LMD Aug 2015

Riding Herd

“The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.”

by LEE PITTS

– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

AUGUST 15, 2015 • www.aaalivestock.com

Volume 57 • No. 8

Squeal of Fortune

Pay to Play I T

BY LEE PITTS

NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

he last time I wrote about the NCBA and their heist of the checkoff in a story titled “Where Did It All Go?”, I reported the news that Forest Roberts NCBA’s CEO, was being paid $550,000 per year. Well, not any more he isn’t.

I don’t know if it’s simply a coincidence or not but shortly after our story ran Mr. Roberts tendered his resignation to explore “other opportunities” in the industry.

Geez, It must be some kind of opportunity if it pays more than half a million per year!

We reported that 72 percent of Mr. Robert’s salary was being paid by the checkoff and that NCBA paid out $13 million in yearly salaries. We also noted that 82 percent of NCBA’s budget comes from your checkoff dollars and that the NCBA was getting 97 percent of all checkoff contracts from the Cattlemen’s Beef Board.

You’d have thought that heisting the checkoff would have been enough for the greedy NCBA but when they held their annual summer conference they raised the cost of dues to their cattlemen members by 50 percent! I know about this because two executives from two different state cattlemen organizations contacted me and were madder than a hot-shotted bull about it.

Everyone you meet has a photographic memory. Some are just out of film.

A Road Map To Your Future Before getting into the money matters we need to clear up just who it is we’re talking about when we say the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association because it’s not just cattlemen. Far from it. There are drug companies, truck and tractor manufacturers, ear tag makers, Canada, Mexico, universities and on and on. They only call themselves cattlemen because of the good reputation you have established. Besides, how would it sound if they more accurately called themselves The National Organization of

Big Corporations Who Want To Hide Behind Your Good Name?

I think we can all agree that the initials NOOBCWWTHBYGN might be a little too cumbersome.

One of the matters of business at NCBA’s summer conference was the report of the Long Range Planning Committee who “establishes a roadmap” for you and plots the future course of the cattle business until 2020. I got a big kick out of it because on page eight under the heading “Critical Assumptions”, the fourth assumption is that, and I am quot-

ing directly now, “Consumers will continue to want to know where their food comes from and how it is produced.”

I repeat, “CONSUMERS WILL CONTINUE TO WANT TO KNOW WHERE THEIR FOOD COMES FROM.” This from the Long Range Plan devised by NCBA’s best and brightest. How did they acknowledge this fact at the same time the NCBA was trying to get rid of country of origin labeling, otherwise known as COOL? You know, a label that says where food comes from?

Then there is this. In addition to the committee chairmen Don Schiefelbein of Schiefelbein Farms and John Butler of the Beef Marketing Group, the members of the Beef Industry Long Range Task Force include Jerry Bohn, General Manager, Pratt Feeders LLC, Kim Brackett, Owner/Operator, Brackett continued on page two

Howard G. Buffett: ‘People Ought to Care About the Border’

D

rug smugglers are just one of the many challenges farmers and ranchers along the Mexico border face. That’s why some, such as Howard G. Buffett, view immigration reform and border security as two separate but equally important issues.

From presidential candidates to court rooms and state house legislatures, the immigration and border debate remains a hotly discussed topic.

From the farmer’s perspective, the issues typically center around finding and securing a workforce.

From above the Arizona desert, it’s not hard to see the winding path of America’s Southern border—an imposing metal and concrete fence now stretching for miles in both directions. But down below, this rocky terrain known as the Tucson sector is one of the most heavily traveled drug corridors in the country.

Howard G. Buffett is now a landowner caught in the middle.

“We have drug smugglers coming across our ranch regularly. We see them going north, we see them going south. We have that intelligence,” Buffett says.

His foundation now owns a ranch west of Douglas, Ariz., and is learning firsthand the challenges America’s farmers and ranchers are facing.

“We have a significant drug problem in this country,” says Buffett, from the ground in Arizona. “When we have a border that’s so porous that you can just—not move back and forth easily, but it can be penetrated.”

It’s a story he’s not alone in telling. John Ladd also ranches along the border, and even with an imposing metal fence, still witnesses crossings.

“What they’re doing is, they’re coming in and cutting the mesh and the center post with anywhere from battery-powered grinders to chop saws, and then they bring in full-sized pickups full of marijuana,” says Ladd, during a conversation he and Buffett had with Arizona’s new attorney general.

In the last three years, he’s counted just under 50 vehicles breach the fence along his property.

“Law enforcement is law enforcement, and protecting the border is pretty much law enforcement,” Buffett says. “You don’t mix that with ideas that have nothing to do with it.”

What Buffett sees is that border security and immigration are two separate issues.

“Border security is border security. That, in itself, is a category,” Buffett explains. “Immigration? I divide immigration into two categories: continued on page four

f you don’t think kids today are smart just go to any county fair and take a big whiff, filling your senses with the sights and sounds of the fair. Amongst the sounds of barkers hustling their games and the organ-ic sound of the merrygo-round, you’ll hear the distinct sound of squealing pigs.

In addition to the smells of deep fried Twinkies, beer battered cheese curds, egg rolls, and cinnamon buns, you’ll be overwhelmed by a distinct smell you’ll remember for the rest of your life and that will be retained in your clothes longer than that. You can’t escape the swineish smell at the top of the Ferris Wheel, in the rodeo arena or in the most distant parking lot.

When I was a kid the beef barn was packed with steers and the sheep and swine shared a ramshackle barn on the outskirts of the fairgrounds. That’s as it should be. Beef had top billing and I figured that the sheep and swine deserved each other.

Any kid who chose to show a pig was, how should I delicately put this so that my swinish brethren will not be offended? To be blunt, pig showmen were “different”. In my FFA chapter typically we had five steer exhibitors and one pork showman and we didn’t mix or fraternize. Now hogs outnumber the steers by 20 to 1 and I think that’s a perfect example of how far we’ve fallen as a country.

My sister showed a hog and for months while I was exercising, bathing, and grooming my steer she was not doing anything because you had to own a steer for six months but a hog was a quick turnaround project. No wonder many pig persons don’t cry when they kiss their pigs goodbye. They hardly knew them.

What kids these days have figured out, that my generation didn’t, is that pigs have a better CIAHW than steers. (That’s cash income for amount of hours worked.)

Pig showmen don’t select continued on page four

www.LeePittsbooks.com

Page 2

Livestock Market Digest

August 15, 2015

Pay to Play Ranches, Tom Brink, Owner/ Operator, Top Dollar Angus, Inc., Donnell Brown, Owner/ Operator, R.A. Brown Ranch, Barry Carpenter, CEO, North American Meat Institute, Lynn Delmore, Ph.D., Meat Safety and Quality Consultant, Adjunct Professor, Colorado State University, Barbara Stevenson Jackson, Owner/Operator, Animal Health Express and Red Rock Feeding Company, Molly McAdams, Ph.D., Retail and Food Industry Consultant, Kevin Pond, Ph.D., Department Head, Animal Sciences, Colorado State University, Bill Rishel, Owner/Operator, Rishel Angus, Brad Scott, Owner/Operator, Scott Brothers Dairy, Eric Smith, Owner/Operator, Xtra Ranch, Tim Starks, Owner/Operator, Cherokee Auction Market, Jay Theiler, Executive Director, Marketing, Agri Beef Company.

Tell me, how many strictly commercial cattlemen do you count in that list of 16? In “establishing a roadmap” for your future it appears that PhD’s, feeders, college professors, and purebred breeders had far more say than commercial cattlemen did.

Reading Their Mail In a letter from the NCBA that the Digest was able to get its hands on, NCBA President Philip Ellis, and Kevin Kester, 2015 Policy Division Chairman, wrote to all the state cattlemen’s organizations, “As you are aware, the board overwhelmingly approved a new NCBA membership dues structure. With this support, we will start working on job descriptions for the additional positions in the Washington, DC office to bolster our efforts immediately. As we discussed in multiple meetings, our needs are immediate and substantial. The top priority for the projected additional membership revenue is the government affairs effort.”

I just have to ask, after watching the NCBA lead the charge to get rid of COOL and steal your checkoff dollars from a USDA program, do we really want the NCBA to have more power and influence in Washington, DC?

Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later The state cattlemen groups were given two options in paying the 50 percent increase in NCBA dues for cattlemen members.

They can either pay it all on October 1, 2015, or pay half on October 1, 2015 and half on October 1, 2017. Please note that the NCBA leaves it up to the states to do their dirty work and collect the increased dues from ranchers. We were told that one of the biggest cattle states tried to put together a coalition to defeat the increase but were unable to acquire enough votes to stop it.

Under Option A, regular members, described as, “cattle owners or persons actively engaged in live cattle production in the United States,” shall pay a membership fee based on one

continued from page one

of the following dues schedule options: Option A: a 50 percent one-time increase in dues in 2016, For 0-100 cows, yearly dues will be $150; 101-250 cows, $300; 251 to 500 cows, $450; 1,000 -1,250 cows, $1,150; Over 2,000 head $150, plus 38 cents per head.”

Stocker feeder shall pay $150 plus 38 cents per head. Unified feeder affiliate 19 cents per head marketed.

Option B is similar except if the state affiliates select this version to delay some of the pain the cost of dues actually goes up even more over the long term.

Let’s cut to the chase. According to my math a rancher with 99 cows pays $1.51 cents per cow to be a member of the NCBA while a rancher with 2,000 cows pays forty six cents per cow. And who says the NCBA doesn’t care about the little guy? And please note that a unified feeder affiliate pays nineteen cents per head marketed, or 12 percent the cost of the cow calf man or woman with 99 cows. Considering that the NCBA pushes the agenda of the big feeders and packers more than it does the cow/calf man or woman, that nineteen cents sounds like a real bargain.

Joining The Country Club The NCBA has come up with all sorts of creative ways that individuals and corporations can buy NCBA’s influence. If you are considering becoming an NCBA member I thought you might like to meet a few of your fellow members.

• “Affiliate Organization members are state or regional associations of cattle producers or feeders that meet such other requirements established by the Board. Affiliate Organizations earn Board and committee representation on each policy committee based on the following formula: General Rule – 1 board seat for minimum of $10,000.

Each additional Policy Division Board seat shall cost $35,000.”

That’s as straight forward as the NCBA gets. Want to be on their Board, then flash the cash.

• “Allied Industry Council Members are entities that engage in activities which support or are associated with, but do not constitute the production and/or feeding of cattle, including but not limited to: feed companies, distributors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, financial institutions. Annual dues: $25,000.

Board and committee representation to be based on an aggregate of the Council’s investment.”

Want two Board seats? That will cost $200,000; four board seats costs $300,000; six board and committee seats costs $400,000; eight Board and committee seats costs $500,000 and 10 Board and committee seats costs $600,000. $600,000? That’s a rounding error for a multinational drug company who might want to hide continued on page three

August 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 3

Pay to Play behind the cattlemen name and use the NCBA’s Washington influence.

• “Allied Industry Partner Members are entities that engage in activities which support or are associated with the cattle industry, but support at a lesser level than the Allied Industry Council. Annual dues: $3,000. Board and committee representation to be based on an aggregate of the Partner’s investment. $100,000 equals one Board and committee seat; $200,000 equals two Board and committee seats.”

• “Product Council Members are entities that operate beef or veal packing or processing facilities or market beef or veal.

Beef packer/processor pays $.09/ head in FY16.” A retailer pays $3,000 up to $25,000 for membership. Foodservice, $3,000 up to $25,000. Beef wholesale/manufacturer, $10,000 to $25,000.

Supplier $10,000. “Each Council member investing greater than $10,000 may select an individual to serve on the Policy Division Board and policy committees in a voting capacity. Council members investing greater than $150,000 will automatically earn an additional Board and committee seat.”

• “State and National Industry Organization Members are general farm, CattleWomen, commodity and livestock marketing entities that represent producers or processors of one or more agricultural commodities. Annual dues: $5,000 This entitles the organization to one Policy Division Board and committee seat.”

• “Beef Breed Organization Members are national and regional breed registry organizations that represent individuals or entities actively engaged in the production of cattle. Annual dues: $3,000 This entitles the organization to one Policy Division Board and committee seat.”

• “Livestock Marketing Council Members are livestock market operators and livestock marketing professionals involved in the business of marketing live cattle and livestock. Annual dues: Minimum $200, Maximum $2,000.

One Board and committee seat costs $10,000 while each additional one costs $35,000.”

• Supporting Members is a catch phrase for everyone else who wants to put an NCBA decal on their Dodge Ram bragging about being a member of a “cattlemen’s” organization. I met a pharmacist last year who bragged about being a member even though the closest he ever got to a cow is a beefsteak. Supporting members annual dues for individual are $150; Student membership costs $50; All corporations, $1,000; and get this, Canada and Mexico can join the NCBA for $250 while other foreign individuals must pay $400.

All this selling of seats and memberships begs the question, how does one serve that many masters?

After reading all the ways the NCBA can grab more cash

continued from page two

I was thinking that perhaps a billionaire with several million dollars who believed in COOL and was against the NCBA getting 97 percent of all checkoff contracts could just buy off the entire NCBA and impose his or her will. Ah, but there is this little kicker in the NCBA rules: “All interested parties will submit an application expressing interest in membership, and appropriate background information. The Membership Committee and Policy Division of the Board of Directors will review and take appropriate action.”

In other words, it’s an expensive country club. A cowy one at that.

I’m just guessing, but I seriously doubt they’d let a certain writer join who keeps opening up their mail and making the contents public.

Selling Your Soul I thought you might also be interested in which companies have invested heavily in the NCBA. At a minimum investment of $100,000 we have Allied Industry Gold Level Sponsors including Bayer, Boehringer Ingel-

heim Vetmedica, Inc., Caterpillar, Central Life Sciences, Dow AgroSciences, LLC, John Deere, Merck Animal Health, Merial, Micro Technologies, New Holland, Purina Animal Nutrition, LLC, Ram Trucks, Zoetis • The Allied Industry Council includes AgriLabs, Animal Health International, BASF Corporation, Elanco Animal Health, Ritchie Industries Inc., and Y-Tex. • I counted 68 Allied Industry Partners including the likes of Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, BEEF Magazine, CME Group, The Hartford Livestock Insurance, Meat & Livestock Australia, Ltd., Monsanto, Rabo AgriFinance and several ear tag manufacturers.

