Column by Hal Walter
Agriculture – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT IS A LOT OF STUFF to focus on at once, especially for someone with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and perhaps mild dyslexia — a steering wheel, clutch, double brake pedals, hand throttle, gearshift, three-point hay fork, a buggy whip, a swinging gate and six frisky escape-minded horses.
The task at hand is to pick up a 1,000-pound round hay bale with a tractor, dismount, open the 12-foot gate, mount up, make a lot of noise with the whip, drive through, dismount again and sprint back to shut the gate before the hungry horses escape. By the way, there is no parking brake on this contraption, the ground is not perfectly flat, and there’s a similar drill to get the tractor back out, though most of the horses are less motivated to escape once a new bale of hay is set before them.
I do this about every four or five days for the people whose small ranch I manage here in my Wet Mountain neighborhood. Some may wonder why someone with a college education and 25 years experience in the journalism field does such labor, but the fact is it actually pays better than, say, editing news copy or writing. And it takes more actual analytical thought than the former and less time than the latter.
The task is simple yet complex at the same time. But it is perhaps the future of farming in Central Colorado. If you don’t believe me then you have not seen the statistics on farmland loss recently released by the Environment Colorado Research and Policy Center, and based on U.S. Department of Agriculture figures.
As an example, in Custer County where I live, there were 150,334 acres in farmland in 1987. By 2002 that number had been reduced to 126,605. More alarming, by ECRPB projections, we’ll be down to 74,290 acres of farmland in this county by 2022.
That’s a loss of more than half of all farmland in Custer County over a 35-year period.
Here are farmland-loss figures for some other counties in the area:
County 1987 2002 2022
Alamosa 209,556 16,374 64,190
Chaffee 105,275 71,508 30,767
Conejos 301,699 292,311 129,729
Costilla 292,125 361,179 281,509
Frémont 305,137 276,194 177,241
Huerfano 643,050 629,731 525,642
Rio Grande 221,155 175,339 213,531
Saguache 472,194 486,642 452,209
All figures in acres. Sources: USDA, Environment Colorado Research and Policy Bureau.
Oddly, in Rio Grande County farming is expected to increase between now and 2022. However, this is offset by the alarming situation in Chaffee County where by 2022 farmland will be less than one-third of what it was in 1987. On average, most counties in our area can expect to see significant losses of farmland in the next few years. The report lists development of 35-acre subdivisions as the main contributing factor to the farmland loss.
These statistics reveal a way of life that may be rapidly destroying itself.
Now the people for whom I manage the aforementioned ranch are an exception. They pieced their “spread” together by buying adjacent 35-acre lots. They also hold the grazing lease on an adjoining 640-acre “School Section,” or state land trust. And they’ve invested in 110 acres of the Bear Basin Ranch conservation easement contiguous to these holdings. So essentially they have created and are maintaining an 800-acre-plus open space corridor.
These folks are also very much in tune with the realistic grazing limitations of their properties. Thus, they rotate pastures accordingly and stand ready to buy plenty of hay to support their horses, and their small herd of Maine-anjou/angus cattle, which are shipped to low altitude for the winter. Feeding the big round bales ensures the horses always have something to nibble on during the pastures’ non-productive winter months (October through May at this altitude), and the impact on the plant life is minimal. In the spring, the horses are contained in a large “sacrifice area” to allow the pastures to come up.
IT’S NICE TO SEE PEOPLE actually building larger tracts of open land and treating it right. This is such a good thing, and quite different from what I see on other 35- to 40-acre horse properties around here. Some of these have taken on a lunar appearance, having been grazed right down to the dirt because people put too many horses and cattle on these marginal pastures year-round and don’t supplement with enough hay.
Enough hay. That’s the kicker, really. And it’s not like the stuff is cheap or easy to find.
In Custer County this year, hay started becoming scarce in late winter as the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristo Range was running way below average. A hay rancher I buy my own personal hay from told me the snowpack was below 30 percent of average in February and he can predict his hay crop in direct relationship — 30 percent of water means 30 percent of a hay crop. It’s an easy formula to remember.
Another hay rancher, the one I buy the big round bales from, was hesitant to sell me too many more 1,000-pounders when I ran low this spring. He agreed to sell eight big bales, but then after a spring storm brought the Sangre de Cristo snowpack up to about 75 percent he said that I could buy 18. I suspect a similar water-based math formula.
The irony, of course, is that the attraction of 35-acre horse properties places a higher demand on hay supplies while also decreasing the amount of hay that is grown. Throw in a drought, several old-timers still trying to make a living off cattle, and high hay demand from fire-ravaged Texas and Oklahoma, and the next thing you know you’re looking at importing hay from elsewhere, a tricky proposition with fuel prices once again approaching $3 a gallon.
One longtime rancher told me he has leased a hayfield for this summer in the Gunnison Valley, where snowpack runoff is expected to be plentiful; he’ll ship that hay home to the Wet Mountain Valley. Some others are trucking hay in from the San Luis Valley, where farmers are pumping the aquifer lower every year by irrigating with well water.
Water is one thing it takes to grow hay, and fuel is another. Most hay ranchers will agree it takes about a gallon of fuel to get each small square bale (65-75 pounds) into the barn. This includes fertilizing, cutting, turning, baling, pickup and stacking. Throw in a couple hundred miles of transportation and it’s not difficult to see why some cattle ranchers are subdividing.
MEANWHILE, THE THREE-EDGED SWORD of farmland loss projections, decreased hay production and overgrazing will only get sharper. What is the answer?
I’m no agriculture expert or range manager, but it seems that people need to be made aware of the grazing limitations of these properties when they buy them, and county agents need to be aggressive in efforts to educate people about the fragile nature of these lands.
Perhaps some sort of “best practices” publication that tells how many animals the land can support and offers alternatives to overgrazing is in order. For example, you can’t keep five horses year-round on a 35-acre semi-arid high-mountain pasture unless you feed a lot of hay; they will destroy it. It would be better to keep them in a large holding pen for most of the day, feed them plenty of hay, and turn them out on the pasture for just a couple of hours of daily exercise. This is especially true during the late winter and spring months in years when there is little snow cover to keep the pastures from taking a real beating.
Moreover, some people may need to examine why they need to own so many horses. I see too many one- to two-person families in my own neighborhood with five to seven horses on 35 or 40 devastated acres. Better to own fewer horses and spend more money on good hay.
These are some of the tough choices many people will need to make in the next few years as the land to grow hay on dwindles, and the water to grow hay with increasingly evaporates in a climate of development and drought. Otherwise, in addition to our dwindling farmland, we’ll have a patchwork of 35-acre dustbowls, further diminishing the quality of life we all moved here to experience.
Hal Walter cultivates prose and raises burros on 35 acres near the one-time mining camp of Ilse in the Wet Mountains.