Tools
photo gallery Ecoagriculture Snapshot » Community-Based Stewardship, Improved Range Management, and Habitat Conservation in Southwestern United States Grasslands
Arizona and New Mexico, USA
See PDF Version
For the past one hundred years, cattle ranchers in southern Arizona and New Mexico have relied on native grasslands to sustain their herds and livelihoods. Recent threats from property fragmentation, declining productivity, and loss of biological diversity have encouraged a unique partnership between ranchers, conservationists, and government agencies. Organized as the Malpai Borderlands Group, they are working to implement ecosystem management on an unprecedented scale.
The Malpai Borderlands Group operates on a roughly pyramid-shaped area of nearly a million acres, with the base of the pyramid beginning just east of Douglas, Arizona, continuing east along the Mexican Border to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. The apex is just south of Animas, New Mexico. This area includes about 57% private land, 20% state trust lands, and 20% federal lands, ranging in elevation from 4,500 feet to over 8,500 feet. The land is dominated by tobosa grasslands and desert scrub, but also includes a diverse mix of mountains, canyons and valleys dotted with Arizona ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, and riparian areas featuring sycamores and cottonwoods. Amidst the widespread cattle rangeland in the region, the Malpai Borderlands are home to several rare, threatened, or endangered plant and animal species, including Gould's turkey and white-sided jack rabbits as well as popular big game species including Coues deer, mule deer, pronghorn, and desert bighorn sheep.
The exclusion of wildfire from the region over the past century has contributed to a decline in herbaceous plant cover with resulting loss of watershed stability, wildlife habitat, and livestock forage. Fewer than 100 families of ranchers live in the area, and if recent trends had not been reversed by the Malpai Borderlands Group, the grasslands necessary to maintain their way of life would have been slowly taken over by woody species like mesquite, cholla cactus, and other desert scrub plants. Spurred by this threat of woody invasion, the local ranchers began searching for a long-term solution based on sound scientific principles would allow them to continue cattle ranching while providing critical habitat to the native flora and fauna.
In the 1990s, the ranchers began working with relevant state and federal agencies to address the appropriate role of fire in management of the grasslands. In partnership with environmentalists, scientists, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, and the State Land Departments of both Arizona and New Mexico, the Malpai Borderlands Group created a Comprehensive Fire Plan for the area. Fire suppression had been a major contributor to accelerated encroachment of brush, and this fire plan helped to restore its naturally occurring role. Since 1994, 69,000 acres of land have been impacted by fire, including four prescribed burns. Working in concert with government agencies to perform monitoring and analysis of the fires, the Malpai Borderlands Group has helped reduce woody plant cover and stimulate the growth of vital perennial grasses.
In addition to the reintroduction of fire to this landscape as a tool for conservation management, the black-tailed prairie dog has been reintroduced to parts of the Malpai Borderlands. Prairie dogs are a keystone species, considered to be fundamental to grassland preservation for the role they play in disturbance. However, they are also threatened in many parts of their range because ranchers have historically attempted to exterminate them for the perceived threat they pose livestock. Ecological research carried out by conservation biologist Charles Curtin in cooperation with the Malpai Borderlands Group revealed that prairie dogs actually benefit livestock, improving the nutrient content and overall abundance of forage. The Malpai Borderlands Group now hosts several meetings each year that are focused on sharing new scientific and land management information with fellow ranchers, environmentalists, conservationists, and government agencies. In the near future, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to approve the Malpai Borderlands Group’s Habitat Conservation Plan to ensure the protection of endangered native species, including the Chiricahua leopard frog, the long-nosed bat and the ridge-nosed rattlesnake. Beyond species-specific concerns, Curtin notes that the true strength of the MPG is in their ecosystem approach to conservation: "Desert grasslands are some of the most imperiled ecosystems in North America. The MBG is largely focused on the preservation of grassland and savanna habitats and as such the success of their efforts has huge implications for ecosystem health. The role of fire management in restoring and sustaining these habitats is a hallmark of the MBG's work."
In 1990, The Nature Conservancy purchased 300,000 acres of biologically rich land as part of the Gray Ranch within the Malpai region. Partnering with the Malpai Borderlands Group, a local rancher funded and created a non-profit called the Animas Foundation, with the purpose of buying and operating the Gray Ranch. The Nature Conservancy holds conservation easements on the land guaranteeing that it will never be subdivided, and has established monitoring procedures to record the health of the rangeland and the natural habitat. Over the past 15 years, the Malpai Borderlands Group has acquired conservation easements on an additional 77,000 acres of private land on 12 ranches. An additional 202,000 acres of surrounding land is protected and owned by state and federal governments. Coupled with The Nature Conservancy’s easement on the Gray ranch, over half the land in the Malpai Borderlands area is now permanently protected from subdivision and development.
Several other Malpai Borderlands projects have also bestowed benefits upon the community. The Group has established technical and cost-share assistance programs, supported by staff at the US Fish & Wildlife Service and the Natural Resource Conservation Service to help local ranchers put in place needed conservation projects and implement sound management practices. The Malpai’s watershed restoration project has helped construct 2,000 small structures along 10 miles of watersheds to slow run-off, contain sediment, build vegetation, and control erosion. With additional assistance from technical experts, the Malpai Borderlands Group has also begun "grassbanking" by which neighboring ranchers who experience serious drought could rest their ranches from grazing by moving their herds to the Gray Ranch under reciprocal conservation agreements. In addition to conserving the land by preventing over-grazing, grassbanking provides a form of insurance to the ranchers. Before the advent of grassbanking, a drought presented ranchers with a serious dilemma, notes author Dan Dagget. "Their choices are either to lease other land and stretch thin margins even thinner, cut their herd and lose money, or continue to pound the land and hope the rains come before permanent damage is done.”"Grassbanking eases this stress to the land and the herd, allowing ranchers to continue operations as usual, where they would otherwise experience serious losses or risk going out of business altogether.
Overall, the creation of the Malpai Borderlands Group and the resulting shift to more sustainable grazing and fire management practices has made the enterprise of ranching a more tenable and hopeful proposition in the eyes of many ranchers. Wendy Glenn, a rancher and coordinator of the Malpai Borderlands Group, expressed a series of rancher concerns that sparked the need for a group such as this one. There was the perceived lack of understanding from the government and the public at large, the ever-present threat of encroachment from subdevelopment, the lack of empowerment and finances to improve their own rangelands, and the disturbing trend of the loss of ranchland and cattlemen from their community. Ranchers especially feared that their children would not be able to continue their way of life. Ms. Glenn feels that the Malpai Borderlands Group allowed many interests to come together to address those problems. "We still have many hurdles to get over, but we are feeling encouraged about the outlook for the future of the land, and a rural way of life for our children and their children to come," she said in a newsletter to the Malpai Borderlands Group. Another rancher from the area, Billy Darnell, spoke of the promise in embracing this new movement of ranching: "The future is in our hands. We must nurture our cattle and produce profits through unpredictable environments and market swings. This is where the future of our beef industry will be written. I can see it and I am glad to be a part of the process, through the ups and downs."
For more information, please visit:
- http://geochange.er.usgs.gov/sw/responses/malpai/
- http://www.malpaiborderlandsgroup.org/
- http://www.fs.fed.us/eco/malapai.htm
- http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/1997/june/malpai.php
Beyond the Rangeland Conflict: Toward a West That Works by Dan Dagget
