Sid Goodloe
Sid Goodloe is a ranch manager and former USDA official, and was the first U.S. proponent of Allan Savory and The Savory Method.
Deforestation
In 1956, Sid Goodloe purchased the 1,400 hectare Carrizo Valley Ranch in south-central New Mexico. At the time it was "overrun with juniper, pinyon, and ponderosa pine." He falsely diagnosed this as a problem, based on an erroneous worldview denying the widespread and historic presence of these Native trees across the bioregion.[1]
Sid Goodloe spent much of the first decade of his management of the ranch destroying over 1,000 acres of Native forest:
With help from the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, he brought in a crew to drag a huge anchor chain, hung between two bulldozers, across half of his 3,500 acres, knocking down the piñon and juniper trees.
The same thing was being done all across the Southwest. Ranchers and federal land managers were trying with varying degrees of urgency to turn back the "brush" that was invading the region's federal and private grasslands. All efforts depended on the same thing: generous help from the U.S. Treasury...
Then, in the early 1960s, about five years after he had chained, Goodloe got a shock. He realized that the big trees the anchor chain had knocked down and left for dead were alive. "The chain had just pulled the trees over, but some roots were still in the ground."
Even worse, the smaller piñon and juniper trees had been bent over by the chain, and then had snapped back up. With the big trees barely alive, the smaller trees were "released," as foresters say. They began to grow quickly. Goodloe realized that if he didn't do something, the land would soon be worse than before it was chained.
Using all the time he could spare from working jobs off the ranch on the task, he bulldozed downed trees into windrows and burned them. When he wasn't bulldozing and burning the big trees, he was on his tractor, "popping the small trees out of the ground" before they grew too large to handle.[2]
Yet "the idea that today's piñon-juniper woodlands were all savannahs and grasslands is also deceiving. For example, early travelers passing through the Flagstaff area along the 35th parallel described thickets of brush. The 1850 Beale expedition described country 'so heavily covered with cedar and piñon that our progress was constantly retarded.'"[3]
Well into the 90s, Goodloe has continued to blame "the encroachment of piñon-juniper forest onto rangeland" for there being "only a fraction of the herbage and forage for livestock and wildlife there was 100 years ago" in the Southwest.[4]
At the 46th Annual New Mexico Water Conference, Goodloe continued to denounce numerous sacred and ecologically valuable native plant species as invaders based on this false history which erases millennia of Indigenous stewardship of the Southwest in partnership with these plant relatives:
Mesquite, sagebrush, piñon, juniper, ponderosa, and other invaders of our grasslands and mountain meadows are using up to half of our annual precipitation. Not only are our watersheds only partially productive, but erosion caused by an overpopulation of these water hungry plants has polluted most of our streams in New Mexico with silt... We must familiarize ourselves with our presettlement conditions in order to bring back those conditions.[5]
The December 2022 edition of New Mexico Stockman celebrated Sid Goodloe's legacy as a "visionary in removing Pinon/Juniper trees."[6]
Savory Method
After visiting Allan Savory twice in the late 1960s, Goodloe wrote an article in 1969 promoting Savory's method and began applying it on his ranch. [7][8]
In 2001, Goodloe remarked:
I think Alan has done more for land management than any other person in history because he has made us think about what we are doing and realize that we must manage our watersheds properly.[9]
Short Bios
For over two decades, Sid has been an international livestock consultant in Australia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Madagascar, and ranch manager for Diamond A Cattle Company in Roswell. He served on the Users Advisory Board to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture for six years. Sid established the First Short Duration Grazing or “Savory” method in the U.S., which is still in operation with few changes. He received the 1995 National Cattlemen’s Association’s Environmental Stewardship Award, Region 6, and the 1999 New Mexico Watershed Coalition’s Watershed Steward Award.[10]
Goodloe is:
- Founder & President of the Southern Rockies Agricultural Land Trust;
- Board member of the Quivira Coalition;
- Board member of the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association;
- Founding member of the New Mexico Riparian Council;
- Board advisor to the New Mexico Land Conservancy[11].
- Member of the Western Landowners Alliance[12]
Bush Administration II
In 2002, Lynn Scarlett, the Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget of the U.S. Department of the Interior referred to Goodloe's cutting down "the forest that had invaded the ranch" and application of The Savory Method through private enterprise as "the spirit of the Bush administration's environmentalism."[13]
Sources
- ↑ "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle Of Water And Prosperity," Sandra Postel 2017, https://vdoc.pub/documents/replenish-the-virtuous-cycle-of-water-and-prosperity-3n4kvr8i1bdg
- ↑ "Raising a ranch from the dead," Ed Marston, April 1996, https://www.hcn.org/issues/57/1762
- ↑ https://www.hcn.org/issues/60/1887
- ↑ https://www.hcn.org/issues/55/1707/
- ↑ https://nmwrri.nmsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/ConfOneFile/2001%20Conference%20Proceedings%20(as%20one%20file).pdf
- ↑ https://issuu.com/nmstockman/docs/nms_december_22
- ↑ https://1library.net/document/ynlrvojq-short-duration-grazing-in-rhodesia.html
- ↑ "Raising a ranch from the dead," Ed Marston, April 1996, https://www.hcn.org/issues/57/1762
- ↑ https://nmwrri.nmsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/ConfOneFile/2001%20Conference%20Proceedings%20(as%20one%20file).pdf
- ↑ "New Mexico Watershed Management: Restoration, Utilization, and Protection," Proceedings of the 46th Annual New Mexico Water Conference, November 5-7, 2001; https://nmwrri.nmsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/ConfOneFile/2001%20Conference%20Proceedings%20(as%20one%20file).pdf
- ↑ https://nmlandconservancy.org/people/sid-goodloe/
- ↑ https://westernlandowners.org/wla-member-sid-goodloe-on-out-on-the-land/; see also featured image on front page for "voices"
- ↑ https://www.hcn.org/wotr/13508