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Grassland Management by the Animas Foundation Ben Brown 1

My name is Ben Brown and I am the Program Director for the Animas Foundation. The Animas Foundation is a private operating foundation created by Drum Hadley and his family in 1993. The primary purpose of this foundation when it was created was to acquire the Gray Ranch from The Nature Conservancy and to manage it in an ecologically responsible manner within the context of a working livestock operation. A private operating foundation is a little bit of a hybrid. You have probably heard of private foundations and public foundations. A private operating foundation is a private foundation that serves a public purpose. The Internal Revenue Service treats them as though they are a public foundation in some important ways. The Nature Conservancy was seeking a private solution to the long-term problem of managing the Gray Ranch and protecting and preserving its significant ecological features. The Gray Ranch is a 502-sq mi ranch in southwestern New Mexico. The Animas Mountains run through the center of the ranch, and its eastern boundary lies in the Playas Valley and the western boundary in the Animas Valley. It contains a large expanse of diverse, high-quality grasslands as well as some fairly unique woodland and riparian communities. The Nature Conservancy met Drum Hadley when he was given the New Mexico Chapter's Aldo Leopold Stewardship Award for his work in restoring the riparian communities in his Guadalupe Canyon Ranch. the Conservancy talked with Drum and his family about the peculiar problems of finding a satisfactory solution to ensure the integrity of the Gray Ranch over the long term. The culmination of these conversations was the creation of the Animas Foundation and its purchase of the ranch from the Conservancy in 1994. The Animas Foundation has a seven-member board of directors, consisting of Drum Hadley, his wife Teresa, his son Seth, Mike Hadley, Leo MacDonald, Sr. (who is also our legal advisor), Bill McDonald (a neighboring rancher) and Dr. Ray Turner (a plant ecologist). Our board meets four times each year and it is very active in setting the overall management agenda for the foundation and the Gray Ranch. Our operating programs on the ranch fall into four areas. The first is called Land Management and Conservation. Under this program we take care of the unique natural features of the Gray Ranch. We have been working steadily at grassland restoration, primarily through the restoration fire as a natural process on the landscape. We employ both natural prescribed fire and management-ignited prescribed fire to alter and restore the natural structure of the grassland communities. We have implemented some mechanical treatments, as well, to compare the relative costs and effectiveness of both methods of altering vegetation structure. We have some other research that we will touch upon in other program areas, but most of the activities under our Land Management and Conservation Program consist monitoring and managing the unique natural features entrusted to us. The second program area is Science and Education. We operate our own monitoring program to document the effects of our management on the natural communities and their

1 The Animas Foundation, Animas NM.

248 constituent plants and animals. When the foundation acquired the ranch, we established a network of 114 monitoring plots and established an ecological baseline through quantitative sampling. The monitoring regime is designed to be repeated at five-year intervals, but some of our plots have burned in natural and prescribed fires, and we have revisited those plots annually to track changes in species composition and abundance following these fires. It has been interesting to look at these results because most of the effects that we have seen following our extensive fires in 1993 and 1994 seem to be more associated with the effects of summer drought than the effects of the fires themselves. We also have a number of outside collaborators that we work with. Tom Valone, from California State University-Northridge (who is speaking at this conference) is researching the effects of fire, looking not only at the changes in species composition and structure of the vegetative communities, but documenting the effects on vertebrate and invertebrate populations, as well. The Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station is researching the effects of fire and mechanical treatments, both alone and in combination, on the structure of older, more established woodlands and shrub lands. One of their experimental plots is on the Gray Ranch. We also have cooperative programs with agencies such as the New Mexico Game and Fish Department, various universities, and private cooperators to monitor species which we would like to track on an annual basis. There has been a significant amount of work on the fire history of the Animas Mountains and how that affects the structure of the vegetation, both in the woodlands and the adjacent grasslands. Ray Turner and a panel of scientists are actively involved in reviewing proposals from potential cooperators who want to establish research programs. We have a formal Science Advisory Panel which assists us in evaluating and making recommendations on proposed research projects. If we get a proposal from a potential cooperator and it looks like something that fits with the mission of the foundation, we will usually try and find a way to get it done. The third program area is called Domestic Grazing. We are committed to carrying out all of our programs within the context of a working, responsible livestock management program which preserves the ranching culture of the Boot Heel as well as the biological diversity of the area. Right now, there are two kinds of grazing management programs. The first is called "grass banking", and some of you may have heard Bill McDonald talk about his earlier in the conference. Some of the pastures on the Gray Ranch have been made available to cooperating ranchers who have conveyed a land use easement over the deeded land on their own ranches to the Malpai Borderlands Group. The value of these easements is determined by an appraisal process and the Malpai Borderlands Group enters into an agreement with the Animas Foundation to provide a number of animal unit months of grazing that is determined by the value of the easement and the value of an AUM. The "home ranches" are rested, usually for a term of approximately three years, permitting them to benefit from rest and natural reseeding. Most of these ranchers are engaged in conservation planning in conjunction with an Natural Resources Conservation Service range conservationist, planning for better management, prescribed fire and other conservation practices. The grassbank ranchers manage their own livestock while they are on the Gray, with the foundation assigning them pastures and a desired rest-rotation grazing schedule. The foundation has also begun to purchase cattle to build its own cow/calf herd and will begin producing calves for sale sometime next year. These cattle will be used both for demonstration grazing and for research into the effects of grazing as an experimental treatment in conjunction with other management activities.

