Dear HCN,
The Esmeralda County
Public Lands Advisory Committee is concerned with an article by
Karl Hess and Jerry Holechek (HCN, 7/24/95) published in High
Country News, because we find that some of your information is
exaggerated, misleading or in error. This commission even contacted
the BLM and Forest Service with requests to determine from where
you received your erroneous information. All replies stated that
they were not familiar with your articles and had not communicated
with you on a state or local level.
Had your
articles not been so inflammatory we would have ignored your
misinformation. You are promoting hostility and misunderstanding
between your primarily urban readers (who generally have no
first-hand information about the subjects) and the people who
actually live and work in the rural West. If you feel these charges
are unwarranted, please reply with your information sources for
such items as the $18,000 subsidy paid to every rancher in Nevada,
and how this $18,000 appears in another article as an emergency
feed check. (The emergency feed program was in Vale, Colo.) In any
event, we feel that Hess and Holechek are deficient as
investigative reporters and we request that you make amends by
checking your information against official government figures and
printing corrections which identify the specific source of your
data. Please do not merely cite some other magazine article. Check
your information with the primary sources
only.
Another item we found amusing is the
statement that there are half as many cattle on the range but the
cattle are now nearly twice as heavy. Please let us know where we
can observe these herds of 2,000-pound cattle. No one around here
has any on the range at this time but we would all be interested in
purchasing some of this amazing breed
stock.
Jack
Vogt
Goldfield,
Nevada
The writer chairs the
Esmeralda County Public Lands Advisory
Commission.
The
writers reply:
Dear Esmeralda
County Public Lands Advisory Commission:
Many
things have changed since the turn of the century. Three of them –
the result largely of better cattle breeding – are the size of
cows, higher weaning weights and larger calf crops. What this means
is that on a per cow basis in a cow-calf operation, ranchers are
able to grow almost double the poundage of beef that they did in
bygone days. When you add in the reduction of cattle numbers on
public lands, things zero out. In other words, total grass consumed
by cows on public lands has stayed relatively constant since 1935,
contributing to what we call chronic overstocking. The original
research – with primary references – is found in an article by Dr.
Larry Foster titled “Half a Century of Change” in the April 1982
issue of Rangelands.
You are right to be worried
about wrong information, but in the matter of emergency feed you
are dead wrong. First, the Nevada information you challenge was
originally presented in an essay by Hess in the June 1995 issue of
Reason and later published by Holechek and Hess in the August 1995
issue of Rangelands. We never wrote, as you claim, that “every
rancher in Nevada” receives an $18,000 relief check for emergency
feed. Instead, we wrote, “Nevada ranchers, the most vocal of
sagebrush rebels and the most intent on kicking Uncle Sam out of
the West, receive on average $18,000 per year for every man and
woman in the program.” In other words, the Nevada ranchers who
participate in the program make out like welfare
bandits.
Finally, the emergency feed program is
Westwide – from Vale, Ore. (not Vale, Colo.) to Las Cruces, N.M.
Also, your investigative skills are way off the mark. If you had
taken the time to read our writings rather than fume over them, you
would have known that the emergency feed program is not part of the
Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service. It is a U.S.
Department of Agriculture program run out of the Farm Service
Administration that liberally rewards public-land ranchers. Oh, and
the data. You can obtain the raw emergency feed data we used from
Richard Pazdalski, USDA-ASCS Budget Division at 202/720-5148. Hope
this helps.
Karl Hess Jr. and
Jerry L. Holechek
Las Cruces, New
Mexico
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Hess and Holechek were wrong on grazing.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
