History & Establishment of Western Ranching Practices
The modern American West is an intricate, working mosaic of land ownership and management, comprised of privately-owned lands, federally-managed lands, as well as some state-managed lands. This managerial patchwork had its origins during the settling of the West, carrying with it a very distinctive set of opportunities and challenges over the years.
Today, the federal government oversees nearly half of the land in the western states, as compared to only 4% of the land east of the Mississippi River. Nevada has by far the highest percentage, with over 80% of the state being federally managed.
The majority of these lands fall under the management purview of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or the United States Forest Service (USFS), and are often referred to as “public lands”. This is somewhat of a misnomer.
While such lands are “owned” by American taxpayers and are largely open for recreational use, much of the land’s resources - such as water, grass, and minerals - belong to private property owners. This is due to what is known as “split estate”. This concept was first introduced by President Theodore Roosevelt and has historically been greatly misunderstood, especially as the rural/urban divide has become more pronounced.
Thus, “public land ranching” has become a controversial issue in the West. A more accurate description of the practice is actually “grazing livestock on federally-managed land,” and it is a vital component of the culture, economy, and environment of the modern rural West.
A multitude of modern western ranchers own and utilize grazing rights—rights that were formally attached to privately-owned base properties during the settling and subsequent development of the West. Today, grazing rights on federally-managed lands remain attached to private land parcels. Grazing rights are owned, transferrable assets which contribute substantial value to western ranches. The benefits of western ranching are many and varied. To truly appreciate this, one must first have an understanding of the manner in which it all came about.
In order to encourage the settling of western lands, and therefore the utilization of their abundant natural resources, the US government passed The Homestead Act of 1862, the Desert Land Act of 1877, and the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916.
The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres to those who would build a home and farm the land for five years. In addition, settlers could also opt to buy the land after six months at the price of $1.25 per acre. If the homesteaders did not succeed in their agricultural endeavors, the land reverted to the government. The Homestead Act led to 80 million acres being settled, developed, and claimed by the year 1900, mostly in the Midwest.
The Desert Land Act of 1877 came about due to the unique environment and climate of the more arid western states. The 160 acres offered by the Homestead Act was usually enough to create a sustainable and productive operation in states with sufficient annual rainfall. However, more land was—and still is--necessary to support a ranching operation where there is less precipitation, and therefore less grass. As an example, Nevada gets an average of 9.5 inches of rain annually, while Missouri gets more than 40 inches. It might take 100 acres to feed a cow in Nevada, and only a few acres per cow in Missouri.
Because of this, the Desert Land Act of 1877 offered 640 acres, specifically to incentivize the development of agriculture in semi-arid states.
Like the Desert Land Act, the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 also offered 640 acres of land to settlers. The lands in question were entirely non-arable, and were therefore deemed of no value except for growing grasses that could be grazed by livestock. In line with the concept of split estate, the government retained the mineral rights on those lands. In the most arid regions of the high desert; such as the Great Basin that encompasses much of northern Nevada, southern Idaho, and southeastern Oregon; even 640 acres was not enough for a viable operation. Therefore, ranchers began grazing the unclaimed lands near their properties.
It is impossible to discuss the settling and resulting productivity of the West without mention of water rights. Without water and the right to utilize it, the aforementioned Acts would have been of no value whatsoever. Land cannot be cultivated for crops without water to grow them, nor can grazing lands be utilized without the availability of drinking water for livestock.
It stands to reason then, that in many cases, water was claimed before land was claimed through the Homestead Act or Desert Land Act. Water rights, known as “prior appropriation rights” arose from a simple “first in time, first in right” system. The first person to put water to beneficial use established the right to continually have first-priority use. With the implementation of state water regulations, those original water claims became known as “vested water rights”. In the high desert, water is worth more than gold, and vested water rights give immense value to property.
Interestingly, the Mining Act of 1866 played a huge role in ranchers’ water rights and land use. The Act established that “rights to the use of water for mining, agricultural, manufacturing, or other purposes shall be maintained and protected.” The law also protects the much-needed right to move water--using ditches, canals, pipes, or other means--from its original source to where it can be put to beneficial use. In addition, the law stipulates that homesteads “shall be subject to any vested and accrued water rights, or rights to ditches and reservoirs used in connection with such water rights.” Thus, like grazing rights, water rights are tangible, transferrable assets that are pivotal in the buying and selling of property in the West.
