Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Had to send this on, an excellent piece on the war between ranchers and
environmentalists in the West, and how they can come together, and about
the Quivira Coalition. We knew Jim Williams when we lived in Quemado before
this year, and his wife Joy was one of our heirloom tomato customers.
Catron County, by the way, was the home of the "Sagebrush Rebellion".

Between Hoofprints
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-6om/Nijhuis_FT.html

JIM WILLIAMS, it is safe to say, is used to doing things his own way.
Williams grew up on a ranch a few miles south of tiny Quemado, New Mexico,
in a sun-cracked, juniper-edged valley not far from the Arizona border. Now
in his early sixties, he has lived and worked on the place all his life.

These days, he and his ebullient, dark-haired wife, Joy Williams, own about
fifteen thousand acres of private ranchland, and live in a low-slung house
with a fading BUSH-CHENEY FARM AND RANCH TEAM sign at the gate. While Jim
manages the ranch, Joy runs a one-woman beauty parlor in a trailer next to
the house. In this lonely country, some of her customers will drive more
than fifty miles each way for a trim or a perm.

Williams learned to ranch here, on the north end of Catron County, which
covers almost seven thousand square miles but is home to fewer than
thirty-five hundred people, and he absorbed the old-fashioned ways. Like
his father and others before him, he grazed cows on his private land in the
spring, letting them congregate in the willows and grasses on the banks of
Largo Creek. In the early summer, he moved his herd uphill to fourteen
thousand acres of land he leased from the U.S. Forest Service, rounding up
the wandering cows in the late summer or fall. It's a time-honored strategy
some ranchers call "the Columbus method," since cowboys must "discover" the
cattle on the range.


On the Williams Ranch, the results of these traditions are easy to spot.
Many of the gullies are deeply eroded, partly due to the overgrazing of
soil-grasping streamside plants. A dangling barbed-wire fence spans one
such arroyo, a stark measure of just how much dirt has washed downstream in
past decades. For a long time, what happened on this ranch, and on the
publicly owned Forest Service land he leased nearby, was almost entirely
Jim Williams's business, and he liked it that way.

That all changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, when many in the American
West became acutely aware of the ecological damage wrought by cattle
grazing. In the face of public pressure, several successful lawsuits from
environmental groups, and worsening regional drought, the Forest Service
began to rein in the ranchers who leased grazing rights on public land.

Williams was given a choice: cut the number of cattle he moved to Forest
Service allotments each summer or shorten the time he grazed his cows
there. He chose the latter, which meant he grazed his private ground more
heavily and paid for extra hay and grain.

The Forest Service restrictions inflamed deeply held anti-government
feelings in Catron County, and Williams, along with several other ranchers,
joined a class action lawsuit against the federal agency. He also traveled
to Tucson to observe another court case brought by antigrazing groups.

When his allies lost both cases, Williams considered giving up the ranch,
and was tempted by a purchase offer from a developer. Though he didn't want
to see his land parceled into ranchettes, he was frustrated by what he saw
as intrusion by outsiders.

Then, in the summer of 1998, Williams received a letter from a friend about
an upcoming public meeting in Pie Town, a hamlet not far east of his ranch.
"They said there was a new organization coming, that they were
environmentalists who were prograzing," says Williams. "I said to Joy,
'Let's go see what the hell is going on'—and I used some worse words,
because at that time, anything that had to do with environmentalism, I was
fed up with."

THE QUIET TWO-LANED ROAD called U.S. Highway 60 runs through the heart of
New Mexico, over a low spot on the Continental Divide, and across the
Arizona border, passing within a few miles of the Williams Ranch. Along the
highway, the landscape rises gently, then crests and breaks open into clear
skies, rocky buttes, and stretches of uninterrupted grassland.


Yet well over a century of intensive grazing has transformed this land.
Spanish missionaries brought large-scale livestock grazing to the Southwest
in the early 1700s, and in the 1800s the growth of rail transport and
customer demand for beef combined to set off a frenzy of speculation. By
the 1880s, more than 20 million cattle grazed the western range, many on
unfenced public lands. Though the cows turned native grasslands into swaths
of grazing-tolerant plants, and stomped unfettered through desert rivers
and streams, scant thought was given to grazing's consequences. It wasn't
until the summer of 1934, when gritty brown clouds from the Dust Bowl
descended on Washington DC, that Congress and President Franklin D.
Roosevelt approved the first federal regulation of grazing on the public
range.

The basic structure of range management hasn't changed much since. Most
public grazing lands are now overseen by the Forest Service or the federal
Bureau of Land Management. About 260 million acres of federal public lands
in the West are grazed by cows or sheep, and the approximately twenty-two
thousand ranchers who use federal grazing lands pay the bargain-basement
price of $1.79 per cow-and-calf pair per month. The Bureau of Land
Management now spends more on the administration of its grazing programs
than it collects in grazing fees.

It's this seemingly nonsensical arrangement that the novelist, essayist,
and provocateur Edward Abbey first described in the 1970s as "welfare."
More recently, some environmental groups began suing to reduce or eliminate
grazing on public lands, charging that cows are simply not compatible with
the native animals, plants, and habitats of the dry West. Grazing, they
argued, violates various federal laws intended to protect the natural
environment.

Many ranchers have reacted to this criticism by digging in their heels,
vociferously defending even the most abusive grazing practices as part of
what they call ranching's "custom and culture." Antigrazing activists
assert that public-lands ranchers represent less than 2 percent of the
cattle producers in the United States, and that their cows account for a
vanishingly tiny percentage of the nation's hamburgers. Yet ranchers remain
a powerful part of the national mythology, and many westerners and others
have sympathized with their plight.

Throughout the dry West, grazing has become a religious war—a pitched
battle between the Church of the Zero Cow and the Church of the Holy Cow.

