The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 203: Thumbs Up or Down on 2019

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Whit Fosburgh, Phil Taylor, and Ryan Callaghan.Topics discussed: Steve's perspective on why Jani isn't a true outdoorsman; Euro-mounting your amputated arm; why is a doornail dead?; New Mexico's stream access laws; S. 47; haggling over the Farm Bill; what CRP fields are; pollinators; testifying before Congress; Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson; migration corridors; fisheries; Steve's kids attending seminars; ethanol as bad for your boat motor; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. Okay, before we start, this is the biggest thing to happen since the business shop. Eli Witt, Cotton Gin, since opening hostilities

of the French and Indian War. This is the biggest thing to happen. Going on tour called Meat Eater Off the Air. Me, Steve, Cal. Cal? That's me. And Yanni and friends are going on our tour, and you'll be able to see and hear things

that you will not be able to see and hear anywhere else. We've got 11 cities. Me and Cal are going to take turns naming the cities. I'll start. San Francisco. Portland. Phoenix. Los Angeles.

Philadelphia. Boston. Detroit. Detroit. Minneapolis. Chicago. D.C. Pittsburgh.

Tickets go on sale Friday, January 17, but are available exclusively to the meat eater community beginning January 14th at 10 a.m. local venue times. So in your venue, whatever becomes 10 a.m. for you, you go on our site, themeateater.com, go to the live events and you'll find your venue and use the promo code mugs. And then you get tickets before they go on just general national sale. We're also going to have an exclusive meet and greet where we take some photos, sign some stuff, sign books. That's available for VIP ticket holders. There's only 65 of those VIP tickets per show.

So get on that. But meat eater off the air. Come see and meet me,anni oh cal we're thinking about having a thing at the show when i when i was a kid and you went to a wedding they had a thing called the dollar dance and you would come and like pay a buck and dance with if it was a dude i think it worked like this you throw a dollar in and it's like i think it was like a dude, I think it worked like this. You throw a dollar in. And it's like, I think it was like a dude. You dance with the bride. It's called the dollar dance.

It's a big part of every wedding. You put in a buck or five bucks or something. Dance with the bride. Corinne, do you not know what I'm talking about? Our producer, Corinne. Corinne, do you understand what I'm talking about? A dollar dance? Have you been to a wedding with a dollar dance? I have not. No, but I'm getting like a A dollar dance? Have you been to a wedding with a dollar dance? I have not, no.

But I'm getting like a picture in my mind of what it's going to be. There's a part of the thing, everybody's a little lubed up. That's a euphemism for drinking. Really? And they it's a big part of the night. Everybody lines up. It's a way to raise money for the

bride and groom to buy a house. Everybody lines up and you throw a dollar into a can and you get a very, very short dance with the bride or I think a shot. How short? It depends on the line. Okay. A quick dance. It'll be like a lot of people per song. Oh, got it.

Yeah, so like a song, the bride might dance with 10 people who are all throwing in money to raise money for the couple. Or I think you get a shot or it was like ladies get a shot dudes either way you get what i'm saying okay it's called the dollar dance the dollar dance got it yeah i were thinking about having a thing um dollar dance with cal for 20 bucks but it all goes to conservation i want to end the i want to end the off-air live shows where you can either leave or do a dollar dance with Cal for $20. All you folks listening,

go get your tickets for this. The most important part will be hoping to win a dance with Cal. You're buying a dance. $50. $20. $20. Dollar dance with Cal for $20. I've already got the playlist in my head. We're going to have a spotlight

shining down on Cal. You can whisper in my head. We're going to have a spotlight shining down on Kel. You can whisper in my ear all the things I'm getting wrong, but whisper loudly because I'm deaf. Yeah, and I was thinking

about ladies get a kiss for an extra five. Oh, you're going to make so much money. So much money for conservation, but what if there are like a thousand people?

Are they going to get like a millisecond of your song? If it gets that bad, me and Yanni will jump in and we'll start dancing with people too. But my wife pointed out that no one's going to want to dance with me and Yanni. They're going to want to dance with Cal. But if someone

was like, you know, needed to get out of there because babysitter or whatever, and they just needed to dance, they didn't care who they got it from, I'll give them a kiss. Right. Okay. I'm going to dance with Cal. It will be a great opportunity to come down and have fun with a bunch of outdoors folks. Meat Eater off the air, 11 cities.

Tickets go on sale Friday, January 14th. That's the exclusive thing on our own website, TheMeatEater.com. Promo code Muggs. 10 a.m. your time. Off the air, folksediator.com. Promo code Muggs. 10 a.m. your time. Off there, folks. Dance with Cal. Okay, we're joined by a very special guest, Whit Fosberg, second ever time on the show. Good to be here.

The first time, we did what we're going to do right now. We did like a conservation roundup. Yeah, it was out in the- In 2018. Out on the eastern shore. Yeah. After you'd been seca hunting. And now that 2019, we're kind of like, the dust is settling.

I mean, there's a new dust to stir. But the dust is settling from 2019, and we can review, like, the lay of the land. Yeah. That sounds great. First, we've got to take care of some. Oh, and. We need to say. Yanni's gone.

Well, Witt Fosberg, CEO. Oh, I said that the first time, but Phil hadn't done his, you know. CEO of Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, TRCP. We talk about a fair bit. Yanni's gone. This is the fourth ever episode he wasn't present for. He's out ice fishing. He's on assignment.

It's part of our fur hat ice tour, which we haven't announced. And Yanni and I were duck hunting the other day, and he let me know that he is not much of an ice fisherman, which I found kind of shocking when you take into consider, you know, where he hails from. Yeah, but he's not a true outdoorsman. He just, oh, I, come on but he's not a true outdoorsman. He just, oh, I, come on. He is not a true outdoorsman.

I will often, I will often invite him to go do things. I'll be like, hey, let's go ice fishing. And he can't because he's going skiing. He probably, like, you cannot be a true outdoorsman and a skier. You just can't do it. That's why me and Seth, the flip-flop flasher, are the only true outdoorsmen. You can't. Unless you're skiing to hunt snowshoes or something, you cannot.

