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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
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