N RANCHING
atural Resources
way up in the air, lift and get up in the wind’s loft, which will disperse it and carry it off.”
Firebreaks Another key part of the plan is positioning of fi re-
breaks, which can be anything from a mechanically bladed, ‘dozed or graded strip of bare ground, to a lesser-traveled road or a cultivated fi eld, to a natural barrier like a creek or river. Weir says fi rebreaks do a couple of things. They
delineate the burn unit, identifying the area you want to burn, and they keep the fi re from creeping outside of those areas.
After-fi re care The fi re should eventually burn out within the burn
unit, but the landowner still has mop-up work to do. This involves going around the edges and perimeter of the burn unit and making sure that anything smoldering close to the edge is dragged further back into the unit so it isn’t blown out of the unit by a gust of wind, or that it is extinguished with water or covered with dirt. Sometimes that work is done the day of the fi re, but it can also last for 2 or 3 days afterwards. Says Weir,
“We need to keep our fi re where it’s supposed to be, even after the fact.” Even with the risks, Goodwin says prescribed fi re
is becoming a more attractive option. He says, “Any time that you have an economic component to what you’re doing that’s cheaper and has multiple ecological benefi ts, and top that with something that economi- cally effi cient, there’s a lot of interest... So I will say the level of interest has increased, but the barriers to getting prescribed fi re on the ground and the liability concerns are still there, even though we now have private landowner insurance available.” Russell encourages ranchers interested in using this
tool to contact a PBA, or even form their own. “Two- thirds of Texas’ counties are within a prescribed burn association,” she says. “When you get east of I35 or get into more areas dominated by urban-wildland interface areas like San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Ft. Worth, you are not going to see as strong of a prescribed burn association. But in the western part of the state, where we still have large tracts of land intact and not hindered by fragmentation or urbanization, prescribed burn as- sociations are very strong and are actively conducting burns throughout the fall and late springtime.”
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62 The Cattleman March 2016
thecattlemanmagazine.com
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