The browns and yellows of last season’s native range growth will soon be blackened by a rejuvenating orange blaze.

Fire will help keep the prairie healthy, just as it has for centuries. From the Osage country of Oklahoma, up through the Flint Hills of Kansas, prescribed burns will put extra pounds of beef on stocker cattle, keep the woody-plant invaders at bay and provide better habitat for wildlife.

But it’s not as simple as lighting a feed sack and dragging it across the edge of the pasture—not if you’re going to do it right, anyway.

“The prescribed burning season is the most intense part of the year for us,” says Hamilton, Kan., cattleman Mike Collinge. “It’s a very important practice and there’s a lot to do in a short period of time. There’s no way to get all of the conditions and situations to line up perfectly so you have to analyze a lot of factors and make a decision on whether or not to light that fire. That can be pretty stressful because you really need to burn, from an economic standpoint and for the benefit of the range, but you want to do it right and you want to do it responsibly.”

At the outset, the range manager has to decide what he or she wants to accomplish. Lighting up the range early in the burn season will generally benefit the forbes—and in turn, wildlife—in the prairie ecosystem while pushing the far end of the season will do a better job of controlling woody species such as buckbrush.

And somewhere in the middle is the time that best stimulates big bluestem growth and the resulting beef gains the native grass is famous for.

“You can’t use a very broad brush to paint prescribed burning recommendations,” says NRCS Rangeland Management Specialist David Kraft, “but it’s clear that fire is a powerful tool in stimulating positive vegetative growth of native warm season species and in controlling many invasive plants that compete for space, sunlight and moisture.”

This spring, there’s a pretty good fuel load for range managers to work with. That, according to Kraft, will open the burning window a little wider. If pastures were grazed down, there would be more green matter from cool season plants and annuals like sedges, resulting in much less desirable burn conditions. Some managers will graze a brushy pasture lightly the previous season to ensure that there is adequate fuel for a good, hot burn the next spring.

This year, however, it looks like there will be plenty of fuel throughout native grass country.

“Good moisture last summer gave us good recovery in the Flint Hills and there’s generally more dry matter than usual to help carry and spread a prescribed burn,” Kraft says. “A quicker fire causes less damage to the grasses and, because the heat rises up and away from the surface, it does more damage to the woody plants you want to control.

“Because we have a good fuel load, grass managers who need to control brush may be able to burn a little later. On native rangeland, it’s hard to burn too late in terms of hurting the plant community. You may postpone grazing just a little but animal performance will make up for it.”

Kansas State University research indicates that early burns result in lower forage yields while there is no difference in production between late-burned and non-burned rangeland.

In general, Kansas burn date recommendations for grazing purposes run through the month of April with prescribed burns down on the Oklahoma-Kansas line starting earliest and those up around Manhattan, Kan., getting lit toward the end of the month.

Right in the heart of the Flint Hills, Greenwood County K-State Ag Agent Jeff Davidson has a general recommendation of April 15 for the cattlemen in his county. That’s a trigger point designed to maximize stocker cattle performance and help control woody plant species.

Davidson knows, however, that a grass manager facing fickle weather conditions and a lot of acres to burn will have to spread that task out over a wider period.