DIAMOND BAR CATTLE COMPANY

David and Goliath

Kit Laney is 43 years old and is fighting the fight of his life.

He is also being forged into the tip of the spear for a thinning generation of ranchers who are fighting to continue making a living on federal lands.

Laney was arrested March 14 by Forest Service law enforcement officers. He was charged with five counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of interfering with a court order. He spent 24 days and about nine hours in jail. He believes he was targeted by the Forest Service.

The assault charges allege Laney charged Forest Service personnel on horseback, hitting at least one worker and causing damage to a temporary holding pen where his cattle were being held. Laney’s cattle were being gathered by Neddy Archuleta, a stock contractor from Sandia Park, hired by the U.S. Forest Service.

Laney said he was responding to reports his cattle were being mistreated and he denied assaulting anyone.

After he was put in Doña Ana County Detention Center, Laney racked up two more charges: two counts of interfering with justice.

March 14, by his own accounts, “had been a little cloudy. It was dark when I got to where the cattle were. They had pickups with lights turned on them, the holding corrals. They’d set up a bunch of portable pens. The cattle had been gathered off of the east fork of the Gila.

“The east fork of the Gila was some of the stock watering the 10th Circuit Court assumed belonged to us,” Laney said. “They presumed without deciding that we owned the stock water. The only way the Forest Service has jurisdiction to close down an area is if the state legislature has granted it to them as an enclave.

“A lot of what was going on that day, was who was in possession of the cattle.”

Laney and his partner of 25 years, Sherry Farr, own the Diamond Bar and the Laney ranches. The Diamond Bar Ranch is in Winston, and parts of the ranch are in Sierra, Grant and southern Catron counties.

It is 225 sections and consists of 110 acres of patented land and “the rest of it we hold the water right, the range in fee, and the government holds the underlying title,” Laney said.

Patented land means that the homesteaders filed on it under the Homestead Act of 1883. After the homesteaders “proved up” – lived on the land, improved it, farmed it, ran livestock on it – the government issued a patent granting them the land and all the rights to it, whatever rights the government still held to that land.

The Laney Ranch is about 47 sections.

“We got the Laney Ranch in 1984, of course, my family’s had that ranch since 1883. We got (the Diamond Bar Ranch) in December of 1985.” The Laneys purchased the Diamond Bar Ranch from the Federal Intermediate Credit Bank of Austin, Texas, now known as Farm Credit Bank.

During the time the bank owned the Diamond Bar, it made an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service – a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) – and under the MOU, the bank agreed, at its expense, to build a number of new improvements on the Diamond Bar Ranch, including stock tanks, dirt ponds in the wilderness, with mechanized equipment as well as some fencing, well restoration and building trails.

Part of the agreement was the bank would put 188 head of cattle, out of the 1,188 head listed on the permit, into non-use until the improvements were complete, so only 1,000 head could be on the land. Another part of the agreement was the stipulation the MOU would be binding on any successor to the bank.

“So, in other words,” Laney continued, “when we bought the ranch, we inherited this binding MOU. In 1986, we built two of the called-for stock tanks in the wilderness with mechanized equipment. Then the Forest Service came to us and told us that they had completed a 10-year forest plan.”

By the Forest Service’s own oversight, Laney adds, the 10-year plan did not include the MOU and the plan would have to be amended to include the MOU. Until the plan was amended, the Laneys would not be able to do any of the other improvements on Diamond Bar Ranch.

According to Laney, the Forest Service delayed its amendments to the MOU for more than three years until they could “finally get the greenies involved,” he added. “And the excuses they used (to delay the MOU amendment) was first they transferred a ranger and they had to wait to get a new ranger. Then they transferred the Range Con – the guy in the Forest Service in charge of the grazing. Then they transferred the supervisor. And every year, when we went in for the annual validation, they told us next year they would have a decision and we could start building the improvements again.”

Nine years later the Forest Service made a decision that even though their own study showed the ranch could carry 2,011 head yearlong, they cut it to 300 head, with total non-use for a period of five years.

To Laney’s knowledge, he had not made anyone mad.

“Before they started doing all this to us, the Society for Range Management gave us their annual award for excellence and grazing management,” he said. A high school graduate and the youngest of four brothers, ranching and raising cattle is about the only work Laney has ever done.

“One time I worked for the sawmill in Reserve on the night shift for about four months ... four or five,” he said. “Back when they had a sawmill. Pulled the green chain, stacked boards.”

The real beginning to Laney’s troubles, he said, started in 1978 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the New Mexico Supreme Court’s ruling which states in part that the Gila River Forest Reserve was not set aside for livestock grazing and that any water rights arising for livestock grazing purposes would be allocated to individual stock waterers and not the U.S. Forest Service.

“That means the Forest Service cannot grant me a permit to use livestock water on the incident range that it does not own,” Laney said. “The Forest Service has always claimed the water rights. And that ruling clearly and unequivocally proved that the water rights belonged to the state.”

“And the state allocates those rights to those who can show beneficial uses,” said Bob Jones, Crow Flats rancher. “Livestock watering and home use are the two forms of beneficial uses.”

“Did the Forest Service respect the court’s decisions and start helping the ranchers claim and protect their water? Quite the contrary. They redoubled their efforts to get the water. Nearly every rancher operating on forest land has had the Forest Service file on the ranchers’ water since 1978.

“And in the Gila today, a conservative figure placed on the water rights is $10,000 per acre foot,” Laney said. An acre foot of water is the amount of water to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot.

“So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what this is all about,” Laney said.

The first time the Laneys knew they “were fixing to get it” was when they attended a Citizens Advisory Board meeting in Silver City in February of 1989 or 1990. The meeting was arranged by then U.S. Forest Service employee Maynard Roast. Roast was supervisor in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.

“Susan Shock from Gila Watch was at the meeting,” Laney said. They found out later Gila Watch had been funded by Ted Turner.

“She (Shock) got up, and I think it was the fifth word out of her mouth ‘the Laneys are MFers for ruining the wilderness’ and so on,” Laney said. “They couldn’t get her to quit cussing. That was our first introduction to it.”

After his run-in with the law this year, Laney was released into fellow rancher Bob Jones’ custody on April 7 and will remain at his ranch on Crow Flats until his hearing May 3 in Federal District Court in Albuquerque.

Jones, president of the Paragon Foundation — a property rights advocacy group — believes the Forest Service is trying to eliminate all cattle grazing, mining and timber harvesting from public lands.

“And they’ve gotten it all done, but the ranchers,” Jones said. “They’ve got most of them off. And after that, it will be everybody else: the hunters, the recreationalists. Their agenda is based on the Wildlands Project and they’re halfway there. The Wildlands Project is a series of urban areas, then there will be corridors in between them and everything else will be wildlands.

“This administration has said they cannot do anything during this term about it,” Jones said. “Too many people were put in place in the Clinton administration. Well, that’s a big part of it. They put a lot of environmentalists in those jobs and they’re committed to it. We’re fighting it.”

Laney said: “I was naïve enough to believe I could prevent the government from taking my ranch. We fought them tooth and nail for years. You can’t keep them from taking it.”