As the bluebonnets bloom in Texas, the wildflower’s popularity creates some concerns for Texas residents. The state flower of Texas, this time of year causes a fanaticism among Texans and tourists who absolutely must have a photo of themselves basking in all of the bluebonnet goodness.

It’s not all wine and bluebonnets, however. Given the fact that 92 percent of Texas soil is privately owned, a great deal of the bluebonnet worship is accompanied by trespassing violations and even folks risking personal safety to get that perfect greeting card-type photo. People are often seen marching into fields of bluebonnets without regard for property ownership or dangers such as snakes, scorpions, fire ants, and/or bull nettle. The issue is certain to be heightened this year due to the drought limiting the amount of quality bluebonnet fields.

But, not all landowners are troubled by the intrusion. Some are proud to show off their bluebonnets to folks who wish to admire them. Either way, the bluebonnet season isn’t very long, so the flower worshipping will cease in relatively short order … until this time next year.

Photo: Texas Parks & Wildlife Department

Breaking laws and fighting fire ants in a rush to the bluebonnet fields

By Kate Murphy, The New York Times

It is bluebonnet season in Texas, when hayfields and grazing pastures are transformed into seas of indigo bloom. And while Vermonters take pride in their fall foliage and Washingtonians love their cherry blossoms, Texans can be near fanatical about bluebonnets, sometimes ignoring property laws and personal safety to wade into their fragrant midst.

“It’s like a feeding frenzy every spring,” said Damon Waitt, a botanist and senior director at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. “Every parent in Texas must have at least one picture of their kids in the bluebonnets, so you’ll see dotting the hillsides little baby butt prints where the flowers have been smooshed down.”

And because 92 percent of the land in Texas is privately owned, bluebonnet season is also trespassing season. “It’s weird when you drive down the road and see all these people jumping over fences,” said George Dillingham, a real estate broker in Brenham, which is about halfway between Houston and Austin. “It’s amazing — people feel like they have some sort of legal access just because there are bluebonnets.” Read more …

Beverly Bell and Tory Field recently wrote an interesting piece for the Huffington Post about the global food market and the impact it has on producers and consumers at the local level.

They write that food is a great unifier for the world’s citizens, but control of food production and distribution is increasingly being taken out of local hands and directed on the international level, detached from the populace.

However, Bell and Field argue that a movement for food sovereignty is underway. This is a movement that calls for the production, management, and distribution  of food, land, and agricultural systems to be placed back into the hands of citizens, giving them more of an opportunity to make the decision to consume locally produced food.

Another important element to this concept is the role of the producer. This movement wants farmers and ranchers, especially small-scale operations, to have the ability to produce products for local consumption under local control, rather than be affected by international market forces. For this to happen, though, activists in this movement are working at local, regional, national, and international levels to help ensure fair trade and economic systems, limiting imports to help protect local markets.

The major obstacle in this movement is the money and power that opposes it. Large landholders, corporations, many governments of industrialized countries, and organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) tend to prefer the status quo, meaning that this food sovereignty movement, although a great idea on paper, has quite a long way to go to become a reality.

Food sovereignty: Think globally, eat locally

By Beverly Bell & Tory Field, Huffington Post

The first group of protestors at Occupy Wall Street publically delivered 23 complaints, outlining the ways in which corporations control our daily lives. Number four asserted, “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”

How we feed ourselves and each other is the backbone of how, historically, we have organized our communities and societies. The ways in which we arrange our agricultural systems make evident our larger worldviews. Food literally and figuratively connects us to each other, to our ancestors, to our cultures, and to the earth. Maybe all food should be acknowledged as soul food (with a low bow to Southern cooking) because it is, in fact, that deep.

A movement is afoot to put food, land, and agricultural systems back in the hands of citizens. One element has long been considered the overarching essential around the world, though it is only beginning to make an appearance in this U.S. This is food sovereignty, a combination of farming practices, marketing systems, and policy choices which together allow every people to make decisions about, produce, and consume its own local, healthy, and culturally appropriate food. Food sovereignty calls for the democratic participation of the population in shaping food and trade policies. It promotes the right of small growers to have control over their land and production, to grow for domestic consumption under local control. It also promotes ecological agriculture. Read more …

As an example of the problems the Endangered Species Act can cause for America’s farmers and ranchers, this article discusses the Utah prairie dog, listed as a “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act, and its impacts on ranchers in southwestern Utah.

