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Preface - Introduction - CHAPTERS: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12
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Water Developments

Every effort should be made to provide the water needed by livestock to fully develop the grazing potential of an allottnent. This would include development of springs and seeps with known supply of season-long water, ponding of runoff, construction of ponds in areas of seasonably high water tables, or use of drilled wells or windmills. Some of these structures may supply only a few head of livestock with water for only a short time, but they will frequently encourage grazing in areas formerly unused. --from "Managing Public Rangelands," a booklet by the US Forest Service

Stockmen discovered early that to control the range they had to control the water. Thus, through the Homestead Act and other legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means, most surface waters in the dry West became private property long ago, and remain so today. Ranches were established along almost every appreciable stream and in nearly every river valley in the rangeland West. ,

But cattle normally will travel only a few miles from water (sheep, somewhat further), and much of the Western range is farther from water than this, especially since so many natural water sources have been eliminated by overgrazing. Generally, livestock cannot survive more than a few days without water. Thus, without supplemental water it would be impossible to graze large areas of the West. Additionally, plentiful water allows livestock to consume coarser, less palatable, and more toxic vegetation (whose existence is also largely a result of overgrazing). So in dry and degraded areas water developments are spaced out evenly across the land to allow livestock more uniform and intensive use of forage and browse.

These artificial stock water sources, termed "tanks," dot the land like pepper on a map throughout all but the wettest regions of the West. (Look closely at a good Forest Service map and you will see, though many are not shown. Probably twice as many per unit of land pepper BLM land, though tanks usually are not shown on BLM maps.) Stock tanks commonly occur at an average of perhaps 1 per square mile, up to 4 or 5 per square mile in many areas. The vast majority of allotments have at least several tanks, and most have a dozen or more; thus, we may reasonably estimate several hundred thousand stock tanks on Western federal land. State and county lands are pocked with perhaps a couple hundred thousand more.

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Mile-wide Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona on upper right; stock tank, lower left. (Unknown)

Most stock tanks are dirt. Ranging anywhere from bathroom-sized to acres in area, they are scraped into the living earth with bulldozers, backhoes , and graders. This often involves bringing heavy equipment across land never even driven on before. The dam site and area to be covered by water, and the ground 10' to 20' all around the site, are cleared of trees, stumps, brush, rocks, and other large objects, destroying animals and their habitat in the process. The topsoil may then be removed and saved to line the dam and spillway. Dirt, sand, and rocks (and remaining plants and animals) are gouged out to form basins and shaped into dams across draws, gullies, arroyos, canyons, and other drainages. Additionally, trenches and/or levees may be scraped into the uphill countryside to divert more water into the prospective ponds. In flatter areas without well-defined drainages, stock ponds are scraped deeply into the terrain, blocked with long, low dams on the downhill side, and fed with long swales, trenches, or levees that capture water runoff from large areas upslope. Some are fined with plastic, clay, cement, oil, and other sealants. But most are "puddled naturally"by the trampling hooves of livestock, and by manure, urine, washed-in silt, and a buildup of salts and minerals left by evaporating water. Infrequently, tanks are fenced to exclude livestock in order to reduce physical damage to the dam and to reduce water pollution (which may cause livestock to become ill or infested with parasites), and water is delivered to stock through a pipe or access point.

The dirt tank fills with water during a good rain, if the dam doesn't wash away or the basin fill with sediment. If it holds water (perhaps 10%-15% of those I have witnessed don't), thereafter it becomes a livestock mud-wallow.

These tanks function partly and temporarily as check dams, as natural sediments and those loosed by overgrazing settle onto the bottoms of waters backed up behind the dams. However, the elevation difference caused by the dams (or any dam) also increases the water speed and scouring action of floodwaters in channels below the dams. This, in combination with the impact from overgrazing and tank building in drainages and surrounding areas -- plus the fact that livestock use and damage is extremely concentrated in tank areas -- usually leave drainages with significant net losses in vegetation, soil, and wildlife. Moreover, most tanks eventually (often suddenly) wash away, causing flooding and erosion to drainages far worse overall than if no tank were built in the first place. Thus, ranchers' claims of slowing channel erosion and providing for wildlife with stock tanks, though often palatable to the public, are usually the inverse of reality.

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A washed-out large stock tank dam.

