| If land management
is more art than science, as many, including many researchers,
say it is, then Sid Goodloe will enter the history books
as one of the West's great artists and his Carrizo Valley
ranch would be considered a masterpiece.
This thought came to me a few years ago
while standing a hill overlooking his property. Surveying
the lush savanna expanses, broken only occasionally
by narrow strips of dense woodland that rose to the
west and segued into a park-like ponderosa pine forest,
I suddenly realized that I was looking at a work of
art, fifty years in the making. It had all the hallmarks
of a great piece of sculpture: beauty, proportion, vitality,
skill, design and effect.
That the chosen medium was land, not marble, made no
difference – the result was the same: awe and
inspiration.
Only don't call Sid Goodloe an artist. He's
a rancher first and last, with work to do – as
we did that day. In fact, my momentary reflection happened
only because Goodloe had walked off, gas can in hand,
to inspect a pile of juniper trees that had recently
been cut and pushed into a heap.
"It's a good day to burn," he had announced at sunrise.
And true to his word, a few minutes after leaving the
truck the pile erupted into flames.
As I watched the fire grow, thinking about art again,
Goodloe returned to the truck, limping slightly –
at 70 his only concession to age being hearing aids
and a bum knee. He had no reason to be impressed by
the conflagration he had just created; he had lit similar
fires a thousand times by now. He tossed the gas can
into the back and climbed into the front seat without
a backwards glance.
"Let's go," he said in his Texas drawl. And we went.
"I paid $19 an acre
– Sid Goodloe,
New Mexico rancher
As we bounced over the rutted road, I pondered my revelation.
Like all great artists, Goodloe is visionary, intuitive,
opinionated, driven, exacting, and boundlessly energetic.
But he is also pragmatic, flexible, and results-oriented.
He has to be, or he wouldn't be in ranching for very
long.
Perhaps that's what makes him, and his work,
so inspirational; in blending art with science, vision
with profit, and opinion with outreach, Goodloe –
by near universal acclaim – has become one of
the preeminent land managers of his time. He is a modern-day
pioneer, trailblazing with a gas can and matches instead
of brushes and oils.
And in the Carrizo Valley ranch, he found the perfect
canvas.
Worn Out Country
In the early 1950s, after an education at
Texas A&M and a stint in the Army, Goodloe left
his west Texas homeland to cowboy on what were then
big ranches outside Roswell, New Mexico. As he worked
he also searched for, in his words, "a worn-out piece
of ground" (i.e., affordable) that would be amenable
to multiple use, had potential for profit and was a
good place to raise a family.
In 1956, Goodloe found what he was looking
for in the mountains near Capitan, in south-central
New Mexico. It was Billy The Kid and Smokey Bear country
– two characters that would play prominent roles
in his life before long.
What he found was 3,500 acres of dusty, scrubby land
nestled up against a national forest, choked at its
higher, western end with spindly trees, and split down
the middle with a dry, rocky streambed.
Thinking that this was what New Mexico was "supposed
to look like," Goodloe purchased the property and began
trying to make a living on a landscape that clearly
had been battered and bruised.
As he quickly learned, continuous year-round
grazing since the pioneer days had stripped the land
of health. Simultaneously, an official Forest Service
policy of "all fires out by 10 a.m." had caused
thick stands of trees to invade formerly open spaces
on the property. Carrizo Creek had dried up, wildlife
was scarce, and the carrying capacity was 60 cows.
"I paid $19 an acre for the land, and for a while I
thought I had been taken," said Goodloe.
It was an "Old West" legacy typical of the
entire region.
"I had no idea that the massive number of livestock
that came west after the Civil War and the good intentions
of Smokey Bear were the cause of denuded watersheds
and water shortages," said Goodloe. "When I first came
here I was impressed by the toughness and self-reliance
of my neighbors and friends, but I didn't realize that
those characteristics didn't extend to the land. A fragile
ecosystem had succumbed to the lack of understanding
that came with our pioneer stockmen. It wasn't their
fault, they were acting on the best knowledge they had
at the time, but it sure made a mess of the land."
Two clues turned Goodloe's thinking around.
The first was the discovery in Carrizo Canyon of a prehistoric
petroglyph of a fish on a rock, indicating that the
creek once sustained aquatic life. The second occurred
after Goodloe attempted, and failed, to locate the southwest
corner marker of his property, which was buried in a
dense thicket of young trees. In frustration, he dug
up a survey report from the 1880s and was astonished
to read that the surveyors couldn't find a tree to mark
anywhere near the corner position.
"Obviously something had gone very wrong," recalled
Goodloe. "So I began to count the rings on the pinon
and ponderosa trees that grew on the ranch. Ninety percent
of those plants had come up after the Civil War. It
was then I began to visualize open woodland, savanna
and grassland."
It was then that the ranch began to be the raw material
for a masterwork.
"Why not try to return to those days of stirrup high
grass and streams with beaver dams and cutthroat trout?"
he wondered.
Work
The first step was getting the cattle thing right.
When he purchased the property, Goodloe implemented
a classic rest/rotation system that he learned in school,
dividing the ranch into summer and winter pastures.
Also in accordance with his training, the goal of his
brush control program was strictly to increase more
grass for his cattle.
But progress wasn't happening.
Conditions changed dramatically in the late 1960s when
Goodloe switched to a short-duration grazing system
that he picked up from wildlife biologist Allan Savory,
whom he met while touring Rhodesia. In the process,
Goodloe almost certainly became the first rancher in
the United States to implement such a system. He also
was one of the first people to write on the topic when
the Journal of Range Management published his article
"Short Duration Grazing in Rhodesia" in 1969.
