AUMs "A Simple Means"

 In 1939, Dad took a job in Reno with the University of Nevada Experiment Station as a range assistant.  Just out of college, newly married, needing financial security, hoping for a position in his field–that job was a big deal.  Five years later, Dad left this secure government career to manage a small cow calf operation near Lee, Nevada. 

     Lately, I have been wondering why.  What gave him the confidence to make the move from a desk job in range management to an actual job managing a ranch? After sleuthing his time with the Experiment Station, I have some ideas.  

     The evidence sits on my dining room table here in Carson City where I do my writing and research. The first is Bulletin No. 155, April, 1941, A Short Cut Method of Computing Grazing Capacity Ratings from Range Survey Estimates. The author is F.B. Harris, my father. 

     This is the last sentence in the first paragraph: “ Men and agencies engaged in range management or in the administration of large areas of rangeland have long felt the need of a simple means [italics mine] of stating and recording the value of forage cover in terms of the number of grazing animals that it will maintain.”

     The men are Great Basin stockmen. The agencies are the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.  The mandate comes from the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.  The problem: how to determine fees for carrying capacity, or  “grazing capacity," on the West’s vast public lands.

     This is the first sentence in the summary:   “A shortcut method of computing carrying capacity ratings has been devised by the Range Management Department of the Nevada Experimental Station.  This method has many distinct advantages over those in use at the present time.”  As far as I can tell, it was my father who devised the “simple means.” It was a result of the research he was doing at the Experiment Station.  

        In 1978,  the AUM method was made official in the Public Rangeland Improvement Act and continued by an executive order issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.  It seems that Dad’s “simple means” was put into use some thirty-seven years before the 1986 executive order.

      I return to my dining room table for documentation.  A worn manila folder, hand-labeled Range Surveys Short-Cut Method #2,  holds a sheaf of letters held by a metal clasp.   The letters either request copies of “A Short Cut Method" or document the use of the formula by other range examiners or conservation entities. 

       For example, on October 6, 1940, Harley McDowell, US Department of the Interior Grazing Service, Pocatello, Idaho says, “Fred, I believe you really have something here, which will not only be a short cut to compilation but a decided development to range survey procedure.”

     Or this letter dated Dec. 9, 1940 from Robert W. Prentiss, Assistant Range Examiner in Charge, Range Surveys, Pocatello, Idaho to Mr. E.R. Greenslet, Chief, Range Surveys, Federal Building, United States Department of the Interior. Salt Lake City, Utah:

        Dear Mr.  Greenslet:

      “I have before me Fred B. Harris’ “Field Method of Converting Plot Forage Estimates Into Carrying Capacity.”  This brief, including the forms developed in Nevada 1 and the accompanying discussion has been circulated among our range examiners and the general opinion has been one of wholehearted approval.

     It is my personal opinion that this new development is the greatest advance in range survey methods since the adoption of the square-foot density system as an alternate means of obtaining survey data.  Therefore I am voicing the opinion of the range examiners for this region in urging the adoption of this new method of recording field data.”(italics mine)

 On March 24, 1941, E.R. Greenslet writes Dad from the Department of Interior office in Salt Lake City, “You have certainly done a fine piece of work here and one that I think will prove to be extremely valuable from the standpoint of practical application in the field.”

      In those first two years at the Experiment Station, the job required Dad to take a deep dive into understanding the complexity of livestock grazing on federal lands.  An unintended consequence was the way it prepared him to run cattle on open range. 

     A second research project and a second bulletin with Dad’s name on it speaks directly to something else he needed to learn:  how to run a ranch:  Fourteen Years Cattle Production and Ranch Earning Power in Northeastern Nevada 1928 to 1941 by C.A. Brennen and Fred B. Harris,  Bulletin No. 165,   Reno, Nevada, October 1943. Picture of bulletin.   

     From the introduction:  “The study was begun in 1928 with eleven ranches operating a total of 12,375 head of cattle. During the years that followed, substitutions were made and other ranches added until, in 1941, a total of 22 ranches operating 30,866 head of cattle was included in the study.” 

