Wed, 12 Oct 2005

Cattle grazing may help rather than hurt endangered species

I can tell you from experience that this is true: we have a nesting pair of heron's in our little watershed, mostly due to the cattle keeping things trimmed to the point where the birds can spot predators more readily. But the key word here is "landowner"...

A landowner has an economic incentive to keep his pastures productive. A landowner will not overgraze his property, to the point where it burns out. However, much of the cattle on grass in this country are on public lands (mostly out West), where no such incentive exists, and a reverse incentive may apply (to "get all you can while the gettin's good", as they say). In the absence of strong governmental management this inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons.

The fight between cattle-grazing landowners and environmentalists may be a false dichotomy.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

/Agriculture | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time