Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Duckworth and is shared here with permission. It offers a practical look at how John Helle – a member of Western Landowners Alliance – and his family are using prescribed fire to manage grasslands, support wildlife and sustain their working lands.

As wildfire reshapes the West, landowners are taking action. Stay tuned for the next issue of On Land, where we’ll explore how people across the region are living with fire – and using it as a tool for stewardship.

Last week, we set fire to our ranch. Yes, we purposefully took gasoline and torches to the land and set it ablaze. “Why on earth would these Montana ranchers do that?” you might be asking. 

What you’re witnessing is just one small facet of caring for and loving the land, albeit a potentially shocking one (visually speaking) if you didn’t know the context and history of land management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

And the simple answer to your question is this: We are stewards of this land. It is our responsibility to ensure the health of the land so that it remains biodiverse, productive, and chock full of native plants and animals. With these goals in mind, we set a whole bunch of grass and sagebrush on fire, as we do every year. 

We realize it might seem counterintuitive…at first. And that’s exactly why we’ve found ourselves with the problem these efforts are aimed at mitigating: conifer forest encroachment – threatening the loss of prehistoric grasslands – and the proliferation of non-native plants.

This landscape, our lands, were forged in fire. “Frequent, low-intensity fires were once common on high-elevation sagebrush lands. These fast-moving fires killed young trees while revitalizing sagebrush, native grasses and wildflowers. Yet more than a century ago, Western settlers began suppressing most fires. That gave Douglas fir and juniper forests an opening to extend their reach into the Sagebrush Sea, where they shade out sun-loving sage,” writes The Nature Conservancy, who in concert with the Bureau of Land Management and the Montana Department of Natural Resources is encouraging and working with ranchers across the region to restore this natural process. 

Removing invasives like cheatgrass and preventing forest expansion (which collectively destroy 1.3 million acres of sagebrush each year) promotes not just healthy, natural and native plant growth cycles, but also ensures the preservation of habitat for the smallest bacteria and bugs, all the way to the threatened sage grouse and terrestrial icon populations of the region.

And hey, healthier landscapes mean healthier forage for our Merino Wool producing sheep. Win, win.

We strive, above all, to open a window into our world of agriculture. The more one knows, the more one can fully appreciate all that goes into every thread and stitch of our premium, USA-made Merino Wool goods.