It just doesn't work. I was flabbergasted recently to find out that his family didn't hunt on Christmas Day. Oh, really? I thought they had cottontails or something. No, they don't hunt on Christmas Day. He grew up not hunting Christmas Day, not taking a walk in the woods for squirrels or

rabbits or ice fishing. The whole day they just sat there well they're up all night doing their pagan rituals that time yeah and then they they drink too much oh the latvian people uh quick before we get into the main stuff here the the lamestream media refuses to cover um what happens with people's we've been talking a refuses to cover what happens with people's... We've been talking a lot about this. What happens to people's limbs and fingers

and whatnot when they lose them? Here's a fresh story. This guy, there's a guy in Edmonton, a guy that sent this thing. We've been talking, I don't know how it came up, but somehow we got a... Oh, it was from getting de-gloved. Conversations around your wedding ring tearing the skin off your finger

and how silicon wedding rings are the way to go. I switched to no ring at all recently because I lost mine, my rubber one. But that got us into talking about just various things that have happened to people's fingers and arms. There's this article out about this guy in Edmonton who got in a crash a long time ago and his arm, he lost the use of his arm but he packed it around he's on a motorbike

his brother's motorbike and he packed it around for 20 years not working arm didn't work so eventually he thought just time to move on and had the arm amputated tells the doctor So eventually he thought, just time to move on, and had the arm amputated. Tells the doctor that he wants to keep it.

And in the end, after he gets his arm amputated, he goes back and brings his frozen arm home in a sack. Calls around to a bunch of taxidermists, and most of them won't even consider his request. And eventually he gets hold of a taxidermist. They even give the name of the taxidermist. I want to give kudos to this taxidermist. Legends Taxidermy in Drayton Valley, Alberta. They finally agree to take care of it. And he gets it Euro-mounted.

And it's funny because the article I'm looking at, there's an image of him holding this bone arm up and a warning about graphic images below the image. So it's like you already saw the image. He brings it, he brought it to Christmas this year to show everybody. He says that he thinks he might eventually retire the arm

and he's thinking about, I'll quote him, I'm just going to keep it probably behind the sink in the kitchen. From the, there's a good line from the taxidermist. So it's husband-wife taxidermy team. From this story?

Yes. Oh, you know more than I know about it? No. It sounds like you know more, but I just read a different, the short version when it first came out. You heard a quote from the taxidermist. Yes. And so the one-armed man calls, and the wife picks up the phone, and she's like, well, you need to bring it down in person so I can make sure it's your arm, which I found entertaining.

Oh, yeah. If a guy with two arms shows up and he's got an arm in a sack and says he wants his arm, I would be incredulous. Yes. And then, so. I'd smell a fish for sure. The husband, the second half of the taxidermy team, says, you know, what's up? And she says, well, this is what's happening. And he says, no way.

And she says, well, he's on his way down here already. And the detail that I kind of want, because she did say that, like. Did they beetle clean it? That's the detail that I want want because I would feel very differently. So typically for a European mount, either boil slash steam the meat and hide off of bone. Phil, are you busy down there? Yeah. Would you mind checking to see if Legends Taxidermy in Drayton Valley, if they advertise beetle cleaning services?

Beetle cleaning. Legends, taxidermy, and Drayton Valley. Real curious, was it beetles or was it a boil and clean? Right, because you're smelling what I'm getting at, right? It'd just be a little different. But I'd never look at my beetles the same way again. If I was using dermifted beetles to clean it. Yeah.

Do you find this interesting or not interesting? Fascinating. Yeah. It's great cast characters. And then they had to get, so we'll let that linger until we get the final result. But they had to, with the bones that were left after the cleaning process, Legends Taxidermy then reached out. How do you know so much more about this? This was just a real tight snippet.

Kind of from their perspective. I can't remember where it was from. But anyway, they had to reach out to a doctor friend of theirs, hand doctor assumed assumedly and they the doctor then put it back together for them because she apparently looked at the pile of bones was like i am not familiar with this i got no idea how this goes together which you'd be kind of bummed right if that's your because you can't give them another arm to work on did you get any sense of what they we should just call these guys up did you get any sense of what they, we should just call these guys up. Did you get any sense of what they charged for this? Oh, that was not in the article.

Not in my version. You know, I never endorsed taxidermists, but, well, no, I will because there's Justin Sable. Dude, Justin, I took two heads from him yesterday. And he called me yesterday afternoon and was like, yeah, come get these things. He doesn't waste time. He's got a system dialed. And then I immediately regretted the price that we settled on. Homie, you got overcharged?

When I finally cave in and pay for something, I want it to be as painful and arduous for the person I'm paying as possible. Oh, I got you. That way I feel like I got my money's worth. So you haggled. I can't, I can't argue with the speed. Oh. With Sable.

Amazing. Does he, is Justin Sable's, does he go by, is it Sable Tax, what's he call this place? No, it's Bridger Canyon Taxidermy. Yeah, he's a good dude.

Love that guy. Does a great job. I met his ma. Huh. Super nice. You see his lion hounds? Yeah, I knocked on the wrong door. Yeah.

And instead of telling me to go around the house and follow the path, which I later found to Justin's studio, she's like, come with me. And we just walked through the house. She was in her nightgown. Is that right? Robe. And I felt pretty bad about the whole thing. She's ready for bedtime.

Well, she was just getting ready for the day. Oh, okay. But she was watching somebody else's dog that she was very politely cussing out the whole time, which was cute. How's it going, Phil? So they don't have a legitimate website, but they have a Facebook page. There's not a lot of info, but on December 18th, they posted a picture of them building some sort of, I don't know, box, and it says our new custom

home for our Beatles is almost done. Oh, okay. Good detective work, Phil. This guy's like a private investigator. There we go. Yeah. One more quote from the guy. He said that, he's talking about calling different taxidermists. He says, a couple of them told me no, like right away.

There was no way they were going to touch human body parts. All right. So that's the major news. Quick thing. We were talking about dead as a doornail. Do you guys know what that means? This is a correction. I was like, why is a doornail dead?

What? No, beyond me. I was like, why is the doornail dead? What? Nope. Beyond me. Where that expression comes from? Phil? Got nothing? Nothing. Do you still have Yanni's soundbites queued up? Not right now. I didn't know he wasn't going to be here today. Yeah. Yeah, so

we'll tack one in, and I'll say, Yanni, you know what dead as a doornail means? And then you'll insert a good sound bite from Yanni. Got it. He's got a stab at where dead as a doornail comes from. It was explained to me. He's a carpenter. And when he was an apprentice carpenter, it was explained to him that frontier doors were made with two layers of boards with the grain running at 90 degree angles.

