Herbivory in Two Biomes

 Herbivory in Two Biomes: 

Vermont and New Mexico

Cows grazing in Danville, Vermont. June

Cows grazing, Santa Fe County, New Mexico. Mid-May.

A few years in Vermont has reshaped my perspectives on an old issue. How do we, as a society, decide where to raise livestock? What are the ecological impacts of those choices? Those of you looking for a staid scientific outlook should probably stop reading. I aim to express my opinions.

For nearly three decades, I walked around northern New Mexico looking for wildlife. Forest land (United States Forest Service, USFS), park land (National Park Service), riparian areas (beside the Rio Grande, Rio Chama, Rio Nambe, and others), lowland flatter spaces (Bureau of Land Management, BLM). Livestock, and their sign, are everywhere, when you are out birding in the southwest, even in wilderness areas. In Santa Fe county, cows graze at 6000 feet, at 12,600 feet, and at every elevational contour between. Why is that?

Most of the public lands in New Mexico and Arizona look a lot like my photograph above (and usually even worse): sage scrub with large areas of bare dirt and eroding hillsides, where cows wander, desperately looking for something palatable. On seemingly every square meter of these two states, one is confronted with desiccated cow pies, exotic weeds, and stunted overbrowsed desert plants. (The cow is the most widespread animal in the state!) Cows need large amounts of water and forage, so any riparian areas in a given grazing allotment are mercilessly decapitated, pounded, and thrashed, reduced invariably to a lonely trickle of moist dirt shrinking in the unrelenting hot sun. I am imagining a great Greek God, enraged at some transgression of the mortals, dragging a giant scraper across the landscape and banishing the rain-bearing clouds as further punishment. The few remaining healthy riparian areas exist only because they adjoin residential areas (like a favorite of mine in Galisteo, New Mexico, and the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve.

   *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

The ranchers in New Mexico comprise a powerful, if not very numerous, lobby. They have the ears of state and national legislators, the governor, village mayors, and editorial boards such as at the Albuquerque Journal. Everybody wants to be seen as helping out the hard-working, dedicated rancher.

But at what cost? There are thousands of square miles of public land in New Mexico that have been beaten nearly to death by the omnipresent cows. The conservation activist groups call it “blasted.” The semi-polite term is “overgrazed.” The ranchers call it “utilized.” Let’s be blunt: the arid American southwest is not compatible with cattle grazing.

Cows grazing in Diablo Canyon, Santa Fe County, New Mexico. One of my favorite birding spots, since Rufous-crowned Sparrows nest on the rocky slopes too steep for the cattle to manage.

Contrast that with Vermont. Our property, long ago converted from forest to pasture, hosts grasses that have an almost unbelievable ability to grow thick, tall, and luxuriant in the wet climate. Unmowed grass was chest-high last week. Bobolinks and Savannah Sparrows, with nests close by, scold me noisily when I dare to walk the back deck of my house. American Woodcock and Wilson’s Snipe call in ethereal tones over the fields after sunset. Wild Turkeys prowl the tall grasses for juicy grasshoppers, Coyotes and foxes are frequent visitors; the high, piercing whistles of a pair of Broad-winged Hawks ring out as they circle above. And the cows graze. Note, too the fences in the Vermont photo and the absence of fences in the other. Cows in the southwest need to range so widely to feed themselves that, in some places, the ranchers and the land management agencies cannot afford to put up fences. If you happen to live next door, it is your responsibility to fence the cattle out! (Try that in Vermont – you would encounter some rather stern opposition.)

   *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

The amount of beef raised in the southwest is pitifully small. I am an avid consumer of beef, but why bother? Why do we, an advanced society, allow our arid lands to be abused by this practice that provides so little to us in return? Why don’t we choose, instead, to raise all of our beef in the wet parts of the country, where the landscape can handle the impact?

It’s a conjecture to say that the states east of the Mississippi could easily supply all of the beef consumed in the nation, but I would bet on it. Some will protest by saying that long-distance transportation of food is a driver of global climate change. Well, come on! We can hardly expect every one of our 50 states to be self-contained. Vermont doesn’t grow and sell Green and Red Chile; Oklahoma doesn’t produce maple syrup for its pancakes; Texas can’t grow all of the grain it consumes; Nevada can’t be expected to grow every apple and orange that its residents enjoy on a hot summer day. If beef must be transported from east to west, that is probably an acceptable situation.

