BATTLE MOUNTAIN - In the face of the recent Bureau of Land Management grazing decisions involving what ranchers were calling the imminent closure of the Argenta Allotment, Doug Furtado, BLM Battle Mountain District manager, is being targeted by a petition circulating to oust him.
Furtado, who has been district manager for three and a half years and with the BLM since 1997, said he has been doing everything possible in order to avoid having to temporarily close the allotment due to drought-related impacts.
At press time May 25, Furtado said an agreement had been signed which allows for ranchers on the Argenta Allotment to let their cattle graze down to a four-inch stubble on the riparian areas and at a level of 30 percent utilization on the upland areas.
Ranchers Lynn Tomera and Shawn Mariluch, whose cows graze on the Argenta Allotment, said they had no choice but to
sign the agreement. Furtado said he feels the agreement is reasonable but the ranchers disagreed.
luch said they did not overgraze the Argenta Allotment.
Last year there was an allowance of six inches of stubble on the riparian areas. Mariluch said his cattle grazed one area to 5.1 inches but all of the other areas were above the six inches. He said he was told he overgrazed his areas but was never shown data by the BLM supporting that claim.
Mariluch acknowledged the extreme overall drought conditions of the area but said he felt the grasses were not impacted by the drought this year and are in the best shape they have been in five years due to spring rains.
Tomera and Mariluch said adhering to this current agreement will be difficult.
In order to comply with the BLM's agreement Tomera said she "believes with a lot of riding and work, they can possibly do it but I feel we are being set up to fail because it is a tough set of rules to comply with and (Doug Furtado) knows that but we've got to try."
Elko County Commissioner and attorney Grant Gerber, who has been one of the key people heading up the protests against the BLM, said he feels the agreement that the ranchers were forced into signing was mean-spirited by the BLM. He plans to continue protesting and believes the BLM should step back and let the ranchers make their own grazing decisions.
The fight between the ranchers and the BLM has been brewing for quite some time. The Tomeras and Filippinis maintain there is plenty of grass on the range for their cows to eat and if the land is not allowed to be grazed it will become a fire hazard in the hot summer months.
Furtado said he wants the cows out there now to eat the grass but his goal is to avoid excessive grazing by having them bring their cows in when the key triggers are met. He is hoping that ranchers will use their cattle to target the fire fuels in order to reduce wildfire danger, he said.
"What we're saying right now is 'go graze it,'" he said. "'Just sign the agreements that say you'll come off before these triggers are met for riparian and key perennial vegetation.' I don't dispute that there's grass out there. We're not saying you can't graze it. We're saying just agree to come off of those areas before there's overgrazing. It's plain and simple."
The Tomeras hosted a Grass Tour May 17 where they led approximately 200 people out to the range to witness for themselves the greenery. Various people spoke on grazing issues. State and local officials attended the event.
In another protest, Gerber rode his horse from Elko to Carlin on Memorial Day where he was greeted with a parade that wound around town.
He rode to Battle Mountain Tuesday to hand off the petition against Furtado to be taken Pony Express style to Gov. Brian Sandoval in Carson City. The event was held to shine the spotlight on the BLM's alleged closure of the Argenta Allotment.
Furtado said he did not feel the protests were a personal attack and that he plans to continue to work with ranchers to come to grazing agreements as he has done in the past.
"The American people have the right under the First Amendment to protest, to assemble, to petition," Furtado said. "I'm not taking it personally. I'm taking the high road and so are my employees on this whole thing. At the end of the day, people have a right to protest and they have a right to assemble and as long as it's peaceful and there's no threats, there's no intimidation or bullying toward my employees or staff then I have to support the First Amendment and I do."
The petition was penned by Gerber who says BLM's grazing restrictions could have a profoundly negative impact on the livelihoods of ranchers.
Gerber spoke at the May 8 Lander County commission meeting and urged commissioners to back ranchers in the fight against the closure of the Argenta Allotment. Commissioners voted at the meeting to stand behind ranchers and send letters to the heads of the BLM, the governor and other elected officials.
Gerber has assumed the stance that the BLM's approach to limit grazing will increase wildfires, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals.
"(Grazing) is extremely important to reduce the great wildfire danger so over 100,000 wild animals will not burn," he said recently.
Furtado said if enough cattle were turned out to reduce fire danger it would cause extensive damage to sensitive rangeland areas.
Gerber said he did not know how many signatures had been gathered but at last count a few weeks ago, Gerber's petition, which is circulating all over Nevada, had more than 500.
The number of signatures is increasing rapidly each day, he said. Gerber urged anyone with questions on the petition or grazing issues to call him at (775) 934-7507.
He said the petition will continue to be circulated until Furtado is ousted. It will be presented to the commissioners in Lander, Eureka, Elko and Humboldt counties as well as all other elected officials and the governor.
"He exceeded his authority and violated the rights of ranchers and threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of animals with wildfire," Gerber said.
Gerber's petition demands Furtado "be removed from his position because he has been ignoring and continues to ignore the pleas of Lander, Eureka and Nye County residents and even his own staff."
