Sheep Preventing Wildfires - America's Heartland

We've brought you some unusual stories here on America's Heartland and this one may well fit into that category. We're taking you to Northern Nevada to see how one rancher and community members are teaming up to help prevent wildfires using sheep and lambs. American ranchers raised more than 5 million sheep and lambs in 2011. Not only livestock that ended up on your dinner table, but animals that provided nearly 30 million pounds of wool for things like sweaters and suits. Ted Borda's family has been ranching these woolly animals for nearly a century. My family's been in the sheep business here in Nevada since 1914. My grandfather came from France, herd sheep for his brother and by 1918-17 he was married and by 1920 he owned his own sheep. We've been in the sheep business since then. Ted is a retired teacher. He turned to full-time sheep ranching a decade ago. You spend time with the sheep as a kid growing up with them and stuff. It's just a place you like to be in life. It's a good place to be. For the most part Ted's 3,000 sheep graze open areas in Northwest Nevada, but come spring they take on a different task tied to a disaster that happened in 2004. It was then that an explosive wildfire called the Waterfall Fire consumed nearly 9,000 acres near Nevada's capital of Carson City. That blaze injured five people, destroyed some two dozen structures, and threatened more than 500 homes and businesses before it was brought under control. As the Sun came up and more resources responded, this fire continued to grow and then our afternoon winds kicked in and it exploded and literally ran south to north across the entire face here of western Carson City. Fire investigators later pointed to a non-native plant called cheatgrass as a major source of fuel that fed that fast-moving fire. It is an annual grass. It dries out early in the spring. It's a very fine textured grass and so it's very easy to ignite and burns very rapidly. Carson City officials knew something had to be done to control the cheatgrass to help prevent future fires. Considering options for eradicating the cheatgrass, residents favored targeted grazing over things like herbicides and controlled burns. With that feedback, officials reached out to sheep ranchers like Ted Borda. His livestock will graze on land adjacent to homes and commercial property. The city covers his cost of transporting the sheep. For the city or the state or other local governments, we're all in tight budget situations. We just don't have the funds to go out and spend large amounts of money on pesticides or mechanical treatments. So it's a very efficient, very ecological friendly, if you will, way to reduce these fuels. It was 20 million dollars to fight the fire. They lost another 18 million dollars in homes. So this is a pretty cheap way to, you know, knock down those fuels. So if you have a fire, you can control it. The sheep will only eat the cheatgrass in the spring when the plant is short, green and tender. It's a good feed right now. They like it. They'll eat it, but once it goes from green to start carrying out and turning red, since it puts seed stock and when the seeds are soft, they'll eat it. But when the seeds start getting hard, they won't touch it. And then we only have about three weeks or so until it matures and it turns green, it turns red, and then it turns brown through the summer. And that's why it's a fire hazard. During the early spring, the sheep can plow through a lot of cheatgrass. If we have about 800 sheep using approximate numbers of forage of what they will eat through the week, we're anticipating about 13 tons of fuel being reduced off the landscape per week. Civic leaders say their targeted grazing is a green approach to reducing the fire hazard. We pride ourselves in Carson City about open space, and we pride ourselves on good prudent management of that open space. And the sheep grazing is good for not only fuel management, but it's just good to tell people, you know what, you can use nature to take care of nature. As for the sheep, well, many residents here will tell you they're happy to have them in their backyards. It's very low impact. I think the public is very accepting to it, and it's going to be successful. And Ted Borda believes the program also showcases his sheep as being a community asset. This grazing is something that's good for the sheep man. It's something that's good for the community. I think it's shown to be a positive for everybody.