A TRUE BELIEVER in the ranching industry, New Mexico's Bill Humphries also believes that industry hasn't been adequately promoted to the public. He sees threats and challenges all around, and thinks cattlemen's checkoff funding should be used to promote the producers of beef along with the product they produce.

Bill Humphries Believes Public
Should See Ranching's Positives

By David Bowser

LINDRITH, N.M. — "Texans have an agreement with the land," says film star and Texas rancher Tommy Lee Jones. "They farm it. They ranch it. They love it. They're good people."

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs is excited about a television advertisement that Tommy Lee Jones did for the Texas Department of Agriculture earlier this year.

Filmed in West Texas, it is shot against a background of a rising sun with Jones on horseback.

"It was very beautiful," Combs says. "It was Lonesome Dove times 20. The sun rises over the peaks, and he's riding along. You see his hands on the pommel. He looks great.

Jones makes his comments in a voice-over while the screen is filled with horse and rider and the open spaces of West Texas.

Then, Combs says, the camera pulls back and Jones looks straight into it with his arm around the horse's neck and says, "And good things come from that."

Bill Humphries, a New Mexico cattle rancher and former president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, shares Combs' excitement — along, perhaps, with a twinge of "I-told-you-so."

Humphries has long been at odds with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association over the proper way to promote beef.

Why can't they promote the producer at the same time they're promoting the product? he questions.

"I'm not talking about image for the sake of image," Humphries insists. "I'm talking about confidence in the people who are producing America's food."

While NCBA officials say they can't use money from the Beef Council's checkoff dollars to lobby, Humphries says that's not what he's proposing.

"Nobody's suggesting that," Humphries says. "All we are saying is that in the battles that the industry's fighting, confidence in the producer is just as important as a commodity promotion."

Humphries was born in Hot Springs, N.M., now known as Truth-or-Consequences.

His mother's family came to Hot Springs in the late 1920s from Mississippi. His father's family came in the mid-1930s from Kentucky.

"Actually, my mom's family was from Texas, but they had been living in Mississippi for a few years," Humphries says.

His dad's father was a World War I veteran with shrapnel in his lungs. They moved to the dry climate of Southern New Mexico for health reasons. He was a Methodist minister.

"My dad was a game warden," Humphries says, "so we moved all over, Capitan, Las Cruces, Albuquerque."

Humphries' junior high school football and basketball coach, Jimmie Lee Black, bought a place near Lindrith, about halfway between Albuquerque and Durango, Colo.

When the coach moved to Northern New Mexico to teach, he asked Humphries if he would like to work for him during the summer.

Humphries had been working for the Chama Land and Cattle Company during the summers of his junior high years. A fellow who had been a game warden with Humphries' father had taken a job managing the Northern New Mexico operation.

"He knew I liked ranching and liked being outside," Humphries says.

Humphries kept pestering the man until he agreed to let the junior high youth work there the summers of 1959 and 1960. After Black bought his place in 1961, Humphries would come on weekends and help him.

"My dad wanted a little place," Humphries says. "Land was cheap."

The first place Humphries' dad bought cost $12.50 an acre.

At one time, the area had been heavily homesteaded, but a lot of the homesteaders who had managed to hang on to their land through the 1930s went to work in the cities during the war and never returned.

"Nobody could make a living out of a section here, much less a half-section or quarter-section," Humphries explains.

It was the spring of 1963 when Humphries' dad began buying small pieces of land, a quarter or half-section at a time.

After graduating in 1964 from Valley High School in Albuquerque, Humphries worked for Black during the summer, then went to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. But with rising out-of-state tuition costs after three years, he turned south to New Mexico State University in the fall of 1967.

It was here that he met a student from Corona, N.M., Frank Dubois, now Secretary of Agriculture for the State of New Mexico.

He laid out of school for a year to buy his dad's place.

"I got marred in early 1969," he says. "We got the loan closed in November 1969, then I went back for one summer session in 1970 to pick up the rest of my hours."

Dubois tells the story of laying out for a few semesters, and when he returned to finish, Humphries was on the board of regents.

"That story's better than the real story," Humphries laughs.

Humphries says a regent had resigned from New Mexico State and the governor, Bruce King, was looking for a young rancher in Northern New Mexico to fill the term. Humphries was tapped.

"I was 25 years old and in debt up to my eyeballs," Humphries recalls, shaking his head.

Humphries completed the unfilled term and was then appointed two more times. Dr. Gerald Thomas, formerly of Texas Tech, was president of the university.

