As Subsidies Near End, Goat Ranchers Fear Extinction : Budget: Texans who produce 90% of nation’s mohair face loss of price supports. But now demand is growing.

With a shotgun at his side and a chaw in his cheek, James Wittenburg lumbers past the shaggy-haired bovids that flourish on this hardscrabble plateau, honking to them from a pickup truck adorned with the vanity license plates: “MR GOAT.”

For nearly a century, his family has ranched the stony soil of Edwards County (human population 2,266; goat population 161,000), helping turn this remote corner of southwestern Texas into the undisputed Angora goat capital of the world. The local newspaper is called the Mohair Weekly. The high school football team is known as the Angoras. Every year, young women vie for the coveted title of Miss Mohair.

“Around here,” said Wittenburg, a man as stolid and unvarnished as the land he tends, “the goat is king.”

But the goat ranchers of Texas, despite producing more than 90% of the nation’s mohair, may themselves be a dying breed.

After four decades of U.S. government subsidies, the industry has found itself among the most skewered symbols of Washington excess--the agricultural equivalent of the $640 Pentagon toilet seat. Under budget-cutting legislation ballyhooed by the Clinton Administration, price supports on mohair will disappear at the end of this year, an annual savings to taxpayers of more than $50 million.

By coincidence, in a world far removed from bleating goats, mohair has suddenly sprung back into fashion, filling department stores with the lustrous fleece for the first time since the 1960s. The price of mohair has soared correspondingly--from about 80 cents to more than $3 a pound--providing critics of the subsidy program with a sense of instant vindication.

“Mohair subsidies are just a form of welfare for farmers--and a pretty damn generous one at that,” said James Bovard, author of “The Farm Fiasco,” a 1989 critique of U.S. agricultural policy. “There’s no reason in the world why Americans should be forced to bankroll the production of expensive mohair sweaters, . . . a luxury item most of them can’t even afford.”

Although the mohair program wasn’t widely popular, its impending demise has frightened and infuriated small ranching communities like Rocksprings, which probably wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for the Angora goat.

The town’s old-timers, most of whom are conservative, anti-government Republicans, viewed the federal subsidies as a necessary evil to help weather mohair’s fickle and widely fluctuating cycles. Without that safety net, they contend, the goat business will inevitably tumble--and with it will go another fixture in the waning legacy of rural America.

“The old pioneers came out here determined to make it, come hell or high water, and that’s the attitude we’re going to have to have if we want to survive in the future,” said Wittenburg, 78, as he hurls a bale of hay from his pickup to a flock of adoring goats. “And even then, it might be impossible.”

Despite the subsidy program’s appearance of largess--last year it earned local ranchers more than triple their own county’s $1.5-million annual budget--there are few overt signs that anyone here has grown bloated on government pork.

Rocksprings, the largest community with 1,399 residents, is a depressing cluster of blistered storefronts, many of them vacant, most of them hurt by competition from discount chains such as Wal-Mart, even though the nearest outlet is an 80-mile trek to the east. To stay afloat, the hardware store doubles as a lunch counter, the gift shop is also a tearoom and the insurance office sells real estate. The only movie theater, long dormant, is home to a TV repairman.

“You have to like the tranquillity of the country to stay here,” said Bill Baker, 59, who ranches 12,000 acres just outside Rocksprings. “If you don’t, why, you can make a lot more money somewhere else.” The payoff is the kind of old-fashioned civility that has been robbed from most urban centers. Deals still get made with handshakes. Doors go unlocked. Lunch is called dinner, and dinner is called supper. Men are “sirs” and women are “ma’ams.” Everyone is listed in the phone book and all their numbers start with 683.

“We have the old values other places have given up on,” said Steve Haynes, 41, a third-generation rancher who manages Priour-Varga Wool & Mohair Inc., a local warehouse and brokerage firm. “If you walk down the street, it doesn’t look like much, and maybe it hasn’t amounted to much, but we’re proud of it.”