COURTNEY WHITE is a member of neither congregation. An archaeologist by
training, conservationist by inclination, and iconoclast somewhat by
accident, he has dedicated himself to carving out a new position in the
grazing debate. A former Sierra Club activist, White is now the executive
director of the Quivira Coalition, a small nonprofit organization he
founded eight years ago with a New Mexico rancher named Jim Winder and
another Sierra Club activist named Barbara Johnson. The trio named their
organization after a Spanish colonial term meaning unknown territory or
distant, golden dream. Their mission would be to convince
environmentalists, public-land managers, scientists, ranchers, and others
of the controversial proposition that "ecologically healthy rangeland and
economically robust ranches can be compatible."



White doesn't seem especially eager to please ranchers, and he doesn't
affect a big hat or pointy boots. Aside from the cowbell that visitors are
asked to sound for service, there are few visible souvenirs of ranching
culture in the airy office that he and the seven orther members of the
Quivira staff inhabit in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Nor does the Quivira Coalition talk much about pristine landscapes. While
members of the Church of the Zero Cow value public grazing lands for their
potential as wildlife preserves, places largely untouched by humans and
their herds, Quivira uses a different language—open space, land
health—to describe the promise of both public and private ranchlands.
This vision may lack a certain wildness, but Quivira members believe that
other social, economic, and even environmental benefits make that
concession worthwhile.

The founders of Quivira recognized a new competitor for the range:
developers. Ranchers who graze their cattle on public land, according to
one estimate, also own more than a hundred million acres of private land in
the western states. These private ranchlands are rich in lower-elevation
wildlife habitat, the luscious, green river valleys where many species come
to nest and breed. These valleys are also attractive sites for housing
developments. In Colorado, one study estimates that nearly seven hundred
and acres of private farm- and ranchland were lost every day to residential
subdivisions and other nonagricultural uses during the mid-1990s. Today,
many ranchers depend on their inexpensive public-lands grazing leases to
help them withstand the increasing economic pressure to sell their private
land to developers. Improving management on both public and private grazing
lands, the founding Quivirans contended, would not only help restore
wildlife habitat. It would also protect some of the West's disappearing
open space by helping ranchers stay in business, and therefore keep private
lands relatively undeveloped.

Yet to many ecologists and other scientists, claims that grazing can
benefit western land are just short of absurd. In a 1999 review paper, the
late biologist Joy Belsky cited dozens of studies of the ecological
disasters wrought by cattle throughout the West, finding "little debate
about the effects of livestock grazing" and concluding that it remains "a
key factor" in the destruction of streamside wildlife habitat.

The scientific condemnation of grazing has been especially fierce in the
arid and semiarid landscapes of the Southwest, where ranchers such as Jim
Williams struggle to survive on less than twelve inches of rain per year.
(The dairly lands of Wisconsin, by comparison, usually receive well over
thirty inches.) In dry, sparsely vegetated country, a cow requires many
times more land than in green eastern pastures, and vast western ranches
sometimes raise only a couple of hundred animals each year.


While the Great Plains were long frequented by bison, and so are adapted to
grazing by large, heavy animals, most researchers say the Great Basin and
much of the Southwest—the lands west of the Rocky Mountains—were
visited only intermittently by bison over the last ten thousand years, if
at all. Ecologists have found that cows do long-lasting—possibly
irreversible—damage to the communities of bacteria, algae, and mosses
that anchor many desert soils. Some researchers and activists describe
grazing in the Southwest as little different from mining, since it can
leave such enduring scars.

Quivirans acknowledge these impacts, but instead of simply comparing the
condition of grazed and ungrazed landscapes, they point to studies that
scrutinize the impacts of various grazing strategies. Kris Havstad, a range
scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture–funded Jornada
Experimental Range in southern New Mexico, says some types of grazing do
substantially less harm than others.
If grazing is properly managed—if you pay attention to when it happens,
and how long it happens—then grass, in most places, can be a renewable
resource."

Researchers have also compared grazed environments with other landscapes,
finding that ranches usually make better wildlife habitat than
subdivisions. A 2003 Colorado State University study, for instance,
indicated that rangelands have more native plant speices, and fewer exotic
plants, than rural land fragmented by roads and homes. Other researchers
point out that while it's nearly impossible to reintroduce fire in a
subdivision, ranchers can use prescribed burns to restore fire-adapted
native grasslands on their property.

And some scientists and managers say cattle can even be used as a
restoration tool. Land laid bare by overgrazing or drought can become
"capped" with a hard layer of claylike soil, making it difficult for
rainfall to soak in and for grasses to grow up. Anecdotal evidence suggests
that cattle, if managed carefully, can "poop and stomp" these nearly
impermeable soils into a more productive state. Such work has helped define
the position of the Quivira Coalition. As White wrote in a letter to Sierra
Club Executive Director Carl Pope in 2002, "The emergence of the
progressive ranching model across a wide variety of western
landscapes...means the goal of public lands environmentalism can no longer
simply be to 'protect' the land from human activity. Instead, its goal
should be the same as the progressive ranchers'—to figure out how to live
sustainably in our native landscapes." He added, "This is something
difficult for the average city-bound Sierra Club member, much less
activist, to understand—that our western lands, all of them, need more
and better stewardship, not less." Statements like this established the
distinctive, if somewhat coded, vocabulary of the Quivira movement, laying
down a bright line between it and traditional environmentalism.

White is fond of quoting conservationist Aldo Leopold, who wrote that
wildlife "can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have
heretofore destroyed it—axe, cow, plow, fire, and gun." Such
irony-plagued territory remains largely unmapped, but in recent years, the
Quivira Coalition has explored it with enthusiasm.



BY THE TIME QUIVIRA opened its doors in the mid-1990s, some ranchers in the
Southwest had already ventured into this unfamiliar territory. During the
1980s and early 1990s, in a few isolated corners of the West, they had
begun experimenting. Instead of employing the Columbus method, this small
minority kept their cows in a single herd and drove them briskly through a
series of fenced pastures, sometimes moving them as frequently as once a
day. This tactic, developed in Africa in the 1960s by Zimbabwean wildlife
biologist Allan Savory, is meant to imitate the movements of migrating wild
herds. Variations on Savory's "holistic management" approach all aim to
control the timing, intensity, and frequency of grazing in order to allow
grasslands and riverbanks time to recover from trampling hooves.

