Deeply Rooted

In 1967, Ghost Ranch started a program that allowed local stockmen to graze their cattle on the llano for the winter at subsidized rates. The program was a boon for small producers in the region. Nearly everyone grazes their cows on Forest Service land during summer, but those who don’t own irrigated land had always had to search for a place for their cattle between October and May. Ghost Ranch quickly became an integral part of their survival as cattlemen.

The program has had up to fifty-five ranchers at a time, but there are fewer people in the business now, especially since the drought. In the worst years, 2002 and 2003, the Forest Service mandated that they take their animals off the summer grazing allotments up to a month earlier than usual, the first in a chain of drought-related events that made it so nearly everyone in the area had to sell off animals. Some ranchers went out of business completely. This winter there will be about forty stockmen in the program, mostly with fewer than fifteen animals. For the season all of their cattle live as one herd of six hundred.

As rangeland manager at Ghost Ranch, Virgil runs the program. When he took the full-time job at Ghost Ranch, he agreed to a wage that was less than he would have liked on the condition that they support his education about rangeland management. He wanted to administer the grazing program as best he could, as well as care for and even improve the rangeland. Through seminars and workshops he studied Holistic Resource Management (HRM), a decision-making method that, when applied to ranching, refocuses attention on the entire system—land, water, grass—rather than just the cattle. One of the first steps is to see the ranching system as based on solar energy: the sun’s energy grows plants, then cows harvest that energy and transform it into protein that is edible for humans. HRM ranchers still make their money by harvesting the cattle, but their strategy for success is to take care of the land that grows the plants.

The most basic application of HRM is a system of rotational grazing. It is meant to make cows replicate herds of heavy ruminants such as bison, whose symbiotic relationship with the flora was an integral part of grasslands ecosystems for millennia. The herds would concentrate in one area, eat its plants down to the ground, then move on and not return until the forage was sufficiently regrown. Had they returned sooner, they would have compromised the plants that they depended on for survival.

Cattle, on the other hand, if left in one big open space, eat only the best plants, trimming them repeatedly without regard for their recovery. To counter this, the HRM rancher divides the open range into fenced pastures and moves the animals through at intervals of a few days or weeks. With this orchestrated migration, a smaller area is grazed hard for a short period of time, then left to rest until the plants have grown back—just like with the bison. HRM practitioners swear (and some research confirms) that the range ecosystem profits substantially, in some cases becoming healthier than if there were no cattle at all.

Virgil’s predecessor at Ghost Ranch instituted an HRM approach in 1986, and when Virgil took over he continued the process. Under his direction the llano has been divided into permanently fenced pastures of four hundred to thirty-five hundred acres, each grazed for two weeks at a time. The benefits are huge, Virgil says, particularly the reduction of labor. Traditional ranchers use the “Columbus method,” which means turning the cows out in fall and then riding out to the far corners of the range in spring to “discover” them again. Should they want to check on the herd or give them supplemental feed in hard weather, the search can be arduous. At Ghost Ranch, ranchers know where their cattle are every day.

“Oh yeah, of course. Big time. Now, in two hours they see all their cows rather than spending the whole day looking for them. In a way it’s actually a mixed blessing, because I really want guys to spend more time out there. But what do you do after two hours? You’re just sitting there watching them graze.”

In a way, Virgil applies HRM to the ranchers as well. Under his direction the grazing program will not simply board people’s cattle; anyone who has his cattle there is required to be an active part of the system. Every two weeks throughout the season, everyone must make the drive to Ghost Ranch, get on their horses, ride out on the range, and help move the cattle to new ground, even in the bitter cold. Once the group of forty riders is out there the process takes twenty minutes tops. The truth is that one person could do it alone with a truck and some hay, just honk and the cows would come running into the new pasture for the feed.

He says he also fears that the next generation is not out on the land and therefore not learning how to do all this—or learning to want to do it in the first place. To him it’s tragic that kids don’t have grandparents showing them the way forward as his did. So he has put in place programs at Ghost Ranch that mandate it. There have been times that if a stockman wanted to increase the number of cattle he grazed there, for every new cow he had to also provide one for his child.

