The Southwest is a dry place. Thin streams flowing from the high peaks trail intense green through millions of acres of red, yellow and gray desert landscape. Green fields of hay and alfalfa spread for miles along random streams in remote places with little known names. Pastoral and beautiful with little ranch houses miles apart, the grassy green fields are creating a water supply crisis in the West. People growing cattle feed parasitize western water, starving the land and wildlife for their cows and their bank accounts.
Western ranchers have spun a powerful myth about their value to the West. From the country music and cowboy fashions, they have captured the American imagination for generations. They have us believing they boost the economy, provide food for people, and that they help the land with the hooves of their cattle. Ranchers tell us (with a wink) that cows even help prevent range fires.
Their critics can go on and on about the wildlife ranchers exterminate (or have the federal government exterminate for them) to make public lands safe for their calves. We can talk about the subsidies Congress sends ranchers, so they stay in business. We can talk about the exotic grasses like cheat-grass that spreads behind their stagnant herds across millions of acres of public land, or the damage cows do to plant and animal diversity or the fecal pollution in lakes and streams and in campsites in wilderness areas. We can talk about the feds slaughtering bison leaving Yellowstone National Park supposedly to protect cattle from disease. Many books and more scientific studies written about the impacts of cattle to the fragile west crowd the shelves of many a conservationist’s office.
Cattle also reach their smelly hooves into the lives of city people across the West. They impact the lives of people who never come to the remote places to see those pretty cattle feed fields along the streams and valleys or to camp among their cowpies in wilderness areas.
Cattle are drinking and eating the West dry. Hardly a trivial matter, cows are the largest users of water in the West. Half of the water used by people in the West goes to growing cattle feed or watering cows. Nationwide, 23% of the water humans use goes to growing feed for cattle. In the wetter parts of the West like Montana and Idaho, a majority of the runoff from the many mountain ranges gets diverted to hay and alfalfa fields, starving the rivers for urban users, fisheries, and the burgeoning river recreation industry that pumps millions into rural economies.
Two things happen with cattle in the West. In the arid, high altitude landscape with short growing seasons, little other than grass and alfalfa will grow in most places in the Rockies. So, farmers and ranchers grow fodder and huge amounts of water from streams and aquifers is used to irrigate the crops.
Second, ranchers graze their cattle on public lands and the cattle cluster around streams, destroying the stream-side vegetation and ultimately causing the streams to dry out. Cattle trample stream banks, widen the stream and expose what little water is left to evaporation. Soon the stream is gone and the river downstream that it used to feed shrinks.
The streams that survive public land grazing on US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land end up being diverted into livestock feed fields. In Colorado, 25% of all water appropriated by people goes to livestock feed. In Montana 97% of water used by people goes to feed. In Nevada, the driest state in the country, agriculture uses 83% of the state’s water supply, most for cattle feed. According to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, some 3,700 miles of stream are dried up by cattle and feed production every year. So, fish and fisher-people are out of luck in these streams. Salmon used to spawn in northern streams before dams and cattle helped put many runs on the endangered species list.
Ultimately functioning streams are far more valuable for fishing, wildlife, and direct human consumption than they are for cattle feed production. Yet in many cases ranchers have senior water rights for their irrigation and it is difficult to regulate such water waste. Cattle destruction of upland public land streams has been going on for so long that almost nobody notices any more. We are used to seeing our lands decimated by grazing and may not even know the symptoms.
No river system is more stressed out than the Colorado River Basin and cattle production wastes most of the water in this critical watershed. The Colorado comes out of the high peaks of northern Colorado and Wyoming and flows into arid western Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. Cities depend on the river for much of their water supply including Las Vegas, Tucson, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Los Angeles and many of its suburbs. More Colorado River water is wasted on cattle feed growing in California. Yet most of the water is wasted on cattle before it can reach those cities. Many of these cities are facing a crisis as the river shrinks away with a warming climate.
In California, a million acres of irrigated pasture requires four million acre-feet of water per year. This is the same amount of water that is used by 23 million people in California.
The Rio Grande has similar problems. The San Luis Valley in southern Colorado is covered with hay and alfalfa fields and Rio Grande water is wasted on these fields before the river flows into New Mexico. Truckers haul the hay and alfalfa hundreds of miles to dairies in southern New Mexico, wasting fuel and polluting the air. In both of these cases, the ranchers and hay growers have senior water rights and are given great deference because of the mystique of the cowboy and beef and the illusion that they contribute significantly to the local economy.
Climatologists know that the West is warming and drying as the climate warms because of air pollution. Warming leads to higher evaporation and less snowfall. Already Lake Mead and Lake Powell on the Colorado River stand half empty. According to Brian Richter, an expert on western water, irrigating for cattle feed is responsible for 75% of the water loss in these reservoirs. Thus, the water shortages in the cities of the Southwest is caused directly by raising livestock in a region where they don’t belong.
Day of Reckoning
At some point we have to come to terms with the fact that cattle ranching is wasting water we desperately need for people and wildlife. Our romance with the cowboy must end. We need to buy out the rancher’s water rights, stop irrigating millions of acres of cattle feed fields, move the dairies in New Mexico elsewhere, and free up that water to sustain rivers and people. We need to buyout and retire all the cattle grazing allotments on public lands and be clear that cattle production belongs in wet places like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
Then our cities can have more Colorado and Rio Grande water, our riparian areas can heal and the wildlife that depends on them can return from the brink of extinction. Fishing and rafting, camping and bird watching, hunting and car camping can be drivers of the western economy and pump far more into the tax base than the old ranchers ever did. Urban people are flooding out to our public lands in search of these things during the pandemic and they will for decades to come.
But first we need to own up to the problem. We need to see the West for what it is, not what the 19th century settlers thought it could be. In the 1800s hardly anyone lived in the West and people brought cattle from wet areas assuming they would be an asset in the dry West. They are not an asset, and cattle are imperiling the water supply of our cities and of the wide range of wildlife that depends on public lands. It is impossible to overstate the scale of environmental damage the cattle industry is doing and the scale of the water shortage they are causing.
To solve this problem, we need to call the water rights of ranchers wasting water on cattle feed. We need to offer buyouts of all public land grazing allotments and phase out the livestock industry in the West. The kids of ranchers can find new and satisfying work in the tourism or light manufacturing world and we can see our water supplies and our wildlife restored.
What a legacy to leave future generations in the restoration and resilience of Western water when we get honest and make hard choices.
Tom Ribe
I agree, Tom. Let’s get rid of cattle in the West!