and cut your alfalfa, and irrigate the stuff."
Ranching is a regimen he knows from personal
experience, says Benesch, adding he has a masters degree
in agriculture and agricultural economics.
"I mean, I've done it all before. It's
long days and .. you don't have a whole lot of energy
left over."
As a consequence, he said, most ranchers who
find they're facing unscrupulous federal land agency
officials also find they face a no-win situation.
"When you get in these situations where
you basically have a full-time beef with the Forest
Service or with the BLM, or with the Bureau of
Reclamation if it's Fallon, over your water rights -- and
let's say you have a secondary beef over your grazing
permits ---after a while, there's nothing left of you to
farm. Or, if you farm -- you've been steamrolled."
The Monitor Valley matter, says Benesch, is
something of an exception, in that the two main ranches
involved, the R.O., and the neighboring Pine Creek Ranch
of Wayne Hage, did have the financial ability to hire
legal help and fight.
"What happened here, is you happened to
have some ranchers that had enough resources to be able
to fight the Forest Service. Most of the time, you're
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out there trying to
make a living."
In the adjudication, the U.S. Forest Service
is legally challenging Nevada ranchers' long-established
("vested") water rights in the area, claiming
those rights instead should be awarded by the state to
the federal government.
The agency's argument is "creative,"
says Benesch, while "ludicrous" is the term
used by a colleague. Deputy Attorney General Harry
Swainston says the Forest Service is "just
overreaching, which isn't all that unusual for the
government to do on occasion. The Forest Service is kind
of notorious for that."
In a preliminary decision in early 1996, the
state engineer rejected virtually all the federal claims.
After hearings which concluded in March, the matter now
moves to Nevada's Fifth District Court in Tonopah and
possibly, later, to the state supreme court.
The irony of the Monitor Valley fight, says
Benesch, is that it most likely would have been far less
expensive for the Forest Service to simply pay for the
water rights it wanted, rather than to seek to contest
rights vested long ago, before the Forest Service was
ever established.
"All the water rights that are the
subject of the Monitor Valley adjudication probably could
have been condemned and purchased at
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