Good luck trying to convince someone of the profit motive in managing land like this:
Posted on 04/09/2014 8:28:06 AM PDT by xzins
Armed federal agents deployed last week to northeast Clark County, Nev., for what can only be described as a major escalation in a decades-long standoff between a local cattle rancher and the U.S. government.
.Cliven Bundy, the last remaining rancher in the southern Nevada county, stands in defiance of a 2013 court order demanding that he remove his cattle from public land managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.
The 67-year-old veteran rancher, who has compared the situation to similar confrontations with government officials in Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas, told TheBlaze that his family has used land in the 600,000-acre Gold Butte area since the late 1800s.
“I have raised cattle on that land, which is public land for the people of Clark County, all my life. Why I raise cattle there and why I can raise cattle there is because I have preemptive rights,” he said, explaining that among them is the right to forage.
“Who is the trespasser here? Who is the trespasser on this land? Is the United States trespassing on Clark County, Nevada, land? Or is it Cliven Bundy who is trespassing on Clark County, Nevada, land? Who’s the trespasser?”
Claiming that all other options have been exhausted, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. National Park Service responded to Bundy’s inflexibility on the issue by calling on federal agents and contract cowboys to restrict access to the public land and to confiscate Bundy’s “trespass cattle.”
.“Cattle have been in trespass on public lands in southern Nevada for more than two decades. This is unfair to the thousands of other ranchers who graze livestock in compliance with federal laws and regulations throughout the West,” the Bureau of Land Management stated on its website about the case.
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(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...
The density is an average. You’ll have more around a watering hole, but the watering holes are spread out.
The time frame is by contract. I don’t remember when cattle are run on the state land near me. As a practical matter, I’ve spotted on cowboy working them one time during 8 years in the area. There are some pens built for handling the steers, but I’ve jogged the area for years at a time without seeing any cattle there.
An aerial photo would make it clearer. You have small areas of land that can support cattle for a time embedded in a lot of land where prickly pear is the only forage.
A friend of mine runs cattle and sheep in Utah. He trucks the animals back and forth depending on where he has permits and what part of the year. He raises hay to feed them for a week or two at a time between contracts. He prefers private land if he can find it. He once had the BLM tell him they were cutting all the grazing in an area by 50%. He said so what, I’m running only 20% of my allotment. They said they were cutting based on what people were running, not what they paid for.
That is why folks don’t like working with the feds. The decision to make the cut was made by a guy who had never set foot on the area being grazed, and it nearly drove my friend out of business. Over the years, he has learned to take that into account when bidding for grazing.
In the 90s, they cut out all of his sheep grazing in an area because they were afraid his sheep would make the Mtn Bighorns sick. 15 years later, a disease swept thru the area and killed all the bighorns. He said he was just glad no one could blame his sheep...
“You are a BIG GOV’T defender”
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“I’m not your little secretary who is here to prove or disprove every fact.”
I’d be content if you stopped making them up. In a debate, facts matter.
Cattle are rounded up with helicopters in a lot of private ranches. It is done because it works and is cost effective in some areas. If it killed the cattle and calves, the private rancher wouldn’t pay to have it done.
Actually, he’s not on his own. Video of protesters here. Things are heating up. BLM using dogs and tasers.
Sean Hannity seemed really sympathetic to the man last night.
After that piece, I agree that there’s no reason that forage should go to waste. Hannity claims that such forage reduces food costs. Hannity also claims the price the fees the fed wants are crazy.
I was glad to hear the old man refuse to say that he was going violent. He just said that they intend to do what they have to do to get their freedom back.
The forage might ‘go to waste’ if there is an endangered species there. I strongly dislike our endangered species laws. I think they are both a waste of time and counterproductive. However, I cannot blame a government agency when it obeys the law. Obeying the law is all too rare now!
But this dispute is centered on one thing - the rancher refusing to PAY for the forage his cattle consume as part of his business. He wants free food for his cattle. No other rancher gets a deal like that.
If the fed charge too much, go elsewhere. However, what you will find is that the fed will be able to sell their ‘product’ to someone else. That person may truck their cattle in and out, like my friend does. The feds write contracts that are a pain in the butt to work with, so the feds get paid less than a private owner. The rancher needs to factor in the pain as part of his operating costs because the feds reserve the right to cut the number of cattle allowed to graze at any time without warning.
But in the end, it is a free market system. Ranchers choose to buy grazing rights from the feds or from somewhere else. My friend has bought grazing in 3 states while operating a base farm of around 300 acres. That is pretty normal in the west.
Why should this guy get for free what all other ranchers pay market value for?
As for Hannity...what does Hannity know about western ranching?
He had the guy on his show and let the old man talk. It was good to see. He seemed determined.
I don’t think the government should be in the land owning business. I’ve said that.
Now...to the EXTENT that the government directly spends money on this particular property to caretaker it, I can see a cost reimbursement plan of some sort. I would be ok with, since the idea is to sell the cattle, that the caretaker fee be taken out of the sale price of each head feeding on that property at point of sale. If each steer takes a square mile of forage to be fattened in a year’s time, then any direct cost divided by all their square miles of that region only would be fair, don’t you think?
Fair cost is best determined by the market. As I said, the feds are a pain to deal with, and that pain needs to be factored in to what a rancher is willing to pay. What I do not accept is the idea that this rancher is special and deserves to get for free what every other rancher pays for. Those payments help fund improvements and the operating costs to manage...and the dust bowl years gave birth to the management.