What was different, though, wasn't just the technical
practice of rotational grazing – the Carrizo Valley
ranch has 12 paddocks on 3,500 acres, seven for summer
use, three for winter and the other two for spring and
fall. What was important was how Goodloe began to look
at the land as a whole system, and not just in terms
of what was good for his cattle.
"My goal is an integration of all components –
economic, human, and environmental," Goodloe wrote recently
in another paper, "into a synergistic, comprehensive
plan that allows management for long term sustainability
rather than short-term production."
For example, Goodloe defers most of his riparian area
from livestock grazing between May to November and only
"flash grazes" it during the dormant season.
The short-duration grazing plan also gave his cool season
grasses a break, which had an economic benefit as well.
"Managing for cool-season plants has probably made
me more money than any other practice," Goodloe said.
"Spring forages are simply a lot more valuable than
summer forages and has more to do with a good calf crop
than almost anything else."
Next, Goodloe switched to a breed of cattle he calls
Alpine Black – a cross between Angus and Swiss
Brown – that suited the environment better. Once
again, his goal was to make his operation fit the land,
not vice versa.
But his masterwork really began to take shape when
he tackled the difficult and tenacious problem of too
many trees.
"Everyone told me I was crazy," he recalled. "They
assumed that the invading trees and brush was just the
land returning to its natural state."
At first, he used mechanical thinning and chemicals
to control the overabundance of woody material on the
property, but the key breakthrough came when he realized
that he needed to get fire back on the land.
"I'm an environmentally sensitive
– Sid Goodloe
"Tree ring studies in New Mexico show that most forests
burned every 7 to 10 years," Goodloe said. "Whether
it was Indians or lightning, the land was kept in an
open savanna state. Fire is as important to the land
as rain and sunlight. It is the natural predator of
the forest. So when the government stopped letting the
forests burn over the past 80 years, the trees came
in and the whole system unraveled."
To achieve his vision for the land, Goodloe began an
aggressive program of thinning and burning. To make
the restoration work pay, he harvested some of the wood
for sale as firewood, vigas and fence posts to the residents
of nearby, and rapidly growing, Ruidoso.
Methodically, like any determined artist, Goodloe willed
his vision into being.
Today, cool season grasses have returned, the brush
invasion has been turned back, water runs year-round
in the creek (or at least it did until the drought hit),
carrying capacity increased by 30 percent, and wildlife
is thriving evidenced by a pronghorn herd that greets
visitors at the ranch's entrance.
"The reestablishment of a presettlement savanna and
riparian protection, working in concert with short-duration
grazing and an environmentally adaptable breed of cattle,"
Goodloe said, "has resulted in healthy, heavy calves,
improved game population and a feeling of accomplishment
that can only be described as euphoric."
Audience
Like any artist, Goodloe appreciates an audience. It
is much less about pride, however, than it is about
his desire to teach and foster change. And have fun
too. "Sharing knowledge and experience is not only a
duty, but a gratifying experience," he said.
In 1998, I had my first exposure to Goodloe's teaching
skills when I helped organized an "outdoor classroom"
on his ranch. After introductions, he marched us onto
adjacent Forest Service land where he dug a trench in
the bare ground between two large junipers, exposing
thousands of minute roots. He told us how trees consume
nutrients and moisture and shade the ground. Grass can't
compete, so there's only bare soil and erosion now.
Rain carries off topsoil, ripping gullies, he taught.
For many of us, we would never look at the ground the
same way again.
One audience that proved initially to be a reluctant
learner was the U.S. Forest Service, which owns the
land that surrounds his ranch on three sides and controls
the upper watershed. Goodloe understood that restoring
his land to health was only half of the whole job –
as a raging, lightening-sparked fire on forest land
above his ranch in the mid-1990s proved.
Goodloe goaded the Forest Service into action primarily
by educating the public with countless tours, workshops,
and public speaking engagements. This effort bore fruit
in 1989 when the agency began the Carrizo Project, a
55,000-acre thinning and prescribed fire demonstration
project that drew praise from many observers.
Other efforts bore more fruit. In the 1980s he helped
co-found the New Mexico Riparian Council, a collaborative
conservation organization focused on educating landowners
and others about the importance of healthy riparian
areas.
In the late 1990s, Sid began to ponder yet
another challenge: inheritance. "When I began to investigate
ways to pass my ranch on to my children, I decided that
a conservation easement was the best way to avoid the
unfair estate tax and provide them a place to raise
their children or grandchildren in a rural environment,"
he said.
To accomplish this vision, Goodloe approached the New
Mexico Cattlegrowers' Association about setting up a
statewide, rancher-run land trust, as had been done
in Colorado and California. His overture was rejected.
Undaunted as usual, Goodloe responded by starting a
land trust of his own, called the Southern Rockies Agricultural
Land Trust (SRALT). Today, SRALT holds more than 10,000
acres of easement-protected property in New Mexico.
To observers, and admirers (at least this one), the
lesson gleaned from Sid Goodloe's diverse accomplishments
is this: Don't underestimate the power and value of
a vision.
"It is my hope that future residents will provide their
children the incentive to develop a work ethic, western
values, and innovative techniques – characteristics
that are more readily acquired on a ranch than in town,"
he said, with characteristic frankness.
Goodloe has demonstrated innovative and sustainable
methods of land stewardship, contributed significantly
to public education about sustainable use of natural
resources, promoted and implemented the collaborative
process in resolving land stewardship conflicts, and
has demonstrated proactive leadership in promoting and
achieving land and community health.
And like all great artists, he led the way.
"My ranch was the first holistic management
venture in the country," he said. "It took a lot of
years and I made many mistakes. Now I have figured it
out and I try to share that. I'm an environmentally
sensitive rancher. It makes me money and I like it!"
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