Much of the town’s social life revolves around the old mohair warehouse, where ranchers drop by throughout the day to sip coffee and discuss the weather, which is more than idle chat when you’re trying to shear 2,000 goats. It is here, amid massive burlap sacks bursting with Angora hair, that locals rail against opportunistic politicians, radical environmentalists and a national press that has lambasted them for clipping American taxpayers.

The way they see it, their lifeblood became Congress’ sacrificial lamb--a way to appear fiscally tough without attacking the exorbitant programs of more powerfully entrenched interests. There aren’t many votes to lose, after all, by alienating Rocksprings.

“It’s just some guys up yonder, who don’t know what’s going on, trying to make themselves look good,” said rancher Loyd Mitchell as he honed the blade of his pocketknife on a whetstone.

But just below that bitter surface, there is also a hint of chagrin in Rocksprings, a town that prides itself on its frontier ethos. Even the most ardent defenders of mohair subsidies are a little embarrassed that they came to rely so heavily on a government program, a little ashamed that they now feel so vulnerable without Uncle Sam’s helping hand.

“Any time you subsidize a fellow, you take a certain amount of his integrity away,” said Mike Grooms, a rancher and mohair broker who owns half a dozen struggling businesses in the heart of town. “The hungry dog always hunts best.”

It was that hunger that first brought European settlers to Edwards County, many of them German immigrants whose children and grandchildren now control much of the ranchland. The Angora goat, a handful of which were imported from Turkey in the mid-1800s, thrived in this region, an arid plateau of limestone too rocky to sustain any crops.

After the Korean War, mohair’s warmth and durability was deemed to have enough strategic value that Congress included the fiber in the National Wool Act of 1954. Using a complex and slightly bizarre formula that tries to give ranchers the same buying power they had from 1910 to 1914, the law calculates a fair price for mohair and funds the difference if the market price slips below that goal.

In the beginning, market prices remained relatively high, triggering subsidies in only eight of the program’s first 26 years. But in the 1980s, as a result of global competition and synthetic fashion trends, the price of mohair began to plummet, hitting a low of 82 cents per pound in 1993--the same price it sold for when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the program into law.

The only difference, however, is that inflation had driven the target price up to $4.74 a pound, which meant that three out of every four dollars being pocketed by mohair producers were coming from U.S. coffers. Even ranchers concede that wide disparity contributed to the perception that their program was a boondoggle.

“It made us look like we were getting rich,” said Zane Willard, a spokesman for the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers’ Assn., which represents 3,000 ranchers. “I wish we could have, but it just kept us in business.”

Deluged by negative publicity, mohair producers argued that their subsidies don’t cost taxpayers anything, that they are linked to the revenues generated by tariffs on imported wool.

But the program already had been targeted by Vice President Al Gore’s task force on “reinventing government.”

Under legislation approved in 1993, the price supports will be phased out at the end of this year, one of the rare instances that a longstanding spending item has been eliminated from the federal budget.

The subsequent rebound in mohair prices has at least temporarily helped cushion the impact for Edwards County’s goat ranchers, who last year sheared more than 1 million pounds of the stuff. But their future remains no less uncertain, and not just because they will be subject to the vicissitudes of a free market.

As the ranchers have aged--many are in their 60s and 70s--few of their children have followed the same footsteps. Most have gone on to college and settled into the white-collar routine of more stimulating and prosperous communities.

After they can no longer ranch, the old-timers are forced to give up their land, which increasingly is being carved into small parcels and sold to city dwellers hungry for a rustic weekend getaway.

“Hopefully, one of my kids will get tired of the rat race and come take over,” said Wittenburg, whose stature as MR GOAT has yet to be bequeathed to any of his children.

One is an attorney, another is an accountant and a third is married to a prominent banker.

If none returns to Rocksprings, the Wittenburg ranch, like many others, may ultimately face a threat far greater than the world’s capricious appetite for mohair.

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.