And the nails were driven through and clenched. This makes a strong door that was not easily chopped through. Right? Yeah. Because you want to, you know, you enter in, like you run your, anyone who's using axe knows you want to run your axe in,

if you want to splinter something, you run your axe in parallel to the grain, the blade being parallel to the grain. Or with run your ax in parallel to the grain, the blade being parallel to the grain. Or with the grain, right? With the grain, but it's backed by boards that are cross. And he goes on to say that this makes a strong door. That was night of these chopped through with a tomahawk. Now, nails were hard to come by and expensive.

So oftentimes they were used time and again, except doornails. Being clenched that tight, there was no way to straighten them, so they were considered dead. The only way to resuscitate them is they'd be recycled at the blacksmith shop. I like that. You like that one? I do, yeah. It works. You guys buying it? Yep.

First framer I worked for, his dad was also a framer, and that's what he did every night. He'd have a beer out in his shop, and he'd straighten all the bent nails that he picked up around the job site, and then distribute the straightened nails the next day to his crew. That's good. Yeah. When I was a kid, when my dad was annoyed with you, one of the things he would do is give you a you kept a two pound meatloaf tin full of bent rusty nails and now and then you'd get like a checklist of chores you're supposed to do and on there was straight and those damn nails out on a hammer and anvil for reuse uh okay first thing we want to do.

Can you explain, update on what's going on with New Mexico stream access law? Yes. So basically the foundation of this is New Mexico state constitution. It says all water belongs to the public. This is just as brief a synopsis as I can give here. Yeah, but there's some stuff changing. There's like trouble brewing.

2017, a bill came up and was voted on to then have a process to which landowners could declare their water non-navigable, and they added a rule, an amendment. So the landowner gets to say? The landowner gets to apply for the section of water

if they have their properties on both sides of the stream or river. Gotcha. So he's got a case of the ass and wants people not accessing. He can go and say like, hey, you know. Yes. And then New Mexico Fish and Game declares or does not declare, looks at his or the landowner's situation, says, yeah, this applies or does not apply. So far, there's been five permits applied for

and received, two are pending, an additional two are pending. Hold on, so five have been accepted? Yes. Yeah. I think Pecos and Chama would be two water. Any sense of what kind of dudes these dudes are that are, that are trying to get their stuff revoked?

I, I would love to get back in there and do some proper research and see exactly what the cases are, you know, um, for, you know, public sway reasons.

The, the ones that get thrown up are like fishing lodges, you know, uppity fishing lodges yeah that's what i'm curious i say like what kind of dudes is it is it like that like what's the motivation is it is it trophy home you know is it like eighth generation ranchers is it fly shops and so you know from the private side of things, it's like, well, you know, people are just coming in here and leaving trash and I'm sick of it, which we can all understand. Nobody likes to see trash outside. But anyway, the, so new governor, Michelle Lujan, a couple new seats on the New Mexico Fish and Game Board. And November 2019,

the state attorney general, Hector Balderas, re-evaluates because he's been asked to by the New Mexico Fish and Game Board and finds that the new rule, this non-navigable water rule, is unconstitutional and unenforceable. All right, so hold on a minute. I'm going to make sure I'm getting this right. All waters, historically, all water is regarded as public.

They make a rule that says you can pull your shit out of it. Then a new administration comes in and appointees there say, you know what? You shouldn't be able to pull your shit out of it. Yes, and this has been tested several times. The case that gets brought up the most was in 1945, went up all the way through the New Mexico Supreme Court. The New Mexico Supreme Court at that time said, you know, according to the state constitution, all water belongs to the people of New Mexico. And then just to kind of like show support for this, and this was just at the beginning of, or I'm sorry, the end of 2019, just a couple months ago, Senator Udall and Heinrich and U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, they wrote in in support of a moratorium on non-navigable permits.

So folks that wanted to apply for this non-navigable status, which is obviously in great question, Udall, Heinrich, Haaland, they wrote in to the Fish and Game Board said, hey, for, uh, Joanna Prukup, who was a department head for fishing game, New Mexico fishing game for over 20 years, uh, was one of the new seats on the New Mexico, uh, fishing game board commission. And, um, she just got notice. She had a lot of, um, you know, public water folks really happy with her. And, um, and she just got noticed that she will not, uh, be reinstated. So, but she's pro public access, not anti-public access. Correct. Correct. So, um so but she's pro public access not anti-public access correct correct so um so she's getting she's getting like uh in trouble for having stuck up for stream access law and that that was a question in the beginning uh and she just came out and and made a formal

statement that she says this is all she can come up with. She said, look at my background. Um, look at my track record. There's no way I should be not asked back to sit on this commission. Um, this is what it boils down to this core argument of the us versus them type of situation and if you have if you if you own both sides of river chances are um you uh have some influence and folks are like see it's the rich folks swinging their weight around yeah um against the little folks and yeah it's it is a bummer it affects everybody if if this law were to go through stream access allows a lot of access um not just for fishing i use it a lot

used it a couple times for hunts this year in the state of montana tubing and drinking beers well that's just good good family fun right so heinrich does a lot for people does a lot for access issues well he's got some stake in the game because he likes to actually go out and do that stuff yeah so. So that's different. There's a sitting U.S. senator from New Mexico, Martin Heinrich, who went out on public land and killed a bull with a muzzleloader. She'd be like coming down the trail. I think he got an archery bull this year too.

Yeah, coming down the trail and running into a dude and shoot the breeze with a dude and then realize he's a sitting senator. And you have some some common interests parked at the trailhead but i love it i love it yeah so that's um you know this is something that's going to go on for a long time yeah but right now and i should say you can't trespass across private property to get to public water. Yeah.

Right? You have to enter the water legally. And in this, so right now they're saying that you could get issued a warning, but you will not be issued a ticket if you are found in these sections of water that have been deemed non-navigable. Oh, gotcha. And yeah, I mean, it's, I know there was some buildup back in 2017 when this came up in front of the house there in New Mexico. But I can't believe this. It was such a good rule favoring public access in a place that's got a lot of public land, New Mexico. I can't believe it passed in 2017.

