RANCHING WITHIN PIMA COUNTY

An Overview of Ranch Conservation
Thomas Sheridan

Ranch Tradition and Conservation in the Altar Valley Area
Sue Chilton

Ranch Tradition and Conservation in the Empire-Cienega Valley
Mac Donaldson

Ranch Tradition and Conservation on the Santa Rita Experimental Range
Andrew McGibbon

OPENING REMARKS: CHUCK HUCKELBERRY, COUNTY ADMINISTRATOR

My name is Chuck Huckelberry, and I would like to welcome all the members today to our session on Ranch Conservation, but first, we will be talking about the Conservation Plan. Ranch Conservation was one of the very first elements included in the Conservation Plan and it is probably one of the most important elements. As we get into the discussions today, you will begin to understand why.

There are maps and pictures set up around the room and I invite everyone to look at them during the break so you will have an idea about the topic to be discussed. Ranch Conservation is probably one of the most important elements that has formed in the past, in the urban boundary definition of eastern Pima County and Metropolitan Tucson. As we will learn through the discussion and with the analysis to date, it is obvious that element has been probably the most important in shaping the urban boundary. When we talk about initiatives that deal with land use and where the County has control over the land use, the historical occurrence of ranges and range conservation has probably done more to form the urban boundary of Pima County than any other element.

Also, when we talk about preserving Ranch Conservation, this graphic is something that with the advent of our Geographic Information Systems and computer systems, we can begin to take massive amounts of data and make sense out of them. This particular graphic shows the influence of ranches and ranch conservation on the urban boundary of Pima County. As you can see on the graphic, the grazing allotments are shown in green for individual ranchers throughout eastern Pima County and they are contiguously attached to one another. Some of it is federal, state and private land, and if you look around at all of them you will recognize the names, character and probably the land.

If you look a little closer, you will see pink squares which is property we call fee-simple owned by some individual who is paying taxes on it under the categorization of ranch, classified by the Pima County Assessor in that it comprises about 240,000 acres of property in eastern Pima County. You will see around the green boundaries, the presence of State Trust Lands as indicated in blue. I believe the State Trust Lands are allocated as ranching of over 800,000 acres of property. In eastern Pima County alone, there is about one million acres of property that is either private or State Trust allocated to ranching which illustrates the importance of the element we will be talking about today. There is another one-half million acres of ranch lands on federal lands so if you add them all up in eastern Pima County, there is 1.5 million acres of property devoted to ranching.

Private lands are owned privately and they can be used at the discretion of the landowner, subject only to local zoning rules and regulations. State Trust lands are held in trust by the State Land Department and beneficiaries of the trust which means those lands can be disposed of or used for a variety of purposes. If you add those two categories together, there is one million acres of property in eastern Pima County surrounding the present urban area that can be converted to urban uses in the future. When you think about it, that is why Ranch Conservation is so important to this process.
That is why we are interested in Ranch Conservation and keeping ranchers ranching so that these properties that surround the urban area in eastern Pima County remain in the form they currently are. With that, we are able to preserve the heritage and culture of the West, protect and preserve what we call a traditional industry of Arizona so that it remains part of a diversified economy that is beneficial to everyone.

Finally, the Conservation Plan chooses to list the goals as being to define the urban area, define where we want lands to develop and not develop, provide open space for the urban area, particularly the 800,000 to one million residents who will be living here in the next 20 years and at the same time, achieve what we call habitat preservation of endangered species.
I think that sets the tone as to why this particular element is very important, it is perhaps one of the more important elements of the Conservation Plan and I think with the speakers we have today, you are going to get an idea as to the diversity of Ranch Conservation and how it can be achieved. In addition, you will learn about its compatibility with the Conservation Plan that the Board of Supervisors has endorsed in concept and form to date.

With that let me stop and introduce the Chair of the Board of Supervisors, Sharon Bronson who will be introducing our speakers today.

INTRODUCTION: SHARON BRONSON, CHAIR, PIMA COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

 

Thank you Chuck, it is a delight to be here today in the fourth of our education series on the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. It is particularly delightful because of 7,403 square miles is in the district I represent includes many the ranches we will be talking about today.

I want to take a moment to recognize a few people who are here in the audience today; I want to welcome from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, a new member, Sherry Barrett; Joe Joaquin from the Tohono O'Odham Nation once again, I think you have been here for all the sessions, thank you so much sir.

It is my pleasure to introduce another District 3 constituent, Tom E. Sheridan. Dr. Sheridan is the Director of Research of the Research Division of the Arizona State Museum and professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He has conducted ethnographic field work and historical research in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico since 1991. He is currently directing a series of grants funded by the Udall Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Contemporary Ranching and the Transition from Ranching to Real Estate in Arizona. Dr. Sheridan lives in Altar Valley, he is a founding member of the Arizona Common Ground Roundtable, an ongoing dialogue among ranchers, scientists and environmentalists. He is president of the Canoa Ranch Foundation, and is a member of the Board of Directors at the Empire Ranch Foundation. He will be talking to us about a shared sustainable landscape, ranch conservation in eastern Pima County. Please welcome Tom Sheridan.

AN OVERVIEW OF RANCH CONSERVATION: THOMAS SHERIDAN

Thank you Sharon and thank you all for showing up today. In August 1997, the Arizona Chapter of the Nature Conservancy asked the University of Arizona's Udall Center for studies in public policy to help them establish a dialogue with Arizona ranchers. The Nature Conservancy was tired of the rancorous debate that pitted ranchers and environmentalists against one another, and wanted to see if they, or the ranchers could find common ground. What eventually became the Arizona Common Roundtable, met for the first time in September of 1997 at two o'clock in the afternoon. The discussion was still going strong at 10:30 p.m. that evening. Over dinner, we realized that we did indeed share common ground which was a passionate desire to keep the open spaces of Arizona open and free of the rampant real estate development that is tearing grasslands like Prescott Valley into strip malls and subdivisions.

We also found our mantra by paraphrasing James Carville: "It's land fragmentation stupid!" The Nature Conservancy knew better than the rest of us how quickly ranches were being sold to subdivider's. They also knew only too well that there was not enough private money to buy all those ranches and keep them from being developed. During subsequent meetings it became increasingly clear to all of us that Arizona has to keep good ranchers on the land if we want to preserve what is left of Arizona grasslands, and nowhere is this need more acute than in eastern Pima County.

Pima County, like the rest of Arizona, is a strange and schizophrenic place. Most of the western half belongs to the Tohono O'Odham Nation, people who have lived in the Sonoran Desert for a millennium or more. Except for the ranchers, however, eastern Pima County is a typical sunbelt society: urban, mobile and often rootless. Most of us were not born here and most of us will not die here, we come and we go, but as we pass through the region we leave scars. In 1900, 84% of Arizona's population lived in rural areas dominated by a tract of industries, particularly cattle ranching and copper mining. By 1990, the trend had more than reversed itself with 88% of us living in cities and towns, but the urbanization of Arizona has not been kind to the wide-open spaces. On the contrary, our cities consume the desert around them while commuter subdivisions and second homes leapfrog beyond metropolitan borders. The Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan tells the story.

In 1950 there were 141,00 people in Pima County. By 1999 our numbers exceeded 800,000. Despite this explosive population growth, however, population density plummeted from 5,200 persons per square mile in 1953 to 2,400 persons per square mile today. We grow by sprawling outward rather than infilling urban areas and pretty soon, unless we have the political will to restrain ourselves, the only rural areas in eastern Pima County will be a few state and county parks and the 28% of the region controlled by the federal government. Western Arizonan's often lulled themselves to sleep by taking comfort in the fact that so much of the region consists of federal lands or Indian Reservations that will never be developed. In eastern Pima County, this bedtime story is a lie. As Indian Nations gain more sovereignty they will make their own decisions about how to manage their own lands. In eastern Pima County, only 9% of the land belongs to the Tohono O'Odham while 33% in contrast are State Trust Lands, and as Chuck pointed out, the Arizona State Land Department is mandated to seek maximum revenues from those lands and a lot being leased by Arizona standards, 31% of our lands are private. Private lands are subject only to zoning restrictions. In other words, 64% of eastern Pima County is, or could become part of our urban sprawl. To prevent that from happening we need to develop creative legal, political and economic tools to keep our open spaces open. Ranch Conservation financed in part by purchase of development rights is one such tool. There is a growing movement across Arizona in the West that sees sustainable ranching as a key factor in the preservation and restoration of rural ecosystems and rural communities.

Organizations such as the Malpais Borderlands Group, the Diablo Trust, the Santa Maria Mountains Group, the Quivira Coalition, the Arizona Common Ground Round Table and the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance are part of this movement, a movement consisting of what rancher Bill McDonald, a founder of the Malpais Group and a recent MacArthur Foundation grant winner calls the"radical center."

These groups bring ranchers, scientists and environmentalists together to establish long-term goals for particular landscapes. These goals include both the conservation of biodiversity and the preservation of the Southwest's ranching heritage. In the words of James H. Brown, a biologist at the University of New Mexico and past president of the Ecological Society of America, "If history tells us anything, it's that for thousands of years before Europeans got here with their cows and their sheep, there were vast herds of grazing animals and people manipulating the landscape."

