Another Upland Range Management Success Story: "...CRYSTALYX® holds the cows up there..."
Joe Bignell
Avon, Montana
February, 2005
Joe and Patti Bignell of Avon, Montana, had traditionally summered their cow-calf pairs with their neighbors' cattle on the US Forest Service Blossburg permit land in the Little Blackfoot River watershed in Montana. In 2004, the Clark Canyon USFS allotment became available to Joe and Patti as a temporary opportunity. Forage reserve allotments would be made available to a current permittee if the allotment was vacant or another permittee elected to not use their allotment.
The Clark Canyon allotment was a single permittee, season-long allotment that had had several years of light grazing use. That light usage resulted in an accumulation of ungrazed forage on the upland rangelands. One management option was a controlled burn to take off decadent forage; but that would have entailed environmental analysis and labor costs. Vicky MacLean, Forest Service Range Technician, asked Joe to try to get his cow calf pairs to use the areas of decadent forage.
Joe had used CRYSTALYX® successfully in 2003 on the Blossburg allotment and decided to try it on the Clark Canyon allotment. Joe & Patti agreed to try late-day cattle herding to CRYSTALYX® on the first day. The Clark Canyon permit was for 100-head on six sections. It was a new experience for Joe & Patti and the cows that had previously only summered on the Blossburg allotment. How long the cows might be able to summer on this new season-long allotment would be determined by their ability to stay grazing in the plentiful decadent forage on the range above Polly Spring, the primary stock water source.
Joe & Patti placed four CRYSTALYX® HE-20™ barrels a half-mile apart at an elevation 500-feet higher than Polly Spring, on an unused meadow ridge. On the first day the cow calf pairs were herded up to the spring and later to the CRYSTALYX® barrels.
The official written report filed by the Bignell's for the Forest Service for the 2004 Clark Canyon allotment grazing year told the success story of the experiment.
"One of (Forest Service Range Technician) Vicky's goals was the use of Polly Springs. When our rider checked during the heat of the summer, eighty percent of the cattle were above the spring. We feel this was mainly due to the use of CRYSTALYX®. Grass that hadn't been utilized in years was used this year. We feel this allotment was in excellent condition by the end of the year. One comment from Vicky that should confirm this was when she said in early September that Joe's cows could stay through September if he kept the cows off the creek bottoms. We feel that the grass was used properly and the cattle kept off the bottoms. The use of a rider and CRYSTALYX® were all contributing factors to this success."
In previous years Joe and Pattie had received calls from the Forest Service asking them to chase away cattle camped by the creek on the Blossburg allotment. Thanks to the use of CRYSTALYX® in the summer of 2004, there were no calls about the Clark Canyon allotment from the Forest Service.
"Those Clark Canyon CRYSTALYX® cows settled right down and started eating grass and the calves started gaining right away," Joe said. "There's just a lot less stress on a cow and calf when they don't have a rider always bumping them, every day, all the time. They just do better with their own time schedule than they do with continual hazing. The biggest thing is the CRYSTALYX® holds the cows up there in the heat of the day!"
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