Straight Shooter
DAVID FLITNER '55 says the ranchers in this country have their backs against the wall, reeling from what he sees as the most serious economic crunch the cattle business has ever faced and assailed by unfriendly federal land-management policies. "If the market problems could be eliminated," he told a visitor last summer, "ranchers would have more latitude to react to adverse government decisions, but the market is usually close to the cost of doing business. We're in a vulnerable position if anything un- usual comes down the pike. It will take 20 years to recover from the last four years when we were losing $100 to $150 a head."
Flitner speaks with some authority. He is president of the Wyoming Farm Bureau, a director of the 2.8 million-member American Farm Bureau, and co-owner and manager of what is, even by Wyoming standards, a large ranch - the Diamond Tail, established by his grandfather in 1906. Asking a rancher how many acres he controls is bad manners, as presumptuous as asking a businessman how much money he has. The size of the ranch would be misunderstood by people unfamiliar with the realities of running cattle on land that receives only five to ten inches of rain a year, Flitner explained.
When Flitner talks about the ranch he actually is referring to the base property - the houses, bunkhouses, barns, repair shop, and other outbuildings, along with the feedlots and surrounding land under cultivation. Seen from the air, it is a patchwork of greens, shaded according to the crops made possible by extensive irrigation. The grazing land varies from rugged desert, cut by a maze of canyons, to high mountain pastures. Most of the land has an abundance of sagebrush and a scarcity of water. It takes between ten and 20 acres, Flitner explained, to support just one cow for one month. Dry-land ranching, by necessity, is a largescale undertaking.
Most Western ranchers, including the Flitners, lease a large percentage of their land from the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management. Because of the scarcity of private land in the Western public-land states, there is no other affordable way to obtain the necessary grazing room. Grazing fees are going up, however, and according to Flitner the increases are set "without taking into account the actual market value of the livestock and the purchase price of the grazing permit." Also, the designation of large areas of public lands as wilderness areas, and the consequent prohibition of multiple-use management, including ranching, is limiting the grazing land available.
Flitner also described the government prohibition on use of cer- tain chemicals as particularly hard on ranchers. They can no longer spray sagebrush with an herbicide in order to encourage the growth of grasses, and they were ordered to stop poisoning coyotes. The Flitners once raised as many as 2,600 sheep - until three years ago when "the predator problem got out of hand."
In the days when there was a large sheep herd in addition to the cattle, the Diamond Tail employed about 20 hands during the summer months and ten during the winter. Flitner and one of his brothers recently divided the operation (the other brother, John, graduated from Dartmouth in 1952 and is in business elsewhere). This winter the size of Flitner's staff will go down to two. The cattleman's workday is frequently longer than from sunup to sun-down. Cattle move best during the cool part of the day, so during round-up Flitner and his hands are up at 2:00 in the morning in order to be in the saddle by the 4:00 sunrise.
In August, Flitner was preparing to bring in the dry cows and open (unbred) heifers for sale. The calves, born in March or April, would be weened in September, trucked to the ranch base property, kept until mid-November, and then sold. Early in January, the cows are gathered to winter on the ranch until April or May, depending on range conditions, when they are driven to adjacent land leased from the Bureau of Land Management. After mid-June (there is too much poisonous larkspur earlier), they are taken to the lower pastures, and as the larkspur declines they are moved up to the lower mountain pastures. During the first part of July, the stock head to the higher elevations and onto land leased from the Forest Service, where they stay until mid-October (hunting season), when they are moved to the relative safety of Bald Ridge. After Thanksgiving the cattle are brought back down to BLM land near the ranch.
Flitner said he was not always sure he wanted to be a rancher. "I was raised in the horse-and-buggy days of the ranch and I lived through the drudgery of ranching before mechanization," he recalled. "I wasn't too damn sure I wanted to do that kind of work for the rest of my life. I needed to get away from it."
He majored in government at Dartmouth with the notion of taking up a career in public service. During the spring of his senior year, while he and a friend were spending the night in New York on their way to a vacation in Bermuda, Flitner's only copy of his senior thesis was stolen from the car. Instead of continuing to Bermuda he went to Washington and spent the next 17 days in the Library of Congress trying to reconstruct the paper. "I more or less lost my appetite for that sort of thing," he confessed, "so I went back to work on the ranch for a while and then spent three and a half years in the Marines." In 1957, he received a call from his father telling him about an opportunity for the family to buy a neighboring ranch that would double the size of the Diamond Tail. His father wanted to know his son's plans for the future. Flitner and his wife opted for the ranch, and after his discharge from the Marines in 1959 they moved back to the Diamond Tail at a salary of $225 a month.
Flitner reeled off the names of nearby ranches that had been in families for generations until they were recently purchased by speculators, developers, or large corporations. The combination of costs in excess of receipts and the escalating value of land in Big Horn County prompted - and in some cases forced - the original owners to sell out. He said that "this false appreciation of land is keeping the rest of us afloat" (it is easy to get a mortgage).
In addition to his Farm Bureau responsibilities, which take up about a third of his time (he recently spent a week in Alaska trying to stimulate the organization of a Farm Bureau there and was planning a trip to Boston to speak about predators on a television show), he is also president or director of several associated in- surance companies, president of a Salt Lake City computer corporation, a director of Wyoming Mountain Bell Telephone Company, and a trustee of the Greybull, Wyoming, public schools. He said that ranchers, himself included, have been "too production oriented" and haven't been paying enough attention to being businessmen. He noted that he finds himself spending more and more time bookkeeping, watching the market, and thinking about when to buy and sell. Although he spends much of the day at his desk, placing orders, arranging for the use of machinery, and scheduling the work to be done, it is the day-to-day, out-of-doors ranch work he enjoys most.
In a questionnaire sent out periodically, the College asks its mostly transient alumni for the names of three people "who will always know your address." In 1975, Flitner replied, "Our family has been on the same ranch for over 75 years and I would assume our next address would be out of sight and mind." He said this summer that "it's not a rational decision to stay. It's an emotional thing."
