Cattle Controlling Wildfires

Removing underbrush is starting to be recognized as a key strategy for protecting property from wildfire, and cattle are being deployed to do it.

The purpose of this research series is to explain the non-monetary economic value traits of common commodities, to encourage supply chain stakeholders to build mechanisms to make payments for currently unpriced traits. Today, there are government payments, regulatory and market access costs, and a small number of corporate-led initiatives that are offering payments to farmers, but there are not the broad-scale marketplaces needed to accelerate adoption at scale.

As Fractal’s Emma Fuller explains in this blog about scaled solutions for row crop farmers, a whole range of programs and levers for change are needed in order to shift practices to reduce emissions at the speed and level needed. Unfortunately, the first big push by voluntary carbon markets basically backfired from the perspective of earning farmer trust in new programs.

Yet payments and markets are only two mechanisms for transferring value. As has been reviewed in this research series several times, insurance coverage and claims are being impacted by climate disruption with severe economic outcomes.

Thus far, the focus around insurance has been negative:

• The challenges facing insurance companies and their customers bearing the costs of wildfires and floods, and

• How crop insurance reinforces industrial monocropping and can’t yet underwrite advanced regenerative practices like intercropping.

In several jurisdictions like Europe and California, governments and universities have started experimenting with cattle grazing underbrush to slow and help prevent wildfires. According to Beef Magazine, “Livestock grazing can be used as a tool to lower wildfire risk, as well as reduce the ultimate impact of the fire, by slowing down how fast the flames spread and how hot the fire burns. They do this by grazing down the annual and perennial grasses, promoting new growth and leaving far less dead underbrush that acts as kindling to a fire.”