The Arid West | Ranching Documentary

funding for this program has been provided by the Nevada rangeland Resources Commission [Music] you [Music] in town when you hear drought they talk about you know I can't water my yard as much and I'm cutting back on this and that in a rural Nevada context when you talk about drought you're talking about especially those folks in in the range agriculture business you're talking about threats to their income one of the outstanding features that the drought that we've been experiencing lately and this has really been the case in the last one to two years it has been so warm we had the warmest winter on record in all of California and most of Nevada the Sierra Nevada had its warmest winter by far on record in the last hundred and twenty years but anytime you have higher temperatures and you have drought conditions this means that water is lost faster it evaporates faster it doesn't come down you know evaporates on the way down and so forth higher temperatures are like getting less precipitation so that's another part of the equation it may be close to normal as far as rainfall in particular areas but you have higher evapotranspiration rates because of the higher temperatures looking at some of these areas that are in d4 here this would be out by Lovelock where rye patch reservoir so below right patch reservoir we've had two years in a row where there have been zero water deliveries to the agricultural areas there so we consider that there's major crop losses and major socio-economic impacts that are occurring in those particular areas as well as out in the Fallon area even when we're not in a drought Nevada is still the driest state in the nation we receive less than ten inches of rainfall every year but you know there's more to the drought story than just limited water ranchers feel that environmental groups have unduly influenced the Bureau of Land Management and this has changed the dynamic between the BLM and Ranchers Eureka Nevada has a long history as an agricultural and mining community most mornings locals like Nevada senator and longtime rancher Coco Chia his son JJ and fellow ranchers gather together to discuss the latest issues that are affecting ranchers across the West if you've got water today you're pumping groundwater and because all surface water is gone when you look at fowl and they're Lovelock in those areas I mean they're completely out of water so in this area it really hasn't impacted to a whole lot because we are pumping groundwater but what has been impacted has been the groundwater levels you've got to keep water if you've moving your water to where the vegetation is and naturally these Springs do that but that's not the case issue those Springs are dried up so those cows will come to wherever that water is and these ranchers have had to move the water to where the vegetation is very interesting any attention number cattle they're lemons all Heather's huge numbers reduce since when I grew up here let's get all these places have ran thousand head of cows and now running sir four hundred that you've got groups environmental groups their mission statement is to eliminate public land grazing they have some friends in high places right now and some agencies but we're seeing the shift away from that over in the last few months when let's just take fire for example whether you're in Washington Oregon Idaho Nevada they're seeing their policies in the last 20 years are backfiring no pun intended and we are burning up a lot more habitat we're getting a lot more damage than we did like when Fred said and we had twice as many cows or twice as many sheep not forage it's either feed hurts fuel and you take your choice while nature may or may not provide optimal conditions the ranchers don't always agree with the BLM's decision over how many cattle or sheep they can turn out on they're permitted allotment in recent years the BLM's Battle Mountain district of northeastern Nevada has been in conflict with the ranchers over its decision to close a major portion of the Argenta grazing allotment public land essential for their operations we had about six acres of wetlands or creek bottoms that were the basis of the allotment closure six acres closed ninety-two thousand acres of federal land last year and our recommendations or our proposal last summer was fence them if these areas if these six areas are such an issue let's fence them like to exclude cattle from those areas and let's graze the remaining part of the allotment that proposal was shut down cold billon they're not user friendly right now especially this office so we made a stand and we're not backing down most of the controversy has settled around the Battle Mountain district manager Doug Furtado he talks a good talk in public he will he's a very charming fellow that knows all the right words to say but I've seen him in meetings with the permit ease where he is very very arrogant no belligerent he's belligerent he told me said Kevin I want to explain something to you I'm an educated man and and I'm gonna put it to you in a way that you could understand this he said I can make it a lot it I could be making a lot more money than what I make now means I'm educated but I choose to take this job as a BLM guy I said he goes you follow me I said yes sir I follow you he says well listen sales the shoe salesmen and I sold the best shoes in the world and and everybody bought my shoes you know like Nike and I said yes sir he said you follow me oh no I follow you he says and then another guy comes around and he built a different kind of shoe and nobody would buy my shoe again you follow me yes sir I follow you he says beans I'm smart you know what I'd do I said no sir he said I'd find another line of work when he said that I blew my