Cattle from the 5 Bar Beef ranch graze on land owned by the Transportation Corridor Agency at the agency’s Live Oak Plaza Conservation Area in Trabuco Canyon, CA on Monday, February 22, 2021. The area, a 23-acre parcel at the corner of El Toro Road and Live Oak Canyon Road, is part of a three-year pilot program of fire mitigation and native species replenishment. The green hills are on the 5 Bar Beef property where the cattle usually graze. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Among climate advocates, beef typically gets a bad rap.
To stock feedlots for factory-farmed cattle, which is how 70% of America’s cows are raised, crews often clear forests and use lots of water to grow grain. And once those cows eat, their burps and flatulence and decomposing manure emit high levels of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
Even grass-fed cattle are sometimes allowed to graze in one area too long, or return to the same area too frequently, turning grasslands into virtual deserts.
But pilot projects underway in eastern Orange County are offering up some promising evidence that suggest carefully planned cattle grazing might actually help restore native plant and animal life while also reducing wildfire risk.
The difference is visible to anyone who drives by Cook’s Corner in Trabuco Canyon. After three years of controlled grazing, the open land across the street, which is owned by the agency that operates Orange County’s toll roads, has transformed from being overgrown with invasive plants into a tidy, green field. And a similar transformation is underway on Orange County Rescue Mission’s nearby Double R Ranch, where people who once were homeless can get job training, equestrian therapy and other services.
“Using the cattle is great,” said Jim Palmer, president of the Tustin-based nonprofit. “It creates a whole healthy cycle.”
Some studies have cast doubt on the benefits of holistic or conservation grazing programs, and the concept remains controversial among many environmentalists. But the teams behind these pilots hope that sharing their results will inspire other regenerative agriculture efforts throughout Southern California and beyond.
“We’re definitely seeing positive results,” said Michelle Miller, spokesperson for the Transportation Corridor Agencies. “So I think it’s something people should look at.”
The last cowboy
At the heart of the cattle-grazing projects is Frank Fitzpatrick, who owns 5 Bar Beef and is affectionately known as Orange County’s last cowboy.
Fitzpatrick has been raising grass-fed cattle locally for more than four decades, confident that such a system is better for the land, the cows, and the people who eat them. But he credits Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean scientist and livestock farmer, for introducing him to the holistic grazing system he now uses on his own 800-acre ranch and in the pilot projects on the TCA and Rescue Mission land.
In a popular TED Talk that Savory gave in Long Beach a decade ago, he promoted the use of strategic cattle grazing as a way to replicate the benefits that huge herds of native hoofed animals, such as buffalo and elk, once provided for soil and habitats. These animals eat non-native plants, which tend to sprout first. That clears the way for later-blooming native grasses and other vegetation to pop through as the animals move on. Meanwhile, the heavy animals churn the soil with their hooves, which prevents erosion. And they fertilize the soil with their urine and dung, which encourages healthy microbes to grow more plants and to sink more carbon.
The key to this system working is not to let the animals graze in one area too long. By moving them around frequently, and keeping them away from certain areas for fixed times, Savory’s theory says plant life and soil have time to recover. So in the plot across from Cook’s Corner, the cattle only graze for around two weeks three times a year. That way, Fitzpatrick said, native plants can establish roots before the cattle return and chomp on what’s growing above ground.
This system of holistic grazing was promoted in the recent Woody Harrelson-narrated documentary “Kiss the Ground,” by a Los Angeles-based nonprofit of the same name. Several scenes from the documentary were filmed on Fitzpatrick’s ranch, he said.
Over the years, the former owner of a 23-acre parcel of land at the intersection of El Toro Road and Live Oak Canyon Road occasionally let Fitzpatrick’s herd of 800-pound Barzona bulls graze on the property. But in 2005, that owner sold the land to TCA, and Fitzpatrick said his cattle hadn’t grazed there for nearly 15 years.
Looking for solutions
TCA bought the Trabuco Canyon land to help mitigate environmental impacts of the toll roads.
