Using Prescribed Fire to Control Eastern Red Cedar
- Ashley Garrelts
- May 20
- 6 min read
Updated: May 22
Dusk looms as volunteers, neighbors, friends, and family gather in a pasture corner on a cool evening in early April. The tall grass is still winter brown, and a soft breeze blows across the meadow and into the hills. As people congregate, several fire trucks lumber past, lining up in two directions. There is a flurry of activity as volunteers are assigned their roles. After a last check of the weather and a call to the county dispatch office, the landowner strikes the match to begin the prescribed burn. This is one of the many prescribed burns the newly formed Garfield, Loup, Wheeler (GLW) Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) will try to complete this spring.
Anita Ballagh manages this property for her mother and uses prescribed fire to control invasive Eastern Red Cedar as part of her long-term conservation and grazing plans. Prescribed burning is a tool land managers use to meet specific goals for their property. Fire is applied to a predetermined area within a prescribed set of conditions to achieve a particular purpose. Fire affects a landscape's structure, pattern, and composition. The Nebraska Sandhills is no stranger to fire; however, in the last 120 years, its relationship with fire has dramatically diminished. This grassland evolved under a repetitive pattern of naturally occurring and human-lit fires. For millennia, indigenous people used fire to manage the land for specific species of plants and animals, clear areas, hunt game, and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. As land management changed with the expansion of settlement into the American West, cultural burning declined and eventually was replaced by the era of fire suppression in the 20th century. Only within the last twenty years has the use of fire begun to regain its foothold in the toolboxes for today’s land conservation strategies in the Nebraska Sandhills.
Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) is a juniper species native to North America. It is primarily found in the eastern Great Plains to the East Coast, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This tree/shrub has always been found in the Sandhills, sparingly on steep slopes around rivers. It is highly tolerant of drought and can grow in various climatic and soil conditions. It is fire-intolerant, and its spread into the grasslands was historically controlled by fire. In addition to fire suppression, the planting of Eastern Red Cedar in shelterbelts and tree claims has led to an increase in seed sources and resulting expansion into the grasslands at an alarming rate. According to University of Nebraska research, an estimated 419,000 tons of rangeland production are lost annually to woody encroachment, primarily Eastern Red Cedar.
Back at the fire, Anita watches as fire licks across the pasture, consuming grasses, weeds, and the little cedar trees in its wake. The setting sun casts an eerie glow across the smoke-filled landscape. Anita grew up on this place in the Sandhills. She is a 3rd generation rancher following in her grandfather’s and father’s footsteps. Eastern Red Cedar is something her family has always tried to control. Her father proactively cut stray Eastern Red Cedar, keeping it contained in the useful shelterbelts on their property. However, his declining health prevented him from keeping up with its invasive nature. “After Dad passed, Mom leased the ranch while I was away at school. Now that I am back in the area with a family of my own, I have taken over the management. I graze some cattle I own and lease grass to family,” explains Anita. Her main goal for the property is to maintain a healthy, vegetatively diverse grassland for cattle grazing and wildlife habitat. She needed to eradicate the scattered Eastern Red Cedar from the landscape.
Eastern Red Cedar encroachment is often ignored because the initial invasion is relatively slow. However, once it is established, it expands exponentially. This can lead to landowners being unable to keep up through mechanical means alone. As Anita looked across her pastures after taking over management of her family’s ranch, she knew she needed to do something to stop Eastern Red Cedar from consuming more of the grass on which her livelihood depended. A family member mentioned a cost-share program through the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) that could help. The Working Lands for Wildlife (WLFW) State Conservation Initiative in Nebraska earmarks money from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to address the conservation of grazing lands in the Eastern Sandhills. Conservation partners, including the Sandhills Task Force (STF), the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission (NGPC), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and Pheasants Forever (PF), work side by side with the NRCS and landowners to develop a conservation plan focusing on improving ranching operations and rangelands. Financial assistance is available to help pay for conservation measures such as mechanical brush management and prescribed burning, which is what Anita was seeking. “We got [financial] help from the NRCS to cut trees in our four pastures, which was great. But now they [cedar trees] are coming back,” explains Anita. Part of the all-encompassing conservation plan is a follow-up management plan to address re-encroachment, which, for many, includes prescribed fire.
Before and after comparison of a pasture where mechanical Eastern Red Cedar treatment has occurred.
(Photo by: Ashley Garrelts; STF)
Using prescribed fire can be scary for landowners who grew up seeing wildfire's destructive nature. Prescribed fire is very different in its effects on the landscape than wildfire. Wildfire typically occurs on days with very low relative humidity and high winds, whereas prescribed fire is employed under conditions that ensure lower flame lengths and safety. Looking forward to the amount of work being done through the WLFW program and the other conservation programs by landowners and individual agencies, the STF and its Partners knew that adopting prescribed fire in the Sandhills would need to be sped up. These partners worked with Rain Water Basin Joint Venture (RWBJV) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to raise funds to hire a “Burn Boss” who could help landowners navigate this new-to-them conservation tool. Chad Bladow, who has 26 years of experience with fire and TNC, was hired in November of 2018 and was tasked with developing a program to help landowners learn to implement prescribed fire in the Sandhills. “There was a lot to figure out,” Chad explains while reminiscing on that first year in the position. “How would prescribed fire conducted on private lands fit in with TNC guidelines, which were developed through focusing on when working with Federal Partners? What would insurance look like? What would the liability to the landowner and the agencies helping look like? How could conservation partners empower landowners to take on prescribed burning without outside help? These were all questions we had to work through,” he explains.
Over the last six years, all those questions and more have been answered. Chad and his team have completed 48 private land-prescribed burns—a total of 23,200 acres. Of these projects, 14 landowners have joined a locally led Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) or worked with neighbors to implement prescribed fires independently. The team was also instrumental in creating a new PBA in Garfield, Loup, and Wheeler County, which brings us back to Anita. A neighbor and friend told her about a newly forming PBA in Ericson and invited her to join. She also saw a flyer for a meeting in the local Livestock Sale Barn, where she works part-time. Knowing she would need to find a way to control the reemerging Eastern Red Cedar on her family’s property, Anita attended the initial meetings and became a member of the PBA. “We couldn't have done the prescribed burn without the PBA. We did not have the equipment to be under prescription as the burn plan was designed,” muses Anita. She is very grateful for the help from neighbors and agencies.
Six weeks after the burn, the grasses have already started to recover. As a windmill rattles in the wind, a sea of green stretches out towards the horizon while brown cedar trees stand at attention. Unseen birds chirp, and a cow bellows to a lost calf in an adjacent pasture. The very way we interact with the Nebraska Sandhills determines not only their condition but often their very existence. Private landowners working with conservation agencies and organizations to maintain the grasslands as working landscapes will ensure that the Sandhills exist now and into the future.
Along with the Private Landowner, this project was made possible by:
