LMD July 2015

Riding Herd

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

by LEE PITTS

– JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

West Of The East

JULY 15, 2015 • www.aaalivestock.com

Volume 57 • No. 7

Accepted Wisdom “Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.”

A penny saved is a government oversight.

I

don’t know if it was my third grade teacher or Confucius who first uttered those immortal words but I am reminded of the pithy proverb whenever I hear or read about global warming. Excuse me, I should say “climate change” since there hasn’t been any global warming in 18 years. Whatever you call it, we’ve been down this rough road before in American history and the last time our government was so wrong it caused the greatest environmental disaster in American history. Could they be doing the same thing now in the name of climate change?

Out There

NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

We really don’t know if man can cause the climate to change, just as we didn’t know 150 years ago when politicians, corporations, academics, journalists, fake scientists, and special interest groups used silly science to further their own agenda. Back then they worshipped at the alter of a theory of climatology that said, “if you come, it will rain.”

Just like global warming, the idea that rain will follow the plow spread like ptomaine poisoning after a bad batch of picnic potato salad.

Simply stated the theory was that plowing the soil exposed it

to moisture in the sky which in turn, caused it to rain. Thus the rallying cry, “rain follows the plow.”

The government quickly latched on to this faulty theory as a means to end, a way to settle the land it owned west of the 100th meridian. In the 1860s American expansion into the west was high centered on Nebraska sand dunes and the general feeling was that the Great Plains were one big desert. The explorer Stephen Long called this area “The Great American Desert” on the maps he drew.

Many of the tens-of-thousands

of adventurers who stormed to California during the Gold Rush in ‘49 came across the Great Plains and wrote home that there was nothing out there “out there.”

It took courageous folks like Harry Haythornethwaith to see the middle of our country for what it really was. Cow country. Most travelers on the Oregon Trail saw the biggest sand dune in the western hemisphere, thought it was a desert and went around it. Not Harry, he only saw opportunity and that’s why his descendants now reside on one of the great cow ranches in

America, the Haythorn Ranch.

Other than the Plains Indians, who were quite willing to let the white man go on thinking their home was an unforgiving desert, there were not many men like Harry willing to stake their claim on a sand dune. That’s why the U.S. government would grab at anything that would further the cause of Manifest Destiny. They owned all that land and wanted it settled so its natural resources could be extracted and the East and West coasts linked. Besides, it was getting “too crowded” in the East and the politicians saw the Great Plains as an outlet for easterners and immigrants who had not yet achieved The American Dream.

As an enticement to those who were chomping at the bit for land they could call their own, Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862 that gave a quarter section of ground to anyone who continued on page two

Bullies try to derail local control of public lands

BY MONTANA STATE SENATOR JENNIFER FIELDER

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ver the past three years, the idea of transferring federally managed public lands to the states has swelled from a small town dream to a full-fledged national movement.

As grass roots support grows, organized opposition bolsters their attempts to distort the truth and dirty the reputations of good, honest people.

For example, opponents have repeatedly told everyone that if Montanans were in charge of our own lands and resources, we would sell them all off. Well, I think that kind of criticism is selling Montanans short.

Whether it is work, play, or the scenic beauty of our rolling prairies, majestic mountains, or clear blue waters, Montana’s public lands are special to all of us. There’s no need to sell public lands to make money because wise stewardship of natural resources can produce more than enough revenue to cover land management costs while enhancing the environment and providing world class outdoor recreation.

Early this year, I introduced SB215, a simple bill that would prohibit the sale of any federal land that may be transferred to the state in the future. Guess who opposed the law that

would keep public lands public? It was the same left-leaning organizations who are telling everyone we would sell it! Specifically, paid lobbyists representing Montana Wilderness Association, Montana Wildlife Federation, and Montana Audubon Society came into our State Capitol and testified against SB215. So did democrat Governor Bullock’s administration.

Amazingly, just one week later, the same groups held a “keep it public” rally in the State Capitol. They came up with a lot of money from somewhere to bus hundreds of people in from all over Montana and feed them free lunch to go with the line of “bull” they served up over the megaphone.

A few weeks later the Montana Democrat party piled on with a bogus fund raising letter falsely stating that my bill, SB215, was a bill to “sell Montana’s public lands”. In actuality, SB215 reads: “An act prohibiting future sales of land granted or transferred to the state”. You can verify what I am reporting here by reviewing the official public record at http://leg.mt.gov and search the LAWS data base for SB215. I welcome you to read the bill and watch the video of the hearing to see who really testified in favor of keeping public continued on page eight

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p until a few years ago I spent my professional life crawling all over this country. I’ve been in all 50 states and although I’m a biased, born-and-bred Westerner there’s much I also like about the East. But I must say, the geography and the people are as different as Al Sharpton and Trevor Brazile. The two regions probably ought to be two separate countries. I’m not lumping the South in with the East because we’re all aware of their feuds. On second thought, maybe we ought to be three different countries.

Although Easterners and Westerners are of the same genus we are two separate species. The East is skyscrapers and Disneyworld while the West is suburbs and Disneyland. The West has disasters like earthquakes, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and the East has hurricanes, Obama and the Kennedys.

Westerners gamble in Las Vegas with their bank’s money while their Eastern brethren gamble on Wall Street, and D.C. with your money.

Westerners get duded up in Carhartt jackets, Wranglers and cowboy hats, while in the East it’s penny loafers, deck shoes and neckties.

There it’s bare feet, here it’s boots.(Maybe because we have more rattlesnakes.) The East has the Atlanta Falcons, Orioles, Blue Jays, Eagles, Ravens and Penguins while the West has Seattle’s Seahawks and Anaheim’s Ducks.

The West has mountain lions, wolves and grizzlies while the East has Congresspersons, alligators and bureaucrats. I don’t know which is worse.

The West is Border Collies, the East is Shih Tzus and Portuguese Water Dogs. The West has rodeo, the East has yachting. The East is New York toll roads, the West is Oklahoma turnpikes.

In the West we have auction barns while the East has auction houses. The center of our liberalism is San Francisco, in the East it’s the Village.

The West is Friday night football, the East is Broadway. We flyfish, they ice fish.

The West has the Alamo and Custer while the East has continued on page sixteen

www.LeePittsbooks.com

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Livestock Market Digest

July 15, 2015

Accepted Wisdom was willing to relocate. Wrote Marc Reisner in his classic, Cadillac Desert, “The idea was to carve millions of quarter sections out of the public domain, sell them cheaply to restless Americans and arriving immigrants, and, by letting them try to scratch a living out of them, develop the nation’s resources and build up its character.”

And it worked...at least for awhile. It just so happened that after the first wave of homesteaders moved on to the Great Plains, Mother Nature rewarded them with unusually heavy rainfall. So much so that those sand dunes in Nebraska were one great big waving ocean of green. Enquiring minds wondered, were these homesteaders just lucky or was there a scientific reason that shortly after the ground was tilled it started raining? Could it be that the rain followed the plow?

The Al Gore Of His Generation Much like our current government with their theory of global warming, in the 1860s the feds latched on to the rain/plow connection to achieve its goal of settling the West. And academia, big business and real estate speculators were more than willing to sell the idea to a gullible public.

Isn’t it all beginning to sound eerily familiar?

Charles Dana Wilber was the Al Gore of the “rain follows the plow” movement. He was an amateur scientist, educator, and entrepreneur and he found a couple ways to cash in. He was a real estate developer who built communities in Nebraska and he wrote a popular book in 1881 called The Great Valleys of Nebraska which would become to the plow boys what the Inconvenient Truth was to global warming. In his book Dana said that he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that rainfall would increase as farmers moved ever westward.

Wilber even suggested that God had his hand on the plow.

He wrote, “To those who possess the divine faculty of hope—the optimists of our times—it will always be a source of pleasure to understand that the Creator never imposed a perpetual desert upon the earth, but, on the contrary, has so endowed it that man, by the plow, can transform it, in any country, into farm areas.”

Wilber continued: “In this miracle of progress, the plow was the unerring prophet, the procuring cause, not by any magic or enchantment, not by incantations or offerings, but instead by the sweat of his face toiling with his hands, man can persuade the heavens to yield their treasure of dew and rain upon the land he has chosen for his dwelling. The raindrop never fails to fall and answer to the imploring power of prayer of labor. God speed the plow! By this wonderful provision the clouds are dispensing

continued from page one

copious rains and the plow is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden.”

As if addressing a congregation of global warming deniers

Charles Dana Wilber was the Al Gore of the “rain follows the plow” movement.

Dana wrote, “No one can question or doubt the inevitable effect of this cooling condensing surface upon the moisture in the atmosphere as it moves over by the Western winds. A reduction of temperature must at once occur, accompanied by the usual phenomena of showers. The chief agency in this transformation is agriculture. To be more concise, rain follows the plow.”

Come One, Come All Just as with global warming, college professors jumped all over the radical concept. Professor Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist wrote, “Since the territory of Colorado has begun to be settled, towns and cities built up, farms cultivated, mines opened, and roads made and travelled, there has been a gradual increase in moisture. I therefore give it as my firm conviction that this increase is of a permanent nature, and not periodical, and that it has commenced within eight years past, and that it is in some way connected to the settlement of the country, and that as population increases the moisture will increase.” (According to the professor’s theory big cities like New York, Chicago and L.A. should be under a permanent flood watch.)

Desperate Americans hitched their dreams to this idea of a desert-turned-Eden and in a ten year period two million people became residents of the Great Plains. And they wrote letters home encouraging more westward immigration so that it would rain even more. Don’t laugh, it’s no more ridiculous than cow flatulence causing the the Hollywood homes of celebrities to be inundated with sea water.

Big business loved the idea too. For building the tracks that were already criss-crossing the continent the railroads got as payment every other section continued on page three

July 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 3

Accepted Wisdom of ground in a process called checkerboarding. This meant the railroads had a lot of land they couldn’t do anything with. But what if they could sell it as farmland? So they printed up colorful brochures with pictures of waving grain and offered folks a free one way ticket to take a look for themselves.

There were other cheerleaders. None other than Horace Greeley, the man who urged Americans “to go west,” wrote that a 160-acre homestead in the Great American Desert could produce “an ample living.” But what would Horace know about the West? He was an easterner.

A New Yorker and practically every day a New York newspaper endorsed the plow/rain phenomenon. In 1866 the The New-York Tribune proclaimed that cultivation could “subdue” arid belts.

Don’t laugh, it’s just the 19th century version of man causing the poles to defrost.

The Four Horsemen Matt Simon wrote a magnificent article for Science magazine last year called, “Fantastically Wrong: American Greed and the Harebrained Theory of “‘Rain Follows the Plow.’” In that article Simon wrote about what he called The Four Horsemen of the Pseudoscience Apocalypse, a nod to the Four Horseman in the Bible who appeared in the last chapter of the New Testament. Aside from Wilber, one of the other Horsemen was Ferdinand Hayden, director of the U.S. Geological and Geograph-

continued from page two

ical Survey and one of the most famous geographers and geologists of his time.”

“Next up,” wrote Simon, “was Richard Smith Elliott, publicity agent for the Kansas Pacific Railway, a sort of salesman for its plentiful land holdings. Elliott thought the railroad itself encouraged rainfall, as did power lines. That may sound crazy to you,” wrote Simon, “but it somehow made sense to the hallowed Smithsonian Institution: It published Elliott’s writings on the subject in its Annual Report of 1870.”

The last member of the fearsome foursome was Samuel Aughey, a professor of natural sciences at the University of Nebraska. Aughey wrote, “There is, however, another cause most potently acting to produce all the changes in rainfall that the facts indicate have taken place.

What then is that cause? It is the great increase in the absorptive power of the soil, wrought by cultivation, that has caused, and continues to cause an increasing rainfall in the State.”

Simon said, “Aughey brought the theory into the ivory tower, essentially accusing the people of Nebraska of squandering their ‘wonderful inheritance of wealth, beauty, and power’ by not fully developing their lands.”

Good Vibrations Just to cover their collective rear ends, the believers hedged their bets by also saying the rain came because of newly planted trees and smoke from trains. Si-

mon wrote, “Some people suggested that the “iron on the lines” or the “wires of the telegraph lines” were responsible. Others thought it was “the disturbance of the atmospheric circulation through the concussions of lo-

Just as with global warming, college professors jumped all over the radical concept. comotives and moving trains. Much more widespread was the idea, created by conservationists, that “forests produce rains.”

This writer remembers traveling to Post, Texas, years ago to write a story about a man who had once owned a big ranch there. His name was C.W. Post.

You may know him for his Post Toasties and other cereals. It seems that C.W used to give tremendous free fireworks shows, but they were not for the entertainment of the locals. Post believed that the vibrations caused

by fireworks helped clouds to form. Dynamiting became a more modern day version of the rain dance. Says Simon, “Even the Secretary of Agriculture came out for a demonstration in Texas.” According to the Ag Secretary, “The result was–a loud noise!”

All this nonsensical propaganda and superstition brainwashed the general public into believing that rain indeed followed the plow, much as the public today has been brainwashed about global warming. The deniers never had a chance. At least until it stopped raining that is.

OOOPS! Pardon the pun but Congress wasn’t about to rain on a good thing. In 1873 they passed the Timber Culture Act which stipulated that homesteaders had to plant one quarter of their 160 acres in trees to produce more rainfall. Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert, “In west Texas all that is predictable is the wind, you would have to spend most of your time replanting your fallen down trees.”

One of the great ranching empires in the West was built after Congress passed the Swamplands Act. It stipulated that if the land was so covered in water that you could traverse it in flat-bottomed boat the land became yours to reclaim. Legend has it that Henry Miller of Miller and Lux fame, put a flat bottom boat on a wagon and hauled it around thereby amassing an empire in excess of a million acres.

And then, it just stopped raining. By the dawn of the new century there had been enough hardship and drouth that it became obvious even to its most ardent supporters that rain had quit following the plow. Ooops!

The populations of Nebraska and Kansas declined by a third.

Only 400,000 homesteaders stayed put, many of the rest leaving for Oklahoma where evidently rain was still chasing the plow. Despite the total debunking of the theory, farmers on the Great Plains continued turning the grass upside down.

Most of the farmers may have left...but their methods remained, eventually producing the dirty thirties, Okies, the Grapes of Wrath, and the biggest environmental disaster in American history, The Dust Bowl. All caused by the farming of submarginal lands that never should have been plowed, and the government’s belief that a farmer could make a living on 160 acres in a desert if more farmers would just immigrate so it would rain more.

One wonders, a hundred years from now will people be laughing at us and the silly science we believed that said cow flatulence was causing polar bears to die and the globe to heat up? And when it didn’t it was all because global warming had caused global cooling.

I began this essay with a well worn proverb and I’ll end with one. “People who live in glass houses...should expect their world to heat up.”

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Livestock Market Digest

July 15, 2015

Coyote Problems: Part Two Difficult to Get Funding for Predator Control

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

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ome states have a combined state and federal program that helps with predator control. For instance, more than half the trappers in Utah are state employees, and funding for predator programs is split between state and federal, augmented by producer matching funds. Utah has had a head tax— 25 cents per head collected by the brand inspector at the time of sale on cattle—and this is used for the predator program.

There’s also a 75 cents per head on wool sales, collected by the wool warehouses. The federal agency gets 59 cents of that, to help manage the predator program. In addition to that, there is a predator damage control fund, where individual producers pay in and the state sets money aside to help match whatever the producers put in, up to $150,000, which puts it up to $300,000.

This helps fund the aerial hunts for coyotes.

Utah often uses helicopters instead of planes to fly over summer ranges in the mountains where they can’t safely use a plane. The planes are used for the flatter country, but the match money is used in the mountains for the helicopters, which is more expensive. With producers paying into it, and the federal and state money, this helps stretch the money a lot farther—with everyone contributing. The program has very good support from the livestock community in Utah.

The predator problem in that state is huge and if the ranchers had to deal with it by themselves it would break them. They are operating on very small profit margins, so every loss cuts into this.

In Wyoming, livestock producers help pay for predator control in every county, but funding is still sometimes short. Losses vary from year to year, partly due to the differences in the amount of predator control that can be ac-

complished. Due to budget cuts, some years there is not adequate control. The most critical time is during lambing and calving, and coyotes are a constant problem.

Each Wyoming county has a predator management board that sets the price for predator control that is added onto every brand inspection. Most of the predator districts also participate in a state predator management program—money given by the legislature for this purpose. To participate, the predator districts charge $1 per head for cattle and for sheep, and are then eligible to request grant funding for control measures within their district.

This money can be used for aerial hunts, ground crews, or whatever is needed. Most counties have contracts with the USDA Wildlife Services, and can call them into certain areas where there are problems.

Gene Hardy is one of the ranchers who has been on the Wyoming Animal Damage Management Board (ADMB). This 15-member board includes cattle and sheep producers, sportsmen, urban representatives, game and fish, BLM, Forest Service, etc. “Each county has a predator management board which obtains funding in various ways. A long time ago it was done with a tax; you turned in your number of livestock to the county assessor, who gave them an evaluation, and you paid that in the taxes—money that was set aside for predator management. That system didn’t generate enough money for adequate predator control, however, so it was changed to where you pay a predator fee, charged whenever an animal changes hands—at brand inspection,” says Hardy.

“But a few years ago the predator boards were basically broke.

Fees were not high enough to keep up with costs of predator control, and also the livestock numbers decreased dramatically due to drought conditions. So we went to the legislature nine years ago to get money from the Wyoming Board of Agriculture.

That money is funneled through our ADMB, dispensing it to the county boards,” he says. The county boards have to meet certain qualifications to be eligible.

Coyotes account for about 2/3 of the predator losses in Wyoming. “We kill a lot of coyotes with aerial hunting and are also allowed to use M-44s and livestock protection collars (a collar on the sheep or lamb that contains 10-80). Those collars aren’t used much, but we do use the M-44, which is a cyanide gun. It’s triggered when the coyote pulls the top of it (a bait) and it shoots cyanide into the coyotes’ mouth.

We also use traps and snares,” says Hardy.

In Wyoming the counties participate with Wildlife Services

who supply trappers.

Some counties provide their own trappers, but work with Wildlife Services on aerial control. The state funds have been cut, however, and this leaves the programs quite short. In shaky economic times, predator control programs are struggling to remain viable in all the western states.

One Rancher’s Experience – Pete Paris raised cattle and sheep on Nevada rangeland in Elko County, and had a lot of problems with coyotes, especially in his four bands of sheep. A female coyote with a litter of pups will kill lambs daily. In the spring it might be five lambs every day because the coyotes eat only the parts they really like, such as the internal organs (hearts and livers). When the pups are small the adult coyote will gorge itself on these parts of the lamb and then go back to the den and regurgitate these for the pups to eat.

As the pups get older, the adult coyotes eat as much as they can for themselves and then tear a lamb in half. The male will pack half a lamb and the female the other half, to take back to their pups. For themselves, the adults will kill two or three lambs every night and eat as much as they can of their favorite internal parts and then take the meat back to the pups. Often when the lambs are anywhere from newborn to a month old, a pair of coyotes will kill four or five every night. If this goes on night after night it adds up to a serious loss, especially if a rancher has three or four bands in which this is happening.

The Nevada ranchers get some help from the government hunters but the government agency doesn’t have the staff that they used to due to budget cuts. Usually they can only focus on the bands that are getting the most depredation.

Pete Paris started using guard dogs but couldn’t use them during lambing time because his bands lambed on open range, with the sheep widely scattered.

During that time he had to gather the guard dogs because there was no one to feed them. After bunching the sheep up again, if the coyotes started killing lambs it was difficult to stop them. Even with a guard dog, the coyotes still kept killing sheep.

Several years ago he started teaching his herders to become better shots and to try to actually kill the coyote rather than just scare it away. If a coyote gets shot at, he gets used to that. If you shoot at him in the morning he runs away, but that night will sneak back in and kill lambs.

He told his herders to not shoot unless they thought they could hit the coyote. The coyotes get braver and if you don’t shoot they will come closer. The herders were afraid the coyote would kill lambs if he came clos-

er. Even if he kills a few lambs, coming closer gives the herder a better chance to shoot him. By contrast, if a person simply scares the coyote away the first day and he stays all summer he might kill 50 or 60 lambs.

Another thing he told his herders was to pay attention to details and try to pinpoint where the coyotes are howling, because this may be where their den is located. Then when the trapper comes, he doesn’t have to search thousands of acres. The trapper can more readily locate the tracks and patterns of travel.

Ranchers can still use traps, and can also call the coyotes to shoot them. The aerial hunting is a big help, especially if there is a ground crew with good dogs to help coordinate the aerial hunt.

The coyotes get smart about the airplane and hide. The sheepherder can tell the ground trapper where the coyotes are and the ground trapper goes in first with his dogs and has radio contact with the plane. If the plane is hunting close enough to where it can be back in five minutes, the person with the dogs can call for the airplane when the coyotes are located.

Wolves Are Hindering Coyote Control Programs – When wolves are present and protected, not only are ranchers limited in what they can do to the wolves, but when they are trying to deal with and control other predators some of the traditional tools may be limited/restricted because of the possibility they might endanger a wolf. This can impact the total predator program. In Idaho, for instance, this increased the cost of predator control significantly.

Jay Bodner (Montana Stockgrowers Association) says that in the past decade, the USFWS has become short on money for predator control. “A lot of Montana counties are trying to help cover some of the additional costs.

But in the counties where there are wolf problems, the USFWS is spending almost half their time dealing with wolves, and have much less time to do preventative coyote work,” says Bodner.

With all expenses going up, and flight times being reduced for aerial hunts, predator control has become more difficult.

The Challenges Grow – Much of the public is against predator control, not understanding the importance of these programs. Some people think that predator control is aimed at helping a few rich ranchers.

But when you look at the demographics of livestock producers in Oregon, for instance, at least 95 percent of them are family operations struggling to survive.

In 1997 when Oregon had NASS survey farmers for every continued on page five

July 15, 2015

Coyotes Part Two continued from page four

type of wildlife damage, a question was included about how much the producer was spending to prevent wildlife damage. Back then, the estimate was 6 million dollars spent by farmers and ranchers across the state, and 1.3 million was spent by livestock producers to try to prevent predation. The majority of that expense was good fencing, but also for guard dogs and llamas.

Producers are spending a lot of their own money to try to protect their livestock.

This is one of the costs of doing business and it keeps going up. Some people who are not in favor of managing predators say predation IS the cost of doing business and that stockmen just have to accept it. Some naïve people actually think the producer can just pass that added cost on to the consumer who buys the meat, not realizing that cattle raisers can’t set the price they receive for their animals. Even if they could, the predator losses and costs are not evenly distributed. One rancher might lose a lot of animals one year while another rancher didn’t lose any. The general public doesn’t understand this because they are not in touch with agriculture.

The United States has the most abundant, affordable and wholesome food supply in the world. Farmers and ranchers are taken for granted, and it is a frustrating challenge for many of them to stay in business. Predator problems are just one more expense/loss that might wipe them out. Predator control programs are never enough, but they do help. The tough economy today is taking a toll on individuals and also on agency budgets.

Recent cuts impact field employees, reducing the number of agents, and impact the timeliness of response to predator problems. More financial burden is placed on the county to maintain the local level of service. The state is passing on more of the cost of predator management to the counties.

Jack Field (Washington Cattle Association) says Washington’s budget for Wildlife Services has been drastically cut. “Some years back, the governor eliminated $300,000 of state money on an annual basis that went to Wildlife Services. This was money they’d used in the past to cost share on depredation— whether it was bird control at feedlots, dairies and farms, or aerial control of coyotes. That money has never come back and never will,” says Field. The need for these services continues, however, so the responsibility falling on private landowners simply went up that much more.

Livestock Market Digest

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Montana switching wolf approach from monitoring to management State’s Top Wolf Expert Moves To Mexican Wolf Program

BY SAMUEL WILSON, THE DAILY INTER LAKE

W

ith gray wolves recovered in Northwest Montana, the state wildlife agency’s role has been moving from species monitoring to management, including hunting.