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Constructing a large BLM dirt stock tank. (BLM)

Other common stock water tanks are metal, usually round and made from galvanized iron. These storage tanks, ranging in size from roughly a hundred to a hundred thousand gallons, commonly are fed via wells and windmills (invented in 1854), gas, diesel, propane, or electric pumps, or springs or creeks via gravity flow through pipes. Small open metal tanks may double as water troughs. Troughs may be built onto the bottom of large tanks, or located nearby and fed through pipes. Water levels in tanks and troughs are regulated by float valves. Like some other structural range "improvements," these metal tanks are sometimes flown into remote areas with government helicopters, allowing ranchers to graze otherwise unexploitable land.

Other stock tanks are constructed from concrete, concrete blocks, rocks, sheet metal, logs, or whatever material is available, then caulked and coated with asphalt or some other sealant. Some are situated in natural slickrock catchments or blasted into bedrock. Some are designed to capture rainfall directly and channel it into storage. These are termed "trick tanks."

One trick tank I encountered on Forest Service land was constructed thus: A gently rolling area of about 1 acre of juniper woods was stripped of all vegetation, bladed flat with a gradual slope to one side, and covered with a thick sheet of plastic and layer of gravel. Rainwater ran off into a funnel-shaped galvanized gutter and then over the side of a hill into a large metal holding tank supported by a platform of timbers. From this tank ran underground pipes, with valves, to a large metal holding tank with a trough, and from there to a concrete stock tank with a trough. The side of the holding tank was stenciled "PROPERTY OF U.S. FOREST SERVICE." A few cows were milling around in the surrounding acre of trampled, bare dirt. Who knows how much this project cost the public -- merely to help water 20 or 30 cows for a few months each year. Ranching contrivances such as this are common on public land.

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A Forest Service holding tank for cattle

Some stock tanks are even designed to capture windblown snow. This may include structural developments, bulldozing, and/or vegetation manipulation.

Where profitable, seasonal drainages are bulldozed to form dams, or dammed with concrete, sheet metal, lumber, rocks, logs, or whatever is available, and lined with plastic. Perennial streams are dammed (damned) similarly, with pipes or ditches sometimes running to stock tanks and troughs in more convenient locations. Springs are dug or blasted out, curbed, or capped off and the water piped to stock tanks or troughs.

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A spring development; water is piped to a cattle tank some distance away. Note the roadside fenceline contrast, barren hillside, and cattle trail at top.

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This rock and concrete cattle tank ties into the canyon walls. Note that the basin behind the dam has filled with rocks and gravel.

Where water is near but still inaccessible to livestock, they may be supplied the water with noisy and polluting water pumps. Or, wide trails may be cut through thick vegetation, rocky areas, or even down steep mountainsides so livestock can reach the water. Pumping plants are installed to lift water from deep canyons. Commonly water is piped for miles onto the dry range. If all else fails, water may be trucked to the thirsty animals. Any water is fair game to stockmen, and little gets away unaltered, undepleted, or unpolluted in most of the West.

(On BLM land a permittee who pays to develop a water source may become sole owner of associated water rights, even to the exclusion of all others, including wildlife. This rule applies only to BLM ranchers. On BLM and most other government lands, "use-it-or-lose-it" policies encourage ranchers to develop and degrade natural water sources.)

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A spring (indicated by the dark area at left) has been rerouted to a metal stock tank (right center), leaving the spring's channel dry. Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada. (George Wuerthner)

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These metal cattle watering tanks are filled regularly during the grazing season with trucked water. (BLM)

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And this cattle tank is filled via a pipe at the center from a water truck that makes its rounds once or twice a week.

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Well drilling in BLM's central Idaho lava country. (BLM)

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This open metal stock tank is fed by a pipeline. (BLM)

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A BLM spring has been capped and piped to this cattle trough. (BLM)

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According to the Forest Service, "Hauling water on dry ranges makes available herbage for grazing that otherwise could not be used "

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Stock water pipeline being installed by the BLM. (BLM)

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Stock tanks and other ranching developments are sometimes helicoptered in to remote or less accessible areas. (Jim Brown)

On a larger scale, the various government agencies allow the development of many streams and rivers on public land for ranchers' use. Diversion dams, reservoirs, channels, dikes, irrigation canals, and holding ponds are all constructed on public land so ranchers can water livestock on public land and raise livestock feed on private land. These "improvements" frequently deplete most of a waterway's water and sometimes drain streams entirely, lowering water tables, further drying up springs and creeks, and so on.

