Cooperative conservation --  Ranchers Unite to Save the Land for Cattle, Wildlife, Way of Life
 

The image of the lone rancher punching cows and cursing environmentalists has gone by the wayside — at least for the Malpai Borderlands Group.

With Malpai, ranchers run a nonprofit cooperative dedicated to conserving rangeland and preserving a ranching way of life. They work with scientists, an assortment of government agencies and even environmental groups. They don’t see cattle in competition with wildlife. For Malpai members, improving the range for one works to the benefit of the other.

The Malpai group could be just the tip of an expanding iceberg. Cooperative conservation has become something of a buzzword in recent years. The White House hosted a cooperative conservation conference in St. Louis in August 2004. More than 1,000 people attended.

In a group like that, a lone rancher would be hard to find.

Malpai area ranches cover 800,000 acres of rangeland stretching from the San Bernardino Valley in southeastern Arizona across the state line into New Mexico’s Peloncillo Mountains. To date, 13 ranchers have signed on with the group. Its formation dates back to the early 1990s. At the time, neighboring ranchers would gather at Warner and Wendy Glenn’s Malpai Ranch. They talked about restoring rangeland through prescribed burns. They later began discussing how cash-strapped ranchers could stay in business — without selling out to developers. They talked about preserving open spaces for cattle and wildlife.

“When the group became official in 1994, the office was still in our home,” says Mrs. Glenn.

Calls come in from around the world

The Malpai office now sits about 18 miles outside Douglas, off a stretch of rugged dirt road known as the Geronimo Trail. Mrs. Glenn and two other ranching wives staff it. They field calls from around the county — and the world, she says. They hear from reporters, scientists, conservationists and the just plain curious.

People often ask, Mrs. Glenn says: “‘Why do you stay out there on the land when it’s so hard to make a living? Or what are easements?’” She adds: “We do conservation easements, and they want to know what those are.”

The answer to the first question is simple, she says. Ranching isn’t just a job. It’s a way life that, in many cases, goes back four or five generations. The Glenn family has been ranching the Malpai area since the 1800s. The work is exhausting and sometimes punishing, but ranchers say the fringe benefits can’t be beat.

“There’s a miracle happening every day,” Mrs. Glenn says.

She talks about watching a calf being born, a hawk swooping down for a kill and crossing paths with jackrabbits and coyotes.

“The stars at night — how many stars have you seen in Phoenix?”

All these miracles, as Mrs. Glenn calls them, are made possible by the wide-open spaces of the rangeland. Keeping them open gets to the question about conservation easements.

Ranchers in the area can sell conservation easements to the Malpai group, instead of whole chunks of ranchland to developers. The property stays with the ranch, but it cannot be subdivided and built upon. Grazing is still allowed. The push for easements came on the heels of an ongoing drought, which has cut into ranching incomes as drier ranges make for fewer cows to sell. And the siren call of developers has reached even the remote ranchlands of southeast Arizona, says Bill McDonald, Malpai Boderlands Group executive director. He runs his family’s Sycamore Ranch. Once development begins, he says, it becomes all the more difficult to stop.

So far, the Malpai group has bought conservation easements from 12 ranches. “We’ve protected 77,000 acres of private land from ever being developed,” he adds.

What’s open space for cattle is open space for wildlife and native plants as well. So, perhaps, it’s not too surprising Malpai ranchers would find themselves allied with the likes of the Nature Conservancy, a high-profile environmental group. A Nature Conservancy member sits on the Malpai board of directors, though Mrs. Glenn hastens to add the Conservancy itself does not have permanent seat.

And the conservancy has advised the Malpai group on how to set up its own conversation easements. Setting aside land as open space is, after all, the conservancy’s specialty.

For the Nature Conservancy, though, conservation easements represent a different approach to saving land from development, says Peter Warren, the Nature Conservancy’s grassland conservation program manager in Tucson. Mr. Warren works for the Malpai group as a consultant.

Historically, the Nature Conservancy bought land to set aside for preservation. But you can’t buy everything, Mr. Warren says.

“There was simply no way to buy and own all the pieces of land we wanted to preserve,” he says.

In any case, the conservancy has long regarded the Arizona-New Mexico borderlands as worth preserving. Mr. Warren first began talking to ranchers there in the 1980s. By the time the Malpai Group was formed, he had a good working relationship with its members.

