"A Grassbank is defined as a physical place, as well as a voluntary collaborative process, where forage is exchanged for one or more tangible conservation benefits on neighboring or associated lands. Grassbanks are one of the innovative initiatives spawned by efforts to conserve working landscapes.

In 1997, author and conservationist Bill deBuys had a question on his mind: could cattle, curlews, prescribed fire, ranchers, environmentalists, and the U.S. Forest Service all get along together?

To find out, Bill assembled the Valle Grande Grassbank, located on a 36,000-acre allotment of national forest land on Rowe Mesa, 25 miles east of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In assembling it, he set three goals for the Grassbank:

• To improve the ecological health of public grazing lands for the benefit of all creatures dependent on them;
• To strengthen the economic and environmental foundation of northern New Mexico's ranching tradition, which is arguably the oldest in the nation;
• To show that ranchers, conservationists, and agency personnel can work together for the good of the land and the people who depend on it.

Inspired by a pilot Grassbank on the privately-owned Gray Ranch in southwestern New Mexico (the term "Grassbank" was coined by rancher and poet Drum Hadley), Bill convinced the Conservation Fund, a national environmental organization, to purchase 240 acres of deeded land on top of Rowe Mesa. The property came with a year-round federal grazing permit but no cattle.

Instead of buying cattle, Bill proposed to offer the grass of the Valle Grande allotment as a "bank" to national forest permittees around the region in exchange for restoration work on their home ground -- principally forest thinning and prescribed fire.

The ecological problem was a now familiar one: too many trees. "In a detailed study of a 250,000-acre area in northern New Mexico," Bill wrote in a summary of the Grassbank's goals, "ecologist Craig Allen found that between 1935 and 1981 tree and shrub encroachment had reduced the grassy component of the area's ecological mosaic by 55%."

"Consider the dynamics," Bill continued. "A fixed number of cows (and an increasing population of elk) must draw subsistence from a grass resource that is declining faster than one percent per year. The cattle necessarily use remaining grasslands heavily and crowd into riparian areas.

To Bill, and many others, restoring grassland and forest diversity and productivity means restoring fire to its natural role. Too often, however, necessary prescriptive treatments caused hardship for the local permittees and sometimes resulted in outright conflict. For many environmentalists, the solution was simple: end public lands ranching.

Bill searched for another way. "Let it be noted that the simple removal of cattle from public lands," wrote Bill, "as urged by a substantial number of environmentalists, will not restore environmental diversity and health, for it will not bring the keystone process of fire back into the landscape."

But a Grassbank could. That's because the Valle Grande Grassbank could take cattle from forest allotments around the region for two to three years so that restoration work could take place in the absence of any potential conflict. This work had a social benefit as well.

"In the case of northern New Mexico, we believe that the best hope for ecologically sound, fire-wise stewardship of public land lies within the ranching community," Bill wrote. "If ranchers, working with environmentalists, become advocates for prescribed burns, wildfires, and related treatments, political leaders and public agencies will respond accordingly -- to the lasting benefit of the land."

In Practice
The partners in the Valle Grande Grassbank included the Northern New Mexico Stockmans' Association, the Forest Service, and the New Mexico State Cooperative Extension Service. Funding for the operation of the Grassbank, which included a full-time ranch manager, was provided by the Forest Service, the EPA (through the New Mexico Environment Department), the Conservation Fund, and private foundations.

In the first 6 full seasons of operation, the Valle Grande Grassbank took over 2,000 head of cattle from 9 separate grazing associations across 2 national forests in northern New Mexico. Conservation projects included:

• Prescribed fire: 5,590 acres
• Hand thinning ponderosa or mixed conifer forest: 4,020 acres
• Brush/Tree removal: 550 acres
• Riparian fencing: 5 miles
• Road improvements: 25 miles
• Trail improvements: 35 miles
• Association herder: 2 seasons
• Water developments: 6
• Wetland/Playa projects: 4
• Rest: equivalent of 14.5 years

In addition to the conservation benefits, the Grassbank was viewed as mostly positive by the ranchers who participated. Summarizing a survey he conducted for The Quivira Coalition in 2004, Armando Nieto wrote:

The work of the Valle Grande Grassbank continues to be viewed in a positive light, but it is a light that is also somewhat one-dimensional: nearly all respondents value it exclusively for the rest from grazing pressure that it confers on cooperating allotments. Concerns of distance and of lack of FS follow-through with promised projects on the home allotment further threaten to make it a less desirable option for northern New Mexico grazing permittees.

In other words, after 6 years of progress, shortcomings in the model began to manifest themselves.

First, the modest conservation gains came to an end during the final 3 grazing seasons (2004-2006) when NO restoration work was completed on the "home" allotments of permittees. This occurred for a variety of reasons, including drought, National Environmental Policy Act hurdles, and budgetary tensions within the Forest Service. But it exposed a weakness in the model: relying on an overworked, understaffed federal agency for the conservation "half " of the Grassbank quid pro quo could be risky.

Second, the funding ran out. The Grassbank's $160,000 budget was entirely grant-funded and when the grants dried up, as they did at the end of 2006, so did the project. This raised a big question: how can Grassbanks "pay" for themselves? It became clear to us that relying on the fickle and increasingly competitive world of federal grants and private philanthropy is not an economically sustainable strategy.

Third, the long distances traveled by permittees to get to the Grassbank became increasingly problematic as transportation costs rose over time (participants paid their own way to the Grassbank). A number of permittees, in fact, dropped out for this reason.

In the fall of 2006, 2 years after The Quivira Coalition took over the Valle Grande project, all of these challenges came together. Some were resolved relatively easily, such as reorienting the Grassbank to serve local permittees, but others proved more difficult to crack, such as the funding conundrum.

In fact, the Grassbank has been shut down temporarily as we create a new business model that addresses these challenges. We still believe that the quid pro quo at the heart of the Grassbank is critical, as are the original goals of the project, but like an early version of computer software, their implementation needs an upgrade.

Bill deBuys anticipated this development when he wrote:

Our goal is to be consistently and continually adaptive. If the land is changing, so must we. Our fundamental challenge is shared equally by both the conservation and ranching communities: how to respond to the constant dynamism of the lands upon which we all depend."