It makes me wonder what was going on. I assume this is going to get litigated, right? All the way up to the state Supreme Court if it's in the Constitution. Yes. And that's what happened here in Montana on multiple occasions. Yes. Yeah. And most recently it was Sailor Lane. Right? That was the most

recent one down in the Ruby. Maybe. And then you had the whole Mitchell slew over on the Bitterroot before that. And this has been sort of a constant theme of the states like Montana and New Mexico, Utah that have more of these open access policies as opposed to Wyoming, Colorado where the landowner owns the stream bottom. Yes. And if the biggest gripe is people leaving their trash behind like i absolutely get that i hate seeing trash and um for one reason or another when i was hunting down it's not about that's not what it's about but that's a that's a red herring it's like a prop it's too important it's not like about yeah

trash is annoying but that's not what this is about uh yeah if you live in new mexico or hang out in new mexico you should watch the issue because it has a lot to do with your ability. And people that live in states where you have stream access, you don't even think about how good you have it. We grew up with a Michigan where you go to the launch on a river

or a lake or whatever. You go to the public launch and put your boat in, and then you go down the river and you wind up in a spot where there's private landowners on either side. You don't even think about it. You just like paddle down, motor down. You can't take that for granted. This is like one of the ways that people will attack your ability to go outside and enjoy nature.

And definitely, New Mexico is absolutely gorgeous. I love Land of Enchantment, right? Did you come up with that? A little something I came up with. And definitely, New Mexico is absolutely gorgeous. I love Land of Enchantment, right? Did you come up with that? A little something I came up with. If it can happen there, it can happen where we have it good here in Montana and Idaho. So, I mean, this is everybody's issue. We all have the ability to travel to these places and, and enjoy, um, you know, these States rights and, um, boy, it's hugely beneficial to, um, have the ability to

truck down, you know, hike down a stream a mile and, and hunt and some hard to get two spots and, or just fish the thing. And, um, something you got to pay attention to. Cause I, I just feel like if anywhere within the U S we demonstrate, you know, a blase attitude, uh, you know, uh, not the willingness to fight over this stuff. Yeah, man. It's just a slippery slope from there. It's everybody this stuff. Yeah. Man, it's just a slippery slope from there. It's everybody's issue. Yeah.

And I think it's really exacerbated in a place like New Mexico, which is so dry. You just have less rivers, less opportunities. So you start taking those away. You know, you've taken away a significant portion. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Yeah.

Like you have limited navigable waters anyways. In Michigan or New York where I grew up, I mean, there's a lot of water and there's a lot of access. And you lose a stream here or there, you may not notice it. New Mexico, you would notice it. Yeah. That's a good point. All right, Whit.

You ready? You fired up? Let's do it. Okay. 2019. Public lands in general. We just covered public waters. But if you consider public waters being part of public lands, which is fair.

Yep. 2019, thumbs up, thumbs down? Thumbs up. It was a good year. We started off good. Right at the beginning of the year, we passed the Senate, or Congress passed S-47, the big public lands bill. Break that down a little bit.

So it did a bunch of different things. And the way Congress works these days, you don't pass individual pieces of legislation like a senior wilderness bill or anything. It comes in these big omnibus bills because so little passes anymore that whenever something is moving, everything gets piled onto it. Oh, that's a strategy? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So because it's just you have very few vehicles move through.

So invariably, instead of just one provision, it's going to be 100 provisions. And so that's what happened with the public lands bill. But what forms the base in something like that? Typically, in this one, you could argue that it was Land and Water Conservation Fund. It could be some of these public lands bills. But essentially, you need to have stuff that's – Like that's what everything is being tacked onto. Ideally, it's something that a lot of people want to see pass.

And really, in this bill, there was nothing super controversial. So you had over 100 provisions. You had over a million acres of new wilderness created. You had 600 miles of wild and scenic rivers created. You permanently reauthorized Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is the primary tool that we use for public access, especially to public lands. Within that, 3% of that has to be used for public access projects. So this goes back to things like the Onyx Report we did, which talks about landlocked

public lands, both on the federal side as well as on the state side. Collectively, more than 16 million acres of public lands the public can't get to. So 3% of this land and water conservation fund is now targeted for projects like that by a simple section here or there, an easement someplace that will then open up a lot more public land. So it's a little bit different way of thinking about access than we have in the past. The past land and water conservation fund has been thought of as a tool to preserve big landscapes, big tracts of forests that a timber company is selling, things like that, which are still really important. But another use of it is these

small strategic acquisitions that are based around access. And I think we're going to see a lot more than that. We saw that reflected in this bill. So now that has been permanently reauthorized. When you say this bill was popular with everybody, what did it pass by? So the overall package passed in the senate 92 to 8 and what was it who like what give me a profile of the eight they have various reasons no i remember hearing one time that the wilderness uh uh when they created like the wilderness act that it was 99 to 1 in the senate because the 1 didn't think it went far enough. Correct. Is that the case with the 8?

Oh, no. Oh, no. No, it's the other way around. I mean, you have especially some, you know, Westerner senators that honestly just don't like public lands. Yeah. I mean, you look at a guy like Mike Lee in Utah who's sort of made his name. He didn't vote for this?

No, he didn't. But he's made his name on railing against public land ownership, period. Yeah, yeah. And some folks thought it spent too much money. It didn't spend all that much money. But anyway, it was sort of ideological anti-public land. That's where the eight came from. Gotcha.

So the 92, they were like something more. They were like to have land and water conservation fund permanently funded as well. We didn't get that, but we got at least permanently reauthorized. So we don't have to worry about it disappearing in three years or five years or what a typical reauthorization is. So that bill was really important. And the fact that it passed by that wide a margin, I think really represents kind of a sea change in a lot of the public lands. We think about the rhetoric over the past 10 years. You went from the Senate passing, you know, a nine bonding resolution that Lisa Murkowski offered that basically said all public lands other than national parks ought to be divested. And, you know, that was that passed with pretty much all Republican votes. Now, compare that to this, where you're expanding protections on public lands or expanding wild and scenic you're expanding the acquisition programs to create more public lands, and it passes 92 to 8.

So I think from that original, you know, sort of sagebrush rebellion, you know, kind of mentality we were seeing really a decade ago, there was, we saw these bills passing on the state levels, like demanding return to public lands to the states, which were never theirs to begin with. But I think that rhetoric has really gotten knocked down pretty good. And I think when you saw Jason Chaffetz essentially have to withdraw his bill that would have sold off 3.3 million acres of public lands to help balance the budget, that really was a sea change. And you saw the Outdoor Industry Association move its show out of Salt Lake City because of the bad Utah politics on public lands. So we really saw, I think the momentum has swung back in favor of public lands. industry association move its show out of Salt Lake City because of the bad Utah politics on

public lands. So we really saw, I think the momentum has swung back in favor of public lands. And I think that's reflected in this vote, which is, you know, you can't do much better than 92 to eight. I mean, you could do a resolution on motherhood and apple pie that probably wouldn't pass by that margin. Yeah. Like a bill says like, we love motherhood and apple pie yeah no forget that do we i prefer cherry pie yeah do uh who within uh who within the administration who within the trump administration is uh who's influential there you know i mean he's like he signs it right he signs it so i think you know the secretary interior clearly this is mostly an interior-related bill. Okay, I got you.