Though converts to rotational grazing brim with stories of taller grass and
thicker profits, these methods remain controversial among ranchers and
scientists alike. The Quivira Coalition itself is careful not to endorse
any particular management strategy, but the rotational grazing movement
represents a larger openness to innovation on the range, and it is that
spirit that shapes Quivira.

Early on, the Quivira Coalition attracted people like Sid Goodloe, who in
1969 pioneered the Savory method in the United States on his ranch in
southeastern New Mexico, and members of the West Elk Livestock Association
of western Colorado, who worked with the Forest Service to establish a
rotational grazing system for the ninety thousand acres of public land they
leased. Quivira also caught the attention of Virgil Trujillo, the young
ranch manager for Ghost Ranch, a twenty-one-thousand-acre Presbyterian
retreat center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Trujillo, whose Spanish ancestors
arrived in northern New Mexico in 1598, has carried on the rotational
grazing practices that the ranch instituted in the mid-1980s. Today, some
forty local ranchers pay a modest fee to graze a total of about six hundred
head at Ghost Ranch each winter, when plants are dormant.

With the help of these and other early members, the Quivira Coalition began
to spread its gospel. They ran free tours of ranches that had adopted new
styles of management. They organized conferences. Most recently, Quivira
took over management and ownership of the Rowe Mesa Grassbank, a chunk of
public and private property in northern New Mexico; its grazing land is
available to local ranchers who agree to reintroduce fire and take other
conservation measures on their private ground. Through these various
enterprises, the Quivira Coalition has steadily gathered new converts.

Quivira now has about nine hundred members, and roughly a third of those
are working ranchers (most of the rest are environmentalists of various
stripes, and federal and state agency representatives). Most of these
ranchers practice some form of rotational grazing, and many monitor their
range. Sometimes this simply means staking out specific locations that are
visited and photographed throughout the year, and using the photographs to
make rough assessments of grass cover, erosion rates, and the presence of
weeds. Sometimes the ranchers establish more formal line transects,
gathering quantitative data on soil and plants. On public land, agency
range scientists may conduct similar surveys, with some referring to a set
of national standards—which consider soil stability, plant community
composition, and other factors—in their assessments of overall "land
health." (Antigrazing activists, however, cite numerous cases of spotty
monitoring on public land.)

        Courtney White sees cattle in the future of the West.
Quivira ranchers hope their years of data will help researchers understand
the impacts of different grazing methods, and help ranchers develop
management strategies tailored to their particular places and climates.
These strategies are likely to be as varied as the western landscape
itself. As the Quivira Coalition's New Ranch Handbook concedes, "We simply
do not have any single prescription...Even with the best science, range
management remains a craft."

IF YOU BELIEVE THAT the most likely alternative to cattle ranching is a sea
of subdivisions, this kind of improvisation makes a lot of sense. By
encouraging a leap of faith in the ranching community, the Quivira
Coalition is doubtless making improvements to public and private land
management, probably helping some ranchers stay in business, and possibly
heading off the sale of some private land to developers. In this view,
neither the ranchers nor the larger public has much to lose by trying.

But the Quivira approach does discard the possibility of a fuller
restoration, of the speedier recovery that might result from completely
ridding the dry West of cows, and some conservationists are far from ready
to give up that hope. The Quivira Coalition, says John Horning, is "just
giving more room to bad actors to get away with murder."

Horning is the executive director of Forest Guardians, an environmental
advocacy group also based in Santa Fe. His office is only a short distance
from Quivira's, but it's on a different philosophical planet. The Quivira
Coalition's faith that ranching in the desert Southwest can be made easier
on the land, says Horning, denies reality. "The agriculture of this region
is not suited to this place," he says. "The whole idea of beef-based
agriculture in an arid land is ludicrous."

Horning, whose family hails from southern Colorado, grew up in Washington
DC and has a lawyerly command of the ins and outs of federal grazing policy
and a peppery temper, both useful to his cause. Not unlike many Quivira
members, Horning sees himself as part of a small but ultimately heroic
movement, a member of an often-misunderstood campaign for positive change.
"We don't spend any time trying to make ranching better," Horning says. "We
work to drastically reduce and/or eliminate grazing on public lands."

John Horning says Quivira gives cover to damaging land management.
To that end, Horning puts in long hours photographing the condition of
public grazing lands and gathering information for lawsuits challenging the
grazing policies of various federal agencies. Forest Guardians, which has
almost two thousand members, also works with willing ranchers on buy-out
programs, in which ranchers are paid to stop grazing the public land they
lease. The group supports a congressional bill, the Multiple-Use Conflict
Resolution Act, which would pay all public-lands ranchers generous sums to
completely retire their allotments. An earlier version introduced in the
House in 2003 failed to pass; the bill was reintroduced in the House by
Arizona Democrat Raúl Grijalva last June.

Forest Guardians doesn't see much value in ranching culture itself. In
fact, the group often argues, it's high time the Marlboro Man loosened his
grip on the national imagination. Horning does applaud the efforts of some
Quivira Coalition members to improve the health of their private acreage.
"But on my public land, I want all of the streams to be as vibrant as
possible," he says. "Grazing retards the recovery process—and, in some
cases, keeps it at ground zero."

The use of cows to break up impermeable "capped" soils might be appropriate
on some tremendously damaged landscapes, says Horning—"if you want to try
it on mine tailings, sure, go ahead"—but in general he dismisses the
Quivira contention that cattle can be a restorative force. He argues that
the direct impact of grazing on the land, combined with its indirect but
undeniable influence on the management of fire, water, and wild predators,
more than offsets any possible benefits.