New Mexico is in the process of losing its lowland grouse (the Lesser Prairie Chicken) due to overgrazed habitat (with oil and gas development supplying the finishing blow). Burrowing Owls, Cassin’s Sparrow, Botteri’s Sparrow, Scott’s Oriole, Gray Vireo, Chihuahuan and Western Meadowlarks, Sagebrush Sparrow, Bendire’s Thrasher, Ferruginous Hawk, Aplomado Falcon are either endangered or exist in a tiny fraction of the numbers they likely enjoyed in pre-settlement times. Eager birders like me have documented the spread of Cactus Wren and Crissal Thrasher to northern New Mexico, due to the grazing-associated expansion of Cholla Cactus. It’s neat to get a new species in your neighborhood, but it’s sad that it was caused by mismanagement of livestock.

   *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

And then there is the tragic story of predators in the west. Eager to make the land safe for cattle and sheep, we removed the Timber Wolf, the Mexican Gray Wolf, the Grizzly Bear. Coyotes were relentlessly pursued, and still are today, courtesy of a state government granting absolutely no protection – surely the clearest exhibition of idiocy in modern wildlife management. Kit Fox, Gray Fox, Lynx, and Mountain Lion exist in vanishingly small numbers after a century and a half of persecution by trappers. This, and pesticide use, still today, all happened in the name of assistance to the southwestern ranching industry, using your tax dollars and mine.

Cow in forlorn landscape, Santa Fe County, New Mexico. Spring.

You might think that National Parks are blessedly free of cattle grazing, but it is not the case. On a memorable trip to Canyonlands National Park in 1991, I hiked to the magnificent confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers, one of the nation’s great scenic wonders. Midway along that hike through magisterial desert beauty, I crossed a field filled with noxious weeds. It was an “inholding”, still grazed by a rancher’s livestock. A park ranger told me that they were “waiting for the rancher to die” so they could restore that land. Regrettably, the death of the topsoil could not be forestalled.

A similar problem exists in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, although this time it is USFS land. Cattle are banned from the wilderness, but stray cattle persist as a legacy from past grazing, which was weakly regulated. Allowing cattle to roam in an arid wilderness area filled with geological wonders and rare plants and birds is tantamount to tolerance of a three-year old, crayola in hand, wandering into Santa Maria delle Grazie unsupervised, to randomly mar Da Vinci’s Last Supper.  USFS employees with dedication to principle have proposed for decades to shoot the stray cattle to remedy the problem. State ranching advocacy groups oppose the idea, even though they have no ownership of the beasts, and there is no hope of ever realizing any financial gain from them. Their view defies logic. And yet New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan-Grisham wrote an official letter opposing the operation to shoot the cattle. Grisham, widely revered as progressive, is bending over backwards to exhibit sympathy for ranchers. Astounding. And deeply shameful. 

There is good evidence that ranchers with allotments adjoining the Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico have deliberately cut border fences to allow their livestock to intrude on Park Service land. This is a sad reminder of the state of desperation characterizing livestock managers, particularly in the face of a 20-year drought that has reduced their incomes.

   *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

Defenders of the livestock industry  have concocted theories about the alleged benefits of livestock, alleging that grazing induces plant growth. Sorry, folks! In a water-limited ecosystem, those plants don’t grow back. I consulted with some of the leading researchers (the late Joy Belsky, Kris Havstad, David Breshears, Roger Peterson, Thomas Fleischner) to confirm that the theories are balderdash. Havstad pointed to isolated examples of a rangeland “rested” from cattle for a few years that did not appear to grow back much. But that can be attributed to the wholesale conversion of that landscape, in the late 1800s, to a “desertified” version of itself. Without the topsoil that it once had, recovery times for former rangeland are likely in the range of decades to centuries – beyond the reach of graduate-student research projects at the agricultural universities.

