At some point, Americans may come to grips with the fact that the cattle ranching industry is using too much water in the American West. The livestock industry takes large amounts of water from streams to grow cattle feed and cattle grazing on public lands damages streams, greatly reducing watershed yield. The public faces reduced water supply left in our rivers and streams after the cattle industry gets more than their share.
Ranching arrived in the West just after the Civil War. The people who introduced cattle grazing to the West were largely wealthy people from Scotland, New York, and Texas. Some of them made a fortune mining the grass of the great planes with millions of cattle. First, of course, they had to remove the buffalo herds and displace the native tribes. That was a bloody and cruel process.
Ranching spread over the Rockies and into the dry deserts of the Southwest, which was and is unsuitable habitat for domestic cattle, a subtropical animal. Before public land agencies existed, widespread overgrazing set the hydrology of the West into a tailspin. Grazing caused damage up to the present, worsening our wildfire crisis, the endangered species crisis, and water shortages caused entirely or in-part by livestock grazing in arid landscapes.
The movie industry romanticized the cattle industry workers and the cattle industry developed a mystique among the American public. Ranchers developed a powerful lobbying machine in Washington and in the states to ensure that they could do pretty much anything they wanted and take subsidies from the taxpayers. 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 exacerbated by the livestock industry).
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, 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 plant communities that had evolved over millions of years and which depended on frequent fire and browsing by species like deer, antelope and elk.
We can’t imagine the world before cattle in the West. Imagine thousands of miles of streams overhung with cottonwood and willow forest. Imagine grasslands with knee-deep grass as far as they eye can see. Imagine clear rivers and lakes, and billions of birds, various species of wildlife And people who had lived in these places for thousands of years. Imagine low fire burning over thousands of acres without interference, nurturing the grass and the forests
Cows came in like heavy machinery and either destroyed or damaged tens of 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, compressing soils and 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.
Most of the land being ruined by cattle is public land. Efforts to stop cattle damage or regulate ranching have largely been thwarted by the political power of ranchers. 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 public land 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 erosive landscape. Yet we know that before the arrival of sheep and cattle in the 1880s, the Upper Rio Grande Valley was covered with grass, the river’s banks were galleries of cottonwood and streams reached the river in places where only dry washes exist today. All these changes were caused by unregulated livestock grazing.
Today, ranchers can 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. Today many cities and private industries are buying rancher’s water rights, but many ranchers hold onto these rights in order to maintain their ranches.
Between public land grazing and 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 public conversation about how to remove cattle from the arid West and restore our rivers for people, wildlife an watrsheds. Romantic feelings toward cowboys 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 (despite feeble efforts to prop it up). Arid land ranching will 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.
-Tom Ribe