Brown, who has carried out extensive research in ecological research in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, points out that despite a century or more of intense cattle grazing, there are still a greater variety of reptiles and amphibians in the region than in any other area of the United States. According to Brown, "Far more habitat has been destroyed to provide water for cities, subdivisions and irrigated agriculture than by even the heaviest grazing pressure. The most serious challenge facing the West is keeping ranches intact," and it is a daunting task.

Except for the handful of ranchers that originated as Mexican Land Grants, Arizona ranches are a complex mosaic of public and private tenure. Most ranches comprise a small nucleus of deeded land, often a section or less, combined with federal and state grazing permits. These permits allow ranchers to run a specified number of animal units, defined as a mother cow with calf or their equivalent," for a specified amount of time on an allotment of federal or state land. According to Jack Mercer, one of the founders of the Diablo Trust and a former president of the Arizona Cattle Growers Association, there are about 5,800 grazing allotments on public lands in Arizona.

One-third of all Arizona ranches have allotments administered by two or more public lands agencies, particularly the Bureau of Land Management and the State Land Department. According to range scientist, George Ruyle, "The value of a ranch is directly tied to the ability to use the forage on a grazing allotment. Although public lands grazing permits are considered by the agencies to be a granted privilege rather than private property, they are commonly bought and sold along with the rest of the ranch." If any of these allotments are lost or if the number of animal units on them are significantly reduced, the economic viability of the ranch may be destroyed. In recent years, grazing on federal and state lands has been increasingly challenged by some environmentalists.

Lawsuits charging non-compliance with the Endangered Species Act affect allotments on Arizona's National Forests. Recently, some groups are also attempting to replace preferential grazing rights on State Trust Lands with competitive bidding. Such pressures make ranchers politically vulnerable at a time when declining cattle prices and a four-year drought have subjected them to severe economic stresses. Farmers and ranchers across the United States, not just ranchers on public lands in the West, are facing hard times. Food producers are going bankrupt and agricultural lands are disappearing under concrete. I, for one, do not believe our nation can afford these losses. Like Wendell Barry calls, the unsettling of America, one major, if unintended consequence of such pressure is the escalating transition from ranching to real estate development across much of rural Arizona.

Faced with rising land prices, unstable markets and unpredictable climate, enormous estate taxes and increasing political uncertainty over their access to public lands, many ranchers are forced to sell their private lands to developers or to subdivide it themselves. This transition has profound ecological consequences. Because they are located around springs or along rivers and streams, the private holdings of a ranch, most of which originated as homestead or Desert Land Act withdrawals typically encompass the most attractive and most biologically diverse habitats in a region. Once these private lands are developed, human demands upon local environments grow exponentially, local aquifers are depleted, reducing or eliminating surface flow. Exotic plant and animal species proliferate off of crowding or killing off native species. More roads fragment wildlife habitat and more traffic kills more wildlife. Recreational use and illegal activities including wildcat dumping, poaching, offroad vehicle use and fuel woodcutting accelerate. Recreation is not necessarily ecologically benign or "Non- consumptive."

A second unintended consequence is a growing constraint on true large scale ecosystem management. Wildlife habitat and wildlife corridors are fragmented or destroyed, particularly for large predators like mountain lions and black bears and ungulates like pronghorn antelope and elk. The reintroduction of fire as a natural process or as a management tool becomes difficult, if not impossible. For the last century, fire suppression has been a consuming, even an obsessive goal, of federal public lands agencies.

Recently, however, scientists, ranchers and land managers have recognized the beneficial role fire plays in the preservation of grasslands and the maintenance of forest health. Working in close collaboration the Malpais Borderlands Group, the Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy have developed a fire plan for more than 100,000 acres of the Peloncillo Mountains on the Arizona/New Mexico border. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife's concern over two endangered species, the ridgenosed rattlesnake and the lesser longnosed bat have repeatedly delayed implementation of the plan. Nonetheless, the reintroduction of fire in that isolated rural area should become a reality because the number of private landowners are small and consensus regarding the reintroduction of fire has been achieved.

Once subdivision occurs, however, fire is perceived as a threat to private property, not a tool to restore the ecosystem. Controlled burns cannot be carried out and natural fires are suppressed. Shrubs continue to invade grasslands while forests continue to build up biomass until truly destructive "crown fires" occur. Meanwhile, the protection of grassland habitat and the creation of wildlife corridors that link mountain ranges from crest to crest become ever more elusive. Some human impacts can be reversed, but subdivisions are more or less forever.

One of the most dramatic ways to see the contrast between ranching and real estate development is to visit Sonoita and the San Raphael Valley southeast of Tucson. The San Raphael is largely a landscaped subdivision, thanks in part to the Nature Conservancy's purchase of the San Raphael Ranch earlier this year. In order to see what the future of the San Raphael might have been if the Nature Conservancy had not intervened, however, all you have to do is drive north over the Canelo Hills.

Like the San Raphael Valley, the Sonoita-Elgin area is plains grassland, a highly restricted life zone in Arizona occurring at elevations of 4,500 to 6,000 feet. Unlike the San Raphael, however, numerous ranchers have been subdivided in Sonoita during the past thirty years. A once-open basin has been fragmented into smaller and smaller parcels. In 1989, the Sonoita-Elgin area had about 600 homes. By 1995 the number had grown to 930 homes, an increase of 55% in less than a decade. There were about 2,400 people in the Sonoita Valley in 1994. Conservative growth estimates project a quadrupling of that population during the next four years. When development occurs, the size of parcels vary considerably depending upon County zoning regulations and subdivision deed restrictions. At present, the minimal lot size in Sonoita is one to three acres although grassroots community efforts have tried and failed to raise the minimum to at least 18 acres.

The resulting land fragmentation impacts wildlife, native vegetation and soil erosion more heavily than ranching, a land extensive activity. Parcel owners may enclose parts or all their properties and the fencing that inhibits the movement of wildlife. They may remove native vegetation, accelerating erosion or replace it with exotic species. They may also introduce domestic animals. Cats that prey on birds, reptiles and rodents, dogs that chase wildlife, horses that remove all vegetation and trample the soil.

Finally, of course, they may rearrange local topography to build houses, corrals and outbuildings. Certain wildlife species like javelina, coyotes and even deer may be attracted to residential areas during times of food and water shortages, but other species like antelope and many predators are displaced. And finally, there is the visual fragmentation of the landscape. Houses are usually constructed on the highest and most visible part of the property. Many people do not like Sonoita's chronic winds so exotic trees are planted around the houses as windbreaks, and it provides shade. A driveway is built and often lined with exotic trees like Italian poplars. All of these modifications of the natural landscape disrupt the unique visual nature of the grassland, one of the features that attracted new residents in the first place. Please keep in mind that Sonoita represents a largely middle class or upper middle class developments with deed restrictions that are much more protective than county zoning ordinances. Missing are the wildcat subdivisions with their single wides, their double wides or their dead or dying cars.

Even more critical is the rising consumption of water. The Sonoita Valley relies completely upon rainfall stored as groundwater. A study conducted by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies drew up an annual water budget for the western portion of Sonoita Valley, the only portion for which there is good hydrological data. According to the study, a cow/calf animal unit consumes about 15 gallons of water on a hot, dry day. A single person in Sonoita on the other hand, consumes about ten times as much water as a mother cow with calf. The two subdivisions in the area with water meters averaged 150 gallons per person per day, probably an underestimate of average per capita water use in the valley because these two subdivisions encourage water conservation.

Present water use, which includes recharge that helps maintain baseflows in Cienega Creek where three threatened or endangered fish species live, currently remains below safe yield; the amount of water an aquifer will yield without depletion. Nonetheless, future growth will likely exceed recharge within the next forty years. Yale hydrologists estimated that the safe yield development density in Sonoita is one residence per 12.62 acres. Current zoning ordinances classify much of the available private acreage as General Rural with a minimum lot size of 4.13 acres. That means without a change in zoning, the western portion of the Sonoita Valley alone could accommodate 8,200 homes which would conserve about 3,900 acre feet of water a year. That figure is three times greater than the available recharge. More than one house per 12 acres means that Sonoita would have to mine its groundwater. To insure safe yield, the minimum size of a parcel would have to be tripled.

As we all know, however, downzoning is an extremely difficult undertaking, despite the Pima County Board of Supervisors recent decision to deny the rezoning of Canoa Ranch. Zoning in Arizona has rarely proved to be an effective tool to control or restrict growth. On the contrary, developers usually manipulate County administrations to increase residential densities and accelerate real estate development across the state.

After living in the Three Points area for seventeen years, I know on a viseral day to day level, the cows are better than condos. My family and I live in a subdivision with stringent deed restrictions, yet few of those deed restrictions are ever enforced. As anyone who has every belonged to a homeowners association knows, divisiveness often overwhelms consensus, especially if people are attempting to regulate their own behavior rather than mobilizing against an outside threat. Moreover, newcomers, no matter how well educated or well intentioned are usually ecologically naive about the natural systems into which they are moving. Many, perhaps most of our individual decisions, contribute to the degradation and fragmentation of the landscape.

