Dr. Tom Bartlett has spent a lifetime proving that rangeland is worth a lot more than meets the eye. Tip sits down with this Colorado State University rangeland economist to discuss career that shifted from mathematical modeling to applied on-the-ground economics — and why Bartlett thinks the real value of public grazing lands is almost always misunderstood by policymakers. Along the way, they reflect on 60 years of Society for Range Management membership, the people who shaped the profession.
Support for The Art of Range comes from the Western Extension Risk Management Education Center, RanchBot, and the Western SARE grant “Evaluating the Affective Power of Art to Increase Knowledge and Support for North American Rangelands, Grasslands, and Grassland Peoples“.
Music by Lewis Roise.
One of Dr. Bartlett’s longest-running commitments, which he mentions often in this interview, is the Society for Range Management’s Endowment Fund. To learn more about SRM or to donate, visit rangelands.org.
Tip Hudson: Welcome to the Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I’m your host, Tip Hudson, Range and Livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com. Welcome back to the Art of Range. My guest today is Dr. Tom Bartlett. Tom was an economist at Colorado State University for some time and was working to characterize and value the ecosystem goods and services associated with healthy grazing lands long before it was cool. Doctor Bartlett, welcome.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Thank you.
Tip Hudson: I’m afraid that I may have already said as much as I know about your career in rangelands, which is the good reason for us to sit down and have a visit.
Tip Hudson: But let’s back up a minute. Where did you grow up and how did you come to be interested in rangelands? Because even though this feels important to us, there’s not that many people that are in this line of work.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Well, actually, I was born off the southern coast of New Mexico, but only lived there for nine days. It was the closest hospital that my dad trusted. He didn’t trust the one in New Mexico. He was a physician surgeon who came from a ranch in Southern Colorado. My grandfather got out of the ranching business following the dust bowl and followed my dad through medical school. One of my worst first memories of anything related to Range was getting bucked off Chico. When I was about 4-years-old. It was in the drive, and luckily, back then, the only part of the drive that was paved was where the wheels were. Everything else was grass. I did land on my head, but it was on the grass, so might have impacted how I developed, but I’m not sure. But anyhow, I had most of my schooling in New Mexico. We were in California a couple of times. Then I went to college in Durango, Colorado at Fort Lewis College. Freshman Deer did really well, was the top student at the college. Bureau of Land Management came to the college looking for somebody to work for them during the summer and the college recommended me. So I was always interested in range and livestock production just because of my family background. But at that time, I think I was in pre-forestry. But I worked for BLM in range doing range inventory in southwestern Colorado at the time when there was uranium mining and prospecting. Saw a lot of the canyon lands of southwestern Colorado. But it really got me interested in rangeland and rangeland management. From there, I said, Where are the good range schools? The one that came to light was Utah State. Because Dr. Stoddart was there of Stoddart & Smith, and Seaway Cook who was one of the pioneers in range nutrition work and a very good individual. I went to Utah State and got there. Early September of 1963, went to a Range club meeting and joined Society for Range Management as a student member. Been a member ever since, and it’s been invaluable to my career. From then until now, it’s still invaluable, so I support it greatly. I graduated at Utah State in ’65 and went to the University of Arizona for a Master’s degree. I was going to go someplace else if I continued my education. But I met a young lady there from Kansas who I married, and she needed to stay in Tucson to finish her degree. I pursued my PhD in Arizona under a Watershed specialist, John Thames, and did got into operations research and different modeling of rangeland ecosystems and watersheds and how to determine what’s best. Well, I finished all my coursework and most of my research work, but Seaway Cook asked me to apply to Colorado State University where he had gone. That was in the summer of 1971, and we couldn’t work out a financial agreement on that first interview. He came back later that fall and up the ante and I couldn’t refuse. In December of 1971, we moved to Fort Collins, Colorado. I spent my career in rangeland economics there. I did graduate courses and I had graduate students who did different types of economic and mathematical modeling, which was really interesting and easy to publish because it was state-of-the-art. But I got to thinking later in my career, this really isn’t helping anybody on the land. I went more to doing applied-type of things. That’s one of the things that really benefited me was Society for Range Management. Particularly the section meetings and the tours that we had across the state. I met a lot of people, both in range and associated with land, but maybe not in the society, but who were working in it. They taught me so many things about rangeland and about people. One of the biggest things is to learn about people. I told somebody today they talked about how hard it was to get policy people to see their way. I said, Well, you have to be patient. Particularly with political people, I said, you have to be really patient and keep working on it until they decide it’s their idea, and then they go with it. But you got to be patient to get there. Anyhow, so that’s where I’m at. Now, I retired in 2002 because I got tired of the bureaucracy in the university. It’s probably one of the most inefficient bureaucracies that mankind has ever developed.
