Rangeland consultant shares his expertise with Mongolia

Dennis Sheehy of Wallowa visits with a herder family in Zavhan Province, Mongolia, earlier this year. - Submitted photos

A couple of times a year, Sheehy goes to Mongolia as a rangeland consultant.

This is nothing new for him. He has been working in that part of the world for 24 years and has made more than 50 trips there.

In 1971 Sheehy received his undergraduate degrees in Asian Studies and Mandarin at the University of Oregon

Later he went on to get his master’s degree in Rangeland Ecology at Oregon State University.

In 1985, while wrapping up his doctorate in Large Herbivore Ecology at OSU, he met a retired department head who was a consultant.

The consultant recommended that Sheehy apply to the government of China for a rangeland specialist position in a study being done there as a part of the United Nations International Fund for Agriculture Development. It was the first such project in China.

Sheehy rides a small horse in Khentii Province, Mongolia, while collecting plant germplasm for the US Dept. of Agriculture-Agriculture Research Service in 1998.

After that the Sheehys moved back to Wallowa to resume working what Dennis calls their “hard scrabble” feed cattle ranch. His father, Tom, now deceased, had been watching over it in their absence. They had been ranching in the Wallowa area since 1976 when they leased Marcie’s grandfather Chris Wyckoff’s ranch.

Dennis continued to make trips to Inner Mongolia and China to do rangeland consulting in both areas.

Then in 1991 the World Bank asked him to go to Mongolia, formerly known as Outer Mongolia.

“There are a lot more similarities than dissimilarities between Mongolia and here,”  Sheehy said. “There are two Mongolias — the urban and the rural.”

There are 5 million people in that country, which is twice the size of Texas.

There are three cities. One million people live in Ulaanbaatar, and there are two other cities of 500,000 people.

The rest of the country is rural and has not changed much in the last 2,000 years, he said.

There are 354 suoms, which are county center equivalents that are about the size of Enterprise.

“One of the great benefits of Wallowa County is having extended family here. It is that way in Mongolia, too,” Sheehy said.

The Gobi Desert there is like that in Nevada, he said.

Typical of some of the projects on which Sheehy has worked was the 2001 Sustainable Livelihood Project. It was a process to diminish risks to herders, he said.

In both 2001 and 2002 there were horrible droughts followed by hard winters called dzads where the temperature dropped below minus-40 for two to three weeks at a time.

Nine million of the 30 million livestock were lost.

Mongolian herders run horses, cattle, yak, camels, sheep and goats.

The Cashmere goats are particularly susceptible to the winters. And, cashmere is the only cash crop of the herders.

Complicating things even further is that the global cashmere market has collapsed.

“The economic meltdown is certainly being felt in Mongolia,” Sheehy said.

It takes three to four goats to come up with a kilogram of cashmere. A kilogram of cashmere was valued at $40, but that has dropped to $19.

Now that the cashmere market has collapsed, people have no way to pay back their loans. The banks in turn are taking their livestock (their source of livelihood), and in some cases even the yurts in which they live.

“The herders who lose their livestock become the urban poor,” Sheehy said.

“It’s a hard time for people here. It is a very hard time for people in Mongolia.”

One challenge in working on such international projects is that other people come and go.

“You have to just keep chipping away at it if you’re going to get anything done,” Sheehy said.

The Mongolian Ministry of Food and Light Industry presented Sheehy with a plaque that thanked him for “the longevity of contribution to the well-being of Mongolia.”

Why has he stayed at it so long, and why does he keep going back?

The reasons are several, but one is that he wants to see things done that need to get done, and another is that there are projects that really interest him.

Eleven years ago he set up 114 ecological monitoring points. Last year he remeasured two in the Gobi, where 30 percent to 40 percent of the plant species are now gone and there has been an increase in aridity.

Two droughts and hard winters and the increase in livestock, particularly goats, may have contributed to the plant loss, he thinks.

When Sheehy was first going to Mongolia livestock numbers totaled 23.7 million. In 2000 there were more than 30 million head, and now there are more than 40 million.

The increase has been mostly in goats, which Sheehy said can get at the critical growth points of plants.

Mongolia is not the only area on the other side of the world of interest to Sheehy .

In 2003 Sheehy visited Vietnam with fellow U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran Joe McCormack of Enterprise.

They even visited the location where Sheehy had been shot.

The country had changed dramatically.

“It was a good experience,” Sheehy said.

It was so good that this year at Christmas he is going back with Marcie and other family members.