COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • AUGUST 2019


25 Ranchers collaborate to preserve grasslands


Biodiversity key to restoring sensitive eco- systems in OK


by JUDIE STEEVES OLIVER—Like a sliver of


sky, a Western Bluebird drops from above and lands among the dried grasses at the edge of a meadow. Down the hill, sun glints off


a small, round lake surrounded by forest down to the water’s edge, and a creek flows out through a low spot, fenced off from the grassy rolling hills on either side. Healthy green grass has been munched in a few places but the cattle grazing there don’t often trek down the hills to the creek for a drink because the rancher provides convenient troughs throughout the range, fed from springs high in the hills. Instead, explains Wade


Clifton, whose family owns the Clifton Ranch in Keremeos, his cows tend to drift across the hills so there’s less erosion than would occur if they wandered regularly up and down the hills between grazing and drinking water. The streamside is also less


eroded and the riparian zone is being restored to a more natural state now that the cows are watered elsewhere through the 17,000 feet of water line and troughs. It’s all part of the Nature


Trust of BC’s White Lake Basin Biodiversity Ranch, at Twin Lakes, west of Kaleden and Penticton. Clifton owns a neighbouring parcel and is now running about 500 cows on both his own and the Nature Trust’s conservation


Little Twin lake is now fenced off from cattle, as is Horn Creek, which links it to Twin Lakes. JUDIE STEEVES PHOTO


property, allowing more space for the cattle so the pressure on the land is sustainable on all parcels. “We try to keep the cattle dispersed,” he notes.


Co-management


In all, the partners own, lease and hold grazing licences on a total of 8,056 hectares of grassland in the area of the White Lake Basin and Twin Lakes, managing it jointly as both ranch land for grazing cattle and as conservation lands for nationally endangered and


threatened species at risk and their habitat.


Although the concept of combining a working, viable


Helping Y


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SUMMER SIZZLERS cattle ranch with land


conservation for species at risk may seem odd, it is working, says Jasper Lament,


CEO of the Nature Trust. A management plan for


See GRAZING on next page o


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