Tip Hudson: That’s saying something.
Dr. Tom Barlett: But then we moved south to New Mexico because I didn’t want to shovel snow on my retirement. Played a lot of golf, haven’t played much this winter, but also stayed involved with the Society for Range Management. Worked a lot in the finance committee and those types of areas. I was also on the membership committee at one time, Student Affairs Committee Jenny Bluehorn and I met one time in Kamloops BC, and I think it was ’84. We’re the only two of the committee that met there. We made a lot of neat decisions. But most of them held water. A few of them people got excited about. Generally, it worked okay, and that’s when we had summer meetings of all the committees which we stopped doing that in about ’97. But I still think those were great thing. You saw different areas. You had good tours, and you also got to meet and know other leaders in the society committee chairs and such. Anyhow, where are we at?
Tip Hudson: As you said, before we started recording, that’s probably the greatest benefit of coming to the meetings, is making face-to-face connections with real people.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Exactly. You make lifelong friendships. Like an example, Rod Hight Smith.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Rodney was a student at Colorado State when I was there, when I started, and I knew who he was and that was it. But I got to know him at SRM meetings. In fact, he’s from the same county as my wife, he and Sue. But we got together and started seeing each other at each annual meeting. We’ve both been to each other’s houses over the years and we still maybe talk on the telephone once or twice every month and see what’s going on. Last conversation was last week. He called me up and said somebody had called him and told him that Ron Sosabe died. Then he asked me, Did you know Ron? I said, Rodney, Ron was on the board of directors the same time you and I were on the board of directors. All of us as we get older, lose some of the memories. Memories recall is not there. The recall is there, but it takes a while sometimes. There’s a good example, another one Phi Busby. Phi Busby and I met in a corner of sidewalk bar in Mexico City in 1975. I had students, and it was down the street from where the students and I were staying to the convention hotel. I met Phi there, and we’ve built a relationship over the last 50 years. He and I ran the silent auction at this meeting. There’s so many lifelong relationships I got and even shorter term relationships. Some of the staff here, like Maggie Tupper who’ve I’ve only known for two years now. I’ve gotten to know her and she does very good. She’s just another ranch kid from Montana. We discuss a few things related to weather and livestock production when we talk, but then we also talk about getting receipts for donations and et cetera. But the two Kellys are wonderful, Mary Jo is wonderful. I’ve got Jess Peterson. The greatest admiration I have for him is he’s gone with the memorials. Each year we have a session on memorials. It took me several tries to get that done. In 1994, I was co chair of the meeting in Colorado Springs, and I set up a breakfast meeting on Monday that was included with the registration, and it was for doing a memorial to people who had passed recently. Mm hmm. It was good, and nothing happened after that. I did it again when I was co chair of the meeting in 2009. After that, they’ve had the memorial every time. I think it’s very important to remember those people that have contributed so much. Were you at the business meeting today?
Tip Hudson: I was not.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Well, they recognized Roy and John both. They had so much written on John, you couldn’t read everything. But maybe we ought to have a little flyer printed up so people can actually read that or take it to their room and read it to see who those people were. There’s so many people I’ve learned so much from. Another one’s Chuck Jarecki. I’ve gotten to know Chuck. Chuck writes autobiography things at the time. But I’ve gotten where he sends those to me. I found a lot out a lot about Chuck. He was raised in Pennsylvania and came out to Montana during the summer to work and decided he wanted to be a rancher. He finally got into ranching and did a wonderful job then sold his ranch in ’93.