That doesn’t include all ranchers in those parts, Mr. McDonald says. A few remain suspicious of the Nature Conservancy and the Malpai group’s conservation easements, he says.

For ranchers who did sell easements, some took advantage of the Malpai group’s grass bank. It’s a grass bank with a lot of assets — the 320,000-acre Gray Ranch in New Mexico. Here, instead of cash for easements, ranchers can graze livestock long enough for their own rangeland to recover. The Malpai group pays for the grazing time, reimbursing the Gray Ranch’s owner, the nonprofit Animas Foundation. The Gray Ranch itself is safe from development, as the Nature Conservancy holds conservation easements to it.

Keeping the open range open is just part of the Malpai group’s mission. It works with a number of state and federal agencies to improve the rangeland for creatures bovine and wild. This kind of cooperation takes a lot of paperwork, phone calls and waiting in line and is often too much for one rancher. The Malpai group is there to help, Mr. McDonald says.

“We’re able to do things that have been very difficult for us,” he says.

Malpai members meet regularly with officials from agencies that are unavoidably part of a rancher’s existence. They include the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Arizona State Land Department as well as state and federal wildlife agencies. Many of these agencies hold title to land on which ranchers have grazing rights. The U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is usually at the table as well. The NRCS provides technical assistance and grants to improve rangelands.

Perhaps the biggest cooperative effort has gone toward rangeland fires — starting them, not stopping them. Fires have long been a part of the range, Mr. McDonald says. They were nature’s way of keeping woody plants such as mesquite from overrunning the grasslands. But decades of fire suppression changed all that, and for a while, the grasslands appeared to be losing out. To reverse that, the Malpai group has worked with government agencies to carry out prescribed burns.

“The agencies stepped up to the plate, and were determined to work with us and make sure things happened,” Mr. McDonald says.

The Malpai Group, including a 2003 burn that covered 47,000 acres, has since carried out four large prescribed burns, Mr. McDonald says.

“It was the largest successful prescribed burn in the United States,” he says.

The burns are carefully planned to avoid harming wildlife, particularly endangered species. The Malpai group doesn’t shy from helping endangered species. It negotiates what are known as safe harbor agreements. These agreements offer a two-way street. A rancher proposes grassland improvements that could provide habitat to an endangered animal. In turn, the government promises not to punish the rancher if something happens to the animal — something beyond the rancher’s control.

The Malpai group recently negotiated a safe harbor agreement for a rancher who wanted to recharge a watering pond. Before it dried up, the pond had been habitat for the endangered leopard frog, says Mrs. Glenn.

“The family hauled in water, and the Malpai Group helped pay for the expense,” she says.

Some projects to help wildlife are supported by conservation programs funded through the NRCS. In one of them, the Malpai Group replaced old pasture fences that had kept the cows in place but restricted the movement of bighorn sheep.

“We tore those down and replaced them with wildlife friendly fences, so that the bighorn sheep could get through them,” Mr. McDonald says.

Altar Valley Ranchers

About a 100 miles to the west, another community of ranchers has taken the Malpai model to heart. The Altar Valley Alliance — like the name suggests — includes ranchers along the Altar Valley watershed southwest of Tucson.

Pat King is co-chairwoman. She and her husband, John, run the King Anvil Ranch.

Like the Malpai Group, the Altar Valley Alliance began informally. Ranchers got together and talked about commonly held resources, such as watersheds.

“We thought it would benefit one little individual watershed if the two ranches worked together,” Mrs. King says. The Altar Valley Alliance became a nonprofit cooperative in 1995.

Like the Malpai Group, the Altar Valley Alliance raises funds and seeks grant money for wildlife and conservation programs. And likewise, the alliance sees the prescribed burn as a way to restore the grasslands. The 11 alliance members worked with NRCS and the state land forester — much of Altar Valley crosses through state trust land — to define blocks of land where a large burn could take place.

Mrs. King says: “We put that together around the year 2000, then we stumbled into a stumbling block — endangered species.”

Now the alliance is working with Arizona Game and Fish and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to devise a plan that would not harm the pygmy owl or the pineapple cactus, both endangered.

