Excerpt from The Practical Application of the Kent Grazing Bill to Western and Southwestern Grazing Ranges: An Address

Now, with high prices for meat and this shortage of beef staring us in the face, let us look for just a moment at the awful condition which confronts the stockman today, with free and unrestricted grazing. He cannot fence part of the public domain. No, no, that is criminal! He is not allowed to count upon his grazing resources one month in advance. That is bad business management, due to our government's negligence. If he stacks up feed on the public domain for a famine period, develops additional water supplies, improves: the quality of his herds, eradicates poisonous weeds, seeks to improve the carrying capacity of the land, or tries to prevent erosion or cutting and over grazing, he does so at his own expense, and his neighbors may derive as much benefit from this work as he, without sharing any of the outlay. Gentlemen, I call this rank injustice. I condemn it. If the stockman has water and grass on the public domain for a thousand cattle, no matter how long he has been a resident, another stockman, and perhaps a non-resident, can put down there beside these cattleanother thousand head of stock, and the resident stockman can have no recourse. He must share, and share alike, his losses with the intruder, regardless of his improvements and his, foresight.

Besides this injustice to the individual stockman, unrestricted grazing has done infinitely greater harm to our country as a whole. It has invariably resulted in overstocking and overgrazing, and in destroying the best and most nutritious grasses on the ranges, thereby reducing both the quality and quantity of the remaining forage from vear to year. It also makes impossible the alternate grazing and resting of areas to insure natural seed production, and it has been directly responsible in the past, and it is no less responsible today, for the heavy losses of stock from starvation on the ranges. In Arizona more than three-quarters of a million head of cattle, to say nothing of sheep, have perished from famine in thirty years' time. I condemn free grazing as unsafe for that one awful truth alone.

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