For example, due to livestock production the Yellowstone River between Yellowstone National Park and Livingston, Montana (a 60-mile stretch), has only 2 instead of many tributaries whose flow still reaches the river through the summer; most water is diverted by ranchers, and the land's water retention capacity has been diminished by overgrazing (Wuerthner 1989). In Idaho's Sawtooth National Recreation Area (established by Congress in 1972 largely to protect anadromous fish habitat) water diversions for cattle pastures by the Busterback Ranch in late summer and early fall drain the entire upper reaches of the East Fork of the Salmon River. This stretch of river is described as once teeming with some of the world's farthest-ranging chinook, sockeye, and steelhead, but now these fish are rare. The Forest Service itself calls this "the single most important resolvable problem in restoring historic anadromous fish habitat in the state of Idaho." (Bagwell 1990) A Nevada rancher was recently served a cease-and-desist order to prevent him from continuing to take all water from a stream on public land and thereby eliminating miles of riparian waterway during hay growing season each year. And in southwestern Idaho, the Bruneau Hot Springs snail is being considered for the Endangered Species list chiefly because groundwater pumping by ranching operations in its range has lowered or dried up its springs (Wuerthner 1991).

Bruneau Hot Springs snails. (Courtesy of George Wuerthner)

Water developments disrupt waterway dynamics, create the danger of dam-breaks and flash floods, release large amounts of sediments into waters, pollute waters with petroleum products, change water temperatures, block fish and other aquatic animal migration and movement, kill plants and animals, and more. For example, Rene J. Dubois of the Natural Resources Defense Council writes:

Channelization is a process which transforms streams into lifeless drainage canals. Bulldozers and chain saws denude the stream banks, while giant draglines cut new channels through the stream's natural bends, leaving behind piles of mud and debris. In most cases, adjacent wetlands are drained as well -- although they act as natural "sponges" absorbing floodwaters. Fish populations are virtually wiped out, waterfowl habitats are destroyed, and the recreational value of the streams is ruined.

In drought years, water diverted for livestock production sometimes reduces streamflow so drastically that fish and other aquatic animals are killed en masse. Such is currently the situation in Montana, where stock raisers are pushing the state to dam more streams, reimburse ranchers for leaving water in streams during dry years rather than use it for irrigation, and transfer water rights to stockmen outright. Already some Western state laws require that during drought ranching be given priority for available water, in some cases over all other uses.

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A scene common to the rural West: the surface flow from this drainage is diverted for livestock pasture, livestock, and the ranch, leaving little or none for Nature and the public. (Julia Fonseca)

On an even larger scale, most major water development projects in the Western US were at least partially promoted by and now benefit the livestock industry, mostly to grow food for cattle. The massive environmental destruction and taxpayer waste caused by these water development boondoggles is the subject of other books, such as Killing the Hidden Waters, Rivers of Empire, and Cadillac Desert. In A River No More, Philip L. Fradkin relates: "Never in history has so much money been spent, so many waterworks constructed, so many political battles fought, so many lawsuits filed to succor a rather sluggish four-legged beast."

In the Northwest, livestock production accounts for over half of the water consumed in the entire region. Half of Arizona's water use is for livestock. According to a 1982 Living Wilderness article, 90% of the water taken from streams in the Colorado River basin is used for irrigation to grow hay and other crops for livestock (Wuerthner 1990b). Most of California's share of Colorado River water doesn't go to Los Angeles swimming pools but to irrigated pastures and cropland for cattle; overall, stockmen account for well over half of the state's water use. A recent federal hearings report on subsidized irrigation stated that 97.5% of Montana's water use was for some form of livestock production (Wuerthner 1991). Dr. Denzel Ferguson, co-author of Sacred Cows, reports that "Of the 100 billion gallons of water used daily in the U.S., 84% is used in 17 Western states, primarily to produce food for cows (Ferguson 1983)."

Livestock production accounts for more than 70% of water consumed in the 11 Western states (Hur 1985a). Moreover, in nearly half of the West (generally the most and portions), in an average year 70% or more of all surface water is taken, again mostly for livestock production (USDA, SCS 1981). In other words, considering these 2 factors and the loss of water flow caused by a century of livestock grazing, it becomes clear that without livestock production the volume of surface water flowing through about half of the West would be at least 2 and perhaps 3 or more times greater!

While ranchers have taken water for livestock production in most areas, they have intentionally decreased natural surface waters for livestock production in others. To utilize Western wetlands for grazing and haying, they have drained hundreds of thousands of acres of marshes, swamps, ponds, and wet bottoms -- formerly some of the most important wildlife habitat in the West. Most of this activity has occurred on private land, but its indirect effects have helped dry up public wetlands in many areas.