• Product Council Members include American Foods Group, Arby’s Restaurant Group, Inc., Cargill Meat Solutions, JBS, McDonald’s Corporation, National Beef Packing, Preferred Beef Group Safeway, Tyson Fresh Meats and Wendy’s International.

I could go on and on like this but I think you get the picture.

After reading about all this pay-

ola and remembering that it’s called the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, whose phone call do you think has a better shot at being answered by the big shots at the NCBA: a call from a rancher with 100 cows who has helped to keep the NCBA from going broke by contributing checkoff dollars, OR, a call from an Allied Industry Gold Level Sponsor who has contributed over $100,000, like Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc., Central Life Sciences, Dow AgroSciences, LLC, Merck Animal Health, Merial, Micro Technologies, Zoetis and the maker of Ram Trucks who, if I’m not mistaken is Fiat/Chrysler, headquartered in London?

Following A Different Road Map Just for the heck of it I got in touch with Bill Bullard, the CEO of R-CALF, and I asked him who his members are and what they pay to join. Here’s Bill’s response.

“Members of R-CALF USA are predominantly family-owned, owner-operators of commercial cow/calf operations. Many, if not most, of R-CALF USA’s mem-

bers are full-time cattle producers who rely on their ranching operations for most, if not all, of their income. Though fewer in numbers, some R-CALF USA members operate purebred operations and others are engaged in backgrounding and stocker operations. Some R-CALF USA members also own feedlots that range in size from the very smallest to some of the nation’s largest. R-CALF USA does not receive any government funding nor does it rely on corporate contributions for its operations.

Instead, R-CALF USA relies exclusively on its membership dues of $50 per year and voluntary contributions made by its members over and above their dues.

The only exception to this are the few corporate sponsors that have made modest contributions to help support R-CALF USA’s annual membership conventions.”

After seeing the NCBA’s “road map” it’s clear that R-CALF needs to get on its bike and start peddling influence much faster if they are to have any chance of competing for cash in our currently corrupt cattle business.

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Page 4

Buffet

Livestock Market Digest continued from page one

agriculture and everything else.”

He says agriculture itself is an issue alone, “Because if we don’t get this right, down the road all that nice lettuce, tomatoes and strawberries and all this amazing amount of diversity, value, volume and quantity, won’t be so easy to get.”

And that’s a problem already showing up. According to a recent California Farm Bureau study, as a result of labor shortages, farmers no longer grow more than 80,000 acres of fresh produce.

“Currently, California has a 71 percent (labor) shortage for their intensive crop producers,” says Kristi Boswell, a farm labor specialist with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF). “We can’t sustain in that environment, so we will get to the point where we’re importing.”

“Instead of importing our labor, we’re importing our food,” Boswell adds.

Buffett agrees. “I always think about the food safety aspect of it,” he says.

“If we are growing something here in the United States, we have the EPA, the USDA, the FDA and all of this regulatory oversight,” he explains. “If you want to start growing lettuce, tomatoes and strawberries in other countries, they don’t have the same oversight. I see that as a food safety issue.”

Which is why Buffett and farm groups like AFBF are calling for agricultural immigration reform along with border security. Another Farm Bureau study says just locking down the border could have far-reaching repercussions.

“The study shows $30 to $60 billion in economic losses in ag production and a 5-6 percent increase in food prices,” Boswell says. “So it not only affects the producer side of things, but the consumer side as well.”

“The challenge with this issue is that nobody will see it tomorrow or next month,” adds Buffett. “It’s something that happens over years and it just erodes.

The problem is, once it erodes, you can’t just put it back in place.”

Fences can be fixed, but right now ranchers, including Buffett, say the status quo is broken.

“Heroin use is way up, cocaine use is up, meth is way up,” he says. “These are dangerous drugs. Our kids use them and people ought to care about the border. They might not have to care about people who want to get a job and send some money home. That’s a different argument. But, when we have people coming across this border that hurt our kids and hurt our society, we need to stop it. We need to focus on stopping it. That, however, is not immigration.”

August 15, 2015

Why are greens so keen to destroy the world’s wildlife?

This pursuit of the dream of “carbon-free energy” is creating an ecological catastrophe

BY CHRISTOPHER BOOKER, WWW.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK

L

ate June’s scenes of green campaigners exulting at the decision by 10 Lancashire county councillors to reject an application to erect a drilling rig for fracking near Preston – on the grounds that it would have an “adverse urbanising effect on the landscape” – recalled a piece I wrote in January, headed “Which ‘environment’ do ‘environmentalists’ really care about?”.

On that occasion, the greenies were celebrating the refusal of a previous fracking application, just when they were welcoming plans to add a further 24 wind turbines 400ft high to what is already England’s largest onshore wind farm, looking down from the Pennines on Rochdale.

When Professor David MacKay stepped down as chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) last year, he produced a report comparing the environmental impact of a fracking site to that of wind farms.

Over 25 years, he calculated, a single “shale gas pad” covering five acres, with a drilling rig 85ft high (only needed for less than a year), would produce as much energy as 87 giant wind turbines, covering 5.6 square miles and visible up to 20 miles away. Yet, to the greenies, the first of these, capable of producing energy whenever needed, without a penny of subsidy, is anathema;

while the second, producing electricity very unreliably in return for millions of pounds in subsidies, fills them with rapture.

Ever more evidence is piling in these days to show how one of the oddest anomalies of our time is the astonishing extent to which the dream of “renewable, carbon-free” energy is creating one environmental disaster after another. The flailing blades of wind turbines across the world may have been shown to kill millions of birds and bats; a fact that their enthusiasts, including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, do not advertise.

But even more blatant is becoming the wholesale destruction of forests, thanks to the lavish subsidies now being offered to burn them as “biomass” to make electricity.

A chilling recent report by the journalist David Rose showed the ecological devastation being wrought over thousands of square miles of hardwood forest in the US to fuel power stations in Britain such as Drax, by a process that even some environmentalists now admit ends up by giving off more CO² than the coal it is intended to replace. In another report, Rose used shocking pictures to show how the “biomass” craze, heavily subsidised through Decc’s Renewable Heat Initiative, is creating a similar swath of destruction across ancient woodlands here in Britain, even including some owned by the climate-dotty National Trust. As one academic ecologist mourns, forests full of wildlife “are being butchered in the name of an ideology”.

It has long been known that a scandal of the age is the even

greater havoc being wrought in south-east Asia, where thousands of square miles of rainforest, brimming with life, are being replaced by sterile palm oil plantations to meet the EU’s targets for “biofuels”. Last month, the Telegraph published a report on how, inter alia, this is killing off the last orang-utans across a huge area of Sumatra.

Then, in late June, the University of East Anglia published a study on just one of the smallest of 40 massive hydro-electric schemes in Brazil. Twenty-five years after 1,000 square miles of the Amazon rainforest were flooded by the Balbina dam, to produce a mere 250 megawatts of electricity, less than one percent of the 3,546 islands it created still have any significant wildlife left. Billions of animals, birds, reptiles and insects, not to mention the former forest‑dwelling Indian tribes, have vanished. Again, scientific studies show that the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from the rotting vegetation destroyed by this and other hydroelectric schemes, some very much larger than Balbina, is far greater than anything their “renewable” power nominally saves.

All in all, wherever we look, this pursuit of the dream of “carbon-free energy” is creating an ecological catastrophe. Like so many of the great crimes of history, this one is being perpetrated by people who imagine they are doing something praiseworthy. In this case, possessed by their delusion that they are battling for nature and the future of the planet, they are in fact doing as much as anyone to destroy the very things they kid themselves they are trying to save.

Source: www.agweb.com

Riding Herd hogs because of their sense of humor, intelligence or pork chops but because hogs have a better ROI (return on investment). Intelligent pig exhibitors are willing to live in shame just as long as they don’t have to halter break anything or invest much money.

It makes you wonder if they’re all going to end up working for the Post Office.

Pigs also have a lower barrier to entry. With a steer to be competitive you’ll need a fitting chute, fan, cold box for growing hair, halters and ropes, a showbox full of bovine beauty products and a trailer to haul it in.

Whereas I’ve seen pigs arrive on the fairgrounds in the back seat of a Ford Fairlane. You don’t need a team of show jocks either to fit your hog as I’ve yet to hear a judge say, “Look at the hair on that hog!”

The winner of hog showmanship is usually the person who does the best job of following his or her hog around the ring wherever the hog wants to go, while the showman tried to make it look like it was his or her idea.

continued from page one

And if a pig steps on your toes you may not even notice while I still walk with a limp from the time my steer stepped on mine.

Junior livestock auction buyers have figured it out, too. One year my wife and I partnered with friends on a fat show steer and before the first steak was eaten we were no longer friends.

We ran out of freezer space and had a big fight over the sweetbreads. And I don’t even know what they are. I woke up at night in a cold sweat wondering if I got too much flank steak and not enough filet mignon.

The proliferation of hogs has gotten so bad I’d almost rather go hear a fair concert of some old rock band with no original members than to sit through a swine show. Who wants to have their senses assaulted, be run over by a Duroc, or get smelly sticky stuff on your shoes that you can’t get off with a sandblaster? The time has come to put fair pigs in their place and that’s in a segregated barn far far away, in the pig races or in chicken fried bacon on a stick.

August 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 5

Is there a moral case for meat?

BY NATHANAEL JOHNSON, GRIST.ORG

W

here are the philosophers arguing that eating meat is moral?

When I started researching this piece, I’d already read a lot of arguments against meat, but I hadn’t seen a serious philosophical defense of carnivores. So I started asking around.

I asked academics, meat industry representatives, and farmers: Who was the philosophical counterweight to Peter Singer?

In 1975, Singer wrote Animal Liberation, which launched the modern animal rights movement with its argument that causing animal suffering is immoral. There are plenty of other arguments against eating animals besides Singer’s, going back to the ancient Greeks and Hindus. There are even arguments that Christianity contains a mandate for vegetarianism. Matthew Scully’s Dominion argues against animal suffering; Scully rejects Singer’s utilitarian assertion that humans and animals are equal but says that, since God gave people “dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,” so we have a responsibility to care for them and show them mercy.

The arguments against eating animals are pretty convincing.

But surely, I thought, there were also intellectuals making convincing counterarguments. Right?

Nope. Not really.

There is the Cartesian idea that

animals are unfeeling machines, incapable of suffering — but I just wasn’t buying that. It’s clear that animals have an aversive response to pain, and careful, well-respected scientists are saying that animals are probably capable of feeling and consciousness. Once we admit even the possibility that animals are sentient, the ethical game is on: It doesn’t matter that an animal is just an animal; if you’re against suffering and you agree animals can feel pain, it’s pretty hard to justify eating them.

(Of course, the further you get from humans the harder it is to judge — plants may be sentient in a totally alien way! Singer says we can stop caring somewhere between a shrimp and oyster.)

My enquiries didn’t turn up any sophisticated defense of meat.

Certainly there are a few people here and there making arguments around the edges, but nothing that looked to me like a serious challenge to Singer. In fact, the lack of philosophical work to justify meat eating is so extreme that people kept referring me not to scholarly publications, but to an essay contest that the New York Times held back in 2012. Ariel Kaminer organized that contest after noticing the same gaping hole in the philosophical literature that I’d stumbled upon. Vegetarians have claimed the ethical high ground with book after book and, Kaminer wrote: In response, those who love meat have had surprisingly little to say.

They say, of course, that, well, they

love meat or that meat is deeply ingrained in our habit or culture or cuisine or that it’s nutritious or that it’s just part of the natural order …

But few have tried to answer the fundamental ethical issue: Whether it is right to eat animals in the first place, at least when human survival is not at stake.

The winner of that contest, Jay Bost, didn’t take it much farther than that, basically arguing that “meat is just part of the natural order,” because animals are an integral part of the food web. That’s a start, but I’d want a lot more than a 600-word essay to flesh out the idea and respond to the obvious criticisms — since almost all the animals we eat are far removed from natural food webs, it’s still basically a prescription for veganism. Plus, where do you draw the line on what’s natural?

I found several beginnings of arguments like this — no real philosophical shelter for a meat eater, but a few foundational observations that you might build something upon if you carefully thought through all the implications.

Animal welfare expert Temple Grandin offered one potential plank for building a defense of meat eating. “We’ve gotta give animals a life worth living,” she told me. Later in the interview, she reminded me that most farm animals wouldn’t have a life at all if no one ate meat. Combine these points and you could argue that it’s better to have a life worth living than no life at all — even if

it ends with slaughter and consumption.

When I bounced this argument off the ethicist Paul Thompson, he said, “That may be a defensible position, but a philosopher should also be prepared to apply it to humans.”

Right. It’s hard to limit the “a life worth living is better than no life at all” argument to farm animals. Using the same argument we might raise children for the purpose of producing organs: As long as they were well cared for, ignorant of their fate, and painlessly slaughtered, you could say they had a life worth living. The clone gets a (short) life, a dying girl get a new heart, everyone wins! It’s rationally consistent, but certainly doesn’t feel right to me.

Perhaps some brilliant philosopher will develop these points, but, since I am not one of those, I was left with the conclusion that the vegans were right. Oddly, however, that didn’t make me think twice about laying sliced turkey on my sandwich the next day. I was convinced on a rational level, but not in an embodied, visceral way.

“Animal Liberation is one of those rare books that demand that you either defend the way you live or change it,” Michael Pollan once wrote. I know what he means — when I first read it, I felt battered and stupefied by the horrors of animal suffering that Singer paraded before me. Nevertheless, despite my inability to muster a defense for my meat eat-

ing, I didn’t change my way of life.

Pollan didn’t, either: His piece is set up as a stunt — he’s reading Animal Liberation while eating ribeye in a steakhouse. And, though Pollan finds himself agreeing with Singer, he has no problem finishing his steak.

I tend to think of rational argument as a powerful force, certainly more powerful than the trivial pleasure of eating meat.

But it turns out that’s backwards: Rational morality tugs at us with the slenderest of threads, while meat pulls with the thick-twined chords of culture, tradition, pleasure, the flow of the crowd, and physical yearning — and it pulls at us three times a day. Thousands, convinced by Singer and the like, become vegetarians for moral reasons. And then most of those thousands start eating meat again. Vaclav Smil notes: “Prevalence of all forms of ‘vegetarianism’ is no higher than 2–4 percent in any Western society and that long-term (at least a decade) or life-long adherence to solely plant-based diets is less than 1 percent.” As the psychologist Hal Herzog told Grist’s Katie Herzog in this podcast, “It’s the single biggest failure of the animal rights movement.”

