prescribed fire

Onset of Rain

For all that’s unpredictable and chaotic in the world, when our Mediterranean climate encounters the onset of rains on schedule we smile and settle and love the transition. Winter birds celebrate. Seeds turn to shoots. Late season apples swell and sweeten. The short days and moisture suggest the end of fire season and we turn our attention to hydrology.

Gold Rush apples have been tasty for a long time hanging on the tree- a new favorite of our community orchardists

Precipitation

Mark Lipson notes that the last couple of days brought the Farm .78 inch of rain, at least at the elevation and exposure of the weather station he monitors. Ecologists suggest that it takes 1” of rain to spur germination and we got a couple of other smaller storms not that long ago…and voila there we have it…the blush of green has commenced! Seeds burst, birthing into seedlings! Dust becomes soil! Drought-shrunken leaves moisten and stretch. Cows drinking from puddles wander further from troughs, grazing freshly wetted grass. Underground fungal hyphae flush and earthy scents are caried on the humid breeze. Storms pass, clouds part, and sunshine sparkles off billions of droplets left behind.

After around an inch of rain: germination!

Land History Demands Stewardship

In deep time there have been tens of thousands of years of warming and drying…plants that love cool, fire-free, moist environments have been retreating northward…ones that love hot, dry, flame-licked landscapes come from the South and East to take their place. Molino Creek Canyon was a grand fir forest 15,000 years ago, just before redwoods appeared. As that march of time progressed, humans walked in using partner flames to tend the wild. The African-like animal-scape winked out – mastadons, mammoths, horses, camelids, ground sloths, bison, and so much more: tasty meat! Gone! Colonists remove the People and their wisdom of place and the tender, intelligent, adaptive care the landscape had come to know. Murder! Genocide!!

Us ‘modern folk’ are, in effect, infants being buffeted by a Nature we do not understand (very few are seeking to understand) and which is imbalanced and untethered with the recent legacy of unprecedented changes, abuse, invasion, and extraction. Once-partner-fire awakens current generations to realize survival is impossible without new approaches. A new culture of stewardship emerges.

Molino Creek Farm Pursues that Challenge

Surrounding the super-manipulated farm fields and orchards: scrubland, coastal prairie, oak forest, creeks and redwoods. Photos from early farm days, 1988, reveal mainly hillsides of prairie surrounding the farm, with forest and trees on the ridge lines and canyons. Slivers of that globally endangered coastal prairie remained in 2008, each a refuge for poppies and lupines, owl’s clover, sanicle, lotus, farewell-to-spring and rare native dandelions. Each year since, we have been working however we can to restore the prairies, conserving species and creating greater wildfire resilience.

Matthew Todd now, and others before him have been the large-scale muscle with expensive mastication machines for mowing brush. Farm partners perform daring and acrobatic maneuvers with our own grass-mowing tractors. Hand-to-stem wrestling periodically controls tree and shrub invaders. Wildfire swept through twice.

Matthew Todd is a dedicated Earth Steward and this is one of his tools – see above, his results!

Sunday, we sigh relief that an extensive stewardship community returns to Molino Creek Farm. The Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association has organized its second event to burn many acres that are returning to coastal prairie. Lots of volunteers, all geared up, in various levels of training and all pumped with enthusiasm for Good Fire, are the reason we can do this. The hillsides will turn from gray-brown to black. Native and non-native invasive shrubs and trees will be rocked back on their heels yet again. Nutrients will flush into the soil to feed the expanding patches of native coastal prairie wildflowers and grasses, which we regularly gather in Spring and spread into restoration areas in Fall. The below-ground biotic community is shifting to that which supports coastal prairie.

Harvest Winding Down

Some fields are still rocking, some petering off. Some orchard trees are already sleeping, some still swelling with fruit. Two Dog Farm’s tomatoes and peppers are still burgeoning, Molino Creek Farm’s all gone. The gleaning of leftover winter squash and onions is still happening. The last big harvests of apples are rolling in – Fuji and Braeburn, mainly. There are 100 pounds of our first Granny Smith apples in years, but those won’t be ready until January. The new favorite apple “Gold Rush” has a few more tasty fruits for snacks. But LIMES, oh my LIMES! (and lemons!) Citrus season is starting, once again. Each day, the Persian limes turn yellower, getting close to being ripe. Lemons are dropping to the ground, rotting – guess no one wants lemons! (or lemonade). Late season avocados are dribbling in, more to come.

Persian limes getting ripe!

Farm Labor

Besides harvesting and helping with prescribed burning, Farm Partner work attention moves to preparing for winter. The final mowing of orchard blocks has recently been completed, so Saturday we switch the mower out for the harrow on the BCS. Bags upon bags of bell beans are stacked in the barn for sowing and folks have ‘signed up’ for shifts behind the beast of a machine to scratch those big shiny seeds into the soil. The ride-on tractors will similarly be at work soon, disking cover crop seeds into the ground, contouring their final tire tracks so soil doesn’t wash down hill and leave large swaths infertile. Stacks of wax boxes are in the greenhouse, curing winter squash for upcoming sale. We’ll soon move tools inside, stack orchard tree props for the winter, and drain irrigation lines in case of freeze.

A look at one of our North facing slopes, Farm tomato field in foreground

Seasonality of Birds

The dominant and the sub-dominant bird songs indicate upcoming winter. We’ve got the cacophonous caterwauling of blackbirds calling from large flocks gathered on the baring branches of walnut trees. And, hidden under and around bushes with calls a bit more subtle, hundreds of sly sparrows. These flocks are big enough to make feather noise when they flush just as much as the quail. Woooosh….Wirrrr…FFFFFFFFF….