So that's who's weighing it up. That's who has the president's ear around. Yeah, exactly. And Dave Pernard has been pretty darn reasonable on most of these issues. I mean, he's been great on access issues. He's been sort of approachable on land management issues. So I think he recognized that this was not only was it there's no point in vetoing this, you're going to get crushed on an override. But it also is good politics and it makes sense and it's not draconian in any way.

Yeah. And you got TRCP worked hard on this. Oh, yeah. No, but not just us. I mean, tons of groups. Yeah. Wildlife Federation, BHA, you know, pretty much everybody supported this. I mean, I don't think anybody in our community oppose this. Because another provision that was in this overall bill was clarifying that public lands

are open for hunting and fishing unless they're specifically closed through an open and transparent process. And that was really an effort to push back on some of the things the animal rights community had attacked, like they did in Michigan a few years ago. You know, on Huron, I think, National Forest, you know, sort of trying to get hunting shut down there. Oh, really? At that time, it was, yeah.

How did I miss that? Yeah, I can't remember. I can't remember if it was a Huron or wherever. But at that time, they got somebody who didn't like the noise of gunfire to try to shut down an area. And it really was a backdoor move. That's an interesting approach. Animal rights community to go in and try to shut down public lands.

And so this is, you know, listen, there are some public lands that make sense to shut down, you know, near campgrounds, you know, other things like that. But there ought to be a public and transparent process to shut those down. Yeah, I mean, you see buffers like there's, you know, you go to river access sites and it'll say no discharge of firearms. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, but there ought to be just a thoughtful process to close areas off, not because, you know, somebody may hear a gunshot a few miles away. So anyway, that did this. So even the right side of the community that typically does not weigh in on wilderness and wild and scenic rivers, they were enthusiastically in support of this because of that, because they saw that as taking away one of these attacks on hunting and fishing on public lands. Do you ever see a situation where people within the animal rights movement will – take this thing, for instance, S47, where it's beneficial to wildlife, it's beneficial to habitat preservation. Do you ever see a situation where they'll sabotage the movement of something that on the whole is good for wildlife because it enables harvest of wildlife like do you ever see it become like a real actual problem sure i mean they oppose that provision that open less closed provision for years but when it's tacked in with

you know a hundred other provisions that's what i'm saying what do they do then then they you know swallow their pride and they support the overall package okay and listen because it's all in all win even though there's a lot even though there's a loss for them in there. Exactly. And it may be some of the hard, I mean, I didn't follow what PETA's position was. Yeah, but I mean, the reasonable players who are actually out there. Right. I mean, again.

Trying to get things done. Nobody gets everything they want in one of these packages. It's just why it passes by such a large margin. Because it's sort of the fringe elements on either side get knocked out. And, you know, so something like this makes a ton of sense. And I think this is the way you're going to see it again. My guess is that early this year, Lisa Murkowski is going to put together an energy package, which would really be a public lands package too,

because there'll be assortment of these smaller bills that are ready to go. They're non-controversial. And before you get into the election year gridlock, this is another probably, I think it's a good chance we'll get another package that moves through. We've been trying to get Lisa Murkowski on the show without any luck. She's a tough one to pin down. Yeah. That's why I want to get her on the show. Yeah.

And she, you know, being from Alaska, I mean, I feel like she, like, would definitely have a lot of opinions. She would. I would love, yeah, I'd love to ask her some questions. Okay, break down the farm bill for me, man. I feel like a lot of people know there is such a thing as a farm bill, but they don't really understand it. Well, one thing, I guess, to point out that makes things tough on the education side of things is, like, we need these certain things within the farm bill to pass, but you're talking about the farm bill or the transportation bill or the energy bill.

And, uh, people get really confused. So it's hard to be like, no, no, this, these sportsman's issues are buried within this thing, but it is the whole package. Yeah. Right? I mean, the Farm Bill is like, let's say if the Farm Bill is composed of 100 things, two are directly applied to sportsmen, or I don't know what the ratio is. Well, yeah, and there's plenty of people out there, right, who are like, I don't have a farm.

Yeah, so I'll tell you what the ratios are here. So we have basically 900 million acres in the United States are in farm or commercial forestry production. Tell me again. 900 million acres. So that's about 40% of the overall land mass of the U.S. It basically is, you could largely call it, in farm. And of that, about 140 million acres are enrolled in farm bill conservation programs. So that's about a 30- I got to hear these numbers again.

What's the number? How many acres of federally managed public lands we have? Like national forests, national parks, refuges? I think the number I see is 640 million. Okay. And how many acres of land, again, are in ag production? About 900 million. Okay.

And of those- Of those, about 140 million acres are enrolled in farm bill conservation programs. Okay. And what does that mean? But that in context, that's the size of- These are privately held lands. Privately held lands enrolled in basically the farm bill, the conservation side of the farm bill, which is the single largest from a dollar standpoint conservation program in the United States. I mean, it's $30 billion.

And, you know, so that's – but in the broad scheme of things, the overall farm bill is $800 plus billion. So it's a relatively – it's like 7%, I think, overall. I mean, you can add it up different ways. But a relatively small portion of the overall farm bill is conservation. The great majority of it is things like food stamps, you know, the nutrition program. Oh, that's part of the farm bill. Yeah. And that was a deal – How often do they need to that's part of the farm bill. Yeah. And that was a deal.

How often do they need to haggle over the farm bill? Every five years. And it was a deal that was cut a long time ago, you know, basically to get urban members and rural members to support something. The food stamp program was in the farm bill. Yeah. Hmm. I think maybe I knew that and forgot it.

Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, but when you have a farm bill, that's what all the debate's around. It's around, you know, food stamp eligibility requirements and, you know, dollar figures and things like that. But that was a very intentional deal that Congress first created. So they're not just sitting around arguing about pheasant habitat. No. No. That's, I mean, there are some of that.