While all of these Acts worked together to foster an immense increase in productivity in the West, they did leave an unaddressed gap regarding the use of unclaimed lands, which unfortunately resulted in overgrazing and range wars as livestock owners competed for resources.
To help remedy this, the Taylor Grazing Act was passed in 1934, organizing as yet unclaimed lands into grazing districts, thereby making them no longer claimable by new homesteaders. The ranchers themselves were also instrumental in bringing order to the range. Having been there for years, and being intimately familiar with the land and conditions, ranchers were a great asset in establishing management practices and helping in the construction of fencing to facilitate much-needed changes. Rights to graze certain parcels of land, known as allotments, were formally attached to privately-owned ranch properties, which established the grazing practices that are utilized to this day.
In 1946, the Bureau of Land Management was created to sustain health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. Multiple uses of these lands were mandated, including both recreational and commercial purposes. In addition to ecological sustainability; mining, energy development, and recreation all fall under the umbrella of the BLM’s multiple-use ideal. Today, the BLM manages approximately 18,000 livestock grazing rights on 155 million acres.
The United States Forest Service (USFS) also manages livestock grazing rights but originated differently and operates with a slightly different structure and purpose. In 1876, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was tasked with assessing forests, and in 1905, the Roosevelt administration created the USFS and shifted the management of forests to this new entity. Today, the USFS oversees upwards of 5,800 grazing rights over 102 million acres.
To strengthen and solidify the multiple-use mandate enmeshed with the creation of the land-management agencies, the Multiple Use Sustainability Act (MUYSA) of 1960 and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976 were put into place. These Acts have helped keep otherwise unusable western lands sustainably productive.
Today’s western ranches are part of the vital first step in the process of producing beef, either breeding and raising the cattle themselves or providing grass on which other producers graze animals. The fact that many ranching operations are multigenerational powerfully demonstrates the overall sustainability of ranching and grazing on federally-managed lands. In fact, a significant number of existing ranches were established long before related laws and organizations came about, and continue to be productive to this day. The practice has far-reaching benefits for the environment, the economy, and our nation’s food security, but is not without controversy.
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
There are numerous far-reaching environmental benefits of properly-managed grazing. Grasslands evolved throughout the ages under the hooves of roaming ungulates, so livestock grazing is a very natural component of the range. In accordance with the multiple-use mandate, ranchers work with land and wildlife-management agencies to strike a balance between the needs of native wildlife and the needs of livestock producers and other land users.
Since the 1970s, livestock breeding and land-management programs have improved exponentially. Today’s ranchers nationwide are raising 30% fewer cattle, but producing 31% more beef. US farmers and ranchers produce 18% of the world’s beef with only 6% of the world’s cattle. Each pound of beef produced today uses 33% less land, 19% less feed, and 12% less water than in the 1970s, according to the Animal Ag Alliance’s Sustainability Impact Report.
Properly-managed grazing plays a key role in carbon sequestration and mitigation of wildfire threats, and can actually restore and regenerate desertified lands. Grazing livestock fertilize with manure, while simultaneously distributing and “planting” seeds and aerating the soil with hoofprints. In fact, some researchers believe that the dead and decaying grasses that remain on ungrazed lands actually account for more CO2 being released into the atmosphere than is released from grazed lands.
“Higher stocking densities on pastures, shorter grazing periods, longer rest periods—all of those things equate to healthier plants, a greater plant diversity, and more plants on the soil surface, which equates to more roots in the soil, which means more carbon is sequestered.” ~ Chris Mehus, ranching director at the Western Sustainability Exchange
Unlike native wildlife, livestock can be strategically moved and placed to help meet specific land and resource management needs. Wildlife habitat can be improved through livestock grazing, as well. For example, carefully-scheduled grazing in certain areas of the Great Basin has been shown to improve height and volume of bitterbrush, which is essential for deer. Several studies have demonstrated that sage grouse prefer the new regrowth of grazed forbs over the old, dried forbs on ungrazed lands. Grazed lands have also been shown to have higher populations of insects, upon which sage grouse chicks depend for survival.