How do we deal with this?

Some people just shrug and say, “Whatever, animals are different, it’s OK to kill them.” I can’t quite bring myself to do that, because I value rational consistency. And continued on page six

Page 6

Livestock Market Digest

August 15, 2015

Moral Defense yet, I don’t feel immoral when I eat meat — I actually feel pretty good.

Whenever you have lots of people agreeing in principle to a goal that is impossible for most to achieve in practice, you have something resembling religion.

Religions are all about setting standards that most people will never live up to. And Thompson thinks they have something to teach us on this issue.

Thompson’s solution is to treat vegetarianism the way religious traditions treat virtues. Christians strive to love their neighbors, but they don’t say that people who fail to reach Jesus-level self-sacrifice are immoral. Buddhists strive for detachment, but they don’t flagellate themselves when they fail to achieve it.

Thompson suggests that we should strive to do better by animals, but that doesn’t mean we should condemn ourselves for eating meat. There are lots of cases like this, he told me. “Some people are going to take these issues up in a way that other people would find really difficult,” Thompson said. “For instance, we all respect Mother Theresa for taking on amazing burdens, but we don’t say that you are evil for not doing it.”

This makes sense to me. Louis CK can make a pretty solid argument that people who have enough money to buy a nice car (or to spend time reading long essays about meat philosophy) should be donating 90 percent of their income to the poor.

And yet most of us don’t give up our luxuries. By Thompson’s reasoning, that doesn’t make us immoral. In fact, he says, it’s just wrong to condemn people who eat meat. When people rise out of extreme poverty, that is, when they start earning $2.60 a day, they almost invariably spend that newfound money on animal protein: milk, meat, or eggs. Now,

continued from page five

you might roll your eyes and say that of course the desperate should be excused from the moral obligation — but wait. As Thompson writes in his book, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone: [T]his response misses my point.

Excuses apply in extenuating circumstances, but the logic of excuses implies that the action itself is still morally wrong. A poor person might be excused for stealing a loaf of bread. Theft might be excused when a poor person’s situation takes a turn for the worse, but in the case at hand, their situation has taken a turn toward the better. Under modestly improved circumstances, the extremely poor add a little meat, milk, or eggs into their diet. My claim is that there is something curious with a moral system that reclassifies legally and traditionally sanctioned conduct of people at the utter margins of society as something that needs to be excused.

Is it morally wrong for a hungry child in India to eat an egg? This isn’t just a thought experiment — it’s a real controversy. It’s not enough to wave it off by saying it’s easy to provide vegan alternatives, because those alternative just don’t exist for many people.

Often, the cheapest high-quality protein available to the poor comes from animals. Thompson’s point is that allowing people to access that protein should be moral, not just an excusable lapse.

If we accept Thompson’s formulation (and I’m inclined to), it lets us stop wringing our hands over our hypocrisy and strive to improve conditions for animals.

That’s what Temple Grandin does.

She didn’t have much patience for my philosophical questions.

Instead, she is focused on the realistic changes that will give animals better lives. And as I talked to her, she served up surprise after surprise. Many of the elements in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that people find most abhorrent, she said, may be

fine from the animal’s perspective.

For instance, consider egg-laying hens: What’s better for them — an open barn or stacked cages?

Small battery cages, with several hens packed inside each, are bad news, according to Grandin, but enriched cages are a really good alternative.

“There are objective ways to measure a hen’s motivation to get something she wants — like a private nest box,” Grandin told me.

“How long is she willing to not eat to get it, or how heavy a door will she push to get it? How many times will she push a switch to get it? A private nest box is something she wants, because in the wild she has an instinct to hide in the bushes so that a fox doesn’t get [her eggs]. Give her some pieces of plastic to hang down that she can hide behind. Give her a little piece of astroturf to lay [her eggs] on. Give her a perch, and a piece of plastic to scratch on, and at least enough cage height so she can walk normally. I’m gonna call that apartment living for chickens. Do they need natural elements? Being outside? Science can’t answer that. I mean, there are people in New York that hardly go outside.”

I pressed her: Can’t you use those same objective measurement techniques to see how badly the hens want to go outside and scratch for bugs?

“Well you can,” Grandin said, “and the motivation is pretty weak compared to something like the nest box, which is hardwired. Take dust bathing. For a hen dust bathing is nice to do, but it’s kind of like, yes, it’s nice to have a fancy hotel room, but the EconoLodge will do too.”

And in fact, the free-range system that I would instinctively choose for chickens may be worse than an enriched cage — because the birds get sick and injured a lot more. And laying hens, unlike meat chickens, are pretty nasty

about setting up pecking orders.

As Thompson observes in his book, “This is well and good in the flocks of 10 to 20 birds, as might be observed among wild jungle fowl, and it is probably tolerable in a flock of 40 to 60 birds that might have been seen on a typical farmstead in 1900 … But a cagefree/ free-range commercial egg barn will have between 150,000 to 500,000 hens occupying the same space. If you are a hen at the bottom end of the pecking order in an environment like that, you are going to get pecked. A lot.”

Even small farms with pastured hens that produce $9-a-dozen eggs often have hundreds of birds, which means the most submissive hens are going to get beat up. I certainly prefer Joel Salatin’s 400bird Eggmobile on lush grass, because to my human eyes it’s beautiful — and chicken cages look horrible. But I have real doubt as to what’s better from the chicken’s perspective.

There are a lot of counterintuitive things like this when it comes to animal farming. So I asked Grandin how we should feel about animal agriculture in the United States as it’s currently practiced: Do these animals really have a life worth living?

It varies greatly, she said, but some CAFOs really are good. “I think cattle done right have a decent life,” she said. I couldn’t get her to give a simple thumbs up or down to chicken or pork CAFOs. Talking to Grandin didn’t make

me want to go stock up on cornfed beef, but it did significantly soften my (negative) feelings about industrial animal production. And talking to Thompson made me realize that I was willing to compromise the needs of animals for the needs of humans if they come into direct conflict. In that way I’m a speciesist — I have an unshakeable favoritism for humans. Perhaps it’s irrational, but I really want that little girl in India to get her egg, even if it means hens suffer, even if there’s a good vegan alternative for a slightly higher cost.

Perhaps there’s a philosophical argument to be made in defense of killing animals, but no one has spelled that out in a way that I found convincing. Does this mean that we should join the vegans?

I think the answer is yes, but in a very limited way — in the same way that we all should take vows of poverty and stop thinking impure thoughts. Ending deaths and suffering is a worthy moral goal for those of us who have the wealth to make choices. But saying that it’s wrong and immoral to eat meat is just too absolutist. I mean, even the Dalai Lama, who says vegetarianism is preferable, eats meat twice a week.

The binary, good-or-evil view of meat is pragmatically counterproductive — the black and white strategy hasn’t gotten many people to become vegan. Instead, let’s focus on giving farm animals a life worth living.

Medal of Honor Recipient joins Horses for Heroes – New Mexico – Cowboy Up! National Advisory Board

H

orses For Heroes – New Mexico Cowboy Up! is pleased to announce the addition of former US Army Ranger and Medal of Honor Recipient Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry to their National Advisory Board.

Horses For Heroes – NM Inc. Executive Director Rick Iannucci a former US Army Special Forces – Green Beret said, “I am honored to have my dear friend Leroy join us in our mission to provide healing; body, mind and spirit, for our nation’s warriors.

His addition to our team validates the important work we do and honors and empowers the men and women who have selflessly given their very best for our country in time of war.”

SFC Leroy Petry who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery during combat operations in Afghanistan, joins an already sterling group of men and women on the National Advisory Board of this faith based program including; former NM Cabinet Secretary and retired Air Force Colonel Tim Hale, NM National Guard Head Chaplain Quentin Collins, Capt. Ralph Galati US Air Force former POW, Sergeant First Class Dana Bowman, US Army Special Forces (the first double amputee to return to ac-

tive duty) and the Hon. Judge Arthur Gajarsa US Circuit Court of Appeals ( Ret) among others.

Horses For Heroes – Cowboy Up! is a Santa Fe, New Mexico based 501 (C) (3) non-profit and a unique horsemanship, wellness and skill set restructuring program FREE to all Operation Irai Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom~Afghanistan and Operation New Dawn men and women veterans and active military, especially those who have sustained physical injuries or PTSD. From day one veterans are hands on with their American Quarter Horses beginning with groundwork and progressing to riding as well as participating in other aspects of ranch life, including working cattle and more importantly experiencing the camaraderie with cowboys who are veterans themselves.

They believe Horsemanship is Leadership and by assisting veterans through the way of the horse and cowboy culture they are able to support their journey, integrating body, mind and spirit.

Petry, a Santa Fe, NM native, and Iannucci have worked together on various national projects for combat wounded veterans since 2012.

For more information on this great program visit their website: horsesforheroes.org

August 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 7

Improve Rangeland with Proper Cattle Handling and Management Part One – The Importance of Low Stress Stockmanship

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

L

ow stress stockmanship is a very effective way to move and manage cattle. Bob Kinford (Van Horn, Texas) gives seminars and schools to show ranchers how they can rotationally graze large pastures or rangeland without using electric fence and without herders. Kinford places cattle in certain areas on the range and gets them to stay bunched up—just as if there was a fence around them—and does it from horseback. He gets the herd moving slowly across the landscape and then swings around in front of them to slow them down. They start dropping their heads, grazing, but take a bite or two and keep moving. This is similar to how the big herds graze on the African plains, staying together but moving slowly across the land grazing as they go.

“This is what people used to do with livestock; we used to herd them,” says Kinford. But in modern times, especially in this country, we’ve gone away from that type of grazing management and rely on fences to keep the animals where we want them. Fenceless stockmanship is foreign to most ranchers today.

“As a kid I asked myself why goats and sheep act like a herd and cows scatter out all over the place. People just take it for granted that cattle scatter, because of the way they’ve been handled. It took me several decades of experimenting to discover that their natural instinct is to act as a herd—and this only happens when you remove the human-induced stress,” he explains.

“If cattle are out on range and semi-wild, they scatter all over the place when they see riders, and are hard to gather. The cattle scatter as a defense tactic, to get away, because they know that when they are all together they are captive. If you take that stress away, however, they won’t try to scatter,” he explains.

CATTLE HANDLING STRATEGY

We can take our cues for natural cattle movement by watching how cattle behave around each other. “If you watch cattle interacting, you’ll see the boss cow walk by another animal and if she puts her head down a little bit that other cow will speed up to get out of her way.” When a bull herds his group of cows, they respond and do what he wants; all he has to do is make a threatening gesture and they meekly get back into the herd and stay where he wants them.

Cattle are much more amenable to doing what we ask, if we ask them without excessive pressure. “You get a lot farther by just giving a cow a suggestion and then walking off and leaving her. When you are moving cattle

and starting them up, you don’t try to do it quickly; it’s better if you ease them into it,” he says.

“Imagine yourself in a traffic jam. You can sit there, bored, but you can wait, and when everyone starts to move a little in front of you, the stress is relieved. But if there are people honking behind you, your stress level rises and you are looking for a way out; the stress just keeps building,” he explains.

“It’s the same with cattle. If the cattle are scattered out, rather than picking them all up and moving them, I go around them quietly and any that are lying down I just get close enough that they’ll get up. I’ll leave them alone and let them stretch, or I’ll walk by them to where they start moving a few steps, and have them going the same direction as the other cows. If I do this early in the morning when they are starting to get up and go to water, they decide to go to water now.” You’ve given them that suggestion.

“Then you can just ride off and leave them. The cow we nudged would then be going down to join the other cows and get water.” Cattle are very suggestible and very much herd animals.

“Just that little bit of suggestion got them started. If a few cows don’t go with the herd, all you have to do was give those cows a suggestion and they join the herd, too. If you do this two or three times, they keep getting closer and closer together every time they move somewhere, staying together as a herd,” he says.

If you can make a cow think it’s her idea, you can do anything with cattle. “But you have to do it at their speed. Once you get them acting as a herd, all you have to do is get to the front and slow them down to stop them where you want them. If you have pairs, you need to ride through them a bit and encourage them to stay mothered up.

It’s important to ride through cattle a lot anyway, without making them do anything, so they are at ease and don’t automatically pick up and go when they see someone on horseback,” says Kinford. The cattle have to be used to you and comfortable with you.

“Then when you start them you go up to the front, and go against them and turn the front of the herd whichever direction you want them to go. They will just line out and go. I’ve taken up to 1200 head of steers and 600 cows/pairs and handled them by myself. It’s easy; you just need enough patience to teach yourself to be able to trust the cattle.”

One thing some people do wrong is trying to keep them all together in a tight bunch as they move the cattle. “There will be some stragglers so they go back and chase them up to the rest of the herd. That puts stress on

those slow ones and they don’t want to be there. But if you don’t follow them, after a few times you’ll find that they will come on their own,” he says.

“When I am moving cattle by myself and have a thousand head, there might be a little group toward the back that stop to graze. I’ll go trotting back there and they may be 100 yards from the rest of the cows, and one will look up and see me coming and they will start running and bucking and butting heads and playing and racing to see who can catch up with the herd the fastest. I don’t have to do anything at all to move them.”

“I have a blue heeler dog who has figured this out and she can do it for me. She’ll go trotting back there partway and the cows will come join the herd and she’ll come back so proud of herself as if to say, ‘See what I did, boss!

And I didn’t even have to work!’

It’s almost like remote control,” says Kinford.

RANGE MANAGEMENT TOOL

This kind of handling can be very helpful to move cattle to different areas of the range and keep them where you want them to stay, without fences. “People think that in order to practice holistic management or rotational grazing they need fences, but in many range areas this is not feasible—and this is one reason most people don’t try to do it on rangeland,” says Kinford.

“In some regions you can trace the origins of when everything started going to desert, with less grass than they had before. When I talk to people in their 80s and 90s down here around Van Horn, they tell me there were places they were haying native grama grass—less than 80 years ago. Those areas are now growing nothing but creosote bush and mesquite.

When I went down to Mexico last summer to a ranch owned by Alejandro Carillo we had an interesting discussion because his great grandfather was the one who started that ranch. His great grandfather’s journals told how they had to clean their cinches every day because otherwise their horses would get sore from all the grass seeds caught in the cinches. That whole area, from deep Mexico clear up into New Mexico, Arizona and Utah was all a sea of grass, but now there’s more bare ground, creosote and mesquite than anything else.”