Skeptics could write off Virgil’s enthusiasm for getting people of all ages involved as self-serving: the stronger the overall ranching community, the more there will be businesses to serve it and buyers drawn in to patronize it, and the more he will succeed. Probably there is an element of self-interest at play, but it’s undeniable that Virgil is also serving something larger. You can hear it in his voice. Virgil gets worked up telling the story of one boy who would excitedly make lunch the night before the bi-weekly ride at Ghost Ranch, then wake his groaning father at five o’clock in the morning to be sure they arrived with their horses by eight. “It’s just one or two kids like that, but that’s exactly what I wanted,” he told me. “Who knows? It may be one of them who ends up taking my job when I decide to move on.”

Over the course of the winter the cows will fan out across the llano. But first they all must enter through one spot on the east side of Ghost Ranch, where they are processed and examined. You’d never notice the place if you weren’t looking for it. All you can see from the highway is a wooden archway marking a dirt road. Up a slight hill, out of sight, is a series of dusty pens enclosed by basic metal rails, with enough separate spaces to work a dozen groups of cattle without mixing them up. Today, scattered around the periphery are pickups and cattle trailers, and three semis off to one side. Other than that there are two sheds and a little building made of concrete blocks painted pink, and that’s it. There isn’t even a bathroom on site. The scrubby rangeland creeps in on all sides.

The pink building does grant shade from the high desert sun, but otherwise it feels more outside than inside. The doors are open and sun is streaming in. The windows are spattered with mud but also slid open; one perfectly frames a view of Cerro Pedernal, the magnificent flat-topped peak that Georgia O’Keefe painted over and over. The floor linoleum has a decorative pattern of rocks, and it’s covered with a layer of crumbly dirt, once the dried mud of boots. The accoutrements are minimal: a low desk with the veneer peeling off, four ancient folding chairs, a garbage can with no bag, two light switches marked INSIDE BUILDING and OUTSIDE BUILDING. Beside the door a box made of plywood has been turned over to serve as a stool.

Inside I find Virgil, wearing the same thing as ever at Ghost Ranch, though this time with a thin black sweatshirt under his denim shirt. At his side is his youngest daughter, Chavela, her long, brown hair in a high ponytail. In her hands is a weathered wooden cane whose ground end has frayed into a point, and she leans her forehead against its curved handle. When I approach she turns to nest her face in Vigil’s stomach, and the hairs from the top of her head stand up fuzzily with static from his shirt.

Standing near them, at the veneer desk, is a stout, decidedly Anglo woman in her mid-fifties. By comparison to the 99 percent male crowd here she is feminine, in stretchy dark pants and a short-sleeved shirt embroidered with flowers. Every thirty seconds her two little, fluffy, grungy white dogs tear in one door, past her ankles, and out the other door.

I introduce myself and the woman explains that she is the cattle buyer, down from the Four Corners area. This is what happens on weekends in the fall, at the end of the season: while the mothers go onto the range at Ghost Ranch to graze for the winter, their calves are sold. This place doubles as the sort of outdoor show-room for that sale, but really there’s not much selective about it. This woman and her husband run a feedlot where the calves will be fed up to slaughter weight, and they’re taking everything they can get.

She and Virgil stand before the big open windows, watching the view directly in front of them: a narrow, fifty-foot-long cattle pen. Its floor is a scale, and every ten minutes a new group of calves is corralled through a series of gates and into the pen. Immediately they run to the far end and squish into the corner, then run back, each time passing in front of the windows. As they go, the buyer woman watches with total concentration, counting and inspecting, making notes in a ledger book before her. Her husband, a similarly stout, older man in a vest and a sweatshirt, works the outside, calling on guys to bring their calves up to be weighed.

Meanwhile, Virgil reads the weight on the scale with a giant steel measuring beam so worn it looks antique. The design is the same as what you’d find in an old-fashioned store or a doctor’s office, a long arm with sliding blocks. The difference is that this scale registers in thousands of pounds, and details to hundreds and tens. When the weights balance the beam, Virgil pulls a lever that stamps a slip of paper to record the number. He hands the slip to the buyer, and to his side Chavela sticks a blank slip in the slot, ready for the next stamp.