Horning also downplays the Quivira argument that continued public-lands
ranching might help preserve the open space provided by private ranchlands.
High land values and persistently low beef prices, he says, will overwhelm
even the most creative efforts to keep ranching afloat. A better future in
the Southwest, he says, might include a few cows, but its agriculture would
be based on fruit crops and other products lower on the food chain. Public
lands would be cow-free. This is a radical vision, he concedes, but the
only one consistent with the natural limits of the region.

He points to the Gila River watershed in southern New Mexico and Arizona,
where lawsuits filed by his group and its allies forced ranchers to remove
cows from parts of seventy-five federal grazing allotments encompassing
about three hundred miles of rivers and streams. In previous years, cattle
often mowed down sprouting cottonwood and willow treses. But along those
streams today, stands of young trees tower over a visitor's head.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH DATA each side accumulates, no matter how many
photographs of trampled pastures and grassy riverbanks flash on
conference-room screens, the battle over grazing in the West is always, to
some extent, going to be fought from the gut. This is, after all, a debate
about values.

When Forest Guardians scrutinizes the past and the present of grazing, it
finds plenty of destructive tendencies—enough to bolster its argument
that grazing, at its heart, is unsuited to the dry West. Quivira, on the
other hand, fixes its gaze on the future, arguing largely through anecdote
and faith that grazing deserves on more chance at improvement. Which
direction looks most like the truth depends on the viewer.

Quivirans value ranches as a barricade that just might keep the rural West
from reprising Phoenix, Arizona, and the small corps of innovative ranchers
as a steady workforce that can help restore the range. They say the current
enthusiasm for outdoor recreation in the West is no substitute for
lifetimes of riding and herding and irrigating, for decades of dependence
on a certain place. These lives, they say, help keep the economic,
emotional, and spiritual existence of westerners linked to the soil—even
if that link is as tenuous as a pound of locally raised beef.

Some Quivira supporters will acknowledge, usually privately, that
competition from cattle producers in other countries—combined with the
region's brutal climate—may eventually make it impossible for cattle
ranching to continue in the Southwest. But by opening the door to
innovation, they hope at least to ease the transition between traditional
ranching and whatever comes next.

Perhaps most of all, Quivirans hope their efforts will help leach some
bitterness out of the recent history of the region, the history that
started with the entrance of the cow. And it is that fervent hope that
Catron County rancher Jim Williams put to the test.

In the summer of 1998, when Jim and Joy Williams drove to the public
meeting with the Quivira Coalition in Pie Town, they heard White, who came
down from Santa Fe with rancher Virgil Trujillo, talk about the common
interests of ranchers and environmentalists. The audience was suspicious
and hostile. Had White come by himself, says Trujillo with a short laugh,
"he would have been eaten alive."

But Williams liked that White made his environmental sympathies clear from
the start, and he immediately trusted Trujillo. "You could tell he was an
honest fellow, that he knew what we were dealing with," says Williams.
Besides, Williams had exhausted all of his obvious options, and was willing
to try almost anything to restore his Forest Service lease to its former
terms. So at the end of the meeting, when the organizers asked if anyone in
the audience was interested in working with Quivira, Jim Williams raised
his hand. He was the only one.


Over the next few months, Williams hired a rangeland-health consultant
named Kirk Gadzia, who frequently works with the Quivira Coalition, and
developed a formal grazing plan for his public and private ground. Williams
agreed to gather his cattle into one herd and keep them on the move
throughout the year. He changed the way he grazed Largo Creek, the main
arroyo on his private land. Instead of letting cows loose there in the
spring, when they would stomp on young plants, he took a page from Virgil
Trujillo and began grazing them on the creek only in the winter.

Williams also extensively thinned about six hundred acres of thirsty
juniper trees on his private land, which had proliferated in the wake of
grazing and fire suppression. He worked with the Forest Service to thin and
burn another fifty acres on public land. Under the supervision of
stream-restoration consultant Bill Zeedyk, another Quivira associate,
volunteers from Albuquerque and Santa Fe helped Williams build about fifty
artificial meanders and other structures in his arroyos, with the goal of
slowing erosive stream flows. Williams also installed several photo points
that would allow him and visiting Quivira volunteers to monitor changes on
the land.

Still, Williams apologizes as he approaches Largo Creek on a mid-January
afternoon. "It looks a little awkward," he says. And it does, with the
arroyo still deep and crumbling around the edges, and the ground mostly
bare but for some spiky blackbrush and widely spaced sprigs of blue grama
grass. No miracles have occurred. Years of drought have hit this area hard,
and even the best-intentioned restoration efforts will progress slowly, if
at all.

In the creek bed, however, the artificial meanders have moistened the
powdery soil, and a few native willow saplings poke out of the ground. The
photo record shows that in summer the grasses and sedges grow more thickly
along the gulch than they did when cows grazed here in the spring. John
Pierson, the local Forest Service range conservationist, says the condition
of the soil and vegetation on the public land allotments Williams leases
has steadily improved, despite the long drought. He also says the Quivira
Coalition helped Williams and the Forest Service repair their relationship,
and begin work reparing the land.


Largo Creek, and the public land uphill, might recover its grasslands and
streamside forests more quickly if there were no cows here at all, and if
the land remained free of development. While steady pressure from
antigrazing lawsuits could have, and still may, bring about the former
condition, it is unlikely to maintain the latter. The end of grazing here
would likely drive Williams to sell his private land to developers. Largo
Creek could then be bordered with asphalt and patios, making recovery of
this sprawling private land impossible.

Instead of ending grazing on the Williams Ranch, legal pressure and federal
grazing restrictions drove Jim Williams to raise his hand at the Quivira
Coalition meeting in Pie Town. He then eased his battle of wills with the
Forest Service, and opened the door to restoring both his private land and
the adjoining public acreage.

While a few of his neighbors support his efforts, most are silent on the
subject, and a few shake their heads, saying, "That's no way to fight the
Forest Service." In Catron County, as elsewhere in the rural West, the
Church of the Holy Cow still wields a great deal of power, and bitter
endings to long conflicts are common. But it was in Catron County that Jim
Williams found a graceful way to walk off a battlefield, and to stand on a
small patch of common ground.



