Ranchers defend agriculture in coal country

ROSEBUD COUNTY — Northern Cheyenne and Sioux camped near what is today’s Clint McRae’s ranch on their way to the Battle of Little Big Horn, where they defeated Lt. Col. George A. Custer and the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry in 1876.

Today’s fight on this remote landscape of southeastern Montana is over coal.

“It will basically cut this ranch in half,” McRae says as he drives down the road in his pickup truck.

It’s Feb. 3. Light snow covers his fields. McRae is talking about a proposal to build a railroad called Tongue River to haul coal from a proposed coal mine called Otter Creek southeast of Ashland. His land is in the path of the rail line.

A month later, Arch Coal Inc. announced it was suspending its efforts to secure a permit to develop the mine, also keeping the railroad McRae is concerned about on hold. The St. Louis-based company cited deteriorating coal markets and difficulties in obtaining a permit for the mine from the state of Montana.

To McRae, the decision was proof that the mine and railroad were speculative projects in search of a purpose, an argument opponents have been making for 30 years about a railroad through the Tongue River Valley to get Powder River Basin coal to market.

But McRae doesn’t think the battle over coal in the Tongue River Valley has ended despite Arch Coal’s announcement. This is the Power River Basin straddling Montana and Wyoming, where large coal reserves are located.

“Its’ never over,” McRae said. “As long as there’s speculation out there, it’s going to carry on.”

McRae is a rancher and member of the Northern Plains Resource Council, a group of farmers and ranchers in the Bull Mountain and Tongue River Valley areas who banded together in 1972 out of concern about big-time coal development in cattle country. McRae’s father, Wally, a well-known cowboy poet, was a founding member.

Forty-five years later, members of the grassroots conservation organization, shouting from a remote corner of the state, continue to call attention to the costs of coal development to natural resources and agricultural in an attempt to balance economic arguments in favor of coal development.

Sheridan, Wyo., is the nearest large city to Jeanie Alderson’s Birney, Mont., ranch, and that’s 65 miles away.

Coal projects can create tension with agriculture interests in what is a uniquely Montana issue because friends, family members and neighbors work in both industries, she said. People need jobs. Agriculture needs clean water. Hard choices.

“I don’t want to see the community of Colstrip lose all of its jobs,” Alderson said. “And I don’t think people of Colstrip want to see ranchers and farmers ruined.”

Coal, climate change clash in Colstrip

Colstrip is home to coal-fired power plants and the Rosebud mine that supplies its coal, where concerns are mounting about the shutdown of some of the units because of changing market conditions and environmental rules for coal that would result in major job loss.

“This, for us, is really about protecting our water — protecting our land and our water,” Alderson said.

The Spring Creek Mine in Montana, 35 miles north of Sheridan, is 25 miles away from Alderson’s ranch. The Decker coal mine in Montana’s Big Horn County, is to the southwest, and the Colstrip coal mine and coal-fired power plant are to the north.

McRae lives 10 miles south of Colstrip.

“Relationships are strained,” he says.

He doesn’t oppose coal development, if it’s responsible, he said, but he draws the line if it would harm agriculture. Alderson’s concern is the industrialization of the Tongue River Valley.

McRae and Alderson say farmers and ranchers got together back in the 1970s to ensure coal development occurred responsibly, with the land reclaimed after the mining ended.

“They came home after that meeting and were terrified,” said Alderson, referring to a meeting her parents attended on plans that were in the works for coal mining and power generation in the Tongue River Valley. Alderson was 5 or 6 at the time.

Coal company representatives, she said, were taking advantage of the tendency of Montanans to mind their own business and not tell each other what to do with their land. “It was a very Montana strategy,” she said.

But neighbors got together and even reached out to environmentalists, a big leap for conservative ranchers. Alderson’s parents also were founding members of Northern Plains. An issue with many landowners in the area is they own the surface land but not minerals under it, she said.

“The whole country is coal,” McRae says as he drives, noting he could go out on his land and dig 30 feet and find coal. He burns it to keep his shop warm. He points out ridges of pinkish scoria, which is exposed coal beds that have burned out.

Northern Plains, McRae says, was instrumental in getting federal reclamation laws passed that later led to additional rules in Montana, McRae said.

“It was just a barren wasteland,” McRae said of how the landscape used to look following strip mining.

Stopping coal development was never the aim, he added.

The Rosebud Mine in Colstrip, for instance, has a purpose to supply coal to domestic markets, including the Colstrip power generating units, and the mine reclamation there has been responsible compared to reclamation at other mines in the Powder River Basin, McRae said.

“Compare that with Otter Creek,” McRae says. “It was based on speculation.”

Following its formation, Northern Plains gradually began to take up other issues, from oil and coal bed methane development to hard rock mining to fairness in the livestock industry. Today it has 3,000 member households in 13 chapters statewide, with the headquarters in Billings.

But coal development and its impact on farms and ranches remains a major concern for members of the group, which was one of the most outspoken critics of the Otter Creek coal mine and the railroad.

