At some point, Americans need to come to grips with the fact that the cattle ranching industry is using far too much water in the American West. Ranching damages almost all watersheds in the West through rampant overgrazing. Further, the livestock industry takes large amounts of water from streams to grow cattle feed. The rest of us get to fight over the reduced water supply left in our rivers and streams.
Ranching arrived in a serious way in the West just after the Civil War. The people who introduced cattle grazing to the West were mostly wealthy people from Scotland, New York and Texas. Some of them made a fortune mining the grass of the dry great planes with millions of cattle. First, of course, they had to destroy the buffalo herds and displace the native tribes. That was a bloody and cruel process that was nothing short of genocide.
Ranching spread over the Rockies and into the dry deserts of the Southwest, which was and is completely unsuitable habitat for domestic cattle, a subtropical species. Before public land agencies existed, widespread overgrazing set the ecology of the West into a tailspin. Grazing caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage up to the present, with our wildfire crisis, endangered species crisis, and water shortages all caused entirely or in-part by livestock grazing in arid landscapes.
The movie industry romanticized the cattle industry workers (called “cowboys”) and the cattle industry developed a mystique among the American public. Ranchers developed a powerful lobbying machine in Washington and in the states to insure that they could do pretty much anything they wanted and take subsidies from the taxpayers for an untenable business. Politicians have been beholden to ranching ever since, even as the West urbanizes and faces an unprecedented crisis brought on by climate change (which is greatly exacerbated by the livestock industry).
Let’s be clear about what is going on in the West. Wallace Stegner and John Wesley Powell pointed out that you cannot farm west of the 100th meridian without irrigation. (Parts of the Pacific Northwest are an exception to this rule.) As cattle ranching became America’s first corporate industry in the 1870s, people in the rural West thought they could get a piece of the money-pie so they brought cows into the deserts and the arid Rocky Mountains and the east slopes of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades.
These cows were introduced into ecosystems where no similar native animal had ever lived. They were introduced into delicately balanced arid plant communities that had evolved over millions of years and which depended on frequent fire and browsing by light species like deer, antelope and elk.
Cows came in like heavy machinery and either destroyed or damaged millions of acres of native plant communities. They denuded the deserts, trampled streams, stripped vegetation from along streams and rivers, trampled springs into mud and caused water tables to drop. They laid open the ground, creating ideal habitat for exotic super-weeds like cheatgrass, knapweed and leafy spurge. Streams dried up, watersheds that used to yield clear water from rain and snow, became dry basins, producing sporadic muddy floods rather that a flow of clear water.
To make matters worse, most of the land being ruined by cattle is public land. Efforts to stop cattle damage or regulate ranching have been largely been thwarted by the political power of ranchers and their organizations. And the public is used to seeing cattle on our land and seeing their damage. Conservationists find it hard to get people to take the overgrazing problem seriously. After all, most of the West has been overgrazed since just after the Civil War and nobody can remember how the land looked before.
People often don’t notice long term degradation of the land, especially if degradation takes place over generations. We are born into a place and we see it without questioning its history. For example, the northern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico is sparsely vegetated and cut by deep gullies (called arroyos locally). Little grass grows and juniper shrubs dot the landscape. Yet we know that before the arrival of sheep and cattle in the 1880s, the valley was covered with grass, the river’s banks were galleries of cottonwood and streams reached the river in places where dry washes exist today. All of these changes were caused by unregulated livestock grazing.
Today, ranchers are able to turn cattle loose on national forest or BLM lands with little regulation or oversight. Cattle gather in the stream corridors and around springs. As they denude the land of grass cover and trample stream banks, the streams widen and dry out. Riparian vegetation like cottonwood and willow die and rain runs off in dirty torrents rather than soaking in among grasses. The streams yield little water as a result. And with streams ruined by cattle, rivers decline and people face a water supply crisis in the whole Rio Grande Valley.
What water makes it off the national forest often enters private land throughout the West. Ranchers irrigate hay and alfalfa fields along thousands of miles of Western streams. Some of the irrigation water returns to the stream but much of it evaporates or goes into the grass which then goes into cows. And ranchers often have senior water rights to these streams. Today many cities and private industries are buying these water rights, but many ranchers hold onto these rights in order to maintain their ranches. Water prices will only go up as aquifers and rivers decline.
Between public land grazing and the livestock feed production, cattle use vast amounts of water in the West. According to the US Geologic Survey, cattle consume about 10 million gallons of water per day in each of the four corners states. Yet less than 2% of our nation’s beef comes from public lands. Ranching provides few jobs and little economic activity in the local economies. Compared to the public costs of lost water; lost biodiversity, recreation, and watershed services, the money spent by ranchers in local communities is hardly worth the tradeoff.
Government fails to protect the public interest from the livestock industry that enjoys various government subsidies. As we move into the era of climate change, with major western watersheds drying and warming, we need to have a serious public conversation about how to remove cattle from the arid West and restore our rivers for people and wildlife. Romantic feelings toward cowboys and their lifestyles will have to give way to hard reality as we enter an era of water shortages.
Many industries have faded away as times change. The past is littered with obsolete industries and we can see the coal industry dying now. Arid land ranching will have to follow suit. This will be a hard swallow for western politicians, but we pay them to make difficult choices in the public interest. The sooner we get started, the better.
