By Ronica Stromberg
Jacob Harvey began managing Barta Brothers Ranch in January 2023 with the hope that the "little brother" to other University of Nebraska–Lincoln ranches and farms could compete better with them.
"I was wanting us to just be firing on all cylinders, or punching above our weight class, so to speak, when it comes to producing research out here,” he said.
He got it.
Although the ranch was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic when he started and had only one large project and about 10 overnight visitors in the May-August field season, now the ranch serves as the research site for three large projects, many smaller surveys and more than 50 overnight guests each field season.
Barta Brothers Ranch has retained the large collaborative adaptive management project begun in 2020 by Craig Allen and Walter Schacht, emeriti professors from the School of Natural Resources and the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture. Eight Nebraska researchers, including Dan Uden and Gwendŵr Meredith from the School of Natural Resources and the Center for Resilience in Agricultural Working Landscapes, now lead that project looking at patch-burn grazing compared with other cattle grazing systems.
The ranch also has a NASA-funded project with Ran Wang, environmental spatial scientist; Nic McMillan, range scientist; and other researchers from Nebraska and Oklahoma State. The scientists are tracking cattle and their grazing habits by placing GPS collars in each of the herds on the ranch's 5,000 acres of rangeland.
Sarah Sonsthagen and other scientists from the Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit have been working with scientists from Kansas State University's co-op unit to research greater prairie-chicken survival and habitat usage in the Sandhills.
Read the rest of the story at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1319