Burn plan or no burn plan, the NRCS district conservationist for the area works regularly with the Altar Valley Alliance. Kristen Egen also attends the group’s quarterly meetings. She often fills in ranchers who can’t attend on what took place. A recent meeting, she says, was a two-day affair.

“You could camp out if you wanted,” Ms. Egen says.

The occasion was a hands-on workshop led by a consultant brought in from New Mexico and paid for by the Altar Valley Alliance. There was also a bulldozer to demonstrate how to grade roads to reduce erosion, Ms. Egen says. The workshop fit right in with the sort of work NRCS does with ranchers, she adds.

“That’s one of our goals as an agency — erosion control,” she says.

Like the Malpai group, the Altar Valley Alliance also sees the conservation easement as a tool to protect open spaces. If anything, development pressures for Altar Valley ranches are even greater than in the borderlands. They are closer to Tucson, and developers have already reached Altar Valley’s northern edge at Three Points.

Getting the easements, however, means raising funds. And that means getting out the message out about the alliance’s work to preserve habitat for ranching and wildlife. It’s a message that could soon be picked up by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Ms. Egen says.

Museum docents have toured Altar Valley to gather information for exhibits, she says.

EQIP-ing the Forest

In Gila County, east of Phoenix, a group of cattle growers is cooperating on a project without the formal structure of a nonprofit organization. They are participants in the Tonto pilot project, working closely with the NRCS and the U.S. Forest Service. Through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the NRCS is funding the project. In it, ranchers are running water lines to their grazing allotments in the 3 million-acre Tonto National Forest. Water is to be piped to newly built watering tanks.

Grazing allotments on forestland are not new. Using EQIP to pay for improvements on forestland is, says David Stewart, director of range management for the Forest Service Southwest region, which covers Arizona and New Mexico.

Ranchers in Gila County depend heavily on these allotments to run their herds, says David Cook, a spokesman for ranchers on the Tonto project.

“We don’t have the private land that other ranchers do,” says Mr. Cook, who runs the DC Cattle Co. with his wife, Diana. He says only about 3 per cent of Gila County land is privately owned.

Lack of rain, however, has forced ranchers to reduce the herds on their forest allotments — often well below the number permitted, Mr. Stewart says.

“The ranchers in the Tonto Forest in the last 10 years have really been heavily impacted by drought issues,” he says.

In response, officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided on the experimental EQIP program. NRCS and the Forest Service both answer to the same USDA undersecretary in Washington, Mr. Stewart says.

The pilot project got off the ground in 2004, receiving about $1.5 million that first year, says Phill Jacquez, the NRCS district conservationist who works with Gila County ranchers. Second-year funding is about $2 million. The NRCS and the Forest Service will evaluate the Tonto pilot project in about a year, Mr. Stewart says.

Like all EQIP projects, ranchers share in the cost. EQIP funds are awarded to individual ranchers, who must compete for funding, Mr. Jacquez says.

“All EQIP applicants have to go through a ranking process,” he says.

About 16 ranchers are currently taking part, Mr. Cook says.

If they receive funding, Mr. Jacquez says, “we contact the rancher and we contact the Forest Service.”

The Forest Service, he adds, has not been a silent partner. Forest Services officials have even called ranchers who might not have heard about the project, he says.

“They informed these relatively new permittees about a program that might be of benefit to them,” Mr. Jacquez says.

Getting an EQIP grant, however, is just one step. Ranchers have to sit down with NRCS and forest rangers to plan their projects.

“We normally meet at the Forest Service office and we’ll go over maps,” Mr. Cook says.

Among other things, the projects have to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Many projects require a review to determine if they might have a significant environmental impact.

Mr. Jacquez says the improvements should help the environment.

“Any time they develop water, the wildlife, it’s going to be there,” Mr. Jacquez says.

Benefit to the local economy

Mr. Cook adds there’s a benefit to the economy as well.

“The metal covers for the wildlife drinkers, a local place — Kevlin Steel and Supply here in town — they make those,” he says. “That gives their people income for their jobs.”

That money, in turn, gets spent elsewhere. It’s a multiplier effect, he says.

Another multiplier might apply to conservation cooperatives. For ranchers, there’s strength in numbers — and in cooperation. —

By Bill Coates
Arizona Capital Times