One of the biggest elements of that change is the departure of Kent Laudon, the region’s top wolf expert who retired after a decade spent trapping, tracking and monitoring wolves in the Northwest Recovery Zone, which roughly spans the top half of Montana’s Rocky Mountains.

He started working for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks as the regional wolf management specialist in 2004, tasked with determining how many packs are in the area each year and how many wolves are in each pack.

When he was hired, there was a minimum of about a dozen packs in his 15,000-square mile coverage area. By 2012, that number had grown to more than 60 packs, and it has remained relatively stable since.

When Jim Williams, the regional supervisor of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, gave Laudon the job 10 years ago, he needed more than a skilled scientist.

“The reason I hired him, he had people skills,” Williams says.

“He knows how to talk with people and he had good relationship-building skills. He likes to have fun, but he’s also a darn good wolf biologist who knows how to catch wolves and how to find them.”

Williams describes Laudon as a workaholic who will stay out in the field, camping overnight, until he gets the information he’s after. And prior to the 2011 delisting of the species within the state, wolves were an extremely controversial and emotional issue.

“If you really want to be an effective resource manager, you have to really understand why people think a certain way, what roadblocks there are to people understanding,” Laudon says.

“I’ve learned just as much about people as I have about wolves in this job.”

And unlike the stereotypical scientist, Laudon is more than happy to spare the public — and tag-along journalists — the thick jargon of his field.

“The way I look at wolves compared to other wildlife, they’re very signy critters,” Laudon explains, pointing out a wolf scat during a June 5 excursion into the Salish range behind Blacktail Mountain, where he’s looking for a pack that had denned in the area for the past several years.

It’s a tracking strategy he af-

fectionately refers to as “collar and foller,” using radio telemetry to locate a radio-collared individual, and thereby locate the pack.

Out of an estimated 67 packs in his tracking area, about 12 have a collared wolf in them, helping Laudon cut down on the amount of time spent searching each pack’s roughly 200 square miles of territory.

Using knowledge of the pack’s whereabouts from prior years, some are easy to locate, denning in the same place year after year to raise the latest litter of pups.

Then it’s a matter of sneaking in undetected, attaching a wildlife camera to a tree, and sneaking out to later collect the SD card and count the number of pups and adults.

But the pack he’s looking for has vanished to another spot this year, with only some old droppings scattered around to indicate they may have passed through a while ago.

So now he begins winding up and down the dirt roads in his pickup truck, with a omnidirectional telemetry receiver mounted to the top and occasionally causing periodic “bloops” to emit from the handheld radio into which he enters the wavelength.

The stronger the sound, the closer the wolf — maybe.

“You have to pay attention to the topography, too, it’s all about line of sight. The signal can bounce off of ridges and funnel up drainages,” Laudon says, bringing the truck to a halt.

He plugs the radio into a hand held receiver that can tell direction, unlike the one on his truck. Standing in multiple spots, he slowly spins around until he finds the direction from which the signal sounds the strongest, then uses a map and compass to triangulate the signals.

It’s time-consuming work and might fail to yield results in a single day. But without the radio collars, Laudon has to track the old-fashioned way, looking for scat, wolf kills and mud puddles that might contain a pawprint.

“The whole job becomes 200 square miles, and where are the pups,” he says. “But once you have the pups, you have everything.”

For Montana, it’s the end of an era for that style of wolf monitoring.

In addition to the job’s needle-in-a-haystack nature, the state’s new hunting and trapping seasons for wolves have made the job increasingly difficult.

Laudon said the higher mortality rates for wolves mean that more alpha males and alpha females are dying each year, and the pack’s new alphas might have different notions on where to make their dens for the season.

The 2014 wolf count estimated more than 700 wolves in the state, more than half of which live in Laudon’s counting terri-

tory.

Statewide, 213 wolves were trapped or killed by hunters last year, down slightly from 231 in 2013. However, those numbers are up significantly from the first wolf season in 2009, when 72 wolves were harvested.

“I think it was a tipping point for difficulty and do-ability,” Laudon says. “All the time you’re adding new packs, and packs are changing what they’re doing.

Last season was very difficult.

Up until then we tried to monitor the population, but we can’t do it any more.”

Williams agrees, noting that wolves are now being managed rather than monitored. Going forward, he expects that surveys and population sampling will inform hunting quotas, replacing the monitoring work that prevailed when the species was listed as endangered.

“We’re in a different place than we were 10 years ago,” he says. “Wolves are at a point now

where we can use a system where we can talk to hunters and trappers and fill in those blanks on the map to know where there are wolves.”

Williams isn’t sure whether Laudon’s position will be filled.

He expects it will be, but the job description likely will change to reflect a different set of priorities, such as post-delisting reporting requirements to the federal government and working on other wildlife programs.

With his work finished in Northwest Montana, Laudon is headed to Alpine, Arizona, where he’s starting a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitoring populations of Mexican wolves, an endangered subspecies of the gray wolf which was nearly extirpated in the 1970s.

Williams says he’s happy for Laudon but still hates to see him go.

“Our loss is the Mexican Wolf Project’s gain.”

Page 6

Livestock Market Digest

July 15, 2015

Man-Made Drought: A Guide To California’s Water Wars

BY U.S. REPRESENTATIVE DEVIN NUNES, NEWS.INVESTORS.COM

I

n the summer of 2002, shortly before I was elected to Congress, I sat through an eye-opening meeting with representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council and several local environmental activist groups. Hoping to convince me to support various water restrictions, they argued that San Joaquin Valley farmers should stop growing alfalfa and cotton in order to save water — though they allowed that the planting of high-value crops such as almonds could continue.

Then, as our discussion turned to the groups’ overall vision for the San Joaquin Valley, they told me something astonishing: Their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production. They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan: From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side, productive agriculture would end and the land would return to some ideal state of nature. I was stunned by the vicious audacity of their goal — and I quickly learned how dedicated they were to realizing it.

How To Steal Water And Get Away With It For decades, extreme environmentalists have pursued this goal in California with relentless determination. The method they have used to depopulate the targeted land — water deprivation — has been ruthless and effective.

Much of the media and many

politicians blame the San Joaquin Valley’s water shortage on drought, but that is merely an aggravating factor. From my experience representing California’s agricultural heartland, I know that our water crisis is not an unfortunate natural occurrence; it is the intended result of a longterm campaign waged by radical environmentalists who resorted to political pressure as well as profuse lawsuits.

Working in cooperation with sympathetic judges and friendly federal and state officials, environmental groups have gone to extreme lengths to deprive the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of much of the U.S. agricultural production, of much-needed water. Consider the following actions they took: The Central Valley Project Improvement Act: Backed by the NRDC, Sierra Club and other extreme environmental groups, large Democratic majorities in Congress passed the CVPIA in 1992 after attaching it to a must-pass public lands bill.

The act stipulated that 800,000 acre-feet of water — or 260 billion gallons — on the Valley’s west side had to be diverted annually to environmental causes, with an additional 400,000 acrefeet later being diverted annually to wildlife refuges.

Smelt and salmon biological opinions: Lawsuits filed by the NRDC and similar organizations forced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to issue, respectively, biological opinions on smelt (in 2008) and on salmon (in 2009). These opinions virtually ended operation of the Jones and Banks pumping plants — the two major pumping

stations that move San Joaquin River Delta water — and resulted in massive diversions of water for environmental purposes.

The San Joaquin River Settlement: After nearly two decades of litigation related to a lawsuit filed in 1988 by the National Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and other environmental groups, San Joaquin Valley agriculture organizations agreed to a settlement in 2006, later approved by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Obama. The settlement created the San Joaquin River Restoration Program. The program, which aims to create salmon runs along the San Joaquin River, required major new water diversions from Valley communities. Despite warnings from me and other California Republicans, agriculture groups naively approved the settlement based on false promises by the settlement’s supporters that Valley water supplies would eventually be restored at some future, unspecified date.

Groundwater regulation: In September 2014, California Gov. Jerry Brown approved regulations requiring that water basins implement plans to achieve “groundwater sustainability” — essentially limiting how much water locals can use from underground storage supplies. But these pumping restrictions, slated to take effect over the next decade, will reduce access to what has become the final water source for many Valley communities, which have increasingly turned to groundwater pumping as their surface water supplies were drastically cut.

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As radical groups have pursued this campaign to dry up the San Joaquin Valley, it’s worth noting some of their stunning contradictions, hypocrisies, fallacies and failures: “There’s not enough water in California”: Environmentalists often claim that the California water crisis stems from the state not having enough water to satisfy its rapidly growing population, especially during a drought.

However, the state in fact has abundant water flowing into the Delta, which is the heart of California’s irrigation structure.

Water that originates in the snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains runs off into the Delta, which has two pumping stations that help distribute the water throughout the state.

But on average, due to environmental regulations as well as a lack of water storage capacity (attributable, in large part, to activist groups’ opposition to new storage projects), 70 percent of the water that enters the Delta is simply flushed into the ocean.

California’s water infrastructure was designed to withstand five years of drought, so the current crisis, which began about three years ago, should not be a crisis at all. During those three years, the state has flushed more than 2 million acre-feet of water — or 652 billion gallons — into the ocean due to the aforementioned biological opinions, which have prevented the irrigation infrastructure from operating at full capacity.

“Farmers use 80 percent of California’s water”: Having deliberately reduced the California water supply through decades of litigation, the radicals now need a scapegoat for the resulting crisis. So they blame farmers (“big agriculture,” as they call them) for using 80 percent of the state’s water.

This statistic, widely parroted by the media and some politicians, is a gross distortion. Of the water that is captured for use, farmers get 40 percent cities get 10 percent and a full 50 percent goes to environmental purposes — that is, it gets flushed into the ocean. By arbitrarily excluding the huge environmental water diversion from their calculations — as if it is somehow irrelevant to the water crisis — environmentalists deceptively double the farmers’ usage from 40 percent to 80 percent If at first you don’t succeed, do the exact same thing: Many of the Delta water cuts stem from the radicals’ litigation meant to protect salmon and smelt. Yet after decades of water reductions, the salmon population fluctuates wildly, while the smelt population has fallen to historic lows. The radicals’ solution, however, is always to dump even more water from the Delta into the ocean, even though this approach has failed time and again.

The striped bass absurdity: If the radicals really want to protect salmon and the Delta smelt, it’s a bit of a mystery why they also champion protections for the striped bass, a non-native species that eats both salmon and smelt.

Hetch Hetchy hypocrites: The San Francisco Bay Area provides a primary support base for many environmental groups.

Lucky for them, their supporters don’t have to endure the kinds of hardships these organizations have foisted on San Joaquin Valley communities.

While the radicals push for ever-harsher water restrictions in the Valley, their Bay Area supporters enjoy an unimpeded water supply piped in across the state from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park.

This water is diverted around the Delta, meaning it does not contribute to the Delta’s water quality standards. Environmental groups have conveniently decided not to subject Hetch Hetchy water to any sort of litigation that would cut the supply to the Bay Area.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help: Government agencies that catch smelt as part of scientific population measurements actually kill more of the fish than are destroyed in the supposedly killer water pumps.

Hitchhiking salmon: The San Joaquin River Settlement is estimated already to have cost taxpayers $1.2 billion — and it’s clear to me that the total price tag will likely exceed $2 billion — in a disastrous effort to restore salmon runs to the San Joaquin River.

Moreover, the settlement legislation defines success as reintroducing 500 salmon to the river, which means spending $4 million per fish. The salmon, which have not been in the river for more than half a century, have proved so incapable of sustaining themselves that agents have resorted to plucking them out of the water and trucking them wherever they are supposed to go. It is a badly kept secret among both environmentalists and federal officials that this project has already failed.

A man-made state of nature: The radicals claim they want to reverse human depredations in the Delta and restore fish to their natural habitat. Yet the entire Delta system is not natural at all. It’s a man-made network of islands that functions only thanks to upstream water storage projects. In fact, without man-made storage projects, canals and dams, in dry years such as this the rivers would quickly run dry, meaning there would be no water and no fish.

A Three-Step Solution The radicals have pursued their plan methodically and succontinued on page seven

July 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 7

Solar eclipse: Green groups fight sun-powered plant over Bighorn worries

BY MAXIM LOTT, FOXNEWS.COM

O

ne might expect environmentalists to fight a new power plant, but a new battle being waged by California green groups against a solar facility shows there may be something new under the sun, after all.