I have no desire to lose public lands. They were provided for in the Constitution, and the original states gave huge chunks of land to the federal government - so the concept is not foreign to our Constitution.
We spent 150 years giving land away. It often failed because people didn’t understand that in the west, it is WATER that matters, not land. There is a long tradition of ‘common land’, and it is reasonable for that common land to be managed for the common good.
I don’t want the government in the managing or owning business when there are individuals who want to own it. As I mentioned to someone last night, I have Swain county, NC relatives who lost perfectly good property to the feds for the Smoky Mountain park...and Al Gore tried to steal more of it at the end of the Clinton era.
They just want to provide nice things for their own polluted selves and overcrowded populations. They should fix their own damn land and leave us alone.
But they make deals that you’re not legally allowed to refuse.
Good luck trying to convince someone of the profit motive in managing land like this:
When the westward settlement of the nation was happening do you think open range was wrong then?
Assuming one could get past all of the environmental nonsense, and depending on proximity to civilization, land like that is excellent for off road use.
Motorcycles, quads, sand rails, mountain bikes, etc...
But that’s really about all...very slim demographic/customer base. But there is money to be made, a town near here created an off road area for dirt bikes, quads and such and in the nicer months of the year, there are lots of folks there.
This photo looks exactly like where I reside...except we have Joshua Trees to help break things up a bit.
A small amount of land like that could have some profit potential for off road sports. But land like that goes on for hundreds of miles, and there are not very many who want to venture 100+ miles into a desert. Access to water is a big problem.
I would prefer to have the government regulate it for off-road use, hunting, grazing when possible, etc. Government is good for some things. The military is one. Stuff done for the common good can be another. I really do not want Bill Gates to buy most of the land in Arizona to run on his personal whim...
“When the westward settlement of the nation was happening do you think open range was wrong then?”
It failed, which is why management started. The overgrazing and abusive timber practices of the late 1800s and early 1900s were not a good thing. Open range needed to be moderated by a cattleman’s association, and that proved too weak to prevent overgrazing as well.
I’m a proponent of ranching, and grazing, and timbers sales, but open access to resources only works when there are few people to a lot of resources. I admire good businessmen, as ranchers much be, but I’ve also met businessmen who would rape their grandmother for 50 cents.
One of my concerns with modern life is the tendency of bean-counting MBA types to run a business based on what give me the most profit THIS month...because I’ll leave and be the CEO of something else next year. Part of the problem with living in an increasingly godless country is that there are more and more businesses run in an immoral manner.
When I started in the military, a Lt could disagree very strongly with a Lt Col and get away with it if the Lt was being honest. By the time I retired in 2008, honesty seemed to be getting very rare where I worked. And the reports I hear from friends still in indicate it is close to disappearing.
You don’t say you thought open range during the westward migration was wrong, so I’m assuming from what you wrote that you think it was the best answer at the time, that it didn’t work, and that land management took over as time went on.
That responsibility to responsibly steward the land might be true, but it doesn’t change that original notion of the land being free unless homesteaded and claimed.
If someone wants to buy it, they should be permitted to do so in homestead amounts.
In the case of range grazing, a reasonable fee for grazing a square mile of land can be assessed at the sale of that steer based on the actual cost BLM put into that particular square mile that the steer fed on for the year it took to fatten it.
Reasonable fees are based on market value, not what the BLM puts in to a piece of land. The rancher is concerned with what he gets, not what the BLM has done.
Given how fragile deserts are, I would hate to see huge chunks of desert land purchased by someone to make a short-term profit. That was what destroyed it before - folks maximizing their profits in the short term. You can destroy desert land in a year, and rebuilding it can take 40 or 50. I would prefer for it to be managed by someone with a long term interest that can be held to the common will on how to run it, instead of a businessman who may want to maximize his profits this year to cover a loss in something else.
I’m a conservative, but that does not mean I believe government is evil or always inappropriate. The Founders, after all, created a government, and one of its duties was to manage the land given to it by the former colonies.
Would you trust Bill Gates to own the land around you? I would not. Would you like Ted Turner to buy up all the public land around you? I would not. The government management of grazing in the west has, on the whole, been a success story. It certainly has worked out better than what was done before. Business tends to be efficient, but it doesn’t always manage for long term good. After the land is destroyed, it does no good to say, “But at least the owner is now out of business”.
Here is another question for you: Do you believe all zoning laws are evil and should be immediately repealed?
USA cannot have anymore USG Waco style massacres. It used to be _very_well_ established law, that there is _no_ Federal police power. What deception has come into play to side-step this law and USA’s supreme law?
I do know the Fed stole family land in North Carolina at the point of a law. Wasn’t anything wrong with how it was before they took it. They took it (1) because they could, and (2) because they wanted to take something nice from someone who had it and give it to their friends and supporters.
So far as I know about Bill Gates, I’d have no problem with him owning the land around me.
I know what you’re saying, though. You’re asking if it was some sort of land rapist, would I be OK with it. I wouldn’t like a nuclear breeder plant next door. No.
When you don’t own the land, reasonable fees are based on your actual costs for that piece of land. That’s the only thing you can possibly be interested in. Why would you want more than what you’d put in?
BS...
You argue chump change while the American people get government gang banged..
We pay hundreds of *billions* to government each year to protect and secure our borders. Yet we get absolutely nothing in return except to a massive tax bill to subsidize tens of millions of illegals running through our streets. Forced to pay for their housing, food, healthcare, social services..etc.
I can only hope those in this corrupt government continue robbing, kicking, punching and pushing people into a corner.
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