The calendar might not say it, but it feels like fall is in the air.  The nights are cooling off, football fills the weekends, and it’s time to bring the cows home from their summer range.  As I was gathering cattle up and down the hillsides of the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) rangeland we run our cattle on, I couldn’t help but feel what a privilege it is to graze and raise our cattle on the range for our consumers.  

Some might scoff at that- producers, consumers, and environmentalists alike.  The circles cattlemen have to jump through to run cattle on public lands and the overregulation that often comes with hardly would seem like an honored experience.  Consumers that are confused with a myriad of marketing gimmicks will say that only the best beef is grass fed, with a nice green pasture in mind.  And environmentalists will say that cattle producers are selfishly using and abusing the public lands for their purposes.

But how often do you really ever find a solution that serves everyone's purposes? Rarely, if ever.  Yet that is what cattle grazing on public lands do.  They mature and develop on the feed grown on public lands, miraculously turning sunshine and grass into healthy, delicious beef for families around the world, all the while contributing to the care of the rangeland and giving it a purpose.  Saying it like that, being a part of such a great solution for all, really is a privilege.

 It's interesting to see the development of cattle running on public lands over the years.  Remember the days when cowboys didn’t have to answer to anybody about cows out on the range?  Obviously I am too young to have any firsthand experience enjoying the range without someone else managing the lands’ uses, but I’ve been told the stories of such glory days.  Many operations in this area, including ours, can trace their roots on the range back to the days before the public lands were regulated by government officials

When the first cows were grazing out on the ranges of these valleys, nobody owned it.  It was just leftover land from when the railroad had been built.  Cattlemen would take their cows to Curlew Valley to graze through the summer months and then head south to Locomotive springs north of the Salt Lake to winter.  It ended up being a conglomeration of all sorts of cattle and brands, which may seem crazy but it worked out well.  Between all of the cowboys there was always enough help to get all of the work done- water kept up, the cattle checked, and all the ground covered.  In the spring they would help brand each other’s cattle and in the fall they would all gather in and wean the calves.

Over time and from experience, they established good patterns of grazing, making sure that they wouldn’t over-graze the land and have something available when it was time to come back.  They let the seasons and weather dictate how and where the cattle would be, flowing with range and its needs.

These days we still run our cattle the same, just with a lot of direction from the higher ups.  We still run in an association, with most of the original brands that we began with so many years ago.  We still help move cattle, brand, wean, and check water just like they did in the past.  But now we are on somebody else’s schedule.  They tell when to turn out, how long we can stay, and where we go next.  The dates are rigid and there is no flexibility to work with what the range is giving.

I really have mixed feelings about this.  I think it is smart to have organization to it.  We want to ensure that the range is healthy for our cattle to feed on so it is important to make sure that we don’t have too many cattle or spend too much time in one area.  But at the same time, having someone from behind a desk telling us what we can and can’t do, especially when they don’t understand cattle or the work it takes to run them, is frustrating.

The job gets even harder when there are special interest groups trying or that the land needs to be left for the public to use for recreation or to preserve it for wildlife or some just don’t want it used at all for any purposes. 

I’m the kind of girl that is all about being efficient with what we have.  I hate to see things go to waste when there is so much value to be had.  But I also don’t want to use it all up at once.  That’s being wasteful too.  There’s that sweet middle ground that should keep from wasting by keeping things from totally unused but also keeping it from being over used and ruined.

But how can we apply that to the range?

It’s all a balancing act, friends.  It's working to keep too many cattle off too little ground with too little feed for too long.  But it is also having cattle out there to disturb the ground to help new seeds to grow, to cultivate the ground, to carry seeds in their poop and fertilize them to grow.  It's having cows out there to eat the grasses and keep the fuels down so fires don’t devastate the range.  Using it for cows keeps it as usable, profitable range land and not the next development area for a new subdivision.

Balance.  That’s how we do it.

We run and raise cattle for people to eat.  It’s plain and simple.  Yes, it is our job and we are trying to make money doing it or at least enough to survive to the next year.  But at the heart of it all, we care about making a good, affordable product for families to put on the table while using the resources available.

For years and years, nothing has changed how ranchers use the range.  But what has changed, is the public’s perception of how and why use the land.  Their land.  The bigger picture is that we use their land to raise cattle to feed their families.  And we have before it was really anyone’s land.  The cattle were there long before anyone began regulating its uses, before adventurers used it for recreation, and before interest groups even existed, let alone had an agenda on public land use.

We are going to keep running cattle out on the rangeland for as long as we are able.  We are going to keep using that land to keep our cows healthy and we are going to keep using our cows to keep the land healthy.  And in the end, you, who eat our beef, will stay healthy too.  Despite the challenges, frustrations and hurdles, giving a purpose to our public lands that will serve so many is truly a privilege.