We argue about pheasant habitat. But in the big scheme of things, we're, you know, decimal dust in the overall argument. Which makes it vulnerable. Well, it does. But I mean, remember, this is the, you know, this reason we able to get a farm bill passed is you have that weird coalition between urban inner city, you know, the black caucus, you know, folks like that, that really want to make sure they have, you know, they're in back in the 70s was this all started, there was a real nutrition problem in this country.

And so the farm, you know, the food stamp program at that time was really created to address a really particular need in this country. But at the same time, they realized that this also helped farmers who wanted to have basically some guaranteed markets within the country of food. So that was how the whole deal got created in the first place was urban members coming together with rural members to create a farm bill. It was good for farmers. It was good for the inner cities. And that coalition has stayed pretty strong. I mean, it's been frayed a little bit more in recent years, but that's the reason we're able to get a farm bill passed. Now, so go back to your original question in terms of what does that look like.

So of that $30 billion, it's broken out into several – Remind me again. The $30 billion your how do you characterize that chunk of the so that is what we call the conservation program of the farm bill that's titled so so the the whole thing with all the everything involved is 800 billion yeah exactly which is that's real money that's real money that is real money 30 billion you'd be doing is the conservation part of it. So we're talking about the $30 billion piece of pie.

$30 billion. And unlike other sort of environmental legislation, the Farm Bill is 100% voluntary. So this is creating incentives on private lands to do the right thing for soil, for water, for fish and wildlife. And there are two different ways you can do that. I mean, there is essentially what they call the land retirement programs, like the Conservation Reserve Program, where you pay a landowner to set aside basically the most marginal land on his or her farm and manage it for conservation.

You get better water quality, you get better wildlife habitat, and the farmer gets guaranteed income for the course of that contract, which is typically 10 to 15 years. So right now, Conservation Reserve Program, there are about 22 million acres that are currently enrolled in that program. Yeah, if you're a hunter and you keep your ears open, you will at some point in your life hear someone say, let's go hit that CRP field. Exactly. That's what we're talking about. I knew that line. I knew the hitting the CRP field line long before I knew what in the world that meant.

And it's a great program. And it's expensive, but it serves multiple benefits. I mean, it helps. What was originally created back in the 1980s was during the farm crisis. And really it was created as a price support mechanism for farmers, a way to pay them for not farming. Yeah, and I feel – just jump in on this because this is – I feel like this is the thing that you hear people gripe about so much.

Like people criticizing farm subsidies and pay – oh, it's all subsidies and paying farmers to do nothing. But I mean, you got to look at sort of world history and American history and it starts making a lot more sense. I mean, millions of people starved to death during World War II. Yep. You had a real hunger crisis in the 70s. And it's like, if markets collapse in some way, some global thing causes markets to collapse, do you really want to just have it be that everyone that has a farm that can't get through that period, that they sell the land? Right. Or turn it into a golf course or subdivide it or whatever the hell? Or do you give them some way that you can allow people to hang on to land, keep it in ag, and be ready for the next time there's a global crisis.

Exactly. Because you can't expect people to go break ground and start a farm because we have an impending famine. It's like they've got to be ready to roll. Right. But you hear people, I mean, I'm sure there are abuses. Like everything, like you can talk about any government program, and if you focus on the abuses, it'd be the same way as me saying hunters suck because some people are poachers mm-hmm it's like of course they're abuses but man I hear a lot of people dogging on the subsidy program it's like you're kind of like doing it without really thinking about the

implications of if farmers all had to go bankrupt every time something happened when this is very different the back in the 1980s in the 1980s when it was you basically just were paying farmers not to farm. Now, you know, CRP and the other wildlife programs, conservation programs have been much more refined. And so they're, you know, geared toward really actually helping things like water quality, you know, soil quality, fish and wildlife, their incentives. So if you enter your land, Cal, into a CRP, you're also going to get some incentives from the federal government to go and, you know, put in pollinator habitat. And so it's way more targeted and strategic and beneficial for the public at large than it was in the old days. And obviously pollinator habitat sounds goofy,

but it's incredibly important if you value agriculture, flowers, anything. And we've been losing it. And this is a way to encourage bringing a lot of that back. Monarch butterflies are the poster child for loss of pollinator habitat. So I think that we've seen a big change in it. You have CRP. You have the Conservation Stewardship Program. You have the Environmental Quality and Habitat Program, EQIP. Can we touch on the bugs a little bit more if you're seeing like in areas in intensely uh tilled lands and intensely in lands with a lot

of intense use of herbicides and pesticides and you're seeing like radical reductions in insect life um you gotta wake up to the reality that like that goes beyond bugs and maybe you like to hunt turkeys a turkey pole 70 of its diet is animal matter bugs yep it's like you can't act like you're gonna strip out it's like oh it's just bugs who cares it's like dude you can't act like you're gonna strip that out and the life as you know it is going to continue to look the same you can't like knock chunks of ecology out and act like it doesn't have it so when people if someone were to roll their eyes about pollinator habitat i'd be like what you don't like turkeys yep or whatever you know i mean you it's like it's essential stuff man this is great it's not just even turkey i mean bob white quail it's you know you name name it, and it's important for it.

And that diversity is just good for ecological reasons, period. Things we don't understand. Right, exactly. And it's beautiful. So I think there are a whole bunch of benefits. So I think that in the days when you could justly criticize some of the farm programs as just straight subsidies with little public benefit other than keeping a farmer afloat, I think it's very different today. I mean, these programs have been refined, have been improved, and I think you're seeing way broader benefits, which just makes it frustrating when we have a sort of a dwindling CRP like we're seeing right now. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness,

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Yeah, that's the part I kind of wanted to get to that because when we were at the TRCP board meeting, there was some talk about money was available for farmers to enroll in CRP, but it wasn't flowing. Correct. So there were people who were – farmers were put in a tough spot because on one hand, they wanted to enroll, but they couldn't get the compensation. Yep. And we're going to be put into a tough spot where they're going to have to try to do something to figure it out. It was kind of screwing farmers. So CRP reached its peak, I think it was in 2007, which about 37 million acres enrolled in that program. And there was a direct correlation between low commodity prices and enrollment in programs like CRP. Because when you're not making money off of growing corn or soybeans or alfalfa or whatever it might be,

then CRP looks a whole lot better. During the sort of go-go years of the 2010s to 2017, when you had $7 corn, things like that, you saw a bunch of land move out of CRP and other conservation. Like that contract would expire and you would go into grain production. Because they're going to make more money doing grain. And some of them would just break a contract and get the penalty and just go straight into it. So over that time period, we lost about 6 million acres out of CRP. Or excuse me, not 6 million acres of grassland and prairie land and

pasture land got converted to row crops. And that also- Because grain prices were through the roof. Grain prices were through the roof. Now you have the exact opposite now. So when the previous farm bill was done back in 2014- What made grain prices shoot through the roof? There were a variety of things. I mean, it's just, we had huge, good weather year. I mean, we had huge export markets. And I think that was when coinciding with like bad Russian wheat crops and things like that.