Growing up in Arizona, I have also seen good ranches and bad ranches. After the cattle boom began in the 1880's, Arizona's ranges were disastrously overstocked because there were no legal mechanisms to regulate livestock numbers. In my book, Arizona History, I call this period the tragedy of the commons on the open range, but with the establishment of the national forest in the early 1900's and the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, grazing has been increasingly regulated. Some ranches continue to be overgrazed, but more and more ranches are developing grazing rotation systems that are sustainable and that restore ranges damaged in the past. For those of you who doubt me, I urge you to visit the ranches owned or managed by my fellow presenters today.

Our challenge with the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan is to work towards what the Arizona Common Ground Round Table calls shared sustainable landscapes. In the past, rural Arizona consisted of networks of ranching families that were true communities, who relied upon one another for both work and play. Ranching was and is, a distinct American culture with a distinct set of knowledge, values and beliefs. Many of those communities have been weakened by the relentless urbanization of Arizona, but now is the time to create new communities where environmentalists, hunters, birdwatchers and hikers partner with ranchers to preserve and restore the open spaces we all cherish. We also need to step back a moment from our present conflicts and controversies and look forward as well as backward. Right now, many people do not believe we need to produce food on our public lands in the West today. Once you dismantle an economy and a way of life, however, it is extremely difficult to reconstruct it, if and when times and needs change.

I will never be a vegetarian so I thought a lot about recently about what it would mean to be a truly, ethical meateater. Should I continue to participate in the globalization of the beef industry? Eating meat from regions where environmental regulations may not exist? Or should I attempt to do what my friend and neighbor, Gary Nabhan is trying to do; eat foods grown within a certain radius of where I live, where I know the people who raise the food and how they raise it. Over on Eagle Creek in eastern Arizona, within the area where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reintroducing Mexican Gray Wolves, Jan and Will Holder are raising and marketing predator friendly, hormone free beef. They now have a hard time finding a slaughterhouse that meets their standards and outlets that sell their beef, but I do not believe that all of us who do want to be ethical meateaters need to support innovators like the Holders.

My vision of the future is a shared, sustainable landscape where responsible ranchers, environmentalists, hunters and hikers take a personal responsibility for the landscapes that they share and love. Thank you.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

 

Q How do you balance the reintroduction of the wolves with the needs of the ranching community in the area?

A: Well, I think that's the million dollar question and it is obviously a very difficult question. Defenders of Wildlife has established a degradation fund, we will see how it works out. That is a question that is facing eastern Pima County and is certainly a question I hope can be resolved. I have hunted and backpacked the Blue River country for thirty years now and I would love to see wolves there.

Q: Someone passed this printed information out that states ranching on public lands has destroyed more native vegetation, wildlife and wildlife habitat, caused more soil erosion and soil damage and has destroyed more riparian areas than any other land use. Do you agree with that?

A: I think you have to look at landscapes as historical texts and the fact that there was tremendous overgrazing in the past. There has been increasing regulation of grazing and I do not think you can take snapshots at a particular time and make sweeping judgements on that. Yes there has been destruction but as for that claim, I doubt it. I think for a lot of riparian areas, groundwater pumping, damming and given the manipulation of the floodplain itself has been a much more significant impact than grazing in the uplands.

 

 

INTRODUCTION: SHARON BRONSON

 

We will entertain additional questions at the end of the session. It is my pleasure to introduce you to yet another District 3 constituent, Susan Chilton. Sue is a partner with her husband Jim, in a family business called Chilton Ranch and Cattle Company. They own and operate historic ranches at both the northern and southern ends of the Altar Valley to the Arivaca watershed. Mrs. Chilton earned her Bachelor's and Master's of Arts degrees from the Arizona State University, no boos please. She is a student of practical southern Arizona range biology. She is currently Vice President of the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance and is a founding member of the Arizona Common Ground Round Table, a collaborative group of environmentalists, ranchers and researchers who subscribe to the goal of a "shared sustainable landscapes." She will present to us today, the Ranch Tradition and Conservation in the Altar Valley Area, particularly emphasizing historic cattle ranching as the best tool to achieve multiple environmental and economic goals. Please welcome Sue Chilton.

RANCH TRADITION AND CONSERVATION IN THE ALTAR VALLEY AREA: SUE CHILTON

Good morning. I was sitting there and this paper came around that my husband just stood up and mentioned and I will see if I can dispel a couple of the myths, extremely and widely publicized myths but we will see if we can give you some information on it.

First of all, I would like to start by saying that if we all had neighbors like Tom Sheridan, we would all be really, really wealthy in an important respect. He is a neighbor and we are glad to have him. He is also a member of the Altar Conservation Alliance so he operates globally and thinks nationally and all that other good stuff. In any case, I am going to skip things that are slightly repetitive of what Tom said and go on with some further elaboration.

What is a ranch?

A lot of people do not really know. I am going to try to give you a little visual idea. Back in the homestead days, ranchers came out from the east, driving their own herds because there were no cows out here to just round up out in the country. In the east, eastern homesteaders were given 160 acre lots of land to homestead. Now that homestead of 160 acres in the humid east with a higher precipitation, was the number selected because it was big enough for a family to support itself. It yielded enough product to take care of their families and with that number, no more acreage was needed. As you move west, you get more arid and even the newest residents know that, so when they continue giving 160 acre homesteads to people, it soon became obvious to everyone, including John Wesley Powell who went to Congress and said,"One hundred and sixty acres could not support one-half of one goat in a lot of places. In other places you can, but the majority of the west has vastly much less precipitation". When these people homestead their 160 acres, Congress said they were going to give them access to the forage of what was then called, the public domain. Now the public domain was land that people could come out and homestead, so the next week somebody else came out and homesteaded right here and he turned his cattle and his sheep out on the public domain. Now they overlapped because there were no fences. Sometime later, Rancher C came out, obtained his 160 acres and turned his herd out on the public domain land also. Well, this went on to about 1890, and in the 1890's, there were some major droughts. What had occurred up to that time was that many people came out, obtained their 160 acre homestead and turned out their stock. All of a sudden, all the ranchers got together and said, "This is not something that can go on and on. We already have all the cows out here that can be sustained on the forage that is available." They said, "Okay, let's do something about it." So the ranchers went to the federal government and said, "Can you create what is called forest reserves?" The forest reserves is the ancestor of the U.S. Forest Service. Those forest reserves, and reserve means that it was to be reserved or removed from the option of homesteading, the areas that were within the boundaries and the forest reserve were no longer available for more people to come in and homestead. This occurred at about the turn of the century, right around the 1906 era. My dates are not exact, you have to be a historian to give you exact dates. In any case, about this period at the area called the Garces Forest Reserve, it had three purposes. The removal of the option to homestead was carried out in order to provide sustainable timber, forage and watershed. They are in the Department of Agriculture, they were not set aside as parks.

Which department are national parks in? Interior, right? Folks do not have a clear picture of why we have a Department of Agriculture. We have that department because we try to have food. Those forest reserves were set aside for the production of forest, timber and watershed and it is at that point that we started building our forest service and they said, "Well okay, this rancher has a history, he has homesteaded that property and he has been running cattle here so this is his allotment." The rancher then began fencing his allotment. As time went on, once you were given an allotment it was the exclusive right to the utilization of that forage and that right was given instead of giving larger homesteads. People do not understand that the right to the forage was a compensation to western pioneers for the fact that they were receiving much less value, less capacity to support the family than their counterparts who settled in Indiana or Iowa or someplace else.

Time went on and this rancher over here got on in age, his kids had moved somewhere and did not want to ranch. So Rancher A bought the allotment and the homestead in this ranch because the economies of scale and what would support a family in 1890 cannot be done today. So now this ranch is here and it now has two 160 parcels in private land. Well, this process went on and on and on so now maybe this rancher or his descendants also bought this allotment. What you buy when you buy an allotment, is foraging rights, you are not buying the land. The land belongs to the forest reserves, the forest service, the U.S. Government and technically to the public, but it is the government who is out there running it. What you buy is the private land and the exclusive right to the forage.

Can you take your cows out tomorrow and put them on someone else's allotment? What would happen?
Along comes the Livestock Inspector and says, "These are trespassed cattle." Now when you own something, what you own is the right to use it, right? Okay, the ranchers own the forage, but this is a split domain.

Do the ranchers own the timber?

No.

Do the ranchers own the wildlife?

No.

Can someone come out and mine on your ranch?

Yes, they can come out tomorrow, stake out a claim on our ranch, on the forest because it is another one of those rights we do not own anymore than you do. If you want to come out tomorrow and place a mining claim and try to look for gold in California Gulch, it is legal! However, if you want to put cows on our ranch, that is illegal because the ranchers bought the right to the forage.

