homes on the range: COOPERATIVE CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE ON CALIFORNIA'S PRIVATELY OWNED HARDWOOD RANGELANDS

Environmental History, Apr 2008 by Alagona, Peter S

BIG CONSERVATION

AFTER WORLD WAR II, national consumption of livestock products grew, and the number of animals on California's rangelands increased in response to market demand. Between 1950 and 1975, the population of cattle in the state rose by 280 percent, reaching a peak in 1976 of about 3.2 million head." The growth of the industry soon prompted a new call from the California Cattlemen's Association for increased productivity through expanded rangeland research. Within months, funding and equipment began to stream into university coffers from state and federal agencies, generous individual donors, and enthusiastic corporate sponsors in the chemical and agricultural machinery industries. Over the next two decades, the goals and techniques of hardwood range management changed as range managers began to amass physical and financial resources and view their mission in much more expansive terms.23

In 1951, the year of Arthur Sampson's retirement, the University of California acquired the 5,358-30-6 Roy L. Pratt ranch, located near the town of Hopland in Mendocino County, as its new range management and sheep husbandry research station. Faculty from the University of California at Davis, a new branch campus on the site of the old University Farm, assumed administrative control of the Hopland Field Station under the auspices of the intercampus UC College of Agriculture. This institutional arrangement would shape the future of the Hopland Station, as well as the management of California's hardwood rangelands in general.24 Under the direction of the ambitious, agriculturally oriented Davis faculty, a new version of range management soon emerged that made Arthur Sampson's approach seem quaint by comparison. The Hopland researchers hoped to transform the landscape, converting decadent woodlands into orderly working pastures and enhancing the productive capacity of the land.

Two main problems occupied researchers at Hopland during the station's early years: how to increase the availability of livestock forage, and how to augment water supply for animal and human use. Although brush removal programs had been underway for decades, little research documented the role of woody plants in hardwood rangeland ecology. Under the direction of Superintendent Al Murphy, Hopland researchers initiated a series of experiments assessing the effects of brush and trees on forage productivity and riparian hydrology. In order to test the hypothesis that oaks in particular hindered stream flow, Murphy and his colleagues converted two entire watersheds within the station from dense blue oak (Quercus douglasii) woodlands to annual grasslands. Approximately 283 acres-including tens of thousands of oak trees-were chemically treated with herbicides, burned, and then reseeded with annual forage plants in order to boost runoff and create fertile new pastures for the station's voracious flock of sheep.25

The Hopland research on the relationships between oak trees, forage productivity, and stream flow succeeded in four significant ways. First, the treatments resulted in a full vegetation-type conversion. In 1996, approximately thirty-five years after the original herbicide applications, both watersheds remained largely treeless, with almost no regeneration by the formerly dominant blue oaks and only patchy woody vegetation emerging on the wettest north facing slopes. Second, the experiments increased forage productivity and stream flow, at least in the short term. Third, the program demonstrated that a combination of heavy machinery, inexpensive chemicals, and controlled burning could allow ranchers to clear their land quickly and cheaply. Finally, when disseminated by UC farm advisers as a model for efficient ranch management, the Hopland research reinforced the notion that oaks limited forage productivity.