The board of regents for New Mexico State also serves as the board of agriculture for the state.

"It was a wonderful experience," he says.

Dubois had gone to work for Sen. Pete Dominici, but came back to finish his college degree. He was awarded his degree six weeks after Humphries was appointed to the board of regents.

"In all honesty, I have the absolute highest regard for Frank, both as a friend and as someone who has made a major contribution to agriculture in New Mexico," Humphries says.

In addition to running his operation and raising a family at this Northern New Mexico ranch, Humphries, too, has done his part to better agriculture. He has served not only as a regent for New Mexico State and as president of the New Mexico Cattle Growers, but he has taken an active role at the national level, though he says he has not always felt welcome.

Humphries says he's been through a long evolution with his place here at Lindrith, starting with a relatively small operation and expanding it in good years with bought cattle and additional leases.

"Mostly, it's a commercial mother cow operation," he says.

As the cattle market would improve, Humphries would lease more land, both nearby and in other parts of the state. For a while, he had a 60-section ranch in Central New Mexico, but when cattle prices headed south in the 1980s, he sold it off.

"We're high," Humphries says of his home place. "Seven thousand feet. It's marginal cow country."

The winters, he says, are rough. It's not because the country won't take care of the cows.

"You have to really hustle to make it work," Humphries says.

In a good year, he says, it will cost $100 to feed a cow on the range during the winter here.

"I imagine a lot of people spend $200," he says.

The only way people make it work in this area is because they don't have much debt, or they're subsidizing their cattle with money from outside work.

In the higher elevations, above 8000 feet, Humphries says, 50 percent of the yearlings gain well, two or three percent are never gathered in the rough country and the death loss is high, but about 30 percent of them never perform.

"I've run a lot of cattle up there in my life," Humphries says. "I've lived up high in that beautiful, beautiful country. Those cattle are just fat back slick all summer long. They look good, but they're not gaining anything. It's just too high."

Any cattle raised below 5000 feet wouldn't work up there.

Humphries is rebuilding his herd right now. He liquidated most of it in 1996 because of the drouth. Initially, he leased two or three places in other parts of the state and started taking the mother cows out.

One of the places he had was a good lease north of Tucumcari.

"In my estimation, that's probably the best country in New Mexico," Humphries says. "If you get under the rim, you drop out of the colder winters. In the early spring, you get green grass. You've got a long season and pretty predictable rain."

But the drouth of 1996 kept getting broader and broader until it finally took over that place.

"We sold about 300 cows off that place in 1996," Humphries says. "We've been trying to replace them since then."

He was bringing his heifers back and wintering them at his place here and breeding them, then taking them back to the other leases, but it got dry here and on his leases, so he sold many of his cows. The ones he kept suffered through the drouth only to have a horrible breeding season.

"We rebred the opens and calved them last fall," he says. "We bought another set of calves last spring, and they did okay."

But he couldn't get the leases he wanted.

He's been looking at some places for his cow herd with the idea of bringing his yearlings back up here.

And with one of his daughters and her husband becoming involved in the livestock business, Humphries is worried about the ranches of the future.

"The guys who are going to make it are the little guys that you couldn't blast out no matter what," Humphries says, "or 500 head or bigger. I can remember when 250 was a good family operation."

Still, he says, most of it comes back to management.

"There are going to be people with 200 cows who will make," Humphries says, "and people with 2000 head who won't."

And that leads him back to the national beef promotions.

"Why not show the family that's producing the product and taking care of the environment and promoting and protecting wildlife all with the background shot that shows the final commodity, which is then supposed to be the sizzle?" Humphries asks. "It's got to be at the national level because that's where the other side is working at chipping away at public support."

The "other side" includes animal rights groups and vegetarians.

"Then you've got what are supposedly the environmental groups that range from pretty moderate to pretty extreme," Humphries says. "I think their agenda is to control the land and to control the political and social agenda of the United States. I don't think they're any different than the government. They just have different points of argument."

The flip side of the equation, he says, is that the livestock industry must in some way indicate to the American public that what's going on is not what the other side is insinuating.

"The only simple, straightforward, honest, legal way you can do that, in my opinion," Humphries says, "is to create an ad that shows who the producer is."

He admits there's a deep division over that between the "suits" and the "cowboy hats" in various livestock organizations, but he says he is seeing some changes in thinking on the subject.

"We're proud of what we do," Humphries says. "Nobody else may be proud of us, but we're proud of us."