Virgil is the only one here who can work the scales. They are the property of the New Mexico Producers and Marketing Cooperative, and he is the designated rep. Members of the co-op are stockmen of the sort who graze their cattle at Ghost Ranch, and as such the lots of calves they’re selling are small—seven heifers, twelve steers. After the woman inspects them and Virgil hands her the weight slip, the calves are herded to a holding pen and a new group moves into position.

The people processing the cows are the guys who own them. They are all men, all dressed to work, in jeans and boots and work shirts; a few sport cowboy hats but most wear ball caps. They don’t look like cowboys the way the men at the county fair did. Outside this context you might not even know they had cattle, but they know what they’re doing, working in groups of six or eight to process their herds and their neighbors’. Some use crops to move the cattle but mostly they have sticks akin to Virgil’s cane; some guys just wave their arms. Their kids are there, playing or hanging on the rails watching. So are their dogs, scruffy herding breeds that are running as a pack for the day. Their trucks and cattle trailers are parked at random in the open spaces. Some are old and rusty, others sleek like Airstreams.

The work happens in a building that’s a cross between a barn and a shed, with tall, corrugated tin walls, open on the ends, and a peaked roof. Leading into the building from the holding pens is what’s called a crowding pen, a steel-walled enclosure that is the shape of a pie with one piece missing. It works like a big turnstile: cattle are let in through the missing pie piece, and then a door like a radius, hinged to the center, swings behind them and crowds them through the circle. From there they enter a straight, narrow chute, exactly wide enough for the cows to go forward in a single file line. On the outside of the crowding pen are welded steel rods, which support old planks of wood, making a circular catwalk. As the cattle enter the enclosure, men on the planks reach down to prod the animals as necessary. Most times they don’t need much prodding. It’s a relatively orderly process; if you can get the cows going in one direction they’ll just keep moving forward, nudged by the cow behind.

The commotion Virgil spotted is that the guys processing cattle right now have loaded nine cows into the pen, which is too crowded even for the crowding pen. The cows are spooked and confused, and in turn guys are pushing the revolving door against the resistant mass to force them into compliance, spooking them more. Two guys are up on the catwalk, poking and pushing with sticks. The cows are lowing. Before Virgil is even quite there he calls out in a steady voice, “Hey, only put four in there, otherwise you’ll never get any of them in the chute.” The men stop what they’re doing. “And just keep calm,” he says, arriving at the steel wall. “That’s the way this will work.” The men back five cows out into the holding pen, and the other four settle down and line up.

At the end of the straight chute is the final destination, the contraption that will hold the cow in place while it is processed. Called a working chute, it has two sides made of green metal bars that are angled downward to make a V shape, from the height of the cow’s shoulders to its belly. In the rear is an improvised back flap made from a metal sign that once advertised Chamisa Realty, its phone number now covered in crusted manure. The instant the cow walks in the chute someone pulls a lever and the chute clangs shut: curved bars close around the cow’s neck, the sides clamp in, and the back flap swings shut. The cow is sandwiched into place and, for the most part, immobilized.

Aside from the working chute there’s little in the shed. There’s a table made from two-by-fours and plywood; a faucet stuck through a hole in the wall and a sink under it whose drain is open to the concrete floor; a worn pink cooler and a shovel. Virgil has his toolbox open on the table, offering its clamps and punches and markers to those who don’t have their own. Leaning against the wall, watching the cows come through, Virgil says to me, “I had hoped we would have new equipment by now,” but offers no further explanation. I’m not sure if he’s excusing the makeshift conditions for my sake, or voicing some true longing of his own.

The purpose of processing the cows is to ensure that they are healthy enough to live unattended over the winter. First the man taking notes records the number off the cow’s ear tag and gets a physical description so the animal can be identified by anyone out on the range. The cow gets a shot with a broad-spectrum vaccine against things like Icterohaemorrhagiae and Bovine Rhinotracheitis. Then she is sprayed down the middle of her back with blue liquid parasiticide. Virgil tells me he wants this to be the last year they do this, as the liquid is a pesticide that’s probably doing more bad than good. “It’s just one of those things, you’ve been doing it so long, you know?” If the cow has horns they are removed in an unsympathetic procedure involving a hacksaw. And finally the cow’s teeth are checked, to make sure they are fit to chew the tough plants that enable survival on the range in winter. The issue is that so many of these animals are older—some ten or twelve years old. If these ranchers were rich they might have culled them for younger, stronger animals, but these guys are willing to stay loyal to an animal that has consistently given them a calf every year for a decade or more. That and it’s expensive to replace them. Virgil once told me it breaks his heart when he finds a cow whose teeth aren’t good enough to make it, but he knows he has to reject her from the program; if she went out on the range she would surely die.

