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Private Ranchers
Cooperating on Public Lands
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Dennis Moroney2
My name is Dennis Moroney and I'm, I think in some ways, kind of an odd duck in this
situation because I ranch mostly on public land. Our ranch is 30 miles northwest of Prescott,
approximately 76 square miles, 98% of which is Prescott National Forest land. We bought the
ranch just under 5 years ago. We came into a situation in which the community was very much
caught up in kind of a polar opposition on issues related to land management, and in particular
grazing on public lands. My background teaching agriculture in public schools and working in the
public school system, has kind of prepared me for dealing with conflict and inter-personal
relationships inherent in dealing with public trust. What has developed in our area is a group
that we call the Santa Maria Mountains Group.
The land itself is extremely diverse. We sit at the top of two water sheds. The ranch
basically straddles the Santa Maria Mountains, the east side of the ranch is at the top of the
Verde River Watershed, the west side is the Bill Williams Watershed. We sit, in many respects,
on the urban-wilderness fringe. The country to the northwest of us, you can go from our ranch
to the Grand Canyon and encounter virtually nothing. There's the small town of Ash Fork and a
few small subdivisions out in the grasslands, but it's a really wild piece of country beyond us.
Looking the other way toward Prescott, there's an incredible development taking place at a very
rapid rate. Two ranches that are neighbors of ours have been purchased and are undergoing
subdivision right now. One of those ranches has been in the same family for over 100 years and
they actually wrote into the deed restrictions for prohibition of commercial agriculture of any
kind. We feel that that makes for neighbors that are probably going to be pre-selected to be not
particularly be favorable to the kind of work we're involved in, so we are kind of alarmed at the
trend.
BACKGROUND
What we found is that in talking with different people, everybody h3s certain expectations of
the land, and because it is public land, there already is a constituency who see it as a
recreational asset or as a place to find solitude or a wilderness experience: two designated
wilderness areas are within a horseback ride or a long hike from our home. I will describe some
of the polar positions that have helped define the middle ground where we were. On one hand
we had very strong "Earth First" contingent folks who were absolutely dedicated to the removal
of all cattle grazing from public lands, and for whatever reason Prescott is home to a lot of those
folks. They have been very actively involved in the permit removal process with the Forest
Service, and even on our ranch prior to the time that we had bought it, there has been incidents
where there was a direct confrontation between the Forest Service and Earth First folks. On the
other hand the neighboring ranchers essentially are pretty traditional, pretty set in their ways,
1
2
Transcribed by Nova Suenaga and Diana lmig, Arizona Nature Conservancy, Tucson AZ.
The Santa Maria Mountains Group, Prescott, AZ.
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extremely dedicated. I'll use these descriptors hoping not to offend anybody, but they were kind
of in the anti-government movement, the property rights coalition, standing firm, holding solid,
"fighting for all that's ours."
FORMATION OF THE SANTA MARIA MOUNTAINS GROUP
I guess in some respects being kind of a generalist I share some of the sympathies of both
ends of the spectrum. I felt that if there's any future in ranching on public land in this particular
area, we're going to have to bring these two sides together and we're going to do some talking
and have some discussion. We became involved in establishing what we call a "Collaborative
Management Team." We invited folks that fell across that spectrum from one end to the other.
We invited the people that wrote letters to the editor, asked them to give us lists of names and
address of people that they felt should be involved in the discussion We invited neighboring
ranchers, we contacted folks at Prescott College, Yavapai College, agency people, sportsmen's
groups, anyone and everyone that we could conceive could possibly be interested in the land.
We met people out on the ranch and asked them if they had any concerns about the future of
this piece of land and would they be interested in participating in the process.
We made some ground-rules. We said, first of all, that you come to the meeting
representing only yourself and your personal values. You can't come and say you're a
representative of a constituency, that you're with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, or Earth
First, the Audubon Society or whatever. It doesn't matter what groups you belong to you come
representing only yourself and you own values. Secondly, we would sit in a circle, and go around
the room initially, and every single person introduced themselves, shared a little bit about their
expectations for the process or what they expected from the land, and by that process we
began to develop some trust, we put a human face with the enemy. Instead of grouping and
boxing people like, "He's damn environmentalist, he's a selfish land-raping rancher," we viewed
each person as a human being. Thirdly, we said everything was a potluck. We're going to sit
down and eat together, and share the process· or whatever happens in the bonding when people
share a meal. And lastly after every meeting, we have an ending time for the business portion of
the meeting, but the social aspect can go on for hours.