Now, a statement has been made and it is true in general, but I want to describe it for the Altar Valley. Ranchers basically own a section or less of private property, this is not true in the case of the Altar Valley for the actual commercial cattle ranches. I would say that all of the working ranches in the Altar/Arivaca Valley own thousands of acres of deeded land and they acquired those thousands of acres through ancestors who homesteaded that property more than 100 years ago. Our neighbors, the Noone's, and Ted Noone is a veterinarian and instructor at the UofA, Chad's family was out and about at the same time as the King's and they homesteaded land there. Many of the ranching families in this part of Southern Arizona are families who came in the 1800's which includes my husband's family. They were here in the 1880's also. Over the course of years, the ranching families purchased other allotments and that is what you own when you say you own a ranch. Now what you own is a big headache too, because you acquire the state land trust as one of your co-managers when you purchase the allotments, you acquire the forest service or BLM as one of your co-managers and believe me, they do manage. They are at the table when you make all of your ranching decisions, virtually they participate in your decisions as to where to rotate or when to use what pasture.

When you buy a ranch, can you just throw any number of cows out?

That is what the public seems to think. When you buy an allotment it has a number attached to it. This allotment may be for 200 head, you cannot put 200 more out there and make it 400 head. This allotment might be for 400 head, that is all you can put out there and that is the maximum. You can put less, you can take what is called "non-use" and for some reason such as there is a drought or something and do less, but you cannot put more.

Now how do you buy a ranch? Do you go to the government and say, "Forest service, I want to buy an allotment?" What will they say to you?

We're not a real estate agency, go buy a ranch from the rancher.

What is the rancher selling you?

The rancher sells you the private land and the right to a certain number head of cattle. The right to graze 200 on this allotment, the right to graze 400 on this allotment and you pay for that at the rate of approximately two to three thousand dollars per animal unit.

Does that include the cows? Ranchers please tell me, does that include the cows?

No. You still do not have a cow! All you have are the transferred exclusive right to graze that piece of territory from someone else to you. Now you go to the forest service and you say, "Here's the deed of sale, I bought the ranch." They say, "Okay, we will transfer that allotment to your name."

Can the forest service say, "No, I am going to give it to my next door neighbor?"

No. It is not something that the forest service can say, "We like him, these are our political party and he gets it." Sorry, you have to go with your deed of sale, show you bought the ranch. When you buy it, you put out a lot of money per animal unit.

Now what?

Now you go out and buy your solar energy convertors. What are those? Cows. Yes, the best solar energy convertor out there.

What does a cow eat?

Grass, forest, all kinds of stuff. Can you eat it? No, not the most die-hard vegetarian in this room really wants to make a meal out of what our cows eat.

What does a cow do? How many stomachs does a cow have?

Four. How many do you have? Some of you think at least two. A cow can digest high silica, high cellulose foods that we cannot digest because we will get appendicitis. A cow converts native forage that you do not want to see on your plate, things humans cannot eat, and they convert sustainably. That is, they only eat down to a certain point, a cow is not a goat. If you manage cattle grazing, you are increasing the health and the diversity of the plant population out there and you heard the word "manage." There is plenty of evidence out there and I will ask some of you range scientists that are in the room, if you agree with me. Managed grazing produces healthier plant communities and a greater variety of wildlife habitat and better communities than overgrazing or nongrazing. Managed grazing is better for the ecological system. Your cows convert this native forage to beef then they get up to approximately 500-550 pounds. Again, they have done all of that without fertilizers, irrigation, chemicals of any kind, tractors, the tillage of soil or anything else.
At that point, what happens to them?

Lots of you know and some do not seem to. Okay, at this weight they are sold, in our case, to the Marana Auction and bought by probably a farmer in the Midwest. They go back there and they go to his field where he has already harvested his crops of whatever, it may be corn, soybeans, whey or wheat and the cows put on another two to three hundred pounds and get up to around 800 pounds. The cows are still eating things you do not want to eat for dinner including stems, leaves and the residue from agricultural production. That solar energy convertor converts the residue from plants to beef which is high protein and high iron. When that yearling weighs about 800 pounds, it is at that point it goes into a feedlot and gets its last 300 pounds on a ration that is supplied right there.

What else do they feed it?

The cows are fed corn, everybody knows about the corn, but how many of you use sugar? Our biggest consumer of sugar is our hummingbirds, I have already been through forty pounds of sugar feeding my hummingbirds this summer.

What is the by product of sugar? Molasses. How much molasses do all of you eat in one year? Two tablespoons, two pieces of gingerbread? A couple of gingersnaps, right? What happens to all that molasses which is where all the vitamins are for the sugar? it is a high mineral, high iron content food. Where does it go? Into the cows! It does not go into a river, you do not eat that much pancake syrup. Okay, the cows eat more residues of agricultural production that includes the molasses.

Cottonseed meal: Is anyone wearing clothes today? I think so, most of us have something on that has cotton in it. Cottonseed meal is a valuable feed, it is high protein. Do you want it for dinner? No. Cottonseed hulls, all kinds of things that are valuable foods but we cannot eat them goes into that cow along with some corn too. Now at that point, the cows are slaughtered. Where are they? They are back in the Midwest.

This piece of paper that just was circulated came around before I stood up here to make you cheerful states, "Only three percent of the cows are from the West," well, they forgot they are born and raised in the West and then they were shipped to the Midwest. The cows were slaughtered in the Midwest and that is where the beef comes from. Now the fact is, twenty percent plus are born and raised out here. Our cows never leave the West, their calves do, and they have ten to twelve calves during their life span. Those calves spend most of their life eating things you cannot eat, and at the end, they have converted it all into beef which you can eat, right? Now that is the real story, this piece of paper that says two or three percent is from the West forgets that they were born out here and raised out here. The Altar Valley alone, as Tom was saying, produces millions of pounds of beef a year. When you sit down and figure it out, it is in the millions. Our ranch alone produces about half a million pounds of beef. Now we are not the big kids on the block, there are a lot of other bigger ranches around us. In any case, there are some other folks who say we are out there ranching completely at the discretion of the government.

How many of you have a driver's license?

Right, we mostly all do, don't we? What is the difference between a license and a ranch? Now you folks who passed around that piece of paper think that we only have a privilege, a license to use our forage that we bought exclusive right to at a pretty high price.

Okay, where did you go when you went to get a driver's license?

You go to government, right? It is the state government and you take a little test and they give you a license. Is there a limited number of licenses? No.

Where do you go when you want a ranch? Do you go to the government? No, you go buy it from a rancher. Can you sell your driver's license? Anybody try that? I don't think so. Can you sell your ranch and the allotment? You bet you can. If you die, can you leave your driver's license in your will? It would not work, would it? If you die, will the IRS tax your driver's license? Well they sure as heck tax your ranch and that includes your allotment, it is part of your personal property, it is in your estate taxes. If this is just a license folks, the IRS owes us a hell of a lot of money back.

In other words, one part of the government is saying, "You are only out here at our whim, we can take this away from you at any time." The other part of the government is saying, "Oh no, you bought that free and clear on the real estate market, we get to tax it as personal and privately owned." Remember, I am not saying we own the land, we own exclusive right to the forage. That is the difference between a license and a ranch.

Why do ranchers need to stay out there?

Almost all of us have hunters on our place every year which is just fine. Do you know how much trouble we have with hunters on our place? Next to none, in the sense of hunters generally regard themselves as outdoors people. Hunters are generally proud of leaving a clean camp and we do not have problem with them. Here and there, there is an exception as there is some beer bust party. Do the miners cause us a problem? No, we happily share our forage area with the miners out there and there are miners on our place quite a bit. I happen to be wearing a bracelet with a stone in it that was mined on our ranch and a ring where the stone also came from our ranch. The jewelry was made in Arivaca, literally, I mean the stone was made there and they were mined there and turned into jewelry there. We have no problem with other people who like to share access to the forest, that includes the birdwatchers, fisherman, campers, day picnickers, you name it. We do have, however, a serious problem with people who want to remove access to every other use except their's. We have a large number of people who regard their idea of what the forest should look like. I mean you get these people who pay money for organic fertilizer for their tomatoes, but that same organic fertilizer, when they see it out in nature becomes offensive. If you put it out on forest land it is bad, but if you put it in your garden, it is good. So they take pictures of cow manure out in the forest and say that is somehow evil. Those who want to expropriate the access of others to what they thought, or what they have a right to use, that is where we have a problem. We want to see multiple use and multiple sustainable, productive use.

Now, the very last point. How do you know you have sustainable use?

In the first place, like Tom said, I invite anybody to drive down I-19, turn right where it says Amado/Arivaca, at Exit 48 and drive that road. Go to the Ruby Road, plan on spending a day, drive over the Ruby Road all the way to I-19 and back again, it makes a big loop. You will be mostly at Nogales, you can go have lunch or dinner at Pete Kitchen's, it is good Mexican food. It is a little bland but it is good. By this time, you will have gone through several historic ranches. Anybody who has driven this can tell you that the historic ranches are not a mess.