JIM WILLIAMS, it is safe to say, is used to doing things his own way.
Williams grew up on a ranch a few miles south of tiny Quemado, New Mexico,
in a sun-cracked, juniper-edged valley not far from the Arizona border. Now
in his early sixties, he has lived and worked on the place all his life.

These days, he and his ebullient, dark-haired wife, Joy Williams, own about
fifteen thousand acres of private ranchland, and live in a low-slung house
with a fading BUSH-CHENEY FARM AND RANCH TEAM sign at the gate. While Jim
manages the ranch, Joy runs a one-woman beauty parlor in a trailer next to
the house. In this lonely country, some of her customers will drive more
than fifty miles each way for a trim or a perm.

Williams learned to ranch here, on the north end of Catron County, which
covers almost seven thousand square miles but is home to fewer than
thirty-five hundred people, and he absorbed the old-fashioned ways. Like
his father and others before him, he grazed cows on his private land in the
spring, letting them congregate in the willows and grasses on the banks of
Largo Creek. In the early summer, he moved his herd uphill to fourteen
thousand acres of land he leased from the U.S. Forest Service, rounding up
the wandering cows in the late summer or fall. It's a time-honored strategy
some ranchers call "the Columbus method," since cowboys must "discover" the
cattle on the range.


On the Williams Ranch, the results of these traditions are easy to spot.
Many of the gullies are deeply eroded, partly due to the overgrazing of
soil-grasping streamside plants. A dangling barbed-wire fence spans one
such arroyo, a stark measure of just how much dirt has washed downstream in
past decades. For a long time, what happened on this ranch, and on the
publicly owned Forest Service land he leased nearby, was almost entirely
Jim Williams's business, and he liked it that way.

That all changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, when many in the American
West became acutely aware of the ecological damage wrought by cattle
grazing. In the face of public pressure, several successful lawsuits from
environmental groups, and worsening regional drought, the Forest Service
began to rein in the ranchers who leased grazing rights on public land.

Williams was given a choice: cut the number of cattle he moved to Forest
Service allotments each summer or shorten the time he grazed his cows
there. He chose the latter, which meant he grazed his private ground more
heavily and paid for extra hay and grain.

The Forest Service restrictions inflamed deeply held anti-government
feelings in Catron County, and Williams, along with several other ranchers,
joined a class action lawsuit against the federal agency. He also traveled
to Tucson to observe another court case brought by antigrazing groups.

When his allies lost both cases, Williams considered giving up the ranch,
and was tempted by a purchase offer from a developer. Though he didn't want
to see his land parceled into ranchettes, he was frustrated by what he saw
as intrusion by outsiders.

Then, in the summer of 1998, Williams received a letter from a friend about
an upcoming public meeting in Pie Town, a hamlet not far east of his ranch.
"They said there was a new organization coming, that they were
environmentalists who were prograzing," says Williams. "I said to Joy,
'Let's go see what the hell is going on'—and I used some worse words,
because at that time, anything that had to do with environmentalism, I was
fed up with."

THE QUIET TWO-LANED ROAD called U.S. Highway 60 runs through the heart of
New Mexico, over a low spot on the Continental Divide, and across the
Arizona border, passing within a few miles of the Williams Ranch. Along the
highway, the landscape rises gently, then crests and breaks open into clear
skies, rocky buttes, and stretches of uninterrupted grassland.


Yet well over a century of intensive grazing has transformed this land.
Spanish missionaries brought large-scale livestock grazing to the Southwest
in the early 1700s, and in the 1800s the growth of rail transport and
customer demand for beef combined to set off a frenzy of speculation. By
the 1880s, more than 20 million cattle grazed the western range, many on
unfenced public lands. Though the cows turned native grasslands into swaths
of grazing-tolerant plants, and stomped unfettered through desert rivers
and streams, scant thought was given to grazing's consequences. It wasn't
until the summer of 1934, when gritty brown clouds from the Dust Bowl
descended on Washington DC, that Congress and President Franklin D.
Roosevelt approved the first federal regulation of grazing on the public
range.

The basic structure of range management hasn't changed much since. Most
public grazing lands are now overseen by the Forest Service or the federal
Bureau of Land Management. About 260 million acres of federal public lands
in the West are grazed by cows or sheep, and the approximately twenty-two
thousand ranchers who use federal grazing lands pay the bargain-basement
price of $1.79 per cow-and-calf pair per month. The Bureau of Land
Management now spends more on the administration of its grazing programs
than it collects in grazing fees.

It's this seemingly nonsensical arrangement that the novelist, essayist,
and provocateur Edward Abbey first described in the 1970s as "welfare."
More recently, some environmental groups began suing to reduce or eliminate
grazing on public lands, charging that cows are simply not compatible with
the native animals, plants, and habitats of the dry West. Grazing, they
argued, violates various federal laws intended to protect the natural
environment.

Many ranchers have reacted to this criticism by digging in their heels,
vociferously defending even the most abusive grazing practices as part of
what they call ranching's "custom and culture." Antigrazing activists
assert that public-lands ranchers represent less than 2 percent of the
cattle producers in the United States, and that their cows account for a
vanishingly tiny percentage of the nation's hamburgers. Yet ranchers remain
a powerful part of the national mythology, and many westerners and others
have sympathized with their plight.

Throughout the dry West, grazing has become a religious war—a pitched
battle between the Church of the Zero Cow and the Church of the Holy Cow.

COURTNEY WHITE is a member of neither congregation. An archaeologist by
training, conservationist by inclination, and iconoclast somewhat by
accident, he has dedicated himself to carving out a new position in the
grazing debate. A former Sierra Club activist, White is now the executive
director of the Quivira Coalition, a small nonprofit organization he
founded eight years ago with a New Mexico rancher named Jim Winder and
another Sierra Club activist named Barbara Johnson. The trio named their
organization after a Spanish colonial term meaning unknown territory or
distant, golden dream. Their mission would be to convince
environmentalists, public-land managers, scientists, ranchers, and others
of the controversial proposition that "ecologically healthy rangeland and
economically robust ranches can be compatible."