Next, we went through a process to set goals for the land trying to be absolutely as inclusive
as possible within a framework that would lead us to some actions on the land. We followed in
a very loose, I'll say even liberal interpretation of holistic resource management, and came up
with a three part goal. I'm going to go ahead and bore you with sharing the goal mostly in the
hope that you can understand where we were coming from. I will tell you that in arriving at the
goal it took a long time and it was very frustrating in many respects because some people were
intransigent in their positions on certain things. We agreed to work on those areas of agreement
first and go outward from there toward the polar positions because we build from that a core of
things that all agreed upon. That helped in terms of a conflict resolution.
There are three parts of our goal. First of all is a portion related to the quality of life, to
spend time working and playing in a natural setting that provides opportunities for solitude and
creativity, enjoy a rural lifestyle characterized by environmental, economic, and social
responsibility, diversity of plants and animals, and enough leisure to spend enjoy family
activities, cultivate relationships with family and friends of all ages and diverse points of view,
experience good health, clean air and water, nutritious food, and enough life energy to deal with
strife. You can picture different people's values being apart of this just like a quilt. Pursue life-
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long learning, personal and spiritual growth, meaningful work, and contribute to our community
and environment, share a community characterized by cooperation with, understanding of, and
respect for our unique differences whether they be lifestyles, politics, spiritual or cultural values.
This is pretty important to some folks.
The forms of production, or the outputs, or the things that the land must provide to support
this quality of life are the second part of the goal. We call it management for a healthy and
sustainable ecosystem characterized by biodiversity for present and future generations,
producing profit from solar energy both directly and indirectly through domestic livestock,
cultivated crops, native wildlife and plants, and providing educational, recreational and aesthetic
opportunities, and producing abundant clean water and high quality habitat for the benefit of the
community. What does the land have to look like in order to support that kind of production?
We tried to describe a future landscape which would create and maintain a full range of natural
diversity within the grassland, chaparral, pinon-juniper, and ponderosa pine communities, to
reduce the amount of bare ground, to reduce the amount of run-off from uplands, and increase
the amount of moisture so it can get into the ground. We want to see perennial streams, and a
mosaic of mixed grasses, shrubs, and trees. We want to create movement corridors which
enhance watershed values, utilize natural materials for buildings and improvements, and
maintain large areas of open space. Once we have formulated a goal and agreed that it is
something we could all support then looking at what were those areas most in need of attention
that would bring us toward fulfillment of the goal.
We identified three areas in particular that would essentially begin the process. I really can't
go into a lot of detail about the conditions on the ranch, but the ranch prior to our ownership
had very little maintenance. We had a lot of problems that needed adjustment right away. We
looked at three areas that jumped out at us right away, feed, water and predation. The feed
situation on the ranch is such that the grassland community was in a pretty serious decline, with
quite a bit of juniper invasion into areas of the ranch that had been initially grassland, a number
of treatments that had been done in the 50s and 60s, chaining and pushing and crushing
juniper and chaparral, burning juniper and chaparral. There was evidence where some things
had worked, some things hadn't worked, but in many cases the energy cycle, or nutrient cycle
on the ranch was bound up in woody material, a lot of bare ground, a lot of active erosion, and
relatively poor performance from the cow herd, and even wildlife. We began to look at what we
could do from the ranch from the private side of it. There's only a certain amount that we're
going to be able to do on our own. We need to reach out and take advantage of some of the
other resources that are available. The Santa Maria Mountains Group, which numbers loosely
about 150 people, gets about 40 to 50 people at a good meeting. There is a wealth of
tremendous creativity that has enabled us to really pull some things together.
ONGOING PROJECTS
Right now we have three major projects that are ongoing on the ranch which address three
weaknesses. We have a grant proposal that will address the chaparral component and a
problem that we have with shrub live oak on the ranch and its nutrient tie-up. We looked at a
number of ways to deal with that problem. The old paradigm was to destroy the scrub oak; we
need to remove that and create grassland. Most of those earlier projects failed. Burning,
crushing, pushing, and chaining resulted in a return of chaparral after 25 or 30 or 40 years. So
we said, well, it may be that in those areas that were grasslands that were invaded we can
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sustain grassland, but in those areas that are chaparral we're over our heads with it, so what are
we going to do.
