NMCGA President’s Message

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE by Randell Major NMCGA President

Randell Major President Magdalena

Loren Patterson, President-Elect Corona

Dustin Johnson NW Vice President Farmington

Cliff Copeland NE Vice President Nara Visa

Jeff Decker SE Vice President Lovington

Roy Farr SW Vice President Datil

Joe Culbertson Vice President at Large Amistad

Shacey Sullivan Secretary/Treasurer Peralta

Tom Sidwell Immediate Past President Quay

Pat Boone Past President Elida

On December 3, 2020, the NM State Game Commission engaged in a discussion regarding Senator Heinrich’s letter urging the Commission and Department to end the E-PLUS system and redistribute landowner allocations to resident hunters. The state of New Mexico consists of 52 percent private property. The E-PLUS system was created to recognize private landowners for providing essential resources to elk. While the E-PLUS system is not perfect, to do away with it, would be detrimental to New Mexico as a state and its landowners, outfitters, guides, hunters, and rural communities. NMCGA Wildlife Committee chairman Dave Kenneke gave comments during the January 15 meeting and Jonas had sent written comments in early in opposition to that plan. Then during the meeting, the chair of the NM State Game Commission, Sharon Salazar Hickey announced that they have no plans on changing the current E-PLUS system. This shows what we can do when ranchers, landowners, outfitters, hunters, and rural businesses all work together.

The Importation Rule was also on the agenda. NMCGA opposes the Importation Rule because we are concerned with all the power going back to a single individual rather than permits being reviewed by the full commission and the public’s ability to comment. After the commission voted down the importation rule, further discussion occurred, resulting in a reconsideration of the vote. A revote took place that resulted in the Importation Rule passing. This voting process was questionable to say the least.

On another subject, Cattle producers are America’s original conservationists, and we work hard every day to ensure that we can pass our operations on to the next generation. We know that grazing benefits the environment. Grazing naturally sequesters carbon, a benefit compounded by ruminant grazing. Grazing builds deep root systems in prairie grasses, which improves soil health. Healthy soils retain more water, sequester more carbon, and increase the resiliency of our ranches. Dr Frank Mitloehner, who is a professor at the University of California, Davis, has commented extensively on climate issues in favor of the animal agriculture sector. He states, “Methane emissions from cattle are part of the natural methane cycle. Within 10 years, more than 90 percent of that methane combines with oxygen in the atmosphere and converts to CO2. Methane has no long-term impact on climate when emissions and oxidation are in balance. And this balance has been maintained for centuries.”

Climate policies can unfairly target cattle producers and fail to recognize the positive role of cattle and beef. Some of our lawmakers attempt to adopt misguided policies that threaten the viability of agriculture. The conversation should be shifted to the fact that American beef production and consumption is a climate change solution not an environmental problem many would have us believe.

The on-going drought issue continues and is disheartening as many of our producers are having to cut deep into their herd due to limited amount of available grass. We as ranchers deal with this every year and know how to survive. We pray for moisture and health for everyone.

My best to all of you,

Randell Major

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by Caren Cowan, Publisher New Mexico Stockman Got us…

As you may know, the New Mexico State Game Commission (Commission) has been considering their rule on importing carnivores for several months. Although the rule included some material on fish, it seems that was just a red herring. The thrust of the rule change was to take the approval of wolves coming into New Mexico out of the hands of the Commission and put it in the hands of the New Mexico Department of Game & Fish (NMDGF) Director or his designee.

There were some virtual public meetings through the fall. I participated in two of them. The main concern of landowners and land stewards was transparency. Would those living in “wolf country” be informed when and where wolves would be coming into the state of New Mexico?

The employee hosting the virtual meetings admitted he didn’t know much about the wolf program. He noted that since the NMDGF was now back involved in the federal program that folks should get their information from the feds. That created lots of warm and fuzzy feelings after New Mexicans have suffered at the hands of the feds and their wolves for some 22 years. One of the selling points the NMDGF tried to use for rejoining the federal team was that New Mexicans would get more information and more ability to protect themselves.

Through the fall there was an extensive effort to sway the Commission to leave the rule in place so that the Commission approved the importations. Nonetheless it was surprising when on January 15, 2021 it voted the rule down.

It must have been surprising to the NMDGF staff as well because there were immediate efforts made to overturn the vote. After a break, NMDGA staff spoke up.