Wildlife can benefit greatly from livestock grazing in other ways. Ranchers invest a great deal of money in development and maintenance of watering points (man-made ponds, developed springs, and troughs supplied through pipelines), which are often the only water available for wildlife in a given area. In addition, mineral supplements put out for livestock are often enjoyed by elk, deer, and antelope. Ranchers also engage in weed control that allows essential native forage to thrive.
In recent years, devastating wildfires have obliterated thousands of acres of timberland and rangeland. While the various causes can be debated, a single contributing factor can be controlled by humans: management of the fuel load. In other words, limiting the amount of material available to burn. This can be easily, naturally achieved through grazing of rangelands and logging of timberlands. It is of particular note that the number of livestock on federally-managed lands has been reduced by more than 70% since the 1970s—thus causing a drastic increase in fuel load.
“Fire, water, and government know nothing of mercy.” ~Albanian Proverb
Of special concern in the rangeland fire cycle is cheat grass, a prolific and highly-combustible non-native grass that has been found to actually double the likelihood of wildfire. Cheat grass is an annual grass that grows in spring and dies off between April and June, depending on how much precipitation an area has received. It dries out long before native perennial grasses, thus causing fire seasons to start earlier and last longer. Its fine leaves and stems and tendency to produce an uninterrupted blanket of vegetation across large areas of land (whereas native perennials grow in clumps, with bare spaces in between), make it ignite easily and spread quickly – the perfect fuel!
Cheat grass also moves back in quickly after a fire, since it thrives on the increased nitrogen in the soil of burned areas, thus perpetuating the fire cycle. Its thick growth and shallow root system utilize much of the already scarce water, making it very difficult for native plant life to compete.
Early-spring and late-fall grazing can drastically reduce the amount of cheatgrass. Livestock graze it very successfully when it is young and green in the spring. This not only reduces the fuel load, but also gives native grasses a boost by aerating and fertilizing the soil and spreading seeds of desirable plant species. Reduction of cheat grass and recovery of native grasses is one of the key elements in fire prevention.
Measurements of grass on rangelands – even post-grazing measurements -- often indicate fuel loads vastly exceeding a single year’s productivity. This is largely due to federal regulations and management decisions that reduce numbers of livestock on the range or require ranchers to graze areas dominated by cheat grass later in the summer, when it is dry and less nutritious and palatable.
Wildfire, which affects every aspect of the rangeland ecosystem, is recognized as the single greatest threat to wildlife. This was researched in detail by the late Grant Gerber of Elko, Nevada. He visited the aftermath of Arizona’s Bear Wallow fire of 2011, which incinerated almost 540,000 acres. He found that over 1.5 million vertebrate animals had been killed, in addition to countless insects and plant communities. It is also incredibly expensive. In 2018 alone, firefighting cost the federal government over $3 billion dollars. Therefore, prompt and effective suppression of fires is of the utmost importance.
Ranchers’ volunteer firefighting associations play a central role in accomplishing this and save the government millions of dollars in firefighting costs. Ranchers are especially valuable as firefighters for a number of reasons. They are physically nearby -- often the first people to notice a newly-sparked fire -- and able to respond quickly. They have intimate knowledge of their local areas -- including lay of the land, type of vegetation, fences, gates, roads, etc. Possession of this knowledge saves critical time in the early stages of fighting a fire. Finally, they have immense personal investment in the health of their local rangelands. Thus, ranchers contribute hugely to quick extinguishment of fires, saving millions of federal dollars and countless wild animals lives.
In an age when concern over CO2 output is a matter of intense focus, the effects of wildfire cannot be overlooked. Wildfire is responsible for 5-10% of annual global CO2 emissions, at approximately 8 billion pounds per year. In 2018 alone, wildfires in California released approximately 68 million tons of CO2… about the same amount created by production of a year’s worth of electricity for the state.
Development is a major cause of irreversible destruction of open lands. The USFS has estimated that 6,000 acres of open space in the United States is lost every day to development. A study by the Center for American Progress stated that “development on private lands accounted for nearly three-fourths of all natural areas in the West that disappeared.” The continuance of grazing on federally-managed lands allows ranches to stay in production instead of having to sell their privately-owned land for development.
Economy
The ability to graze livestock on federally-managed lands is essential for the viability of many ranching operations, but the economic benefits go far beyond that. Ranching is the base for many rural economies and also supports numerous related industries throughout the nation. It has been estimated that grazing on federally-managed lands contributes as much as $2.6 billion to the US economy and supports upwards of 42,000 jobs.