The difference, according to those old journals, was that ranchers were constantly moving the cattle. They’d graze an area, then move and go to a different water source, like the wild herds did. Then came fences; farms and ranches/ranges were fenced and the livestock were kept in pastures where they grazed the same areas over and over, never giving the forage a chance to re-

cover and go to seed.

“You’ll see certain plants being grazed, and two weeks later that same plant will get grazed again. Eventually that one dies because of overuse, and some of the others die because of under-use.” This is where mob grazing (short-term use of a piece of pasture with a lot of animals, grazing the tops of the plants and trampling the rest as litter, to build the soil—and not coming back to it until the plants are mature again) has done a tremendous job of restoring depleted pastures and soils. This strategy hasn’t been used much on rangeland, however, because of the lack of fences or herders.

That’s where low stress handling and placing cattle as a herd wherever they need to be to graze the range can be so beneficial. “We can get them acting as a herd and grazing as a herd.

Winter before last on the Circle Ranch here, I was running 468 cows through their system. The water situation is such that if you have 500 cows in a pasture they have to work off four or five

different water sources. So I’d have four or five groups and get them each working as a herd— and move them around in the pasture. There would be times I would put them all into one area, and then split them back into their smaller groups to use other areas. It was really amazing because they would all go back to their own group and water source,” says Kinford.

“I had one area where I had almost ¾ of the herd on one water source. They would go back up to the same place where I’d sent them up a mountain. Some actually made it all the way to the top—a 600 foot elevation difference from the water. They would come down to water and then hike back up. We were grazing some areas that people claimed couldn’t be grazed with cattle.

A person has to open their mind and realize that these things are doable,” says Kinford.

“If you are doing it in a way that the cows think it’s okay because they’ll be going up the continued on page eight

Page 8

Livestock Market Digest

August 15, 2015

Improve Rangeland

continued from page seven

mountain and eat, then they will do it. If we are trying to force them into going someplace that they have no idea why they are going there, it will be harder to move them, and they’ll want to come back,” he says.

“The cows on the Circle Ranch knew I was moving them from pasture to pasture to pasture and leaving the gate open, in case I missed a calf. That way a cow could go back and get her calf and then bring it back and rejoin the cows. The other cows would never try to come back.”

He worked with a rancher in Chihuahua, Mexico (Alejandro Carillo) who changed to holistic management 10 years ago. “Now his bottom lands have recovered and are back to growing grama grass and a whole bunch of native grasses. Last summer we got his cattle acting as a herd. He took them into some mountains this winter and we set up a plan for water sources. He only had to develop one water point instead of needing to have four or five like he thought,” says Kinford.

“He had a person go out there and send the cattle up the ridge one day and the next day send them up a valley and a ridge, and they went around the whole interior of the mountain range. Alejandro says they now have three cool-season grasses that no one around there could identify because they’d never seen any of them before. Under this management, these grasses were coming back—and it’s only taken one rider to do this on 30,000 acres on the Chihuahua desert,” he says.

“When Alejandro started this management he was only running 100 cows and having to feed hay. Now he is running more than 500 head and not feeding any hay. He estimates that when the entire ranch is re-

TIPS ON HANDLING CATTLE

“Almost everything I do is accomplished by taking pressure off the cow rather than putting more pressure on the cow. They respond to release of pressure—and you set up the release to be the direction you want them to go,” he explains.

“Anymore, the only time I put pressure on a cow’s head to get her to do something is when someone else has gotten the cow excited. At that point you don’t have much choice because the cow is too wound up to respond to the normal pressure and release; you are past the point of a proper response,” he says.

“Your horses will pick up on this type of cattle handling, too. If I am taking a cow out of a pen I just put my hand on the saddle horn; the horse’s first reaction when a cow starts to do something is to back off away from the cow. The horse gets the idea quickly because horses are just as lazy as we are and want to do it with minimum movement. The easier you can make it on the cow, the easier it is on the horse, and on you. And in feedlots, it’s also easier on the maintenance crew.” The cattle are never crashing into the fences.

“You always have to do things that make sense to the cow, and trust the cow that she is going to go. An example is when you have to take cattle through the brush. People tend to bunch the cattle up and make them go, make them go, and get through there or past there, and the first thing you know, you’ve got a calf bawling and then a couple, then everything’s bawling as the cows try to find their calves, and dust is flying, and everycontinued on page ten thing’s falling apart.” The cows are more

worried about their calves than going the right way.

The calves, because you’ve put so much pressure on them, are wanting to run back because they no longer know where their mothers are. “If you can go to the front and just get some pressure coming from the front and let them stay real loose, they won’t go through that brush and you won’t have a problem.”

The cows won’t be trying to get away and go hide in the brush.

“One thing that Alejandro and the group of ranchers he’s with down there in Mexico had a problem with was moving their cattle every day, in fenced 200-acre pastures, going through the bottoms.

They would go out to move the cattle and at 6 a.m. those cattle were bawling and moving toward the gate. It was basically a stampede out the gate, with no way of holding them up, and they were leaving calves in the back. Then we went out in the afternoon and picked them up and moved them, but did it all very slowly, just drifting them over a different part of the same pasture. The next morning when we went out to open the gate, they were not bawling. Just having that extra time during the day, on new feed in the same pasture, made a difference,” says Kinford.

“We started out on a Monday morning and when we went out on Friday morning those cattle were grazing close together. I went through with the foreman and we made sure the calves were up, then went down to the front end and walked halfway down that herd three times and stood there and watched and they started going over to the water, which was next to the gate, and lined

out. The ones in the back just stood there and kept grazing until the cattle in front of them started to move. It was like waiting at a red light, and when it turned green we can go now. We didn’t do a thing on the back of the herd. They just followed the others, once they had room to move,” he says.

The foreman has been keeping those cattle easy to handle ever since. “It took us going out twice a day, for five days, to instill herd behavior, but after that the foreman was able to do anything he wanted with the cattle. He could have them grazing in places they never grazed before, to the tops of the mountains. In the past they left some of those areas off the grazing plans because they didn’t think the cattle would go there, and it was too rough to fence. But with this type of handling and management they grazed it, and got three new species of grass they didn’t know they had!”

Some people think that a group of cattle are “settled” and will stay in a certain area if they all facing different directions. “But we don’t want them doing that. If we are going to put them at the bottom of draw we want them all together, all facing the same way, so they can graze up that draw. I don’t want them to all stay in exactly the same place; I want them to stay together, graze up that draw, and go back to water, and maybe go back up that draw again if you want them to.

Then the next day or so, or whenever you think that area is done, and grazed correctly, you can go with them someplace else. But you know where your cattle are going to be when you go back to move them, because they are comfortable there and will stay together,” he explains.

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August 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 9

Leaders in Cattle-Feeding Community Honored

T

enacious. Honorable. Driven. Visionary.

These are just some of the adjectives used to describe those who have been successful in the cattle-feeding industry. What makes this industry so demanding and distinguishes it from other vocations? Former Hall of Fame inductee Roy Dinsdale shares one reason, “It’s a challenge every year between Mother Nature and me. Fortunately, we’ve won just a few more than Mother Nature.”

But weather isn’t the only variable that makes achieving success in this industry a challenge. There’s grain prices, consumer demand, cost of transportation, the fluctuating cattle market, land management and human resource issues. Handling all of those variables and being successful in spite of them takes a special kind of individual – the kind recognized annually since 2009 by the Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame.

This year’s class is no exception – they’re considered tenacious, honorable, driven and visionary – and have achieved remarkable success, as recognized by their peers. More than 400 members of the beef industry gathered in Westminster, Colorado, one evening recently to honor these four individuals.

Robert Josserand and Loren Doll were inducted into the Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame, which recognizes two leaders annually who have made lasting contributions to the cattle-feeding industry. Topper Thorpe was presented with the Industry Leadership Award, recognizing individuals who have demonstrated outstanding leadership, provided exemplary service and made significant contributions to the cattle-feeding business.

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Karla Olson received the Arturo Armendariz Distinguished Service Award, given to exceptional feedyard employees.

In his acceptance speech, Josserand, owner of AzTx Cattle Co., said the annual Hall of Fame event celebrates what the industry is all about – understanding what’s important in life, including family. He thanked his fellow cattlemen for being part of an industry that has the responsibility of feeding the world.

Doll, who has been in the cattle-feeding business for more than five decades, recognized the contributions of the many people he has worked with through the years. “Finding people smarter than you are in certain areas is key,” he said.

Long-time CEO of CattleFax, Thorpe also acknowledged the many people who have contributed to his success throughout his career. “Nothing I have accomplished in my life has been done by myself. I have worked with and met some of the greatest people in the world – those

who produce beef,” he said.

The running theme throughout the evening seemed to be the recognition of the contribution of others – and when Karla Olson, the first female recipient of the Arturo Armendariz Distinguished Service Award, accepted her award, she was no different.

“I really enjoy what I do. And it is possible because of the support of my family and friends,” she said.

Besides recognizing the honorees, guests were inspired by keynote speaker Andy Andrews, author of more than 25 books, including the New York Times bestsellers, The Noticer and The Traveler’s Gift. Andrews’ message “The Seven Decisions that Determine Personal Success,” concluded with a charge to everyone in attendance: “I don’t hope you do great things with your life, I expect you to,” Andrews said.

The evening also included the unveiling of a new organization, the Cattle Feeders Historical Society, which is dedicated to preserving the history of cat-

575 456-2000

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Missouri Land Sales

361 Acres - Absolutely the Ultimate Hunting/Retreat being offered this close to Springfield/Branson, Missouri. Many options for this property - hunting, recreational, church camp, jeeping, horseback riding facility, or just your own personal retreat. A-1 built 60x100 all steel insulated with 2-16’ elec. overhead doors. Inside is a fabulous 900sq ft. 2 BR, 1 BA living quarters. Open fields, heavy woods, timber, rolling hills, bluffs, springs, creeks, a cave and breath taking views. Only 60+ miles south of Springfield, minutes to Bull Shoals Lake.

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GREAT INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY CLOSE TO SPRINGFIELD. El Rancho Truck Plaza. MLS #1402704; Midwest Truck Stop MLS #1402703; Greenfield Trading Post MLS # 1402700. Owner retiring. Go to murney.com, enter MLS #, CHECK THEM OUT!!!

174 M/L Acres. Cattle, horses, hunting retreat. Live water year round - spring crawdad creek. 30+ ac open, more land could be opened with brush hogging. Good fencing, 2 miles from S&H fish pay fishing ponds. 8 miles east of Ava on Hwy. 76. MLS# 60029427

Ken Ahler Real Estate Co., Inc 300 Paseo Peralta, Suite 211 Santa Fe, NM 87501

505-989-7573 • Cell: 505-490-0220 Toll Free: 888-989-7573 www. SantaFeLand.com email: Kahler@newmexico.com

Office:

Apache Mesa Ranch – 5,144 acre rim rock ranch located on Apache Mesa off Hwy 84 near Las Vegas, NM. Mostly deeded, cedar & ponderosa tree cover, rim rocks & mesas, canyons & meadows. Comfortable HQ w/bunk house, caretakers quarters on 5 acres plus barn & corrals & plenty of scenery. Priced at $2,698,900. Come see this place.

D

SOL

Little Cayuse Ranch – This a horse or cow operation north of Corona. +- 2,025 acres. There are 2 homes, hay barn, sheds, tack room, 3 excellent wells, 4 pastures & 80 acre irrigation pivot with water rights. Good fences & views. Priced reduced.

Sombrero Ranch near Tremintina, NM - 1,442 deeded acres, 3 pastures, 1 solar well and 1 windmill well. Traditionally has carried 30+ mother cows year round. Located 44 miles east of Las Vegas on Hwy 104. Price is $575,000 Owner will finance.

La Cueva Canyon Ranch – 1,435 secluded acres w/240 acres of BLM lease land. Located SW of Las Vegas off Hwy 84 on Apache Mesa. This parcel has tall pines, canyon springs, stock tanks, new fence on NE corner. Off the grid and pristine. Price is $607,000 & Owners will finance.

uyers, I have B tings... s li I need

Ken Ahler-GRI, E-Pro, RSPS

Trigg Ranches – 720 deeded acres lies near the La Cueva Canyon Ranch on Apache Mesa off Hwy 84. Off the grid in the tall pines & power is close by! 720 acres priced at $288,900 & smaller 200 acre parcel available for $124,000! Other parcels available & Owners will finance.

Ledoux, NM – Perimeter fenced 60 acre dry land terraced farm has overhead electric, sub-irrigated pasture and all weather county road access! Located ½ mile north of Ledoux. Price reduced $228,000 & Owner will finance.

Anton Chico – Historic 65 acre irrigated farm w/ditch rights.

Adobe home, bunkhouse, storage shed, shop + irrigation & some farm equipment go w/sale. Priced below appraisal at $698,900 & Owner can finance!

Dilia Loop Road – Fenced 20+ acre parcel is planted in alfalfa & grass, has 4 irrigated sections plus ditch rights and Pecos River frontage. Excellent farming opportunity for organic vegetable gardens. Price is $231,500.

Upper Anton Chico – This parcel has outstanding alfalfa production for a small parcel, 7.5 acres are irrigated with under ground pipes, perimeter fenced, easy farm to work and water. Pick up 375 bales per cutting! Asking $82,500 .

continued on page ten

O’NEILL LAND, llc

Good inventory in the Miami, Springer, Maxwell and Cimarron area. Great year-round climate suitable for horses. Give yourself and your horses a break and come on up to the Cimarron Country.

Miami Horse Training Facility. Ideal horse training facility w/large 4 bedroom 3 bathroom approx 3,593 sq ft home, 248.32± deeded acres, 208 irrigation shares, 30' X 60' metal sided shop/ bunkhouse, 8 stall barn w/tack room, 7 stall barn w/storage, 10 stall open sided barn w/10 ft. alley, 2 stall loafing shed, 14 11' x 24' Run-In Shelters, 135' Round Pen, Priefert six horse panel walker. Many more features & improvements. All you need for a serious horse operation in serious horse country of Miami New Mexico. Additional 150 acres available on south side of road. Miami is at the perfect year round horse training elevation of 6,200. Far enough south to have mostly mild winters. Convenient to I-25. $1,550,000.