A solar-powered plant proposed by industrial giant Bechtel on federal Bureau of Land Management property in the Mojave Desert could supply up to 170,000 homes in Los Angeles with electricity from the sun, but it also would make life difficult for about 100 Bighorn Sheep and other critters, according to the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council. Their concerns have convinced the city not to buy electricity from the 350-megawatt Soda Mountain project.

“The green movement is not

about creating better forms of energy, it is about minimizing development.”

– Alex Epstein, Center for Industrial Progress.

“The City of Los Angeles spoke with one voice and rejected buying power from the ecologically damaging Soda Mountain Solar project,” the Sierra Club said in a statement.

“Given the Bureau of Land Management’s recent decision to approve the project, this leadership from Los Angeles is well-timed and makes a powerful statement.”

The BLM approval, issued earlier this month, scaled back the size of the plant and established safeguards for the sheep, as well as fish, desert tortoises and other animals that might be affected by the project. The federally-approved version would have supplied 79,000 homes and required Bechtel to hire a “Bighorn Sheep Monitor” who would ensure that no construc-

tion take place while sheep are within 1,000 feet of the site.

The company would also have to provide water in selected areas in an attempt to coax the herd to use highway underpasses and establish a migration pattern.

Environmentalists want the sheep to be able to cross the nearby I-15 highway so they can breed with other herds and avoid becoming inbred. They claim that even the limited solar installation might get in the sheep’s way because it would be built near existing highway underpasses. Local environmentalists acknowledge that the sheep do not currently use the underpasses, but say they might in the future.

The Sierra Club did not respond to a request for comment from FoxNews.com. Bechtel officials said they will not comment in detail until they can study the BLM’s full environmental impact report on the

proposed plant, which is more than 3,700 pages long. But on a company website promoting the project, the company touts the project as critical to California’s goal of increasing its reliance on renewable energy, and claims the site was chosen with an eye toward “minimizing impact on rare, threatened, or endangered species” selected with sensitivity to the environment.

“The Soda Mountain site was chosen specifically for its excellent solar resources, its location in an existing utility corridor and due to the low density of sensitive plant and animal species,” the company states.

The united front by environmental groups against a clean power plant shows their real agenda is stopping progress in general, said Alex Epstein, of the Center for Industrial Progress.

“Since solar energy – like coal, oil, gas, nuclear, and every form of energy – involves de-

Man-Made cessfully; between the CVPIA, the biological opinions, and the San Joaquin River Settlement, around a million acres of farmland have been idled. What’s left of the water supply is inadequate for sustaining Valley farming communities: South of the Delta, we now face an annual water supply deficit of approximately 2.5 million acre-feet, or 815 billion gallons.

In fact, with the state groundwater regulations announced last year, the radicals are poised to achieve their goal. The depletion of groundwater is a direct effect — and indeed, was an intended result — of the radicals’ assault on our surface water.

(After all, if farmers, churches, schools and communities can’t get surface water, they’ll predictably resort to ground water.)

But the radicals have perversely cited the groundwater depletion they themselves engineered to justify regulating the groundwater supply. This is the final step in their program, since many farmers will not be able to keep growing food if they continue to receive zero water allocations and are restricted from tapping enough ground water.

The Valley cannot endure this situation much longer, but the good news is that it’s not too late to save our communities. Led by the Valley’s Republican delegation, the U.S. House has passed legislation twice that would bring a long-term end to the water crisis. The solution comprises these three simple measures: • Return Delta pumping to normal operations at federal and state pumps. Because normal pumping levels are already paid for, this measure would cost taxpayers zero dollars.

velopment, this is no surprise,” Epstein told FoxNews.com.

“The green movement is not about creating better forms of energy, it is about minimizing development.”

Bechtel officials have said the plant is not totally dependent on having Los Angeles as a customer, but experts say the city’s decision could imperil the project if it necessitates major changes. Federal tax breaks for such solar projects are scheduled to drop to 10 percent from 30 percent by the end of next year, Cory Honeyman, a senior solar analyst at the consulting firm GTM Research, told PV Tech.

“If they do change location or they downsize it or do anything that requires a second review of the project’s eligibility for getting a permit or siting approval, that is another chunk of time that eats into the project’s ability to come online before the end of 2016,” he said. continued from page six

• Fix the San Joaquin River Settlement. Instead of continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an unworkable scheme to recreate salmon runs, we should turn the San Joaquin River into a year-round flowing river with recirculated water.

This approach would be good for the warm-water fish habitat and for recreation, and it would save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars that will otherwise go down the salmon-run rat hole.

• Expedite and approve construction of major new water projects. This should include building the Temperance Flat dam along the San Joaquin River, raising Shasta dam to increase its reservoir capacity, expanding the San Luis Reservoir and approving construction of the Sites Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley.

Because water users themselves should rightfully pay for these projects, they would cost federal taxpayers zero dollars.

These measures would not only end the water crisis, they would improve the environment for fish and wildlife — all while saving taxpayer dollars.

The Price of Inaction I warned of the likely outcome of the radicals’ campaign in my testimony to a House committee back in 2009: “Failure to act, and it’s over.

You will witness the collapse of modern civilization in the San Joaquin Valley.”

That is indeed the grim future facing the Valley if we don’t change our present trajectory.

The solution passed twice by the U.S. House, however, was blocked by Senate Democrats, who were supported by the administration of Gov. Brown as

well as the Obama administration. These Democrats need to begin speaking frankly and honestly with San Joaquin Valley communities, and with Californians more broadly, about the effects of idling 1.3 million acres of farmland. This will ruin not only Valley farming operations, but will wipe out entire swathes of associated local businesses and industries.

The damage is not limited to the Valley. Although residents of coastal areas such as Los Angeles, the Bay Area and San Diego have been led to believe they are being subject to water restrictions due to the drought, that’s not actually true. As in the Valley, these areas and many others ultimately depend on the Delta pumps for their water supply. If the pumps had been functioning normally for the past decade, none of these cities would be undergoing a water crisis today.

And it’s a safe bet that Brown’s mandatory water reductions will not alleviate the crisis, leading to a drastic increase in restrictions in the not-too-distant future. Watering your lawn, washing your car and countless other everyday activities will be banned up and down California. In their mania to attack Central Valley farming, the radicals are inadvertently running the entire state out of water.

Endgame Many organizations representing California agriculture, including water districts and — shockingly — even some San Joaquin Valley cities and counties, became part of the problem instead of the solution, having lent no support to the Housepassed water bills. Suffering from

a strange kind of Stockholm Syndrome, many of these groups and agencies hope that if they meekly accept their fate, their overlords will magnanimously bestow a few drops of water on them.

This mousy strategy, which willfully ignores what the radicals are really trying to achieve, hasn’t worked out well for growers of almonds and other high-value crops. Although the radicals had been promising them a free pass back when the groups met with me in 2002, these growers have now become the radicals’ primary scapegoat for the water crisis.

This condemnation is reflected in articles such as The Atlantic’s “The Dark Side of Almond Use,” The Guardian’s “Alarm as Almond Farms Consume California’s Water,” and Bloomberg View’s “Amid a Drought, Cue the Almond Shaming.”

Sadly, the end is near for communities whose land will be forced out of production. One hopes the affected families will eventually find a more welcome home in some other state where those who wield power appreciate folks who grow our food instead of demonize them.

But for now, the pitiless, decades-long assault to deprive them of their livelihoods is hurtling toward its apex. Meanwhile, many of those capable of advancing a solution are content to wring their hands, blame global warming and continue whistling past the graveyard.

Agriculture groups, water districts and municipalities that refuse to support the two Housepassed bills owe their constituents an alternative solution that will resolve our water shortfall.

Water bureaucrats who ignore or oppose the most prominent,

viable solutions while offering no alternative are, in effect, complicit in the radicals’ long struggle. They should publicly declare which land ought to come out of production and which Valley industries should be eliminated since they have no proposals to steer us away from that outcome.

The Valley’s critical situation today demands unity around constructive solutions. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we must all hang together, or we will surely all hang separately.

Nunes is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He represents California’s 22nd congressional district.

Page 8

Bullies

Livestock Market Digest

continued from page one

lands public and who opposed it.

Governor Steve Bullock recently held an expensive statewide “telephone town hall”, apparently funded by the Wilderness Association to perpetuate blatant untruths about the transfer of public lands movement. The latest whopper came about two weeks ago from a mysterious new, self-proclaimed “watchdog” group which is run by high level democrat political strategists in Washington, DC. In spite of the fact that transfer of public lands to the states has already been done before, this group is claiming it is “fraudulent” to work toward less federal control of the public land in our states! That, my friends, is a desperate attempt to shut down debate, suppress free speech, and stifle our success.

Despite the organized opposition’s outrageous rhetoric and relentless attacks, the grass roots movement for local control has been so successful that seventeen States and the U.S. Congress have now initiated legislation in favor of turning federal lands over to willing states. Fifty western counties and numerous organizations have issued official statements of support. Many have donated time and resources to the effort and more are joining every day.

Obviously the idea of thoughtful, accountable, locally driven stewardship of our public lands makes sense to a growing number of people. Many of us realize Montanans would make wiser choices for our lands than distant decision makers in Washington, DC. We could become a more self-reliant state with better public access, environmental health, and economic productivity on our public lands. And that seems to scare some very powerful, very wealthy bullies who prefer federal control of Montana.

I won’t be bullied. Any time you have a question, feel free to contact me a sen.jennifer.fielder@ mt.gov or visit www.jenniferfielder.us. You can get more facts about the transfer of public lands at www.AmericanLandsCouncil.org

July 15, 2015

House votes to weaken Obama’s climate rule

BY TIMOTHY CAMA AND CRISTINA MARCO THEHILL.COM

T

he House voted June 25, 2015 to delay the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) climate rule for power plants and let state governors opt out of complying.

The bill, passed 247-180, is a major blow to the main pillar of President Obama’s effort to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, although the White House has promised a veto to protect his legacy.

Representative Ed Whitfield (RKy.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s power subpanel, sponsored the legislation as House Republicans’ principal response to the EPA’s climate rule. The rule has become the most controversial aspects of the Obama administration’s environmental policy, and one of its most controversial regulations.

Under the bill, state governors could opt out of adopting state plans for the EPA’s regulation if such a plan would harm electricity rates, reliability or important economic sectors in the states.

The regulation’s enforcement would also be delayed until all court challenges are resolved.

The GOP believes that the rule will not withstand judicial review, so

the delay is designed to ensure that the regulation never takes effect.

“They’ve picked up a shotgun and pointed it at the heart of the American economy, our power generation,” Representative Pete Olson (R-Texas) said of the EPA. But Democrats warned it would ultimately gut the regulation intended to help mitigate the effects of climate change.

The White House sees the bill as a threat to the centerpiece of Obama’s climate legacy.

“This ‘just say no’ bill would effectively give governors the power to sabotage EPA’s proposed clean power plan by allowing them to opt out of the federal requirements of the plan based on arbitrary and ambiguous determinations,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.).

The EPA proposed the regulation last June, and plans to make it final this August. It seeks a 30 percent cut

in the carbon emissions of the nation’s power plants by 2030, with specific targets assigned to each state.

Regulators will give states 13 months to draft plans to hit their targets. If they don’t, the EPA will write its own plans and impose them — something the GOP is trying to prevent.

“Earlier we heard the gentleman from Illinois say that this was a ‘just say no’ bill,” Representative Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) said in response to Rush. “You bet it is. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a ‘just say no’ bill. No to a weaker electric grid. No to fewer jobs, particularly in manufacturing and also in the coal and energy industries.”

The White House sees the bill as a threat to the centerpiece of Obama’s climate legacy, and it has threatened a veto.

“The bill would give governors unprecedented and broad discretion to avoid compliance with the [CAA, Clean Air Act], thereby delaying the delivery of important public health benefits,” the White House wrote to lawmakers.

“The bill’s effects would be felt hardest by those most at risk from the impacts of air pollution and climate change, such as the elderly, continued on page nine

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House continued from page eight the infirm, children, native and tribal groups, and low-income populations,” it said, calling the bill “premature and unnecessary” and saying that Obama’s advisers would urge a veto if it were to reach his desk.