top despite repeated requests duck frittata wasn't available for an interview John sure Vee is the field manager for the Battle Mountain district the belin has no desire to put any any industry out of business ranching has been going on in this in this area for generations ranching will continue to go on for generations it's a legal use on public lands we've been involved with a drought situation continuous since 2012 and we've been having to make management decisions based on the drought and the impacts to the resources since then if we can't run our cattle on that mountain you know in a way that's financially feasible we we don't have a cattle ranch anymore some people have speculated that there is a need for better management in the battle Battle Mountain District has been a need for a long time perhaps that was a harder area to get good management into for a long time my grandpa came from Switzerland in 1870 he started in Eureka went to Elko and then Battle Mountain and back to Elko and he's been ranching ever since and we've kept it up one time when they were Dora Jenna they ran lots of cattle well I think they ran eight thousand hit cleared Austin but that's a long time ago T now these ranches are all smaller well I think all of our kids are in ranching when way or the other four girls and a boy dan it's been in their blood all these years it was in my blood it's in their blood and they loved ranch they worked it helped since they were little kids they learned how to work when they were little kids they used to cowboy all the time it used to be fun to ranch long time ago when I was a kid it was fun to ranch now you've got so many restrictions from the BLM they hold you here they tell you this they tell you that and they don't know which end the cow eats on the key area is what they call a key area is a place where they do their utilization study they place those right on a cow trail and so you don't have a chance of meeting you're not exceeding your utilization levels that they give you we've got these what's known as key management areas and their positions on the ground that we continually use for a reference and we look at the forage that's being utilized by the cattle and compare it to an area that is not being utilized and when the vegetation has reduced by about 30 percent based on sound scientific methods then that's been our trigger to remove cows one of the issues with this drought management that the BLM is imposed is often these very small areas which people are calling postage stamp is very very small you know maybe 1/3 of an acre is this total area is it's dictating grazing management on the rest of the entire allotment so if they meet a use trigger here which again cattle have not even been in here this year they have to move their cattle from the area even though there's ample forage in the uplands so what it means is these very small areas are controlling the grazing on hundreds of thousands of acres of grazing allotments and it's putting ranchers in a situation to have to go out of business there's a very distinct transition here so you look at the restrictions being placed on the grazing and the entire allotment because of this riparian area but literally three or four feet away we have these grasses that are you know three feet high or more you know some of these are up to my waist a lot of buildup of fuels in 14 they called us in in February although our gianna permit ease and said that they there was going to be no cattle turned out until maybe fall and falls when we normally come home with cattle their reasoning was the drought and our question to them was how do you declare a forage drought in February we don't get rains it might not go in here and tell June what happened last year's we got some good spring rains month of March we had some really good rains into April and we had grass that grows with a little bit of rain you can get a lot of a lot of growth in this country the ranchers felt a spring forage would allow their cattle to graze the allotment but the BLM shut down ninety two thousand acres due to six acres of riparian area that they determined needed rest from use at the time we told them the areas aren't that big will fence them off at our expense to protect them if that you know if it's going to be a huge issue we can do this and they said oh no by the time we do the EAS and the studies and all the hoops and paperwork it'll it could be four or five years for you have clearance to do this that's our understanding that the renter wanted to fence off the area but your office wouldn't wouldn't authorize it in these in that situation I think that had to do with with fencing along a private public boundary but we have worked extensively with these with the our Jenna permit ease in fact we're right now are underway on developing a number of exclosures around riparian areas during the conflict over the Argenta allotment the BLM asked for assistance from a national riparian service team which was created in 1996 by the BLM Forest Service and other government agencies to be a catalyst to bring together all stakeholders and help manage the valuable wetlands on the range this riparian team though has come in and they've looked at several these areas that we proposed fencing as well as several other areas that could or will be an area of contention but their recommendations was fencing we're looking at doing some riparian exclosures some water development that was one of their biggest issues was the lack of infrastructure and a lot of the development that needs to be done is on federal land ranchers have a strong case for demanding water distribution methods and infrastructure as they have the water rights on public land grant Gerber he was an attorney for us he organized a grass store and what