Wyoming Earth haters ignoring cheatgrass fix

Cheatgrass can produce more than 10,000 plants per square yard and is a major fire risk because it dries out more quickly than native vegetation. In 2021, the Forest Service, the US Department of Agriculture and the Wyoming Game & Fish Department sprayed the herbicide Rejuvra® with a helicopter on cheatgrass in a 9,200 acre area within the Mullen fire perimeter with the hopes of reducing, maybe even eradicating its presence. People recreating on the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest were warned to avoid the kill zone and the compound is persistent in soil posing long-term risks to aquatic habitats through rain-induced runoff particularly on sloped or compacted earth.

In 2025 the Red Canyon Fire scorched 195 square miles of land plagued by a cheatgrass infestation so county weed and pest people argue that "without costly chemical intervention in the near future, the fire scar could convert to an unproductive monoculture of invasive grasses." But, those in the extreme white wing of Wyoming's party of Earth haters are pushing back on the cost of spraying Rejuvra®, at about $1,150 a gallon, on at least 340,000 acres in just one county.

Buffalo eat young, green cheatgrass in the spring and dormant plants but they mostly avoid it during the mid-summer seed stage when the awns are sharp and unpalatable. Wapiti or elk, mule deer and pronghorn travel from Grand Teton National Park to winter ranges throughout the region and into the Wind River Reservation eating cheatgrass along the way. But disease, urban sprawl and oil and gas development have altered historic migration routes in wonderful Wyoming.

So, irony is just another casualty of Wyoming's wildfires which have also cleared millions of acres of fences, power lines, dry grasses, sagebrush, ponderosa pine and juniper in Republican ranch country even as the Biden administration reached out to those serial ecoterrorists who rely on moral hazard to survive. But, if grazing cattle is the key to preventing wildfires why do red states suffer from near daily high even extreme grassland fire danger indices even in February? Because they're in denial about how manifest destiny is destroying the West.

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