Once the animal is cleared, the working chute releases and she walks forward into the sunny corral. When the rest of her owner’s herd has been processed, they’ll all be loaded into a trailer. Later today, they’ll be driven out to the llano, and there they’ll stay until the first of May. Aside from the wildlife, they are the most permanent residents of the Piedra Lumbre.

I’m standing back from the action now, watching the whole place work, and up walks a man who introduces himself as Julio. He wears a green sweatshirt, dark jeans, a white cowboy hat, and rimless, mirrored sunglasses. Down his back is a thin black ponytail, and his gray beard is cut into a sharp line that follows the contours of his jawbone. When he smiles and laughs, which is often, he shows the big gap between his front teeth. As we talk, he stands next to me like the guys at the county fair: talking sideways to each other while looking straight ahead. I ask him where he’s from and he points to the west, to the dip between two mountain ridges. “There,” he says.

Today Julio and his nephew brought a combined total of sixty-five cows, which were processed early this morning and are now waiting to go out to the range. That’s more cows than most people have here, but it’s still fewer than his average. Like most other local stockmen, during the drought he had to sell off many of his cows. It’s a lose-lose situation when that happens. If they had kept the cows they’d have had nowhere to graze them, but selling during a drought means prices are rock-bottom because everybody else is selling, plus nobody wants them because it’s dry all over.

This year was better because it wasn’t as dry as in recent years, but a lot of guys lost cows to a mysterious respiratory illness. He and his nephew lost six, and he knows a guy who had fifteen die. “At six hundred dollars apiece,” he says, counting on his fingers, “that’s about nine thousand dollars.”

Julio has been bringing his cattle to Ghost Ranch to graze winters for twenty-five years. He was also part of a similar program a few years back, started by a millionaire oil-fortune heiress who moved here from Texas and wanted to do something good with her ranch. It lasted only a few seasons, though, before it went bankrupt. The ranch, that is.

“Not her whole thing. I mean, you’d really have to screw up for her whole thing to go bankrupt.” He laughs. “I read this article about her brother. He was the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, and this was during a time when they were really bad. He was losing something like a million dollars a day on the team, and this reporter asked him how long he could afford to lose like that. For the rest of my life. That’s what he said. I’ll never forget that.”

Julio thinks for a second then speaks again. “There’s a guy I know in Chama, a rancher. He won the lottery, twenty-nine million dollars. You know what he said? I wish I’d won the week before, because the jackpot was double.Can you believe that? I mean, what do you even do with all that money?”

“Beats me. Well, you know the old story: A rancher wins the lottery and someone asks him what he’s gonna do with the money? He says I’m gonna keep ranching until it’s all gone.” Julio shakes his head and chuckles. “Money is just . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead he looks at me, smiles and says, “As long as you have your health, right?”

It’s past one o’clock now and the sun is beating down. All the cattle for Ghost Ranch have been processed and the empty shed has been taken over by a swarm of kids playing a Star Wars-themed make-believe game. The guys who have had their calves weighed are all leaning against the rails of the pens, sometimes talking with their eyes trained down on their hands, sometimes silent and looking into the distance. Once in a while a truck drives up and unloads some calves to sell. The men shake hands with the new arrival and then return to leaning against the rails, looking back over their shoulders to check out the new lot. Virgil stands on the far side of the pink building, talking business to this man and that. While he talks he scratches lines in the dirt with the sharp end of the cane, over and over, one horizontal, one vertical, in the shape of a cross. They are all just waiting. The issue is that in order for the sales of the calves to be official and legal, a state inspector must certify them—mostly to ensure that no one is selling stolen livestock. People have been waiting since ten this morning for the inspector to show up, and no one knows where he is.

