Behind the Scenes 

When I began thinking about my master’s project, I had no idea I would end up writing about cows. Or that I would end up producing my first podcast as part of it. Initially, I thought that I was going to write a book proposal on the history of climbing in Tucson. The two ideas really couldn’t be more different. 

For the last year, I’ve been working as an editorial intern at the Herald/Review in Sierra Vista, Arizona. When former Gov. Ducey began illegally placing shipping containers on the border in Cochise County this winter, that became my beat. While it may sound far-fetched, covering the shipping containers on the border gave me the sources I needed to start digging into cows on the San Pedro River this spring. One of my main sources for the shipping-container stories was a field researcher for the Center for Biological Diversity who spent a lot of time documenting damage caused by cows in the river. Another one of my main sources became C.J. Karamargin, Gov. Ducey’s communications director. Later, C.J. began working for Juan Ciscomani, the newly elected representative for Arizona’s 6th district. Since I was the only reporter at the paper who had a working relationship with C.J., I got thrown into the role of political reporter as well. 

After the shipping containers were removed from the border early this year, I needed more stories to pitch to my editor, and I remembered my conversation about cows in the river. I pitched it knowing that I had at least one source. I thought it would be a short article for the paper on why environmental groups said cows were bad for the river and why ranchers wanted to graze there- if they would talk to me. That second part seemed like a big if. But around the same time, I got assigned to cover Ciscomani’s creation of a new Citizens Advisory Council. This put me in contact with John Ladd. Ladd is a fourth-generation rancher in Cochise County and the Chairman of the Hereford Natural Resource District. After asking him about his political aspirations on Ciscomani’s new advisory council, I asked him if he knew anything about grazing in the SPRNCA. He did. 

He invited me to the NRCD’s next quarterly meeting and told me that two of the chairmen were some of the ranchers permitted to graze within the SPRNCA. When I arrived at the meeting, he had carved out time on the agenda for them to speak with me about their grazing allotments in the SPRNCA. Ladd later told me that they were skeptical of me coming to the meeting but that he had countered their objections by saying “I already invited her.” When I arrived at that meeting Ladd told me that he wasn’t a fan of journalists himself. But for some reason, he decided to trust me and went out of his way to connect me with other ranchers and make sure that they were all answering my calls. I’m still not sure what I did to earn Ladd’s trust, but it was a major part of me being able to report on this story. 

When I started backgrounding for this story, I quickly realized that all of the previous coverage of the BLM’s management decisions for the SPRNCA did not include any input from the ranchers. I found one local rancher quoted speaking at a public meeting in 2018, but that was it. None of the allotment holders had ever spoken to the press about the issue. But there were a lot of quotes from environmental advocates who wanted grazing out of the SPRNCA. I realized that if I was going to produce a long-form feature on this issue, I would need to speak with the ranchers. Doing this was both one of the biggest challenges while reporting and one of my greatest achievements while reporting this story. Speaking with the environmental groups suing to get cows out of the SPRNCA was easy. They all wanted to direct more public attention to the issue. 

One unexpected aspect of reporting this story were the allegations of rancher violence. The name Bundy kept coming up over and over again. At first I was a little confused. Bundy the serial killer? No, my sources were referring to Cliven Bundy, who in their eyes was probably worse than Ted Bundy. In 2014, Cliven Bundy raised a militia to free his cattle after they had been impounded by the BLM. Other reporting has tied this militia to some of the groups responsible for planning the January 6th attack on the capital in 2021. It's rumored that Scott Feldhausen, the Gila Director for the BLM, was present for the Bundy incident in Bunkerville, Nevada. Feldhausen had gone on record saying that he would not be rounding up and impounding cattle here because of previous bad experience he’d had being threatened by ranchers. 

My reporting took me down the Bundy rabbit-hole to ask this question: could a Bundy-like incident be possible here? I had some sources adamantly telling me that it was Bundy all over again. I was skeptical of this claim, and still am. But through my reporting it became clear to me that the BLM’s actions weren’t making a ton of sense. The legal case against them allowing grazing in the SPRNCA is strong, but they seem to have dug their heels in and plan to allow grazing until a court orders them not to. I concluded that while the threat of another Bundy-like incident in the SPRNCA seems low, whatever experience Feldhausen previously had with ranchers is influencing his decisions. It showed me how an extreme incident like Cliven Bundy’s standoff with the BLM was potentially impacting land management decisions across the country. 

One of my challenges while reporting this story was deciding how much to focus on this element of alleged rancher violence. I had no credible reports of rancher violence in the area. The ranchers I interviewed seemed pretty unlikely to be the next Cliven Bundy. But it was clear that Feldhausen and the BLM were reluctant to do much of anything about the trespass cattle in the river. It seemed like his statement about being scared of rancher violence was at the core of a lot of the decisions being made by the BLM locally. 

The final challenge for this story came when my advisor, Monica, recommended I make a podcast out of all the interviews I’d done for this story. I was intrigued because podcasting has always appealed to me, but also super intimidated. Technology has never exactly been my friend, and learning how to edit a podcast in a few short weeks was a daunting task, but I did it. Creating the podcast that goes along with this story was by far the most rewarding part of the experience. It boosted my confidence with technology and showed me another potential storytelling avenue for the future. This will likely not be the last podcast I create. 

Deciding to create a podcast after almost 90% of my interviews were done and recorded was challenging. When I originally recorded my interviews, it was for note-taking purposes only. So I wasn’t exactly thinking about background noises or me sloshing around iced-coffee in the background. This presented a great challenge when mixing together my podcast at the end.