written by Stephany Wilkes
Photography by Paige Green
“This is not new,” Jaime Irwin says. “None of it is new. Women have been shepherds and herders for thousands of years.”
Many of California’s contract graziers and shepherds are women, now and again. If not exactly novel, shepherding is still a fairly unusual modern occupation. Jaime Irwin, of Kaos Sheep Outfit; Sarah Keiser of Wild Oat Hollow; and Paigelynn Trotter of Coastal Land & Livestock – among many others – occupy one of the most traditional roles in human history, albeit within profoundly and irreparably altered cultures and landscapes.
Individually and collectively, these women are building and shifting the sheep industry, influencing public policy, and providing mentorship and professional training to share their own hardwon, always evolving wisdom. This includes a deep knowledge of land, plants, animals, fire, and soil, and the relationship between all of these. It means multitasking on a sometimes maddening, seemingly impossible scale, serving hundreds or thousands of animals – ewes with new lambs, injured guardian dogs, a calf with a sticker in its eye – while dealing with a fire started by a truck’s careless passage through bone-dry grass, and serving as mothers, mentors, public policy ambassadors, and emergency prevention forces, reducing fuel loads as they help restore altered ecosystems.
Grazing for Fire Safety and SB 675
Sarah Keiser provides contract grazing services, education, and organizes community grazing co-ops as Wild Oat Hollow. She dispels misconceptions that grazing is, inherently, overgrazing. It is the opposite: thoughtful, intentional, deliberate, and highly skilled.
Keiser says, “Prescribed grazing follows historical patterns of grazing, where — due to threat of predation – ruminants and ungulates moved swiftly across landscapes, tightly packed together. They impacted the land pretty heavily, but then there would be a year of rest and landscape recovery. To actually do this now, you first have to know the goals of a client or community on a particular landscape. What are your ecological goals, vegetation management goals, fire fuel load reduction goals? What are you grazing for? How many sheep – or a mix of species – do you need to achieve that? In prescribed grazing, you control the number of animals in a certain area, or zone, and move them around so that you get appropriate impact to achieve those goals. You can’t just throw them out there and think they’ll eat it down and take care of themselves. Impact with rest is the critical piece for prescribed grazing with the goal of fire fuel reduction.”
Grazing is back in an increasingly big way, in recognition of the fact that the ecosystems of what is now the American West co-evolved with grazing and fire, and that trying to suppress these has – along with climate change effects like severe and prolonged drought – contributed to catastrophic wildfires. Recently, California Senate Bill 675 (SB 675) was signed into law. This bill establishes a grant program to promote the use of prescribed grazing as a tool for wildfire prevention and forest health, which is important because grazing is not always or explicitly an approved treatment for fire mitigation, in the way that chemical application and masticator machines may be. Until recently, that bureaucratic detail meant that – even if Cal Fire, a Firewise community, or a local Fire Action Council were interested in funding grazing to reduce fuel loads – they may not actually be allowed to apply grant funds to that method.
Keiser’s enthusiasm about SB 675 is contagious. “I’m super excited about it,” she says. “SB 675 is going to encourage and enable Cal Fire to begin funding prescribed grazing.”
Paigelynn Trotter founded Coastal Land & Livestock in 2016 and is curious about how SB 675 will translate on the ground. In some agriculture circles, there has been an assumption that Cal Fire does not value fire prevention (grazing included) so much as fighting fires that have started, but SB 675 has shifted that perception. As Trotter puts it, “I’m realizing now that I had this idea that the individuals operating in the Cal Fire organization did not value grazing, but maybe it’s that legislation doesn’t value grazing. SB 675 creates the possibility to reopen our minds to the idea of collaboration with Cal Fire, because people are now recognizing there were real legislative barriers to grazing.”
Trotter is also hopeful that increased funding for grazing from SB 675 might help public agencies and landowners – often confined by low and/or restricted budgets – to shift away from “one and done” fuels reduction treatments to more year-round management. She says, “When landowners are less confined by budgetary restrictions and can value what animals are bringing to the landscape in April, then they realize we should be managing vegetation year round, have multiple grazings per year and move the landscape to greater resiliency, and that we should not wait until it dries out. There is a year-round relationship we have with the land.”
Field Research
Jaime Irwin has been one half of Kaos Sheep Outfit for over 12 years, which now runs thousands of ewes and has a sizable team of highly skilled employees. In addition to grazing vineyards, orchards, and firebreaks, and producing meat and fiber, Irwin and her sheep also participate in experimental field research. This year, funded by a Western SARE grant and in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), they are conducting field research to determine how grazing is best applied for fuels reduction and soil health. While increasingly robust research on targeted grazing is available, much depends on context and there is still a great deal to learn.