High Productivity Sub Irrigated Grass Unit, 624.027± deeded acres plus 178± acres grazing. Has supported 80-100 cows since November 2012, with winter supplementation. Exceptional grass producing unit surrounds lake 11 of Maxwell Conservancy and has 70 irrigation shares out of Stubblefield Reservoir. $1,150/deeded acre.

Miller Krause Ranch. 939.37± deeded acres. 88 Springer Ditch Company water shares. Mostly west of I;25, exit 414. Big views. $559,000.

Maxwell Farm, 280 +/- deeded acres. 160 Class A Irrigation shares, 2 center pivots. Nice barns, small feed lot, owner financing available.

Miami Mountain View. 80± deeded acres w/80 water shares & house. $510,000.

Miami. 80± deeded acres, awesome home, total remodel, awesome views $395,000.

Miami WOW. Big home in Santa Fe Style great for family on 3 acres. $234,000.

Miami Tangle Foot. 10.02± deeded acres w/water shares & meter. $98,000.

Maxwell. 19.5± deeded acres, water, outbuildings, great horse set up. $234,000.

Canadian River. 39.088± deeded acres, w/nice ranch home & river. $279,000.

ING

CONTRACT PEND

ING

CONTRACT PEND

O’NEILL AGRICULTURAL, llc “Offers computer-generated color custom mapping service on digital USGS base maps.

Hang a map in your office that looks like your ranch, w/water lines, pastures & roads etc. Put your ranch on one piece of paper.”

Ranch & Farm Real Estate

3879 State Road 209 Broadview, NM 88112

Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame and annual banquet will serve as one of the the funding mechanisms

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Scott Land co.

ed t n a w Your farms, ranches and rural properties.

tle-feeding in the United States.

The newly formed 501(c) 3 is also committed to helping educate consumers. The National

1301 Front Street, Dimmitt, TX 79027 Ben G. Scott – Broker Krystal M. Nelson, NM Qualifying Broker 800-933-9698 day/eve. www.scottlandcompany.com www.texascrp.com

TUCUMCARI VALLEY – Quay Co., NM - Choice 960 ac. irr. farm, 5 circles, 3 phase power, 2 large hay barns enclosed on three sides, 755.5 ac. of Arch Hurley dist. water rights, on pvmt. & all weather road.

SPRINGER, NM - amazing improvements, see our website for photographs of 5,000 sq. ft. + home, two guest houses, huge two bay shop, state-of-the-art horse stalls & runs, roping arena w/air-operated release chute, nice employee home + more horse stalls & runs, large set of working pens w/camp house (old-west style w/state-of-the-art outhouses), 9,200 ac. +/- deeded, 193 ac. +/- state lease, yearling or cow/calf country just E. of Springer on Hwy. 56 w/frontage on the I25 access road on the West.

MOUNTAIN VIEW FARMING – Colfax Co., NM - Excellent area for alfalfa, wheat, other small grains & forage crops, improved w/several homes, barns & 5 pivot sprinklers, water for sprinklers provided from three irr. districts, 1,854 ac. +/-, elk hunting, on pvmt.

GREEN AS POISON W/GREAT HUNTING - 10,432 ac. +/-, huge lake on spring-fed creek, hunting cabin, buy one pasture or all, on pvmt.

FOR SALE OR POSSIBILITY OF TRADE for ranchland in Texas, OK, NM or Nevada – 5 sections, part sprinkler irr./part subject to irrigation w/existing wells in Swisher/Castro Counties, w/feedyard, grain elevator & an extreme amt. of barns for grain/other storage, on pvmt.

CASTRO CO., TX. – 320 ac. +/-, w/nice home, precon. pens w/ concrete bunks, processing facilities, two pivot sprinklers w/two ½ circles of alfalfa, on major hwy.

DRY HOLLOW RANCH – Collingsworth Co., TX. – 2 sections grubbed of mesquite. Draws. Cabin. Artesian well, excellent grass & hunting.

TRIPLE DRAW RANCH – Crockett, Co. - 1,458 +/- ac. high-fence ranch, well improved w/hunting lodge, good hunting including axis.

Good access w/hwy. frontage.

HIGH RAINFALL! ADA OK. AREA -3,120 ac. +/- of choice grassland w/houses, barns & steel pens, lays in 3 tracts, will divide!

We currently have a cash buyer for 200 - 3,000 acres of grassland, combination grass/cultivated land or straight cultivated land in the area between Dallas & Houston (or perhaps further East) with or without improvements. Brokers welcome!

CONCHOS LAKE AREA – well improved 11 section ranch +/-, mostly deeded w/small amt. of BLM & State, homes, barns, pens, watered by subs & mills at shallow depth just off pvmt., on co. road.

STATE OF THE ART – Clayton, NM area, 1,600 deeded ac. +/-, plus 80 ac. +/- State lease, home, barn & pens in excellent condition, all weather CR road.

THE ICING ON THE CAKE – buy this well located, really good ranch (grama grass & western wheat grass country) & develop the really scenic parts of the ranch for residential subdivisions w/10, 20, 40, 100 acre tracts. 12, 088 deeded ac. +/- w/an addtl. 33,000 deeded ac. +/- available for sale across the hwy., addtl. perks, hunting, fishing, recreation w/a large lake on the ranch together w/the Cucharas River.

HARDING CO. – starter ranch, 1,875 deeded ac. +/-, 901.9 ac. +/- CRP, well watered w/subs, mills & pipeline, 3 bdrm./2 bath brick home, garage, shop/ livestock, metal barn & pens, 7 miles fr. town, co. road.

DINNER HILL RANCH – Otero Co., NM – 22 sections well improved, home, barn, pens, excellent fencing & watering. Deeded/State/BLM, all weather road.

MULTIPLE USE! Capitan/Alto, NM – Minutes from Ruidoso. A multipurpose property w/15.6434 ac. +/-, laboratory/office, covered pens, home. Ideal for an auction facility for custom auctions of purebred cattle, reg. horses, etc., horse or cattle breeding, embryo transfer facility, vet clinic or many other uses in a beautiful area of NM. Please view our websites for details on these properties, BEAUTIFUL AREA, DEV. POTENTIAL - Alto/Capitan, NM – 8,060 choice TX, NM & CO ranches (large & small), choice ranches ac. +/- (deeded, Forest & State Lease) super location w/pvmt. on two in the high rainfall areas of OK, irr./dryland/CRP & commercial properties. We need your listings on any types of ag sides in close proximity to the Capitan/Alto 15.6434 ac. property w/ properties in TX., NM, OK & CO. tremendous pens & improvements.

Page 10

Improve Rangeland claimed, he will have enough grass to run 1000 cows without having to feed. This is a great success story, yet there are still a lot of people who say it won’t work on their place. In the current drought Alejandro had one year that they only got 5 inches of rain, and he still managed to make more grass,” says Kinford.

“It’s a fascinating concept that works, yet you have to make the

Livestock Market Digest continued from page eight

cow think it’s her purpose (the key being low stress handling) rather than doing it as your purpose. Then when it’s time to take the cattle someplace, when they are acting as a herd you start them in that direction and just keep the front end going and the back end will bring itself.” The cows in the rear don’t want to be left behind because they feel they are part of the herd.

Leaders continued from page nine for the organization. More details will be released within the coming months.

About the Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame The Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame was established in 2009 to recognize and honor outstanding men and women in the cattle-feeding community. Additional information about the Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame and the honorees can be found at www.facebook.com/cattlefeed ers and www.cattlefeeders.org.

Founding partners of the Hall of Fame include Merck Animal Health, Drovers/CattleNetwork and Osborn Barr. Contributing banquet sponsors for 2015 included: Boehringer Ingelheim, Z® Tags/Temple Tags, Zoetis, Phibro Animal Health, CattleFax, Goose Ridge Estate Winery, Creekstone Farms, DVAuction, La Vaca Cattle Co. and Greeley Hat Works.

About the 2015 Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame Honorees

Digest

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August 15, 2015

Robert Josserand – 2015 Hall of Fame Inductee Robert Josserand, a native of Pratt, Kansas, is the owner of AzTx Cattle Co., which includes two feedyards in Texas and Kansas. Josserand served on the boards of directors of numerous livestock organizations, including the National Livestock and Meat Board in Chicago, Beef Industry Council and National Cattlemen’s Association. He also is a past president of Texas Cattle Feeders Association and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. In 1988, he was commissioned as a member of the Texas Agriculture Task Force, by former Governor Clements.

Currently, Josserand is serving on the Llano Estacado Regional Water Planning Group.

Loren Doll – 2015 Hall of Fame Inductee Loren Doll has been in the cattle-feeding business for more than five decades, starting in 1961, when he and his father partnered with three Irsik brothers to construct and operate Ingalls Feed Yard. Over time, this feedyard grew from a one-time feeding capacity of 2,500 head to 40,000 head. In 1968, Doll became the managing partner and chief executive officer of Irsik and Doll, a company that now operates seven commercial cattle feedyards in western Kansas with a one-time total feeding capacity of 215,000 head. Doll served as the managing partner and chief executive officer of Irisk and Doll until 1989, and continued to provide leadership as a member of the board until 2004.

Topper Thorpe – 2015 Industry Leadership Award Recipient In 1968, Topper Thorpe went to work as a market analyst at CattleFax, a company recognized for developing a unique

Topper Thorpe, 2015 Industry Leadership Award Recipient.

Pictured left to right: Dick Farr (presenter), Topper Thorpe

Karla Olson, Arturo Armendariz Distinguished Service Award Recipient. Pictured left to right: Scott Foote (presenter), Karla Olson, Trent Johnson (Greeley Hat Works, award presenter)

Loren Doll, 2015 Hall of Fame Inductee. Pictured left to right: Mike Doll (Doll’s son), Loren Doll, Veleeta Doll (Doll’s wife), John Petz (presenter)

database from information provided by its members, which is used extensively for analyzing and forecasting market trends.

He served as the Executive Vice President and CEO for nearly 30 years, before retiring from CattleFax in 2001. Upon his retirement, Thorpe returned to livestock production with his wife, Leeann. They currently operate an irrigated family farm and stocker operation in the Gila Basin of New Mexico, where he serves on several local ditch associations, and at the state level where he serves on the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.

Karla Olson – 2015 Arturo Armendariz Distinguished Service Award Recipient

Robert D. Josserand, 2015 Hall of Fame Inductee. Pictured left to right: Robert D. Josserand, Bill Dicke (presenter)

A lifelong resident of Hoxie, Kansas, Karla Olson grew up on her family’s dairy and farming operation. That work helped lay the foundation for her ultimate success at Hoxie Feedyard, where she began her career in 1976. Since she began working with Hoxie Feedyard, Olson’s oversight has grown to managing the office work associated with 53,000 head of cattle. Besides the cattle-related responsibilities, as office manager Karla is also charged with weighing millions of bushels of corn, along with processing payments and receipts for those millions of bushels. Olson hasn’t just grown with Hoxie Feedyard, she was instrumental in fostering that growth.

August 15, 2015

This month we cover the Forest Service & BLM law dogs, and the relationship between prairie dogs, the plague and peanut butter.

Smokey sent back to his den

I

magine this scenario: On a state highway a New Mexico citizen passes a Forest Service LEO. The LEO alleges he did this at a high rate of speed and without using his turn signals.

The LEO turns on his emergency lights and follows the citizen at an alleged 70 mph and turns on his siren.

The citizen travels for a mile and half until he finds a safe place and pulls over and parks next to a deputy sheriff.

The LEO asks the citizen to turn off his engine, which he does.

The LEO asks the citizen several times for his identification, to which the citizen replies the LEO has no authority to pull him over. The LEO says unless he produces identification he will be arrested. The citizen presents his drivers license and the LEO issues him a citation.

At a later date the LEO files additional charges of resisting an

Livestock Market Digest

officer and “wreckless” [sic] driving.

Finally, the U.S. attorney revises the charges to interfering with an officer and failing to stop when ordered to do so.

The citizen challenges the citations and they go to court.

How would the judge rule?

Actually, this is not just a scenario but actual events that took place in January of this year on U.S. Highway 180 in Catron County, New Mexico. The citizen is Alvin Brent Laney, the LEO is Forest Service Officer Mandrick and the federal judge is U.S. Magistrate Lourdes A. Martinez.

Based upon arguments and a motion filed by Laney’s attorneys, A. Blair Dunn and Dori Richards, Judge Martinez dismissed all charges.

On the interference charge Martinez ruled the feds failed to show how driving another 1.5 miles and initially failing to identify himself interfered with “Officer Mandrick’s official duties ‘in the protection, improvement or administration of the National Forest System.’ ” Martinez also found the feds failed to explain how Officer Mandrick was engaged in an “official duty” when pursuing Laney on a non-Forest System road.

And finally, Martinez wrote,

The Emperor’s New Clothes

T

he Emperor’s New Clothes is a fairy tale wherein two swindlers convinced the vain emperor they could weave the most elegant clothes so uncommonly fine, only those with the highest refinement, good taste and intelligence would be able to see them. The ambitious emperor heartily agreed, thinking it would help his ability to distinguish the wise men from the fools in his empire. The swindlers went to work for weeks weaving the most beautiful cloth ever seen. They fitted and sought his opinion frequently while charging him mightily.

The emperor began to worry because he could never see any cloth, even though he praised them profusely for its quality and beauty. He questioned whether he was really qualified to be emperor, so he pretended to admire the cloth that the swindlers pretended to weave, lest he be thought a fool. On the day of the public procession, the swindlers dressed the emperor in the exquisite invisi-

“…the court also finds that Officer Mandrick did not have authority or jurisdiction to stop or cite Defendant on a non-Forest System road for actions that did not implicate the Forest System.”

There is one little old fact I left out. Officer Mandrick asked the Deputy Sheriff on location to sign the original citation, but the Deputy declined the request.

It would behoove you to check with your local Sheriff and make sure he hasn’t cross-commissioned the officers of any land management agency.

On the importance of this particular case attorney Dunn said, “The significance of this case is the Court pointing out that absent a clear showing that it is a forest system road, not merely a road existing inside of the US Forest System lands, that they do not gain jurisdiction to stop any individual for anything other than a crime that affects the protection of USFS lands. Further this becomes the law of New Mexico until another case says differently”.

I’ll close with an excerpt from the opinion which caused a broad smile to appear on my face: Moreover, if Officer Mandrick felt endangered by going 70 miles per hour while chasing Defendant, he should have let Defendant’s alleged speeding and reckless driving be handled by an officer with jurisdiction to pull Defendant over for those violations, and the United States fails to explain why Officer Mandrick did not call law enforcement to do so.