The cost to federal land-management agencies of managing ungrazed lands is more than double the cost of managing grazed lands. Grazing saves the BLM approximately $750 million each year. This is because ranchers are on-site stewards of the land’s natural resources and man-made improvements. Also, unlike the vast majority of public land users, ranchers pay for their use of the land.
Benefits to the Public
Some people question the use of these federally-managed lands to produce materials for human consumption.
Ranchers are among the very few members of the American public who pay for their use of federally-managed lands.
Beyond the environmental and economic benefits, it is important to appreciate the role livestock grazing on federally-managed lands plays in maintaining our national, and even global, food security. The world population is projected to be 9 billion by the year 2050, meaning that our need for food will increase by 100%. A great deal of the world’s arable land is already being farmed or, of equal importance, conserved. The vast majority of rangelands in the west are unsuitable for any other productive use—much of the terrain is rugged, and the soil types and limited water availability mean that the land cannot support the growing of crops.
Cattle and sheep are something like rangeland super-heroes, with the unique power to quite literally transform raw materials that are unusable by humans into nutritious, delicious food. An estimated 40% of the nation’s beef animals and 50% of the nation’s sheep spend some part of their lives on federally-managed lands. With current populations of 31.2 million beef cattle and over 5 million sheep in the United States, it’s easy to see the tremendous impact of federal-land grazing on food supply.
Federal-land grazing is only one step in the production of beef. While some cattle are sold as “grass fed”, most are sent to be “finished out” in feedlots, where they consume rations of farmed feed until they are processed into meat. Livestock are able to eat byproducts and waste of crop farming that humans cannot eat; therefore, farmlands that produce food for humans also produce feed for livestock. In fact, 86% of global livestock feed intake is material that is not edible by humans.
All things considered, it’s easy to see why the continued utilization of otherwise-unusable, rugged western rangelands to sustainably produce food is of the utmost importance for food security.
Those that promote a vegan diet claim that the farmland used to grow feed for livestock should instead be used to grow food for humans. However, there is simply not enough arable farmland in the world to produce enough to meet the nutritional needs of the global population—specifically not the need for high-quality protein that is most easily gotten from meat.
Opponents of federally-managed land grazing state that it accounts for only 3% of the nation’s beef. To put this into perspective, the North American Meat Institute found that in 2017, there were 26.3 billion pounds of beef produced in the United States. Thus, 3% would amount to 789,000,000 million pounds of beef. Considering that per-capita beef consumption in 2017 was estimated to be 57 pounds, by the numbers, federal-land grazing fed 13,842,105 people—more people than the population of the entire metropolitan area of Los Angeles.
Even people who choose to not eat meat benefit from meat production in the form of hundreds of byproducts that are used every day in modern society.
Challenges & Issues
It is standard for agricultural operations to experience challenges, such as market fluctuations and weather. Ranchers that graze federally-managed lands, however, face a number of additional issues. Since the 1970s, the number of livestock on federally-managed lands has dropped by more than 70%, for a number of reasons.
Governmental Policies
Governmental policies regarding grazing can fluctuate a great deal as administrations come and go. Even staffing changes within regional and local BLM and USFS offices can affect grazing-management plans. Also, despite owning a permit to graze, a rancher’s ability to turn livestock out on grazing allotments is determined by annual conditions—precipitation, wildfires, and prior year’s utilization by livestock and wildlife, among other factors.
Besides managerial points of contention, grazing has been under continual attack by special-interest non-governmental organizations (NGOs). With complete disregard for long-established grazing rights and the multiple-use mandate, such groups have waged war on western ranching under the guise of environmentalism and wildlife advocacy. The range wars of today are fought in the courts, and in the arena of public opinion, as differing interests collide.
The term “welfare rancher” was coined and spread in extremist environmentalist communities, the implication being that by grazing livestock on federally-managed lands, ranchers are wrongly taking something that belongs to the public. This intentionally misleading term has proliferated, largely due to a profound lack of understanding of the history of the West, particularly the concept of split estate.
While ranchers own the grazing rights that have been either inherited or purchased with the base properties to which they are connected, they also pay usage fees and are required to adhere to criteria dictating number of animals that are allowed to graze, length of time they graze, and percentage of available forage they consume.