The White House added that it “is not aware of any instance when Congress has enacted legislation to stay implementation of a CAA standard during judicial review.”

Senate Republicans have put their efforts into a similar bill that would go even further in its attempts to weaken the rule and impair the EPA’s ability to set carbon rules for power plants.

Their bill, led by Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), would give governors even more reasons they could cite in rejecting compliance, including if doing so would hamper economic growth, competitiveness or jobs.

The Senate legislation would also repeal the EPA’s rule and reinterpret the Clean Air Act to make it extremely difficult for the agency to regulate power plants’ carbon.

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No Respect For Baxter

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good friend from the Texas panhandle sent me a printed poster of a new program enacted by the Amarillo Humane Society. It is designed to encourage dog and cat owners to spay or castrate their pets. On the front is a picture of a frightened, bug-eyed brachygnathic Pug. The accompanying headline says, NO BALLS FOR BAXTER – MATCHING SPAY/NEUTER INITIATIVE! I admit I didn’t know how to take it… was it a compliment? Was it a signal to the pitcher to only throw strikes when I was at bat? Were they revoking my invitation to

attend the dance in Cow Town? Did they make specific restrictions on what certain people would bring to the beach? Would I no longer be allowed to answer, “I’m havin’ a b______?”

There’s an old celebrity saying that says, “Any publicity is good publicity!” I have to say that in my case, it’s not always been true. It’s hard to deny Tom Foolery when there are witnesses!

The picture of the dog was not even flattering. I never considered myself handsome but coupling me with that pore misshapen, unloved, pitiful, smashed-face critter…was it intentional? You know how they say dogs and their owners look alike…I admit there is a certain resemblance, I do have floppy ears and cut my own hair.

Then again, the Humane Society advertisements feature sympathetic photos of

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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 .

yearning puppies, kittens with matted hair or starving horses in their donor solicitations. I could have lent them a photo of me looking miserable.

Which does bring up the issue, if they claim to have picked the name out of clean air and it is just coincidental, it sounds fishy to me. In my research, Baxter as a first or middle name ranks 1,590th in popularity, between Kimball and Serge. I actually know or have met maybe 15-20 people with that first name Baxter. However, I have been told and/or received hundreds of photos of animals ranging from rodents to reptiles and porpoise to parakeets named Baxter.

In my defense, there are so many other names they could have chosen to represent the program; Phyllis, for instance, Esubio, maybe Chuck or Shanisha. How does Roper sound? NO BALLS FOR ROPER, NO BALLS FOR FITZHUGH, NO BALLS FOR THE FORMERLY CALLED PRINCE. And to be fair, there are women in the Amarillo Humane Society; how ‘bout NO OVARIES FOR CAMILLA! Alas, the name Baxter has always been a burden. In the movies, the men whose last name is Baxter are usually slime-ball investor types, sadistic drug-smuggling secret agents or left-handed ropers.

Ah, well, I can’t complain. They spelled it right.

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

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. BEAUTIFUL AREA, DEV. POTENTIAL - Alto/Capitan, NM – 8,060 ac. +/- (deeded, Forest & State Lease) super location w/pvmt. on two sides in close proximity to the Capitan/Alto 15.6434 ac. property w/ tremendous pens & improvements.

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!

Please view our websites for details on these properties, choice TX, NM & CO ranches (large & small), choice ranches in the high rainfall areas of OK, irr./dryland/CRP & commercial properties. We need your listings on any types of ag properties in TX., NM, OK & CO.

U.S. Forest Service withdraws proposed directive on groundwater

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he U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has withdrawn its proposed directive on groundwater resource management. The notice of withdrawal was posted in the June 19, 2015 Federal Register.

In the notice, the Forest Service stated that “any future actions will not infringe on State authority, impose requirements on private landowners, or change the long-standing relationship between the Forest Service, States, and Tribes on water.” The agency also acknowledged the importance of further discussions and input from states and other groups.

RESERVE YOUR SPACE NOW FOR LIVESTOCK MARKET DIGEST’S ANNUAL FALL MARKETING EDITION Advertising Deadline August 1 Call Ron Archer 505/865-6011 email archerron@aol.com

Page 10

Livestock Market Digest

The topics this month are budgets, enviro lawsuits, toad roads, and kiddy carrots.

Budget time

T

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he House Appropriations Committee has approved the fiscal year 2016 Interior and Environment Appropriations bill. This legislation includes funding for the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Forest Service.

The bill totals $30.17 billion in funding, a decrease of $246 million from last year and $3 billion less than the President’s request. Of interest to many, especially the counties, it includes $452 million to fully fund “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” (PILT). Also included is $3.6 billion for the Department of the Interior and U.S. Forest Service to prevent and combat wildfires.

The bill also contains policy riders, which the Committee says are “to stop job-crushing bureaucratic red tape and regulations at federal agencies… that stymie growth, hurt businesses both large and small, and damage the U.S. economy.”

Let’s take a look at some of these riders.

For the Department of Interior, there are policy provisions that: n Prevents the listing of the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, n Requires the de-listing of wolves in Wyoming and the Great Lakes from the endangered species list n Prevents the implementation of Secretarial Order 3310, issued on December 22, 2010 (Wildlands policy) n Req u ires a go vern men t-wide report on expenditures for global warming, and n Prevents the BLM from studying the consolidation of Arizona and New Mexico state offices For EPA, the most talked about rider will prevent the enforcement of the waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule. In addition, there are provisions preventing any rules which require the reporting of green house gas emissions from manure management piles, and one that prohibits the regulation of lead content in ammunition or fishing tackle, and another that prohibits the use of funds to limit recreational shooting and hunting on federal lands.

July 15, 2015

The Senate Committee on Appropriation has just passed their version of this bill, but I haven’t read the particulars. I believe they are good though.

How do I know? Because Senator Tom Udall doesn’t like the amounts appropriated or the policy riders. I mean he really doesn’t like them. “I cannot stand by and watch while our nation’s most important environmental laws are dismantled through policy riders that have no place in a funding bill” says Udall. Udall presented two amendments to the committee, one to raise the spending amounts and another to strip all riders from the bill. Both amendments failed to pass.

And for those who thought the Republicans in the House would cut the budgets of the land management agencies, you needn’t worry. For instance, compared to last year, BLM has a $45million increase in their budget.

And speaking of BLM, during a recent Joint Legislative Hearing Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told two federal land officials, “I come bearing good news. I think if your employees keep up the arrogance, keep denying access to the land then very soon we’ll be able to dramatically cut your employees back and start turning those powers over to the states.”

We are with you on that Mr. Gohmert, whether or not they get their arrogance under control.

Enviros & Local Community

The WildEarth Guardians have been suing anyone and everyone over the years, always in the name of the environment. Well how about their impact on the local communities where they are filing these suits? Americans for Prosperity wanted to know and funded a study to find out. The study was done by Ryan Yonk, Ph.D., Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice at Southern Utah University and Randy Simmons, Ph.D., Department of Economics and Finance at Utah State University.

“What our study found was a negative impact on household income (in) places where WildEarth Guardians are active,” Yonk said. Yonk said household income is $2,500 less in areas where WildEarth Guardians conduct “litigation for the wild.” “This approach is successful in meeting their own goals, but it comes at a cost to

local communities,” he said.

We’ve known this all along, but now we can put a number on just how much WildEarth Guardians and similar groups are costing rural communities.

Toad Road

There’s a newly installed mode of transportation to keep New Jersey’s threatened wildlife safe. Toads and other small animals have been hit while trying to cross River Road in Bedminster, so the township — with the help of the Department of Environmental Protection — installed a series of underground tunnels to help them get to the opposite side.

The five tunnels run from the land next to the Raritan River to the grass and woods on the other side. Wooden fencing surrounds each tunnel entrance and lines the roadway, making the tunnels the only way for the animals to cross the road explains the local paper.

I’m sure this will start a new trend. We are sure to have turtle turnpikes and frog freeways in our near future.

Carrots for kids

The unappetizing report card for Michelle O’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act continues.

The program spends $12 billion a year on school lunches, $3 billon on breakfast programs and “serves” 32 million children, or nearly 45 percent of the total U.S. youth population. It is also creating tons of trash as kids throw their healthy meals away.

Now comes summer school and the anti-meat activists are still pushing their veggie regimen. The results? School districts are reporting big declines in participation after just one week. That won’t stop them though. Some Minneapolis public schools have obtained food trucks so they can stalk kids at local parks and give them carrots. Yes, carrots. And now their nutrition director is asking for $6 million to bring the program to the entire district. Let’s call it a Have Carrot Will Travel program for the summer.

One thing, though, should be made clear to the drivers of those food trucks. They better not run over any toads.

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

July 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

Page 11

Lifting Ban on Exports Could

Grizzly bears captured for study Reduce Gas Prices as feds consider delisting MARSHAL WILSON,

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wenty-four grizzly bears have been captured so far this year in and around Yellowstone National Park as wildlife managers start another season of research toward a potential lifting of federal protections.

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team captured the grizzlies in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and outside the parks in Montana and Wyoming.

Teams are now starting to trap grizzlies in eastern Idaho to attach radio or GPS collars.

“If we can get on half a dozen (in Idaho), that’s good,” said Gregg Losinski of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. “If we can get a dozen, that’s wonderful.”

The estimated grizzly population in the 19,000-square-mile Yellowstone ecosystem is 757 bears. Losinski said grizzlies have recovered in the Yellowstone ecosystem and should be delisted, and that discussions are going on between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and individual states.

“The states are ready to take over management,” he said. “The population has met all its goals.”

Frank van Manen, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and team leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said a decline in the survival of cubs and yearling grizzly bears is an indication that the habitat has reached its carrying capacity for grizzlies.

“From a biological standpoint, if you can’t fit more animals into the ecosystem, you’ve reached recovery,” he said.

The Yellowstone ecosystem is one of six grizzly recovery zones in the lower 48, with those in Idaho, Montana and Washington state.

Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity said bears need to be doing well in all the recovery areas and not delisted one area at a time.

“That’s not how the Endangered Species Act is supposed to work, and we don’t agree

with the approach,” he said. “From our perspective, to carve it up into separate populations to delist undermines the population as a whole.”

Grizzly bears were first listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975.

Federal officials delisted grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem in 2007.

But after conservation groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, sued, a judge returned the protection two years later. The judge said the effect of the decline in whitebark pine trees on bears wasn’t given adequate consideration. Whitebark pine nuts are a key food source for grizzlies as they prepare for hibernation. Scientists say warming temperatures can make the trees more susceptible to insect attacks and disease.

Since the 2009 decision, state and federal scientists have submitted additional information they said indicates grizzlies are finding other food sources. There are also indications, scientists said, that the sharp decline in adult trees has leveled off in recent years.

It’s not clear when federal officials might make a decision. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t return a call from The Associated Press.

Losinski said he’d like to see a delisting so money spent on grizzly bear research in the Yellowstone ecosystem could be used in the other recovery areas.

Should Idaho take over management, hunting on a limited basis for grizzlies would be allowed and would generate revenue for state management of grizzlies.

“Hunting is a management tool that is used for all other species at the state level,” Losinski said, noting about 50 grizzlies a year on average are killed because of conflicts with humans. “It’s not that bears aren’t dying, it’s how they’re dying.” http://helenair.com/news/state-and-regional/grizzly-bearscaptured-for-study-as-feds-consider-delisting/article_ccb9e7f0a600-57a5-9efd-5291453fa8a8.html

Fourth Annual American Akaushi Association Convention October 30 - November 1, Bernalillo, N.M.

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his year’s American Akaushi Association Convention is set for October 30 - November 1, 2015 at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort, Bernalillo, New Mexico just north of Albuquerque.

Bubba Bain, Executive Director of the American Akaushi Association said, “We are excited to move our convention to New Mexico this year. We all loved the Texas location near Bastrop, but as our breed has grown, we knew it was time to step out and try a new location where there is growing interest in the breed. We expect to again have record attendance and many new Akaushi enthusiasts.”

This fourth gathering will feature representatives from all facets of the beef industry who will provide insight into “all things Akaushi” and where we are heading.

