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[another superb "background info" article -- comprehensive and detailed ] -- from "Jeffrey D. Burgess"... 

 "Arizona Legislature Diverted Prop. 303 Money To Ranchers"  (see below, for an excerpt)

"Arizona voters passed Proposition 303 in 1998 to fund the Growing Smarter Act with the belief that it would provide $20 million a year for communities and nonprofits to buy state land to preserve it as natural open space. But very few of the voters knew that the Arizona Legislature had secretly included a clause to divert up to 10% of the money to subsidize public land ranchers.

The issue of cattle grazing along the middle Gila River made the news in November 2018 when the Arizona Republic newspaper published an opinion titled, “Why I stopped eating beef after hiking the Arizona Trail,” written by Dr. Nicolaus Hawbaker. He described hiking the Arizona Trail along the middle Gila River during the summer and finding it full of cow turds. He complained that, “Cattle have more right to public lands than humans.”

"There’s plenty of research that shows pulverizing the ground with cattle hooves doesn’t improve the soil, but damages it and increases erosion. Moreover, cattle grazing doesn’t improve the Sonoran Desert, but degrades it. For instance, cattle seek shade under desert trees like mesquite and palo verde, which also serve as nurse plants for juvenile saguaro cacti. Cattle denude the ground beneath desert trees and destroy the young saguaros. Furthermore, cattle compete with desert wildlife for forage. In the cooler winter months they consume much of the limited amounts of grasses and forbs, and in the summer months they are forced to rely on browsing desert shrubs. Research (Rosiere 1975) has shown that cattle can’t get more than 50% of their forage from desert grasses, while in the summer up to 53% of their diet is jojoba, and up to 40% is mesquite (Smith 1993). This makes them direct competitors with the desert wildlife, particularly mule deer, that rely on  browsing woody plants, especially during the hot summers. And these are just some of the examples.

"The LCCGP grants, and the other government assistance for ranchers they helped to leverage, facilitated increased cattle numbers on public land in Arizona during a period of almost uninterrupted drought. That wasn’t what the state’s voters believed their money would be used for when they approved Proposition 303 in 1998.

 

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