White doesn't seem especially eager to please ranchers, and he doesn't
affect a big hat or pointy boots. Aside from the cowbell that visitors are
asked to sound for service, there are few visible souvenirs of ranching
culture in the airy office that he and the seven orther members of the
Quivira staff inhabit in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Nor does the Quivira Coalition talk much about pristine landscapes. While
members of the Church of the Zero Cow value public grazing lands for their
potential as wildlife preserves, places largely untouched by humans and
their herds, Quivira uses a different language—open space, land
health—to describe the promise of both public and private ranchlands.
This vision may lack a certain wildness, but Quivira members believe that
other social, economic, and even environmental benefits make that
concession worthwhile.

The founders of Quivira recognized a new competitor for the range:
developers. Ranchers who graze their cattle on public land, according to
one estimate, also own more than a hundred million acres of private land in
the western states. These private ranchlands are rich in lower-elevation
wildlife habitat, the luscious, green river valleys where many species come
to nest and breed. These valleys are also attractive sites for housing
developments. In Colorado, one study estimates that nearly seven hundred
and acres of private farm- and ranchland were lost every day to residential
subdivisions and other nonagricultural uses during the mid-1990s. Today,
many ranchers depend on their inexpensive public-lands grazing leases to
help them withstand the increasing economic pressure to sell their private
land to developers. Improving management on both public and private grazing
lands, the founding Quivirans contended, would not only help restore
wildlife habitat. It would also protect some of the West's disappearing
open space by helping ranchers stay in business, and therefore keep private
lands relatively undeveloped.

Yet to many ecologists and other scientists, claims that grazing can
benefit western land are just short of absurd. In a 1999 review paper, the
late biologist Joy Belsky cited dozens of studies of the ecological
disasters wrought by cattle throughout the West, finding "little debate
about the effects of livestock grazing" and concluding that it remains "a
key factor" in the destruction of streamside wildlife habitat.

The scientific condemnation of grazing has been especially fierce in the
arid and semiarid landscapes of the Southwest, where ranchers such as Jim
Williams struggle to survive on less than twelve inches of rain per year.
(The dairly lands of Wisconsin, by comparison, usually receive well over
thirty inches.) In dry, sparsely vegetated country, a cow requires many
times more land than in green eastern pastures, and vast western ranches
sometimes raise only a couple of hundred animals each year.


While the Great Plains were long frequented by bison, and so are adapted to
grazing by large, heavy animals, most researchers say the Great Basin and
much of the Southwest—the lands west of the Rocky Mountains—were
visited only intermittently by bison over the last ten thousand years, if
at all. Ecologists have found that cows do long-lasting—possibly
irreversible—damage to the communities of bacteria, algae, and mosses
that anchor many desert soils. Some researchers and activists describe
grazing in the Southwest as little different from mining, since it can
leave such enduring scars.

Quivirans acknowledge these impacts, but instead of simply comparing the
condition of grazed and ungrazed landscapes, they point to studies that
scrutinize the impacts of various grazing strategies. Kris Havstad, a range
scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture–funded Jornada
Experimental Range in southern New Mexico, says some types of grazing do
substantially less harm than others.
If grazing is properly managed—if you pay attention to when it happens,
and how long it happens—then grass, in most places, can be a renewable
resource."

Researchers have also compared grazed environments with other landscapes,
finding that ranches usually make better wildlife habitat than
subdivisions. A 2003 Colorado State University study, for instance,
indicated that rangelands have more native plant speices, and fewer exotic
plants, than rural land fragmented by roads and homes. Other researchers
point out that while it's nearly impossible to reintroduce fire in a
subdivision, ranchers can use prescribed burns to restore fire-adapted
native grasslands on their property.

And some scientists and managers say cattle can even be used as a
restoration tool. Land laid bare by overgrazing or drought can become
"capped" with a hard layer of claylike soil, making it difficult for
rainfall to soak in and for grasses to grow up. Anecdotal evidence suggests
that cattle, if managed carefully, can "poop and stomp" these nearly
impermeable soils into a more productive state. Such work has helped define
the position of the Quivira Coalition. As White wrote in a letter to Sierra
Club Executive Director Carl Pope in 2002, "The emergence of the
progressive ranching model across a wide variety of western
landscapes...means the goal of public lands environmentalism can no longer
simply be to 'protect' the land from human activity. Instead, its goal
should be the same as the progressive ranchers'—to figure out how to live
sustainably in our native landscapes." He added, "This is something
difficult for the average city-bound Sierra Club member, much less
activist, to understand—that our western lands, all of them, need more
and better stewardship, not less." Statements like this established the
distinctive, if somewhat coded, vocabulary of the Quivira movement, laying
down a bright line between it and traditional environmentalism.

White is fond of quoting conservationist Aldo Leopold, who wrote that
wildlife "can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have
heretofore destroyed it—axe, cow, plow, fire, and gun." Such
irony-plagued territory remains largely unmapped, but in recent years, the
Quivira Coalition has explored it with enthusiasm.



BY THE TIME QUIVIRA opened its doors in the mid-1990s, some ranchers in the
Southwest had already ventured into this unfamiliar territory. During the
1980s and early 1990s, in a few isolated corners of the West, they had
begun experimenting. Instead of employing the Columbus method, this small
minority kept their cows in a single herd and drove them briskly through a
series of fenced pastures, sometimes moving them as frequently as once a
day. This tactic, developed in Africa in the 1960s by Zimbabwean wildlife
biologist Allan Savory, is meant to imitate the movements of migrating wild
herds. Variations on Savory's "holistic management" approach all aim to
control the timing, intensity, and frequency of grazing in order to allow
grasslands and riverbanks time to recover from trampling hooves.