How many of you read that guest comment a couple of weeks ago where it said that the grasses had all been extirpated from the Coronado? Yes, that is what it said. Now if I wrote a guest comment that said the houses in Tucson have all disappeared, do you think the Arizona Daily Star would publish it? It may say crackpot but guess what? On the Editorial page it says, "The grasses are all gone." Well let me show you a list. This is just a list of a variety of grasses that are in one pasture we have, it has 42 varieties on it. You can see the date on it, it says 1994. I did this for an SRM Convention some years ago and have never changed it because all the same grasses are still there that were there in 1994. Some of these are in the forest, but almost all of those are native grasses. Now, I would make a bet, and I would like to see if George Ruyle or some of the other professors agree with me, I would bet you that every grass that was here when the Spaniards arrived is still growing on the ranches. I can walk to right where there is healthy, viable, vigorous seeding stands of "X" grass.

1. sprucetop grama 22. annual 3-awn
2. slender grama 23. spike pappus
3. sideoats grama 24. viney mesquite
4. black grama 25. deergrass
5. blue grama 26. sacaton
6. hairy grama 27. sand dropseed
7. Rothrock grama 28. plains bristlegrass
8. Santa Rita grama 29. Bermuda
9. purple grama 30. Johnson grass
10. curly mesquite 31. annual fescue
11. green spangletop 32. squirrel tail grass
12. cane beard grass 33. rabbit's foot grass
13. Arizona cottontop 34. tanglehead
14. wolftail 35. crinkleawn
15. bush muhly 36. woolly bunchgrass
16. creeping muhly 37. slim tridens
17. aparego 38. annual grama
18. plain's lovegrass 39. annual panic
19. Lehmann lovegrass 40. stinkgrass
20. mesa 3-awn 41. canary grass
21. spider 3-awn 42. beggartick 3-awn

There are a few imports here, however, it is not because we seeded them. They are growing because it is one of those, if you build it, they will come. We have Bermuda Grass in our front yard that we did not plant. You water it and it is there.

Let me ask, how many imports are in this room?

If we are going to be opposed to imports, we better all leave, right? I think the gentleman back there with the hat and standing up is about the only one that gets to stay.

Final conclusion: what do we ranchers need to stay out there?

Remember, we are providing open space, not because we have that purpose in life, but it is just that it works with our ranch. What we do not appreciate is downzoning because we bought the property, we paid for it and if other people want to deprive it of the uses that it legitimately was zoned for, you can purchase it for development rights or conservation easements, we will consider that....as long term too but just do not take it.

How many of you would take kindly to someone announcing that the government wants one-third of your house? You bought your house, didn't you?

Unless you are a renter, you bought your house and you paid for the whole house and if the government or some other party, I say government because I do not want to say the county, state or federal government, whichever applies, the government wants your land for a park. they need to tell you first, is that not true? And then they need to make some arrangement with you such as buying a right to the park or conservation easement, or they need to do something to reach an agreement on both sides.

How many of you would feel a little put upon if someone announced they just wanted one-third of what you bought?

Remember, they are actually debating these laws and saying, "It is not a taking, it is not an expropriation," if they only take one-third. Well, I am willing to agree with that whenever they pass a law in Tucson that it is not "theft." A thief comes in but does not steal over one-third of your property and that is why we get upset when people say, "Well we are only."

One last comment: We actually had a person from an agency who will remain unnamed say to us, "But we only want to cut 10% of your cow numbers, that would not be a problem would it?" First of all, most of my 10% times 2,000 would pay for it, and second of all, that is 100% of the profit margin. That is not 10%, he is thinking 10% off his salary, he still has 90% of his salary doesn't he? Ten percent off our cattle numbers reduces the factory, the solar conversion factory to a non-profit operation. Thank you all for your time very much, I really appreciate it. God bless you.

BREAK

Ms. Bronson announced a ten minute break.

We will come back with Mac Donaldson and I think we are going to wrap up with Andrew McGibbon. Before we do that, let me recognize a couple of people. I want to thank Luther Propst and the Sonoran Institute who is going to provide lunch after all of this so thank you Sonoran Institute. Jessie Juen, BLM; Della M. Stanley and Eloisa (?) from the Baboquivari District, thank you for coming, and Rick Daley and Nancy Laine from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum for allowing us to host these sessions here.

RECONVENE

The educational series reconvened.

INTRODUCTION: SHARON BRONSON

 

Let me introduce Mac Donaldson who is a native of Tucson. He graduated from Catalina High School, attended the University of Arizona, and later earned a degree in Fine Arts from the Eastern Technical College in Sydney, Australia. Mr. Donaldson comes from a second generation ranching family and he has lived in the Altar Valley from 1952, until he moved in 1975 to the Sonoita Valley where he and his family currently live. Mr. Donaldson currently ranches on lands that comprise the Empire-Cienega Valley and has worked for a Colorado cattle company representing the Southwestern region. Mr. Donaldson is an active member of the Sonoita Valley Planning Partnership and a member of People for the USA in Cochise County. He is active in local 4-H activities and Little League. He also has served on the Santa Cruz County Fair and Rodeo Association. May I present Mac Donaldson.

RANCHING TRADITION AND CONSERVATION IN THE EMPIRE-CIENEGA VALLEY: MAC DONALDSON

Thank you for the opportunity of addressing you today about ranching in the Empire-Cienega Valley. Let me provide you with a little history on how cattle ranching began in that area.

There were two brothers who were mining assayers in Virginia City, Nevada, who came out in the mid-1870's who thought it would be a good idea to get into the cattle business. It seemed a fairly prosperous thing to do since a lot of people were doing it after the Civil War, and they looked at this area. They decided they would settle in Southern Arizona so they came to Tucson, came out to that valley and saw a lot of potential there. An Englishman by the name of Hislop, who installed streetcar services, put up the money. The brothers began ranching and providing meat to the mining camps of Bisbee and Tombstone. When they developed this partnership, the Vail's were the dynamic end of it, Mr. Hislop eventually really did not want to continue so he left after a few years and then at the turn of the century, they were grubstaking miners who were looking for gold and silver. Silver was found in the Empire Mountains at the Total Wreck Mine. With the earnings over an eight year period, operations were expanded by buying neighboring ranches. The expansion included about 1, 000 square miles going from the bottom of (?) land grab down by the Town of Patagonia where the Rail X Ranch is located, all the way up the Santa Rita Mountains, Whetstone Mountains into the Rincon Mountains. Vail was their shipping point and it was an extensive holding where they had about 23,000 head of cattle. All the cowboys and some Indians with their white overseer and a Chinese cook, were centered at the Empire Ranch.

Tom is on the Board of the Empire Ranch Foundation which is attempting to preserve the buildings that were originally built by the Vail's. The brothers would send the men out to different areas to look at the cattle that were traditionally located around water to check on the cattle and ensure they were doing well. There were a few line camps and the cowboys did most of their riding from the Empire Headquarters. They developed a farm at the Cienega which means marsh in Spanish, but the farm was established to grow fodder for their horses or weaning calves. Mr. Hefner was a cowboy who came out from California to manage the properties for the Vail's and he tells the story that in the summer they would eat fresh meat and beans and in the winter, they would eat dried meat and beans.

The property is a wonderful expanse of property and if you come out and look, you can envision what it was like and the values therein that were really dynamic. The first pasture and fence put up was the north fence. When the Boice Family bought the ranch from the Vail's in the late 1920's, it also coincided with a drought and the Vail's knew they had to take steps to protect their cattle because they were dying. That is a good example of infrastructure that fails to allow you to protect your resources. When the homesteader's first came out they brought cows, they tried to keep all of their heifers so they had more cows for more production. When the climate caused problems, they had to get the cows off this land the only way to get the cattle off this land was to ship them to the railhead. That meant the cattle had to be strong and healthy enough to go to the railhead out of Tucson, Vail or Willcox. If the cow was so weak that it could not be driven and pushed to the railhead, nothing could be done with them. With 23,000 head of cattle there were losses of perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 head in that drought because the weakened cows could not be moved. The carcasses were so thick over the Elgin-Canoa area that you could hardly traverse the area due to the stench. It was somewhat like the blizzard in 1889 in Montana where they also suffered great losses of cattle due to the cold.

There were people who made a living selling the bones from those dead cows. They shipped the bones back east to the bone mill plants. This is possibly where the perception that cow grazing is bad may have come from.

The Boice's retained their land as a cattle ranch and they were raising purebred Hereford's. At that time, ownership of the ranch was beginning to change and they were selling off some of their smaller parcels of adjoining ranches such as the Empirita, J-6, Cienega, the Rosemont, the Rail X, all those different ranch lands that no longer have ranching. The Boice's were selling them off to have cashflow so they could operate through the Depression and perhaps even through World War II. The Boice's sold the ranch to a Gulf America Corporation in the 1960's who were home developers who planned to construct 30,000 homes in the valley on 45,000 acres of deeded ground. They ran into financial problems and encountered resistance from Santa Cruz over the zoning and what could be done with that land. The corporation elected to sell the ranch to Anamax Mining, which is a combination of American Metals and Anaconda who operates the Twin Buttes Mining operation in Green Valley. They purchased the land for the ore body in the Rosemont Mountains and Helvetia as they wanted the protection of the land so they would not have a conflict with Green Valley when they were mining copper. Anamax also wanted the water so they could use it in their smelting processing for copper.

