Range Improvement Task Force
Founder Just Seeks The Truth

By David Bowser

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — There are no bullet holes in the walls of Jerry Schickedanz' office, but there have been times, he grins, when he's wondered if there would be.

The interim dean of New Mexico State University's College of Agriculture and Home Economics helped create the Range Improvement Task Force that for almost 20 years has provided a forum for disputes between ranchers and governmental agencies in the Land of Enchantment.

"Back in the late 1970s, a group of ranchers came and asked if we could give them some help in interpreting what the federal government was doing," Schickedanz says.

The Bureau of Land Management had to write environmental impact statements for every ranch property with public land in the state. They initially had written a general impact statement centered on areas such as the Chihuahuan Desert. An environmental activist group came back and said that was not good enough. The courts ruled the reviews had to be specific down to an individual ranch allotment basis.

BLM began an inventory process in the middle 1970s to determine carrying capacity, to determine problems on individual allotments, and to write descriptive plans for each one.

"That was when ranchers came and said, 'We don't understand what's going on,'" Schickedanz says.

The ranchers were not sure who to believe. Some were told they would have to reduce grazing by 60 or 70 percent of their herds. They couldn't understand why when they had been running similar numbers for 30 years or more.

Government officials would not explain where they got their numbers or how they arrived at their decisions.

The ranchers came to the director of New Mexico's Cooperative Extension Service at the time, Gene Ross, and asked for help. Ross turned to Schickedanz, who was then a young assistant professor of range management. The New Mexico state legislature funded the new program that came to be known as the Range Improvement Task Force.

"From there I developed a plan that included a range management specialist, a brush and weed control specialist, a livestock specialist, a wildlife specialist, a ranch economist and a soil specialist," Schickedanz says.

They began filling those jobs in 1979.

Universities are usually split into two trains of thought, Schickedanz says. There are Extension people, who use applied science to deal with solving individual problems with the best information available. There are also researchers who solve problems, but they do it relying on basic research processes which often involve three or four years, a replicated study and an answer several years away.

Recognizing that ranchers needed some quick answers, Schickedanz drew on Extension specialists who tended to apply existing knowledge. The Extension specialists also had the freedom to move around the state and were not tied to teaching schedules.

Schickedanz also set up an advisory committee which included not only ranchers but members of various land management agencies.

"The initial years were pretty rough," Schickedanz recalls. "We had people on campus who were afraid that we would keep the university in lawsuits all the time because we were in some really controversial areas."

That is not a situation a university usually enjoys.

"We were out there treading water in some new arenas, trying to solve problems under the threat of lawsuits," Schickedanz says. "There was a lot of pressure on us. The agency people wanted us to see it their way, and ranchers, of course, wanted us to see it their way."

Schickedanz and his task force were the keepers of the truth.

"We didn't have an axe to grind," Schickedanz says. "We were only searching for best management practices for these particular things."

They continued on an annual funding cycle for about five years.

His personnel "used to get worried about that," Schickedanz says, "but I would tell them, ‘if we're doing our job, I don't think we need to worry. It will come. If we're not doing our job, then we probably deserve to go do something else.’"

The program was finally rolled into the university's regular budget.

"I think the program has been very successful," Schickedanz says. "It has allowed controversy between an agency and a rancher to be solved without going to court."

They have mediated hundreds of disputes. Voices would often be raised at RITF meetings. Some of the early meetings, Schickedanz says, could get heated.

"But I have not seen that in the last number of years," he adds. "This gave us an opportunity after those impact statements and providing input and comments to issues being developed by those impact statements, so we're a lot further ahead of the game now. The Forest Service or BLM will call us on a policy issue as it's being developed."

The Range Improvement Task Force has also done contract research for different agencies.

"We developed the model for changes in state grazing fees," Schickedanz explains. "We had lots of input into federal grazing and helped stabilize it. That one's still controversial."

The real impact of the Range Improvement Task Force is that it gets people together to discuss issues, Schickedanz says.

Through the years, the RITF has been involved in several lawsuits and appeals. Because of the outcome of some of those suits, Schickedanz says, the group has often been accused of being in one camp or another.

"On a lot of these issues, I guess we probably wound up on the side of the producer, if you can say there's a side," he concedes. "But it's probably a little unfairly branded."

But his goal was to avoid taking sides and provide credible scientific data that both sides could rely on. Schickedanz says the task force has provided a forum for policy disputes. They've also provided training for ranchers in dealing with governmental agencies.

"We've put on workshops and trained people," Schickedanz says. "The ranchers are much more qualified now to go out with the land management agencies on inspection rides. They're much more knowledgeable about how carrying capacity is developed."