The buyer remains at her table by the window, hands clasped behind her back, counting calves. When the scales are empty, she is sorting through the white receipts before her. Her husband comes in often and they confer in quiet voices, she punching figures into the calculator and he writing names and numbers in his notepad. There is a whole crew of workers who will be necessary once the calves are officially sold, but until then they are just sitting around outside. It’s easy to tell who’s who out there. The ranchers are exclusively Spanish men, all wearing long sleeves and standing in groups. The buyers’ crew don’t wear hats or boots. They have sunburns and smoke cigarettes, and sit on the ground at times. One driver has a slick, red ponytail and wears a muscle shirt. The short, wide woman next to him wears a T-shirt with the slogan: YOU’RE NOT YOURSELF TODAY—I NOTICED THE IMPROVEMENT IMMEDIATELY.

An hour later everybody is still waiting. It turns out that nobody ever called the inspector—whoever Virgil gave that job to forgot. Now they’re trying to coax a different inspector out of his Saturday afternoon and up here into the hills to check the boxes and sign the papers so they can all get on with their own days. The guys who were leaning are now sitting on the railings, their feet hooked under the middle bar. Some people have gone back to their trucks and are eating lunch on the tailgates, others are drinking beer. Chavela is munching on a piece of Halloween candy and drawing in the dirt with the cane. One of the drivers throws an old cow horn for the grungy white dogs to fetch. Without explanation, there is a hog running around the parking area.

I see the emcee from the county fair livestock auction, dressed today in a camo vest over a plaid shirt. He’s here selling his calves and, like the rest, is just waiting around for the process to move forward. I ask him how he did this year and he shrugs. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “Until they get us in that little room we don’t know.”

What he means is the little back room in the pink building, where the buyer couple are now setting up shop. They’ve pulled the table and chairs in there but otherwise it is empty: wood veneer walls and a single lightbulb overhead, no window. The inspector finally arrives and starts certifying the sales, which sends a stream of signed papers into the back room. Starting then, the woman leans out the doorway and calls out the sellers’ names, one at a time: Salazar. Martinez. Chacon. One by one guys jump off the railing and go in to sit down at the table. The buyers tell him how much his cattle weighed, how much money that became, and they write him a check. That’s what it all amounts to. All the grazing and breeding, the droughts and respiratory diseases, the judgments made and time spent driving out to take care of the herd after work and on weekends, all that becomes calves, and each calf, pound by pound, becomes this check. The rancher walks out, and the woman calls another name.

Meanwhile, the buyers’ crew has started to work. They’ve backed up one of the double-decker semis they brought here so that its loading end is flush with the pens. Using bright yellow paddles to prod the calves, they move each group from their holding pen, through a series of corrals and finally into the narrow chute that leads them single-file onto a ramp and into the truck. There are two guys in the chute with the calves and two guys on planks like at the processing shed, reaching down into the chute and slapping the rumps with their paddles.

Because the chute and the ramp have solid walls, it’s an odd sight. From across the yard you can see nothing but the guys on the planks and the heads and shoulders of the guys in the chutes, all swatting at unseen things with those yellow paddles. The calves aren’t tall enough to be seen until the last second, when they appear at the top of the ramp and disappear into the truck. There are more animals than expected, so calves are crammed in tight. The last few on each deck require a man on the ramp, pushing the animals with his shoulders; the final calf takes two men with all their might.

When she’s done in the back room, the buyer woman brings her tally to Virgil. For each calf sold $1.50 has been deducted as dues for the co-op, and she hands him a check for $516. They small talk a bit, Virgil casually networking and encouraging them to come back to buy again. He explains the co-op and tells her sincerely that this is one of those few places left where people still have small operations. He tells her he cares about a buyer who will keep prices fair, and as good as possible. “I just want the small guys to be able to survive,” he says. “You know, if they have twenty head, this is one of the highlights of their year.” She replies that prices are hard on them, too, that there are no margins for anyone in the business. Then she asks how on earth they own such a prime piece of real estate. “It must be worth millions!”

Virgil explains to her about Ghost Ranch and the Presbyterian Church. “Believe me,” he says, “realtors are knocking down our door every day. They say, Just a hundred-acre tract, you won’t even notice it’s gone. Well, I guess the guy after me can do that. For now, it’s not for sale.” She hands him her card, and they shake.