Now you know why there were so many changes in the charges.

The Forest Service LEO had filed charges based on a section of the federal regs that dealt with

Baxter BLACK ON THE EDGE OF COMMON SENSE www.baxterblack.com

ble cloth. All the emperor’s sycophants lauded him with admiration. He put on his most regal face and strode down the street, his noblemen carrying the train behind him. The crowd, who assumed they were unable to see invisible clothes, cheered as if they, too, could see something more than just an old man parading through town naked. Then from the sideline a little child was heard to say, “But he hasn’t anything on!” The crowd stood dumbstruck for a minute, then took up the cry, “But he has nothing on!” The emperor shivered for he suspected they were right.

But he thought, “The procession must continue to prove I am smarter than I am.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the trailing train that wasn’t there

at all.

Once upon a time, 2007, a group of mostly well-meaning horse lovers (WMHL) questioned the humaneness of horse slaughter in the United States. For years previously, the vast majority of unwanted horses went to U.S. inspected and approved plants within the borders. In the ten years before 2007, the plants in the U.S. slaughtered an annual average of 62,719 horses and exported an average of 42,286 per year for slaughter to Mexico (24%), Canada (74%) and Japan. An average 105,002 horses per year.

Effective in 2008 WMHL politically managed to prevent horse slaughter in the U.S. It coincided with the stock market crash. Ignoring the predictions of virtually all profes-

Page 11 National Forest System Roads.

Not only did the LEO not have jurisdiction, he had issued the complaints based on the wrong section of his own regs.

BLM & Burning Man Having explored the competency of the Forest Service LEOs, let’s now turn to the BLM. Every year thousands of people celebrate the Burning Man event on lands managed by the BLM in northwestern Nevada.

As part of the permitting process, BLM seeks to recover costs and apply certain conditions to the permit.

This year the BLM demanded a compound be constructed at their on-site camp which would have flush toilets, washers and dryers, showers, air conditioning and refrigerators. It was to contain a 24-hour full-service kitchen to be stocked with 10-ounce steaks, 18-ounce pork ribs, poultry, ham, fish, vegetables, potatoes, bread, and a salad bar with five toppings and three dressings.

And, oh yes, “soft ice cream” to be available 24/7, as well as cakes, cookies, pies, cobblers, puddings and pastries.

By obtaining emails, a Nevada paper identified BLM Special Agent Jack Love, located in Salt Lake City, as the culprit behind many of the requests. The paper said Love was also the one who led the LEOs in the Bundy fiasco.

The arrogance displayed is amazing, but I like this excerpt from an editorial by another Nevada paper: Here’s an idea for the BLM: provide some basic camping courses to your staff — in the outdoors, not at a five-star hotel — and hire fewer

sional horse users, raisers, vets and equine associations, who warned there would be tragic results, the WMHL congratulated themselves righteously and derided those professionals who opposed them. The Tragedy began. What was going to happen to the 62,719 unwanted horses normally slaughtered at home? Where would they be taken? Who will feed them? There was no system in place to handle the unwanted. WMHL continued to tell people how much better horses will be treated. The price of horses plummeted.

The Depression put economic pressure on many people with unwanted horses. Whereas before they could sell them for several hundred dollars, now they couldn’t give them away.

WMHL enlisted gullible celebrities to their cause. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office blamed the WMHL, sighting ‘Unintended Consequences’. WMHL became indignant. Horse rescues quit giving out their addresses, auction barns quit selling horses the price was so low. Nationwide, desperate

wimps.

Bees, prairie dogs and peanut butter I wrote last month about a Toad Road and jokingly predicted we would soon see Turtle Turnpikes and Frog Freeways. We haven’t seen those yet, but we have come across a Bee Highway.

Norway’s capital Oslo is creating a “bee highway” to protect endangered pollinators essential to food production. The goal is to provide safe passage through the city and they are doing so with individuals, school children and others planting sunflowers, marigolds and other nectar-bearing flowers at key points in the city. This is a pretty cool, voluntary project and we wish them success.

Then there are prairie dogs.

They are the almost exclusive prey of a protected species, the black-footed ferret. Problem is, the prairie dogs keep dying of the plague which in turn wipes out the ferret. Enter some scientists who want to provide an oral vaccine to the prairie dogs. How do they get the dogs to ingest the oral vaccine? They use peanut butter, and it apparently works.

We now have a Toad Road, a Bee Highway and Prairie Dog Peanut Butter.

I’ll bet it was Peter Pan Prairie Dog Peanut Butter. But was it the Creamy, or the, oh my...

Crunchy?

Till next time, be a nuisance to the devil and don’t forget to check that cinch.

Frank DuBois was the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003, is the author of a blog: The Westerner (www.thewesterner.blogspot. com) and is the founder of The DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

unwanted horse owners began turning them loose. Unable to feed them, many thousands died of abuse and neglect.

The WMHL said nothing other than Vote For Me, or Send Money! While the swindlers are still in business, the real heroes today, like our truck drivers, sale barn owners, horse buyers and Mexican abattoirs, are the reason we are not shooting horses in the street. Since the closing of local plants, we have averaged exporting 137,475 head a year, almost one million unwanted horses, hauled across the border to be shipped abroad for human consumption.

The WMHL keeps the cowardly politicians and innocent ignorant media pacified by praising their new clothes.

Those who are the most out-spoken in the WMHL; the politicians, animal rights groups and activists, accept no responsibility for the tragedy they created. They are still sewing invisible clothes for their naïve, well-meaning emperors like Robert Redford, Tom Vilsack and good ol’ T-Bone Pickens.

Page 12

Livestock Market Digest

August 15, 2015

Lawmakers take aim at EPA ‘sue-and-settle’ collusion

BY GEORGE RUSSELL, FOXNEWS.COM

F

aced with President Obama’s vastly expensive Clean Power Plan to remake the U.S. electrical system and other looming regulatory decisions that dramatically affect energy supplies, Republican lawmakers have renewed their offensive against alleged under-the-table legal collusion between the administration and environmental lobbyists in the cascading anti-carbon agenda.

In early August, a Senate subcommittee heard witnesses argue that “sue-and-settle” legal arrangements involving the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) and hyper-aggressive environmental organizations have cut energy suppliers and state regulators out of the discussion, speeded up the agenda to force unrealistic environmentalist priorities on the energy market, and are likely to cost consumers and producers billions of dollars in the years ahead.

Such charges have been heard before, especially as the Obama Administration faced increased Congressional opposition in its second term. But they are reaching a new crescendo with the arrival of the Clean Power Plan

and impending costly new rules governing ozone and methane, to name just two substances, as the Administration heads toward its lame duck year after an unprecedented blizzard of rule-making.

The charges are just as vigorously disputed by the federal agencies and environmental groups.

“The sue-and-settle model takes policy making away from the public and puts it into the hands of one special interest driving an agenda to ultimately prevent the use of fossil fuels,” declared Katherine Sgamma, vice-president of the Western Energy Alliance, a Colorado-based lobbying organization for small oil and gas producers.

Sgamma noted that as of October 2014, there have been 88 sue-and-settle cases since the Obama Administration took power, and that 79 of them had been launched by environmental groups.

Moreover, the success of some efforts have led to more. In lawsuits involving the Endangered Species Act (which can affect not only energy production but land use across millions of acres) Sgamma noted that after the Fish and Wildlife Service made a deal with one environmental organization that involved 404 threatened or endangered species, the same

organization came back the next year with demands involving 53 more.

In the case of the Clean Power Plan, the “artificial urgency” of the legal effort has been “key to push the regulations out the door, rush an incredibly complex and expensive rule through standard regulatory review processes, steamroll any potential political opposition, and put pressure on the states to begin compliance activities immediately,” argued Andrew Grossman, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Calling the Clean Power Plan announced in early August by Obama and EPA chief Gina McCarthy a “naked power grab” that imposes national standards on state regulators, among others, Grossman charged that “at every step of the way, EPA has relied on sue-and-settle tactics to facilitate its outrageous conduct.”

“This is not how the regulatory process is supposed to work in a country founded on the principles of the rule of law and federalism.”

Sue-and-settle is shorthand for a legal agreement after plaintiffs sue a federal agency for failing to meet a deadline for undertaking a review or filing a regulation, then work with the agency privately to create a plan and new deadlines.

The deals often have the effect of imposing a higher priority on the action than the cumbersome regulatory bureaucracy might otherwise give it. How they were arrived at is often sealed by the courts.

Proponents argue the tactic does no more than make bureaucracies confirm to existing law.

But according to critics, the supposedly adversarial process becomes something different when both sides quietly have the same objective: it becomes a means of short-circuiting oversight, opposition, and delay that in democracies can lead to broader consensus and accommodation, especially when large and expensive undertakings are involved.

Sue-and-settle “overwhelms regulatory agencies, resulting in settlement agreements and consent decrees requiring agencies to promulgate major regulations within an arbitrarily imposed timeline,” said Senator Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who chaired the

subcommittee hearing.

“These agreements are often negotiated behind closed doors, with little to no transparency or public input. Public comments from the states and industries regarding the feasibility or impact of these regulations are routinely ignored.”

Rounds’ argument was backed by testimony from Dallas Baker, a senior official in Mississippi’s Department of Environmental Quality, who said that sue-andsettle “does not afford my state any input into the agreement, yet subjects us to the burden of satisfying the requirements of the agreement.”

Baker cited the case of a letter he received last March as the result of a deal between EPA, the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, both aggressive litigators, on power-plant sulphur-dioxide emissions.

The letter suddenly put Baker’s state organization on hurry-up notice to certify the acceptable status of a major power plant by upcoming September 18—a lengthy and expensive exercise— or have the power plant declared a violator, even though that status had not been previously in question.

Mississippi is complying, but “the end result of EPA’s sue-andsettle in this case will be the expenditure of already stretched and valuable resources for both the state and [the power plant] with no environmental benefit,” Baker declared.

“Even beyond the sue-and-settle,” Baker added, “we see EPA, where given the discretion to establish timing, chooses to be more and more stringent and less flexible.”

For its part, the federal environmental agency responded to Fox News queries about the hearing testimony by referring to a February, 2014 blog post by its General Counsel, Avi Garbow, which an EPA spokesman said “still stands.”

In the blog post, Garbow declared that “the ‘sue-and-settle’ rhetoric, strategically mislabeled by its proponents, is an often-repeated but a wholly invented accusation that gets no more true with frequent retelling.”

EPA, he said, had no control over who decided to sue the agency, and “is not complicit in such lawsuits.” The Department of Justice is involved in all settlement decisions and when that course is agreed on, “both agencies do so solely with the interest of the United States in hand.”

In the same vein, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman responded to Fox News questions by referring to agency testimony from September 2014 that said settlement agreements “are often in the public’s best interest because we have no effective legal defense to most deadline cases, and because settlement agreements facilitate issue resolution as a more expeditious and less costly alternative to litigation”—meaning the cost to the agency.

EPA’s spokesman also pointed to a December 2014 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that examined seven agency settlement agreements over a five-year period and said that none of them “required EPA to take an otherwise discretionary action or prescribed a specific substantive outcome of a final rule.”

In other words, whatever else the lawsuit settlements accomplish, they did not dictate the terms of whatever the agency ultimately decided to do.

That analysis, however, begs the critical question of whether the agency and its impatient suitors may already be of like mind and want to put the pedal to the metal on achieving the outcome.

The same study noted that in cases involving the Clean Air Act, EPA is required to give 30 days’ notice of a settlement and invite public comment. Whether that is sufficient time, given the intimidating complexity of EPA’s often-sweeping rules—the Clean Power Plan involves thousands of pages of often-interlocking aspects—is not discussed.

Moreover, the study notes, “EPA generally does not ask for public comments on defensive settlements if the agency is not required to do so by statute.”

Six other “key” environmental laws examined by GAO, the document says, “do not have a notice and comment requirement for proposed settlements.”

Apply for an American Quarter Horse Foundation Scholarship

T

he deadline for 2016 American Quarter Horse Foundation scholarship applications is December 1, 2015. Applicants wishing to obtain scholarship funding from the Foundation for the 2016-17 academic year can download the scholarship guidelines for a complete list of criteria and requirements.

The Foundation awarded scholarships totaling more than $300,000 to 144 students for the 201516 academic year. The Foundation scholarship program has provided more than $6.3 million in financial assistance to more than 1,100 American Quarter Horse Youth Association members since its inception in 1976. Available scholarships range from $500 to $35,000 and vary in length from one to four years. Recipients are required to renew their scholarship annually.

To be considered for a Foundation scholarship, please complete and return the current scholarship

application. In addition to the application, several support materials are requested.

Eligibility of applicants is based on the individual criteria and requirements of each scholarship.

Applicants must be AQHYA or AQHA members.

Recipients are selected based on academic achievement, financial need and American Quarter Horse involvement, as well as the applicant’s leadership and communication skills.

Applicants can submit a nonspecific application, which will be evaluated against the criteria supplied within the scholarship program outline to determine eligibility. Faxed applications will not be accepted.

Mail completed applications to: American Quarter Horse Foundation, Scholarship Program, 2601 East Interstate 40, Amarillo, TX 79104 For more information about Foundation scholarships, please call 806/378-5029.

August 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

By JIM OLSON

Everett Coborn Early-Day Rodeo Promoter

H

e is best-remembered for being Gene Autry’s business partner in the World Championship Rodeo Corporation. Pretty much everybody has heard of Autry, his star power is still alive today. Everett Colborn however, could arguably be remembered as the greatest rodeo producer of all time.

Born Everett Edward Colborn to Mark and Mary Colborn on July 26, 1892, he entered this world into a ranching family near DeLamar, Idaho. A top hand by the time he was a teenager, it was said he often received stock in lieu of money for his wages. He had an eye on the business side of cowboying from the get-go.

Although he had some success as a professional roper, Everett entered the ranching profession during his twenties. He bought the family ranch.

While he still rodeoed a bit, ranching and the business side of rodeo (producing) appealed to Everett. In the 1920s, Doc Sorensen and Everett Colborn founded the Colborn and Sorensen Rodeo Company producing rodeos throughout the Northwest. Their maiden voyage was producing the first ever Henry’s Stampede. Caldwell Night Rodeo was organized in 1935 and the stock was provided

by Everett Colborn and Doc Sorenson. Numerous events Colborn and Sorensen helped start live on to this day.

