Rangeland Changes in Santa Barbara County

Most people here agree it's a good thing to have a viable cattle industry in Santa Barbara County. It's good for both the economy and the culture to be diversified, it’s good for resilience to grow our own food and grazed rangeland can be a good fire risk reduction strategy, serving as a buffer that surrounds our cities, towns, and other critical infrastructure. If managed effectively, grazing also helps with carbon sequestration.

Ranching in Santa Barbara County is threatened by a host of factors, among them: increased land costs and/or lease rates; higher costs of production; lower prices at the market; and an increased regulatory burden, which in turn increases the costs of production. All of these self-reinforcing constraints combine to threaten the vibrancy and viability of ranching in the county. As the industry shrinks, production costs increase as support services such as the auction yard in Buellton have to close and ranchers have to go further afield for such services. And on top of all these other constraints, rangeland conversion and the loss of available grazing lands means that cattle producers have less available land to support their operations.

What is driving rangeland and grazing loss in our county? How have other forms of agriculture, namely vineyards and cannabis, contributed to these losses? There are no easy answers but at the very least, we can all work from the same data to better understand what has happened, what the situation is now, and where things are going if no changes are made.

How much rangeland existed in the past and how has it changed over the years? What areas were once grazed but are now vineyards or cannabis? How does the Williamson Act affect all of these changes? These were the questions in our minds when we started.

The following are a set of maps, available in the Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint Atlas, that help our community work together and move toward a resilient and vibrant economy, ecology, and culture. This project also serves as another example of how the  Conservation Blueprint's Atlas  can be used to understand, inform, and tackle difficult issues for our community.

Rangeland fallowing is the removal of cattle from rangeland. It can be temporary, but is often permanent because of the loss of fencing, infrastructure, etc. over time.

In this study, we are focused specifically on the rangeland following that occurs on a parcel that has a portion of its land use changed to something else. This is what we refer to as Rangeland Fallowing. While it’s fairly easy to measure acres of direct conversion (aerial imagery shows a vineyard planted one year where it was previously grassland), it’s harder to understand where we’ve lost grazing on neighboring acres of a parcel because of management and land-use changes associated with the vineyard or cannabis expansion.

When an acre of rangeland is converted, two things can happen: 1) that acre no longer supports livestock production and rangeland-specific ecosystem services (e.g. habitat for wildlife and plants, carbon storage, fire protection, etc.) and 2) losing that grazed acre potentially means the associated loss of other grazed acres on that property. For example, when fifty acres of vineyards are planted on a 500-acre ranch historically grazed by cattle, it is uncertain that grazing will continue on the 450 acres not planted to grapes. If in fact grazing is removed, not only have fifty acres of rangeland converted to another land use, but 500 acres have effectively been lost to grazing.

1. To bring attention to this phenomenon, local partners (University of California Cooperative Extension and the Conservation Blueprint Team) convened a panel of experts and ranchers to review data on land use and rangeland conversion through the use of the Data Basin platform.
2. All parcels over 100 acres that had experienced either vineyard or cannabis conversion were identified and the panel was asked “does grazing remain on the portions of these parcels that didn’t directly convert to vineyards or cannabis?”

Losing rangelands to other land uses and grazing on the rangelands that remain matters. Rangelands are the backbone of our county’s two-centuries-old livestock industry and support a significant way of life and a vibrant economy for the people who work for them. Additionally, rangelands provide a host of critical ecosystem services, such as groundwater recharge, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and scenic viewsheds that we lose permanently when they are converted. Furthermore, maintaining grazing on rangelands is ecologically important because it increases our community’s resilience to catastrophic wildfire, allows for habitat specific to threatened and endangered flora (Gaviota tar plant) and fauna (CA Tiger salamander) species, and preserves increasingly rare coastal grasslands as a vegetation type in our region.

It is clear that the Williamson Act is not necessarily good protection against this loss of grazing land. Of the 214 parcels over 100 acres that experienced rangeland conversion due to vineyards and/or cannabis in our study period, just over 80% of them participate in the Williamson Act. With that said, Williamson Act parcels do appear to lose grazing at a lower rate than parcels outside the Act.

This project—pioneered by the Conservation Blueprint—will serve as the basis for future work; more specifically, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, will be using this historical data to model future land use and land change scenarios. The hope is that this developing modeling effort will inform important community conversations and local policy as it relates to public safety from wildfire, agricultural land preservation, and sustainable land use practices.

As you can see there's a lot of information here and to really get at it we suggest investigating the  Rangeland Fallowing map  in the  Conservation Blueprint's Atlas  so that you can zoom in to an area of interest, turn on imagery, and more. You can even add other data layers of interest and save your own maps. There is also a  Rangeland Fallowing Blueprint Guide and Case Study  where you can download the original data layers for your own analysis.

If you are interested in learning more about the SBC Conservation Blueprint, check out the  Blueprint website . Also, you can read the  original Blueprint report  or view the many other data layers available on the  Blueprint Atlas !