By Mary Alice Murphy

The Silver City Museum has, as its featured exhibit, photos and histories of ranching in Grant County.

Jo Lutz, museum volunteer and events coordinator, said the panel of three speakers tied into the exhibit. Ron Troy, Southwest New Mexico project coordinator of the New Mexico Land Conservancy; A.T. Cole, owner of the Pitchfork Ranch; and Jim McCauley, owner of the LT Ranch, served as panelists.

McCauley said: "I guess first of all we should define sustainable ranching, and we might not agree. In southwest New Mexico, being able to raise cattle profitably for several years and several generations, I believe, can be defined as sustainable ranching. My family came here in 1904. Members of my family have been ranching ever since. We find things that work, change things that don't, and sometimes, we just get lucky."

"In reality, in ranching, we're in the business of raising forage and grass," he continued. "The cattle harvest it for us. Cattle are ruminants like sheep, goats, deer and elk. They turn useless forage into profitable protein. What controls the grass is the Good Lord and how much rain we get. What my dad taught me, and I try to adhere to, is to leave enough grass at the end of the year to make it another year if you don't get another single drop of rain. If you graze everything off and don't get any rain, then you have to sell your cattle. So, that's not sustainable. If you keep some grass, you can supplement a little bit and make it through the year."

Cole presented slides. "It is interesting, the Pitchfork Ranch where my wife and I retired to 16 years ago, was founded in 1904 by his ancestors," referring to McCauley, who replied that it was his uncle who began the Pitchfork Ranch in 1904.

"Earth Day is a time to celebrate," Cole said. "But I think there is a mixed mood about it nowadays. He mentioned drought, and, of course, we're in a drought. But it's the climate crisis that is critical to us, and it is critical to our work on the Pitchfork. I don't think things are going to get better. Agriculture, as I understand it, is in transition. In 2017, scientists came up with a natural climate solution. To meet 37 percent of the Paris Climate Accord, farmers can make changes in plowing. There are 21 things they can do. We, at the Pitchfork, are trying to restore a cienega (a wetland). Ranch land covers 30 percent of world land. The quickest way to make a different in the climate crisis is in meat and dairy. The plow and the stockyard will be done. We will have to cut back on meat to 10 percent. I hope ranchers will benefit because healthy grass-fed beef is the best. A friend of mine, in college in 1969, told me he read a book by Bill McKibben, 'The End of Nature,' which was the first book that dealt with climate change. He said it really 'rocked his world.' My friend went and talked to his professor, who was the designer of the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act). My friend said we live in the most important time in human history. I study restoration ecology, because it's the only ecology we have. We take photographs of our restoration on the same day every year to establish what the changes have been. We have installed more than 1,000 grade-control structures. We have raised the bed of the cienega, which is terribly incised and much of the habitat is gone, so we're trying to save the cienega. If the cienegas are gone, the species will be gone, too. We have what I call a brag point. There are 32 drainages that drain into the nine miles of the Burro Cienega on the Pitchfork. In one of those drainages, we have five machine-built grade-control structures. The biggest has captured 1,065 tons of sediment in two monsoons. That's 684 elephants' worth of tonnage. We have 12 varieties of grade-control structures, including wood, rocks or boulders, we put in using a grant and with help from Aldo Leopold Charter School students. We have removed the one-seed juniper trees and use them as posts to keep some of the sediment back. One blade of grass draws out carbon and stops sediment. Patrick Henry said the greatest patriot is the one who stops the most gullies. In 1936, FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) said the history of every nation is written in the way it cares for its soil."