If you will recall, Colonel W.T. Johnson produced some of the biggest rodeos in the United States during the 1920s - ‘30s and, according to the cowboys, paid out some of the smallest purses won. Cowboys were not satisfied with the smaller than should be payouts, and at Boston Garden in October of 1936, they struck and wound up forming the Cowboys’ Turtle Association

(CTA). This was the predecessor of the PRCA (Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association) as we it know today. As it turned out, Boston was Johnson’s “last rodeo.” Disgusted over the strike, he sold his rodeo company – lock, stock, and barrel.

In early 1937 Everett left the partnership of Colborn and Sorensen Rodeo Company (on good terms) to join Bill and Twain Clemans of Florence, AZ and Harry Knight of Casa Grande, AZ in the purchase of Colonel W.T. Johnson’s World Championship Rodeo Co. Twain Clemans was president of the corporation, Everett Colborn was executive director, Bill Clemans was executive secretary, and former bronc rider Harry Knight was manager of the newly formed World Championship Rodeo Corporation.

The stock reportedly included one-hundred-fifty saddle horses, one-hundred-fifty bucking horses, fifty bucking bulls, one-hundred-head of bulldogging cattle, ninety calves, fifty wild cows, parade horses, saddles, and various other equipment.

Colburn, who had also been a director and judge for Col. Johnson, moved from Idaho and bought Johnson’s fourteen-thousand acre Ranch in Dublin, Texas. He called it the “Lighting C.” Along with the Clemans onehundred-twenty-eight-thousand acre ranch in Florence, the company also used Colborn’s Idaho ranch to run the rodeo stock.

This partnership was largest ranch / rodeo company of its day dedicated to the raising of rodeo livestock. The headquarters stayed in Dublin, with Everett running things from the Lighting C. Author and rodeo historian, Willard Porter said of Everett, “Everett Colborn produced some

of the best rodeos ever held.

Among his peers, there were few, if any, who could do it better.”

The World Championship Rodeo Company, then one of the largest in the country, definitely did things in a big way.

A September, 1937 Florence, AZ. Blade-Tribune article reported that, “a train called the ‘World’s Championship Rodeo Special’ left Texas transporting the world’s largest rodeo herd to New York City for the Madison Square Gardens Rodeo.”

Besides Madison Square Garden, the company also produced (amongst others) Boston Garden, Phoenix, Houston, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Chicago – some of the biggest and best rodeos of the day.

The company was also known for having some of the best bucking stock: Hell’s Angel, Kickapoo, Home Brew, Conclusion, Harry Tracy, Sea Lion, Hell-toSet, Broken Bones and Reckless Red were some of the greats belonging to the World Championship Rodeo Company.

Cowboy star, Gene Autry owned the Flying A ranch out of Oklahoma about this same time.

Besides being a famous movie cowboy, he also was a big-time stock contractor. However, in 1939, Autry felt the call of duty and enlisted to go fight in World War II. Before leaving, he made a deal with Everett and partners to merge the Flying A with World Championship Rodeo Company.

This way he would be free to go to war without having to worry about his ranching / stock contracting operation.

The merger of two of the largest stock contractors in the country created, by far, the biggest contractor / producer of rodeos to date. Under the agreement, Everett would remain executive director and Autry would pro-

Page 13 vide the “star” power. Later in the 1940s Autry acquired the company in its entirety. Colborn continued to serve as the company’s director until his retirement in 1959.

As a testament to Colborn’s sense of community, about 1940 the city fathers of Dublin approached him about putting on a show there. Colborn stepped up and put on one of the biggest rodeos in the country, right there at home (a fairly small community). It was touted as the “Pre-Madison Square Garden World’s Championship Rodeo.”

It became one of the best rodeos in Texas. Reportedly, forty-seven-thousand fans flocked to the newly built “Colborn Bowl” during the 1947 edition.

Everybody in rodeo wanted to be involved in the Madison Square Garden show, which was pretty much the National Finals Rodeo (NFR) of its day.

However, Colborn would tell the cowboys, specialty acts, other contractors and even the press, “If you want to go to New York, then come to Dublin first.”

After the rodeo, everyone would help Everett and company drive the stock and entire operation several miles from the ranch to the railhead, where they all loaded a specially commissioned train bound for New York. It must have been quite a time. All of this (including the Madison Square Garden Rodeo) took almost two months. The Colborn crew even had Twentieth Century Fox movie cameras rolling with them during the drives, train ride and New York rodeo.

They made a feature film called, “Rodeo Goes to Town.”

This era has often been referred to as “The Golden Age of Rodeo.” It was when rodeo officially morphed away from the old Wild West type shows and un-organization of the past, into the big-time future. It paved the way for what we have today. Much of this was accomplished with Everett at the helm. Another Everett – Everett Bowman, was president of the CTA. The two men worked together and with Colborn heading the production and Bowman ramrodding the cowboys, rodeo stepped into the modern era.

Horn measuring event for Texas Longhorn cattle expects to draw enthusiasts from across the U.S. & Canada

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he Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America will host their annual Horn Showcase at the Great Plains Coliseum in Lawton, Oklahoma on October 1-3. The event is expected to showcase some of the industry’s best registered Texas Longhorns to cattlemen, spectators, future breeders and fans from all walks of life.

The Horn Showcase Steering Committee is bringing the event back to its deep roots.

Lawton was home to the very first TLBAA meeting in 1964 that ratified bylaws and elected the Association’s first set of officers.

It is also only 18 miles from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge where the historic WR Longhorn herd began.

Horn Showcase gives breeders the

chance to have their cattle’s horns measured at a satellite location or the Great Plains Coliseum where cattle will be on display.

Each year, the Guinness World Record for length of horn is broken for the Texas Longhorn breed. Vendor exhibits, seminars and roundtable discussions will also fill the halls of the Coliseum.

A handful of new events have been added to Horn Showcase this year. These include a futurity, where the total Longhorn package is evaluated and rewarded. Other activities added are the bred and owned heifer production sale, fashion show and Heritage of Horns Gala. The gala will feature dinner, dancing and entertainment by Charlie Searle and the Ashtonz Band.

“The 2015 Horn Showcase has something

for everyone,” said Tony Mangold, Steering Committee Chair. “We look forward to having a whole new flock of fans of this majestic animal from the Lawton area and the great state of Oklahoma.”

The Apache Casino Hotel is this year’s host hotel. TLBAA would like to thank their other participating sponsors to date — Hudson, Longhorns, CR Ranches, T&L Longhorns, Stott’s Hideaway Ranch, Cowboy Catchit Chex Partnership, Bar-H Ranch, M2 Ranches, CV Cowboy Casanova Partnership, Mangold/Ince Partnership and McIntyre Ranches.

For more information on the event, vendor space or sponsorship packages, please contact Amy Weatherholtz at 817-6256241, amy@tlbaa.org, or visit www.tlbaa.org.

Everett was a family man. His wife Ava and daughters Rosemary and Carolyn were very much a part of his busy life.

Many old black and white photographs are a testament to this as the family is right there with him at big rodeos.

The Rodeo Heritage Museum of Dublin, TX. website said of Everett, “He was not just a stock producer, he produced a show,” and that, “he placed the epicenter of American rodeo in Erath County (where Dublin is located) while cementing his status as ‘the Father of Rodeo.’”

The great stock contractor, Everett E. Colborn died March 20, 1972 in Dublin, TX. He was posthumously inducted into the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Hall of Fame in 1979.

Page 14

Livestock Market Digest

August 15, 2015

Sage Grouse Defies Feds, Environmental Lobby; Increases By Two-Thirds

BY BRIAN SEASHOLES, DIRECTOR, REASON FOUNDATION ENDANGERED SPECIES PROJECT

V

iva La Sage Grouse Revolucion! This plucky bird has the nerve to defy the federal government and environmental lobby by increasing its population by two-thirds since 2013, according to data in “yet-to-be-published research,” according to a story in Greenwire.

This is a huge deal because the Interior Department has a September deadline to decide whether to propose to list the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act across its 11 state 165 million-acre range. If listed, the sage grouse will have enormous impacts on otherwise normal and legal forms of land and resource use, such as cattle ranching, oil and gas extraction and mining.

Unfortunately, and the penalty-based approach to sage grouse conservation being pursued by the Interior Department, and favored by the environmental

lobby, will actually harm the bird by punishing landowners who harbor grouse. Landowners are the linchpin because they own upwards of 80 percent of the wetland habitat grouse can’t survive without, 31 percent of all habitat, and are the critical piece for implementing conservation measures on federal land, which constitutes 64 percent of grouse habitat.

In order to justify listing the sage grouse, the feds and environmental lobby have aggressively pushed a narrative in which the bird is headed for extinction, despite that the population was estimated be 200,000-500,000.

Now, the new data, compiled by the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, increases this estimate to 334,000835,000.

Many scientists and others have long pointed out a wellknown fact; sage grouse populations naturally fluctuate around rainfall patterns, driven by the 10-year El Nino cycle, in their semi-arid sagebrush habitat.

When rains are good, sage grouse

habitat improves and populations increase; when rains are poor, sage grouse populations decline. “Improved weather conditions are mostly responsible for the increased numbers,” Tom Christiansen, sage grouse coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, stated to Greenwire.

Proponents of listing the grouse contend that the recent sage grouse population trend is downward. In April, proponents released a report claiming sage grouse populations declined 56% between 2007 and 2013. “Our research should and must ring alarm bells,” Edward Garton, report lead author and emeritus professor of biology, said. “These numbers indicate to us that if significant protections aren’t established, this important bird and the entire sagebrush steppe region face irreparable harm.”

Others also chimed in. “This report provides definitive evidence about the fragile state of the greater sage-grouse,” Ken Rait, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts Public Lands Project, stated. He also said the report “adds to a growing body of evidence that should encourage the [Obama] administration to establish broad conservation measures for this at-risk ecosystem.”

A closer look at the report reveals a very inconvenient truth.

“State wildlife officials said the report cherry-picked just the years of decline—2007 marked a major peak in sage grouse populations, and 2013 could be a trough, they said,” according to a story by Phil Taylor in Greenwire.

It should not be surprising the Garton report cherry-picked data to push for draconian federal land and resource use controls for sage grouse. After all, the report, which was not published in a scholarly journal, was bought, paid for and published by Pew Charitable Trusts, an $810 million behemoth that made over $111 million in grants in 2013

and constantly pushes for more federal environmental regulation.

Edward Garton, along with report co-author John Connelly, are part of a coterie of scientists who aggressively advocate for increased federal control over the sage grouse. Garton and Connelly are the lead co-authors of a scholarly 2011 study that is the most frequently cited study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2013 Conservation Objectives Team report, according to a legal challenge to the quality of the report’s data brought by a coalition of 19 counties in Colorado, Nevada, Montana and Utah, along with ranching, mining and energy trade associations. The COT report is so crucial because it serves as thefoundational document for the service on sage grouse, including whether to list the bird under the Endangered Species Act. The challenge to the COT report and other federal sage grouse reports states: The agencies are relying on an insular group of scientist-advocates who deviate from providing credible, accurate scientific data to advancing policies they personally support.

This small group of scientists have interlocking relationships as authors of the Reports, authors of the studies used in the Reports, peer reviewers, editors, and policy advocates. Their conflicts of interest include receiving multi-millions of dollars from the agencies while supposedly developing independent studies. When faced with conflicting science, they simply ignore studies that don’t fit their bias.

Not surprisingly, Garton and Connelly are also two of the eleven scientist-advocates who sent a widely-publicized letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging them to enact ever more harsh land and resource use controls for sage grouse.

Fortunately, there is a much more successful, open and transparent approach to sage grouse

conservation that is 180 degrees away from outdated, penalty-based, one-size-fits-all, topdown, scientifically unsound and ultimately unsuccessful approach to sage grouse conservation taken by the Interior Department, environmental lobby and scientist-advocates.

States, municipalities, industry and the Sage Grouse Initiative (a project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service) are charting the course to an innovative and successful approach that is cooperative, incentive-based, flexible, site-specific and scientifically robust.

Robert Bonnie, Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had this to say: “I’ve been involved in rare species conservation efforts for two decades, long before I became Undersecretary and before I came to USDA. That gives me some perspective on the importance of the work that has been done under the Sage Grouse Initiative…There’s never been an effort that’s been this comprehensive, this scientifically based that’s been so successful in working with partners on the ground to produce real conservation for the benefit of a rare species…This is historic. I think the work of the Sage Grouse Initiative is truly path-breaking. Of course the agency can take some credit for that but of course none of this happens without the relationships and partnerships on the ground…most importantly our landowner partners, the ranchers that have been involved in this. I think it’s a true testament to the opportunities of voluntary conservation, of getting the incentives right and of getting the relationships right on the ground.”

John Swartout, Senior Advisor to Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and the state’s point person on sage grouse, offers this perspective: Let me stress this point: Colorado has worked closely with many partners across the spectrum, including local governments, landowners and conservationists. A decision by Fish and Wildlife to list the greater sage grouse puts at risk all this cooperation and threatens to pull apart the very coalitions that – to date – have made enormous progress is conserving the sage grouse and its habitat.

Our partners will be left wondering: What was the point of all this effort?

We’ve taken enormous steps to avoid a listing and the accompanying federal intervention only to have our efforts answered with a listing. That kind of outcome not only jeopardizes our progress with the sage grouse, but any other work we’re doing to conserve these treasured species in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain west.

So if you want objective information on sage grouse, coupled with innovative, successful approaches to conserving this magnificent bird, look to states, counties, industry and the Sage Grouse Initiative, not the Interior Department, environmental pressure grouse and scientist-advocates.

August 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 15

Lawsuit Forces Payback for Green Defamation of Property Owner

BY RON ARNOLD, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE CENTER FOR THE DEFENSE OF FREE ENTERPRISE

I

n December 1993 several environmental radicals, led by a young man named Kieran Suckling, gathered in New Mexico and incorporated the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity.

They had $47,900 in the bank, ambitions to put every logger, rancher, and miner in the region out of business, and a magic wand for the purpose: the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Since the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the snail darter case stopped Tennessee’s $100 million Tellico Dam, the Endangered Species Act has trumped economics, property rights, and all else. The high court fashioned a virtually omnipotent bludgeon in a single sentence of its ruling: “Congress intended endangered species to be afforded the highest of priorities.”