Tip Hudson: Ahead of you check back in September, and we’ve run that piece already. I should have called you before I talked to Chuck because I had to pedal pretty hard to get Chuck to talk.
Tip Hudson: If I’d had a few more prompts, it probably would have gone a little bit better.
Dr. Tom Barlett: But Chuck started. He came up with the idea of an endowment fund. He was on the board in 1980, ’79, ’80 of when the society went broke. We had a executive. I think he was an executive secretary at that time instead of vice president. But we had a Northern Great Plains project through the society. That was a good project. They’ve got excited about it and essentially spend all the money the society had on that project. Not just the money that we had received as a grant to do it. We were completely broke and that was one of the ways that Chuck Jarecki said, to avoid those situations in the future, is build an endowment. Of course, it’s taken a little long to get it where it’s really doing much, but John Hunter actually got it instigated in the society that it was approved. I think that was 1982, so it took a couple of years. But I remember John Hunter, we had a summer meeting in Park City Utah, and the endowment had hit 100,000. He was so excited. [LAUGHTER] But now it’s up to 1.6 almost 1.7 million. It’s going to contribute 44,000 this year. We hope that it keeps growing. We’re going to try to get bigger contributions and some corporate contributions that believe in what the society stands for and what it does. I have a couple of ideas on how to get that started. We’ll see if they work. [LAUGHTER] But I know some people that have some experience in that area.
Tip Hudson: I was talking with Barry Perryman yesterday. He said, literally, these are the people that keep the world stitched together, that hold the dirt down and keep things from spinning apart. It’s important, and people throw money at things that are of much lesser long term importance.
Dr. Tom Barlett: We just got to convince some people of that and get some good contributions because, they can contribute half a million, a million with no problem. We had our biggest contribution was the Pendletons. There’s another person that I built a good relationship with. But it was because of Don. Don was a mentor. To anybody that came into the society that he met, he tried to help them. He was remarkable. But he and Betty Joe both passed away. No children, so they gave all their resources to SRM, the Texas section, a couple of universities and their church. We got 350,000 out of that. That was really a big boost.
Tip Hudson: What changes have you seen in the society over the last 50 years?
Dr. Tom Barlett: Oh, gee.
Tip Hudson: Maybe just talk about positive ones.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Well, I don’t know. They talk about changes today, and I thought, John Walker talked about a couple of things like Advisory Council, like it was something new, it’s not. Advisory Council has been around as long as I’ve been a member and gives advice. The one thing that’s changed as far as annual meetings is the staff has a lot more to do with it now than it used to. It used to be the sections that did it. I did it twice, and all I required was them to tell me when they want to do it and how much money they wanted, and I did the rest. Now it’s they still give those instructions, but they give it to the staff and the staff does a lot of it. They rely on a person to find them a hotel and find them a location. We used to use the sections to do that. I did that for finding a hotel and the rates, on which the hotel manager has told me is you do a lot better job than the society. But it’s part of the communication with people again. But the changes in the society, we don’t have as many sections as we used to. I don’t know why Washington, the National Capitol section didn’t keep going because they have range people back there, but apparently they decided they didn’t need to worry about range, which is unfortunate. The Florida and Southern section stopped doing it because I had a person from Arkansas tell me, young person, a student at University of Arkansas at this meeting. She was here, and I said, “Well, obviously you’re interested in rangeland.” She said, “Well, we don’t really have range.” I said, “Sure you do. You have all kinds of range in Arkansas. You have a lot of land that’s used for livestock grazing, used for wildlife, used for recreation, used for water production.”
Tip Hudson: We just don’t call it range there. I grew up in Arkansas, and I didn’t know the word range until I moved to Idaho. But I got started because I was doing an internship with the Corps of Engineers that was managing habitat for wild turkeys, and I like the idea of combining livestock production and wildlife habitat.