249 The fourth program area is called "Culture and Neighbor Outreach". In this program, the foundation works with our local community to support cultural and community activities. We also work with the ranchers who are actively involved with the Malpai Borderlands Group, and were instrumental in starting this sister non-profit, providing funds for start-up activities. We support local community service groups like the volunteer fire departments and the emergency medical service. We have helped the Cochise County Historical and Archeological Society with by hosting a fundraiser and we work with the Bootheel Oldtimers Association, too. The purpose of this program is to help preserve the culture and the lifestyle which make this part of the United States and adjacent Mexico unique. Our fifth program area deals with the administration of the everyday affairs of the foundation: personnel matters, budgeting, and other administrative tasks. However, within the umbrella of the first four programs that I have described, we concentrate our efforts primarily on the management of the Gray Ranch. As I mentioned earlier, our current emphasis is on grassland management and grassland restoration, mainly through the use of fire and grazing. We have been very fortunate so far in that we have had to use hardly any management-ignited burns. In the years in which we have had fine fuels and wanted to burn, we have been blessed with a lot of natural ignition. We haven't had to light many fires ourselves, so far. We have also had a lot of cooperation from the agencies that have the responsibility for fire suppression: New Mexico State Forestry Department, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. These are the agencies that deal with wildfires in our part of New Mexico and they have cooperated in establishing containment lines at natural fire breaks, backfiring off of these and letting fires burn as they will until they reach the containment lines. In 1993, we burned about 38,000 acres on the Gray Ranch and in 1994 we were able to burn about 78,000 acres. With a total of approximately 322,000 acres in the ranch and a preferred fire return interval of five years, we are looking at having to burn acreages of these magnitudes in the good years to achieve our management goals. We hope to do some more research on the effects of fire, particularly on the effects of fire frequency in the grasslands. We feel like we know when natural fires occurred in the presettlement grasslands, because Mother Nature lights the fires herself at the proper time. In 1993, we had approximately 214 natural starts on the Gray that we know about, all from lightning storms. In 1994, we probably had similar numbers. We rarely have natural starts before the middle of April nor after the middle of July. Those fires that do start outside of this April-July window usually don't burn very long nor do the burn very extensively. I'll quit here and let someone else have the floor, but I'll be around for a bit if anyone wants to ask questions about the programs of Animas Foundation and the Gray Ranch. I'll be happy to talk with you about them. I do want to brag a bit on the Animas Foundation before I sit down. Our foundation was one of the key ingredients in starting up the Malpai Borderlands Group and this whole landscape/ecosystem planning effort. This was largely due to the vision of Drum Hadley, who thought that this magnificent piece of country that we call the Gray Ranch had the ability to leverage conservation action outside of the boundaries of what he and his foundation could afford to buy. I think that the results so far have proven that his hopes were true. I think that Bill McDonald will tell you that the Malpai Borderlands Group is finding that they have a similar (and probably more extensive) ability to leverage grassland conservation and grassland restoration efforts beyond the 900,000 or so acres that we call the primary planning area. Good ideas are contagious.

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