The agency is charged with preserving 17 such sites in Orange County, a total of more than 2,000 acres. While some of those sites have been set aside as nature preserves, the parcel across from Cook’s Corner sat undisturbed until February 2021, when the TCA used toll road revenue to start paying Fitzpatrick $11,500 a year to have his cattle graze there as part of a three-year pilot project.
The most recent grazing period wrapped up Saturday, with one final round set to happen in late summer.
Miller, spokesperson for the TCA, said the pilot project has several goals. One is to reduce fire risk on the property. That happened in the very first grazing period, in 2021, when Fitzpatrick’s cattle cleared feet-tall invasive mustard that had browned on the plot, helping TCA win recognition such as the “Outstanding Wildfire Hardening Project of the Year” from the local branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
If that was the project’s only goal, the toll roads agency could have recruited goats to munch on the fields, as some other local agencies have done. But while goats help clear non-native plants that increase fire risks, Fitzpatrick said they aren’t heavy enough to churn up soil or robust enough grazers to give native plants the space they need to come back. And since TCA also wanted to bring back some of the area’s natural riparian grasses and coastal sage scrub, which support the threatened coastal California gnatcatcher and the endangered Riverside fairy shrimp, Miller said research told them that cattle was a better option than goats.
Biologists working for the toll road agency recently finished an updated evaluation on the pilot project. Overall, a report says they’ve found a reduction in non-native plants and fire risk, with an increase in native plant life and both gnatcatcher and fairy shrimp populations.
Biologists do recommend that TCA does some seeding of native plants because repeated wildfires in the area and overgrazing by previous landowners have leeched native seeds from the soil. The biologists also recommend some additional management to control the weeds that the cattle don’t eat or trample.
Toll road staff will share those findings with the agency’s Board of Directors by early next year, Miller said, as they consider whether to continue, tweak or possibly expand the cattle grazing program.
As for the Orange County Rescue Mission, Palmer said Fitzpatrick approached the nonprofit shortly after his team bought 35 acres of Trabuco Canyon land from St. Michael’s Abbey two years ago, when the monastery moved to a larger campus in nearby Silverado Canyon.
“We’ve obviously learned an awful lot that we didn’t know about how to handle the land,” Palmer said, with Fitzpatrick regularly helping to educate clients who live on the ranch.
“We just really appreciate him and what he’s doing and how he helps our land regenerate.”
Controversy remains
The concept of holistic grazing is appealing, particularly to those who want to protect the planet but still enjoy an occasional steak.
But environmental groups such as Sierra Club insist that Savory’s theory has been debunked, citing studies that suggest the system does little to improve soil quality. Instead, some equate promised solutions from the cattle industry to promised solutions from the fossil fuel industry, which they view as a clear attempt at self preservation.
Most controversial is Savory’s suggestion that there’s no such thing as too many cows so long as they’re not left to overgraze. Fitzpatrick, too, insists that his grazing program would be far more environmentally beneficial if he had lots more cows grazing on lots more land.
“All we need is about 16,000 acres and about 4,000 cows,” he said, rather than the 60 to 80 head of cattle now grazing on TCA’s 23 acres.
But grass-fed cows still emit lots of planet-warming methane, with balanced grazing tricky to get right. That’s why a 2017 study from the Food Climate Research Network, out of the University of Oxford, argued that ditching factory-farm cattle isn’t enough.
“Simply switching to grass-fed beef is not a solution,” lead researcher Tara Garnett said. “Eating less meat, of all types, is.”
Asked about such pushback, Miller said they haven’t received any negative feedback on their grazing program. It likely helps, she said, that Orange County has a long history of cattle ranching that dates back to the 1700s.
Already, county Supervisor Doug Chaffee, who chairs TCA’s Joint Environmental Committee, said he believes the targeted cattle grazing program “has helped alter public perception of land use and how it can be managed in a holistic and sustainable way through regenerative agriculture.”
To continue that mission, Fitzpatrick hopes to launch the Orange County Grazing Coalition, a group that would produce educational videos, offer ranch tours and otherwise promote holistic grazing as a tool to help fight climate change.
His message, really, is a simple one.
“If you save the soil, we’ll make it. If you don’t save it, we won’t.”