Utah prairie dogs, and their destructive nature, have traditionally been a thorn in the side of cattle ranchers, but a new program is hoping to turn the situation into a positive one for landowners and developers. The Utah Prairie Dog Habitat Credit Exchange Program, funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), is a market-based approach, which pays landowners approximately $1,000 to $2,000 per acre to develop easements on land that contains Utah Prairie Dog habitat. The protected parcels are then assigned habitat credits that are sold to developers to help reduce the impact of development on prairie dog habitat in other areas. The credits cost approximately $4,800 to $8,000 per acre of habitat.

The program is very early in the process, with only two landowners signed up at this point, but it will be interesting to see if this approach will be beneficial to all involved. With over 80 percent of endangered species habitat located on private land, creative solutions are needed that will benefit the wildlife, as well as landowners.

Photo credit: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Saving threatened Utah prairie dogs — on private property

By Nathan Rice, High Country News

When Curt Bagley learned he could get paid for the prairie dogs digging up his land, he had a change of heart toward the varmints he’d grown up shooting. On his family’s cattle ranch in Greenwich, Utah, they’d had to learn to live with the destructive rodents since 1973, when Utah prairie dogs were federally protected. “If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have ‘em,” Bagley says. “But they’re here, so I have to work with ‘em.”

To Bagley and many other residents of southwest Utah, prairie dogs have been the bane of an otherwise peaceful existence. Listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, the diminutive rodents have been hit hard by urban growth and disease. Most of their remaining habitat lies on private land, where protections have slowed, and in some cases halted, development. They also punch holes in runways and tunnel into cemeteries, disturbing graves and enraging locals. That they can carry bubonic plague doesn’t help relations either (though disease transmission to humans is rare).

But last year, Bagley signed the papers to permanently set aside 80 valley-bottom acres for the much-maligned animals. After all, dealing with “prairie rats” isn’t that far from his past job as a high school security guard: “I’m used to working with pests,” he notes with an arid humor. He’s the second landowner to enroll in the Utah Prairie Dog Habitat Credit Exchange Program — a market-based approach to private-land conservation that could help change how landowners view endangered species, while also allowing an avenue for development. Each protected parcel is assigned habitat credits, which are then sold to developers to mitigate building on prairie dog habitat elsewhere. A third property should be finalized in August.

Read more in High Country News

A recent report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture entitled, Agricultural Resources and Environmental Indicators, 2012 examines “trends in economic, structural, resource, and environmental indicators” in the agricultural sector that have developed since the previous report was published in 2006.

We are encouraged to see improvements in water efficiency, conservation tillage, nitrate recovery, as well as increases in federal funding to encourage the voluntary adoption of practices to help lead to these improvements. However, the overall decline in farm and rangeland continues to be a significant concern and phosphorous levels in America’s waterways remains as a critical environmental issue.

Key findings of the report include:

• Small farms made up 88 percent of all U.S. farms, but large-scale family and non-family farms comprised more than 80 percent of the total value of production.
• In 2007, approximately 51 percent of the 2.3 billion acres in the United States was in agricultural use.
• Cropland, forestland, grassland, pasture, and rangeland acreage has decreased, while urban areas and land used for recreation, transportation, and national defense has increased.
• From 2000 to 2010, farm real estate values appreciated faster than residential values.
• Private sector research and development emphasizes marketable goods, while public sector R&D emphasis has been on environmental protection, nutrition, and food safety.
• Higher prices for genetically engineered seed have not deterred farmers from purchasing them, due to increased benefits such as higher crop yields and reduced management time.
• Nitrogen recovery rates on corn and cotton have increased and overall application of nitrogen appears to be more efficient.
• Phosphate recovery rates have seen little change.
• On-farm irrigation efficiency has improved.
• Since 2000, corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat acreage under conservation tillage has increased.
• From 2004 to 2011, organic food sales have doubled, accounting for over 3.5 percent of food sales in 2011.
• Federal funding for the adoption of voluntary programs that encourage conservation practices in 2010 was the highest it has been since 1960.

Download a summary of the report (pdf)

Download the complete report (pdf)

Photo by USDA NRCS

Anyone who thinks water conservation on private, rural lands doesn’t impact metropolitan areas, needs to look at the situation in Las Vegas.

Facing a quickly diminishing water source in Lake Mead, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently backed a plan to divert groundwater to Las Vegas from three farming and ranching counties in eastern Nevada.

The plan calls for a pipeline system that could cost from $3.5 to $12 billion and presents several complications beyond the impact on water resources in the region. A large portion of the region is Goshute Tribal territory, and tribal leaders have vowed to vigorously fight the plan, which, they contend, could be culturally and spiritually devastating to their people. Furthermore, the proposed pipeline would run through an area that is home to several threatened or endangered species, including sage-grouse. 

