species composition due to the rotations.

"There is a high percentage of grasses like meadow dropseed and silver bluestem that are less preferred on the Kite Camp. We would prefer something like sideoats," Teague said.

Sideoats has increased significantly in the four-one and eight-one pasture systems relative to the control, and meadow dropseed has declined significantly. However, he noted, fire has had almost no impact on species composition.

"We're happy with rotations in terms of improving our range condition," Teague told the group. "Now we want to see if any of the management techniques we’re doing improves the carrying capacity of the land and allows us to increase stocking rates. To date we haven’t been able to increase numbers, but we’re showing different signs in increased range condition, so we think we’ll get there whenever we get some rain."

Teague also laid out the basic livestock management plan currently in place during the third stop on the tour. The Waggoner Ranch has long been run as a cow-calf operation with Hereford being the dominant breed. Because the Waggoner estate has always had the philosophy of drouth avoidance and minimal risk, stocking rates have always been fairly conservative, on average 30 acres to the cow.

When the research project began, researchers adjusted the stocking rates to 20 acres to the cow because they were more in line with those recommended by the NRCS for that given area.

"That might have worked, except at the same time we put together a mixed group of cattle so we would have a true representation of a typical ranch," said Dr. Bill Pinchak, another researcher on the project. "So we increased stocking rates, then mixed cows that didn’t know how to get along, and then we asked them to rotate.

"We messed up behaviorally," he continued. "We should not have increased stocking rates the first two years. We should have trained the cows to the rotation first."

On top of those changes, the ranch experienced the worst winter, spring and summer drouth recorded this century. The end result that first year, Pinchak said, was a wreck in terms of conception rates.

Stocking rates were readjusted back to 30 to 32 acres to the cow. When they changed to rotational grazing at these moderate stocking rates, no loss in animal performance was documented.

Pinchak briefly discussed the implications of nutrition

of the livestock due to the different treatments.

"Nutritionally, there is very little difference between different treatments as long as there is sufficient forage," Pinchak told ranchers. "This year has been a real eye-opener for us. With dry conditions, we feel that even at moderate to light rates of stocking, it will be a real challenge to burn 25 percent of a grazing system and have enough grass to carry the cattle through the year.

"I believe we're on the brink of a drouth cycle that is comparable to the 1950s," Pinchak continued. "We’ve had four drouths in five years. We’re in a drouth right now. If you haven’t made the tough decisions yet, you better get serious and make them, because even if we were to get rain we’re not going to grow enough grass to keep 50 percent of your normal cow herd if you’re not already below that today."

Three different classes of cattle, stocker steers, replacement heifers, and first-calf heifers bred back for their second calf, were used in fire and grazing experiments on another ranch, the Y Ranch, west of Crowell in 1993-94.

In the first year, April through June, 1993, the steers gained 1.6 pounds per day on native range while those grazing burned native range gained 2.9 pounds per head per day. That performance, Pinchak noted, is similar to wheat pasture performance.

"We achieved a tremendous response," Teague noted, "but we had very favorable precipitation in 1993-94. We need to remember that," he told the group.

The effect of burning on the performance of replacement heifers wasn’t quite that good, but improvements were noticed.

"We had a similar wreck in 1993-94 on the Y Ranch that we’ve had this year on the Kite Camp," Pinchak said. "We bought heifers to use on wheat pasture but the wheat pasture never produced due to drouth, so we stocked heavier than we should have. We were about 30 percent overstocked on this whole experiment, but we still saw a response," Pinchak said.

"We averaged six-tenths of a pound of gain a day on native pasture and just under a pound of gain a day on the burned area."

The plan was to sell the heifers as bred heifers to add some value to them. Those grazing native pasture had a 72 percent conception rate versus 86 percent on the burned sites.

"So not only did we get more gain, but we also added more value to these heifers by getting them bred," he remarked.

In treatments where first-calf heifers were used, heifers gained 125 pounds on native versus 165 pounds on the burned areas.

Body condition scores when palpated in August were 4.6 to 5.3; conception rates were 85 percent on the native versus 92 percent on the burned.

Possibly the best outcome was in improved weaning weight, Pinchak noted, which was 475 pounds on the burned areas versus 426 pounds on the unburned pastures.

"So all across the board in favorable years on the Y Ranch, we dramatically enhanced individual animal performance and we dramatically improved pounds of beef weaned per acre using fire," Pinchak concluded. "That’s not what has happened on the Kite Camp, however, since we’ve been in a drouth four of the last five years."

To determine the economic returns of the various treatments, the researchers took the 10-year average price of the Amarillo market. That way, Teague explained, any differences recorded could be attributed to the biology of what's occurred and not a fluctuating cattle market.

"Once we got stocking rates right there was little difference in returns per acre on the different treatments," Teague remarked.

In 1998, researchers calculated a 79 cent per acre return on the continuous treatment and a 59 to 69 cent return on the rotation treatments.

He pointed out that the returns on the continuous treatment were higher simply because there were no brush treatment costs, whereas the rotational systems all had some kind of brush treatment cost figured in.

The Kite Camp project, the research group said, is a work in progress. They're learning from mistakes of the past and incorporating the knowledge gained to better help ranchers find ways to make their ranching operations sustainable long into the future.