Range Management with a New Look

After a century and more of overgrazing, much of Arizona's rangeland is in need of help. Now there's...

A NEW LOOK IN AN OLD RANGE IMPROVEMENT TECHNIQUE

Text by Jan Barstad/Photography by Jan and Ron Barstad At sunup in the corrugated hills east of Tonto Creek, Bill Conway and his father, E. C. Conway, are already on horseback, and Greenback Valley is noisy with voices that haven't been heard there for fifty years: the Conways are driving 600 goats to fresh pasture.

The goats fan out across the hillside, nibbling shrubs. “In ten minutes they'll be up in the rocks,” says Bill Conway. “There's lots of mountain mahogany up there for them to eat.” At the Laughlin Land and Cattle Company in the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, Lenora Odle fills clean soda pop bottles and fits them with large nipples. From the barn comes a chorus of high bleats. Eleven Angora kids are yelling for their breakfast. “Their mothers either died or rejected them,” Mrs. Odle explains as she lifts two of the animals into a wheelbarrow and begins to feed them. The others wriggle impatiently.

In the sage and juniper country between Window Rock and Ganado, Rose Owens separates the kids from the rest of her band of seventy-five goats and sheep in the corral behind her hogan. Leaving the kids behind, she guides the band down a steep cliff trail with the help of her husband, Robert, who is on horseback. For the first time this spring, Mrs. Owens has brought her goats to Bear Canyon to graze the new grass.

Five miles north of Dewey, Rick Knipe ambles into the oak brush beyond his windmill. Three billies atop a boulder give away the location of his 450 Angoras. Two white dogs appear from the center of the band, wagging plumed tails. “Cagney and Lacey,” Rick introduces them, “my goat cops.” The two Great Pyrenees were raised with the goats and protect them from predators.

East of Knipe's Broken K Ranch lies Turtle Rock Ranch, home of Ken Jordan's 1800 Angoras. Eight hundred and fifty kids have been born during the spring, and Jordan is busy trying to convince many of the nannies to accept their offspring. “Angora nannies can be terrible mothers,” he says. So that he can tell which kid belongs to which nanny, Jordan spraypaints their sides with matching numbers.

These are the ranchers who have brought goats back to the Arizona range - generally to the same range occupied by goats fifty years ago: the chaparral country that arcs from northwest to east through the center of the state. The objective of men and goats is to improve this range by controlling the brush, thereby increasing grass and available groundwater. If men and cattle had the opposite effect for a century, what chance have men and goats to do better?

The answer lies in the nature of the vegetation and the animal the ranchers have chosen to control it.

Chaparral shrubs are tough, woody plants that grow on hillsides between 3000 and 6000 feet in elevation. Scrub oak, manzanita, mountain mahogany, cliff-rose, silk-tassel, barberry, and others share the same ecological niche. All put down deep roots that tie up large amounts of water, and their tops often grow so thick that leather “chaps” must be worn by riders to protect their legs. This thick foliage shades the ground so that nothing much grows beneath the plants. Leathery leaves minimize moisture loss, and, after brushfires, most of the shrubs grow back quickly from buds around their root crowns or from heat-seared seeds. Deer browse the leaves and fruits, but cattle prefer to graze the grass (if any can be found) between the shrubby plants.

In Rose Owen's country in northeastern Arizona, the elevation is a thousand feet higher and the vegetation is piñon, juniper, and sage, but the problem is the same: too little grass, too many shrubs.

The goat, closely related to the sheep but boasting a beard and lacking foot glands, is nimble, intelligent, and curious. Unlike the cow and the sheep, it is a browser, preferring shrubs to grass, and it doesn't mind foraging on steep slopes. Dr. Duane Knipe saw these characteristics as advantages when he investigated the use of goats to control chaparral on Forest Service lands in the late 1970s.

A range ecologist for Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Knipe was looking for an alternative to prescribed burning, herbicide treatment, or mechanical means such as root plow-ing or chain-dragging for shrub control. Goats seemed to fit the formula: browsers that were cheap and environmentally acceptable. By 1980 Knipe had launched the Forest Service's first "goat study" on Diamond Rim northeast of Payson.

The 240 Angora goats rented from Dan Page of Payson were so effective at their assigned task that they nearly destroyed Diamond Rim's plant cover.

"They ate everything, even the grass we planted after we burned the hill," says Knipe. "We moved them out of the study plot into another fenced area and kept our fingers crossed that the plot would recover. Then we looked for a workable grazing rotation system."

After two seasons, the goats were removed from Diamond Rim and the study was terminated because of overgrazing.

Dan Page's goats were shifted to the Laughlin Ranch, where Don Laughlin had thousands of acres in need of improvement. After reading about the Payson goat study in the Los Angeles Times, Laughlin requested that Knipe begin a similar study on his ranch in the Hualapais. By this time, Knipe had hit upon a method of grazing rotation that promised to spare the vegetation.

