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Show 48 Mr. CANNON. Thank you, Mr. Morgan. Why don't we go now down the panel, because we know this microphone works and so Mr. Bowler, if you would favor us with your testimony, it would be appreciated. STATEMENT OF MR. R. LEON BOWLER, CATTLE RANCHER AND FARMER, SOUTHERN UTAH Mr. BOWLER. Thank you. I am Leon Bowler and I do live in Southern Utah. In fact, if you look at Dr. Potter's map up there, I live in that little part of Utah that was circled out as being in the extreme drought area. I have the unique situation of having been in the livestock business for 70 years. My grandfather had a policy when the oldest child was born or the first child of each one of his children, he gave them a heifer calf, so I've been in the livestock business my whole life. I have never in my life seen anything in Southern Utah like this. I tried to look at the map to see if I could gauge that and I couldn't for sure. But I have never seen anything like this in my life. My son and I now operate a ranching and cattle operation, as you have been told, where we have 20,000 acres of private property and that's a farm, we take care of all of our livestock with no problem. We, however, also have BLM rights in Utah and Nevada. Our ranching operation is involved in Northern Washington County and in Western Iron County. We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past years in building water systems and trying to take care of water for our ranching and livestock programs. We find ourselves within the last year having to drill four additional wells deeper because the underground water has deteriorated to the point we have to go deeper to get that. We have spent thousands of dollars in piping water from springs and moving it around on our range so that we would be able to do a better job and more efficient job of taking care of the range and getting the use of the resources. This is the first time in history that I know of that some of the springs on that range have dried up as they have. A year ago we had a windmill- that in my history had never stopped pumping- that did, and we went in and purchased a solar system, and where we put the solar system down the well further and turned it on and got a great stream of water for five minutes and it quit. We then reduced the flow so that it fell to one gallon per minute and were able to water some of cattle with that well, but that had to be restricted in order to do that. In trying to find what I ought to say to this committee, I decided that I should contact as many of the ranchers and farmers in the area and talk to them about their situation and what they were going to do or what they thought they could do. In discussing it with one of the ranchers, let me tell you first it was very disheartening to do that, very discouraging to do that. The first farmer that I talked to said, " I don't think there's anything that they can do for me." He said, " I just think that I'm out of business." I said, " Well, don't you think a low- cost loan program might help you?" And he said, " No, if the money were free I'm probably still going to be out of business." He said, " I'm taking my cattle to the auction as fast as I can take them." The auction can only handle so many |