Troy said the organization he represents looks at conserving ranch lands and farm lands, as well as properties not good for farming and ranching. "We believe the biggest threat to our soil is development. We lose the equivalent of a football field every hour to development." Idaho, he said, is a cold desert, where 75 percent to 80 percent of the precipitation is snow. "Our 75-80 percent here is during the monsoon season. New Mexico is one of the most erosive states in the country. If we lose soil in the Rio Grande, we're lost our production. The Big Ditch is an example of high erosion. Every year, we learn more. The NRCS (National Resources Conservation Service) provides and facilitates information to ranchers and farmers on how to protect their soil. We're always learning how to protect soils as much as we can from development. If it goes under asphalt or concrete, we lose the grass that holds water back and sequesters carbon, which is critical right now. We protect 85 properties in New Mexico. By 2037, our goal is to protect 1 million acres. We work with landowners, and we pay them or facilitate ranchers getting tax credit in perpetuity. It protects them from ranchettes. Ranchers control or protect our most productive soils, and we help them to protect them forever. We monitor soil conservation easements. A.T. and Cinda have a conservation easement of 5,000 acres."

Cole added to what Troy had said. "We are environmentalists. When we moved to the Pitchfork, we were against the flow, but our mission is to preserve land from development. There has been tension between environmentalists and ranchers, but that is changing. Now, our second argument is to provide healthy beef. If we continue corporate agriculture, degradation and erosion will be so severe that the land won't support cattle. This is a 10-year-old statistic, that says 24 billion tons of soil are lost every year. We have to hang on to the soil, so we can grow grass, raise healthy beef and raise vegetables."

A woman in the audience asked a question about the recently passed Healthy Soil Act.

Troy said he believes it will be positive for Grant County "It's about education from the small-scale farm and community gardens to the large ranches. There will be a lot better facilitation of information."

A man asked about the stockyard and feedlots comment. "When I was young, we took our fattened cattle to the stockyards, where we sold them."

Harry Browne said he believed one of the 21 things Cole referred to was rotational grazing. He addressed the question to McCauley about whether an Albuquerque expert, who says the practice sequesters carbon and provides higher yield, if it is something McCauley does.

"We don't use traditional rotational grazing," McCauley said. "We do have parts of ranch where we move cattle off. We have a pasture this spring with a bad problem with locoweed, which is a drug to cattle. They go off feed and will just finally die. We had to move the cattle off. That gives other plants a chance to grow. Mustard weed is a good feed until it gets flowers, which keep the cattle from eating. If we have what we call careless weeds, we pull the cattle off the pasture. We do rotate, but not in a traditional way. If we had a stable source of rainfall, we could do regular rotation. We don't ever want to ruin our country. It's more seat-of-the-pants rotation. We adopt what we can do. We constantly do erosion control I've probably thrown a thousand old dead yucca stumps into ditches to prevent more erosion. Some things that work in other parts of the country don't work here. We have steep topography; we can't defy gravity. Physics is going to take water downhill. We can slow it with earthen dams to catch water and spread it across the range. We call those little structures erosion control. In the 1950s, we had severe drought. We are now able to deal better with the water shortage with solar pumps to bring up groundwater, so can spread out our cattle. In the 1950s the railroad and horses were the best transportation to move cattle. We have large trucks now that work better and more efficiently.

"I want to take exception with what Mr. Cole said, that the way we're doing agriculture we're going in 20 years to be starving," McCauley continued. "We've been feeding the country and a good part of the world. I'm not saying there aren't things we can do better. I think there are studies going on that will improve the way we do things, using resources better, using less land and fewer people. I take complete exception that with the course we're on, we're not going to able to feed the country. We've done a pretty good job feeding people. There's no one sitting in here today that's hungry. Everything you see in here today—everything— was either mined or grown. When you walk out of here, other than the air, everything you see was either mined or grown. We can do better and we're doing things a lot better than we were, say 50 years ago. To say things are going to end is frightening to people, and I don't believe in that kind of philosophy. We need to work to make things better. That's the approach I think we should take. I would be interested in hearing a definition of sustainable ranching from the others."

Lutz asked for other responses. Troy said he thinks of sustainability as a definition of time. "Are we looking at seven generations or your grandchildren? I think a lot of people don't look at noxious weeds. We already have cheat grass in northern New Mexico and we can see noxious grasses come in from Arizona. We will be looking at a monoculture. Everything in nature is not linear but exponential. It seems to surprise how fast temperatures are rising. We need to take precautions. All we can do is build resiliency."

