Discouraging Word Is Heard in Cattle Range Country Across West

Cattleman Bob Jahn has survived a time when many ranchers decided a home on the range wasn’t worth singing about, when discouraging words were heard all too frequently and financial skies went from cloudy all day to downright stormy.

“Right around here, we’re about the only ones left in the cattle business,” said Jahn, who will be 70 this summer. “Oh, there’s a few. But quite a few have given up.”

His son, Brad Jahn, was among those. Cattle he bought from his sister in 1980 became too much of a drain, and he sold them to his father four years later.

“I was having a difficult time in the cattle price structure we had then making my payments to my sister and getting any return from what I was doing,” said Jahn, 36, who now feeds other people’s cattle over the winter and concentrates on what he calls the “science and art” of growing potatoes. “I couldn’t justify the time I was putting in, in light of what I was getting back.”

All Over West

The story is the same for farmers and ranchers across the West. The 1980s have been a time of high debt and low return, pushing many livestock operations over the edge. In addition, Americans simply aren’t eating as many hamburgers, steaks and prime ribs as they once did.

“Prices started falling in early 1980, and they haven’t recovered,” said agriculture economist Dave Lambert of the University of Nevada-Reno. “The traditional way of life in agriculture is that you hang on and tighten your belt in the bad years, and things get better. What’s been happening is the belts have just been getting tighter and tighter.”

Cattle prices have rebounded this year by $8 to $9 per 100 pounds over a year ago, ranging last week from about $55 to just over $71. But for many, the damage already has been done.

“Our numbers are down throughout the United States, but we’ve perhaps been hit harder in the Western states,” said Dr. Greg Nelson, who heads Idaho’s Division of Animal Industry. “We’ve lost an awful lot of cattlemen in the last five years.”

Industry observers estimate 15% to 20% of Idaho’s ranchers and farmers have gone out of business in the last decade. One-third of the nation’s beef producers are reported to be in financial trouble. In New Mexico, rancher Larry Foster, a beef cattle specialist with New Mexico State University, says he has seen three or four ranches put up for sale each week for the last six months.

“There’s all kinds of reasons,” said Tom Hovendon, executive secretary of the 950-member Idaho Cattlemen’s Assn. “In some cases, it was poor management. In some cases, they decided to expand at the wrong time, and interest rates killed them. People said if you owned land, you’d get rich. But they owned land and went broke.”

Game Ranches

Some ranchers have made money turning cattle country back into a place where the deer and the antelope, and the big-game hunters, play. In Montana, where some economists predict only 6,000 of the state’s 24,000 farms and ranches will remain by the year 2000, one man has proposed turning 15,000 square miles into a hunting preserve with 300,000 wild animals such as elk and bison.

The Shelton Ranch near Bozeman, Mont., is just launching its commercial hunting operation there, modeled after its highly successful Texas venture.

Near Kerrville, Texas, “every rancher in this area depends on commercial hunting,” said Robert Cook, wildlife biologist for Shelton Ranches. “The cattle industry has been doing very poorly for a long, long time. We have reduced our cattle numbers in Texas substantially, and the bulk of our income and almost all our profit in ranching has come from wildlife management.”

The Texas Shelton ranch books 180 hunters annually for three-day, $1,725 deer hunts. So far, Cook said, he’s booked a dozen hunters at $5,500 apiece for five-day elk hunts on the 107,000-acre Montana spread, where Shelton Ranches also keep 3,000 head of cattle. They sold some of their livestock and opted, like Brad Jahn, to feed other people’s cattle for a price, a move that made good management sense.

Big Producers

Among the ranching survivors are big producers whose costs are reduced by volume; the small producer, like Foster, who keeps 60 head of cattle but makes his money elsewhere, and long-time cattlemen like Bob Jahn, who conservatively manages 200-300 head on land his parents homesteaded at the turn of the century.

“It’s good management, for one thing,” Jahn said.