‘Not About Animals, About habitat’ In truth, the Endangered Species Act is not about plants and animals; it’s about habitat.

That means land and water—all of it, public and private. If you harm the habitat of an endangered snake in your own backyard, under ESA’s Section 11(b), you could get socked with a year in federal prison and a $50,000

fine for each violation. In effect, the Supreme Court’s ESA ruling said, “Congress intended productive people to be afforded the lowest of priorities.”

Green groups don’t have to sue people directly to destroy them. They can overload the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) with hundreds of petitions to list every plant and animal in an area as “endangered,” and then, if the agency is slow to consider them for listing, sue the agency, which then typically settles the suit by listing the species in question outside of the normal scientific review process. The groups then sue FWS for failing to adequately protect the habitat, whereupon FWS designs a habitat protection plan that ends up limiting people’s access to and use of both their own and public lands. Often this results in putting people out of business.

Suckling and his radicals pioneered this model and have feverishly filed citizen lawsuits, thus significantly slowing development throughout the Southwest.

By 1999, they had moved to Tucson, Arizona and had more than $800,000 in Rockefeller and Pew foundation dollars in the bank. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) morphed into a green litigation powerhouse.

CBD’s power is money. Ig-

The View FROM THE BACK SIDE

Cowists Amongus

BY BARRY DENTON

O

n a recent trip to the San Diego Zoo I was told by a tour guide that it takes 1000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. I asked the tour guide if he really believed that and he said he knew it was true.

I replied, “Can I see your research?” Of course, he gave me some whacko propaganda website to go to. My next question was how much water does it take to produce one pound of giraffe?

I have concluded that it would take at least three times as much water to produce a pound of giraffe as it has to run up hill so far. Keep in mind that the farther water has to travel the faster it breaks down. Want to see my research?

The trouble is that there are many folks that work for the government and they actually believe this stuff. You must realize that California is presently in a man-made drought of their own choosing and the government

tells them it’s because of global warming.

If you keep repeating the same misinformation in many different venues people will actually start to believe it. I thought that zoo keepers would love all animals. Boy was I wrong! The ones I was around hated animals that were not African. What is this obsession with African animals lately?

Just in case you are wondering what a “cowist” is, that is a new word that I coined for “cow hater”. It seems if you are a regular white guy these days you are always being accused of hating something.

For instance, if you disagree with Al Sharpton, then you must hate all black folks. Therefore, you are labeled a racist. I am not sure why, but if you have the suffix of “ist” then you hate something. I am not quite sure what a physicist would hate, but we can figure that out later. Maybe he hates physiques?

Anyway, you get the gist of my definition. You must have a

noring its income from successful lawsuits, since 1999 CBD received 386 grants from 128 foundations totaling $21.9 million, with current assets of $13.7 million. Kieran Suckling’s annual compensation is above $206,000.

Lobbyists Make Mistake Suckling’s well-heeled lawsuit factory remained impervious— until it messed with fifth-generation rancher Jim Chilton.

Chilton grew up on Arizona ranches and went to Arizona State University, where he earned degrees in economics and political science. Chilton then joined the staff of late U.S. Sen. Carl Hayden (D-AZ) and later had a successful career in municipal financing. In 1979 he became a full partner in the Chilton family ranching business.

Jim and his wife Sue started their own ranch and home in 1987 near Arivaca, Arizona.

They prospered and purchased the neighboring Flying X ranch, along with the grazing permit for the 21,500-acre Montana Allotment in Coronado National Forest.

The Chiltons were registered cooperators of the Natural Resources Conservation Service and gained respect for outstanding land management—grazing rotation, increasing native perennial grasses, wildlife protecpretty boring life if all you can do is get up and hate cows in the morning. Remember cowists not only hate the cow for drinking water, but they also hate them for what comes out the other end.

I cannot say I am thrilled with what comes out the other end, but it does grow grass and flowers quite well. I also heard through the grapevine that cowists spend lots of time at their therapists because they have too much manure between the ears.

Just think about it, the cowist gets up in the morning and fears cows. Never mind fearing the forces of evil in the world such as terrorists, despots, the devil himself, and the increasing amount of stupidity in this country. If you do not think stupidity is increasing in this country, look who our elected officials in Washington are.

The only time I tend to be a cowist is when I am trying to doctor or brand a calf and mama cow is trying to run me down. At that moment I really hate cows.

How about the time that a calf was stuck part way out of a cow trying to give birth in a sleet storm? It is wet and freezing; the mama cow is down and bawling because she can’t get the calf out. Besides she is up on the side of a mountain under the thickest bush she could find.

I had to walk up there carrying ropes, medicine, and hobbles because it was too rocky for a

tion, and inviting academicians to conduct monitoring, utilization, and production studies onsite.

Then somebody filed multiple complaints with the Forest Service claiming the Chiltons were “destroying the land.” The complaints came from CBD, trying to kill the Chiltons’ pending grazing permit renewal.

Despite CBD’s protest, the Forest Service renewed the Chiltons’ grazing permit. CBD filed an administrative appeal of FWS’ decision and lost. Then CBD made a fatal error: It posted an Internet “news advisory” of 21 photographs of “Chilton’s devastated range.” It wasn’t.

Dueling Lawyers Longtime Chilton friend, biologist, and attorney Dennis Parker, and Chilton’s cousin Gerald, also a lawyer, told Jim there was a defamation suit itching to be filed there. Jim agreed, and they filed a libel suit against CBD. CBD hired a noted trial attorney in a big Phoenix law firm, Robert Royal, to lead its case.

Chilton added Kraig Marton, a prominent attorney from another large Phoenix law firm.

At trial, Marton showed four key Internet photos of “Chilton’s devastation” weren’t his land at all, but a plot known as “Marijuana Flat,” which was trampled by mobs of cavorting greenies horse to make it up there. Because it was so far in the back country where there are no roads I’m wondering if I’ll ever get back to civilization.

However, here we are and the calf has an elbow hooked inside mama. We finally get the calf out and the mother is completely exhausted and panting hard as the sleet is driving down. Pretty soon the calf “baas” and that hooky mother jumps up, snaps the lariat rope we had around her horns tied to the tree, and is coming after us at a run.

I did not have time to gather my things and was up a tree in a matter of seconds. I tried to come down, but as she was licking her calf she kept an eye on me. That is one point that I became a cowist. Have you ever tried hanging onto a juniper tree in a sleet storm?

The difference here is that I only hated one cow, not all of them. Eventually I climbed down and ran for my life. Luckily she did not want to get too far from her calf.

If you are a city slicker I think you would have to work very hard to hate cows as you know nothing about them. You do not even know their relatives so what would you base it on?

I guess the only source you have would be whichever propagandist appealed to you. Does that mean that you research the propagandists that you are interested in? What qualifies one

during a nature indulgence. A CBD staff member took the four “Chilton’s devastation” pictures from his own campsite, proving Chilton’s case. The jury awarded Jim Chilton $100,000 in actual damages and $500,000 in punitive damages.

CBD appealed the decision, engaging Thomas Burke from San Francisco. Burke’s argument essentially suggested CBD had a First Amendment right to lie. They lost.

Appealing the case to Arizona’s high court, CBD hired former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Stanley Feldman to ask his former colleagues to hear the case. Arizona’s Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving the lower court’s ruling as the final word. Case closed.

The Center for Biological Diversity’s liability insurance paid the $100,000, and the group paid the $500,000.

Perhaps in the hope its assets will be shielded from award or seizure should future courts rule against the CBD, the group reincorporated in 2012. Its IRS Form 990 now inconspicuously lists Center for Biological Diversity Holding Company, Inc. Chilton’s wrap: “I wanted to beat those liars, and I did.”

America owes you a great deal, Jim Chilton.

Ron Arnold (arnold.ron@gmail.com) is a free-enterprise activist, author, and commentator.

to be a cowist propagandist? Do they have to be employees of the federal government? Are there cowist credentials that hang on the wall?

I guess what I really need to know is, what is an African giraffe’s yield when dressed out?

Page 16

Livestock Market Digest

August 15, 2015

Groups fight bureaucracy over endangered bird that was never in danger

BY RON ARNOLD,

NEWS.HEARTLAND.ORG

B

ad science and corrupt bureaucrats turned a beautiful migratory songbird that nests only in Texas into a 1990s terror that good science and concerned citizens are now fighting to exonerate.

The songbird is the golden-cheeked warbler and the fear it instills comes from its status as an endangered species protected by a bureaucracy that confiscates property, bankrupts businesses and imprisons decent people – and we now know that the warbler was never endangered at all.

A coalition of three groups, Texans for Positive Economic Policy, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Reason Foundation, hand-delivered a petition to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) offices in Washington, DC, requesting that the warbler be removed from the endangered list, citing verified scientific evidence of ample populations and abundant habitat.

The official story is that the golden-cheeked warbler was erroneously believed to be rapidly going extinct when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed it under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 on an emergency basis.

The FWS claimed the warbler’s best breeding habitat was primarily in the mature juniper nesting trees of the Hill Country that spreads westward from the outskirts of Austin, a bungled guess based on outmoded 10-year-old satellite mapping and an unverified 14-year-old study of warbler density.

The details are not so innocent: the golden-cheeked warbler listing petition was a handwritten document dated February 1, 1990, signed “Timothy Jones, Earth First!” (the vandalism-and-arson radical group).

The petition wasn’t challenged by the FWS addressee, Alisa Shall, Wildlife Biologist, or anyone else in the agency. The warbler was simply listed upon Jones’ request.

The listed warbler instantly became a weapon for the FWS to

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restrict landowners’ use of their property and even jeopardized military training. And some federal officials frightened landowners into selling at panic prices to environmental groups.

Margaret Rodgers, an elderly lady who owned a ranch west of Austin, was clearing a fencerow of invading young junipers so she could rebuild the fence they were pushing down so badly that her livestock got out – a familiar problem to Hill Country ranchers. An informer told FWS Field Supervisor Robert M. Short, who wrote to Mrs. Rodgers in December 1990, that her property “supports prime habitat for the federally-listed endangered golden-cheeked warbler,” and threatened her with criminal and civil penalties for cutting the 6-foot high junipers (hardly “prime habitat”): “Section 11(b)(1) provides for a fine of not more than $50,000 or imprisonment up to one year, or both.”

Mrs. Rodgers immediately warned fellow ranchers of Short’s threat and something odd: The Nature Conservancy had already bought out adjoining parcels of the ranch owned by relatives, and she had just refused a lowball offer from the Conservancy to buy her land. Nobody believed that

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n a letter to the SunZia project coordinator, the New Mexico State Land Office outlined the approach to be taken by the New Mexico State Land Office to evaluate and process a proposed right-of-way for the SunZia transmission line project if the project moves forward. Amid public concerns and uncertainty about impacts to state trust lands, Commissioner Dunn suspended SunZia’s right-of-entry permit in early 2015 and sought additional public input to review the proposed project. During the public meetings, many landowners expressed concern regarding project siting and adequate compensation for rights-of-way across their lands.

In the letter, Deputy Commissioner Laura Riley notified SunZia that the fee for a new right-of-entry permit will be $125,000. A right-of-entry permit is required by the State Land

Office to enter state trust lands for purposes of activities associated with initial project scoping and siting. The fee for this right-of-entry permit will not only cover the work associated with review and issuance of the permit, but would also recoup the estimated costs incurred to date by the State Land Office in review of the project and pay for an independent valuation of the proposed right-of-way across state trust lands.

“We need to protect the interests of our beneficiaries by recouping the substantial costs incurred to date. Ultimately, the Trust must receive appropriate compensation for the right-ofway as determined by an independent contractor should this project go forward. My leadership team and I have worked diligently to take into account a variety of suggestions and concerns and, as always, I will do what is

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of course, to keep their bullying authority intact.

The Washington, D.C.-based Marzulla Law Firm, arguably the premiere property rights law firm in the nation, was the clear and obvious choice to put together the petition to delist the golden cheeked warbler.

Robert Henneke, director of the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation says, “we consider state and local conservation efforts as being of greater benefit to the warbler and that continued ESA regulation can impede voluntary and local conservation efforts.”

One of the petitioners, Susan Combs, is a fourth generation Texan with astonishing experience, having served as a state representative, agriculture commissioner, and most recently, as state comptroller for public accounts.

Combs has devoted her career to Endangered Species Act issues, heading the state task force on endangered species.

This is a formidable coalition backed with formidable scientific and legal talent, all up against a formidable bureaucracy more interested in its own power than the welfare of the nature it is charged to protect.

The New Mexico State Land Office Moves Forward with SunZia Negotiations

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the timing of the Nature Conservancy’s offer and Field Supervisor Short’s letter were coincidence.

Brian Seasholes, director of Reason Foundation’s Endangered Species Project and part of the effort to save the golden-cheeked warbler from its fearsome status, has new, thorough, and accurate data that indicates the warbler’s habitat and population are much greater than the FWS believed in 1990.

Seaholes wrote in the Daily Caller that “a number of peer-reviewed studies published in the early 2010s, primarily by researchers at Texas A & M University, document that compared to 1990 the warbler’s population is nineteen times larger, breeding habitat is five times larger and much more widely distributed, and the warbler can breed in a much wider range of habitat types.”

He believes that “all of this scientific research is a slam dunk because there is no basis for keeping the warbler listed under the Endangered Species Act.” But bureaucrats don’t willingly surrender their power, and Seasholes sees “strong indications” that the Fish and Wildlife Service will “try to fight reality in order to keep the warbler listed,” and,

in the best interests of the Trust beneficiaries.” noted Commissioner of Public Lands, Aubrey Dunn.

While Commissioner Dunn will make a final determination regarding the pricing and structure of the proposed right-of-way after review of the independent valuation, the letter dictates a payment of 50 percent of the total right-of-way cost upon issuance. The remaining fifty percent will be prorated over the 35 year term of the right-of-way. In the absence of the professional valuation, the State Land Office’s initial internal assessment of the value of the right-of-way is between 750 thousand to 1 million dollars per mile.

Commissioner Dunn stated “The New Mexico State Land Office is making every effort to provide increased revenues to our Trust beneficiaries while ensuring that state trust lands are adequately protected for future generations. Siting for this project and other potential projects that would move energy and resources across the state have made it increasingly clear that the bureaucratic hurdles faced by companies to cross US Forest Service lands or to traverse the state near the White Sands Missile Range have created a bottleneck in Torrance County that will result in a very congested and unsightly energy corridor.”