It seems that an immediate transfer of wolves to the Ladder Ranch was in the works just eight days later. Instead of going through the regulation that was in place for the Commission to approve the transfer, the Department was going to change the rule, and let the wolves in with no notice to the public.

After this admission, the Commission reconvened and reconsidered the previous vote on the issue. That time the vote carried. The Commission Chairman explained her change in vote saying that it appeared that the old rule would cause more harm than good.

There are so many flaws in what happened, it’s hard to know where to start. First, wasn’t the NMDGF bound by the rule in place? Shouldn’t they have brought the January transfer of wolves to the Commission under that rule? Surely they couldn’t have been afraid that the Commission would have voted against the transfer.

Even after the new rule was voted on there was the process of filing in the New Mexico Register, which publishes openly twice a month, before it took the place of the old rule. There wasn’t even a pretense of following any rules. The new rule wasn’t filed with State Records until January 26, 2021.

We have no way to know if the wolves, or how many of them, were transferred to the Ladder this past month. We don’t know if this transfer is just a stopover for these animals or if they will be staying in New Mexico. And, if so, where at?

We don’t have answers for any of these questions, and we are not likely to get them.

There has been an ongoing legal battle between the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) and New Mexico livestock organizations, including the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, New Mexico Federal Lands Council and the New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau, over the designation of critical habitat of the jaguar since 2014. In case you are unfamiliar with the critter, here is some information from that well known source Wikipedia.

The jaguar (Panthera onca) is a large felid species and the only extant member of the genus Panthera native to the Americas. The jaguar is the largest cat species in the New World and the third largest in the world. Due to convergent evolution, it closely resembles the leopard but is usually larger and sturdier. It ranges across a variety of forested and open terrains, but its preferred habitat is tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forest, swamps, and wooded regions.

The jaguar enjoys swimming and is largely a solitary, opportunistic, stalk-andambush predator at the top of the food chain. As a keystone species, it plays an important role in stabilizing ecosystems and regulating prey populations. The jaguar has developed an exceptionally powerful bite, even relative to the other big cats. This allows it to pierce the shells of armored reptiles and to employ an unusual killing method with mammals: it bites directly through the skull of prey between the ears to deliver a fatal blow to the brain.

The jaguar’s present range extends from the extreme southwestern United States and Mexico in North America, across much of Central America, and south to Paraguay and northern Argentina in South America. Though there are single cats now living within Arizona, the species has largely been extirpated from the United States since the early 20th century.

Wikipedia fails to recognize that the only jaguars seen in Arizona were males. Although it notes that jaguars like to swim, it doesn’t elaborate that water is a great part of its preferred habitat.

With all of this wisdom in hand, the FWS and environmental zealots managed to designate 764,207 acres in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona as critical habitat essential for jaguar conservation. That was back in 2014. The vast majority of the designated area was in Arizona, but the southern ranching community would have been adversely impacted.

In 2017 the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico ruled in favor of the FWS. The case was appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals that in March 2020, overturned the case and remanded it back to the New Mexico Court.

Generally when a rule like this gets overturned it is stayed until the lower court re-rules. The impact of the rule doesn’t take effect. However, the FWS and their cohorts attempted to have the critical habitat designation remain in place.

In late January 2020 the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico held that the designation of critical habitat for the jaguar in New Mexico should be struck down based on our win in the Tenth Circuit.

The livestock groups’ attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation take this as very good news. The environmental intervenors were arguing that the court should leave the designation in place while the feds rewrite the rule to comply with the Tenth Circuit opinion. But the District Court held that the likelihood of harm to the species was minimal at best and that the agency is not likely to revive its designations of the New Mexico units.

We do not yet know whether the intervenors will appeal. But this is a good decision that could be helpful in other similar cases down the road.

“Congress shall make no law respecting

an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The censorship of the former President of the United States by big tech social media companies has created a great deal of discussion of what is and what isn’t freedom of speech. One might take the position that these are privately owned companies that have the right to control what appears on their platforms. However, these companies have spent millions if not billions attracting participation on their platforms and created world-wide followings.

But no one forces anyone to participate and indicating your displeasure is as easy as just not being on them. Apparently many have taken that position and have vacated those platforms.

