The Spanish first brought cattle to Florida and the cattle industry shaped much of the state’s history. Photo of the Great Florida Cattle Drive. (Via Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services)
There wouldn’t be any Westerns if it weren’t for us Floridians. The Spanish brought the first cattle to America, so the first cowboys were vaqueros tending herds around St. Augustine in the late 1500s.
Instead of the clean-cut, laconic Western heroes we see in the movies, such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne, picture a bunch of bearded guys riding and roping while they habla some Español.
The cattle industry still has a strong presence here in Florida, to the point that some of our legislators want to do these modern-day vaqueros un favor gigante. They’re pushing a bill to force state parks, state forests, and other state-owned property to become grazing lands for cows.
“The proposal (HB 1421) sponsored by Rep. Jon Albert, R-Frostproof, says that any lands determined to be suitable for cattle grazing must be described in the land management plan and allowed to be leased for such purpose,” my colleague Mitch Perry reported in the Phoenix last week. “If no portions of the land are deemed ‘suitable,’ the management plan must explain that decision.”
The bill sailed through the House Natural Resources & Disaster Committee last week. I am assuming it passed so easily because it would be such a disaster for our natural resources.
There’s a Senate companion, SB 1658, filed by Sen. Keith Truenow, a sodgrower from Mount Dora. It was just introduced last month and so far hasn’t made it to any of its three committees.
Apparently, these duly elected dim bulbs didn’t learn anything from what happened two years ago, when the governor tried to put golf courses into a state park. People from both parties went nuts, protesting all over the state, and last year the Legislature passed a law that said governors can’t do that to the parks.
The state didn’t buy these lands to use them as golf courses OR as pastures. They set them aside to preserve and protect them from what’s happening to the rest of Florida.
I was curious about what the folks in the cattle business thought about this bill. One of them, former Ocala-area ranch manager Jan Cubbage, didn’t think much of either the bill or its House sponsor, Rep. Albert, who works in manufacturing.
“I believe his total knowledge of cattle is limited to Burger King and the cream in his coffee,” she told me. “Grazing cattle on any land alters the ecology of the landscape. … This bill is one big pile of bovine manure.”
The last roundup
Cattle ranching has played a key role in Florida’s history. If you doubt me, go read Patrick Smith’s “A Land Remembered.”
One of the earliest entries in the state’s lengthy “Florida man” chronicles was a cowman named Bonaparte “Bone” Mizelle. He couldn’t write his own name but was renowned for his ability to recall every brand of every rancher in the region around Arcadia.
He was even more acclaimed for his prodigious liquor consumption. Once, after he passed out during a cattle drive, his compadres built a fire circle around his bedroll. When he woke up and looked at the flames, he said, “Dead and gone to hell. No more’n I expected.”
Nowadays, instead of brands burned into their hides, the cattle wear electronic tags in their ears that can be scanned by a smart phone. The cowboys themselves are mostly temps, hired just for the occasional herding job. There are no more cattle drives — truckers take care of the long hauls.
Other things haven’t changed, though. The Seminole Tribe, whose forebears began tending herds back when the Spanish first brought livestock here, continues to control ranches from the Georgia state line down to the Everglades, including the 36,000-acre Brighton Reservation. Yes, they’ve already heard all the jokes about their cowboys being Indians.
Most of the Florida ranches are cow-calf operations, meaning they raise calves from birth until weaning, typically around seven months, at which point they’re sold to ranchers out west. Five of the 10 largest cow-calf ranches in the U.S. are located in Florida, according to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
Lately, though, we’ve seen the number of ranches dwindle as their owners decide to sell out to developers and head for the last roundup.
“Major homebuilder buys 4,100 acre ranch near Lake Wales,” the Lakeland Ledger reported last year. Versions of that headline have been popping up in Florida newspapers for decades, signaling a slow decline in ranchland and an increase in sprawl.
If there are fewer ranchers around, why would those who remain need to run their cattle on state land? I posed that question to Jim Strickland, a longtime rancher in Myakka City who’s also the son of a rancher, as well as a former president of the Florida Cattlemen’s Association.
“I don’t know,” Strickland admitted.
Cubby told me her theory: Some ranchers sell part of their property to developers but hang onto the rest. But they don’t want to cut the size of their herd to match the amount of land that’s left, she said.
Instead, if this bill passes, they can simply rent grazing space on state park or forest property and continue with the same number of cows, boosting their profits.
Too bad if this ruins the taxpayers’ property.
Grazing in the grass
The one rancher I talked to who told me he thought that this bill was a great idea was Gene Lollis, who manages the Buck Island Ranch at the Archbold Biological Station in Venus.
“The state’s been buying up a lot of land, and cattle can help them to manage it,” Lollis told me.
Strickland told me he thinks cattle grazing should be an option for state lands, but not a mandate, as Albert’s bill requires.
“I don’t like mandates,” he said.
One ranch owner who sits on the House Natural Resources and Disasters Committee, Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville, made perhaps the strangest argument in favor of the bill. He contended that it’s a cheap way for the state to mow the lawn.