Dr. Tom Barlett: It’s good joint production. There’s a lot of joint relationships there that you can have both of them.
Tip Hudson: There may be increasing interest in Florida. I’ve visited with a few people down there.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Good. I used to have that. George Tanner was at University of Florida. His nickname was the Swamp Bear. Big fella. But very nice guy. He was good in range. But the changes. I think the changes in our perception of what people think of as range, and we try, well, it’s rangeland, to make sure it’s land that they’re associated with. We have a Range Cafe in Bernalillo, New Mexico, and their symbol is an old kitchen electric range [LAUGHTER] which is a little bit different. You talk about range management on the golf course, and they say, oh, you manage the driving range?
Tip Hudson: Or the shooting range.
Dr. Tom Barlett: You got to be a little bit aware of it, but I think you need to sell it. I tell a lot of people, well, it’s cows and grass. [LAUGHTER] They get that. But it’s so much more than cows and grass. There’s that. The society is more open, I think, to everybody. When I went to school at Utah State, we had no women in the classes. The only women that was in college, I think, were in wildlife, and there was only one or two women in wildlife at that time. That was at Utah State. Now I’ve had classes and would that have been mostly women. They’re great. The people we have on the rangeland or the endowment fund development committee right now, Jessica Wind is a rangeland economist from Idaho. Julie Fenzel is an extension agent from Bakersfield, and we can go on and on of all the people that are really working. Then we have the males too, Tate Lance from South Dakota.
Tip Hudson: They’re not useless?
Dr. Tom Barlett: No, they aren’t useless. No. They’re jackrabbits in South Dakota. But which I always got a kick out of. My granddad used to side in his bear rifles with going out on the Mesa West of Las Cruces and shooting jack rabbits. [LAUGHTER] But he’s a heck of a good shot. When he was in Colorado, he was also a marshal and so he’d practice with a pistol of throwing eggs into the air and shooting the eggs.
Tip Hudson: I couldn’t hit an egg on the ground with a pistol much less flying through the air.
Dr. Tom Barlett: I have a pistol in my bedroom. It was my grandfather’s. He gave it to me. It has a fairly sensitive trigger on it. You don’t want anybody to touch it.
Tip Hudson: What are some things you think we’ve made progress on whether ecological, economic, sociological range?
Dr. Tom Barlett: I think ecologically, we look much more, the whole picture instead of just livestock and the relationship to the land. But we look at, well, what’s the relationship of that to wildlife and to recreation and to aesthetics? How do people see that? I think one of the unfortunate things in the West as far as aesthetics, and this isn’t popular probably is wind turbines. They ruin the landscape, such as life. I think we’re much more open. We’re more open socially to people. I’m much more open to the women in our profession than I was at one time. They’re super and very knowledgeable. I think we’re more open to different people from different parts of the country or different parts of the world. Whether it be Africa or Asia, whatever. The Aussies are a little hard to take once in a while, but I love them. We’ve seen all those changes and we’ve all evolved with those changes, so it’s hard to see changes. You and I are sitting here, what are the changes have we seen? You keep asking me. Some of them I can’t see.
Tip Hudson: Until after the fact.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Until after the fact, and look back.
Tip Hudson: Do you ever find yourself thinking, I just wish everybody understood this. If so, what is this? What’s that thing, and what should they know about it?
Dr. Tom Barlett: Well, I think it’s understanding that if they make a commitment to go through that commitment with that commitment. That’s one of the things that’s always bothered me. Is that when you do something, you ought to do it and do it well. When I get involved with something or some organization, I want to do it and do it well. I don’t want to just be another member. If I turn out to be that way in some organization, I’ll drop out of the organization. Then I have some professional organizations that I didn’t feel I was contributing anything, so why should I be a member? But with SRM, it’s always helped me, so I always try to give back. Get back with talking to people and trying to inspire them to keep going. That’s one neat thing about this meeting is we have so many young professionals and students. I sell membership pens at the silent auction. I get to give my sales pitch to all kinds of people. But mostly it’s younger people. You get to talk to them and get to know them and get to see some changes. I ask them, how long have you been a member? They might say, well, I’m not a member and I said, well, why not? Why don’t you join? Because it’s inexpensive. There is a mention today about raising dues.