Though converts to rotational grazing brim with stories of taller grass and
thicker profits, these methods remain controversial among ranchers and
scientists alike. The Quivira Coalition itself is careful not to endorse
any particular management strategy, but the rotational grazing movement
represents a larger openness to innovation on the range, and it is that
spirit that shapes Quivira.

Early on, the Quivira Coalition attracted people like Sid Goodloe, who in
1969 pioneered the Savory method in the United States on his ranch in
southeastern New Mexico, and members of the West Elk Livestock Association
of western Colorado, who worked with the Forest Service to establish a
rotational grazing system for the ninety thousand acres of public land they
leased. Quivira also caught the attention of Virgil Trujillo, the young
ranch manager for Ghost Ranch, a twenty-one-thousand-acre Presbyterian
retreat center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Trujillo, whose Spanish ancestors
arrived in northern New Mexico in 1598, has carried on the rotational
grazing practices that the ranch instituted in the mid-1980s. Today, some
forty local ranchers pay a modest fee to graze a total of about six hundred
head at Ghost Ranch each winter, when plants are dormant.

With the help of these and other early members, the Quivira Coalition began
to spread its gospel. They ran free tours of ranches that had adopted new
styles of management. They organized conferences. Most recently, Quivira
took over management and ownership of the Rowe Mesa Grassbank, a chunk of
public and private property in northern New Mexico; its grazing land is
available to local ranchers who agree to reintroduce fire and take other
conservation measures on their private ground. Through these various
enterprises, the Quivira Coalition has steadily gathered new converts.

Quivira now has about nine hundred members, and roughly a third of those
are working ranchers (most of the rest are environmentalists of various
stripes, and federal and state agency representatives). Most of these
ranchers practice some form of rotational grazing, and many monitor their
range. Sometimes this simply means staking out specific locations that are
visited and photographed throughout the year, and using the photographs to
make rough assessments of grass cover, erosion rates, and the presence of
weeds. Sometimes the ranchers establish more formal line transects,
gathering quantitative data on soil and plants. On public land, agency
range scientists may conduct similar surveys, with some referring to a set
of national standards—which consider soil stability, plant community
composition, and other factors—in their assessments of overall "land
health." (Antigrazing activists, however, cite numerous cases of spotty
monitoring on public land.)

        Courtney White sees cattle in the future of the West.
Quivira ranchers hope their years of data will help researchers understand
the impacts of different grazing methods, and help ranchers develop
management strategies tailored to their particular places and climates.
These strategies are likely to be as varied as the western landscape
itself. As the Quivira Coalition's New Ranch Handbook concedes, "We simply
do not have any single prescription...Even with the best science, range
management remains a craft."

IF YOU BELIEVE THAT the most likely alternative to cattle ranching is a sea
of subdivisions, this kind of improvisation makes a lot of sense. By
encouraging a leap of faith in the ranching community, the Quivira
Coalition is doubtless making improvements to public and private land
management, probably helping some ranchers stay in business, and possibly
heading off the sale of some private land to developers. In this view,
neither the ranchers nor the larger public has much to lose by trying.

But the Quivira approach does discard the possibility of a fuller
restoration, of the speedier recovery that might result from completely
ridding the dry West of cows, and some conservationists are far from ready
to give up that hope. The Quivira Coalition, says John Horning, is "just
giving more room to bad actors to get away with murder."

Horning is the executive director of Forest Guardians, an environmental
advocacy group also based in Santa Fe. His office is only a short distance
from Quivira's, but it's on a different philosophical planet. The Quivira
Coalition's faith that ranching in the desert Southwest can be made easier
on the land, says Horning, denies reality. "The agriculture of this region
is not suited to this place," he says. "The whole idea of beef-based
agriculture in an arid land is ludicrous."

Horning, whose family hails from southern Colorado, grew up in Washington
DC and has a lawyerly command of the ins and outs of federal grazing policy
and a peppery temper, both useful to his cause. Not unlike many Quivira
members, Horning sees himself as part of a small but ultimately heroic
movement, a member of an often-misunderstood campaign for positive change.
"We don't spend any time trying to make ranching better," Horning says. "We
work to drastically reduce and/or eliminate grazing on public lands."

John Horning says Quivira gives cover to damaging land management.
To that end, Horning puts in long hours photographing the condition of
public grazing lands and gathering information for lawsuits challenging the
grazing policies of various federal agencies. Forest Guardians, which has
almost two thousand members, also works with willing ranchers on buy-out
programs, in which ranchers are paid to stop grazing the public land they
lease. The group supports a congressional bill, the Multiple-Use Conflict
Resolution Act, which would pay all public-lands ranchers generous sums to
completely retire their allotments. An earlier version introduced in the
House in 2003 failed to pass; the bill was reintroduced in the House by
Arizona Democrat Raúl Grijalva last June.

Forest Guardians doesn't see much value in ranching culture itself. In
fact, the group often argues, it's high time the Marlboro Man loosened his
grip on the national imagination. Horning does applaud the efforts of some
Quivira Coalition members to improve the health of their private acreage.
"But on my public land, I want all of the streams to be as vibrant as
possible," he says. "Grazing retards the recovery process—and, in some
cases, keeps it at ground zero."
The use of cows to break up impermeable "capped" soils might be appropriate
on some tremendously damaged landscapes, says Horning—"if you want to try
it on mine tailings, sure, go ahead"—but in general he dismisses the
Quivira contention that cattle can be a restorative force. He argues that
the direct impact of grazing on the land, combined with its indirect but
undeniable influence on the management of fire, water, and wild predators,
more than offsets any possible benefits.

Horning also downplays the Quivira argument that continued public-lands
ranching might help preserve the open space provided by private ranchlands.
High land values and persistently low beef prices, he says, will overwhelm
even the most creative efforts to keep ranching afloat. A better future in
the Southwest, he says, might include a few cows, but its agriculture would
be based on fruit crops and other products lower on the food chain. Public
lands would be cow-free. This is a radical vision, he concedes, but the
only one consistent with the natural limits of the region.

