New Mexico Rancher Sees Hope,
Frustration Dealing With Feds

By David Bowser

A veteran New Mexico rancher has hopes for working out management problems on public lands but worries about some of the government officials on whom he may have to rely.

Gabe Estrada is Tierra y Montes Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor and has cow-calf operations near Quemado and Las Vegas, N.M.

"We have a ranch at Quemado and a ranch and a permit in Vegas, and we work with BLM at Quemado," he says.

Estrada was born and reared in San Miguel County in the backwaters of the Conchas Dam on Tremintina Creek, but his family moved to Las Vegas when he started school.

"I graduated there in 1952, and that's been our base ever since," he says.

Estrada was on the 4-H livestock judging team and the dairy judging team.

"We won the 4-H livestock judging and FFA livestock judging and went to Kansas City and to Denver and Waterloo, Iowa," he says. "I was very involved in 4-H."

But it was his experience with the 4-H public speaking team that has probably served him the best. In addition to his other duties, Estrada serves on New Mexico's Range Improvement Task Force, an organization that includes ranchers, state and federal officials and part of the New Mexico State University agricultural department and Extension service.

They gather annually to review and discuss various projects and problems facing the state's ranges.

Estrada is not shy about speaking up, whether the problems and projects concern grazing permits, government regulations or noxious weeds. He's dealt with almost every problem conceivable and speaks from experience.

"I've been around livestock all my life," Estrada says.

In addition to his ranching, he bought the Las Vegas auction barn in 1963 operating it for a dozen years.

Although amiable and with an easy grin, when Estrada speaks, he has something to say and gets right to the point. Most officials who have dealt with him know it is wise to listen.

One of his neighbor's cattle got into a patch of larkspur in the Pecos Wilderness north of Santa Fe in the Sangre de Cristo Range, and he lost 22 head.

"It's a very poisonous weed," Estrada says, "and it happens every year."

There are more than a dozen permittees in that area where the Larkspur is so prevalent.

"The Forest Service biologist says that the larkspur is natural to the land and that it had as much right to be on the land as any other species of plants," Estrada says.

The attitude of the Forest Service appears to be that the permittees know it's there, so they can drop their permits or sell them and get out.

"What the permittees wound up doing is hiring a range rider," Estrada says. "The Forest Service won't furnish anything. This guy's job is to keep those cattle moved away from the plant colonies of Larkspur. It congregates in a little colony and it keeps growing and growing."

If the range rider saves two or three cows, it pays to have that ranger for one month. The savings of cattle from noxious weeds pays for the rider if he does his job, Estrada explains.

"If you don't play your cards right, it can wipe you out," he says. "We have a lot of permittees with only 20 head of cattle. If their cattle happen to be the ones, it could wipe them out. I know another man, he'd lost 10 or 12 cows, and you could smell that stench for two miles downwind coming on to where they died."

The larkspur should be controlled, he insists, but it isn't.

"It isn't such a big patch that they couldn't use personnel or let the permittees take care of it," Estrada says. "It's in a very wet area. That plant requires a lot of water, and you can almost pull it out by the roots. But no, it's a natural plant, and it stays."

Like many New Mexico ranchers, Estrada questions the wisdom of some of the government's policies concerning public land.

"They didn't want plastic pipes in the wilderness to carry water," he says. "They didn't want galvanized drinking toughs, and they didn't want any barbed wire or steel posts because that detracts from the land."

No motorized equipment whatsoever is supposed to be used. That presents a problem when trees blow down over trails, blocking them.

"We have blowdowns where it closes the trails," he says. "They have one two or three-man trail crew for half a million acres. Those posts almost rot by the time that crew makes its circle to where the blowdown was. They just don't have the personnel."

Estrada has had his disagreements with the Forest Service but has learned to deal with the agency.

"We came to an understanding," he says, "but we had to go clear to the top level of the regional office to straighten our differences."

He has praise for Gerald Henke, regional range management director for the Forest Service, but worries about who might succeed him. Henke is scheduled to retire after the first of the year.

It is a concern echoed among many ranchers in the state. Henke has a reputation for being fair and reasonable, for listening to both sides of an argument before making a decision and for relying on the hard-won knowledge he has gained through his years in the region.

"When you can talk to somebody and you know what both parties are talking about, you can come to an agreement, an understanding," Estrada says.

Not all Forest Service personnel have such wisdom, Estrada says bluntly.

A local ranger told Estrada that the riparian area on one grazing permit had been totally destroyed and his permit was grossly overgrazed, but when Henke investigated, the facts failed to verify the accusation.

"We took the county Extension agent," Estrada says, "and took some clippings and returned the results to her (the Forest Service ranger) and she said, 'We can't accept that. He's not a specialist.' So we got Chris Allison from New Mexico State University, who is a range specialist, and the results of his findings were identical to the results of Henke's findings. They were very similar to the Extension agent's finding. You measure grass only one way, by clipping it and weighing it and making an analysis of the kind of utilization you have. We were only using 33 percent."

The Forest Service wants 40 percent of the range left intact. The permittees were leaving 67 percent. The range was in better shape than the initial report indicated.

"We didn't overgraze it like the rangerette was saying," Estrada says.

There are problems with the range, however. In addition to the larkspur, there are growing numbers of elk. Estrada believes that if there is overgrazing, it is more likely to be by elk than by cattle. The cattle are tightly controlled; the elk are not.

"A 600 pound elk will eat 18 pounds of forage a day," Estrada notes.

"Those elk are there year around," he says. "Take those elk and multiply that 18 pounds by 365 days and that would be 6570 pounds a year per elk. That's over three and a half tons apiece. The cow that's there 110 days consuming 27 pounds a day, using the Forest Service figures, would only consume 2970 pounds. If you multiply the great number of elk compared to the few cattle grazing there, the elk can do more damage to any riparian area than the short period those cattle are in there."

The only control over the elk is by the New Mexico Fish and Game Department. They are the ones in charge of issuing hunting licenses. The department wants one bull for every five cows.

"We use one bull for every 25 cows in rough country," Estrada says. "Down in our deeded land, we use a bull for every 35 to 40 head."

Estrada says they don't kill enough to balance the elk herds, and that is taking a toll on the local ranchers.

"They don't furnish one grain of salt or one flake of hay or anything," he says of the government agencies. "What happens is the elk will move down off the mountains and onto the farms and clean them out. They go into their hay stacks. They go into fields and take fences down and everything else."

If New Mexico gets a killing winter, many of the elk will die.

But the cattle and elk grazing controversy is being studied by wildlife biologists at New Mexico State. Estrada hopes a solution can be found.

And there is hope now in working with the Forest Service in some type of noxious weed program, Estrada says.

"They're very open to working with permittees and our Extension service and people who are knowledgeable about using a hand spray so they can take them where they won't spray a stream," he says.

"Extension service personnel can tell them what kind of chemical would do the least damage or no damage except to kill the plant."

Estrada says he is pleased with the quality and experience represented on the Range Improvement Task Force.

"Between the experiences of these different people we can make it work," he says. "We need to work together, or we're going to lose it together."

While Estrada insists that the permittees are the real stewards of the land, he also acknowledges that the differing groups involved in the land's management must work together.

"If we can't agree on the right solutions, we can't hold it together," Estrada says. "This is for our future generations. We want to leave something behind that's better than we found it and improve on that."