Grazing fees are based on animal unit month (AUM), or the amount of forage an animal will consume in a month’s time. An AUM equals one cow and her calf, one horse, or five goats or sheep. Stocking rate is based on the number of AUMs available in an allotment. Ranchers are charged per AUM. The per-AUM fee is determined annually by a formula established by the Public Rangelands Improvement Act (PRIA) of 1978, and perpetuated by President Ronald Reagan. The fee is calculated according to lease rates for private-land grazing leases, current market prices of livestock, and the cost of livestock production. The minimum fee is $1.35 per AUM, and was as high as $2.31 in 1981, averaging $1.55 over the years since its inception.
The Equal Access to Justice Act
Environmentalist NGOs have mastered the art of dominating land-management policy through rampant abuse of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA). The act was originally put in place in 1980 to help individuals and small organizations who were injured, were in imminent threat of injury, or were likely to suffer irreparable harm. Later legislation in 1995 removed such limitations and left wide loopholes for the Act to be exploited. Strata is a public-policy organization with the mission to “help people make informed decisions about issues that impact the freedom to live their lives.” The Strata website states: “The EAJA was designed to allow those with limited resources to engage in the legal process when government agencies violate their own rules… In other words, EAJA reimburses various groups for litigation costs when those groups lack the resources to take on the government. If the government is found to have violated its own policy, the government will pay the litigation costs to the plaintiffs.”
Thus, the EAJA has become a cash cow for sue-happy NGOs, who very deliberately bog land-management and wildlife-management agencies down with litigation, often over minor procedural issues, in order to collect money. This practice is known as “sue and settle.” Also, when agencies cannot complete the necessary procedures for defendants, they are required to pay by default. A Notre Dame Journal of Legislation article stated that the EAJA law once had a noble purpose, but has produced instead an “incalculable waste of taxpayer money.”
A 2012 Fox News article quoted Wyoming Senator John Barrasso: “(The EAJA) was intended for helping our nation's veterans, seniors, and small-business owners, but environmental groups have hijacked the so-called Equal Access to Justice Act and abused it to fund their own agenda… Then you have small businesses and the American taxpayers left to foot the bill.” Congress removed the reporting requirements for EAJA payments, and as a result, it is difficult to determine how much has been paid out and to which groups.
The Fox News article further stated: “The exact taxpayer cost of the Equal Access to Justice Act remains unclear. The General Accounting Office, or GAO, tracked 525 legal fee reimbursements that totaled $44.4 million from 2001 through 2010, but found that only 10 of 75 agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Interior could provide data on cases and attorney fee reimbursements.” It is standard practice for these NGOs to cite slight procedural violations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act in their massive number of lawsuits against the federal government.
In 2014, Strata also reported on a particularly litigious group, and stated that they “could not fund their legal program without EAJA, and as such, they have filed a very disproportionate number of lawsuits. These lawsuits are regularly over frivolous and procedural issues… Bearing in mind their financial limitations, the numerical data we have about (the group’s) reception of EAJA reimbursements make clear that fee-shifting statutes like EAJA are what have kept (the group) suing.” This particular organization was awarded $1,150,528 in lawyer fees from 2000-2009, meanwhile claiming millions of dollars in the form of gifts, grants, contributions, and membership fees on their tax forms.
Thus, the fact that the term “welfare rancher” originated from the EAJA-abusing environmentalist NGO sector is highly ironic.
Feral Horses
Another point of contention regarding federally-managed lands is the West’s population of “wild” horses, which has grossly exceeded what was scientifically determined to be the appropriate management level (AML). This sad fact has been much to the detriment of rangeland health, native wildlife populations, and even to the horses themselves.
So-called “wild” horses are actually feral—the cumulative result of domestic horses that either escaped or were intentionally set free over the years.
True native wildlife is property of each individual state, and is managed by state wildlife agencies, while rangeland horses are federally managed. The Free-Roaming Wild Horse & Burro Act (WH&B) was passed in 1971 to protect rangeland horses and preserve their place on the rangelands. When the Act was passed, the total AML for the West was determined to be 26,700 horses, and the Act specified very clearly that rangeland horses were to be managed to allow for “thriving ecological balance” with other mandated multiple uses, and that excess horses were to be removed. The Act also decreed that horse herds could not be relocated to areas where they were not present at the time of the Act’s passage. The situation today, however, is tragically different.