that grass store was is we invited general public we had ranchers from Humboldt Eureka Elko Lander County were all represented and we had County Commissioners from the four counties as well as state representatives and Senators when we went out on this tour we wanted to show them that there was actually grass in the allotment and it wasn't in the degraded condition that BLM was making it out to be if we're requesting and working with the rancher to reduce their hay ums that means there's just not that feed available a um stands for animal unit month and it's the amount of feed is needed for one month for a cow on a calf typically in Nevada you're looking at about 20 to 30 acres of land that could support one a um throughout the district we have about 350,000 a um s and we've voluntarily reduced about 130,000 of those a um the BLM is saying voluntary they say you do this you this is what you do you take the non use or will pull your printable clothes the allotments so what they're doing is extorting people and they're robbing them of their livelihood what's the basis of the dispute to why they why there's a problem with it there that that would a lot of it is stems from a different interpretation of monitoring data and the the the interpretation of the range conditions we visited an allotment it was closed in 2015 because of BLM's environmental assessments so in the drought EA's that the BLM has put out they cite a lot of rangeland literature and research about drought and impact on vegetation and a lot of the literature they cite talks about how especially herbaceous species like grasses are especially impacted by drought how those plants work hard to build up root reserves to make it through that drought they create reduced seed heads they don't put as much of their energy into producing seed they're just trying to survive themselves rather than reproducing what we find when we come into these areas and you find plants in some of these perennial plants you talk about a reduced seed head if it were drought you know that is that's it's a Sandburg bluegrass that is not a reduced seed head that is a very substantial seed head there's each one of those has a tremendous amount of seed that it's putting out and so the rangeland research that's being cited for drought talks about the plants having decreased growth putting much of their energy into root reserves and not producing seed or having reduced seed heads so what that would mean you know if if it were you'd have a small seed head something like that would be all the plant would produce you can see that those are pretty substantial seed heads so again the timely rains and the moisture that's been received here the vegetation just is an exhibiting vegetative drought one of the tools that the BLM uses to determine grazing policies is the US Drought Monitor the US Drought Monitor is a weekly drought map and it's produced a joint production by NOAA the USDA and the National drought mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska and Lincoln the process not only includes looking at a variety of indicators which include hydrologic climatological data soils data but we also look at impacts data as well from agriculture Nevada is a Nevada is a real challenge for for getting environmental data because of the the station density as far as meteorological stations across the state the density is very low and one of the sort of instructions to the authors of the Drought Monitor and this has been the procedure that's been followed since day one if there's three situations and one of them is pretty good one of them is medium and the other is is not so good we we portray the Drought Monitor according to the one that's the worst off so it sort of picks on the one that is having the most impact this entire area according to the US Drought Monitor says it's in severe drought which is multiple classes higher than pre drought or even normal conditions so you know there are tools available that the government puts out that separate the difference between hydrologic drought and vegetative drought one of the tools ranchers field isn't used enough by the BLM is a vegetative index so that's a satellite based product a satellite looks down and sees how green the vegetation is and it it adjusts for how green it normally is because in Nevada it's not as green as Kentucky obviously so a green here means a different thing than green there so we we try to get his objective of information as possible and on scales because as you know in the summertime these thunderstorms that we see here are not very big and somebody can get a lot in one part of it you know the allotments are pretty large one end of an allotment can get a lot and another can get a little the veg dry product as I mentioned is it's good at looking at short-term conditions so what's going on over the past like 30 days to perhaps 90 days because the vegetation will respond to a short-term rainfall and green up so yeah and this is this is this balancing act that we're trying to do between the short term and the long term conditions so the short term we're looking pretty normal it is something we use in conjunction with the on-the-ground monitoring so the the vegetation drought index is kind of give us a bigger picture idea of what's happening on the ground but still doesn't tell us the the site-specific conditions so we use that in conjunction with to focus our monitoring efforts is the BLM taking the easy way out and just saying the drop Martyr says we have drought conditions we'll deal with it that way no I don't think that's the case what you're seeing is a local effect on a more seasonal basis on some seasonal rains that may have helped the vegetation on a short period but those plants aren't going to be able to sustain that type