But there are two questions that come to my mind. The first is, if one president is censored what stops the censorship of all those to come in the future? The second is who or what else is being censored?

It seems there is no “policing” of anything that crosses or does not cross the airwaves or the internet. Although the Federal Communications Commission is charged with oversight of broadcast media including television and radio, they really do have teeth in anything by prohibiting obscene, indecent and profane content from being broadcast on the radio or TV which is against federal law. That may seem clear enough, but determining what obscene, indecent and profane mean can be difficult, depending on who you talk to.

Each type of content has a distinct definition:

Obscene content does not have protection by the First Amendment. For content to be ruled obscene, it must meet a threepronged test established by the Supreme Court: It must appeal to an average person’s prurient interest; depict or describe sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way; and, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Indecent content portrays sexual or excretory organs or activities in a way that is patently offensive but does not meet the three-prong test for obscenity.

Profane content includes “grossly offensive” language that is considered a public nuisance.

Factors in determining how FCC rules apply include the specific nature of the content, the time of day it was broadcast and the context in which the broadcast took place.

Broadcasting obscene content is prohibited by law at all times of the day. Indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.

The “news” media is under no constraint to provide more than one side to any issue or even to tell the truth. This is evident to anyone watching television news.

Walter Cronkite once said “Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine.” We are down to strictly Playboy.

But although long gone, there are still commentators and writers who subscribe to Cronkite-like principles. “In the past, national evening news programs, local evening news programs, and the front pages of print newspapers were dominated by fact-reporting stories,” says patent attorney Vanessa Otero. “Now, however, many sources people consider to be ‘news sources’ are actually dominated by analysis and opinion pieces,” wrote Shawn Langlois in April 2018 in a MarketWatch story.

It will take more than a logo to fix that mess… Burger King has embarked on an extensive rebranding of its Burger King brand, reports meatingplace.com, starting with a new logo. The new logo hearkens back to the one the company used for decades after its founding in the ‘60s, with a stylized representation of the chain’s name sandwiched between two buns. “This pared down design is meant to reflect the clean ingredients and bold flavors of the brand’s most famous menu item – the burger,” Nation’s Restaurant News said.

The logo is simpler and doesn’t include the blue swoosh that enveloped the previous image. “There’s no blue food,” Global Chief Marketing Officer Fernando Machado said in an interview with Business Insider. And, “buns don’t shine,” he said, and so a part of the old logo that highlighted the buns also went away.

Plumrose USA, a JBS USA branded packaged meat subsidiary of JBS USA, is rebranding to become Swift Prepared Foods, the company said in a news release. JBS USA is a wholly owned subsidiary of JBS S.A. , a Brazilian company that is the world’s largest processor of fresh beef and pork. The subsidiary was created when JBS entered the U.S. market in 2007 with its purchase of Swift & Company.

This shift in name “better aligns the heritage and future direction of the company, with a significant focus on innovation and prepared foods,” the release said. The rebrand is taking effect immediately, with an ongoing rollout throughout 2021.

In early January a federal judge in Minnesota granted preliminary approval to the class action settlement between JBS and direct purchaser plaintiffs in the pork antitrust case covering purchases dating back to 2009.

JBS and the direct purchasers notified the U.S. District Court in November that they had reached a settlement agreement.

Under the terms of the agreement, JBS will pay $24.5 million into a settlement fund within 14 days of the court’s preliminary approval. The funds will be deposited into an interest-bearing escrow account and will be used to compensate plaintiffs for damages suffered and expenses incurred, according to court documents.

Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride are also working on settlements as reported elsewhere in this magazine.

Smithfield Foods said it is another step closer to achieving its goal of curbing its greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2025.

The Virginia-based food producer said many of its farms and facilities will soon be operating on renewable power now that the Diamond Spring wind farm is up and running in southern Oklahoma.

“The wind energy generated from this site will account for what is needed to power more than 15 percent of our total U.S. operations, marking a significant step forward in achieving our goals,” Kraig Westerbeek, senior director of Smithfield Renewables, said in a news release.

Smithfield earlier this year announced it would be carbon negative across its company-owned operations in the United States by 2030. The company last month announced it had completed a natural gas project producing energy from 26 hog farms in southwestern Utah.

You can’t help but wonder how much agricultural lands are being impacted by these moves. Granted, those hosting windfarms may see a financial windfall at the outset. ▫

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