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Floor Speech
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Mr. PADILLA. Mr. President, I rise to introduce the bipartisan Wildfire Resilience Through Grazing Research Act. This legislation aims to advance research into the use of hooved animal grazing as a tool for wildfire prevention, mitigation, and recovery.
Wildfires in the U.S. are becoming more frequent, intense, and destructive, posing significant threats to lives, ecosystems, and property. The economic and ecological costs of these fires are devastating. To mitigate future risks and support postfire recovery, we must adopt effective land management strategies. One promising and natural method is ungulate grazing, which has proven effective in reducing the fuel loads that exacerbate fire spread.
However, we still lack sufficient scientific understanding of how to optimize grazing practices for wildfire mitigation while avoiding potential environmental harms. Supporting this research will allow the Federal Government, as well as private landowners, to make grazing a core, cost-effective tool in wildfire prevention, working alongside other mitigation strategies to protect our landscapes, our communities, and our way of life.
Our bipartisan bill would add the Grazing for Wildfire Mitigation Initiative to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture's (NIFA) High-Priority Research List. Specifically, this initiative would support research and development of ungulate grazing land management techniques that promote wildfire mitigation, fuels reduction, and postfire recovery. In addition, it would support information dissemination of ungulate grazing land management techniques that support wildfire mitigation to public and private landowners, land managers, and livestock owners.
I would like to thank my colleagues Senators Moran, Hirono, and Lankford for their leadership in introducing this bipartisan legislation with me. I urge my colleagues to support the Wildfire Resilience Through Grazing Research Act, and I look forward to working together to ensure our communities are better prepared to face the challenges posed by increasingly frequent and severe wildfires. ______
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