of growth that type of vigor if those those rains and that precipitation doesn't last through the entire grazing season or the entire growing season since 2012 we crafted a and drought EA an environmental assessment the drought EA focuses on on methods like water hauling and these are super water placing water where it's not located naturally and that allows greater disbursement of livestock to take them out of certain areas where they could be concentrating and over grazing resource in a particular area we also look at reduction in numbers and and changes of season of season they use three or four years ago when the drought environmental assess once were first being discussed they were pitched to the industry and to local government and that these are going to be a win-win and there were a lot of good things in there in all honesty there was increased ease of getting water halls less red tape for doing developments temporary fencing water developments in cases where they were needed so it was kind of sold to the industry as a bag of goods about this is what we need we're going to use adaptive management and flexibility there were provisions to allow livestock permit ease to operate outside of their current season of use in their their grazing permit and what we found is that that flexibility that's promised is that was promised is very seldom used when the decision came out in Argenta it didn't have any of that in it it went right to the most extreme reduction in livestock grazing what we've seen is you know I often say the easiest management is prohibition because restriction and prohibition is easy you can simply tell somebody they can't do it and it's non management it's not true management we have ranchers that have been asking for water halls for multiple years and they've never received the authorization to do that you know 99% of the rangeland issues is water if we could distribute to livestock across this landscape there wouldn't be a lot of the issues there are with livestock grazing management the goal of movement of the animals is to mimic nature's process from the past that maximized the potential of the land native herbivores did that back during the Pleistocene when we had a lot of herbivores in the Great Basin and leave at least a lot of different species of large herbivores and they would migrate seasonally up the mountain following the green of the mountain leaving the plants to regrow after they had been grazed and then of course we also had large predators chasing them around so that got the movement too so now to have the natural or bibury ranchers have to play the role of moving the animals and in a way that makes sense for the plants and if there's no feed we're not gonna turn on cows on there's no water we're not going to turn our cows out maybe that's what some people need to need to understand is that just because you're allocated a certain number of AMS to turn a certain number of cattle out if the range conditions don't warrant it you're not gonna do it that's correct that's correct it's called it's called managing your resources and taking care of what takes care of you and your cattle I want to add one thing that I that I think is intuitive but it's very seldom pointed out and that is people who make their living by grazing on public lands do not make a living by destroying the grazing properties on those public lands so when you start out when anybody starts out in the issue with the culture of some how these folks are gonna try to do something while nobody's looking to graze for another month or something like that it's like if they destroy their allotment they've just destroyed their source of income think about that they give us ten days to remove our cattle from the allotment that is a process that in the fall of the year when the cattle want to come off takes us 45 days the our gentle Altman is three hundred thirty thousand acres ended up BLM found 14 head of cattle in a remote canyon that they trespassed us it was basically an attempt on BLM's part to have documentation that we had failed in our attempts to run cattle out there in the thirty years that we've been hearing about a mountain we've never had a trespass they said if if you cooperate and you pay this it'll only be a trespass you'll pay the three thousand it'll be a trespass but if you try to argue and it will it will become a wilful trespass and he said he says it could be tens of thousands of dollars worth of trespass looking back I'm sorry we did it I think we should have told him where to stuff his trespassing and walk out of there is that really working with the ranchers do in that particular situation shouldn't they be given more time to do that certainly in seven days is a is a fair amount of time to to manage your livestock and remove them if needed but we even in a hundred and fifty square mile on it sure the cattle are known positions they're known to their they know where they're grazing we know where they're grazing that there's water sources that they'll concentrate around so the livestock an operator can certainly manage his livestock and round them up you can ride across this flat and miss a cow on what looks like flat ground there's little jaws and necks and valleys that you don't even know about we had to bring them all home bring them off the mountain and bring them all home and feed them and try to find pasture for them which we found pasture for some of them we haul them all around the state and then we had to feed the rest of them on on dirt and dried dirt in the summertime and they didn't do really good they're supposed to be out in the hills eating grass and in the summertime it you just can't feed cattle on the ground feed them hay on that it just gets dustier every day they need to be born and bred