Examining the practical on-ranch application and benefits of low-stress herding and stockmanship techniques

January 2019: We experienced some setbacks early in our grant execution process that we have since recovered from. An early challenge was that fire and drought meant that Mike Williams could not renew the lease on the ranch in Ventura County (Canada Larga) on which we planned to conduct our Western SARE project. Mike ranches on another 12,000-acre property in Los Angeles County and so we chose to move our project location there. The property in LA County (Ritter Ranch) has similar topography and vegetation as does Canada Larga, however there were far fewer internal, cross fences separating pastures. With fewer pastures, we needed to reconsider our study design. The Latin-square design we proposed initially required at least two large pastures with similar characteristics; Ritter Ranch really did not allow for this approach. After consulting with experts at UC Davis and Chico State, we settled on a different design: Year 1 would become our “control.” GPS tracking collars would be administered to cows on the ranch and field data would be collected but we would administer no herding treatments. Years 2 and 3 would be our “treatment” years: we would continue to collar cows and collect field data, and Mike would begin administering the herding treatment.

We spent April and May 2018 gathering supplies and building the GPS collars. Collars were applied to thirteen mother cows in late June 2018, which represents the beginning of data collection on the project. Cows will be managed from June 2018-June 2019 much as they have been in previous years. In July 2019, we expect to begin our herding treatment, which will consist of bunching and placing the cows every 3-5 days. In December 2018 (end of dry season) we collected fecal pat data at over sixty transects on the ranch that we stratified in areas of heavy and light use. We expect to continue that monitoring every six months.

We are planning on having our first workshop for ranchers in July 2019. The workshop will last two days and will gather experts, academics, and ranchers to showcase our SARE project and have them share techniques and experiences.

January 2020: Research and data collection is continuing much as planned. Thus far, we have collected GPS location data from the cows twice (December 2018 and July 2019) and expect to make our third collection this month, January-February 2020. The first two sets of collaring data tracks cows during our control year (Year 1) and this month's collection will represent the first GPS data since our treatment begun. The herding treatment was initiated in July 2019 and has continued to the present. In the intervening 6 months, 1-3 times/week cows are located, bunched, moved, and placed by horseback. Effort is made to place them in areas that have been identified as "low-use," in order to measure our success in augmenting distribution by our method. 

Fecal pat data has been collected across more than sixty sites on the ranch three times (December 2018, June 2019, December 2019). 

In July 2019, we held a very successful 3.5-day workshop that gathered over twenty academics, practitioners, and ranchers in Palmdale, CA on the Ritter Ranch to hear about our project, stockmanship principles, and to practice them horseback.

January 2021: We continue to have success executing the data collection component of our project. As originally proposed, we have continued to collar and collect GPS location data on cows in the treatment herd. In the last year, we have collected location data two additional times (March 2020 and July 2020) and expect to collect collar two more times (Feb/Mar 2021 and July 2021). Collecting data in July 2021 will represent three full years of collar data (one control year--Year 1--and two treatment years--Years 2 and 3). Herding treatments continue largely as originally conceived, however efforts have been targeted during the dry season (June-October) and during the rapid growth season for California annual grasslands (March-May). 

We continue to regularly collect fecal pat data across 64 sites twice annually. 

February 2022: We concluded our data collection effort in August 2021. In Year 3 of the trial, we collected data in February 2021 and August 2021, which represented our second full year of our "treatment." We performed a final fecal pat monitoring in January 2021.