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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Burns, Oregon » Range and Meadow Forage Management Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #295159
Title: Where to begin with weed management efforts on your ranch and range

Author
item Smith, Brenda
item Sheley, Roger

Submitted to: Oregon Beef Producer
Publication Type: Popular Publication
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/1/2013
Publication Date: 7/1/2013
Citation: Smith, B.S., Sheley, R.L. 2013. Where to begin with weed management efforts on your ranch and range. Oregon Beef Producer. Oregon Beef Producer.

Interpretive Summary: It is critical to develop a simple method for prioritizing invasive plant management strategies on a ranch level. With producers typically limited by time and money, careful and strategic allocation of these scarce resources is necessary. A simple tenet of such a prioritization would be to optimize the benefits from expenditures by gaining as much ecological and economic value for each dollar as possible. This requires managers systematically implementing the least costly, most successful and most beneficial strategies progressively over time. Using this tenet, the more risky and more costly strategies are delayed until after the more effective solutions are fully implemented. The purpose of this paper is to describe a process form producers to prioritize invasive plant management strategies, while implementing integrated weed management on ranch scale.

Technical Abstract: It is critical to develop a simple method for prioritizing invasive plant management strategies on a ranch level. With producers typically limited by time and money, careful and strategic allocation of these scarce resources is necessary. A simple tenet of such a prioritization would be to optimize the benefits from expenditures by gaining as much ecological and economic value for each dollar as possible. This requires managers systematically implementing the least costly, most successful and most beneficial strategies progressively over time. Using this tenet, the more risky and more costly strategies are delayed until after the more effective solutions are fully implemented. The purpose of this paper is to describe a process form producers to prioritize invasive plant management strategies, while implementing integrated weed management on ranch scale.