Working Ranch Magazine March/April 2025

toppin’ out

questioned if they’re even going to lose their own insurance now after this. So what’s the subcommittee focused on this year? AS Our priorities unfortunately haven’t changed; grazing on state and federal lands, prescribed fire, insurance, and fire prevention to all extent. The grazing on state and fed eral lands, again, I know Brennan and Dave Daley have done a ton of work on that. It just astounds me that they’ve been advocating for this long and so has CCA, and we still haven’t made a whole lot of ground. Insurance is going to be a really big topic. I think all of us at CCA have been canceled at one point or not. I know there’s CCA members that don’t even have insurance anymore and just kind of live on the edge because it’s not worth it. And that’s true, and I’m sure we’re all going to get can celed again. And that’s where I have to say, it’s industries like us that have to develop solutions instead of pushing blame. But I think if we come forward and we push solutions, that’s where we’re going to gain a lot of ground. And to mention earlier, adding more fire fighters is not the answer. We lose firefighters on these fires as well, and so we don’t want them out there. We need to educate, not lecture. And I think we’re good at that too. And maybe that’s where we look at some of our other, you know, collaborators, stake holders, you know, the cattlewomen are really good at educating. Maybe we ask them for some help in educating people on wildfire prevention.

four across the state. He’s now funded equipment for 25-plus PBAs. So we have all that in place, but we still hit the red tape with working with Air Pollution Control District, the grazing, the thinning of the for est. But when it hits the ground, the APCD, the environment, they’re still limiting us to what we can do. We stop logging, we stop grazing. And I think there’s more to be talked about on that front. For us in my county [Santa Barbara] we’ve had lawsuits threatened against us for grazing with just goats. The vineyard just shut us down because of smoke taint. The water side of it, I mean, I would just say that amount of fire, and you’ve got to think about all the open valves to every single house is now burnt down there, and all that water is leaking out, plus all the fire engines are pulling on it. The reservoirs probably would have helped. And I would say across the state, we need them. Absolutely, we need reservoirs. We need a backup sys tem. Those hydrants weren’t built to take that much pressure off the system. As we saw in some fires in the past, in Cedar and San Diego, one of the num ber one problems in the water [sup ply] back then was the pump stations burned up. KR Let’s switch a little bit and talk about the CCA Fire Subcommittee. So you’ve been Chair of this for mul tiple years now. We know insurance was a big conversation that the Fire Subcommittees had, and I’m sure everyone has seen articles and

For the entire 22:38 podcast head to https:// calcattlemen.org/2025/01/21/sorting through-the-la-wildfires-with-cca-fire-sub committee-chair-anthony-stornetta/. If you want to get involved, particularly if you have fire or insurance experience, find the Cal ifornia Cattlemen’s Association at https:// calcattlemen.org/. We’ve sat with the Cal Fire Director and talked about this, you know, back with Senate Bill 1260 in 2017. And Cal Fire gave Director Tyler a lot of credit, too. He pushed a lot of money towards prescribed burn associations (PBAs). Back in 2017, there were only three or only. There is no putting the fire out at that time. We’ve seen this fire over and over and over. The Camp Fire, the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa. It’s occurred so many times. And unfortunately, this went from what we called the wildland interface into an urban fire. And I hear over and over that, you know, it’s climate change, climate change, but the big question, was it preventable? Absolutely. Absolutely. This was preventable. The fuel beds there, if they would have been either grazed or treated, our communities protected through some type of defensible space on the out skirts of those communities? It abso lutely would have been preventable. Even with those winds and every thing else, there would have been a little more mitigation if there were those types of treatments in place on the outskirts, because it never would have transitioned into the structures. I think your last one is, is there any thing we could do? We’ve made a lot of progress with CCA and the fire com munity, but there has been some red tape, and hopefully from here forward, we can work on some of that stuff. And I’ve had personal conver sations. Luckily, in Santa Barbara County, we have a pretty robust pre scribed fire program, and so does San Luis. And I’ve met with LA. They have restrictions in their laws and ordinances down there that they can only burn 10 acres at a time because of smoke production. And they’ve made zero progress on prescribed fire.

16 I MARCH 2025 WORKING RANCH audited readers run 21 million head of beef cattle.