It continues, "Mr. Furtado, without notice and without hearings, reduces and impedes agriculture, mining, recreation and hunting. His latest action in demanding radical reductions in grazing imperils tens of thousands of animals with wildfire."
Gerber, who has long shown concern for the plight of animals during wildfires, is the brainchild behind three pilot projects in Elko County aimed at proving sage grouse populations can be restored by killing predators and cattle grazing.
The programs, being conducted at the Devil's Gate Ranch, the South Fork Indian Reservation and one other area, implement a massive reduction of all prey animals such as coyotes, ravens, crows, red foxes and badgers through poison and other methods.
Commissioner Dave Mason gave recent input outside of a commission meeting regarding the grazing situation. He said he feels the BLM is trying to manage public lands the way parks are managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
"Our national parks are a national treasure but Nevada's land belongs to the people of Nevada and it's by the people and for the people," he said. "For the economy of Nevada, they took over the management because it was very sparsely populated when that happened years ago and I think what's happened here is that BLM ... they are treating our land as if it's a park. It's not. It's a public entity of the state of Nevada. They were called into manage it because there weren't enough people to manage all those acres."
He continued, "The BLM is managing what belongs to Nevada not what belongs to the national Forest Service and there's a huge difference in how they manage that. I mean we have cattle, farmers. We have ranchers and all kinds of people trying to develop the land into something prosperous and they're trying to hold us out because it doesn't fit to the rules of a national forest."
Contact Heather Hill at h.hill@winnemuccapublishing.net.[[In-content Ad]]BATTLE MOUNTAIN - Doug Furtado, Bureau of Land Management district manager for the Battle Mountain District, said the Battle Mountain BLM did not close the Argenta Allotment and was doing everything possible to work with permittees to avoid temporary closure due to drought-related impacts.
He said his goal has always been
to reach an agreement that would prevent excessive grazing on public land. He added that a BLM team of experts agreed the majority of the allotment was overused last year due to extreme drought conditions.
Lynn Tomera, of the Tomera Ranches, and Shawn Mariluch, of the Filippini Ranching Co., whose cattle graze on the Argenta Allotment said they did not overgraze the land.
Furtado said BLM representatives met with permittees in February, presented monitoring information collected by Field Manager Chris Cook's staff and said last year's agreements did not work in the Argenta Allotment, which still saw excessive grazing despite the cooperation of the Tomeras and Filippinis.
He said the ranchers were told they would be allowed on the area around Mt. Lewis after the growing season and hot summer months, which would be around Oct. 1, to allow the public land to rest and recover.
"This whole environmental controversy right now is a result of that," Furtado said. "This whole time over the last few months since the petition was put out for my removal ... from that time on, I've told my staff, 'We are taking the high road. We are going to continue to work with our permittees, the counties and the public despite all this controversy and conflict that has been created. We are going to try to continue to get agreements with people and the BLM Battle Mountain District will continue to support all local businesses despite petitions being put out.'"
Local ranchers said they have had a difficult time working with Furtado and that he has overstepped his boundaries with some of the regulations he is enforcing to reduce grazing.
After the February meeting, Furtado said the agency conducted a series of meetings with Argenta Allotment permittees "to come up with something they could all agree to that would result in protecting the resource so it doesn't get overgrazed a third straight year during drought."
Furtado said he asked Lander County Commission Chair Brian Garner and Commissioner Steve Stienmetz to meet with him to help facilitate a plan that could be presented to the Argenta permittees that would maintain rangeland health and benefit ranchers.
Garner said it was his goal to work as a liaison between ranchers and the BLM to come to an agreement while keeping the county's interests of preventing wildfires through grazing at the forefront. He said he spent countless hours doing so.
"It's important to the county and the constituents of the county to take care and prevent wildfires," he said.
Furtado said the BLM came to a decision that permittees could turn out however many cattle they wanted onto the Argenta Allotment within their permitted use if they agreed to come off when key triggers were met.
The triggers were four inches of stubble height in riparian areas and 30 percent utilization of the upland areas for key perennial grass species. Furtado said four inches is one bite away from bare ground.
"We want grazing during a drought but we want light use on the perennials and on the riparian areas," Furtado said. "Most ranchers would tell you that when you reach a certain level of use that constitutes the maximum allowable before you get into overgrazing ... its time to go round up those cows and move them to the next area."
Furtado said he felt the agreement was reasonable. Tomera and Mariluch said they felt it was not reasonable and these goals would be difficult to meet. They said they felt they had no choice but to sign the agreement.
Furtado said it had been written in the agreement that if the triggers were exceeded the land would need to be rested the following year. He said the ranchers were against that portion so he took it out.
"I don't see how you could be more flexible ... you just got to come off within seven days before you have overgrazing," Furtado said. "That's the premise of the agreement. It's not a complicated agreement. It's not some multi-page document that requires some legal review. It's just very simple. You can turn out but you've got to come off at the time the triggers are met."
