N RANCHING
atural Resources
The Details of a Prescribed Fire By Gary DiGiuseppe
T
HERE IS A LOT THAT GOES INTO PLANNING A PRESCRIBED fi re. “You have to have a fuel source. You have to have the proper prescription to meet the
objective you want to achieve, and then you have to have some sort of ignition,” says Jeff Goodwin, state rangeland management specialist for USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “You write a prescription to meet an objective, just
like a medical doctor would. In this case, we are go- ing to call on specifi c environmental conditions like relative humidity ranges, ambient temperature ranges, wind direction and speed and fuel amounts, to carry the fi re in the direction and with the speed and in- tensity that we want, to meet whatever management objective we have. “I can burn it under different parameters or a differ-
ent season to have varying results, based on whatever the landowner chooses to focus on as their goal for the property,” Goodwin explains. There are also safety parameters to meet. Goodwin,
who helps private landowners adopt practices that ad- dress resource concerns, notes that prescribed fi re is unlike any other practice. “It is something that takes a tremendous amount of planning, and you need someone where that fi re is being conducted who knows exactly what they’re doing, has a lot of experience and, if you’re hiring a contractor, needs to be insured.”
56 The Cattleman March 2016
Fire-induced ecology Goodwin describes Texas as a fi re-induced ecology.
Every square inch of the Lone Star State, he says, was historically dependent upon fi re as a key ecological process. All of the state’s major land use areas developed
under frequent fi re, but that was mostly uncontrolled wildfi re. Those fi res are now suppressed. Landowners now
use prescribed fi re to mimic the benefi cial effects of fi re on such processes as brush management. Woody species, particularly Ashe juniper, have opportunisti- cally encroached from their traditional habitat of steeper slopes and canyons into more productive lands. Fire can retake that land. Ashe juniper “does not
have a root-sprouting bud underground, so if you take the green portion off of an Ashe juniper plant, you’ll kill it,” Goodwin says. “It’s very easily controlled with
Ashe juniper doesn’t have a root-
sprouting bud…if you take the green portion off of an Ashe juniper plant, you’ll kill it.”
fi re, as long as it’s at a height where we can grow enough fuel to consume it. Once it reaches 7 to 8 feet tall, it’s diffi cult to grow enough fuel under it to actu-
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