Needless to say the Goshute Tribe is joined by hundreds of Nevada and Utah farming and ranching families, businesses, and conservation groups in filing petitions to stop a primary step in the process, which includes the diversion of 84,000 acre-feet per year of groundwater from four rural valleys to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas bets big on rural water

By Heather Hansen, Red Lodge Clearinghouse

In the high stakes game of Western water supply, Las Vegas is doubling down.

A water mining project that’s been a quarter-century in the making took a major step forward last week, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recommended approval of a plan for diverting groundwater from three counties in eastern Nevada, via hundreds of miles of underground pipelines, to Sin City.

In its final environmental impact statement (FEIS), the BLM looks at six alternatives for the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s (SNWA) plan to siphon water from several rural valleys and to transport it 300 miles south to the shining city in the desert. The BLM’s preferred alternative “F” (the plan they recommend implementing) was crafted, they say, in response to public comments submitted on the draft EIS, as well as input from the SNWA.

Alternative F of the “Clark, Lincoln and White Pine Counties Groundwater Development Project” appears to differ from the proposal submitted by SNWA in a few key ways. While SNWA asked for a 96-inch pipeline to transport 176,655 acre-feet per year (AFY) of groundwater from five basins in northeastern Nevada, the BLM recommends an 84-inch main pipeline to transport up to 114,000 AFY from four of those basins—Spring, Delamar, Dry Lake and Cave valleys. Diverting water from the fifth basin, Snake Valley, which straddles the Nevada/Utah border, is not included in Alternative F. In 2009, the states had reached an agreement on sharing the water in the hotly-contested Snake Valley, but Utah ultimately never signed the deal.

For those whose oppose the project overall—and there are many different groups that do—the BLM’s recommendation to extract less water from the region is scant acknowledgement of the environmental, economic and cultural issues that have been raised since 2004, the year the SNWA first asked the BLM for the rights-of-way needed to construct the pipelines (and related infrastructure including roads, wells, power lines and production facilities). Since then, the BLM has been reviewing the potential impacts on federal land and opposition to the project has intensified.

Read more on the Red Lodge Clearinghouse

In what amounts to the largest conservation easement ever provided to the federal government, billionaire Louis Bacon, has pledged to protect 90,000 acres of his ranch in Colorado under a conservation easement. The easement, which provides tax benefits to Mr. Bacon would be part of the “Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area” proposed by the U.S. Department of Interior. The area is deemed to be a critical wildlife corridor, providing a migration route for bison, cougar, black bear, bighorn sheep, elk, and deer.

Louis Bacon bought his 172,000-acre Trinchera Ranch from the family of Malcolm Forbes in 2007 for $175 million, which was, at the time, the most expensive property ever sold in the United States.

Billionaire pledges 90,000 acres for conservation area in Colorado

By: Miguel Llanos, MSNBC

A billionaire hedge-fund manager on Friday pledged to protect 90,000 acres of his Colorado ranch from further development as part of a much larger planned conservation area. The Obama administration said it would be the “largest single conservation easement” ever provided to the federal government.

The easement, which would include tax benefits for New York-based Louis Bacon, provides “the foundation for the proposed new Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area,” the Interior Department announced.

Should the conservation area happen, Bacon said Friday, “I will place approximately 90,000 currently unprotected acres of the Blanca portion of Trinchera Ranch into a conservation easement.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who grew up in the area and announced the deal with Bacon at his side, said the ranch “is in one of the most beautiful places in the country” — and home to three peaks above 14,000 feet that are in the center of the longest U.S. mountain chain.

Read more on MSNBC

Nebraska Cattlemen and five federal lawmakers have joined together to question the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its use of flyovers to monitor the environmental compliance of farms and ranches across the nation. The EPA, which has been doing these flights for 10 years, claims that they are an effective, inexpensive way to quickly stop agricultural pollution issues. Nebraska Cattlemen and several lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, believe that the flyovers, which photograph farming and ranching lands are an invasion of the landowners’ privacy. 

What do you think? Should the EPA be allowed to monitor America’s farms and ranches this way? We’d very much like to hear your opinion.

Photo: © Bill Gillette

EPA planes spying on ranchers? Lawmakers want answers

By: Miguel Llanos, MSNBC

A Nebraska cattlemen’s group is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to stop pollution-control flights over ranches, claiming it amounts to spying on citizens. EPA, meanwhile, says the flights are an effective way to quickly spot — and stop — pollution from manure lagoons and other waste at large livestock operations.

Nebraska’s five federal lawmakers joined the fight this week, demanding to know on what authority EPA is flying over and photographing private property. The lawmakers sent their demands to EPA chief Lisa Jackson on Tuesday, listing a battery of questions and demanding answers by June 10.

