DOUGLAS, Wash. – The rolling terrain extends endlessly to the edges of a wide, bright horizon streaked with gauzy strips of cirrus clouds. The belts of gray-green scrub alternate with fallow fields of beige and the emerging emerald swaths of winter wheat now topping a good eight inches of growth, thanks to a particularly rainy May this year.
This huge expanse of eastern Washington state – larger than Connecticut – may be as close as American agriculture comes to subsistence farming, pursuing the production of grain, hay and livestock in an harsh, arid and often unforgiving climate.
Known geologically as the Columbian Plateau and locally as the Moses Coulee – a French fur trappers' term for a large, dry canyon or wash – this so-called "shrub-steppe" landscape bears physical witness to one of the planet's most incredible natural "disasters," an event as dramatic as anything that shaped present-day North America.
Some 15,000 years ago, at the tail end of the last Ice Age, when wooly mammoths still roamed the region, a towering mass of glacial meltwater backed up behind an ice dam in western Montana finally crashed loose. In less than 48 hours, the wall of water tore across Montana, southern Idaho and across central Washington, pouring over basalt cliffs in a waterfall 100 times bigger than Niagara Falls. The flood tide carved out massive coulees, the Columbia River Gorge and the 100-mile-long Willamette Valley 800 miles away in Oregon before finally pouring more than 50 cubic miles of water and silt into the Pacific Ocean.
Its spectacular origins now merely a footnote in geological history, this rugged area welcomes a handful of curious tourists each summer, and provides home and livelihood to an even sparser sprinkling of farmers and ranchers whose roots in this hard-packed clay extend back to the turn of the century.
The 19th century, that is.
But the reason for a visit with one of those hardy souls is less about appreciation for a life of long, hard hours set against the backdrop of sweeping Western scenery – inspirational as that might be to office-bound drones like me – and more about furthering an initiative I've long argued is central to the long-term viability of the meat industry: Recruiting farmers and ranchers as front-line environmentalists.
A sensible synergy
Perhaps "environmental stewards" is a more accurate label, and Jim O'Brien certainly qualifies. A slow-to-speak, well-weathered man in his mid-50s, whose hardened palms feel like shaking hands with one of the fence posts that define his winter cattle corral, O'Brien's grandparents staked a homestead claim in 1915 on the 2,600-acre farm where he now raises white wheat and black cattle. They abandoned the farm in the 1920s after several years of punishing drought, then returned a few years later to resume the challenge of eking out a living leavened by little more than relentless chores and the occasional camaraderie of fellow farmers on a rare visit to the one-horse town of Douglas about eight miles away.
O'Brien runs about 100 head of Angus-Charolais cattle in his cow-calf operation, wintering them on hay he has to purchase from farmers as far as 100 miles away. With rainfall perilously close to single digits some years on his farm, and wells in the area often needing to exceed 400 feet deep before yielding any recoverable water, it's just not possible to irrigate any pastureland.
"It takes about 40 acres an animal to run cattle here," O'Brien explained. "You need a lot of land, and a lot of patience, because the cattle need to be moved frequently to keep them on good forage."
Patience, I'm guessing, is as deeply engrained in Jim O'Brien's makeup as the facial creases that are testimony to more than a few decades of riding the range. The availability of the rangeland he needs to run even his modest cattle operation, however, required a unique collaboration with the landowner of the adjoining McCartney Creek Preserve: The Nature Conservancy.
Now, I know TNC is a three-letter word among certain ranchers and farmers, the ones who crow loudest about "independence" and self-determination, even as they hustle into town to cash those Conservation Reserve Program checks that provide an income on fully one-third of the total agricultural acreage now sitting idle in Douglas County.
But although TNC's fundamental mission here in the Moses Coulee region is habitat preservation to support restoration of certain threatened species, such as grouse and quail and songbirds, the organization takes a practical, collaborative approach toward achieving those objectives.
"We're pragmatists," said Karen Foerstel, associate director of TNC's Marketing Resources Center at the group's world headquarters in Arlington, Va. "We actively want to engage farmers and ranchers in programs that further our goals of habitat restoration and offer ways for them to operate in a more sustainable fashion."
Indeed, its doubtful that O'Brien, and a number of other rancher-partners, as TNC calls them, would be able to continue raising cattle if not for the availability of the relatively good rangeland made available by the Conservancy. In return for allowing ranchers to graze acreage that otherwise might be "managed" as virtual wilderness – as many of its members make no pretense about preferring – TNC officials on the ground say that arrangements such as O'Brien's are as close to a "win-win" as possible.
"We care about the survival of a number of threatened species in this area," said Nancy Warner, TNC's program manager for north-central Washington. "Ultimately, we want to restore the watersheds, habitat and foliage that are essential to the survival of the wildlife native to this region. But we can't do that as effectively if we're not working with local farmers and ranchers. They're the ones who control a lot more of the land area involved."
Can a rancher-farmer, by definition attuned to the health of his bottom line, enjoy the luxury of worrying about the health of the environment? O'Brien answers in a most practical way.
"I need the rangeland TNC controls," he said. "And they need ranchers like me to help them restore the native grasses birds depend on."
O'Brien explained that birds like the threatened sage grouse need the maintenance of fencerow foliage and the rotational grazing of his cattle to control weeds and brush.
"Nobody believes me at first, until they come here and see for themselves, but the number of grouse and quail and other birds has increased noticeably right on the same land where I have my herd grazing all spring and summer," he said.
As his eyes scan a panorama of rangeland, farm fields and plowed ground stretching as far one can see, O'Brien talks hopefully about biodiesel processing plants that might someday make canola a new cash crop, or the even more distant possibility that some of the wheat now traveling to Asia aboard freighters departing Portland, Ore., or Seattle might find its way to domestic processing plants that could provide a better margin to the farmer.
But the truth is that without those markets for the soft wheat he grows, unsuited for the bread and baked goods Americans prefer – plus federal largesse that allows him to rest almost a third of his land each year – he wouldn't be long for the business of farming.
And without the collaboration he enjoys with TNC, its doubtful he'd remain a cattleman very long, either.
Some policymakers openly acknowledge that "outsourcing" of U.S. food production may someday be considered a smart adjustment, as our post-modern economy continues to evolve toward information technology and service industries.
That, I would argue, would be a tragedy from both a human and financial perspective – not to mention the incredibly negative impact on national security.
And if there is ever to be a truce between the environmentalists who loathe the "industrialization" of food production and the millions of independent farmers and ranchers who struggle to stay on the land and in the black, it starts on the ground with projects such as TNC's that align the goals of both groups of stakeholders in ways that prove agriculture can be part of the ecological solution – not the problem.
"We're not about keeping farmers or ranchers in business," Foerstel admitted. "We're focused on conservation and protection of wildlife. But there is no reason those goals can't support sustainable farming and ranching, in ways that preserve open land, habitat and wildlife."
And guys like Jim O'Brien.
Plus his herd of cows, which one can only hope won't someday join the buffalo as icons of a wild West that no longer exists.
by Dan Murphy on Friday, June 02, 2006