“What we’re really going to be talking about is dirt roads, roads that have grass growing on them, and that the state now pays people to mow,” he said. “And instead of taking taxpayer dollars and paying someone a lot of money to mow it at a two or three-week interval, we’re just going to let the cows eat the grass.”
It sounds to me like Rep. Black has confused state parks and forests with ballpark outfields. Someone should let him know that they’re not the same. After all, the parks and forests include swamps, wet prairies, sand dunes, estuaries, springs, rivers, and streams.
There’s not much that requires mowing, except in the campsites, where you wouldn’t want cattle anyway.
The other problem is what happens to the grass AFTER the cows eat it.
The BS objection
Cubby’s opposition to Alpert’s bill can be boiled down to two letters. They are B and S.
“When the Florida weather gets hot and buggy, cattle head to water, be it a stream, a spring, a river, lake, or pond,” the onetime Dunnellon council member told me. “Cattle will wallow like hippos in any aquatic feature. An adult mama cow will poop 15 times a day, no less than 65 pounds of manure and urine per day, 12 tons per year and they do not care where.”
A lot of our state-owned springs, such as Silver Springs State Park, are already suffering from cow-caused pollution.
The Florida Springs Institute just issued a comprehensive report on how dairies near the north Florida springs are creating lots of nitrate pollution in them. The report says the 83,000 cows at the dairies in the area produce 20 million pounds of nitrate pollution every year.
“This excessive nitrogen load contributes to impairment of north Florida springs/river health and pollution of the regional … potable water supply,” the report says.
Curious, I contacted the head of the Florida Springs Institute, Haley Moody, to ask how dairy cow pollution compares to beef cow pollution. She told me beef cattle produce about two-thirds as much poop as the dairy cows do, which is still quite a lot.
Bear in mind that a 2016 state law called for cutting back on the nitrate pollution in the springs, not adding to it, Moody pointed out. The reason for cutting that pollution goes beyond just the damage done to the springs, too.
“Anything that happens in that landscape has a straight shot into the groundwater,” she said.
You’d think legislators would want to avoid adding to the pollution going into the springs and people’s water supply, Moody said, “but this is sort of the moment that we’re in now.”
Something money can’t buy
All this talk about re-enacting “Rawhide” in the state parks and forests stirred my memory of the days when Rick Scott was governor. Back then, Scott’s minions contended that the state parks — which generate billions in tourist revenue every year — ought to be made to pay for themselves.
Sure enough, I tracked down a 2015 story in which the then-new boss of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Jon Steverson, proposed opening the parks to cattle ranching as part of his effort at turning the parks into profit centers.
Former DEP employees told me then that this went against a policy that dated to the start of the state park system in 1935.
“State parks in Florida have not been designed to make money,” Florida’s first state parks director, Lewis Scoggin, said in 1941. “They have been designed to give something to the people of Florida and to our guests that money cannot buy.”
As of 2015, the DEP was already preparing a pilot project for renting some land to a rancher in Myakka River State Park, one of the oldest and biggest parks. The 37,000-acre park hadn’t had any cattle in it since the state bought the property in the 1930s.
However, the story noted, “the taxpayers may not get any money for leasing all that public land to a rancher, though. The proposal calls for the rancher to build fences and do other chores for free in exchange for parking his or her herd on public property.”
A few months later, the DEP pulled the plug on the pilot, announcing, “Cattle grazing was not the best resource-management tool for Myakka.”
The pilot had run into strong local opposition. People in the Sarasota area pointed out that the state had spent years trying to turn that ranchland into a restored natural landscape, and turning cattle loose there would undo that work. Steverson, incidentally, resigned after two stormy years leading DEP.
At some point, though, the DEP changed its approach again.
A legislative analysis of Albert’s bill notes that five of the 176 state parks now feature cattle grazing as part of their management plans and maintain cattle grazing agreements: Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, Colt Creek State Park, Alafia River State Park, St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park, and Lake Kissimmee State Park, home of a historical cow camp.
Clay Henderson, a former Audubon Florida leader who literally wrote the book on environmental land preservation in Florida, “Forces of Nature,” was appalled at this news. He was particularly upset to hear cattle are already allowed in St. Sebastian River Preserve, which he’d helped arrange for the state to purchase. After all, he pointed out, that park actually has “preserve” in its name, not “pasture.”
If this bill passes, it will go against the law establishing the state parks as well as ruining their broad appeal, he said.
“People go to state parks in many cases to see wildlife,” Henderson said. “Cattle aren’t wildlife.”
Perhaps that’s the solution, though. What if the Legislature were to declare that beef cattle are actually wildlife? That would make them a benefit, not a detriment. We could even charge the tourists extra to see the herds trampling the landscape and scaring away the endangered critters.
Although I suppose purists like Henderson would look at the damage done and say of the parks, like Bone Mizell, “Dead and gone to hell. No more’n I expected.”