“We’re really talking about taking care of our land and our water and our communities and those are linked, and there are not always black and white answers,” Alderson said.

Constants in the changing landscape of issues Northern Plains members have tackled have been the goals of protecting working farms and ranches, educating people on environmental and agriculture issues and defending water that’s scarce and critical to survival in these parts.

Alderson, who is vice chair, says the group has been instrumental in bringing attention, through public education and legal work, to the flagging market situation for coal, and the costs associated with some projects.

“Everybody talks about the benefits, but nobody really talks about the cost,” Alderson said of coal. “Costs to our land, costs to our health, costs to our water.”

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced in January she was launching a moratorium on new coal leases on public land pending a review of the federal coal program.

The move followed concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office about whether taxpayers were getting enough money in the leases for the coal and whether the payments reflected the impacts of mining on the environment.

Critics have called that move, along with new emissions limits proposed at coal-fired power plants, a war on coal, but Alderson doesn’t see it that way.

“Taxpayers have been really ripped off in a lot of ways,” she said.

Proposals to transport coal on rail lines to ports on the West Coast, such as the Otter Creek mine and the Tongue River railroad, also riles McRae, especially if it would involve the use of condemnation for a rail line to send coal to an export terminal for shipment to China, a country he notes is not all that hospitable toward the United States.

Alderson’s great-grandfather came here from West Virginia. It’s always been a working ranch, but between the 1920s and 1960s it became a guest ranch to help make ends meet. Buildings once used as a store, dance hall, guest cabins and post office still stand.

A promotional poster for “Pals of the West,” a 1934 B western, hangs on the wall in the old dance hall. In the film, Floyd Alderson, Jeanie Alderson’s great uncle, plays a Texas ranger.

“They came for the grass and water, and that’s why we’re still here,” she says.

Protecting water quality may be the biggest concern of farmers and ranchers.

East Fork of Hanging Woman Creek flows outside the front door of the home Alderson shares with her husband, Terry Punt, and their two children, who attend a country school for students in kindergarten through the eighth grade. She teaches part-time at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer.

“We’re lucky at this ranch,” said Alderson. “We have two creeks.”

The arid land, a high desert, is fragile, she says, and the ground water is ancient.

Coal seams lie below the 8,400-acre ranch and filter the water. Alderson and Punt run a cow-calf operation and also own their own herd selling the brand Omega Beef directly to customers.

“Coal is the aquifer in our area,” she says, noting the coal serves as a filter for the water.

Coal development can threaten water, she said, because water has to be pumped out of coal seams when the coal is mined. The salty water has to be put somewhere and that’s usually streams and rivers used by agricultural producers, she said.

Another worry is coal mining upsetting the balance of the underground water. Artesian springs on the ranch flow all year round.

One way Northern Plains stands out, Alderson says, is it’s a member-run organization whose members work and live with people who may benefit from coal or other forms of resource extraction.

“Sometimes we’re hard for people to understand,” she said.

Environmentalists sometimes get frustrated with the group because its members have roots in agriculture. While she supports the state moving in the direction of more renewable energy, Alderson also says the state needs a viable coal industry to take care of workers and the environmental reclamation in the transition.

On the other side, some folks in the ag industry see members only as environmentalists.

The Otter Creek Mine was proposed about 25 miles northeast of Alderson’s ranch.

Several rail routes were proposed. One was a mile west of the ranch.

Arch Coal’s decision to cease efforts to get a mine permit from the state Department of Environmental Quality was huge relief, Alderson said. But Like McRae, she isn’t convinced the battle is over, noting that the proposed rail line before the federal Surface Transportation Board is only on hold not officially dead.

“It does seem like this zombie thing that keeps dying and coming back to life,” she said.

McRae’s great-grandfather immigrated to Rosebud Creek from Scotland in the early 1880s before Montana became a state in 1889. McRaes have been here ever since.

Great grass and water for cattle are why they are still here.

A shallow, 30- to 40-foot aquifer lies beneath the ranch, and each of the 16 springs comes out of a coal seam.

The family first heard about a proposed railroad to haul coal from a mine in the 1970s. They’ve been fighting various iterations of the project ever since.

“It’s the impact to our operation, that’s our big issue,” says McRae, referring to the railroad.

In McRae’s view, the region has been allowed to become a “sacrifice zone” for coal development because it is so sparsely populated.

Blue hills are on the horizon. It’s the Otter Creek coal tracks. Otter Creek is a tributary of the Tongue River that flows through McRae’s land, where cottonwood trees along the river burned in wildfires in 2012 along with 50 percent of the summer grass.

Agriculture and coal mining can co-exist, McRae says. But he wants to see better reclamation of lands mined for coal. The public, he adds, already is beginning to ask tough questions about coal mined on public land.

“Is there a better way? Can we do it better? Can we do it more responsibly?” he says.

Follow Karl Puckett on Twitter @GFTrib_KPuckett.