You also had, you know, sort of the go-go years, the ethanol subsidies. So that was driving production of corn. Okay. Yeah. It was, you know, so that was part of it. It was just a really good time to be a farmer and it was not a great time to be a conservationist because all this land was getting moved out and converted to row crops. Now, all of a sudden, we have trade wars and prices are through the floor and there's huge demand to move land into CRP and other conservation programs at a minimum just to stabilize farm income to weather this storm because eventually

prices are going to stabilize again. Yeah, because they're afraid of farmers. If they're not able to do CRP, they're going to maybe be in a situation where they're further contributing to flooding the market with grain and keeping prices down. Or just, I mean, listen, I mean, record suicides out in farm country right now, record bankruptcies. I mean, it is a true crisis right now. And instead of giving them a $30 billion bailout, which is what we've done to address some of the impacts of the trade war, we ought to be moving a buttload of land into conservation, where they're getting payments, which are also doing public good at the same time.

Yeah, like where the taxpayers are getting more out of it. Right. So in the 2018 Farm Bill that we passed, which was a good Farm Bill, again, $30 billion, you know, and sort of made improvements to the 2014 Farm Bill, changed the conservation programs a lot. It got rid of a bunch of them, consolidated them, streamlined them, created a couple of new ones like the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. This most recent Farm Bill didn't make any drastic changes like that, but really improved upon what we did in 2014. And, you know, among other things, it expanded CRP, which had been down to 24 million acres in the 2014 farm bill because demand was so low. It kicked that back out to 27 million acres because demand is much higher now. Tell me the two numbers again. 24 in the previous farm bill and the most recent one, 27.

Now, to make that budget neutral, they made it a little bit less profitable for farmers. They reduced the rental rate a little bit. They reduced the incentive payments a little bit, but overall the end of the day- So they're making the same spend and getting three more million acres in CRP. Yeah, exactly. And are those people getting their money now? No. So just in December for the first time in four years, they've done a sign up for CRP, which is just insane because you're having acres expire. You have huge demand in farm country, but we just couldn't get these guys to do a new sign up.

So finally- Trevor Burrus Who's these guys? Jason Kuznicki Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency. Trevor Burrus Because of what reason? Jason Kuznicki All right. So Farm Bill is mandatory funding. So it doesn't have to be appropriated every year. So this is essentially something that is done and they don't worry about it.

So it's not the vagaries of annual appropriations like Land and Water Conservation Fund. I mean, obviously we want to get LWCF off budget for the same reasons. So you're stable and money's coming in. We know what it's going to be. But Farm Bill programs are truly off budget. So these are mandatory programs. However, if you don't spend the money, like you go and they look, OMB will look over a few years and say, geez, you haven't even spent a third of this money. We're two years from the end. We're going to basically cut a bunch of your money away. So the devious, the cynical

of those among us, like me, who's been in D.C. a long time, feels that this has been basically a backhanded way to reduce the baseline. So in other words, to not spend the money that Congress expected them to spend and then have OMB say, well, geez, you're not spending the money, so we're going to reduce that overall amount. Who's OMB? Office of Management and Budget. And there was indications they didn't like the original farm bill, that it was too expensive. This would be basically a backdoor way of not implementing it the way Congress intended it to be implemented. At the same time, lose that baseline so it makes it less spendy for the federal government.

Doesn't show you're running quite as big a deficit as you're doing it. At the same time, it's not providing the benefits on the ground that Congress intended. Finally, in December, they announced a new signup. So if anybody is listening and has friends in farm country, tell them to go to the Farm Service Agency, get signed up for CRP. Trevor Burrus Doug Dern, get down there. Peter Van Doren Get down there, Doug. In fact, he's at the front of the line. And if you folks want to learn more about it, then go to – we have

a website called crpworks.org. So you can go there and learn more about the program in general. But what we're expecting is not going to be a great sign-up because they lowered incentive payments significantly. So in other words, instead of the payments for going and putting in pollinator habitat, it used to be about 40%. Now in this new sign-up, it's down to about 5%, which is, you know, just, it really does not that help. So they also moved a bunch of the continuous funding, which is way more expensive, which is non-competitive. And that's where you do things like, you know, a lot of the, you know, like sage grouse, you know, restoration is work being done under the farm bill is in this continuous

programs. A lot of the Bob White, you know, restoration, longleaf pine restoration is being done, you know, under this continuous program. They're much longer term. But they're also more expensive. But a lot of those wildlife programs that had always been in these long-term programs are now getting moved into general sign-up, which makes them much cheaper. So the folks like the landowners will not get the same amount of money for them. So we're going to think that while we should be getting about 8 million acres that could get signed up, I mean, I think we'll be lucky to see 6 million. An increase of 6 million.

Yeah. So right now there are 22 million acres enrolled. There are about another 6 or 8 million that are basically expiring in the next year. So there is a – and the cap is 27 million acres. So there's a lot of room to add acres, and God knows farm country needs it right now. But we're not going to see that. We're going to see, yeah, we're going to see some acres added, probably about 6 million acres. We may kick it up to, you know, from 22, you know, up a decent amount.

But given what's expiring, it's not going to come close to that cap of 27 million acres. Are there CRP lands in Hawaii, for instance? Like where is all this stuff? Not that I know of, but here I've got actually a map on my computer, which I'll show you when. But, yeah, you've got to give these folks, you know, the value of their time and gas. Oh, exactly, yeah. And if they're going to go spend their time and gas, they're going to look for a better return. Yep. No, that's exactly right.