Speakers for 2015 will include Jeff Witte – Secretary of Agriculture for the State of New Mexico, Colin Woodall – NCBA, Vice President

Of Government Affairs, Twig Marston – Red Angus Association of America, Dr. Steve Carlson – PSR Genetics, Ryan Ruppert and Jill Ginn – GeneSeek, Dr. Nevil Speer – AgriClear, Dr. Matt Cherni – DVM/ CSC Livestock LLC, Dr. Aaron Cooper and JoJo Carrales – Heartbrand Ranch, Bill Fielding – CEO Heartbrand Beef, Wes Ishmael – Cattle Current and Clear Point Communications. They will be speaking on a variety of subjects of interest to all Akaushi breeders.

Highlighting the annual convention banquet will again be the presentation of the 2015 “Securing the Legacy” Award. This unique award is given to the individual, family or ranch that has provided key leadership and marketing efforts for American Akaushi.

Last year’s recipient of the “Securing the Legacy Award” was Sterling Cattle Company of Big Spring, Texas and Sterling Ranch of Colgate, Oklahoma.

“We offer a great family-style and inclusive atmo-

sphere at our convention where there is literally something for everyone of any age to enjoy. Our hope is that our participants leave relaxed, refreshed and inspired about Akaushi in today’s Beef industry, “Bain said.

Other popular convention activities will include a Golf Tournament, Santa Fe Excursion, Trade Show, Taste of Akaushi Dining, Fun Auction and Country Church.

“Our message of “Nature’s Healthy Beef” is spreading.

The rare, inherent oleic acid and higher ratio of monounsaturated to saturated fat is key for today’s health conscious consumer. Akaushi beef is still in great demand. The American Akaushi is a proven model for quality carcass and profit potential in the Beef business,” Bain said.

Please visit www.Akaushi. com for the complete 2015 convention schedule and registration as well as other information about the American Akaushi Association.

THE DAILY SIGNAL

Y

et again, the push is on to lift the 40-year-old ban on exporting crude oil. Yet again, opponents claim this would be a disaster … that prices would climb, availability would be threatened and the strategic advantages of holding onto our oil would be discarded.

But what Americans need to understand is that lifting the ban probably would reduce prices at the pump, that American refineries—set up for the heavier crudes we import from Venezuela, Mexico, Canada and the Middle East— are ill-suited to process the lighter, sweeter crudes produced by America’s fracking and horizontal drilling explosion, and that government retains its dismal record for picking economic winners and losers.

Moreover, the legislation recently reintroduced by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, to effectively eliminate export restrictions on crude oil not only would ease logistical problems within the oil and refining industries, it would reduce the U.S. trade deficit, create jobs, increase wages and encourage investment, all of which are good for the economy.

Fracking and horizontal drilling have enabled the U.S. to increase its domestic production of liquid fuels to 9 million barrels per day, up 4 million barrels per day since 2006, and enough to lead the world in fuel production. But refining capabilities have not kept up with the rising production of domestic crude that is different than the type of oil refiners in the U.S. typically manage.

Bottom of Form Domestic oil is lighter and sweeter than the heavier oil typically imported. Sweet crude includes more sulfur than sour crudes and thus costs more to produce and lowers the value of end products of the oil.

But lighter crudes—light v. heavy is determined by the “American Petroleum Institute (API) Gravity” rating, which compares the weight of the oil to the weight of water— are more valuable because they are easier to produce and less costly to process.

According to a Government Accountability Office study, Americans could save up to 8 cents per gallon if crude were exported.

Light sweet crudes produce a range of higher value-added products with simple distillation and are generally more expensive than heavy crude. Before the shale boom, refiners in the U.S. invested tens of billions of dollars to handle the heavier crudes from Mexico, Venezuela and the Middle East.

Domestic refiners that can process light crude have reduced their imports substantially, and a number of companies have made investments to handle more light crude. But it is not nearly enough to handle the excess of light sweet crude coming out of the ground.

The lack of efficiency for American refineries to handle light sweet crude in addition to burdensome

restrictions on exports forces oil companies to offer their crude at a discount or reduce production.

The discounted crude as a result of the ban concentrates benefits to refineries when they buy crude at depressed prices, refine it then sell the finished products on the global market at higher prices.

This is why lifting the ban on crude exports would reduce, rather than increase, prices. Refined products produced in the U.S., such as gasoline and diesel fuel, are available to the global market, but crude oil is not, so the glut of crude oil is not now holding down prices. If that crude were available on the world market, prices would fall, which would mean lower gas prices for Americans. According to a Government Accountability Office study, Americans could save up to 8 cents per gallon if crude were exported.

In addition, according to an IHS study, lifting the ban would create 394,000 more jobs on average from 2016 to 2030 with a peak of 964,000 jobs in 2018, increase government revenues by $1.3 trillion from 2016 to 2030 and increase Americans’ household income by $391 per year in 2018. The public gets this. That is why a recent poll

by FTI Consulting found “69 percent of registered voters surveyed favor allowing oil exports.”

This is not your father’s energy economy. The landscape of the 1970s, or even the 2000s when Americans were importing twothirds of their energy, simply does not exist anymore. The benefits of the innovation brought to us by a free market approach to energy exploration should not be allowed to go to waste because of outdated rules.

Marshal Wilson, a 2014 graduate of New Mexico State University, just completed the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation. He and his family ranch near Carrizozo, New Mexico.

Page 12

Livestock Market Digest

July 15, 2015

Eminent domain abuse violates private property rights

BY REP. TOM REED (R-N.Y.) THE HILL.COM

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ince our country was founded, private property has served as a cornerstone of our freedoms. The constitutional right to private property is based on the principle that government should not unreasonably interfere with the use of one’s property.

In the Declaration of Colonial Rights, the First Continental Congress explicitly stated that, “[Americans] are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power … a right to dispose of either without their consent.”

This served as the foundation for the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, “No person shall be deprived of … property, without due process of law.” This provision, known as the Takings Clause, protects citizens from unreasonable government seizure of private property.

The government has repeatedly cited the Takings Clause as justification for taking private property without the landowner’s consent. Although this practice, known as “eminent domain,” has occurred since the early days of our country, the government had been restricted from taking private property except when required for the public good, such as building a fort during a time of war.

However, a Supreme Court decision in 2005 severally undermined the protections afforded by the Takings Clause and greatly expanded the government’s power to seize private property.

In Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court held that “economic development” constituted a “public use” that justified the taking of private property through eminent domain.

According to this decision, the government can utilize eminent domain to seize your property whenever the government deems it necessary for “economic devel-

opment.”

Consider the implications of this decision: If the government decides to undertake an “economic development” project, the government can seize your family-owned farm and sell the property to a private developer to build a new factory.

In the dissenting opinion to the Kelo decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that this expansion of the Takings Clause subverted the constitutional limitation on the government’s power: “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner.”

Is this not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they drafted the Fifth Amendment.

The Kelo decision is based on the premise that “Big Government” is more capable of determining what serves the best interest of local landowners than the landowners themselves. To understand the flaws of this perspective, look no further than New London, Conn.: the city confiscated Ms. Kelo’s home so that a pharmaceutical corporation could build a new facility.

The city claimed that seizing this property under eminent domain was necessary to complete a “redevelopment project.”

Today, 10 years after the Kelo decision, the property where Ms. Kelo’s home once stood is a vacant and desolate lot. After spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money and forcing sev-

eral hard-working families from their homes, this economic development plan was a complete failure. The abandoned 90-acre lot in the heart of New London is a chilling example of the danger posed by government overreach and intrusion into the lives of American citizens.

As illustrated by this example, the power to take property through eminent domain is frequently abused by the government for unnecessary and unreasonable purposes. This practice harms landowners by forcing them to expend their valuable resources (through expensive legal proceedings) to simply keep the property they have owned for decades. This is inherently unfair to hard-working Americans.

Eminent domain takings are especially concerning in the context of “urban renewal.” According to Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, transferring property to private interests (for “economic development”) tends to “victimize the poor, racial minorities, and the politically weak.” Mr. Somin points out that eminent domain takings “disproportionately occur in poor and minority neighborhoods,” which inflicts “great harm” on the individual landowners and their communities.

I care about the rights of landowners. The constitutional right to private property must be defended. That is why I created the Private Property Rights Caucus and introduced the Defense of

Property Rights Act. The Private Property Rights Caucus provides a platform to educate members of Congress on the importance of property rights, demonstrate how landowners across the country are being adversely affected by government action, and discuss practical solutions to protect the constitutional rights of property owners.

The Defense of Property Rights Act provides a practical solution. This legislation protects landowners by creating a safeguard against unfair and unreasonable government actions that violate their property rights. This provides citizens with an opportunity to seek redress in federal court when government action significantly impairs the value of their property or unreasonably restricts the use of their property.

As Americans, we must not be complacent when the government infringes on our individual liberties and restricts our constitutional rights; we must ensure that government is kept in check and does not overreach the limitations placed on its power. The Defense of Property Rights Act is an important and necessary step toward achieving that objective and keeping government in its proper place. That serves the interests of the people rather than the interests of “Big Government.”

Reed has served as a representative of New York since 2010 and is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee. He is chairman of the Private Property Rights Caucus.

Steelman joins Purina Animal Nutrition research team

P

urina Animal Nutrition announces the hiring of Samantha Steelman, Ph.D. as a senior scientist on the research team at the Purina Animal Nutrition Center in Gray Summit, Mo. Steelman’s knowledge of animal health began on her neighbor’s farm and in the equine show ring as a child.

Throughout her academic career, she expanded that knowledge base from animal science into human medical science.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in equine science from Colorado State University and a master’s degree in animal science from Texas A&M University. Steelman earned her Ph.D. in medical science while studying human cardiovascular physiology and the effects of stroke on cerebral vascular structure at Texas A&M’s Health Science Center. Prior to joining Purina Animal Nutrition, Steelman worked as a postdoctoral research associate

at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Her work focused on using functional genomics to study equine laminitis.

“Steelman’s experience with animals and in research will be a strong addition to the Purina Animal Nutrition Center team,” says Cindie Luhman, Ph.D., vice president of research and development with Purina Animal Nutrition. “Her work will support our commitment to doing what’s best for animals, our commitment to research innovation and the continuous improvement of our nutrition solutions.”

In her role at the animal health research laboratory, Steelman will lead a team that studies how nutrition impacts the health and immune systems of animals of all species.

To date, more than 24,000 studies have been conducted at the Purina Animal Nutrition Center, and tens of thousands

of ingredient and nutrient combinations have been evaluated to create the best animal feed.

This is just scratching the surface of understanding all the ways proper animal nutrition contributes to efficiency, productivity, longevity and health of animals.

“Growing up with Arabian horses, I knew Purina Animal Nutrition as an iconic brand and a trusted name,” says Steelman. “I could not imagine working anywhere else. I am happy to add my knowledge and energy to the team.”

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July 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

By JIM OLSON

Jesse Stahl – First Black Bronc Rider

M

ost everyone has heard of Bill Pickett, the man credited with inventing the bulldogging event of rodeo. Bill was also the first black man to be inducted into the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Hall of Fame and is often referred to when people talk about historical black cowboys. A lot of people may think Bill was about the only black man to make a name for himself in those early days of Wild West Shows, Stampedes and Rodeos because he garnered so many headlines.

Arguably however, one of the best bronc riders of all time was another black man, Jesse Stahl.

Jesse was a professional bronc rider from the early 1900s through the late 1920s. Things he did while riding a bronc are the stuff legends are made of and are still talked about to this day.

Not a lot is known about Jesse’s childhood. Most reports say he was born in Tennessee some-

time between 1879 and 1883.

Others say he was born in California or Texas. What we do know is he had a brother named Ambrose who also rode broncs.

Rodeo Historian, Willard Porter, wrote about Jesse, “He was a tremendous athlete—quick, coordinated and physically able to respond to the unpredictable action of rough stock.”

Jesse competed in bulldogging, steer (or bull) riding and bronc riding. He became legendary however for his bronc riding skills.

We first hear of Stahl at a bigtime show in Salinas, California in 1912. The attendance of that event was reported at around four-thousand spectators. It was the first time Cowgirls were included in the performance and it was also the first time a black man performed there.

