Nevada ranchers fight feds for survival in changing times

Rancher Carl Slagowski as seen Wednesday, April 30, 2014 on his ranch located about 50 miles west of Elko, Nevada.The third generation cattleman runs between 900 to 1,000 cattle on land that was once the route for the Pony Express. (Jeff Scheid/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By BEN BOTKIN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

 Cliven Bundy might be Nevada’s most well-known rancher now, but he’s not the only one trying to eke out a living on dry, inhospitable rangeland. Ranching on federal public lands is diminishing, and remaining ranchers in Nevada and throughout the West have become a hardy breed of survivors in changing times. Like the generations of ranchers before them, they deal with disease in cattle, swings in beef prices and drought. In the past couple of decades, their work and way of life have faced growing threats: increased red tape from the federal government, reductions to their herd sizes and resistance from federal officials who fret about lawsuits from powerful environmentalist groups. The numbers are telling. Nevada has 797 grazing allotments for ranching on 43 million acres of public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM has given 2 million animal-unit months, or AUMs, to Nevada ranchers. One AUM allows a head of cattle, or a cow and its calf, to graze for one month on public lands. But permitted grazing has dropped dramatically on public lands in Nevada and elsewhere. In 1954, ranchers in the West had 18.2 million AUMs from the BLM. The figure is now less than half that: 7.9 million. The ranchers feel squeezed. And while they pay their grazing fees and the nonranching public considers Bundy an extremist, the ranchers also sympathize with Bundy, a fellow cattleman who has said “enough.”...
STATE MANAGEMENT
Ranchers long for a day when their livelihood doesn’t rest in the hands of a federal agency. To that end, the Nevada Public Land Management Task Force could play a role in finding a long-term answer. The task force, created by the 2013 Legislature to examine the workability of the state taking control of some federal land in Nevada, would like to start with some 4 million acres, much of it along the original railroad corridor that crosses Northern Nevada. That’s less than 10 percent of Nevada’s public lands, and even that would take an act of Congress. For now, the task force will craft state legislation that the Legislature can consider as a way to make a statement to Congress, said J.J. Goicoechea, a Eureka County commissioner and rancher who sits on the task force. Goicoechea stressed the goal isn’t for Nevada to get all its lands under state management quickly. It’s a job that will take decades to accomplish. “If, by the time my young daughters are my age, we’ve got half of these federal lands under state control, I’ll be happy,” the 40-year-old rancher said. “We can’t do this overnight.”

A lengthy, but interesting and even-handed article.  Read it here.