Landowners challenged to be wiser and smarter

Range specialist, Barron Rector, delivers a plea to attendees at the Texas Ag Industries Assn. regional meeting in Salado "to manage land at the best level to deal with drought." -Staff photo by Briskin

November 1, 2001 -- According to Barron Rector, range specialist with Texas A&M University, a wise man in South Texas once said that, "in Texas we are always in a drought with infrequent floods." With this thought Rector began his discussion on weed and pasture management with participants of the Texas Ag Industries Association regional meeting held in Salado, Oct. 16, 2001.

"One thing that landowners do not do is manage the land at the best level to deal with drought," said Rector. "If the individuals who manage the land would learn about the biology of weeds and what allows weeds to come up, part of what we have to do in dealing with the weeds would no longer be necessary. As long as the landowner is in the dark and does not understand why they have weeds, a lot more chemicals and technology will be sold."

According to Rector the current trend in weed management is to use less chemicals. "The shift now is to be wiser and smarter in all we do with our land resources and in our land management," he stated. "Weeds are normal and are part of nature's cycle."

Rector explained to the group that the top inch of soil contains as much as eight percent by weight weed and brush seed. "The weed and brush seeds are always sitting there waiting for human land managers to mess up," he said, "so that in the natural process the weeds will come up to protect the soil from erosion."

One of Rector's jobs is to field calls from landowners with questions about weed management. "When a client calls and asks me what to spray to get rid of a certain weed I give them a 30-minute lecture on why they have weeds," he stated. "Before I tell them what chemical to use I ask them if their management is going to change. If they don't tell me they are going to change the practices that promoted the weeds in the first place I won't tell them what chemical to spray!"

Times have changed he said. Now land managers need to learn and understand how the natural system works. "How do you know what the right tools, technology and chemicals are for a certain problem?" asked Rector. He said the first step is to become educated about the land so that the source of a problem can be identified and understood.

"The reason we have research at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station is we want to live by the truth and the facts that exist," he said. "We are not going to promote any chemical, any technology, any control for any plant until it is documented that it works."

Rector stated that there are over 5,000 species of plants in the state of Texas. "Today we know a lot about the management, control and growing techniques on 200 of those 5,000," he said. "We are going to need a whole lot more of your tax dollars to figure out the other 4,800 species!"

One important point Rector made during his presentation was that those individuals that insist on planting non-native grasses in Texas will always have to fight Mother Nature. "To keep plant material that does not fit into the natural processes and functions of the land will cost landowners and managers a lot of money," he stated. "The natural ecological processes in the state of Texas do not stop because of human activity or wishes."

Rector asked the group to think about who was managing Texas land in 1820 when the settlers arrived. "Why do we think that we are so important today that we have to be out there managing the land?" he asked. "The answer is simple. The reason we manage the land today is because what is out there is not natural to Texas. What many of the animals and plants out there do to the land is just not natural."