Called the Savory Grazing Method, or SGM, it was the brainchild of Allan Savory, a wildlife biologist in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1950s. Concerned with the plight of Africa's game animals and the desertification of large areas of the world, Savory studied wild herds to find out why, after they had devastated an area, the land would recover dramatically during the next growing season.

He concluded that the animal's hoof action broke up crusted soil, trampled down old plants and seed heads, and drove everything into the prepared seedbed. Rain sprouted the seed, and the cycle repeated.

He reasoned the same principles could be applied to livestock grazing. So developed the "Savory cell," a fenced area divided into "paddocks," in which livestock could be grazed intensively to simulate the action of a wild herd. Time is a key element in the method's success: a rancher must know exactly when to move the animals to the next paddock.

Now known as Holistic Resource Management, or HRM, the controversial "Savory method" is being taught at Savory's Center for Holistic Resource Management in Albuquerque. It has reached some forty Arizona ranchers via its branch in this state, and all the goat ranchers practice it to some degree.

A three-year experiment on the Laugh-lin Ranch proved that 600 goats could open up chaparral shrubs to sunlight and rainfall and produce more grass. Don Laughlin judges the use of goats a success, but says, "Our progress has been slower than I'd like because we haven't had much rain-it all depends on rainfall."

Ken Jordan, who began his HRM project in 1984, agrees but insists, "We have to start somewhere. Nothing grew under these shrubs when I began, and now I have annual weeds and grasses. Perennial grasses will be next."

While the Forest Service searched for another cooperator in 1984, Bill Conway was looking for a way to save his half of the 114-year-old Greenback Valley Ranch. Like many ranchers, he was suffering from increasing costs and decreasing profits in the cattle business.

"I even thought of turning it into a dude ranch," he says dryly.

Goats, he decided, were more profitable and less trouble than dudes. He built an HRM cell, modified for statistical needs of the Forest Service's study of vegetation and soils, and stocked 600 Spanish goats.

Descended from animals brought to the New World in the 1500s, the Spanish goat is hardier than the Angora (a cold rain right after shearing can wipe out the major part of an Angora herd). The Spanish goat's short hair requires no shearing, and its meat is reputed to be tastier. The meat has a ready market: Conway ships more than 1000 yearling kids and culled nannies each year to auction markets in Los Angeles, where meat packers and individuals from the Mexican and Asian communities buy all he has to sell.

But succulence on the hoof also is tasty to predators, and electric fences powered by solar cells have not been enough protection. Conway added guard dogs this last year. Like Rick Knipe, he welcomes barking all night long because it deters coyotes and mountain lions.

For a century, the Angora goat was a familiar sight on Arizona ranges. It arrived in the state in 1873-and promptly started an argument. Yuma and Tucson fought over who got the first goat. In 1874 Tucson's Arizona Citizen reported: The Sentinel notices the arrival at Yuma of two Angora goats for James Peck of Mohawk Station, and errs in saying that this is the first introduction of Angora goats into the Territory. Maisch and Jacobs of this place have an Angora goat that was brought in last fall.

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Early writers on goat production saw herding as the only good predator deter-rent, and even today, Lenora Odle at Laughlin Ranch scoffs at electric fences and holds out for herding, not only to protect the band but to prevent over-grazing. Most early goat ranchers, includ-ing Mrs. Odle's father, Jim Herridge of Skull Valley, hired herders who stayed with the bands, followed them to fresh feed and water every day (a herder leads sheep from in front of the flock but fol-lows goats), and settled them on fresh bedding grounds each night.

By 1918 Arizona was home to 178,000 goats. Gila County even boasted of a place called Angora. Mae Holder Haught, eighty-six, a long-time resident of Payson, re-members John Holder's store and post office on the East Verde River. "My father called it Holder, then changed the name to Angora," Mrs. Haught recalls. John Holder herded his goats on Diamond Rim before the family moved to Gisela.

When the Department of Agriculture and its Forest Service took over the nation's forest reserves from the Department of the Interior in 1905, officialsrequired ranchers to remove their goats from the Tonto reserve (later Tonto National Forest), mistakenly assuming that goats were the cause of the area's overgrazing. (Will C. Barnes, the USFS's inspector of grazing, by 1911 had pinpointed cattle and sheep as the culprits.) Holder drove his animals to New Mexico, returning later to settle near Kirkland."The cattlemen looked down on us goat people," says Mrs. Haught. "But we made money, and they didn't."

The cattlemen didn't fight with the goat people. They were too fond of eating kid each spring. Instead, they reserved their hostility for the sheepmen.

It was not a wolf in sheep's clothing but a coyote in a polyester suit that killed Arizona's goat industry. Predators and synthetic fibers combined after WWorld War II to reduce goat numbers from 210,000 in 1942 to 29,000 by 1951.

