Wildfires: eat sheeps or fry

By Richard North - August 15, 2023

The figures speak for themselves. In 2018, according to the Hawaii Cattlemen’s Council and the UH College of Tropical Agriculture, 43,500 calves were shipped out of Hawaii and only about 11,100 head were raised to maturity and processed on the islands.

Locally processed meat made up only about 6 percent of the beef consumed by the Hawaiian population, with the bulk of the meat consumed on the islands being shipped in from mainland United States.

Meanwhile, a million acres of non-native grassland on the islands – introduced largely by ranchers to provide more productive feed for their cattle – goes to waste. Worse still, as even the New York Times acknowledges, it adds to the fuel-load that drives the increasing number of wildfires on the islands, the proximate cause of the destruction of the town of Lahaina.

And yet, we have the BBC’s Washington correspondent speaking on yesterday’s 6 o’clock news bulletin telling her audience that many scientists believe that the fires are “proof of a climate emergency”.

The reality, of course, is that if there is no fuel load in the environment, there can be no wildfire, no matter what the conditions – drought, wind or elevated temperatures. No fuel, no fires – simples. Too much fuel and the fires are unstoppable.

With a million acres of non-native grassland to deal with, there is too much fuel. Furthermore, there is a general consensus that removal and reversion to native strains is impossible – if not practically so, then as an economic proposition. The public sector simply doesn’t have the budget to mount an eradication and restoration programme.

There have been management trials in Texas, involving mowing swathes of Guinea grass and the selective use of herbicides, but these have been on a small scale and have gone nowhere.

Logic, therefore, would suggest that the ultimate solution to managing the proliferation of non-native grass is to rely on nature’s lawnmowers, in the form of cattle, sheep and possibly goats, collectively referred to as ungulates.

Unfortunately, in Hawaii, things are not that simple. Ungulates are not native to the islands and cattle were only introduced in 1793, spreading so rapidly that by the mid-1800s there were 25,000 roaming the landscape. Feral breeds are now regarded as highly damaging to “fragile ecosystems”, alongside sheep (and deer) which are similarly regarded.

The native flora, which developed in the absence of large land mammals, is extremely vulnerable to browsing, trampling, and bark stripping by ungulates, and the effects of these introduced species has been severe. The state is home to 421 endangered and 16 threatened plants and animals, prompting some to call it “the endangered species capital of the world”.

As a result, Hawaii has ended up with what some might regard as a perverse situation. Unable to mitigate the effects of non-native grasses, the local government has nevertheless expended considerable wealth in mounting eradication programmes, particularly of sheep in order to reduce the ecological damage.

The adverse effects of grazing, as I remarked in my first piece on this issue, had Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organisation noting that there was a strong “anti-ungulate” faction among environmentalists. Evidently, in the manner of Monbiot, they resist any increase in livestock, whether farmed or feral.

The situation has led one academic at the University of Hawaii, as recently as 2020, to write in her master’s thesis that: “Targeted livestock grazing provides a potential tool to reduce fire risk at large scales, although implementation of cattle grazing to reduce invasive grass biomass has not occurred”. She added:

Stakeholders that support forest conservation do not support the use of cattle grazing for fire control, while other stakeholders do not appear to be unified in their opposition or support of cattle grazing for fire management. This strong opposition by one group of stakeholders must be addressed for cattle grazing to be implemented as a fire management strategy in Hawaii.

Attempts are being made to educate the public on the distinction between controlled agricultural grazing – with targeted objectives such as creating firebreaks – and unmanaged grazing by feral animals. There is also a suggestion that a shift may be needed, away from traditional economic models in which ranchers pay landowners for forage to a new system that considers grazing for fuel reduction as a service.

However, while cattle ranchers are seeking to increase production, there remains a bottleneck in slaughterhouse capacity, as well as difficulties in the local sourcing of supplementary feed, which creates economic constraints on growth.

It is unlikely, therefore, that the cattle industry in the foreseeable future could provide anything but a partial solution to the problem of reducing the environmental fuel load. And then, if cattle production is to be demand-driven, it is estimated that only about 36.9 percent of Hawaii’s pastureland is suitable for high-grade beef production.

Bearing in mind the rugged terrain in some areas, it is likely that, under any circumstances, some grazing will be inaccessible to cattle, some of which may be precisely the areas which need intensive grazing to secure fuel reduction.

For these and other reasons, some believe that the future of Hawaii’s farming industry lies in an expansion of sheep husbandry. That there is room for expansion is evident from the current size of the islands’ sheep population, standing at 27,000 (as of 2017) compared with over 100,000 in the late-1800s.

Once again, though, the sticking point – as with the beef industry – is slaughterhouse capacity and, even now, the capacity for ruminants such as sheep is so small that live animals are often sold in lieu of processed meat.

Until that is fixed, says one industry commentator, talk of expansion is just academic discussion. Until then, most sheep’s value lies in its management of pasture, nothing else, and that alone is not enough to sustain an expanding industry.

At least, with the proliferation of wildfires, in the rest of the United States as well as Hawaii, there have been some voices arguing for this solution. In 2022, ABC News ran a programme headed: “Flocks of sheep are the firefighting solution we never knew we needed”.

The programme describes Cuyama Lamb, an agriculture company that aims to regenerate the grasslands native to California and provide sustainable food production.

This company then ran about 700 sheep that grazed landscapes in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties for fire fuel mitigation. The fire department directed the sheep to the areas it decided were most need of fuel mitigation creating a “burn breaks” that stopped wildfires in their tracks.

Currently, though, it seems that the biggest barrier to this environmental solution are the so-called environmentalists – at several levels. Not only is there the local (and irrational) opposition to the expansion of managed grazing, there is also a studied refusal to see the problem for what it is.

We see this graphically illustrated in an article in the Guardian, where the author – the aptly-named Christy Lefteri – oozes indignation at the “failure” of Greek people to recognise that the wildfires that have been blighting their lives have been caused by climate change.

The insistence that climate change is the cause of wildfires is obscuring the real source of the problem, and thus diluting or delaying appropriate policy responses. You end up with governments installing wind turbines to fend off climate change rather than letting loose flocks of sheep.

While livestock may be the real answer, it is not a simple solution, requiring potentially expensive infrastructure, and a rethink of farming industry economics, including re-thinking agricultural subsidies – as well as facing down rampant eco-zealots who are obstructing progress.

Simple or not, though, the consequences should be clear to all – eat sheeps or you fry.