There are currently estimated to be over 95,000 rangeland horses and burros on federally-managed lands. This is a direct result of the actions of “wild” horse advocacy NGOs, who sue the BLM to prevent the greatly-necessary gathers that were mandated by the WH&B Act. The BLM has attempted fertility-control measures that have been largely ineffective. Rangeland horse herd populations can double every four years, and as a result, the current situation has become truly dire.
The unmanaged horses exhaust resources, eating most or all of the forage needed by both native wildlife and livestock, and also eating themselves out of edible plant growth. The result is an environmental and animal-welfare crisis.
Even considering the drastic reduction of livestock numbers on federally-managed lands since the 1970s, many ranchers have been completely unable to utilize their grazing rights – rights to grass that they literally own -- because the rangeland horse population has gotten so entirely out of control. This is very damaging for the horses and burros, not only because they run themselves out of feed, but because without ranchers to maintain water resources for livestock on the range, many herd-management areas (HMAs) are completely without water.
Thanks to the “wild” horse advocacy crowd, in recent years, the only gathers the BLM has been allowed to conduct have been on an emergency basis. Nonetheless, there are over 50,000 horses that have been removed from the range, currently living out their days in long-term holding facilities at massive expense to tax-payers. In fact, the vast majority of the overall program budget goes toward the feed and care of horses in long-term holding, rather than management of on-range horse and burro populations. The demand for adoption of rangeland horses is a mere drop in the proverbial bucket, and does little to stem the overpopulation crisis.
Like some environmentalist NGOs, rangeland horse-advocacy NGOs often use the term “welfare ranchers,” very intentionally painting the false picture that ranchers are wrongfully taking what is not theirs by grazing livestock. While this strategy of falsehood has proved lucrative for such groups, the fact is that effective, sustainable management of native wildlife goes hand in hand with modern ranching practices as part of the multiple-use mandate. Also, legislation establishing ranchers’ grazing rights was written several decades prior to the enactment of the Wild Horse & Burro Act.
Introduced Wolves
The excessive proliferation of rangeland horses and burros is not the only wildlife-related issue that ranchers face. The introduction of non-native wolves to the West has been immensely damaging to both ranch operations and native wildlife populations. Native predators; such as mountain lions, bobcats, and coyotes; can take a toll on livestock. However, populations of these species are proactively managed through hunting and are usually kept in balance. State wildlife departments keep track of animal populations and habitat conditions, and hunting is conducted according to population-management needs. However, in the 1990s, gray wolves from Canada — not the truly native, smaller, less-aggressive Northern Rocky Mountain wolves -- were introduced to Yellowstone and the mountains of central Idaho. This species was not endangered worldwide; there are estimated to be well over 200,000 gray wolves in the world.
Since the time that wolves were introduced, legal battles have raged over the protected status of wolves and the ability to hunt them. Meanwhile, wolf numbers have exploded, big game populations have crashed, natural game-movement patterns have been disrupted, and wolf attacks on domestic animals — including pets and livestock – have increased exponentially.
Currently, laws governing wolves vary from state to state. Even where they can be legally hunted, wolves are a highly-challenging quarry and hunt success rates are low. This leaves ranchers faced with the difficult challenge of protecting their livestock.
Final Thoughts
From its earliest days, the ranching life has never been easy, but ranchers have not expected it to be. Most often, challenges like those listed above are met gladly, because the quality of life and pride in ranching heritage make it all worthwhile. Those who first ventured westward faced difficulties that are hard for modern people to comprehend. Although well over a century has passed since then, the importance of western ranchers remains. Modern society still benefits immensely from those who were tenacious, and lucky, enough to survive and thrive. Ranchers today face many of the same challenges of the natural world that were faced by their ancestors, in addition to the issues created by shifting policy and misunderstanding from a populace that is several generations removed from the agrarian lifestyle. Nevertheless, they carry on, and for that we can all be thankful.
“If American taxpayers value landscapes unbroken and unburned, they should tip their hats to the ranchers. These hard-working men and women aren’t on “welfare.” They are fundamental to the welfare of America’s wide-open West.” ~ Andy Rieber