here and learn the country they have to know where the waters you can't go buy new cattle every year and you would never make it they would never make it in this country 50 years ago when they ran a lot more cattle we had less fires a lot more sage in a lot more deer if you just go back in history a little bit like I said and see cattle numbers get cattle numbers from 40 50 years ago and talk to the old-timers about the sky turning black with a chin and no fires I mean he didn't even hear a fire and now I mean that's the BLM's huge budget for firefighting since 1960 the eighth largest fire years by acres burned have occurred since 2000 and federal funding for fire suppression efforts have more than tripled since 1990 a case for grazing the land to help prevent wildfire is often made by ranchers and Range scientists one of the major contributors to wildfire is cheatgrass and invasive species that will burn easily but also is often the first return after a fire we have a couple different categories of weeds we have the invasive weeds which are typically plans to come from other countries other continents they come here they don't have those natural enemies that they did in their home environment so they are able to come over here and just kind of take over in a lot of areas because they don't have that competition so with these invasive weeds a good example is cheatgrass it's not usually listed in many states but it is one of these invasive species that comes from the Eurasia part of the world and comes here and it's an early germinating species it takes advantage of the resources the water that's available before our native plants do that's the thing that they don't want to tell you we have to get rid of that cheatgrass before it makes seeds and before the seeds sit on the ground for a year and it comes again if we do nothing if we take all livestock grazing off we were gonna end up with a Duff mat like this of cheatgrass and it's just going to continue to inoculate seeds and occu late seeds and pretty soon we're gonna have cheatgrass everywhere certainly in the right conditions yes it is a it is a tool that could be used to manage fire and to reduce fire impact but in in these areas where we have had heavy utilization of the resources just allowing cattle into to graze on cheatgrass doesn't do any good for the long-term health of particular allotment it doesn't always have to be in the spring spring is ideal for a cow man to get in or when it's green on that cheatgrass but we can hit it a little bit when it's green early set that back a little bit for fuel reasons for fire reasons move out maybe go to some other pastures that don't have that invasive component come back late season and if you use the right supplementation some blocks some supplement blocks for your cows they'll stay on that dormant cheatgrass and they'll eat it after the growing season when the plants are dormant the grazing doesn't matter nearly so much and one of the things that we're learning in recent years is that we can use fall grazing dormant season grazing to manage fuels very effectively because at that time of the year we don't have a differential effect between the annuals which we'd all like to gray is more of and the perennials which we'd all like to be more healthy and robust if they're all dry and dormant then livestock will actually eat the annuals more than they'll eat the perennials so grazing in the fall is a great time of year to manage fuels so if a fire came through here and there was a wind to spread Sparks and embers into a plant like that that old dry grass would burn down into the roots and that plant would be much more likely to die because of the accumulation of the old thatch from previous years than if it had been grazed periodically on a regular basis in order for grazing though to have a significant impact on fire prevention cattle and sheep numbers need to be significant enough to impact the vegetation but this requires the BLM allowed those numbers on the land and the reduction in livestock by the Battle Mountain office hasn't been limited to just the Argenta for me at ease when we came here before we purchased this ranch I did my phone calling to the Healy district because one of our allotments is on Healey side with Gilmore there and the Battle Mountain district which is Doug tato and i wanted to make sure there was no problem with waters and there was no problem with the horses and no problem with the numbers that the ranch presented itself with and they assured me there was absolutely no problem so we purchased the ranch thinking everything was fine as soon as we purchase it we get moved in it comes time for turnout that's when the problems started kevin Borba has a permit to run nearly 500 cattle on his allotment the Battle Mountain district insisted that he reduce those numbers to a hundred and forty they said well you're gonna have that's all you could turn out I said no wait a minute I got a permit him we took him to court it's still in court to this day we're 50 thousand into the deal with attorney fees that we still owe on the following season we go to turnout which no animals had been out and they say God what happened to this ground I should well we haven't had cattle out well we got problems here this ground is tore up there's no feed left here blah blah blah if they said that the Rangers not in good shape but you hadn't turns out what ate the forage the horses European explorers introduced a horse to the Americas in the 16th century later more horses were let loose and and escaped on to our arranged lands when we were settling the West but by the mid 20th century excess horses and burros were competing with limited forage with wildlife and livestock this led to the 1971 wild horses and burros Act which put the