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According to the photographer, this deep cut into a drainage in the Big Horn Mountains near Story, Wyoming, was caused by ranchers' misuse of irrigation water. (George Robbins Photo, Jackson, WY)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Cattle visit stock tanks often. Here they congregate and spend much time, especially during the hot part of the day, lounging about, scratching, chewing cud. Thus, the area immediately surrounding tanks (springs, creeks, etc.) is severely trampled, devoid of ground cover, splattered with urine and littered with excrement. These places are commonly and rightly termed sacrifice areas.

The boundaries of sacrifice areas are usually welldefined as the extent of bare dirt around tanks -- commonly a radius of a few dozen yards. As the distance from tanks increases, livestock damage generally decreases, but definite impacts, associated cattle trails especially, are often discernable a mile or more away. A study at the Jornada Experimental Range in New Mexico showed that on unfenced range where stock tanks were spaced 7 to 11 miles apart, most vegetation was killed within 1 mile of tanks, about half was killed within 2 miles, and the impact was significant more than 4 miles away in all directions. In other words, almost the entire range was significantly affected.

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A stock pond and the cattle drawn to it transform this draw's verdant landscape into a sacrifice area.. (BLM)

Ranchers are caretakers. In developing water sources we benefit the land, and we benefit the wildlife.

--Phelps White, past president, New Mexico Woolgrowers Association

Sure, they can say they are bringing in a permanent water supply where it was only intermittent before [often because of overgrazing] and that it helps wildlife. But they are putting it in so they can concentrate cows where cows wouldn't go before. Cattle stick pretty close to water, and they'll get all the grass and beat up the range. That's no benefit to wildlife.

--Bill Meiners, retired BLM range specialist (Luoma 1986)

According to many ranchers and range managers, their water developments are "vital" to wildlife. Many stock tanks are even called "wildlife watering tanks" by those who think the public gullible. In reality, the vast majority of tanks are built primarily to help spread livestock into lightly grazed areas, where water is scarce and cattle and sheep seldom wander. These areas are, of course, exactly where many remnant wildlife populations survive -- a convenient coincidence to justify the new "wildlife" watering projects.

Wildlife tends to shun these stock tanks, which are usually little more than nearly sterile, viscous mudholes frequented by hordes of bellowing cattle. Many large wild animals actively avoid cattle and/or sheep (and their smell), and thus tanks. Most small animals have been killed off or forced away from sacrifice areas, and many of those in surrounding areas may refuse to cross the wide "zones of nothing" around tanks, especially with livestock present. The sides of most troughs are too high for small animals to reach, anyway. Lucky for them; troughs and open metal tanks often become death traps to those birds and other small animals that do try to drink from them, fall in, can't get out, and drown. Few ranchers bother to provide "escape ramps," or even a simple stick from water line to trough or tank rim, which would save many of their lives. Needless to say, these dead animals do not enhance water quality.

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To those few wild animals that can reach them and choose to use them, open metal tanks such as this may become death traps and purveyors of disease and parasites.

Indeed, stock tanks and the livestock frequenting them are ideal purveyors of disease and parasites to what wildlife does come around. The water of dirt tanks, in which cattle trample, defecate, and urinate, usually has incredibly high bacteria and protozoa counts, and the mucky, heavily trammeled area surrounding tanks often is rife with disease and parasites.

Many stock ponds contain heavy concentrations of harmful dissolved and suspended substances, causing health problems to livestock and whatever wildlife may use them. Manure, urine, minerals, salts, settled air-borne pollutants, toxic wastes, and sediments from surrounding sacrifice areas and degraded ranges are carried down by runoff and deposited in these artificial depressions. Because these stock ponds are devoid of plantlife and open to full sun and wind, evaporation rates are astronomical, and these harmful substances build up in ever-greater concentrations, while frequent livestock trampling keeps them dissolved or in suspension.

In the context given, ranching advocates' claim that wildlife needs these foul, unnatural water sources is patently false. Most large wild animals drink less frequently, require less water, and can travel faster to and further from water than cattle or sheep, and many small animals drink dew or extract or metabolize most or even all the water they need from the food they eat. On the other hand, livestock's depletion of the West's most succulent vegetation has caused some wild species to depend more heavily on drinking water to maintain hydration.