Furtado said he agrees with the ranchers that there is plenty of forage out there for their cows. He is not denying there is grass, he said. But he cautioned that the spring rains do not mean the area has seen the end of extreme drought conditions.
He explained that the BLM uses U.S. Drought Monitor by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to make drought determinations.
He said in order for the area to see the end to the drought it needs moisture beyond just a series of spring rains, which only generates cheatgrass.
"Certain people have this perspective that ... 'if it rains in the spring everything will be good,' but that's not how it works," he said. "A drought is something that establishes regionally over a period of time."
Furtado said the extreme drought began 2012 and that summer there was documented excessive overuse of the range throughout much of northern Nevada. Furtado, who has a degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, in range management, said he utilizes resource specialists and his own experience when making decisions.
"I understand ecological processes and I understand drought management and how we need to be managing grazing during periods of extreme drought that we're in now," he said.
He explained that over time, when lands are excessively or inappropriately grazed, cheatgrass increases at the expense of native perennials.
"Whenever we have cheatgrass as a significant component of a plant community that is an indicator that rangeland health standards aren't being met," Furtado said. "It's an indicator of degraded rangeland."
Ranchers spoke out at the May 8 commission meeting and said taking care of the land is in their best interest and that they do not graze inappropriately.
Assemblyman John Ellison, who was at the meeting, said that 10 years ago, two million acres were lost to fire.
"Why was that?" he asked. "Reduction of grazing. We're going to see that again. ... These fields were created by the ranchers. ... and now they're saying that these ranchers don't know what they're doing? That's crazy. They're the first stewards. They built this state."
Furtado, who was not at meeting, said excessively grazed rangeland, particularly during drought, results in the lack of resilience of the native plant communities to drought conditions and facilitates downward trends in the condition of the range, he said.
Rangeland dominated by cheatgrass or other invasive annuals has little resource value, increasing the potential for wildfire, and provides very little habitat for wildlife, he added.
This happens slowly over a long period of time, Furtado explained. It takes the land years to recover and sometimes it never does, he said.
He also pointed out that the decision of whether or not to list the sage grouse as endangered is coming up in 2015. He said the BLM has been trying through various efforts to avoid the listing of the sage grouse and that overuse of sage grouse priority habitat on a large scale during a drought is not a good message.
Ranchers have been advocating the critical importance that their cattle be allowed to graze in order to reduce cheatgrass and other grasses that are fuels for wildfires.
Mariluch told commissioners May 8 that there's no science to it. He said he has been monitoring the land.
"This year looks better than it has in probably the last five to 10 anyway with the production that's out there," he said. " ... If we don't graze it this year, it will burn. ... so if you manage it like (Furtado) wants to manage it then there won't be cows out there cause it'll all burn."
Furtado said that if enough cows are put on the range for it to not burn then other resources will be negatively impacted.
"We don't have the luxury to subscribe to theories of rangeland management that sponsor or promote landscape scale overuse of the range solely to reduce the potential of wildfire," Furdato said. "Why? Because you can never put enough cows on the range to reduce all the fuels ... enough to prevent fire without affecting other resource values such as riparian areas, wetland areas, streams, fisheries, habitat for wildlife. You can't put enough cows out there to reduce the fuels without affecting the other resources."
Furtado said the goal of the BLM is to manage for multiple use and the agency has a legal responsibility to manage public rangelands in a manner that achieves rangeland health standards as defined by the RACs (Resource Advisory Councils).
"We have to manage the range during a drought," he said. "We have to provide habitat for wildlife. We have to provide forage for livestock grazing. We have to provide forage for wild horses and burros where they exist in herd management areas and we have to protect the riparian areas and the wetlands."
He said he adheres closely to the Code of Federal Regulations which are not discretionary to the BLM, while at the same time working to implement the regulations by avoiding adverse decisions through reaching agreements with the grazing permittees.
Furtado emphasized that in all of his decisions, including ones likely to generate controversy, he makes sure to have the support and backing within his chain of command up to the BLM Nevada State Office.
"Some people have said that I personally make rules and regulations," Furtado said. "That is nonsense. Although district managers have a tremendous responsibility, the authority to make decisions are clearly defined. Contrary to popular belief, district managers do not have the authority to develop statewide or national policy and certainly do not have the authority to make regulations as someone recently stated. I have been implementing the regulations and BLM policy on this drought issue. Are we consistent statewide? Not yet, but collectively we will get there."
He said, in contrast to what some have been saying, he is not acting alone with a personal vendetta against ranchers. He said that is unsubstantiated rhetoric. He is fond of the people in the Battle Mountain area and wants to see everyone succeed, including the ranchers.
"I like Battle Mountain and I intend to stay here for a long, long time," Furtado said. "I like the community. I like the people in the community. I enjoy my job and the challenges that it presents. I'm going to continue to work with permittees in what is an environment that one could describe as a perfect storm of issues."
Contact Heather Hill at h.hill@winnemuccapublishing.net.