The one thing RITF has not been able to do, he says, is get ranchers to do some of their own monitoring. He's tried to just get ranchers to carry a camera with them so they could take pictures of given areas every month and write down what the conditions were on a continuing basis.

"Not many of them ever did that, but some did," Schickedanz says. "I've seen some pretty well documented pastures. They didn't know how many pounds of forage were out there, but you could look at the picture and say there was a visual difference between this year and last year."

Although some ranchers have tried to document their practices, it’s not as many as Schickedanz had hoped.

"Of course, they're busy people," Schickedanz admits. "Carrying that camera along was something that was foreign to a lot of them."

About as foreign to them as college was at one time to Schickedanz, who grew up ranching in northwestern Oklahoma.

"I grew up seven miles south of Tangier," Schickedanz says.

He went to school at Fargo, Okla., where he graduated from high school in 1961. His dad and younger brother still farm and ranch there.

"At that point in time," he says, "I had no ambition to even go to school. I remember very plainly, we were feeding that winter and my brother had come home from college and he asked me about where was I going to go to college."

Schickedanz told him he didn't think he was going to go to college. He was just going to punch cows.

"Daddy said, 'I don't care if you punch cows for a living, but there’s one thing you're going to do first, and that's go to college,'" Schickedanz says. "That was the end of the discussion."

Schickedanz says he probably wasn't ready to go to college then, but he did. He went to Panhandle State for four years.

"My mother said, 'Isn't there anything you can graduate in?'" Schickedanz says. "I said, 'No.'"

He went to Oklahoma State University and graduated with a B.S. in zoology and wildlife in 1966.

Initially, he thought he wanted to become a veterinarian, but admits that he wasn't a stellar student.

After he graduated, he worked as a cowboy for a while and was in the Army Reserve Special Forces.

He was working on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle when he decided to go back to school and get some information on range management.

"I could see a need at that point in time," he says.

He came to New Mexico State in the spring of 1968, where he earned a Masters in range science in 1971.

"I had no intentions of going on to school," Schickedanz says. "I was just coming for some information."

Schickedanz was working for a man who wanted him to come back and partner with him, but one of the professors at New Mexico State, Don Dwyer, talked Schickedanz into continuing his studies.

"He really gave me a chance, because I didn't have the grades to get into the school," Schickedanz says.

Dwyer told Schickedanz that he would take a chance on him if Schickedanz would come to the school and prove himself. Schickedanz worked hard and got an assistantship to pay for his education.

It was while at New Mexico State that Dwyer told Schickedanz he couldn't go back to the ranch. They needed people with practical experience on the range. Under pressure from Dwyer, Schickedanz went to the University of Arizona, where he studied under Phil Ogden, who Schickedanz terms a "practical" man.

"He's the one who really pointed me toward working with Extension," Schickedanz says. "I was never cut out to be a researcher."

Schickedanz says with a smile that he hasn't done any research since he left the University of Arizona.

Dr. Schickedanz took his first Extension job in 1974 as county agent in Duncan, Ariz. He came to New Mexico State in 1976 as a range specialist.

"I've been here ever since," Schickedanz says. "I kid the Extension people that I've had every job in Extension except home economist."

He worked his way up to director of Extension and is now interim dean of the agriculture department.

"I never had goal one of getting into this kind of work," he says, "and nothing I was ever trained in has trained me to be an administrator."

To be an administrator, he says, you have to be able to get along with people.

"I have no regrets of the career path I chose or stumbled into," Schickedanz says. "I never wanted to be boss. I just wanted to do my job."

That job has been a learning experience, he admits.

"I have some of the philosophy of the people coming out of the Midwest and Plains," he says. "I thought ranchers out here had it easy with cheap grazing fees. They didn't own anything. But little did I realize that where I was raised you didn't have to put up with government regulations. There is a real cost associated in dealing with the federal government. I had the view that government's probably right. I was raised that the government knows best, and you need to follow the rules."

The more he dealt with ranchers, the more he realized that the ranchers weren't necessarily doing anything wrong. He realized that the government wasn't necessarily right all the time, and that they weren't always telling the ranchers the whole truth.

Many of the ranchers, he says, weren't prepared to deal with government agencies or government scientists.

"When they came to me with this problem that they didn't know what to believe, that's when I really decided that somebody had to speak up for these people," Schickedanz says. "I guess that's the real guts about why I did what I did with this program."

He wanted decisions made on the best possible information. If that went against the Forest Service or the BLM, so be it.

"But we have also given testimony that went against the rancher," he says. "You can't defend somebody of abusing the land. If you fight for a guy that everybody else knows is doing wrong, you'll lose your credibility. We just try to get to the bottom of what's right."