Whatever the case, many stock watering developments would not have been constructed if ranching had not depleted natural vegetation and water sources in the first place. In many areas, tanks partially replace water lost to overgrazing. But livestock monopolize and degrade this replacement water and surrounding areas. According to retired BLM grazing management specialist Hugh Harper, "We are treating the symptom instead of the problem." Building artificial water sources ensures that the real problem -- livestock grazing -- will be ignored, if not worsened.

In other areas, tanks have been built where there was no surface water originally. Thus have land managers been able to "produce" certain animals, usually small numbers of elk, deer, or pronghorn, in places where they would not normally live. As shown in countless areas where non-native animals have been introduced (e.g. mountain goats in Olympic National Park, pigs in Hawaii, burros in the Southwest, cattle and sheep almost everywhere...), it is not a good idea to bring either wild or domestic animals into areas where they and the ecosystems are not mutually adapted. This applies, for example, to winter grazing allotments where herds of sheep subsisting on snow seriously damage land normally lacking water for large numbers of ungulates.

From the standpoint of wildlife, stock watering developments differ from natural water sources in another important, but seldom considered, way- They are inherently temporary and undependable water supplies. Natural water sources occur as long-established perennial surface flows, ponds, and lakes, or as intermittent -- yet relatively predictable -springs, creeks, and ponds. Indigenous plants and animals have adapted to and depended upon these water sources for millennia. When changes in water availability did occur, they usually did so gradually enough that biota. could adjust or migrate to more favorable areas.

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This obsolete BLM water development no longer produces water.

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Most stock tanks are of little use to wildlife.

Artificial water sources, in contrast, are nonpermanent and undependable. Take the common earth-fill dam type of tank, for instance: on the bottom of a small canyon in the hills of Southern California, a rancher uses heavy machinery to scrape out a basin and push the excavated material into a long dam across the drainage below. The basin soon fills and remains at least partly full from that point on. Assume that what wildlife survives in the grazed area comes to rely on the pond, natural water sources having been exhausted by cattle. Now, one spring day years later a snowmelt flood breeches the dam, and suddenly the tank no longer holds water. Soon thereafter, the cattle are moved to their summer pasture. The rancher doesn't repair the dam until December. In the meantime, the wild animals either die, or move out to suddenly overpopulate other areas.

Because most dirt stock tanks are built in overgrazed, flood-prone drainages, they trap large quantities of silt and other sediments. Animals, wild and domestic, sometimes get stuck and eventually die in the thick muck. Tanks often fill completely with these deposits within a few decades. At (or before) this point, the dam themselves usually begin to crumble and wash away under the erosive influence of livestock, gravity, the elements, and floods. Because tanks are degraded by livestock and support little or no vegetation, few roots exist to hold the sediments or dams in place, as in a natural situation. When a dam finally goes, the thick, loose sediment layers filling the basin wash away quickly. What is left is a sacrifice area worse than that created by the bulldozer and livestock in the first place. Such situations are in fact very common.

Dirt tanks must be rebuilt or repaired periodically. The same holds true for all other artificial water developments; they break down or are damaged. Water may not again be available for weeks, months, or years, depending on knowledge of the occurrence, management priorities, availability of money and equipment, amount of precipitation, etc. Less efficient tanks are abandoned.

Many structural tanks are kept full only during grazing seasons, which on public land averages 4 months per year. Many other tanks are located inside corrals that are closed during periods of non-grazing. Most of the windmills and other water pumps that supply many water developments are turned off when livestock are elsewhere. In colder regions in winter, tanks that still contain water freeze over much more readily than natural water sources. To be of much use to wildlife, water sources must be clean, accessible, and dependable.

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A washed-out stock tank dam on BLM land in central New Mexico. Note the size of the humans at top left.

Finally, stock tanks require an extensive network of roads for construction and maintenance, and fences to facilitate livestock utilization of the water.

In sum, stock watering developments are ugly sores upon the land. They harm ecosystems by bringing ranching degradations to areas that had little or no ranching previously. I have visited hundreds of stock tanks around the West and most have been barren, sterile, stinking, and polluted. Rarely does one see more than a few birds and insects using them. If government was really concerned with providing water to wildlife, it would stop building stock tanks and end livestock grazing.

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After denudation and trampling by cattle concentrations near this BLM water development, floods from an overgrazed watershed ravaged the drainage. (BLM)

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Close-up of the bank of a typical dirt stock tank.

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On the few months per year when this trough contains water, cattle drive off what few animals would use it; when the cattle are gone, so is the water.

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