Between Grass And Sky: Where I Live And Work

Cattle Ranching in South Dakota

C A T T L E R A N C H I N G I N S O U T H D A K O T A 1 5 7 I own a South Dakota ranch that has been in our family since my grandfather , a Swedish cobbler, homesteaded here in 1899. Since 1980, I’ve been active in various environmental affairs, including several statewide battles to contain uranium mining and prevent the establishment of a nuclear waste facility and radioactive waste dump in the state. I now live full-time in Wyoming , visiting the ranch only in summer, so I lease my land to a neighbor who grazes his cattle on my land under conditions calculated to enhance the land’s condition. The lease limits the number of cows he can run, and includes provisions requiring him to maintain improvements that benefit wildlife as well as cattle, such as windbreak trees that shelter deer and grouse in winter. Clearly, I’m a rancher as well as an active environmentalist. Because of my interests, I’ve been disturbed by a steady escalation of the “war” between ranchers and environmentalists. In 1985, David Foreman, a founder of Earth First! published a technical manual on “monkey-wrenching ,” a modern environmentalist’s version of sabotage. The book, reprinted several times, devotes fourteen pages to instructions on vandalizing ranches: stealing salt blocks, plugging water pipes, smashing water tanks, disabling windmills, cutting fences. “Some experts estimate that 100 people cutting fences on a regular basis around the West could put the public-land ranchers out of business,” wrote Foreman encouragingly. The April 1998 issue of the ••• Hasselstrom/157-220 6/13/02 10:55 AM Page 157 1 5 8 • b e t w e e n g r a s s a n d s k y journal Earth First! noted “rampant fence cutting” in Wyoming, and advised , “Dust off those wire cutters, folks!” In June of 1998, during the Wyoming Stock Growers Association annual meeting in Casper, someone still unidentified drove a hundred miles on dirt roads in the rough Gas Hills uranium mining area of the Rattlesnake Range, cutting barbed wire fence in hundreds of places. “Just in time for the welfare cowboys’ convention,” read signs nailed to fence posts. No group admitted the action, and no arrests were made. Wyoming agricultural groups acknowledge that fence-cutting has increased in recent years, explaining the incidents weren’t publicized because members hoped to keep the conflict quiet. One Wyoming rancher whose fence was cut in sixty places said in June: “For their own safety, they better lay off. If the right group finds them, they might get shot.” Another notes, “Any number of my neighbors are now carrying rifles.” While ranchers in some states use millions of acres of public land, in my home state of South Dakota the percentage is low. Still, in this state where nearly everyone knows everyone else or their cousin, we experience most of the misunderstandings that arise nationally between ranchers and environmentalists . For years, in my writing and in talks before varied groups, I’ve urged ranchers and environmentalists to get acquainted, to listen to each others’ positions instead of squaring off. Though I am highly visible as a writing rancher, with connections to dozens of environmental groups, neither ranchers nor environmentalists have ever asked me to sit in on a discussion of the conflicts between the two “sides.” If asked, I’d explain my views on land use as follows. No one driving past our pastures could ever have seen the difference between the land we leased from the government and the land we owned. My father treated both kinds of pasture the same: with care. (As soon as I bought the ranch, I gave up the public land lease we had held for more than fifty years.) My father lived on the ranch almost all of his life, and knew exactly how many cows a particular pasture would comfortably support, in wet years or dry. Damaged grass will not recover in time to support our cattle next year, so in a dry year we start selling cows in early summer to avoid overgrazing. If anything, he habitually undergrazed, keeping grass in reserve in case a prairie fire or a hard winter reduced the amount of pasture we expected to have. Most of our neighbors do the same, as does the man who now leases Hasselstrom/157-220 6/13/02...