Paradise Lost

Doug Youngdahl

Paradise Lost

Service Agriculture

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

Our friend and long time colleague, Doug Youngdahl, was sitting in a room with us awaiting what was expected to be a long day.
At hand was an annual budget meeting with our respective boards and the hierarchy of our farming properties owner, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The year, 1994, had not been a good year and the results we had to report were not what had become an expected norm. We were trading jabs as to who should fall on the sword for the lot of us, but there sat Doug. Always in command and always upbeat, he was cool and collected as if it was a most celebrated, banner year.
I never saw him any different.
After returning to New Mexico several years later, I called him to congratulate him when he was named as Chief Executive Officer of Blue Diamond Growers. We had laughed and reminisced about that day on the hot seat as well as others we had shared in the almond business. I told him I was proud of him.
I was prouder yet as I followed his success and the helm of what had become the world’s largest and most respected almond processor and powerhouse marketer. In large part, his career theme was what he spoke about at the world nut conference in Spain shortly after being named to the position, “Large crops do not automatically mean low prices”. He demonstrated what he believed to the 3300 growers (California has a total of about 6000 almond growers) who depend on Blue Diamond’s ability to sell a nut crop once thought to be immoveable above 600 million pounds. Today, knocking consistently at the door of two billion pounds and continuing to experience quality returns, he proved what he knew to be true.
When Doug stepped down, I assumed it was always his intention to devote full attention to his home town he asked me repeatedly to visit. Unable to reach him now worries me.
Doug’s little place of wonder was … Paradise, California.
Paradise Lost
Anybody listening to the news knows Paradise is essentially no more. The infamous Camp Fire has destroyed it. More than 7700 structures have been incinerated, but the more horrific tragedy is the loss of life. The morning this is being typed the known fatality figure was 71 with more than 600 missing!
Blame is the endless game in town.
The press is pointing a finger at PG&E, the giant California utility, as the initiator of the conflagration, Jerry Brown is blabbering about global warming, and the fire fighters have found fault with the President’s comments, but the truth is that state simply cannot continue to build fuel inventories and not expect these results. Someone or something is going to set these massive fires off and life and property are going to be scorched.
There is an interesting factor in this one, though. This fire has largely burned over recent burns. It is a reburn. Why this is interesting to a cowman is the fact that cattle (or any converter of biomass) have been substantively absent in the regrowth regimes following these fires. It is under those conditions that management by ungulates in quantities is well suited. Of course, domestic ungulates and global warming stand in stark juxtaposition and are poor bedmates, but there is a corollary that is present across the entire West. When cattle go away so does infrastructure. Even with allowance to do so it becomes extremely difficult to manage in the absence of fences, pipelines, water storage and drinking devices.
Even if leadership understands what cattle removal manifests, it would be extremely difficult to return them in huge swaths of the West because working infrastructure is now woefully deficient on federal lands.
There is also the matter of numbers.
To clean up the inventoried biomass mess in California on the basis of conversion in place, there aren’t enough cattle available. Although cattle are very opportunistic, complexity of grazing is yet more desirable. The problem is there are essentially no goats in numbers, and sheep are dramatically reduced based upon the loss of generational stewardship and regulatory emasculation.
California has gutted its natural ability to convert in place by its anti-grazing assault and the 100 year regime of fire suppression.
Service Agriculture
Although Californians won’t agree, this year is over. The lull that will take place as soon as there are rains of consequence will be a short-term respite from the inevitable return of next season. The problem has not changed a bit. Fuel, fuel everywhere and every tool for reaching a point of managed balance is either inadequate, uneconomic, or catastrophic in its application.
So, chaos will rule, and more finger pointing will ensue.
Landscape scale land management needs to go back to most basic practices. Timber companies need a green light, vacated federal lands allotments need to be filled, cooperative agreements for the accelerated installation of basic water distribution and administrative infrastructure must be fast tracked into place, and government land agencies either reorganized on a market-based mission approach or be discontinued. The track record of the latter other than fighting fire is abysmal. These agencies have lost all semblance of engagement of those practices of substantive, proactive fuel reduction. They are lost in a cloud of environmentalism and litigious impasse, and it is killing people and destroying private property at an accelerating rate.
$3B is the talking point of new fire budgets. It is long past time to devote as much effort to reducing fire danger as there is willingness to spend money putting fires out. It is time to contract with heritage industries to perform remedial fuel reduction by allowing them to do the things they could have been doing all along.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Visit a Forest near you if it hasn’t been burned to the ground! On second thought, maybe a burned one is safer!”

My apologies to Steve. Those who read yesterday's note know I only have internet access by using the hot spot on my cell phone and that only works on my laptop. I receive Steve's column as a word doc, but my only option on the laptop is to open it with word pad, causing the different appearance of his column today.