This is where we entered the picture as my father was contacted because he was a conservation rancher who was well thought of and they decided to have him come out and evaluate the property and make recommendations for its use. Eventually, that turned into a joint venture in which Anamax owns the cattle and we manage the cows, but the profits became complicated. One gentleman from Anamax said, "We can lose one of those giant trucks and we can lose more money than you can make in one year," and we said, "So if this is ridiculous, why are we doing a joint venture? Why not just go ahead and lease it. That is what we ended up doing, we leased it and took over the management of the property.

In 1988, the Bureau of Land Management entered the picture because they were looking at several issues. One was water and the other issue was how to obtain a corridor of land from the Mexican border into the Coronado National Forest and be able to have control over it which is still an ongoing process. That is what we are doing here, we are talking about holding and retaining open space and keeping development from occurring on those lands. The Endangered Species Act may have had something to do with the process because at that time, the Gila (?) was in Cienega Creek which may have been its primary habitat so those factors were pushing the BLM to purchase the land. They could not purchase the land so a three way trade was conducted for land around Phoenix and because we were in place as lessee's of the land from Anamax, we just stayed in place and took over the lease.

Because we went from a private ranch held by private individuals whose concern for the resource was to benefit their needs, we went from that to a public situation of isolation and locked gates where entrance could only be gained if you were invited, or during hunting season because anyone can have access to state land for hunting. It was very, very quiet and if anyone comes out, we would see perhaps two or three vehicles which we would not know who they were or what they were doing out there, in one month. The pressure of people and the uses they bring with them has increased dramatically leading to threats of fire and open gates.

Education: When you talk about people who are ranchers or hunters, these are people who pretty much understand the issues and the needs of the land. When the BLM came in, that added increased scrutiny over how the ranch was being managed. The political climate that has existed for the last 12-15 years is that ranching is a poor excuse for a living, ranching is taking whether it is from the federal coffers as a subsidy, or the belief that the ranchers are consuming and damaging the resources. Under that type of scrutiny, we were trying to operate our ranch. As I said earlier, my father was contacted and we obtained Cienega Ranch because he was considered a conservation rancher and resource oriented. We have always had an ethic to maintain the resources and manage it to the best of our ability. That was evident in what was done on the Tortuga which is no longer in our ownership but we are still involved in the management of it somewhat. The Tortuga is north of Three Points which is currently owned by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe who purchased the property this past spring.

We felt very confident in our ranching practices and management ability in conserving resource efforts, but the perception of the public was different. The BLM had ownership and they were sort of bouncing around several scenarios that created some conflict. It may have been due to a lack of trust, but I also think it was a bureaucratic position that things had to be done a specific way so therefore, we were going to do them and because we were their lessee, our considerations were really not first and foremost. Consideration was foremost to the Secretary of the Interior or the State Director and we were left out of the loop at first. There were a few rough times and I actually left the ranch for a time because there did not seem to be any future there. We were told that after our lease expired that they had to honor, we could no longer use the land for grazing and the place would be locked up. At the age of forty, it did not look promising for me to stay around so I went to work for another cattle rancher, however, my Dad stayed on. They had a few fiery words and luckily, Jesse Juen became the manager and his attitude was much more together to try to work out what was best for the land and resources and leave the bureaucratic and political aspects behind us. He developed an idea to get a Resource Management Plan which is what the BLM has to have on their properties and most of those Resource Management Plans were in place or implemented in 1934, and other acts came down and were added but since this was a recent acquisition, it had no plan in place. No plan outlined what was going to be done with the property such as: Was mining going to be allowed, forestry, burning, paved or unpaved roads or grazing? There were thousands of different aspects and I credit Jesse with the formation of a group called the Sonoita Valley Farm Partnership. He looked for people within the area but also recruited people from the Phoenix area, Cochise County, Pinal County and people from all other areas to be involved in the planning.

They were asked, "What would you like to see? Would you like to see open space with wildlife? Grazing? Fire?" and then that group of concerned citizens has been meeting for over three or four years to complete the planning process regarding what to do with the resource. We have been participating because our livelihood depends on us being there. Ultimately, there are going to be conflicts and issues to resolve, but this group will get the issues out to the public first as opposed to the property owners telling the lessee's, "This is what we are going to do because it is our property and this is what we see is needed here." The group is using scientists to help resolve some of the issues and the group even published the plan for public input. Public input has been a positive step to take in this planning process. Through that process, my father and I, as the largest use of that property for cattle grazing, have created a certain amount of trust within those people involved and we have also shown through our commitment to reduce/increase the numbers and put our money where our mouth is in favor of the resources. From our point of view, that has been a good thing and I think if the resources has shown that this year. Tom was right, go take a look at anyone's ranch and it is going to be all right because they are incredible and I am proud of the way the Empire-Cienega Ranch looks.

I was going to give an example of the Endangered Species Act as I told you that one of the issues that probably prompted Dean Bibles to push to get the Empire-Cienega was the fact that there was (?) as an Endangered Species on the creek and it is considered one of the primary habitats in the world. I cannot remember the last time they did a count but I know it was in the millions of fish, it does not have any predators within the creek and they are trying to keep it that way.

This is just an example of resolving conflict: we have established something called Wildlife Planning. Every six months we look at what our uses are going to be, where the pastures are and where they were, why we changed what we said we were going to do and what we plan to do in the future plus any conflicts that might occur between antelope, the lesser longnosed bat, Gila (?), a bicycle race that's been planned or whatever, that is brought up during the meeting so our rotation and our use is somewhat monitored to resolve conflicts before they happen. We were coming out of our winter country when we started counting and we come down into the Sacaton Bogs, the deltas that are adjacent to Cienega Creek with our herd which is the point when they begin to get better nutrition.

Better nutrition starts the calving process and it is also usually the worst time of year because it is spring, there is no moisture, it is hot and it is before the rains. The condition of your cow drops dramatically and you are trying to breed back so you can get another calf next year. All those factors come to this apex about April, May and June. We utilize the Sacaton benches which contain sub irrigated grass that is very productive to freshen our cows, to get the cows into the kind of condition they need to breed back and also to raise those calves. We said, "We want to come down into this area and use these pastures." Well those pastures were adjacent to the creek at that time, we had been doing that same program for about 17 years and the cattle had access to the creek. We always thought perhaps the Southwest Center for Biodiversity or somebody else like that might sue BLM for an excessive take of the species because the cows had access to the creek, no matter that Father Kino first brought cattle in there in 1600.

The cattle have been there ever since and the creek seems to be doing pretty well, but that did not matter, the fact was that we were at risk for a lawsuit. We were denied use of that creek so that also meant we were denied use of that grass. That placed our cows back in the uplands which are very precarious since they are much more fragile than the heavier soils in the bottomlands. The cattle were in the uplands and it was a fairly tough year. The calves weighed probably about 30% less that year and less in the next year and we had a decrease of pregnant cows at about 15%. We just lost $50,000.00 because somebody is worried about a lawsuit due to the Gila Topminnow. We realized we had a problem and had to do something about this so we went in, fenced the creek and said okay, "We will not allow the cows to be in the creek. Can we still use the grass adjacent to the creek? We were given permission to use that land for the grasses, but we had to use alternative methods for watering the cattle. We now have to pump water instead of using the creek that God gave us, but at least there is water underground that we can use. We solved the problem and whether we created a Gila Topminnow habitat or not, that remains to be seen and Mike Saunder who is not here said, "To hell with the damned Topminnow." He is an environmentalist and really hates cows and wants to see all cows off western ranges but he was looking at the entire riparian habitat. We have created a different habitat here, we may be losing Gila Topminnow population but actually the riparian corridor is going back towards what it should be. It may be better for the willow flycatcher and all those other things that people seem to like to put down on lists, but doing things like that, we have created a certain amount of distrust. Scrutiny was brought in to look as if we were under a magnifying glass, scrutinizing what the Donaldson's are doing out there. I am hoping that we can deal with issues either perceived or real and that we can manage the resources and go forward.

The benefit is that if the resources are in good shape, then we are in good shape. If the resources are in a sorry shape, then we are in sorry shape.

I wanted to say one little thing before I finish this. I titled it, What Would Grandpa Say, because if my Grandpa was here, he would have ranched from about twelve to sixty-five, that time frame. The rancher was doing his job, he was producing meat and fiber for the consumption and people were concerned about how many television sets they had or whether they had a 1957 DeSoto or whatever the hell they were thinking about in Los Angeles and we were left alone. I remember my Dad tells a good story, he was at a Cattlemen's Convention in 1957 or 1958 and he was talking to a man who had a lot of state leases at Houghton, Pinal County, Maricopa County., he had just massive amounts of property. He said we had a great formula because nobody checked us. We had state leases and no one knew what we were doing, we ran twice as many cattle and paid half as much and now it was sort of an adjunct, we did what we wanted, we had control and now the urban center has control and the ranchers are scrambling, it's a different situation."