EPA has been operating these flights across the country for nearly 10 years.

By Brent M. Haglund, Ph.D.

A decade and a half passed between completion of Aldo Leopold’s two most significant books.  In Game Management – released in 1933 – he stated that recovery of wildlife habitat and wildlife species dependent on such could often be accomplished with more skillful, careful use of the same tools which had created the losses.  In a frequently quoted series, “. . . axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun. . .”, Leopold laid out how humans as tool wielders effectively decide wildlife’s fate.

The emphasis on “tools” became a frequent topic for Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

Now, a study from Finland concludes that voluntary conservation programs can be cheap and effective in certain circumstances when landowners decide where not to use tools.  This in itself should not come as a surprise.  Aldo Leopold was warning of the limits of “government conservation” in the 1930s and 1940s.  Public acquisition of habitat was impractical and insufficient.  Regulatory prohibitions and mandates cut against human nature and were unenforceable.  Thus, he identified the need to cultivate an ethical impulse, consistent with human nature, and reinforced with incentives where necessary.  The Finnish research shows that need and opportunity are consistent and can be merged.

There are a growing number of such examples in America in which conservation success, be it clean water, habitat protection, or species recovery, result from determined and passionate individuals who couple their knowledge of the land with an abiding interest in nature.  Many of them just need to be asked and encouraged.

In Louisiana, the Black Bear Conservation Coalition (BBCC) has been successful in recovering a federally threatened subspecies that suffered from habitat loss.  In the lower Mississippi floodplain, they turned the bears from a regulatory liability into an animal that private, as well as corporate landowners wanted on their land.  The BBCC found the right mix of science, education, ethics, and incentives in their drive for voluntary participation.  They even deal with nuisance bears so that neighbors will not object strenuously to the bears’ presence.

In Wisconsin, another federally listed species, the Karner blue butterfly, is seeing steady population gains because landowners welcome the beautiful, delicate creatures, which have a wingspread approximately the size of a quarter.  The habitat needed by the butterflies is entirely consistent with many private landowners’ other land uses.  Cost sharing incentives help them improve the landscape for both.

Texas rancher Bob Long figured out how he and his Bastrop County landowning neighbors could protect the diminishing Houston Toad.  With little outside help, they, with partners, developed management techniques that allowed the toads to thrive and are consistent with livestock grazing and forestry.

At about the same time, a northern Montana tribe, the Blackfeet Nation, decided to recover a bit of their cultural heritage by re-introducing a long-lost component to their prairie landscape.  In just a decade, the swift fox, the smallest North American canid, weighing in at only five pounds, is flourishing on the Blackfeet reservation.  More importantly, it is repopulating ranches from which it had been swept away by poisoning campaigns directed against coyotes. As a species, it has been removed from a list of those which might become included under the Endangered Species Act.

These and many other examples underscore what Aldo Leopold imagined and experienced 80 years ago.  Voluntary human conduct depends upon and emerges out of an ethic that motivates and guides it.  The lessons from countless examples of voluntary conservation point to a few basic conclusions:

1. Society should avoid penalizing those who invest time and effort to enhance the environment
2. Knowing what is the right thing to do requires that landowners are armed with an understanding of physical, chemical, and ecological processes
3. Policy should attempt to align as closely as possible with human nature and economic reality
4. Incentives, whether financial or regulatory, should help people and organizations do things that they already want to do

In light of these tenets of effective, meaningful, voluntary conservation, it is not surprising that forest landowners in Finland, when asked if they would like to save hawk and owl nests on their property, agreed in overwhelming numbers.  These landowners faced no regulatory costs for doing so.  They were asked, not told.  Most said “yes”and set aside the use of the axe on some small part of their timber lands.  Otherwise, they continue to utilize their forests in ways that are consistent with their needs and values.

We have approached the limits of government ownership of land. Public spending on regulation and enforcement is stretched to the breaking point. Inexpensive, voluntary conservation by private landholders will grow in importance and the means to achieve it will be greatly sought after.

As Leopold wrote, “The fallacy (of) the economic determinists…is the belief that economics determines all land-use.  This is simply not true.  An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse.”

Or to put it more simply, whether in Finland or in the United States, many landowners just need to be asked to do their part.

Dr. Brent Haglund is president of Sand County Foundation.

Prior to the Farm Bill passing the Senate Agriculture Committee, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet (D – Colorado) conducted listening sessions around his state to hear agricultural families’ concerns about the Farm Bill, which is now in consideration by the full Senate.