Cole thinks that the definition of sustainability has changed due to severe overgrazing by corporate ranching in the 1880s, not the historic rancher, but the investors. "In fairness to them, they didn't know how arid it was in the southwest. Sustainable ranching has to be at five generations, not two. There used to be 10 cattle to an acre; it has to be fewer."

McCauley said parts of his property have pine forest, some are more arid and some good rolling countryside. "Our rule of thumb is a cow per section per inch of rainfall. If you get 12 or 14 inches of rain, it makes more forage. Four or five inches are not going to make as much forage. Rainfall makes things work."

A woman, a new resident who had come from Denver. In Colorado, they had a big problem with corporate slaughterhouses. "Do you have smaller slaughterhouses?"

McCauley said the Ruebush slaughterhouse had closed; one had closed in Arenas Valley. Deming still has a small slaughterhouse and there's another at Arrey, near Hatch. "Willcox Packing, I'm not sure how much longer they will be in business."

Troy said a few small ones are in the northeast of the state.

McCauley said the cattle grown in this part of the country are sold as weaning calves or yearlings that are grass-fed and sold to people to take them to other parts of the country and graze them to heavier weights. Some go into feedlots; some are totally grass-fed; and some go into huge packing houses in the U.S. "The threat to small ranches is that the slaughtering is concentrated into so few packing houses that they have the control of prices. I don't know how we can fight that. That is one thing that does us harm. It goes from the packing houses to the wholesalers to the retailers, like Walmart, Albertson's or the restaurant where you order a steak."

Lutz said she wanted to drill down in economics. "What are the biggest conflicts between traditional ranches and the sustainable ranches?"

Troy said he works with ranches using a lot of practices. "Some of our funding comes from mitigation funding that we can put on the ground. One of the biggest economic challenges is a long time ago, a rancher could raise more cattle, but with rain being more volatile, it's harder to manage. When a person buys a ranch, they usually buy on revenue per head and whether they can sustain 50 or 500. Grazing allotments are based on acres per head, but there's a huge variance."

McCauley said there were probably a thousand economic challenges—the price of gas, insurance. "Vehicles, for instance, when the price goes up, we find ways to use the pickup a couple of years longer. If you can't take in more money than you spend, you can't be sustainable. We lead a conservative lifestyle. We make more, we put it into water systems or renovate the well. It's not sustainable, if it's not profitable. Taking care of your land will help you bring in more money. If you abuse it for a couple of years and buy that fancy new pickup, and spend it all on travel, your ranch is gone. You take care of your land; you take care of your cows, when the market is good, you invest in what needs doing on the ranch. Same challenges come in every business."

Cole said his ranching experience is anecdotal: "A friend told us: Every drop of rain that lands on your ranch, you want it to stay on your ranch. It used to take four or six cows to buy a pickup. Now it's takes 20."

A man from Montana said one of his neighbor ranchers said the first pickup he bought was a 12-calf pickup and the last he bought was an 88-calf pickup. "There's an enormous pressure from banks, which aren't as welcoming to loans, and by advertisers, to buy that fancy tractor. In the 1960s we figured if we bought one new pickup a year, we'd be broke."

Troy said the price to buy an acre of dirt has gotten so expensive.

Lutz said she found it hopeful that sustainability and profitability go in the same direction."

McCauley thanked everyone for coming. "I hope I've educated you a little bit."

Cole said his parting hope is that "we think restoration is critical and can be done on all sizes of property. Start a climate change garden."

Susie Salars, who said she was born on the Pitchfork, said she's been good friends with the McCauleys for many years. "I was friends with Jimmy's parents. They bought a Norge gas stove, which has been there forever. Jimmy may have been three or four years old when they bought it. They fixed the wells. They didn't buy extra stuff. To sustain a ranch, you have to take care of it."

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