They're coming under attack, and the fighting isn't fair. Nor is the truth being heard. Ranchers-and in fact all beef producers, from the biggest cattlemen to the smallest family operators- are coming under attack for putting beef-high grade protein-on your family's dinner table, and things will only get worse for them so long as the attackers are virtually the only ones being heard.

That's why we at American Cowboy magazine hope to contribute our two bits toward setting the record straight for an honorable trade. Call 'em ranchers, cowmen, cattlewomen, herdsmen, grazers, cowboys, husbandmen. by whatever name, they're part of a noble occupation, and they stay so busy at it that they cannot make its case with the same organizational wherewithal, time, lobbying effort, legal wrangling, and truckloads of money that the enemies of ranching can muster.

In this issue and others to follow, we will lay down the basics of what the grazing/pasturing industry is really about, and what makes it different from all other forms of land use-even different from other forms of agriculture- and why that difference makes it (1) ecologically indispensable to the nation and its environment and its flora and fauna, (2) as sustainable as any form of food production, because it is generally confined to land that is deemed unfit as cropland, and hence has no other use in food production except to support foraging animals. Grassland-pasture, range-is the only use whereby such otherwise reject-able, unproductive land can produce anything, and the fact that it produces beef is in itself one of the marvels of land use and one of the niftiest economic realities/viabilities of the American agricultural scene.

We will show why radical environmentalists' agenda of ridding the public lands of the West of cattle-an agenda of "exclusion," aimed at achieving some form of imagined natural paradise-is itself a recipe for creating not biodiversity but its opposite- diminished diversity, including in some cases the formation of desert, and a detriment to the endangered species of those regions. It has been observed that the endangered species are on the managed rangelands- more so than on the "excluded," "protected" places.

We will show why the allegations brought against cattle producers- that livestock consume 70 percent of the grains and cereals produced in America-is a charge that ought be leveled against the consumer himself.

The feedlot phenomenon, as carried on today, represents a relatively recent trend in human eating habits. The feedlot industry was a far different thing 75 years ago, and if the consuming public wants grainfed beef when it could instead select healthier grassfattened beef, well, that might be something answerable by the feedlot industry, but the rangeland-tending rancher need not bear the brunt of that outcry, which is chargeable to public taste, to end users, and not to the business of putting cattle on grass, a practice that produces meat with, for instance, lower levels of saturated fats and higher levels of healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Some may say that this argument is unrealistic-that the public will never lose its taste for fattier, more tender, grainfed beef. And it well may be a hard habit to break. But if we are to look at harsher realities-that there are special interest groups out there that would like to see all animal proteins removed from Americans' diets, for reasons either "environmental" or presumably ethical-then the belt-tightening, self-policing practices of reverting to earlier practices is not such a stretch after all. Which is better-Grandpa's beef, or no beef? Not that it has to come to that, but let us not allow our adversaries to lay this kind of stigma-all the purported wrongdoing of the feedlot industry- on the grazing profession. The ranching business is a different animal, and it's time it got some recognition for what it really is.

But these matters will get their due in later discussions. For now, let us lay some more basic groundwork- an examination of what it is that makes grazing a land use different from any other.

That difference is observable in any traditional, diversified farming operation. It's easily seen in the distinction between the land that is put into crops and the land that is left in pasture. Cropland is tillable land. It is plowable. It is the choicest land-the bottomland; sandy, loamy soils; the ground that is generally better watered if not irrigated. In short, it is the most fertile, most productive land, and it is for that reason that cropland generally has a higher yield, in dollars-and-cents value, than pasture land.

So what land is left in pasture? Just look at any farm. Whatever can't be or isn't put into crops is left as grazing land. There is an economic reality to it. Just look at where this land sits. It is the hilly land. The rocky land. Gullied land. Uplands. Hills. Timbered land. Dry land. It is this land that is left in pasture. The proverbial "cattle on a thousand hills" tells us the terrain where cattle are typically found. Hilly land is not the prime farm land. Hills, in fact, are hills because the ground is rockier, and has proven more resistant to erosion, and hence has remained hilly. But rocky, hilly, gullied, even timbered land-this still can produce a yield of food, if the foodstuff is beef. The term "foraging"- which is what grazing animals do-aptly describes this process of indirectly harvesting land that could not otherwise produce food for human sustenance.

If you're someone who thinks that by "stopping" the production of a pound of beef you are enabling the creation of a bushel of vegetables, think again. That bunchgrass country won't grow your artichokes. It won't grow your tofu either.

A ranch-a place where only grazing is conducted-couldn't earn a livelihood for someone if the ranch had no more land than comprises the average farm. We've heard the expression used for subsistence farming- the old, Depression-era saying "forty acres and a mule." That's bare subsistence for a farmer, but how well could a person live if he stocked cattle there at four acres to the cow? Even the commonplace quarter-section (160 acre) farm of those days was not enough to support a beef herd big enough to support a family. Ranches require more land only because ranchland, being non-arable, cannot produce the dollar yield that prime farmland produces. And yet they do produce food, converting grass- something no human can utilize- into beef, the most nutrient-dense offering on the market.

If the earth's six billion inhabitants are going to be fed, and if starvation is going to be minimized-because it won't be eradicated-then man must employ every means available to harvest that land which is reasonably harvestable. If land is not tillable-not plowable-and hence if it cannot be planted or sown, then the only way that that land can produce food, the only way that a harvest can be obtained from it, is if animals harvest its increase and we reap a harvest from the animals. There is generally no other way that that land will help offset hunger or create a livelihood for a human being. So to argue that it should not be harvested by the herdsman is to say that it ought to be left to waste, and that hunger should increase.

Even tillable land has other uses-it can be pasture if it is not tilled-but rangeland has no other use at all. That's why it is home to cattle. And if there are not cattle on it, it begins to lose its value even for cattle, because without proper management and stewardship by ranchers/cattlemen/ cowboys and the like, the land becomes something other than what it is. That change is something we will discuss in a future issue.