LMD March 2019

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Riding Herd “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

March 15, 2019 • www.aaalivestock.com

Volume 61 • No. 3

On The Edge Of The Big Empty BY LEE PITTS

No man should have cowboys boots in his wardrobe. That’s fair enough, isn’t it? Unless you’re a cowboy, of course. - Paul Weller

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NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING

ris Stewart wants to make the West great again, and she hopes to do it with President Trump’s help. Smirk if you will but I wouldn’t bet against her. Nevada’s Great Basin is affectionately known by buckaroos and the folks who live out there as “The Big Empty”. Folks who live back east who call it by a different name...”flyover country”. That’s because on their coast to coast flights they look down from their lofty heights and see only sagebrush. The Big Empty is definitely not for sissies or bunch quitters and the Stewart family Kris, Fred and Patrice, are definitely not the quitting type. Never have been. Stewart’s Ninety-Six Ranch is Nevada’s oldest family run ranching operation starting in business in 1864, the same year Nevada became a state. For its first hundred years Stewart’s 96 Ranch was viewed by the bureaucrats as a top notch outfit. When Taylor grazing was first introduced the 96 was known for never abusing the range. The Stewarts use of the range predates federal land management by many decades and they historically ran about 5,500 head of cattle, plus ranch horses and a mob of sheep. In its first century they took zero cuts in the number of cattle the feds said they could run. “Our operation focused just on cattle after the war,” says the wife Kris Stewart, “and our numbers bounced between 4,5005,500 through the 1960’s. Our ranch was lauded for using best practices in range management and my father-in-law was seen as a respected, engaged partner in managing the resource.” Like many other things about our country in the 1970’s, things

started falling apart. “We, along with all the cattlemen of the west,” recalls Kris, “became the enemy of the modern environmental movement, educational establishment. A set of permits that once ran 5,500 head of cattle are now down to about 1,800. We go out later and come home earlier. We now share our outside permits with another operator and we pasture far more cattle inside on our productive private ground. All strategies to survive. In mid June, our BLM use dates ended and we requested additional time, citing our own monitoring that showed we had used but 18-20% of allowable forage. The BLM admitted that overall fuel levels were between 2001,000% of normal. There was ton upon ton of thatched cheat grass all over our permit and no allowable use dates during seasons when our cattle could take down the fuel load. They of course rejected our request for

more time and made us move off.” The feds were building a fire bed like an urbanite might lay down a fire in his backyard barbecue. And boy, oh boy, did it ever burn! The devastating Martin Fire in Humboldt County Nevada started in July 2018 and before it was extinguished the Stewarts lost 57,000 acres of its 67,000 BLM permit and over a third of their private ground, 6,300 acres. Kris says emphatically, “No matter what the ignition source, there can be not doubt that the root cause of the Martin fire was 50 plus years of piss poor federal land management. Once it started it was too late. Inside the first 24 hours, we lost everything. It burned for weeks and took a toll on 9 other operations in Humboldt and Elko Counties.” Before its ashes began to cool the Martin Fire would burn a total of 400,000 acres but all the hysterical talking heads on

TV could talk about was the Malibu fire on California’s left coast because that’s where movie stars and the rich and famous live.

Saving The Great American West Generally speaking, you don’t want to mess with the folks who live in The Big Empty. Says Kris, “My husband, daughter and I decided that we weren’t going to suffer this kind of preventable disaster without telling our story and demanding reform.” Thus was born the Save the Great American West Campaign, a program aimed at lowering wildfire danger in the west by using livestock grazing to reduce excess fuel loads. “Currently, the Western U.S. is burning up at a rate never seen in recorded history,” says Kris. “The root cause is over five decades of nonsensical land management by federal agencies including the BLM, USFS and USFWS. Our federal government has caved into radical environmental theology, and has allowed federal land management to become political, rather than a common sense, science based exercise. Our campaign seeks a fundamental reworking of federal land management in the west, recognizing livestock continued on page two

Border County Commissioner: Ranchers are Scared to Report Drug Trafficking Crimes BY DANIEL HOROWITZ WWW.CONSERVATIVEREVIEW.COM

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f ranchers in our own country are scared to report crimes, not of internal criminals, but of foreign invaders at our border, is that a national emergency? And if their properties are being used for drug smuggling, does that count as drugs coming in between ports of entry in the minds of the media? And if you live in a poorer county at the border in New Mexico, are you as much of a citizen as a resident of Maryland or Virginia? In a wide-ranging conversation with Joel Edwards, one of the county commissioners in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, he expressed deep concern for his constituents in this hard-hit county. “One of my primary responsibilities is to try to see that the residents of my county can enjoy a solid quality life and they don’t have to live in fear for their lives,” said Edwards. “You know, they shouldn’t have to live in fear that somebody is going to steal their vehicle or their four-wheeler or their horses, just because they live on an international border.” Edwards explained that the folks in Washington live near counties that are completely protected and have robust resources to deal with internal crime, yet his county is left in

the lurch dealing with “sophisticated cartels” coming over an international border. And that is scaring his residents. “Some of them are afraid to even come forward because they live right there on the border,” said Edwards of the ranchers encountering drug traffickers dressed in paramilitary getup. “Some of my residents go back and forth across the border because they actually have some family on the other side of the border, and they fear retaliation from the cartel if they cooperate and [try] to do something about the border problem.” As I’ve reported before, Hidalgo County has just four sheriff’s deputies for a county of several thousand square miles, with no law enforcement presence in the border ranch areas south of Highway 9. The county has money to add only two more deputies, a drop in the bucket for an area that size. “You know, we’re a poor county. The average income in this county is small, considerably small compared to the part of the country where the media lives,” said Edwards. Perhaps that is why the media sees no emergency at the border. Hidalgo County alone has been forced to absorb roughly half of the more than 60 groups of 100-300 migrants at a time continued on page five

by LEE PITTS

The High Cost Of Being Cheap

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kay, I admit it: I’m the cheapest SOB who ever made soup out of a complimentary cup of hot water from McDonalds and a free packet of ketchup. My wife and I have been married for 44 years and we’ve owned a total of two television sets and our current one is a chunky box-like structure that weighs 100 pounds and has a tube in it. We can’t stand the thought of buying a new TV just to see them get even cheaper next year. The last pickup we owned we drove for 25 years and we’ve started taking showers every other day to cut our water bill. If I ever owned a Rolex it would have to be a fake of a fake. I could go on like this but I don’t want to waste any more paper than is absolutely necessary to get my point across. I got this way because I was my parent’s banker and had to pay every penny of my college education with money I made on show steers and working in the oilfields. The first apartment my wife and I lived in cost $125 a month and was above the office of a construction company. When we lived in Australia we lived on $40 a week due to budget constraints. My first job as a ranch manager I made $650 a month and in my second job for a livestock newspaper I worked on commission so I stayed in motels that cost $11 a night. The first time I ever paid $100 for one night in a hotel was in New Orleans and I didn’t sleep all night because I was mad at myself for such extravagance. With the lights out it was no different than those $11 rooms. My miserly ways naturally carried over when we became ranchers and I soon discovered that it didn’t cost that much to be cheap. We leased a ranch for $12 a month per cow which came to $144 a year and because we began at the start of a seven year drouth we spent $9,000 a year on hay. That’s $219 per year per cow for feed and when we sold our

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