In my time in New Mexico, I was tempted to join the outraged conservation action groups who were using confrontational language at agency meetings scheduled to discuss land management decisions. I chose a different approach. I know a thing or two about how government agencies work, and how Congress and state legislatures exert influence on them. The problem is deeper than the bureaucrat toiling away in an obscure office, trying to do the right thing. The root of the problem is the erroneous belief among Congressmen that arid-land ranchers are producing something of value to the people, and doing it with only minimal impact on the landscape. That flies in the face of the decades of agency ecological research supported, ironically enough, by those very same Congressmen. 

What is needed is courage. Senators Lujan and Heinrich, and Congresswoman Fernandez and Congressman Vasquez need the courage to look at the research, to talk to the researchers, to get acquainted with the century-long reduction in vitality of the landscape. (They need to go beyond the ag schools: you don’t get tenure at NMSU by writing about cattle damage on the land.) Then they need to support the dedicated BLM and USFS managers who boldly propose to reduce cattle numbers in their districts. But education of the voters is necessary, too, because they will support or oppose the Congressmen taking bold stances on the issues. We could start with the editors at the Santa Fe New Mexican and Albuquerque Journal, who have allowed nonsensical unscientific gibberish about grazing to take precious space in their publications. (Shockingly, even National Audubon, The Nature Conservancy, and Sierra Club have parroted some of the nonsense. Which accounts for the lack of my contributions to them.)

It won’t help to demonize the ranchers. (George Wuerthner’s very good 2002 book had an unfortunately incendiary title that poisoned the debate for years afterward.) We need to recognize that ranchers are earning next to nothing, and are stuck in a system that even they don’t like. I spoke to a handful of ranchers twenty years ago, and they would like to lighten their touch on the land, but they are constrained by the common practices of the industry, which determines the kind of bank loans that they are likely to receive. We need to find ways to slowly ease ranchers out of their difficult business and into a different way to earn a living. For most of them, it will be a painful and difficult transition, and we should be cognizant of that. 

There is also the matter of financial equity in their operations, which they cannot afford to walk away from. Ranchers in New Mexico have accumulated financial equity over the decades by paying grazing fees for allotments, which results in a financial asset (on paper, at least) that is significant, and which they must rely upon for eventual retirement income. It’s important to be pragmatic here, and this is where I part company with many of the activist groups. If we, as activists, proposed to abruptly abolish the retirement nest-eggs of several thousand influential ranchers in the country, we wouldn’t get far. So one of the most brilliant ideas that I have seen is to pay ranchers for that equity, have them stop grazing their allotments, AND retire those grazing permits so that no future rancher will take their place. It was formulated in a proposed new law called REVA, and the activist Mike Hudak was one of the major forces behind it.  It never passed (likely because of Republican skepticism of anything that reduces industrial activity!) but it is still a viable idea that could become reality someday. (The new name for the effort is VGPRA.)

    *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

I sparred, gently, with Ed Marston twenty years ago. Ed, who passed away recently, was the legendary publisher of the High Country News, the home of spectacular writing about land management in the West (but which subsequently evolved in an urban direction that I didn’t like). Ed, a great conservationist who nevertheless was sympathetic to the ranching industry, pointed out that conservationists like me were attempting to create a public lands “vacuum” without any thought of what would replace it. (Were Ed alive today, I would liken that concern to southerners in 1860 chiding abolitionists for lack of a good plan for what might replace slavery on plantations.) 

I didn’t have a good answer for Ed in 2004. But twenty years later, the country is scrambling to do things to manage global temperature rise. Enter the western rangelands, and their vast capacity to grow vegetation (if slowly) to capture atmospheric carbon. David Breshears first pointed out to me, also about 20 years ago, that the western landscape could be put to good use for this. Today, the trick will be to place a monetary value on the accumulation of vegetation on rangelands, demonstrate that it is greater than the economic activity of ranching (not a difficult bar to surmount), and satisfy everyone that retirement of southwestern ranching will be a small sacrifice to make, given the looming global threats. It will be a long anticipated evolution in America’s relationship with its landscape.

    *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

I have accumulated tons of peer-reviewed published literature on this topic. Contact me if you’d like to thumb through it.