One of the highlights of the show was reportedly none other than, Jesse Stahl, riding a bad bucker named, Glass Eye. After

being awarded third place, Stahl climbed aboard again, on an exhibition horse who had a bad reputation as well. He rode this bronc facing backwards!

Why did he ride this exhibition horse? Why did he ride facing backwards?

Although Salinas was the first big show we hear of Stahl riding at, he had probably been competing at smaller venues for quite some time before. Stahl later became known for his famous exhibition rides. He usually did this facing backwards or with a suitcase in his free hand or on occasion in tandem with another black cowboy, sometimes George Fletcher or Ty Stokes, in what was dubbed as the “Suicide Ride.”

Many felt he did these outlandish exhibitions just to prove he could ride better than anyone else. Other reasons have also been given.

It has been said that Jesse was mostly remembered for winning (or earning) first but placing

Page 13 third. Accusations abound that Jesse was never placed higher than third by judges because of his skin color and prejudices of the day. Many have reported that Stahl put on these extraordinary exhibitions to mock the judges for their placing decisions. Perhaps skin color had something to do with being placed third when everyone else thought he placed first, but if he was truly mocking the judges, that probably did not help either.

It is also said that some white cowboys would refuse to compete if Jesse was entered. Perhaps because of prejudice and Stahl’s reputation as one of the best bronc riders around, these men did not want to enter because they thought it would make them look bad if they were bested by a black man. This could be another reason Stahl rode so much in exhibition.

Producers desperately wanted Stahl to ride in their shows because it pleased the public. It has been speculated they could make everyone happy by paying Stahl to ride exhibition horses instead of competing.

To mock Judges for perceived bad decisions? To prove he was the best? Because of prejudice

and segregation? All of the above has been suggested as reasons why Jesse Stahl rode so many exhibition horses while preforming wild stunts at the same time.

What ever the reason may be for the extraordinary rides, they have become fodder for numerous tales and legends.

After a long and colorful career in which he made headlines from New York to California, the great Jesse Stahl retired from bronc riding in 1929. Most rodeo historians say he was one of the best ever. He died in Sacramento, California in 1935. The first well-known black bronc rider, was posthumously inducted into the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1979. Making him the second black cowboy (after Bill Pickett) to receive such an honor.

Idaho Land Managers Get Federal Grant To Remove Plants That Threaten Sage Grouse

BY FRANKIE BARNHILL, BOISESTATEPUBLICRADIO.ORG

I

daho is among 12 states that will share $10 million from the Interior Department, which will be used to keep the threat of wildfire to a minimum in sensitive sage grouse habitat.

The sage grouse is the subject of an unparalleled cross state conservation effort, to save the bird and keep it off the endangered species list.

The award comes after Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s visit to Boise in May when she announced a range-wide plan to make saving the sage grouse habitat a priority during a fire.

Lance Okeson is with the Bureau of Land Management in Boise. His district was awarded $166,000 to cut down dense and invasive conifer trees like junipers. The focus will be on half a million acres in the southwest corner of the state.

“This project is really important because what we’re doing is we’re focusing on the best of the best habitat [for sage grouse],” says Okeson. “[I]f we start early before the trees get very big... it’s really cheap and it’s really effective. And it’s easy to maintain those habitats.”

Okeson says besides the fact that trees are fuel for wildfire, they also provide a perch for predators that eat sage grouse. But he says sage grouse return quickly after the plants are removed, giving land managers a quick fix in a complicated conservation story.

He says the district will need more money to continue this work past next year.

Page 14

Livestock Market Digest

July 15, 2015

Supreme Court overturns landmark EPA air pollution rule

BY TIMOTHY CAMA AND LYDIA WHEELER, THEHILL.COM

T

he Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Obama administration’s landmark air quality rule, ruling the Environmental Protection Agency did not properly consider the costs of the regulation.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices ruled that the EPA should have taken into account the costs to utilities and others in the power sector before even deciding whether to set limits for the toxic air pollutants it regulated in 2011.

The case, Michigan v. EPA, centers on the EPA’s first limits on mercury, arsenic and acid gases emitted by coal-fired power plants, known as mercury and air toxics (MATS). Opponents, including the National Federation of Independent Business, say it’s among the costliest regulations ever issued.

The EPA estimated its rule, which took effect for some plants in April, would cost $9.6 billion, produce between $37 billion and $90 billion in benefits and prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma cases annually.

But the agency concluded that its regulatory impact analysis should have “no bearing on” the determination of whether regulations are appropriate, as set forth in the Clean Air Act. In the majority ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia concluded that the EPA “unreasonably” interpreted the Clean Air Act when it decided not to consider industry

compliance costs and whether regulating the pollutants is “appropriate and necessary.”

While the agency is afforded a certain level of power to interpret the law, the court wrote, “EPA strayed well beyond the bounds of reasonable interpretation in concluding that cost is not a factor relevant to the appropriateness of regulating power plants.”

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy joined Scalia in overturning the rule, while Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with the EPA. Writing for the minority, Kagan said the EPA properly considered costs at a later stage in the regulation, something that it has done in other rules and that the courts have allowed.

“The majority’s decision that EPA cannot take the same approach here — its micromanagement of EPA’s rulemaking, based on little more than the word ‘appropriate’ — runs counter to Congress’s allocation of authority between the Agency and the courts,” she said.

The EPA said it is reviewing the decision and will decide any next steps — including re-doing the regulation — once that process is complete.

“EPA is disappointed that the Court did not uphold the rule, but this rule was issued more than three years ago, investments have been made and most plants are already well on their way to compliance,” EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison said in a state-

ment.

She said the agency “remains committed to ensuring that appropriate standards are in place to protect the public from the significant amount of toxic emissions from coal and oil-fired electric utilities and continue reducing the toxic pollution from these facilities.”

Opponents of the regulation immediately cheered the ruling, while environmentalists expressed disappointment.

“The mere fact that the EPA wished to ignore the costs of its rules demonstrates how little the agency is concerned about the effects it has on the American people,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement.

“The Supreme Court’s decision today vindicates the House’s legislative actions to rein in bureaucratic overreach and institute some common sense in rulemaking,” McCarthy said.

The rule will technically remain in place while the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decides how the EPA can proceed.

National Mining Association President Hal Quinn called the ruling a “vindication of common sense that is missing in much of the administration’s regulatory actions.”

“The decision effectively puts EPA on notice: reckless rulemaking that ignores the cost to consumers is unreasonable and won’t be tolerated,” he said.

Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, called the ruling “unfortu-

nate” and said it puts communities and families at risk.

“While today’s decision is a setback, EPA has ample information to swiftly address the Court’s concerns,” she said.

“The court’s decision to let polluters off the hook is a huge setback for our kids’ health,” Anna Aurilio, director of Environment America’s Washington office, said in a statement.

Since the ruling only concerns the cost-benefit analysis, the EPA can try writing the rule again if it considers costs.

While the ruling struck down a major environmental priority for President Obama, it is not a complete loss.

Most power plant operators have already either complied by shutting plants down or retrofitting them, or have made firm plans to comply.

On an appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, EPA head Gina McCarthy said she was confident the Supreme Court would rule in the EPA’s favor.

But she was not too concerned about what would happen if the ruling went against the EPA. “This is a rule that actually regulates toxic pollution emissions from primarily coal facilities, and we think we’re going to win because we did a great job on it,” she said.

“But even if we don’t, it was three years ago. Most of them are already in compliance, investments have been made, and we’ll catch up. And we’re still going to get at the toxic pollution from these facilities,” she contin-

ued.

Furthermore, the EPA’s carbon limits for power plants are expected to shut down more than half of the nation’s coalfired power plants, which would also reduce the other air pollutants.

“It is possible that, if the court strikes down the rule, some utilities might not be willing to pay the cost of running the control equipment as much as they would have to under the rule,” Jody Freeman, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School, said before the ruling “But generally the bottom line is that utilities are already headed in the direction of putting more controls on this pollution, whether because of this rule, or to comply with the crossstate pollution rule the Supreme Court already upheld in the Homer case last term, or in anticipation of the carbon rule for power plants,” she said, referring to a case decided last year that upheld the EPA’s regulation on air pollution that crosses state lines.

The ruling also could help the EPA defend its carbon limits in court.

Opponents of the rule, including energy companies, utilities and some states, say the Clean Air Act prohibits the EPA from regulating power plants’ carbon output if other pollution from the plants is also regulated under another section of the law.

While the EPA and its allies disagree, striking down the MATS rule largely neutralizes the problem.

U.S. Supreme Court Denies Review in Whooping Crane Case

T

he United States Supreme Court on Monday, June 22, 2015, denied review in The Aransas Project (TAP) v. Shaw, No. 14-1138. The Supreme Court denial came in response to petition by attorneys for TAP after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied a Petition for Rehearing En Banc last December, following a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit’s reversal of a judgment of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

In a June 30, 2014, decision, the Fifth Circuit panel agreed with defendants that the plaintiff failed to prove its case that diversions of water for use by Texans had led to multiple deaths of federally protected whooping cranes in the winter of 2008.

A lawsuit against the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) initiated by a group wielding the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) to bring a halt to water permitting on the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers by alleging multiple deaths of the endangered whooping cranes that winter on the Texas coast led the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority (GBRA) to intervene as a defendant. With only two whooping crane carcasses and two partial carcasses

found during 2008-2009, no evidence supported the double-digit losses claimed by the plaintiffs.

Yet, on March 11, 2013, federal district court Judge Janis Graham Jack “adopted verbatim TAP’s proposed findings of fact” and held that the TCEQ caused the deaths of the whooping cranes by issuing water permits that resulted in diverting water from the cranes and ordered TCEQ to immediately stop issuing water permits on the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers. The judge also ordered a costly federal planning process that is duplicative of current state programs.

“This case, which essentially boiled down to defending the state’s system of water rights and fending off federal intervention, cost ratepayers and taxpayers more than $7 million,” Bill West, GBRA general manager said, adding, “We worked to challenge and dispel what we believed to be a seriously flawed chain of causation theory and an even more flawed methodology for counting whooping crane populations that allowed for the species to be counted as dead if it was missing in more than one aerial flyover.”

In the Fifth Circuit hearing, GBRA’s appellate attorney Aaron Streett of the firm Baker Botts

LLP argued that TAP failed to prove proximate cause as a matter of law because the chain of causation from the State to the permit holder to the alleged harm to the cranes was too attenuated and unforeseeable to constitute proximate cause. In the revised panel opinion released in December, the panel made minor clarifications to its proximate-cause analysis but reconfirmed its reversal of the district court.

The Fifth Circuit panel that consisted of judges Edith Jones, Jerry Smith and Emilio Garza agreed, finding “Nowhere does the court [District Court] explain why the remote connection between water licensing, decisions to draw river water by hundreds of users, whooping crane habitat, and crane deaths that occurred during a year of extraordinary drought compels ESA liability... the court’s ambiguous conclusion cannot be sustained.”

The panel concluded that the district court’s opinion misapplies proximate cause analysis and further, even if proximate cause had been proven, the injunction stopping the State of Texas from issuing water permits for the Guadalupe River and San Antonio River basins was an abuse of discretion.

West said the Supreme Court’s denial of review allows TCEQ to

go forward with its job administering the State’s surface water resources and GBRA to continue its mission of environmental stewardship of the resources of the Guadalupe River Basin. We all should work on developing a meaningful plan to address the needs of the flock and work toward growing the flock to a sustainable level. A long-term project that could benefit both whooping cranes and citizens is a proposed integrated water power project (IWPP) to provide desalinated seawater from the Gulf of Mexico to constituents in the designated region.

GBRA was established by the Texas Legislature in 1933 as a water conservation and reclamation district. GBRA provides stewardship for the water resources in its 10-county statutory district, which begins near the headwaters of the Guadalupe and Blanco rivers, ends at San Antonio Bay, and includes Kendall, Comal, Hays, Caldwell, Guadalupe, Gonzales, DeWitt, Victoria, Calhoun, and Refugio counties. GBRA provides services that include hydroelectric generation; water and wastewater treatment; municipal, industrial, and agricultural raw water supply; and recreational operations.