He points to the Gila River watershed in southern New Mexico and Arizona,
where lawsuits filed by his group and its allies forced ranchers to remove
cows from parts of seventy-five federal grazing allotments encompassing
about three hundred miles of rivers and streams. In previous years, cattle
often mowed down sprouting cottonwood and willow treses. But along those
streams today, stands of young trees tower over a visitor's head.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH DATA each side accumulates, no matter how many
photographs of trampled pastures and grassy riverbanks flash on
conference-room screens, the battle over grazing in the West is always, to
some extent, going to be fought from the gut. This is, after all, a debate
about values.

When Forest Guardians scrutinizes the past and the present of grazing, it
finds plenty of destructive tendencies—enough to bolster its argument
that grazing, at its heart, is unsuited to the dry West. Quivira, on the
other hand, fixes its gaze on the future, arguing largely through anecdote
and faith that grazing deserves on more chance at improvement. Which
direction looks most like the truth depends on the viewer.

Quivirans value ranches as a barricade that just might keep the rural West
from reprising Phoenix, Arizona, and the small corps of innovative ranchers
as a steady workforce that can help restore the range. They say the current
enthusiasm for outdoor recreation in the West is no substitute for
lifetimes of riding and herding and irrigating, for decades of dependence
on a certain place. These lives, they say, help keep the economic,
emotional, and spiritual existence of westerners linked to the soil—even
if that link is as tenuous as a pound of locally raised beef.

Some Quivira supporters will acknowledge, usually privately, that
competition from cattle producers in other countries—combined with the
region's brutal climate—may eventually make it impossible for cattle
ranching to continue in the Southwest. But by opening the door to
innovation, they hope at least to ease the transition between traditional
ranching and whatever comes next.

Perhaps most of all, Quivirans hope their efforts will help leach some
bitterness out of the recent history of the region, the history that
started with the entrance of the cow. And it is that fervent hope that
Catron County rancher Jim Williams put to the test.

In the summer of 1998, when Jim and Joy Williams drove to the public
meeting with the Quivira Coalition in Pie Town, they heard White, who came
down from Santa Fe with rancher Virgil Trujillo, talk about the common
interests of ranchers and environmentalists. The audience was suspicious
and hostile. Had White come by himself, says Trujillo with a short laugh,
"he would have been eaten alive."

But Williams liked that White made his environmental sympathies clear from
the start, and he immediately trusted Trujillo. "You could tell he was an
honest fellow, that he knew what we were dealing with," says Williams.
Besides, Williams had exhausted all of his obvious options, and was willing
to try almost anything to restore his Forest Service lease to its former
terms. So at the end of the meeting, when the organizers asked if anyone in
the audience was interested in working with Quivira, Jim Williams raised
his hand. He was the only one.


Over the next few months, Williams hired a rangeland-health consultant
named Kirk Gadzia, who frequently works with the Quivira Coalition, and
developed a formal grazing plan for his public and private ground. Williams
agreed to gather his cattle into one herd and keep them on the move
throughout the year. He changed the way he grazed Largo Creek, the main
arroyo on his private land. Instead of letting cows loose there in the
spring, when they would stomp on young plants, he took a page from Virgil
Trujillo and began grazing them on the creek only in the winter.

Williams also extensively thinned about six hundred acres of thirsty
juniper trees on his private land, which had proliferated in the wake of
grazing and fire suppression. He worked with the Forest Service to thin and
burn another fifty acres on public land. Under the supervision of
stream-restoration consultant Bill Zeedyk, another Quivira associate,
volunteers from Albuquerque and Santa Fe helped Williams build about fifty
artificial meanders and other structures in his arroyos, with the goal of
slowing erosive stream flows. Williams also installed several photo points
that would allow him and visiting Quivira volunteers to monitor changes on
the land.

Still, Williams apologizes as he approaches Largo Creek on a mid-January
afternoon. "It looks a little awkward," he says. And it does, with the
arroyo still deep and crumbling around the edges, and the ground mostly
bare but for some spiky blackbrush and widely spaced sprigs of blue grama
grass. No miracles have occurred. Years of drought have hit this area hard,
and even the best-intentioned restoration efforts will progress slowly, if
at all.

In the creek bed, however, the artificial meanders have moistened the
powdery soil, and a few native willow saplings poke out of the ground. The
photo record shows that in summer the grasses and sedges grow more thickly
along the gulch than they did when cows grazed here in the spring. John
Pierson, the local Forest Service range conservationist, says the condition
of the soil and vegetation on the public land allotments Williams leases
has steadily improved, despite the long drought. He also says the Quivira
Coalition helped Williams and the Forest Service repair their relationship,
and begin work reparing the land.


Largo Creek, and the public land uphill, might recover its grasslands and
streamside forests more quickly if there were no cows here at all, and if
the land remained free of development. While steady pressure from
antigrazing lawsuits could have, and still may, bring about the former
condition, it is unlikely to maintain the latter. The end of grazing here
would likely drive Williams to sell his private land to developers. Largo
Creek could then be bordered with asphalt and patios, making recovery of
this sprawling private land impossible.

Instead of ending grazing on the Williams Ranch, legal pressure and federal
grazing restrictions drove Jim Williams to raise his hand at the Quivira
Coalition meeting in Pie Town. He then eased his battle of wills with the
Forest Service, and opened the door to restoring both his private land and
the adjoining public acreage.

While a few of his neighbors support his efforts, most are silent on the
subject, and a few shake their heads, saying, "That's no way to fight the
Forest Service." In Catron County, as elsewhere in the rural West, the
Church of the Holy Cow still wields a great deal of power, and bitter
endings to long conflicts are common. But it was in Catron County that Jim
Williams found a graceful way to walk off a battlefield, and to stand on a
small patch of common ground.