I think you need to look at what is management and how it has changed. What was once considered good practice in building cars is no longer good practice. What was considered good practice in farming in some areas is no longer considered good practice because you are losing soil, you are doing this, you are doing that. The same thing is happening in ranching and as you look at the way range management has changed in the last 30 years , it is really dramatic in what the goals and objectives are of those people that are on the land is to stay on the land. The question then becomes, what is sustainable?

When you think about how we, as a society, want to change things, what was created that caused this population to come here? Air conditioning. All these people have come here and changed the environment to their needs. They brought tree's to stop the wind in Sonoita, they brought the Bermuda grass because it is pretty for their lawn and they brought their concepts and values with them. It reminds them of home and by having air conditioning enabled them to stay and survive in this heat. If you look at the Native people's, they would seek shade and they accepted the conditions, they would roll back. They accepted what was here and lived within those bounds. We, as a European, had an attitude, oh we will build a bigger house and we will build a bigger air conditioning and a bigger road and whatever. We would do it, we are industrious and it has been done and that cannot be changed but the only thing that is constant is change.

We have a tendency, as a people, to want to put everything into compartments and boxes. You have to adapt to changes and if you are constantly adapting changes, that is what we, as cattlemen, do all the time. You are out there in that environment where we have just come out of a terrible series of dry years and we have a good year this year and maybe we will have another two or three, but then it is going to be dry again, and we are going to lose habitat. The thing is that you have to be able to make those changes, to follow that change in order to survive. Laws and people's concepts are really difficult to do that change because they know after reading an article in the San Francisco Examiner, that is the way it is and you cannot change them but you have to be flexible. Thank you for your time.

INTRODUCTION: SHARON BRONSON

 

We are running into somewhat of a time crunch so we will move right along. I want to say that we were really privileged the County Administrator and myself. We were out at Empire-Cienega last January with the Secretary of the Interior and there is a ranch that is in excellent condition and we want to thank you for the terrific tour. I knew I cannot get away with misspeaking at least once in a session and I did a little bit ago when I referred to Drew McGibbon as Andy, my apologies sir.

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce him now, he is the current Vice President and manager of the Santa Rita Ranches which operates in cooperation with the Santa Rita Experimental Range located to the west of the Santa Rita Mountains, in the upper Santa Cruz Valley. It was established in 1903 and the Experimental Range is recognized as a principal site for research on the improvement and management of semiarid grasslands in the Southwest.

Mr. McGibbon is currently working toward his Master of Science degree in Animal Science at the University of Arizona and holds undergraduate and minor degrees in Animal and Veterinary Science, International Agriculture, Agricultural Biochemistry, and Range Management and Ecology. He is active in the Arizona Common Ground Roundtable, National Cattlemen's Association, Arizona Cattle Growers Association, Southern Arizona Cattlemen's Protective Association and the Center for Holistic Resource Management. Please welcome Andrew McGibbon.

RANCH TRADITION AND CONSERVATION ON THE SANTA RITA EXPERIMENTAL RANGE: ANDREW MCGIBBON

Thanks for having me here this morning. You have heard from some of the finest people in the industry so I am going to try to keep this short and to the point.

What I have to offer you this morning is I am going to give you a general overview of a ranch in Southern Arizona, that happens to be ours. We have several management plans as you will see and I think it is fairly accurate to say that a majority of the ranches are here to stay in Southern Arizona under the intense management that you will see on some of our sites.

Ranching on the Santa Rita Experimental Ranch: how many of you have driven through the Experimental Range south of Tucson? Probably quite a few of you and some of you have probably driven through there and did not even know you were driving through there. It is just outside of Green Valley. If you drive up the road towards Madera Canyon, every inch that you drive through is the Santa Rita Experimental Range.

This is just a brief overview: As Sue Chilton mentioned previously, she talked about forest reserves and originally, the Experimental Range was a forest preserve, it was established by presidential order on April 11, 1902, but experiments had already begun by 1901. By experiments, I mean any kind of range scientists and I will show you a little later what types of experiments are occurring there. The forest service was formed in 1905 and in 1988, it went out of the hands of the forest service overlooking the entire operation and into the hands of the University of Arizona College of Agriculture.
Now the Experimental Range goes from many different elevations. The next three pictures are just kind of a general overview of the different elevations that we have there.

[slide]

This is roughly 3,000 feet, I believe it starts at 2,900 feet and you will see that there is a lot of Lehmann's lovegrass which is an introduced grass and you will see a lot of mesquite. You will see in the next pictures that a lot of the land is rather similar.

[slide]

This is roughly 3,500 to 4,000 feet. There are large stands of Lehmann's lovegrass with mesquite. I will tell you a little bit more about the grasses in a moment.

[slide]

This is probably the higher country, this is about 4,200 feet roughly, it goes a little bit higher than this, but this is stands of Lehmann's lovegrass again. These pictures were taken about a week ago and after July, according to the range records, right on average. They were slightly above average, about a quarter inch above average.

[slide]

Now, on the Santa Rita Experimental Range, one of the main uses of the range are for grazing systems, to find out what works, what does not work, what the best route to take is and some of these systems of our renewable natural resource grazing systems is year round.

Can anybody think, why would they want to use year round systems?

Most people realize that year round is not your most beneficial grazing system, period.

But, how can we know for sure that these are the best routes to take, the one's below that if we do not have something to compare it with?

Our second would be best use: simply based on monitoring. We ride the pasture and determine when the grasses need a rest. The third, which I will draw a little picture up here in a little bit is called the savory system and its rotation around central water. The fourth is the Santa Rita system which are three nine-month and a year rest of three pasture system. I know this is confusing, I will go over here in a minute, and it involves a lot of intense management.

I am going to go through savory system just real generally. Think of it as a wagon wheel or pie. Obviously the land is not shaped like this but we have one central water for what used to be three or four, possibly five even grazing systems. What we have in the center is the one water that the cattle are moved around very frequently, seven to eleven days in many instances and we have two of these systems in use. The Santa Rita system was developed by two professors at the U of A.

What that is, is a three pasture system roughly for three and nine month grazing intervals so your first pasture will be grazed for three months. Your second pasture, at the end of the three months, will be moved into the second pasture for a nine-month period, but during this rotation, this pasture here has had an entire year of rest, not a single cow on that pasture and it rotates through that schedule with a little bit of variation but sometimes you change the months to adapt to different conditions such as drought or fire. That is kind of the basis of the Santa Rita system.

[slide]

This is our year round pasture and in the pictures you will see today, it is probably not one of our best pastures, I will be the first to say this, "It is not our best pasture," and the year round system just plain and simple, does not work. At least it does not work in Southern Arizona, in my opinion.

[slide]

This would be best use, this is our pasture three which is the best use management system which simply says, well look, we examined the pasture, looked around and see if it was time to move these cows? You base the move obviously around growing seasons.

[slide]

This is a little bit hard to see, but on the left you will see some electric fence. The interior fences on this wagon wheel system are usually electric fence powered by solar panels.

[slide]

This would be the Santa Rita System, this is about seven months into a nine month grazing season. The cows will be moved out of here in roughly forty-five days. Now, in addition to grazing, the Santa Rita Experimental Range does multiple research. You will see that obviously grazing, the benefits of what works and what does not, the nutrition of the grasses, hydrology. There is a lady out there right now from the University of California working on a cottontop, soil sciences, and there are guys out there with funny hoods on working on the Hanta virus, bacteriology, vertebrates, wildlife management, tree ring research that shows the behavior from fire, drought and flood, animal behavior, the general health of anything from human health to animal health, noxious weed control and general research management.

[slide]

This is an example of one of our rain gauges, there are over thirty rain gauges over the Experimental Range for every month and at the end of the month, rain data is gauged. It hard to see this sheet, it is just a standard sheet but this is just one range gauge and they have constant rain data on this particular gauge from 1918. So every month, for every year since 1918, we know exactly how much rain fell on this pasture at that site right there. Some of them are variable and some of these, unfortunately, we have people who like to drive through that rain gauge with a four-wheel drive at 60 mph, it is a little difficult to obtain your rain data after that.

[slide]

This is just a top view of the gauge.

[slide]

Now what we have here, this particular station is a desert grasslands station. Scattered throughout the Experimental Range there are plots of land, multiple, many, many plots of land that have been fenced off starting roughly around World War I and what they have done is, this is not grazed. This has not been grazed, except for an occasional fence down when a heifer might run in there, but in general, that area inside that fence there has never been grazed, at least in my lifetime and a lot of our lifetime here. So that is very important because it shows right across the street or right across the fence, the affects of what you can achieve by grazing that same plot of land.

[slide]

Now I have a quiz for you. Which side of the fence is grazed and what system is used?

Right side is grazed? Wrong. It has not been grazed since shortly after World War I. The left side is part of the Santa Rita Rotation System.

[slide]

Okay, I have a couple of old photos here, I apologize if they are a little hard to see but this is our Pasture 12A in 1948. As you can see, I am not terribly proud of what you see here, it is nothing to write home about. I took a picture about a week ago after a very average season, slightly above average for our rain records, that is 12A. As you can see, there is a little bit of encroachment of mesquite and that is one of the problems that I hope to address here over the next few years is mesquite.