BLM in charge of creating and maintaining HMAS or horse management areas to help protect the horses and manage their numbers for ecological balance I see wild horses almost every day I see wild horse from my house at times I live in the mountains and the Parra is here northeast of town and it's not wild horses on the way to work this morning beautiful love to see them romantic symbol of the West we can go on and on valuable resource but like any reasons they need to be properly managed and at that point their numbers need to be managed Bureau of Land Management and the u.s. Forest Service have been completely unable to do so I can tell you that statewide we're probably three times over appropriate management level for the number of wild horses that we have in the state if we removed all the livestock off of the HMAS that have livestock grazing on them with the with the population growth that we have it wouldn't be very long before the numbers of horses took away that livestock a UMS as well as the UMS that were identified for the wild horses so bottom line is its its removal of live stocks not the answer to the horse problem there for a while we did make progress I think it was probably a 2008 and we were really close to being at AML nationally but again then then Congress went in and took away some of our tools and when our tools are gone then it takes away our management capabilities this policy that sets the grazing limits for rangeland grasses at 4 inches for cattle yet allows horses to graze that same grass all the way to the bare ground does that really make sense any outdoorsman who is out in Nevada sees it all the time and it is one of those problems that is probably next to wildfire maybe the most devastating impact to our healthy rangelands and a major impact to our wildlife populations they've looked at the sterilization stuff then it's like as something that is administered completely by the BLM it's probably not going to work that's just because they don't have the resources to do it so they either need a whole bunch more resources from Congress which quite frankly is hard to get the eastern folks which is where most of the people are in Congress to vote for that before anything really could be done in the way of population control you almost need to at least remove them down to where they're not damaging the range and remove those excess donors once you get there you could manage those by sterilizing and I'm talking about simple surgical procedures to permanently sterilize mayors right now our our horses produce at a rate the word they double their population every three and a half to four years the reproductive rates cause a boom and bust cycle and the horse numbers some starving without enough forage in May of 2016 the Washington DC office of the BLM issued a statement acknowledging the wild horse issue on Western public lands was out of control financially unsustainable and asked ranchers environmental groups and horse advocates to help them in finding a solution one option would be to have ranchers assist with administering birth control there's some ideas that are intriguing to say okay these horses are on the Argenta allotment let's make the people in the Argento allotment those folks that are the permittees there let's give them a part in this quite frankly if you don't involve the people that are on the range you know those folks who are the most interested then I think any solution is gonna be problematic of course you oversee them of course you monitor how they're doing it of course you see how those results are you know I think that's probably a good idea and it's one that needs to go to the wild horse and burro Advisory Committee that needs to be then handed over to the BLM and it needs to be addressed and looked at because I think there are some possibilities with that while wild horse numbers continue to rise ranching in the West has seen a reduction from 18.2 million AUM in 1954 to 8.3 million in 2014 there are several environmental groups that often file lawsuits against the BLM to stop livestock grazing on public land one is a Western watersheds project Western watershed is that an environmental group whose sole purpose is to remove cattle from federal land in this last two years it appears that about a mountain district has had a very good working relationship with Western watershed everything the balaam does is a public process so any interested party can play a role in the BLM's decision-making it just so happens that Western watersheds has an interest in this and they have been participating there legally they there they can do that and they can have they can influence our decisions just like somebody living in New York City can influence our decision at the end of the day from our perspective they have the same objective I wouldn't say that as a whole as far as BLM is concerned but definitely there's about a mountain district they want cattle off the range there's a different Avenue they take every time they come out yo the desert tortoise age in drought riparian areas water quality anything they can use in the case of drought the drought the impacts of drought within our district we've gone to extreme lengths to understand the impacts to resources and plan long-term for the long-term sustainability of a resource and these decisions that are in the interim while they are controversial they are consistent with the mandate that's given to us one of the issues that groups like Western watersheds have used to justify reduction of grazing is the potential listing of the sage-grouse as an endangered species over the past several years restoring sage-grouse habitat has become a major focus some groups claim industry and ranching are to blame for the habitat loss this is an example of if it's