Smoke drifted west over Santa Cruz County on Thursday as CAL FIRE crews set intentional blazes across Swanton Pacific Ranch, burning up to roughly 48 acres of oak woodland, grass and conifer understory in a deliberate, controlled operation rather than an emergency response. The burn brought engines, water tenders, a dozer, a helicopter and multiple hand crews onto a property still recovering from the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire.
A Prescribed Burn Partnership
The operation was carried out in partnership with the Cal Poly Research Foundation, according to CAL FIRE CZU
, which posted updates from the scene Thursday. The agency, which covers the CAL FIRE San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit in Northern California, said the fire covered oak woodland, grass and conifer understory at the 3,200-acre ranch. Resources on site included multiple engines, water tenders, a dozer, the Alma Helitack Copter 614, and hand crews from Glenwood, Ben Lomond Conservation Camp and CAL FIRE SCU Mount Hamilton, per the same post.
An earlier report from ksby.com described Cal Poly's plans for what it called the university's first prescribed burn at the ranch since the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fire, with officials saying the burn would run roughly 50 acres and be led by CAL FIRE. That figure differs slightly from the up-to-48-acre total CAL FIRE CZU reported Thursday; the dossier does not explain the discrepancy, so both figures are presented here. Either way, ksby.com reported the goal was the same: reducing hazardous vegetation, strengthening a regional fuel break and supporting wildfire resilience.
Rebuilding From the 2020 CZU Fire
The stakes at Swanton Pacific Ranch trace back to August 2020, when the CZU Lightning Complex Fire tore through the property, scorching roughly 80% of its 3,200 acres, according to Cal Poly Magazine. The blaze destroyed more than 40,000 square feet of learning space at the ranch, which operates as a living laboratory for hands-on agriculture and natural-resource-management education, according to Cal Poly.
Mark Swisher, Cal Poly's Swanton Pacific Ranch director, said the ranch has used different techniques to reduce catastrophic wildfire risk since the 2020 fire. In the years since, students have taken on much of the recovery work themselves, managing vegetation and hazardous fuel debris, cleaning up damaged infrastructure and helping restabilize the property, the magazine reported. New growth has started rising in the redwood forests and oak woodlands that burned at high severity, per the same account.
Students Get a Front-Row Seat
Around 20 Cal Poly agriculture students attended Thursday's operation to learn about prescribed fire firsthand, part of what the ranch describes as a major educational component of its recovery. Among them were Lisa Banda and Arianna Lunsford, who were both excited to watch CAL FIRE in action and see the impact of good fire on the land. The post was tagged with the hashtags #GoodFire and #CAwx.
Thursday's burn is one piece of a broader fuels-maintenance strategy the ranch has been building for years. The property has also turned to 960 goats as a land-management tool, grazing overgrown vegetation in what the Cal Poly College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences described as the first use at that scale and intensity at the ranch in decades, if not centuries. That grazing work runs alongside prescribed fire, mulching and pile burning as part of the ranch's hazard-reduction toolkit.
Part of a Statewide Push
The ranch's approach mirrors a wider shift in California wildfire policy. In 2022, the state's Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force issued a strategic plan to expand the use of beneficial fire statewide, according to the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force. That plan set a target of expanding beneficial fire to 400,000 acres annually by 2025, as part of a broader goal of treating 1 million acres each year statewide.
Swanton Pacific Ranch has also hosted training for the next generation of practitioners, having listed an inaugural San Luis Obispo prescribed-fire training event in October 2024 that brought Cal Poly together with a range of partners to burn and learn, according to the ranch's own news listings.