[slide]

Another picture here taken in 1960, Pasture 12B. You can see Elephant Head to the left and the mountains to the right are just behind I believe it is Rio Rico if I am not mistaken.

[slide]

This is the same pasture as you can see the same mountains there on the left so it is rotated slightly to the right, but it is the same area, same pasture and again, Lehmann's lovegrass. This was introduced I believe, correct me if I am wrong Dr. McClaran, in the 1930's by range scientists and you might think, well gee, this is fairly homogenous, there is nothing but Lehmann's lovegrass. Well, I have four pages here of native grasses that still exist in numerous areas of the Santa Rita Experimental Range and I will tell you later about our website where you can access all this data. Anything I say here today, you are more than welcome to access on the website, it will tell you anything you want to know about the range.

[slide]

This is that same pasture. Ohmigosh, look at what the cattle have done! This is horrible, look at this! What kind of grazing system is this?

Audience: None.

Exactly, none, zero, diddly squat. No cattle on here since World War I. Now I am not trying to tell you that the reason that there is grass in the pasture next door is simply because of a cow but I am trying to show you what can be done with intense management. Unfortunately, when someone drives up the road and they look at this, they are going to say, "My gosh, look at what those cows have done!" That is what they take home with them is a picture like this, yet they have no idea that cattle have never set foot on this piece of land except for jumping a fence every once in awhile.

[slide]

Okay, what does this picture show? Well, just a little sign. What does it signify? Well, it is only one-half of what was once there. We have vandals that come on the land on a regular basis. That was taken away with a shotgun, they decided it would be a nice target.

[slide]

This, I apologize, it is a little hard to see but at the bottom of the wash are the remains of thirty-six bottles of beer. Someone decided this was a good place to go shooting. I found this just a few days ago, this was done last weekend some time so if you take thirty-six bottles of beer and a 22 rifle, there is quite a mess and who cleans that up? We do.

[slide]

Look at this, wow! The Santa Rita Experimental Range is now a garbage dump, this is next to the main road. People have decided, "Well, I am just going to dump my garbage out here. Well heck, there is 53,000 acres out there, it does not make any difference." Who cleans that up? We do.

[slide]

This is some of our supplementation, this is a trace mineral block that is used as much, if not more, by wildlife than it is by the cattle. It has a lot of trace minerals like copper, zinc, magnesium, etc.
[slide]

What I have here is a watering hole. Is this natural? No, there is no riparian area on the Santa Rita Experimental Range, this is built by the people who owned the ranch prior to us and this is a good example of watering holes that have been made by the ranchers themselves. Keep in mind that there is no riparian area on the Santa Rita Experimental Range without the rancher forming these waters, where do they get their water? Think about that.

[slide]

Just a couple of more pictures. That is the end of a wash where we have had a little water gathering there that is about one week ago.

[slide]

This is the same picture, a little blurry.

[slide]

As you can see, the watering holes themselves were not much more than simple grass environment. By bringing the water into that area, simply by bringing out a dozer and stopping runoff, you form some very nice environments, a very nice ecosystem.

[slide]

Okay, this is our board of directors.

[slide]

I put this picture in simply because I think it is very important that everybody in this room realize that behind these ranches is a family that works their tail off to do whatever they can to improve the range.

In closing, first of all I would like to thank you for letting me speak today and I would just like to invite each and every one of you out to the Experimental Range anytime you would like, just stay on the main roads obviously, we would not want any tracks out there but come out and look and see what the ranchers can accomplish these days.

There is our website there, please visit it at anytime.

http:\\ag.arizona.edu/SRER

QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIOD

Okay, we are going to open the session to questions now. I am going to let Tom Sheridan direct that but let me lay some ground rules as we do that.

Number one, we want the questions, first to come from those who are members of the steering committee. They will be making some decisions so we feel it is important that they are heard first.

Number two, I just want to remind you that this is not a debate, this is not a debate format. The kind of questions we want are questions that either require clarification or additional information.

With that Tom, I will turn the session over to you.

TOM SHERIDAN

Thank you so much Sharon.

Q: The University of Arizona has sold a lot of their lands for development. What is the potential threat that the Santa Rita Experimental Range for development long term?

A: The University of Arizona only administers the Santa Rita Experimental Range for the State of Arizona. It is State Trust Lands. There are proposals being advanced regarding how State Trust Lands are administered. It would require changing both the Enabling Act of the Sate of Arizona and also the Arizona State Constitution, but there some proposals to give the State Land Department more flexibility so they do not have to manage strictly to maximize revenue. As Andrew pointed out, the Santa Rita Range is right next to Green Valley is prime real estate so it is a good example of the possible threats from development that we all face here in Southern Arizona.

Q: Has any part of the Santa Rita Experimental Range been sold?

A: No, it has not been sold but the fact of the matter is, Green Valley is approaching us. It is prime land and I can see developers licking their chops for the chance of developing the Experimental Range.

Q: How many of the old original homesteads of 160 acres and a forage allotment are still operating or existing separately and not consolidated with others?

A: My guess would be none. I do not think there are any original homesteads. There may be ranchers whose great grandfather or great grandmother originally homesteaded an area who still have that homestead but it is not being run as a 160 acre homestead because you cannot make a living doing anything on 160 acres in this country. At least for the areas I am familiar with like the San Raphael Valley, there has been a tremendous consolidation and it is still going on.

SUE CHILTON: I just want to say that those homesteads are still in ranching if there is a ranch around it. It is not like the homestead is not being used for ranching, it is but usually, there are several homesteads and many of those are contiguous to private property. The diagram that I drew there might tend to make you think that it was only 160 acre lots everywhere but many of those lots are 500, 1,000 and others that have been put together and they are in ranching if the families are still there.

TOM SHERIDAN: One thing about private land in Arizona is even though there is very little private land across the state, that is not the case when you look at Arizona grasslands. Arizona grasslands were prime habitat for homesteaders. Homesteader's homesteaded a lot of grasslands and much of the rest of the grasslands are State Trust Lands so Arizona grasslands are very, very vulnerable to development because so much of it is either private land or State Trust Land which could be sold off at any time to a developer.

Q: What fees do ranchers pay?

A: You buy the ranch just like you buy a house or a farm. You do not purchase it every year. Now you buy the ranch from the owner of the ranch, the government is not in the business of selling ranches. If you want to buy a ranch, you come over to us and say, "Gee, I am really interested as starting up as a rancher, I would like to buy the Chilton's Arivaca Ranch and we would discuss how many cow units the ranch supports, what our allotment value is, what the condition is of our ranch because you are buying forage, you do not want to buy the ranch if the place does not have any forage. You would be asking, what are your waters like? How well developed are and what condition are your stock ponds in? What kind of wells do you have? Do you have a solar water line? How is the ranch set up for management? You would ask, what are your water rights papers? Do not just ask about the papers, you want to see them just like you would if you were buying a house. You are going to ask a lot of questions but you are asking those of the owner of the ranch and then you will pay for the ranch. Now let us say you pay a million dollars to buy the ranch, then you go to the forest service and inform them that you just purchased that ranch. You do not buy cows from the forest service or the BLM, you buy the cows at an auction or from another rancher or some sale. What you get from the agency is the transferred allotment from the name of the person you purchased from to your name and you are now the party responsible for carrying out the management plan of that ranch, for running that operation. Now the forest service will be talking to you about management plans, you will have an annual meeting about that subject and you will have lots and lots of other meetings about watershed, pasture rotation and all kinds of things. You will be paying the forest service an annual fee on top of what you paid to buy the ranch, this is like when you buy a car. You do not purchase the car every year but you do have to pay the government an annual fee called registration, license and smog and all that stuff, that is what you are paying the government for.

Q: The question still has not been answered. It was said that it was $2,000.00 per head which sounds like it is actually two head and a cow and calf but that is $2,000.00 per head annually.

A: When you buy a ranch that has 500 animal units allotment and then it may average two to three thousand dollars an animal unit just to buy the ranch. It is part of the purchase of the ranch itself.

Q: What I understood was that a fee had to be paid annually to the forest service to use the land past the 160 acres of private land. Is that fee $2,000.00 a year? What is the fee?

A: No. It is an annual fee that is based on a formula that is set federally, it takes into consideration many factors. It is about $1.31 and that is per animal month and that means times twelve and that is strictly for oversight.

CLOSING: SHARON BRONSON

At this time, I am going to cut the questions because lunch has arrived. I just want to wrap up with a couple of comments and tell you why I think Pima County Ranch Conservation is important. It is going to help us better define the Metropolitan Urban Boundary, it will help us preserve the heritage and culture of the West and an important traditional industry for a diversified local economy. It will help us protect water resources and groundwater and the natural landscape will be preserved providing unfragmented open space, habitat critical for maintaining sustainable and diverse ecosystems and wildlife corridors. I want to thank you all for coming, I want to thank Luther Propst and the Sonoran Institute for lunch and lunch is here, you are free to talk among yourselves as you eat.

Thank you all for coming and let us give another round of applause for our terrific presenters today.

ADJOURN

Session 4 of the Educational Series adjourned at 12:00 noon.