really about sage hen habitat loss and fragmentation then that issue can be worked and the facts for the last 20 years for example are these we've burned between six and seven million acres in Nevada we district managers and district Rangers for the Forest Service have permitted about 150 thousand acres of mining so you got between six and seven million and 150,000 so it's not we're not mining them out then you look at the AG stuff and you say we've got about 20 percent of the sheep in this state that we had 20 years ago we ain't grazing them out with sheep you look at cow calf on the range down about 20 percent from their all-time highs and so you're sitting here going we're not losing habitat to grazing or mining or recreation even when you look at those statistics so I know it's human nature to go to the things that you can control I can control that allotment in terms of cows or sheep on I can control that permit for mining in terms of yes or no but if you're really serious about the resource and the habitat for Sage hen and other species the challenges wildland fire many of us in the urban environments don't know the vast western range land up close some might ask how it's possible at millions of acres of land that seemed to go on forever could be so contentious but within the arid West water is the major factor that determines the quality of the landscape the survival of wildlife and the frequency of wildfire and the success of ranching and agricultural operations we happen to be in a situation these days where we've had a long-term drought over the states of California and Nevada it's kind of parked there for the last four years we have a longer term drought over the Colorado River system it's been around for about 15 years now and we're wondering how long it's going to persist that drought on the Colorado River has impacted much of the West especially Las Vegas which has seen Lake Meads levels drop to record lows the Southern Nevada Water Authority has developed a plan over many years to build a 15 billion dollar pipeline to northeastern Nevada to extract water from the aquifer that is essential for ranching operations so organizations like Great Basin Water Network have been fighting it we are a network and that's we don't take that term lightly we are counties we are tribes we are ranchers and farmers we are conservationists we are communities we are urban we are rural and we have a common interest which is keeping water at its source so with the drought the last few years what has that changed your focus at all or is that changed how how you are able to accomplish things well in a way it's it's it's focused even further on the folly of what is known as the Las Vegas water grab you know it's a fifteen point seven billion dollar project to build a pipeline from Las Vegas to Eastern Nevada and it's all the more clear that it doesn't make sense to build a pipeline to move water from one drought stricken area to another that just doesn't pencil out we've been very successful in court in 2015 the Nevada Supreme Court twice affirmed that they would not take Judge sd's decision on appeal and so they the state engineers decision back to the state engineer an our view of that is they've had two full hearings the state engineers had two full hearings on it he has the information that he needs to deny all the applications and that's what he needs to do despite these rulings the State Engineer and Southern Nevada Water Authority continue to pursue for the pipeline in court there's no way you can build that pipeline at that cost for sixty-five thousand acre-feet into into Las Vegas ed it made it cost prohibitive and I'm I don't believe that sixty five thousand acre feet of waters there so I'm afraid they would build that pipeline couldn't fill it and then they'd start reaching into valleys like this and on farther north Ruby Valley sitting there and provide across the hill here with a hundred and eleven thousand acre feet of somewhat unappropriated water groundwater I don't believe that's there either but just as soon as you start pumping that you're going to impact that National Wildlife Refuge there those things can't happen so I don't think there's enough water in this side of the state Eastern Nevada to ever fill that pipeline and and the closure costs of building it I think even sudden about our waters already starting to recognize they're gonna have to look someplace else but even if they get permission to do that when you look at the overall what's Las Vegas going to be when it grows up and even water that's available north of there there's not enough water for them to be what they want to be when they grow up the real answer to them for them I believe even if you extend the pipeline another 200 miles in all directions is you folks have to get and they've made some progress on it ruthlessly efficient with how you use what you've got because there's that saying the cheapest acre foot you've got is the one you already own you got to make it go farther [Music] in addition to cities like Las Vegas seeking more water in 2014-2015 the federal government was pushing for legislation known as waters of the u.s. it was designed to clarify which waters fall under the Clean Water Act and further regulate wetlands and streams that can impact downstream water quality but ranchers and organizations like the Farm Bureau pushed back stating it was creating more confusion in 2016 litigation against it brought a nationwide stay on the proposed new law they determined that this was a water of the u.s. they could ask pretty much anything they wanted to or they could make the rancher put in or apply for a permit and go through a very expensive permitting process for something that him and his family have done for for dozens of years and