Dr. Tom Barlett: I don’t see because they say, well, our dues are so cheap compared to other organizations. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. That means you’re fairly efficient. Why should you base your raising dues because somebody else has higher dues? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Tip Hudson: A friend of mine said one good question that she likes to ask of people is what is something that you wish you had asked of yourself earlier in life? What is a question that you wish you thought through found answers to earlier in life that people should think about?
Dr. Tom Barlett: I think it’s the people aspect of really working towards developing relationships with people. Earlier in life, I was always an independent CAS, primarily the CAS part, but not being really interpersonal with people. Of course, I’ve changed that, but it takes a while to learn those things, and I wasn’t real quick about it. I guess if I could have learned how to do that earlier, it would have been better.
Tip Hudson: How do you feel like there’s been changes in the public perceptions of grazing on public lands?
Dr. Tom Barlett: Many people think grazing on public lands is a giveaway. Having worked in rangeland economics and, unfortunately, being an expert on grazing fees, which I never intended to be, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. People pay for it one way or another. The grazing fee might have been a whole lot less than what the forage was actually worth. But the rancher paid for that extra value in paying for his ranch. That value was incorporated into the ranch. Now, when you eliminate public grazing on the land, that really impacts the ranch because you lose a lot of the value of the ranch that was appreciated because of the difference in the value of the forage and the grazing fee type of thing. The other thing is, people don’t understand that you can manage animals. Most people don’t understand that you have to manage animals to be able to make them efficient in production. They think you just have a cow and put it out on the range, and everything happens. Well, that’s a start, but there’s a lot of other things that have to go on with that.
Tip Hudson: I was interacting recently with a federal employee who was answering the question of why are there so many vacant federal grazing permits. The answer was because there’s so many people that can’t afford it. The cost of repairing the infrastructure, transportation. Human energy to manage the animals, as you’re saying, it exceeds the value that they get back out of it.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Also, just the conflict of having it makes a lot of cost. That’s one of the costs that’s increased over time is handling the conflict with other humans. That’s a reason why a lot of people have got out of it. I know some ranchers in Colorado, down by Castle Rock, left Castle Rock because of the people problem. Just too many people and too much hassle with people not only on the land, but also the social structure, their kids in school. I know a lot of them that moved to Wyoming or Nebraska. Those things happen.
Tip Hudson: You mentioned a few people, but who are some other folks that were influential on you in your career?
Dr. Tom Barlett: A lot of people. Well, one I mentioned quite a bit. One of my all-time heroes was Marion Clawson. He was the first director of the Bureau of Land Management, a resource economist. He attended our meeting in it was in the early 1980s, I think. I know it was in Albuquerque. I at that time, did a cocktail hour at my parents’ house for a bunch of people, and invited Marion, and Marion came. Later on, Marion and I met and was at 1987 in Berkeley. When I was on Sabbatical. They had invited Marion to come in and give some seminars. But Marion came in, and he saw me, and we spent most of his time at Berkeley with me instead of with the other professors. I really chapped some of them, but we had a great conversation. He was a dynamic individual. He was one of my heroes because he kept active into his 90s, which is remarkable. Who else? One I found out today, Professor Ren, who’s in Lanzhou, China. He was the director of the Gansu Ecological Research Center. I knew him when I was in China in 1988. I met him earlier in Paris at a UNESCO meeting, but I just met another Chinese citizen here who is from that research institute. He said, Dr. Ren is still alive, 103, and he says he still uses a computer. That’s amazing to me. But he had a picture of him which was neat. It was Ren, R-E-N. When I was there in 88, my wife wrote me a letter, and it said, In care of Dr. Wrin W-R-I-N. I think it was. Then she spelled Ren like the bird. It was interesting. But he wasn’t as much of an inspiration to me, but it was one of the connections I made through rangelands across the world. Other people. **** Wetzel, Oklahoma. I don’t know if you’ve heard of **** or not.