Navajos contend that goats never disappeared from Arizona. They learned the technique of herding from the people ofthe New Mexico pueblos in the 1600s. Twenty-seven hundred sheep and goats went with them on the Long Walk into captivity at Fort Sumner in New Mexico. When they returned to their homeland in 1868, the federal government gave them 14,000 sheep and 1000 goats so that they could once again live by herding. Those numbers had swelled to nearly a million by 1918. In 1934 the Bureau of Indian Affairs, alarmed by what it saw as rampant overgrazing, ordered a massive reduction of Navajo livestock. Goats and horses, considered by the BIA to be less commercially valuable than sheep, were hardest hit. Slowly the tribe rebuilt its herds, and by 1982 some 95,000 range goats ninety-nine percent of Arizona's totalcould be found on the Navajo reservation. Today many Navajo families have bands of sheep with a few goats mixed in.

Rose Owens has reversed the usual ratio: she has seventy-five goats and a few sheep. The goats are Angoras and provide meat, milk, hides, and mohair. But Mrs. Owens doesn't use mohair to weave her unique round rugs because the soft, easily-broken hair obscures the edges of the design. She uses sheep's wool for weaving and trades the mohair.

Tribal livestock owners have been suspicious of grazing "management" since the stock reduction of the 1930s, an event almost as traumatic as the Long Walk. But Holistic Resource Management is changing their minds.

Bob Archuleta, a BIA land operations officer, says, "When Allan Savory said the range might have to be double-stocked to To increase the grass, I went to HRM school to prove him wrong!" Instead, he became an HRM enthusiast and now has two natural resource specialists speaking on HRM, in the Navajo language, throughout the reservation.

One is Joanne Manygoats, who works for the tribe's Livestock Division. "There was much suspicion when I first began talking about HRM," she admits. "But now the ranchers say, 'That's okay! That's how our grandfathers did it!'"

She feels that Navajo herders have always practiced a kind of instinctive HRM. Like Rose Owens, they are with their animals every day, protecting them, watching for signs of illness, and moving them constantly, using different ranges at different seasons.

"I helped with my father's herd when I was growing up," says Joanne Manygoats. "He got real mad at us if we let them go where they weren't supposed to."

If Bob Archuleta has his way, he'll figure out how to practice HRM without physical barriers. He'd like to try a system of rock cairns or markers on trees to indicate paddock limits, so that herders could keep the animals within the boundaries without fencing tribal lands held in common by all Navajos.

Goat owners farther south see a good future for their operations. Mohair's re-

turn to popularity as a natural fiber, its

government-backed incentive price of $4.63 per pound (1986), and improved predator control have given the goat industry new impetus. Bill Conway wants to increase his herd to 1000. "I'm getting sixty-three pounds of red meat to the acre with goats, compared to 6.5 pounds from cattle," he points out. "And I'm making $28.80 per pound, against $4.23 for cattle." Lenora Odle would like to see the Laughlin Ranch herd grow to 1200, and Ken Jordan wants to increase his 1800 to 2500. Rick Knipe has added 200 nannies to his herd and will hold at 600. At twentysix, Knipe is the youngest of the goat ranchers, heavily mortgaged but determined to make a go of it. "Sometimes I have nightmares about going bankrupt," he says. "If I can't make it work, I'd have to go back to cutting meat in the super market." Knipe will make it work: he's using the goat research his father, Duane, developed for the Forest Service. The ranchers are convinced that "goating" improves the land. Knipe and Jordan are working with Pat Boles of the Arizona State Land Department, monitoring goat movements and vegetation changes. Says Boles, "It was refreshing to find someone who wanted to use a suitable browsing animal on the land, instead of struggling to make cow range out of it." At Tonto National Forest, Dave Stewart, working with Bill Conway, admits that not everyone is as sold on Holistic Resource Management as he is. "But I see HRM as one of many good tools we can use for proper range management." If the combination of HRM and goating works, mixed goat and cattle operations might be possible on some ranches. Arizona's goat ranchers also must improve the public image of their favorite animal. For centuries the goat has been maligned: consider "scapegoat," "to smell like a goat," and the nature of that disreputable old god, Pan. The prejudice against goat meat also persists, and Bill Conway and Ken Jordan think this is unfortunate because it tastes good. "Maybe," suggests Jordan, "if we publicize the fact goat meat contains less cholesterol than beef, they might change their minds." Nothing is left of Angora, Arizona, but a few foundation stones near the East Verde River, and the goats are gone from Diamond Rim. The only sound to be heard up there is the call of a hunting hawk and the wind across the hillside. There are a few shrubs, the stalks of flowering agaves -and grass: muhly, side-oats grama, and weeping love grass in abundance, the seed trampled into the ground during two seasons of heavy browsing. The grass has returned, thanks to the goat.

Selected Reading

Production of Goats on Far Western Ranges, by W. D. Chapline. U. S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin 749, Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1919.

"A Solution to Desertification and Associated Threats to Wildlife and Man," by Allan Savory. Proceedings of the 51st North American Wildlife Conference, Reno, Nevada, 1986.

"Effects of Angora Goat Browsing on Burned-Over Arizona Chaparral," by O. D. Knipe. Rangelands, Volume 5, Number 6, June, 1983.

The Angora Goat Book and Guard Dogs, by Jean Ebeling. Double Horn Books, Marble Falls, Texas, 1983.