The University of Arizona, Utah State University, the Forest Service, and the Santa Maria
Mountains Group, have collectively written a grant proposal that looks at expanding on some
research done in Israel and at Utah State University supplementing cattle or supplementing
livestock on high tannin diets with something called polyethylene glycol. Now, I don't know a lot
about polyethylene glycol, but I've been told that it lies similar between an alcohol and sugar, it's
a carbon chain. It's used in a full range of food products. It's approved by USDA and the Food
and Drug Administration. They have what they call food-grade polyethylene glycol. I was
fascinated with work done in Israel where they had been feeding sheep and goats and found
that with a very tiny amount of this stuff, it was breaking the bond that holds energy and protein,
and they got a tremendous amount of livestock response and apparently the polyethylene glycol
goes through the animal with no particular effects. That's a little bit skeptical because we're
kind of into organic food and clean and natural things, but at the same time I saw this dilemma
with oak brush as a serious problem. So we got a full blown project where they're gonna have a
research student on the ranch all summer, and they'll be doing this with a small group of cattle
and will replicate a similar program that Utah State in a fine situation. And if indeed it works and
if indeed it meets the criteria of our goal to be ecologically and environmentally sustainable and
responsible, it could be a real breakthrough for people ranching in this chaparral community and
we're kind of excited about it.
The second project deals with juniper in grassland, predation and nutrition, because all of
these things are linked, but there is another entity in our community called the Juniper Institute.
Its members are also members of the Santa Maria Mountains Group and it's goal is to look at
the Juniper not as a weed, or as the enemy, but as a resource in something that we can use to
create sustainable communities and economies within these communities, so we have a grant
proposal and a project put together with the Juniper Institute, we've already had a Ph.D. from
Germany who came and has not published a paper looking at the economic uses for juniper in a
world market view. Looking at everything from chemical sources, pharmaceuticals, various wood
and paper by-products, just every possibility. And that paper is now being edited for publication
by the Juniper Institute, the Highland Center which is a nature education program in the Prescott
area, the Forest Service, the Santa Maria Mountains Group, the Phoenix Zoo whose animal
observation team has begun quarterly monitoring the mountain lion population on the ranch,
the Environmental Protection Agency is concerned about some watershed aspects of Juniper
woodlands and the fact that we have very active erosion in juniper monocultures and especially
in areas where juniper has invaded the grassland, and Arizona Game and Fish is concerned
about the habitat implications.
Initially we wanted to do a large burn and open up an area that was adjacent to some open
grassland where we have not experienced live predation. It seems as though the politics of
getting the burn accomplished are just unbelievable. When we burn we are putting a lot of
carbon into the atmosphere rather than into the soil horizon, and so we asked what could we do
that would mimic a burn or mimic some benefits of a burn that would not lose this carbon from
the energy cycle. So what we proposed was to do a green fuelwood cut of juniper, or a green
juniper product cut where we could remove firewood, fence posts, stays, the larger scale usable
products and leave the slash on the ground. Then we're going to some seeding and leave some
areas not seeded as an experiment, but bring in mulch in the form of cheap, poor quality hay,
bring cattle in concentrate them on this cut area by using hay as bait. They will then tramp down
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the juniper slash, plant the grass seed, prepare the seed bed by pressing mulch into the area,
and we've got a couple of small experiments with this on our private land, and we're very
pleased with the results. Over about three years, when it rains, we get grass established pretty
readily and the first wave includes annuals and weedy types of pioneer species, followed by the
establishment of the perennial warm season grasses. We're hoping to see the cool season
grasses come in as time goes on.
Our final project is one to establish waters, or re-develop some waters in some areas of the
ranch that were being very much under-used because of lack of water, and again, pulling in
cooperation from a variety of agencies and entities that, in this case, included the Rocky
Mountain Elk Foundation and the Prescott Area Wildlife Habitat Community, and so on, and I
guess that the essence of my message is that there is a lot to be done on the land to bring out
what we all want from it, and many of the people that are stakeholders but not ranchers can
play an active role in bringing about a sustainable situation in our grasslands and in our public
lands by working together, cooperating, and by doing what each of us can do individually and
collectively.
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