Stanley has different way of looking at rangeland issues 

One could likely bet if Paige Stanley had a dollar for every time she heard the phrase “non-traditional” she’d be rich at this point in her career.  

The Colorado State University researcher was recognized by the Society for Range Management earlier this year with its Outstanding Young Professional Award.  

According to SRM, the award recognizes early-career professionals who demonstrate exceptional promise and leadership in range management and is intended to encourage continued excellence among those entering the field. 

“I think typically when people hear a bit about what I do or they’re in this line of work, they expect us to have some kind of like ag or farming background, and I really don’t,” Stanley said. “I come from a very blue-collar family, and I went to a tiny liberal arts school in the middle of Georgia.” 

She grew up in what she describes as a “really rural part” of Georgia and wanted to study soil carbon by way of cows. 

“As a part of my liberal arts education, I wound up in this really random class called food ethics, taught by a vegan philosophy professor,” she said. “The long and short of it is I just got really interested in the kind of ethical and environmental implications of agriculture and of livestock in particular.”  

Her interest in studying greenhouse gas mitigation in livestock has led her to soil carbon sequestration and negative emissions associated with it. 

“But nobody had really quantified that at the time in the grazing space,” she said. “It was just kind of—we know this is big potential, but we don’t know how much. And so, I wound up kind of following that line of inquiry throughout my master’s and into my PhD, and I’ve loved it ever since.” 

The other 3M

In her role now at CSU as a rangeland soil biogeochemist, she helps lead the soils work on what she calls “a giant” collaborative project they call the 3M project—an acronym for metrics management and monitoring. 

The project is trying to understand how different types of grazing management influences different ecosystem outcomes and soil health. 

For her, it’s a privilege to follow that line of inquiry in the last 11 or 12 years of her career. 

When discussing carbon sequestration, Stanley and many of her colleagues tend to get “ahead of their skis” in that conversation, mostly because of how much they care about it. 

“Sometimes that just comes with the presumption that other people care about it as much as we do, and that’s of course not true,” she said. 

Farmers and ranchers generally are not making decisions about soil carbon, she said. They are more likely thinking about grazing as it relates to forage productivity. They are likely making decisions based on the market or considering drought resiliency. 

However, some have recently become more aware of carbon topics. 

“At the same time, I’d say over the past 10 years, we’ve had an emergence of interest in soil carbon related to climate change mitigation, particularly in rangeland systems, and kind of in parallel to that, soil carbon markets that have come onto the scene as a payment opportunity for producers who are interested in managing for soil carbon opportunities,” she said. “So some folks are more interested or maybe are more aware of the soil carbon opportunity.” 

Also, at CSU she’s looking at aspects of grazing management, soil biogeochemistry and rancher decision-making. She likes being able to connect with producers and help them understand her research and how they fit into it. Ranchers typically make grazing decisions based on what they can see with the naked eye above ground and not about soil carbon. 

“I think it’s within our purview and something that us in the sciences need to do better to relate why soil carbon is important,” she said. “They’ve got to make the decision: Is this something they want to manage or optimize for? That will always be up to them.” 

Virtual fences

Stanley sees virtual fencing as a hot button topic right now, and not something that’s necessarily her expertise, but sees how its application could be used to optimize management in landscapes that are hard to reach. 

That can also apply to ranchers who work with federal lands allotments from the Bureau of Land Management or U.S. Forest Service.  

Virtual fencing could be a management catalyst toward meeting some of those goals. 

“We’re seeing a bunch of different companies and technologies come online to be able to do that with a variety of economic implications,” she said. “So, I think the jury is out. We’ll see. We’re just now starting to collect data on some of these things, and we’re hearing a variety of different anecdotes from farmers and ranchers on their lived experiences.” 

From a research perspective for her, it opens up, more opportunity to understand the mechanics of grazing. 

“If we were to take the hat off—just like the names we give grazing systems: Continuous, conventional, rotational, what have you—having collars on animals allows us to track their movements and understand why are they going where they’re going,” she said. “And from a temporal aspect, I think hone in on these specific temporal items and tie them back to some of the ecosystem measurements that we’re taking, and understand more of the why, which is super helpful and it allows us to understand these things in a lot more color.” 

Stanley said she’s got some “really cool stuff” she’s excited about happening at CSU. The project she mentioned earlier, the 3M project is wrapping up its fifth year and the overarching story for that is the data researchers have been able to collect at several experimental sites and grazing treatments.  

“We started five years ago, and we’ll be going out to collect the resample data here in just a few months,” she said. “That will be a really exciting opportunity to understand exactly how these different grazing treatments have influenced these ecosystem outcomes that we’re interested in, which is doesn’t seem so novel, but that’s a really expensive thing to be able to do in grazing research.” 

Working in partnership

Those longitudinal measurements and being able to measure many details are critical too. Stanley also has 59 rancher partners as part of a project where she goes out and collects soil samples, water data, remote sensing data, and other data types. Researchers have finished data collection on all the producer sites and will begin analyzing the information. 

Despite the work in front of her with the research projects, Stanley keeps going because of the ranchers. Their conversations are so important to her. 

“I always go out and I collect my own soil samples, and when I have producers out there in the field with me, and they get to see what a meter deep soil sample looks like for the first time on a ranch that they’ve managed for 30 years, and you can just see, the kind of wonder in their eyes, and the kinds of questions that they ask, or even things that they’re able to shed light on for me that I can see in their soils,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have had any kind of management context for. That keeps me going because it’s a real reminder about the people that I serve.” 

That interaction keeps her grounded and trying to help or “maybe arm them with the kinds of information they would need to help manage their systems better, and I find a lot of value in doing that,” she said. 

“I think that is what I love about working with ranchers is that I’m able to do the kind of work that I do only because I talk to them,” she said. “I would have just no understanding of grazing management really if it weren’t as a result of conversations with actual producers.” 

Grazing research has struggled through the years, Stanley said. Researchers try to replicate practices that aren’t applicable to all land managers. 

“So, myself and the people I work with really try hard to make that not the case, and it’s for that reason an exciting time in the kind of work we’re doing,” she said. 

Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].