This is going to look different in a few days- one of the main slopes we burn when we can

People for Fire

Nature around the Monterey Bay has been adjusting to changing wildfire regimes; we should expect that to continue, but how that happens is up to us in many different ways. Very recently, we are putting purposeful, good fire back onto the land. This may help restore the land while protecting human infrastructure from catastrophic damage, but there are too few projects to learn from…we must learn more!

Burning History

The Monterey Bay area has been getting hotter and drier for 20,000 years, which coincides with the era of fire-lighting humans. Laguna de las Trancas is an ancient pond that lies on a geological fault on the North Coast. Ancient ponds record the history of their place in strata. Scientists have taken sediment cores from that pond and recorded layers of pollen and volcanic ash, going back through time as the deeper sediment is older. Volcanic ash has properties that allow us to know from which volcano it originates and scientists have used various methods to chart the age of ancient volcanic eruptions. So, volcanic ash serves as milestones marking known years in the sediment’s past. This is how we know that this region changed to a much more fire-prone landscape around 12,000 years ago, consequent with the widespread archeological evidence of humans. Before that, the dominant forest trees were firs; after that, fire-adapted redwoods came to dominate. More recently, for the past 1200 years, fire scars on ancient redwoods illustrate a 4-6 year burn return interval. Indigenous people likely managed the fires sweeping frequently through redwood forests, but their fire tending of this landscape tragically ended during the genocidal colonist period. Purposeful fire has been almost entirely absent on most of this landscape for 230 years. In its place, long-interval catastrophic wildfires have caused all sorts of mayhem and loss of life.

Indigenous Pyro Management 

Oral history, written accounts at the time of colonist contact, pollen records in ponds, burn scars on ancient trees, and vegetation patterns on this landscape are things that can teach us bits about thousands of years of intentional use of fire by humans. One early written account from early Old-World colonist explorers notes that many of the meadows around Monterey Bay were burned black. We know now that without burning and/or grazing all of this region’s prairies change quickly into forests, so fire must have been maintaining meadows for a very long time, in the absence of grazing and tree-pulling by the Pleistocene megafauna. The blackened meadows hampered the progress of invading Old-World explorers because they had trouble feeding their horses, which they relied on for transport. In this case, we might contemplate the use prairie fire as self-defense, but we also know that indigenous peoples used fire to cultivate native plants that served as medicine, salad greens, grain, basket materials and much more.

Good Fire Emerging Now

California’s governor has set a goal of using prescribed fire on a half million acres a year. It has been 1/10th of that for too long but indigenous folks probably burned more like 3 million acres (or more) a year previously.  

Most people do not see the natural landscape as their pharmacy, grocery store, or fibershed, but many people look to the hills and know the danger of wildfire. Purposeful, good fire is starting to address this last concern and one day will help people reunite with the land in those other ways. 

I was recently fortunate to interact with the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association as they purposefully burned big patches of brush on Santa Cruz County’s North Coast. After much planning and preparation, forty volunteers gathered one Saturday to light big patches of hillside on fire. The goal was to restore coastal prairie and to train more wildland fire lighters in order to expand our region’s capacity to reintroduce fire on the landscape. These volunteer groups are growing around the world, including here in California. We have learned that their work is essential for everyone’s safety, and for the stewardship of the land, which provides us so much: water, timber, livestock, recreation, clean air, food, health, and solace.

Value-Added Fire

As we realize the importance of good fire in natural lands, entrepreneurs are envisioning profit. People are cashing in on the wildfire crisis by managing wildland fuels to power electrical generators. Some are seeing a potential to power electrical land stewardship equipment with generators fired by the fuel that equipment is removing. Others are already hauling wildland fuels to generation facilities supplying regions in Northern California with power. New technology allows burning wildland fuels to create charcoal, which is added to agricultural areas improving water holding capacity and maybe even soil fertility. That carbon is captured to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The machines are called ‘carbonators’ and they use thousands of gallons of water a day to keep them cool, which is the trick to making charcoal.

There was a lull for a bit, fand now there’s a rejuvenation of wood fired heaters for rural homes. The new woodstoves are engineered to be very efficient with very low air particulate output. Greenhouse gas (carbon) output is from recently grown wood rather than ancient fossil fuels.

The Future?

I envision a time when robots harvest biomass for fuel, farming every square inch of Planet Earth for energy. Imagine micro technology…ant-sized robots that prune plants in cultivated landscapes and natural areas, hauling bits of biomass back to larger robots which haul it to biomass energy production facilities…one big conveyor belt of fuel stolen from natural food webs. I do not like that future, but it seems inevitable in our ‘civilized’ world. How far off is that future? Without another way of managing wildfire, the day of that scenario is coming closer, quickly. The alternative is for more people to be involved with community groups managing purposeful, good fire across large areas, like the Monterey Bay region.

Your Role

Each of us has a role in helping Good Fire gain traction. Start with getting an air filter for your house: you need one anyway for wildfire smoke. Air pollution is a great concern, even with purposeful fires. The recent burning exercise I was a part of was delayed a week because of air quality concerns, and that week delay caused a bunch of issues with people’s schedules, wasted catering food, etc. If we can all be better prepared for smoke, it will be easier to get Good Fire on the ground. If you are able, help to figure out a way to get air filters to folks who can’t afford them!

We can’t expand Good Fire unless everyone feels safe in their homes. So, helping people get safe in their homes is an important thing. And, even when those homes are well secured against wildfire, people still need to be talked to, shown Good Fire, and helped to shed their fears. We can try to experience purposeful fire and see how well it is managed and then tell those stories to more people: there is a lot of fear about even professionally managed, purposeful fire.

The last thing I think more people might do: volunteer to help! The Prescribed Burn Associations could use more volunteers. Learning to manage purposeful fire is hard work and many people are needed.

-this column originally posted in the very informative weekly blog, BrattonOnline – please subscribe, like, and spread the word!