July 15, 2015

Livestock Market Digest

The View FROM THE BACK SIDE

Global Climate Warming Change

BY BARRY DENTON

I

have always been curious as to what the suicide rate is among scientists because they are wrong so often. After all, dentists have a higher suicide rate because no one likes them.

Take my friend Joe for instance, he is about eighty now and has been a rocket scientist for over 50 years. He says that being wrong became a way of life for him and he was able to get used to it. I truly admire how well he handles it.

Joe says that he had to come to grips with himself early on especially after he got married. His wife, God bless her, made sure that he knew he was wrong most of the time at home. Finally to get some inspiration each week he attended church on Sunday with a hell fire and brimstone preacher. In a 20 minute sermon this preacher convinced Joe that he was going to Hell each week.

Joe the scientist was just an average American that worked hard, provided for his family, and made his community better through his work. However, as you can see he was wrong most of the time. Joe was truly a brilliant scientist and climbed the ladder easily in his company even though he was wrong. Being wrong was Joe’s life. Once in awhile Joe would have a success.

Normally it was a large success that would catapult him to stardom and national acclaim.

The company he worked for always blew the successes out of proportion to gain contracts from governments. A few years later he would find out that his large success was actually wrong again.

I always admired Joe the scientist, because he would never quit trying and he never committed suicide. Along the way he would occasionally discover minor things that were right and this was enough for Joe. He stayed the course and enjoyed the quest.

If you read enough history people are always trying to convince you that the world is going to end and you should panic. It is remarkable that they have a world of theories that never quite come to fruition. When you question them about this, they claim that some dynamic beyond their control has postponed the end of the earth for awhile.

There is the other set of

doomsayers that studies an extinct race such as the Mayans. For some reason they are convinced the Mayan calendar accurately predicted the end of the Earth. Why would you think an extinct race would have the answers to the universe?

I was perplexed the other day when Pope Francis embraced climate change. I am not sure why anyone that believes in God would believe in climate change. It is quite apparent that man does not control or affect the weather. It looks like running the world’s weather is still up to God in my estimation. According to the Bible if the world ends you have nothing to fear if you believe in God. Does the Pope know something we do not? If you study the weather a little you will find that it pretty much runs in 25 year cycles since humans have been recording it. Common sense tells us that when one part of the world is suffering disasters another part of the world is having their best year ever. There is always a balance.

We also know that man might be able to mess up the earth once in awhile, such as an oil spill. However, nature takes over and those areas come back to life. I am alarmed that man is so arrogant that he thinks he has the power to destroy the earth.

Do you remember the cover of “TIME MAGAZINE” in the early 1970s? It was predicting the impending “ICE AGE” within 30 years. Scientists were predicting that the ice would once again take over the earth and humans would be destroyed.

Now we have Al Gore and his cohort scientists telling us about global warming. We are all going to be saved because we eliminated the incandescent light bulb from our lives.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Mr. Gore is involved with a company that makes the proper items to save you from global warming. Do you see a political agenda here? Create a crisis and then profit from it.

I consider that pretty low. If you waste time worrying about dying when will you live? Besides, in my estimation God will not destroy the earth any time soon as he does not know what he would do with all those mules arriving in heaven at the same time.

Page 15

Little Bird Is A Big Deal In Texas

BY BRIAN SEASHOLES, DIRECTOR, REASON FOUNDATION ENDANGERED SPECIES PROJECT

S

ometimes small things make huge differences.

Take the golden-cheeked warbler, a small, beautiful songbird with contrasting golden-yellow and black on its head that nests only in central Texas and is protected under the Endangered Species Act. The warbler has generated enormous controversy as the centerpiece of a massive land use control plan pushed by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, influenced the 1994 race for governor in favor of George W. Bush, triggered a grassroots movement that resulted in Texas’s landmark 1995 private property protection law, and has been the bane of homeowners, ranchers, developers and others who have seen their property values plummet and paid exorbitant mitigation and surveying fees due to federal regulations for the bird.

Now, an effort is underway to petition the federal government to remove the golden-cheeked warbler from federal protection under the Endangered Species Act because scientific studies show the bird’s population is so large and habitat so extensive that the species does not merit the Act’s protection. The petitioners to delist the warbler consist of Texans for Positive Economic Policy, Susan Combs, a fourth generation rancher from west Texas and a former state representative, agriculture commissioner and comptroller, Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Reason Foundation. If the past is any guide, the effort to delist the warbler is likely to generate

Texas-sized controversy.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the golden-cheeked warbler under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 based on very limited and inadequate data because the agency wanted to use the bird to stop development in much of the fast-growing Austin region. The agency relied on essentially two studies, one commissioned by the Service and published in 1990, which conveniently concluded the warbler was in dire shape. At the time, the bird’s population supposedly consisted of only 13,800 pairs of warblers in 813,000 acres concentrated around Austin, the state capital.

As a result, the Service took the highly unusual step of listing the warbler on an emergency basis that short-circuited the normal process and allowed little time for public comments, which the Service ignored anyway because it was hell-bent on listing the warbler as a land use control tool. Development was the overwhelming reason for listing the warbler, and the Fish and Wildlife Service painted a grim picture. “At present rates, the estimated maximum carrying capacity of the habitat will be 2,266-7,527 pairs of golden-cheeked warblers by the year 2000, a reduction in population size of more than 50 percent,” the agency claimed. Extinction seemed a very real prospect.

It turns out all this was hugely overblown. 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. Furthermore, the warbler does not have geographically separate, self-sustaining populations, which means there is no basis for the Fish and Wildlife Service trying to divvy the species up into “distinct population segments”, which the agency might try to do to preclude delisting. All of this scientific research is a slam dunk because there is no basis for keeping the warbler listed under the Endangered Species Act. Unfortunately, the Fish and Wildlife Service has given strong indications that it will try to fight reality in order to keep the warbler listed. Despite that the Act mandates the status of each species be reviewed by the federal government every five years, the Fish and Wildlife Service did not bother to publish a review for the warbler until August 2014, nineteen years late. In preparation for the review, the Service commissioned a study, published in 2010, that pointed out serious deficiencies with the data and assumptions upon which the Service listed the warbler. Yet the 2014 review ignored the study’s embarrassing conclusions. More significantly, the Service’s 2014 review was a sham because it discounted and ignored findings from the spate of peer-reviewed studies in the early 2010s that provide the key evidence for why the warbler no longer merits the Endangered Species Act’s protection.

Also, there is no reason to keep the warbler listed because if it is delisted it will be protected by a wide range of federal and state laws, protected areas and conservation programs.

Page 16

Livestock Market Digest

July 15, 2015

Texas, 15 other states sue EPA over clean water rule WWW.EXAMINER.COM

O

n the same day that the U.S Supreme Court dealt a crushing blow to the Obama Administration’s environmental agenda by rejecting EPA’s mercury rule for coal-powered plants – the court, in a 5-4 majority opinion

by Justice Antonin Scalia, said the Environmental protection Agency must reconsider the rule because it didn’t take industry cost into account – Texas and 15 other states filed a lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Army Corps of Engineers Clean Water Rule: water of the United States.

Assistant Secretary for the Army (Civil Works) Jo-Ellen Darcy, called then new rule finalized in May 2015, generational, saying it completed an-

other chapter in the history of the Clean Water Act by giving the public greater clarity, consistency and predictability when making jurisdictional determinations. Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi filing a joint lawsuit in a Houston court said the new water rule published yesterday was both costly, and an illegal attempt to expand the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In a separate case, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming are seeking to have the rule overturned.

“The EPA’s new water rule is not about clean water – it’s about power”, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said. “If it moves forward, essentially anybody with a ditch on their prop-

erty could be at risk of costly and unprecedented new regulations and a complicated web of bureaucracy. Texans shouldn’t need permission from federal government to use their own land”.

EPA and environmentalists have said the protections of the nation’s streams and wetlands has been confusing, complex and time-consuming as a result of Supreme Court decisions in 2001 and 2006, and that the new rule protects clean water necessary for farming, ranching and forestry.

Environment Texas Director, Luke Metzger, in a statement called Attorney General Paxton’s lawsuit outrageous, and said Paxton wanted to turn back the clock and allow polluters to spoil streams which feeds great waterways like the Colorado River and Galveston Bay. “The EPA rule will protect

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143,000 miles of Texas streams, including those which feed the drinking water sources of 11,5 million Texans”, Metzger said, adding that more than 34,000 Texans and dozens of local elected officials, small business and ranches submitted comments in support of the rule.

According to EPA the new clean water rule will: • Clearly defines and protects tributaries that impact the health of downstream water.

The Clean Water Act protects navigable waterways and their tributaries. The rule says that a tributary must show physical features of flowing water - a bed, bank, and ordinary high water mark - to warrant protection.

The rule provides protection for headwaters that have these features and science shows can have a significant connection to downstream waters.

• Provides certainty in how safeguards extends to nearby waters.

The rule protects waters that are next to rivers and lakes and their tributaries because science shows that they impact downstream waters. The rule sets boundaries on covering nearby waters for the first time that are physical and measurable.

• Protects the nation’s regional water treasure.

Science shows that specific water features can function like a system and impact the health of downstream waters. The rule

Riding Herd

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Gettysburg and Arlington.

The West is the raw frontier while the East is civilized gentility.

Easterners stamp their feet to New Orleans, the Grand Ol Opry and Graceland but Westerners have Merle Haggard, cowboy music, the Austin sound, and the National Poets gathering in Elko.

The West is bytes, bits, Silicone Valley, Cupertino, and Redmond, while the East is Silicone Alley, Pittsburg steel mills and shuttered textile factories. The West is cowboys, Indians, Santa Fe, Cow Town, the OKC stockyards, lassos, lariats and Billings. The East is Amish, flat saddles and Lancaster. The West is sagebrush and mesquite while the East is Kudzu and Kentucky Bluegrass The East is D.C., the Kentucky Horse Park, Niagara Falls, Boston’s Freedom Trail, leaf season, maple syrup, the Statue of Liberty, Williamsburg, Ford’s Theatre and the Smithsonian. The West is the Redwoods, Bryce, Zion, Craters of the Moon, Old Faithful, the Grand Tetons, Carlsbad, bison, the Badlands and Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, Wall Drug, Death Valley, Hoover Dam, and Mounts McKinley and Whitney. While

protects prairie potholes, Carolina and Delmarva bays, pocosins, western vernal pools in California, and Texas costal prairie wetlands when they impact downstream waters.

• Focus on streams, not ditches.

The rule limits protection to ditches that are constructed out of stream or function like streams and can carry pollution downstream. So ditches that are not constructed in streams and that flow only when it rains are not covered.

• Maintains the status of waters within Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems.

The rule does not change how those waters are treated and encourages the use of green infrastructure.

• Reduces the use of case-specific analysis of waters.

Previously, almost any water could be put through a lengthy case-specific analysis, even if it could not be subject to the Clean Water Act. The rule significantly limits the use of case-specific analysis by creating clarity and certainty on protected waters and limiting the numbers of similar situated features.

“The EPA’s final rule is so broad and open to interpretation that everything from ditches and dry creek beds, to gullies, to isolated ponds formed after a big rain could be considered a water of the United States”, Attorney General Paxton said. continued from page one

the East is home to the Hall of fames of baseball, football and basketball, the West has the Cowboy Hall of Fame... and we wouldn’t trade them straight across.

The West has Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier Park, Big Bend country and the Grand Canyon. The East has the Great Lakes and Adirondacks. Rich Westerners congregate at the Yellowstone Club, Aspen, Vail, Jackson and Palm Springs while their counterparts in the East have mansions in Cape Cod, Nantucket and Palm Beach. They send their kids to Ivy League schools while in the West it’s Stanford and Texas A & M. The West has too little water and the East has too little space. The West is home to Chinatown, Watts, South Central, and the barrio while the East is home to Selma, Hell’s Kitchen, exiled Cubans, and Jewish synagogues.

The East is Jewish delis while the West is Mama’s Mexican Food.

The West is the frontier while the East is the old country. The East is West Point while the West is gateway to the Far East. The West is West and the East is East and, as they say, never the twain shall meet.