     The topics of the study included the following:   Herd make-up; Selling practices; Distribution of ranch investment; Land purchases; Land culture; Irrigation and stock water adjudication; Allocation of range privileges;  Permanent Improvements, machinery and equipment, autos and trucks, cattle other livestock; Factors affecting production; Weather conditions, Calf crop death loss; Other factors influencing beef production;  Pounds of beef produced per cow unit operated; Cattle prices;  Costs and earning power; Balance per cow unit; Cattle ranch earning power and investment value; Production cost of cattle. 

       I was focused on the importance of my father’s research to his future in ranch management. It took me a while to grasp the historical significance of the work of the Experiment Station.  That lead me to a third document: NEVADA’S  WARTIME AGRICULTURE, A STUDY OF PRODUCTION CAPACITY IN AN ALL-OUT WAR EFFORT WITH ESTIMATES OF PROBABLE PRODUCTION IN 1944 AND MAXIMUM FEASIBLE PRODUCTION.     “Nevada’s wartime agriculture”...”an all-out war effort…”...war food production…” 1943.  Of course. We were in the middle of World War II.  The pressure was on farms and ranches to feed America at war. The challenge was to research practices to increase livestock production without overgrazing. A demanding role for the Experiment Station, to say the least.

There are nine separate studies in the Nevada’s Wartime Agriculture document.  The first one listed is "Range Livestock Production,” C.A. Brennan and Fred Harris, Department of Range Management Experiment Station.

       I only have one example of the reception Dad received for his part in the larger study.  In an August 9, 1943 letter from Rex E. Willard, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, US Department of Agriculture,  Berkeley, California to S.B Doten, Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Reno.  

      “...In particular may I mention the splendid section on “Range Livestock Production.”  Fred Harris is to be congratulated on the detailed and painstaking care with which he carried on the job.  I hope that he gets full credit for his excellent work.” 

         There is this affectionate note from S. B. Doten himself.   I think this important wartime work came near the end of Doten’s tenure as director of the Experiment Station, which was from 1913-1946. 

         So, there was Dad’s work in developing a method of computing carrying capacity on BLM land. Western stockmen relied on grazing allotments.  (Still do.) Understanding the limits of foraging on this environment was vital.  (Still is). 

     There was an in-depth study of how to run a ranch, increase production and not ruin the land.  There was a third element. He needed to be out of the city and into ranching  country.  

     Here’s where luck and opportunity met.   After two years in the Reno office, Dad was transferred to Elko, the center of northeastern Nevada ranching, both the small family ranches along the flank of the Ruby Mountains and the high desert big outfits.   

     We lived in Elko from 1941-1944.  Dad continued his research and data collection under C.E. (Charlie) Brennan for the “Range and Livestock Production” portion of the Nevada Wartime Study.   He and my mother made lifelong friends and developed a deep affection for this lively cowtown.  They became parents. I was born in the Elko General Hospital on November 16, 1941. 

       Then, in 1944, we were at the Pitchforth ranch in Lee. There's a black and white photo of a bundled up, three-year-old me on a horse-drawn wagon piled high with hay. On the back in Mom’s handwriting, “Lee, Nevada 1944 snowed in.” 

         Now, forty years after his death, I look at these publications and other memorabilia on my dining room table and I have so many questions.   I sure  wish…well, you know the drill.  No one  to ask. 

     Anyway, how did Dad get his first job in ranching?  I know that there is a Milford, Utah connection.  The Pitchforths were family friends of my grandmother.  Ralph Pitchforth was a prominent stockman–cattle  in Elko County, sheep in Route County, Colorado. 

      There's a final  publication and article by Dad in the 1953 November Nevada edition of the American Cattle Producer “The AUM: Real or Paper?”  Here’s the brief biographical information at the bottom of the one-page article:  “The author has run sheep and cattle in Nevada and Colorado, has fed lambs in Kansas and is now cattle ranching at Deeth, Nev. He speaks his views from a good background of actual experience and first-hand knowledge about AUM’s…both paper and real.”(italics mine)

 When he writes this, he is in the middle of a successful career as a ranch manager and then as a well-respected ranch broker and range consultant.   It is a long life and a good one.   

 On one level it doesn’t matter--this AUM thing, the “simple means.” But it is so interesting.  Where does Dad’s work fit into the ongoing history of cattle production and range management?  An issue still relevant and even more controversial.