Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 2020-21 Project Fellows.
On day three of a 10-day reporting trip in early November, I pulled up in a cloud of gravel dust to a cattle ranch outside of Ft. Sumner, New Mexico. Waiting for me in a black cowboy hat and a white Ford truck was Tom Wilton, a fourth-generation rancher.
The interview was part of the research for my Knight Science Journalism Project fellowship; I’ve been working to highlight land owners’ endeavors to prevent wind erosion, save water, and keep land productive as the arid southwest muddles through a megadrought. An insurance agent who works with New Mexico-based cattle ranchers connected me to Wilton. Prior to my trip, we emailed briefly to arrange a time and place, but little more.
I greeted him and expressed my gratitude that he was willing to talk to me, because I felt it was a critical time to have clear-eyed conversations about land and water management struggles in the West. I had barely closed the passenger door to his truck when he said, “Well, actually, I started not to visit with you.” Uh-oh. I’ve talked to enough farmers and ranchers over the years to know that many have little incentive to talk to an environmental journalist, much less one from ultraliberal Portland, Oregon.
I was heartened, however, by what Wilton said next: “But one thing you said that I think is extremely important is at this point in our society, the gap between those who grow the food and those who consume it is becoming so large that people don’t understand.” He agreed. “We really should have more of a symbiotic relationship. And the only way to do that is through education and talking and understanding one another,” he said.
Fortunately for me, Wilton kindly spent the next two hours driving me all over his property. His top three concerns, in order, were drought, market volatility, and politics.
Wilton’s ranch is home to pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, badgers, jackrabbits, and all kinds of snakes and birds.
Many ranchers I’ve spoken to in recent years have expressed similar frustrations. They feel castigated for raising methane-burping ruminants and attacked for continuing what, for many of them, is a family tradition — and one that fulfills ravenous market demand. “In my industry, it always feels like there’s someone ready to take your head off,” he explained. The cow is the poster child for agriculture’s impact on climate change. Livestock are responsible for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally, and cows are responsible for two-thirds of that, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.
A comprehensive environmental picture of working lands is much more complex than a simple tally of greenhouse gas emissions. Compared to croplands, ranches don’t pump nearly as many fertilizers and chemicals into waterways, and if grazed properly, they aren’t as prone to soil erosion. And ranches can provide valuable wildlife habitat, water storage, and biodiversity. Wilton’s ranch is home to pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcats, badgers, jackrabbits, and all kinds of snakes and birds.
As we bounced along Wilton’s fields, he shared that he and his father-in-law tried to figure out what else he could do with this land — to no avail. If Wilton gets 12 inches of rain a year, he is happy. Traditional crops won’t make it without irrigation. “This is it. If there was an alternative, someone would have figured it out,” Wilton explained.
The Venn-diagram overlap between conservative and conservationist is larger than most might expect — and Wilton sits in the intersection. He showed me his solar well and how he turned recycled dump truck tires into troughs for wintertime supplemental feed for his cows. And while there are certainly ranchers who overgraze their land, Wilton, like many ranchers in the region, has sold all the cattle off his land (called destocking) twice in the last decade rather than risk destabilizing his land. “I’m just not going to let the ground cover disappear. I consider the most important thing my ground cover,” he said. Without it, he said, the land will blow away. But there are only so many times he can unload his cattle and risk losing big. Land managers need policies that reduce their risks while shaping a future that makes sense as climate changes.
Land and water management fights in the West are likely to escalate as the planet continues to warm. I’m hopeful more land owners, like Wilton, will agree it’s time to seek out common ground. If not, solutions to weather drought, adapt to climate change, and manage these increasingly arid lands will prove elusive.
Virginia Gewin is a former soil scientist turned journalist. Based in Portland, Oregon, she writes about food security, land use, climate change, and biodiversity loss for a variety of publications, including Nature, Popular Science, Bloomberg, and Civil Eats.
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