Tip Hudson: I know the name.
Dr. Tom Barlett: **** was NRCS retired, a very good person as far as resource management and range management. I wrote some articles about different types of strategies for ranchers. One of them was early calving and having a larger a number herd and marketing your calves early. He said, you can’t do that. I said, sure he can. I said, not everybody can do it at the same time, but somebody can take advantage of it. We had discussions back and forth through the years, and we were on, well, in Wichita. In 1996, we had a meeting in Wichita. We had a little golf tournament beforehand, and he and I played golf, but then we had a tour, I think it was afterwards. We went up to one place up north by Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, which was an old ranch house. But we were down in the corrals, looking at things. Wetzel picked up this grass, and he said, what’s that? I looked at it, and I said, Shenonards Pencults Texas tumble grass. He looked at me. He said, I didn’t think you’d know that at all [LAUGHTER]. But after that, we never had another argument, I don’t think. But he passed away right after the turn of the century, I think. Suddenly, they were going to go on some type of ride looking at some rangeland, and he just had a heart attack and died. Well, that was unfortunate. Who else? Well, Seain Cook was always one of my heroes, just because he was so influential in range. That’s one of my first range meeting Wow, the first national range meeting was in ’65 in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Dunes Hotel. I was so impressed that you could go and listen to these people that you had been reading their work. You could listen to them and meet them. That was just really impressive to me. That was back when people read. That’s another thing I tell young people. I say, go and meet him. Talk to him. Tell him, I like that article. I said, they’ll love. He was influential. Well, my dad he’s one of my heroes. Another hero in out of history was President Truman, just because the buck stops here. He wasn’t afraid to commit to things, and he paid his own way. Very unusual for a politician. He lived in a small house in Missouri. That’s another. I could go down. Chuck Jarecki, just keep going and going and going. But so many people in, Rod Heightsmi. I’ve learned a lot from him, Free Busby, all my friends I’ve learned from. Even some of my enemies [LAUGHTER], but I’ve learned from you. With your participation on the endowment committee and what you did and the way you did and your other endeavors that you’ve done, I learned from those things. I learned from a lot of people.
Tip Hudson: I don’t feel like I’m a young clan professional anymore. But if you had a piece of advice for young range professionals, what would it be? You may have already answered that. We’ve talked a few times about getting involved.
Dr. Tom Barlett: Get involved and committed, and don’t be afraid to say what you think. The outgoing board member, Julie Elliott, named Calcum. She was a student at CSU. But we have had some good discussions recently because, well, she has really torn up when her husband died three years ago. At these meetings, we’ve spent a lot of time together trying to get through that. But I said something in the airport in Spokane about, well, we ought to do it this way. She said, no, we shouldn’t [LAUGHTER] You really impressed me. That’s good. You can disagree and still be friends, which some people don’t realize.
Tip Hudson: That’s a good final word. Dr. Bartlett, thank you for your time.
Dr. Tom Barlett: You bet. I enjoyed it, and like I said, I still respect you.
Tip Hudson: I appreciate that [LAUGHTER].
Tip Hudson: Thank you for listening to The Art of Range podcast. Links to websites or documents mentioned in each episode are available at artofrange.com. Be sure to subscribe to the show through Apple Podcasts, Podbean, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting app so that each new episode will automatically show up in your podcast feed. Just search for Art of Range. If you are not a social media addict, don’t start now. If you are, please like or otherwise follow the Art of Range on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, formerly Twitter. We value listener feedback. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode or just want to let me know you’re listening, send an email to show@artofrange.com. For more direct communication from me, sign up for a regular email from the podcast on the homepage at Artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by CAHNRS Communications in the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by sponsors. If you’re interested in being a sponsor, send an email to show@artofrange.com.
Narrator: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University’s endorsement.
