9367 ‎(2)‎

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9367
• Author: Colorado Water Workshop.
• Title: Proceedings
• USFW Year: 1992.
• USFW - Doc Type: Colorado Water Workshop July 22-24, 1992.
• Copyright Material: NO

We keep hearing that agricultural producers are bad people
because they want to protect their property rights. Let me share
something with you. The American public has become accustomed to
cheap food. They expect it, they demand it, and they have received
it. Therefore, agricultural producers are price takers. We are not
price setters. The consumers tell us what they will pay for beef and
finally it runs down the chain to me, the low man on the totem pole.
I take whatever I can get. However, I am not a price setter on the
things that I must purchase. The manufacturer sets the price of what
I am going to pay'for manufactured goods. Therefore, we are caught
in the vice from both ends. Our only source to ride the crests and
the pitfalls of the economic roller coaster is the property rights,
the value that is invested in those property rights. When times get
tough we do not go on strike and ask for a wage increase. When times
get tough we cannot go to the trust fund and ask for another $100.00
or $1,000.00 a month. When times get tough we have to take that
property right to the bank and mortgage it in order to get through the
tough times. We have to be able to take that property right and sell
it in order to start over somewhere else. That is why we are so very,
very careful of what we do with our property rights. That is why
agricultural producers are caught in the middle of this debate. We
sympathize with the wishes of the environmental community. We also
realize that we have to earn a living in the business world.
I think if we are going to work through this whole process, we
as agricultural producers, we as water users, we as environmentalists,
and we as water developers, and I list myself in all those categories,
have to work together. We have to be open, forthright, and we have
to work very diligently to negotiate options and remedies to these
problems.
I have one more analogy I want to make in closing. It
illustrates the zeal with which things get done. While there was not
a bad intention in any of it, people wanted to protect the
environment, and they wanted to protect a way of life, but as a result
I am faced with the consequences. In this situation, Arapahoe County
filed on water rights and points of diversion within this basin. The
scientists went out, within the basin, to try to identify potential
endangered and rare species, things that they felt needed to be
identified for protection in case these water diversions came about.
There is nothing wrong with that. They found the Boreo Toad at one
of the points of diversion. They took that to the Forest Service and
said we must protect this site. Well, I happen to be the permittee
who runs cattle on that site. So, the Forest Service says to me,
"Trampe, you will not congregate cattle at that site." I can handle
that except, in this pasture, the site is the first and only place
that the cattle can get to the stream. It is two miles inside a fence
and the first place in which the cattle can head for the stream, and,
I am supposed to keep the cattle from congregating there. That is
fine, we will handle that. However, there are two outlying factors
that arose in dealing with the Forest Service on this issue.
Number one, the biologists tell me that when I use the pasture
in September, the toad has already begun hibernation.
Secondly, the site is generally so full of campers and
recreational users that the cows do not want anything to do with it.

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