“We are looking at various levels of grazing across different plots,” Irwin explains. “We have six plots with three different grazing and feed conditions: grazing down to the dirt, medium grazing, and lite grazing, and each of those has one plot with hay supplement and one without. That allows us to measure things like ‘Graze it down to dirt, with or without alfalfa, and see how the soil and animals do.’ We’re looking at vegetation weights in the field, soil temperature, animal condition, and a few other things. When we graze down to dirt – which people often want by default, for fire control – it’s just too hard on the soil, on erosion, on soil temperatures. In some cases it seems to help some native plants come back, like if you have a serious invasive, but I think we can graze more lightly and still get fuel reduction benefits, so that’s what we’re looking at.”
Irwin is also interested in the relationship between grazing and fire. “I really want to see how it burns afterward,” she adds. “I believe from experience that with light grazing, you can still fight fire, that it’s better than no grazing. But I want to see how it burns, to see if we can not graze down to dirt, because what’s great for fire is not always great for soil.”
Irwin’s observations hint at the degree of knowledge required to graze in a way that is beneficial on a holistic level: for soil health and resilience, animal health and wellbeing, biodiversity, and for human safety and livelihood.
Myriad, Complex Considerations
Trotter’s description of her grazing work hints at the myriad, complex variables she considers. Technically, all of her work could be framed as “fuels reduction,” but there is a lot more to it. She says, “Pretty much everything between mid May and August could be considered fuels reduction work, which is when we transition over to late season, invasive-species targeting. It is too dangerous to go out with a mower when it’s dry and it’s a tinderbox, so animals feel like the most appropriate tool because they don’t go out there and light fires. But even our green-season projects contribute to fuels reduction, even if it looks different than a one-and-done mowing looks. In spring, we graze to extend the growing season of annuals, increase water retention, and promote landscape diversity in the belief that promoting more diversity in annuals, and increasing perennials and soil coverage, are moving the landscape into a more resilient state. Then, when or if it burns, it can burn more slowly and recover faster from that.”
Human livelihood – the business aspects of contract grazing, how to materially and logistically fund it and keep it going – often get short shrift, but landscape practices cannot continue without it. Trotter has adapted her grazing business in multiple ways, to prioritize her family and human rest, in the same way that holistic, managed grazing allows land rest.
“When I started a family, I ended up just selling my entire herd,” she says. “It was an opportunity to start over, to take a break from owning animals and then when I started over, I could apply the knowledge that I learned from them. So while I had my kid and got settled in, I took a year off and just did very minimal contracts to maintain my most important relationships. And then last year I did a full season, and my son was out with me a lot, and it went really well. The key is to be in relationship, the ability to adapt and adjust your strategy as you are observing and listening to the landscape, and to your animals and what they’re expressing on the land, but also in your own life.”
This all continues to change as her son grows. “There are times it felt very difficult and vulnerable to integrate him in our work, to do the constant juggle and learning of ‘That’s not the best time for him to be with me or you,’ and seek help from our community. That’s the parenting side: the vulnerability smacks you in the face all the time. I’m a perfectionist, but sometimes doing it right means letting it get a little messed up, saying ‘I feel successful today because I was able to drop to my knees and be with my child who was curious about something in the soil.’ Having him on my back while moving animals is one of my favorite things because he’s our cheerleader and he points out things we wouldn’t have taken the time to appreciate.”
Another way Trotter has adapted and adjusted – for the benefit of landscapes, animals, and family life – is to rent or share animals, rather than own a large herd that requires year-round management and infrastructure. Flexibility and fluidity are key themes in her business.
She says, “I think what’s unique to my context is that I rent the animals I graze with, but I have all my own equipment, I do all of the labor. I have a pretty extensive contract with livestock owners about our expectations of each other. Now I’m running close to 1,000 animals for four months out of the year and honestly, I just want to go to bed afterwards. The partnerships I cultivate mean I get to send a majority of my animals home where they continue to get quality care and attention, and I get to rest a little, which is why I’ve stuck with that model for most of my animal units. It’s still essentially nomadic living between two counties. It’s not sustainable if I stay in Mendocino County, because there just are not the type of funding opportunities for vegetation management that there are in Sonoma County right now, but then I migrate back to Mendocino County where I can live fairly affordably, unlike in Sonoma County.”
This flexibility, fluidity, and constant adjustment according to myriad complex variables, from climate to funding to family life, from legislation to housing costs, is all part of making shepherding work in the modern world, making the land a little better each season through shepherding that is new and a bit more how it used to be.