there's just so much flexibility written in the rule for the agencies to make that determination that it's almost impossible for any landowner to have an understanding of whether this falls under the the jurisdiction or not it's not about clean water it's not about managing storm flows it's not about distribution of of water and some sort of engineering whatever I mean you look at this and you go what is the environmental or resource objective here and the answer in my view is is it's it's pretty political and so knowing that you sit there and say listen if there's an issue with the resource then we can deal with that but this blanket authority where everything now becomes waters of the u.s. even if there's not water in it is I mean you got to call it what it is it is a grab for absolute everyday control and you say well what's the matter with that and it's like well you have county commissions and City Council's and and resource planning agencies that are closer to the resource in Nevada and other states in counties where it's like why wouldn't you let the people closest to the resource do that in 2017 president Trump signed an executive order intended to rollback this legislation many ranchers feel alone in their fight to continue their family legacy which has gone on for generations the efforts of the argenta Primanti's have led to a new agreement that's been reached with the BLM we had added a number of decisions that had to do with closing those use areas and they were upheld in court and now we've reached an agreement with the with the permittees to open it up again with the change then John does that mean you guys made a mistake no there's there's been no mistakes made we've got the monitoring that supports it and and we now have a grazing plan that's going to be under heavy scrutiny by by us we've got a national team national riparian service team that's involved despite the controversy Doug Furtado remains as a district manager though John Roos has been named state director of the BLM and has taken over negotiations you gotta sometimes force the force of the activity of actually having a conversation because you can't get to know each other if you don't converse so communication is a big component of that because I think in the older days back even when I started with the Bureau I think the employees had a better understanding of of what it took to make a living on the ground because we were a lot more tied just as a society to to the agricultural resources and to the to the natural resources since John Roos has been here I have a lot more else a lot more faith in the system I think from our perspective right now the situation out there is more transparent more collaborative they've come to an agreement which took some work to do wasn't easy but I think the the nervousness factor and the anxiety factor associated with those allotments for the time being is down a few notches from what it was when we were doing grass tours and and all that other sort of stuff but then the question is when the drought is over or the forage indicates it's plausible will they ever get back to the AUM numbers they had originally and I don't think many of them feel that that's ever going to happen with the the current attitude about grazing Nevada's public lands our grazing permit is part of the value of our ranch when we buy a ranch that is figured into the purchase price we we pay for that that's what determines the value of our ranch and we purchase it we're taxed on it it's a property right as our our water rights if they take our numbers away and they and they reduce our ranch down and I walk and I lose my ranch no one's gonna buy it for a ranch so it's virtually you know the value of it and they say that well you know you still have your deeded ground well when you buy a ranch part of that price of that ranch is because you have the permit without the permit it would not be as expensive long as they are and when you pay taxes you pay taxes on that permit which so that makes it to where and they tell you it's not you're just it's just a privilege they give you to get a run out there no it's part of our ranching we own the water that's that's the deal it's in the deed management has moved away on the land to court rooms and boardrooms and it's almost like if you are an individual that makes his living on the land on our closest to the land you are discredited because your opinion is swayed and we've got to get away from that my solution if I was a queen for a day would be the state land transfer get the land back to the people who use it and take care of it we are not unreasonable people we will compromise and that we're not saying that the way we're doing it is always right but we've got some good ideas I feel that they're just trying to put us out of business and we'll just go by by it and then they'll go on to the next Rancher and take him out and that's what they're gonna do you know our family is we're devastated by it and it's hard to it's a tough situation we're losing as an industry and I don't like to lose but I'm fearful for the next generation you know I made a promise that I was going to fight every day for that next generation and it's getting tough I'm running out of gas [Music] my welcome my dying breath I'll try to keep these ranches intact you you [Music] [Music] [Music] you funding for this program has been provided by the Nevada rangeland Resources Commission

Channel: Golden Productions

Views: 120,551

Rating: 4.5485563 out of 5

Keywords: Ranching, Cattle ranching, cowboy, cowboy documentary, ranching documentary, drought, wildfire, endangered species, government regulations, bureau of land management, public lands

Id: QRjqrOF0GNI

Length: 55min 51sec (3351 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018