Perennial grasses planted since October across more than 300 square miles in Millard and Beaver counties are growing green and healthy. So even if the range burns again this year, the western wheatgrass, Indian ricegrass, bottlebrush squirreltail, sand dropseed and forage kochia will come back next spring, said Harvey Gates, range monitoring specialist with the Utah office of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

That means the state's battle against invasive cheatgrass, the bane of the West, might literally have gained ground.

In November, the coalition of state and federal agencies, called the Utah Partners for Conservation and Development joined with local officials and private landowners in a one-year reseeding project that aimed to stabilize the soils.

To date, the project has cost more than $27 million. More than 1.7 million pounds of native and non-native seeds have been drill-planted, dropped from the sky and hand-broadcast on 202,000 acres.

Paul Briggs, fields program manager for the BLM's Cedar City field office, said the emergence of even the tiniest blades of grass have been a cause for celebration. Enthusiastic as proud gardeners rejoicing over the first radish sprouts, BLM workers have lain on their sides in the dust to look for evidence of greenery.

"They'll come back to the office excited, say, 'It's coming up!' " Briggs said. "If we didn't do this, cheatgrass would dominate."

If cheatgrass had a brain, you'd call it wily. Even though the cold April stalled its growth along with the other grasses, it still took only six weeks for the annual pest to sprout, grow 9 inches tall and go to seed. Monsoon rains in the summer will bring it back to drop more seeds ahead of winter. As soon as the spring thaw arrives, it starts sucking up moisture and sending out a substance in the soil that keeps other plants away, getting a head start.

Without the intensive reseeding, the cheatgrass would overwhelm native plants that are slower to return.

"That's why they call it cheatgrass," Briggs said.

All this spring, dust from the 363,000-acre Milford Flat fire area has blown upstate to the Wasatch Front, prompting air quality health advisories. In the broad valleys of central Utah, the dust is so thick it looks like ground fog, obscuring the mountains to the east.

The reseeding effort is almost like setting a backfire. Especially effective in this pre-emptive effort is forage kochia, a tough little shrub that provides shelter for other plants, resists fire and grows well in clay soils where other grasses have a hard time establishing.

"We're trying to be proactive instead of reactive to the fires," Briggs said.

The reseeding effort met with some opposition from ranchers, who argued the BLM ought to let their cattle graze in the early spring to eat the cheatgrass before the seedheads turned purple, which happens just a few weeks after it sprouts. After that, the grass is too prickly and can cause a condition called lumpy jaw. Cattle and elk generally won't eat the grass unless it is green.

The Utah Farm Bureau backed the early-grazing request, saying it could help lessen wildfire potential, said organization spokesman Todd Bingham.

"It's a great theory if we can wade through the bureaucracy to make it happen," he said.

"The cattle aren't going to overgraze. They're going to hit what's green and what's in good condition and then move on," Bingham said. "They'll go after the cheatgrass because it's in abundant supply and comes up earlier than anything else."

The BLM and U.S. Forest Service generally restrict spring grazing. Bingham said ranchers didn't want to graze everywhere in the spring, but did want to help out those ranchers whose grazing allotments burned up.

Trouble is, Gates said, the cattle would move off the cheatgrass and then eat up every other green thing, damaging the newly planted grasses' ability to establish and hold the soil in place.

Had the agencies not launched the reseeding effort, it would be reasonable to let cattle graze the native grasses, even though they are sparse, he said. But the new grasses need time to establish.

"We don't want to lose these topsoils," Gates said.

Cheatgrass is a problem all over the West. It thrives on disturbance, growing where livestock have trampled the soils and especially along gravel roadsides where graders and other vehicles have rolled. It grows fastest on south-facing slopes where wildfires leap as they advance across the range ahead of the wind.

The invasive grass is one of the main reasons the fire season has lengthened, Briggs said.

But in areas where native and other perennials dominate, the grasses are thick and healthy - even though they burned to the ground last year. Those areas are not likely to need reseeding, he said.

Utah's fight with cheatgrass goes back to 1996, when fires raged across Nevada and Idaho, where cheatgrass took over the range about 20 years ago. Idaho tried to plant native perennials to compete with cheatgrass, but the Russian invader crushed the opposition, Gates said.

Those fires blew cheatgrass seed into Utah and may have traveled back with firefighting crews dispatched from here to help the fight, Gates said. The invasive plant thrived in the dry soils.

Fighting back is difficult. "You get down to 6 inches of rainfall in salt desert shrubÂland, you've got a real problem," he said.

Taking a lesson from Idaho's failed effort with native species, the Utah Partners for Conservation and Development agreed to include non-native but beneficial perennials in the seed mix, including some that naturally compete with cheatgrass, Briggs said.

phenetz@sltrib.com

The Milford Flat fire

* Was the biggest fire in Utah history.

* Started July 6, 2007.

* In four days, burned 325,000 acres in Millard and Beaver counties.

* Burned for 2 1/2 months, ultimately torching more than 363,000 acres.

* Scientific name: Bromus tectorum L.

* Common names: Cheatgrass, downy brome, June grass.

* Growth characteristics: A weedy annual grass,

2 inches to 2 feet tall. Has a branched base and is typically rusty red to purple at maturity. Seeds germinate in the late fall or early spring. Has rapid spring growth, with seeds maturing within 2 months of beginning growth.

* Ecological adaptations: Grows on all exposures and all types of topography from desert valley bottoms to high mountain peaks, 2,500 to 13,000 feet in elevation. Cheatgrass thrives in disturbed ground such as heavily grazed rangeland, roadsides, waste places, burned areas and even in urban alleys.

* Soils: Adapts to all kind of soils except the extremely wet or extremely saline alkali. Thrives where there is only weak competition from perennial native or introduced plants.

* Uses: Fair to good for livestock for a short time, but once seeds form, they can injure eyes and mouths of grazing animals and contaminate fleece. Deer and pronghorn graze it in the spring while it is actively growing. Chukars and partridges are uniquely adapted to cheatgrass infested range where it provides food and cover. Canada geese also use it heavily for feed in the fall immediately after it germinates. Mourning doves and other upland game birds and rodents also eat the seeds.

- Source: Utah State University Extension