Joanne Stanko, who, along with her husband, Jim, owns Stanko Ranch in Steamboat Springs, recipient of the 2010 Leopold Conservation Award in Colorado, was at one of these sessions and voiced her opinions about the effectiveness of conservation programs under the Farm Bill. She articulated her concerns, which appear below, during a follow-up discussion.

“First, let me say that these programs are wonderful and very helpful to the small farmer and rancher,” Stanko said. “Cost sharing allows them to do more conservation work, earlier, on their property. That being said, here are some of our concerns.”

Watch a video about Jim and Joanne Stanko’s conservation efforts

A farmer and rancher should be able to call someone at the local, state, and federal level and get the same answer to a question or interpretation of a program.

With our CSP (Conservation Stewardship Program), we decided to apply for the CSP after repeated encouragement from various entities. We had been putting it off, because we weren’t sure the money was worth the hassle. Since it was the first one done in our county, our local agent called her higher ups, as we worked through the test and paperwork. There was a question of how much of the property was eligible. She called and was told one answer. When the original contract was sent to the higher ups, it was sent back with an amendment that said more of the land was eligible for calculation and, therefore, the contract was for a higher amount. We signed the amendment, moved ahead with our planned improvements, and, after a year, received our first check from the federal government. About four months later, we received a letter from the government telling us that we were overpaid, needed to repay almost $3,000, and had to go to a local office to sign another amendment.

The process of review and refunds needs to be more timely.

The federal government gave us 10 days to return the money, which we did. We, then, went in to sign a new amendment. However, our local office, and others, felt that we should seek mediation, which we did. We were scheduled for a hearing, when, the day prior to the meeting, we were told by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) that the funding would be returned and the contract would be set at the original amount. We received a letter from NRCS stating that we could expect the refund in 30 to 60 days. That was in September 2011. We didn’t receive the refund until we had called, written, and, finally, contacted Senator Bennet’s office. The money was refunded in April 2012.

The application process and qualifications need to be more clearly defined.

Example: For the first time, we filed for death loss from Farm Services for the calf crop of 2011. We were told our application deadline was last fall. However, our local agent told us in April that she wasn’t sure when they would get to 2011 due to the agency being in the middle of a backlog of denials and appeals from 2010.

I think the greater issue here is, obviously, either the information given to the producer or local agent wasn’t clear, if all 2010 applicants to the program were denied, or maybe the guidelines weren’t written clearly enough. Do the programs need to be written more simply? Do we need better training? Between us, Jim, Pat, our son, and I have a total of seven degrees. Add to that our local agents’ number of degrees and years of experience. It shouldn’t be that hard.

New farmers and ranchers will have a difficult time if changes weren’t made.

I worry about the upcoming farmers and ranchers. We’ve been in the business long enough to have been able to pay down our capital expenses, have conserved not only our land but our money, so when they want $3,000 in 10 days, it’s there. According to reported trends, more people are going into ag. Their average age is 10 years younger than the overall average, and the average size of their property is one third to one half smaller than in the past. They have had to invest a lot of capital, and they won’t have the funds sitting around to come up with refunds, wait long-term for payments, et cetera.

The whole process needs to be more streamlined and clearly defined up front.

I don’t want to waste my time or the organization’s time if I’m not qualified.

Jim and Joanne Stanko’s Stanko Ranch has been in the family since 1907. Jim cites the ranch’s centennial anniversary as one of the greatest accomplishments of his life. 

Photo credit: Bill Gillette

Julie Cart presents a story about the clash between environmental organizations in the American West over the development of solar power in desert areas. The Wildlands Conservancy bought 600,000 acres of the Mojave Desert and deeded it to the federal government with the intention that the land be preserved. The government is now looking to open 50,000 acres of that land to solar development.

Wildlands Conservancy, a small-scale organization, is arguing that larger environmental entities are not doing enough to halt this sort of large scale development. Larger environmental organizations, like Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club see renewable energy projects as crucial to slowing climate change.

What do you think? Is the development of solar energy in desert areas essential to combat climate change, or is it too detrimental to desert ecosystems?

A collision of perspectives on renewable energy

By: Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times

April Sall gazed out at the Mojave Desert flashing past the car window and unreeled a story of frustration and backroom dealings.

Her small California group, the Wildlands Conservancy, wanted to preserve 600,000 acres of the Mojave. The group raised $45 million, bought the land and deeded it to the federal government.

The conservancy intended that the land be protected forever. Instead, 12 years after accepting the largest land gift in American history, the federal government is on the verge of opening 50,000 acres of that bequest to solar development.

Even worse, in Sall’s view, the nation’s largest environmental organizations are scarcely voicing opposition. Their silence leaves the conservancy and a smattering of other small environmental organizations nearly alone in opposing energy development across 33,000 square miles of desert land.