So anyway, we're going to be disappointed with the signup that's currently going on. But it's better than nothing. We're thrilled they finally got a signup out. But long term, we're going to have to have a serious discussion between Congress and the administration about implementing this program the way it's intended. We'll be organizing comments on behalf of the broader— The administration has been dragging its feet up. Not sort of exercising the will of the people in terms of— And part of the problem here is, too, this is the one conservation program that is ministered by the Farm Service Agency and not NRCS.

And National Resource Conservation Service, they wake up every day and think about conservation on farmland. Farm Service Agency doesn't. So they look at the big things to do today. You know, this is down toward the bottom. Got you. I mean, Steve's earlier point is the one that it's the development threat. You know, I mean, farmers and ranchers, they do what they do not because they have to. That's their life.

I mean, it's the way they choose to spend their lives. And eventually, they're going to get in a point where it's like, man, it's not worth the hassle. And you're in a place like the Gallatin Valley here, my mom's place there outside of Billings, where it's, let's just cut this sucker up and get a paycheck and move to Hawaii. Yep, that's exactly right. And that's the real threat long-term.

If you drag your feet on this implementation, there's huge ripple effects through farm country. I'd much rather have the argument of CRP or row crop versus CRP or housing development. Yep. Because once it's in housing, it's not coming back to. Yeah, it's not coming out. Hey, Phil, we're going to move on to. So I'm just going to. There's a map of where.

Hotbed CRP. Hotbed CRP. Upper Midwest, Great Plains. Yep. Boy, things get complicated when you move down there towards Florida. A lot of stuff in the upper Midwest and Great Plains and the Columbia. Yep. Columbia drainage

Hey Philly, you know that noise Cal uses and cows we can review where goes Yeah, moving on. Yeah put that noise in right got it Access yeah 2019 thumbs up thumbs down thumbs up. Yeah again, you're kind of far you're kind of thumbs down in Farm Bill Yeah, and I think thumbs down in Farm Bill up, thumbs down? Thumbs up. Yeah, again, I think- You're kind of thumbs down in Farm Bill. Yeah, and I think thumbs down in Farm Bill. Two thumbs down? One and a half. So one thumb is- One thumb is sideways.

One's down. Okay. Hit me two thumbs on, or give me both your thumbs on access. Good. Witt's got two thumbs up. Two thumbs up on access. Okay. So we've been, honestly, Dave Bernhardt and the Interior Department have been really good on this issue.

So he's been, you know, sort of done a bunch of things in terms of opening up hunting and fishing on refuges and places, streamlining regs. I mean, we had a situation in the past where you may have a refuge someplace that had totally different regs than the state, which may make sense, but it may not make sense, but it made it really confusing for hunters. And so a lot of that has been streamlined. They've also, you know, there are certain refuges and other public lands that got closed for no particular reason, and those all got reevaluated and a bunch got reopened. So that's good. Perhaps the most important thing he's done on the access front is dealing with, you know, what we call disposable lands for BLM. So under the original FLTMA, which is the Federal Land Management Policy Act, which essentially governs BLM management, they're required to, every time they review or renew

a resource management plan in RMP, look at areas that don't make sense for them to hold on to and are suitable for disposal. Give me an example of what that would look like. Yeah, let's say they have a plot inside the city limits of Las Vegas that happens to still be BLM land. Just some weed plot laying there. Yeah, I mean, just an historical anomaly. Maybe it was part of a railroad grant or something long-term ago. But there's some guy that hunts jackrabbits out there.

There could be. But anyway, there probably are a variety of federal lands out there that make sense to be swapped or disposed of, and that's fine. And honestly, Jason Jason Chakins – Explain a land swap real quick. So let's say you have a parcel that is in the city limits of Las Vegas, and the city really wants that to expand the strip. I mean, just to use a hypothetical – Let's say a hospital. I like it if it's a hospital.

A hospital, okay. Then they could enter into and say, okay, fine. We have – we, the city of Las Vegas, has this parcel way outside of town adjacent to a national forest. We'll swap it to you in exchange for this piece in town. Your national forest gets bigger. Our hospital gets bigger. Right. And it's a win-win for everybody.

Okay. Now, there's some rules in place that swaps have to be, you know, generally, you know, the same value, things like that. Yeah, so people don't come in and manipulate it. But it makes perfectly good sense to do things like that. And that's how we deal with a lot of inholdings in places or through things like land swaps. But the part of the problem was in the original FLPMO bill when it talked about looking at lands suitable for disposal, it basically talked about lands that were difficult to

manage, isolated. It didn't talk anything about recreational access. So you have a situation where you may have a section, 640 acres of BLM land someplace, nowhere near other BLM lands, but it may be adjoining state lands or a national forest. Now in the old days, BLM would automatically put that parcel on the disposal list because it was isolated, it was hard to manage, didn't make sense in terms of big picture agency management. So what we got Dave Bernhardt to do was to change the rules, and he issued a secretary of order on this, 3373, that when the agency comes up and looks at areas suitable for disposal, if it's important for recreation, including hunting and fishing, it's off the list. Got you. So it is, again, and this is a direct result of some of that onX work we've done, you know, that identifies these sort of landlocked public lands.

Because if you're disposing of some of these isolated parcels, you're impacting way more than that one or that half section that may be out there. And that's, well, Eric Siegfried of onX and I hunted a chunk this year that is so prime, so prime for disposal or land swap because it's surrounded by, we're not talking ma and pa kettle ranchers out in eastern Montana. We're like big, big money. Um, and you know, it's a corporate holding type of situation. Yeah. And, uh, they're, they're not in it for the cattle.

And, uh, this chunk of ground that we hunted is great recreational value. Um, but it's not something the BLM could even get in and manage if it, if the landowner around it decided that they didn't want them to. Oh, I'm with you. Yeah. So wake up in hot sweats over something like that because it has tremendous wildlife value. You just think about like the furor of the Wilkes brothers in Idaho and now Montana. And obviously they're going to, they may have some parcels that make sense to trade to the federal government.

But their exchange may be that one section which allows the public to get to that national forest behind them. And if you get rid of that and make that private, then essentially you privatize all that elk habitat behind them. Trevor Burrus Yeah, you can imagine the manipulations that go on. Peter Van Doren Right. And so now with that Secretary of Order, it basically prohibits BLM from doing that kind of stuff, which is great.

And you know, a lot of credit to, you know, Bernhardt and Interior for doing that one. Now I say also on the access front, the fact that we got permanent reauthorization, LWCF, huge win for access. You know, we now have, again, another result, this Onyx project, which we— Is Bernhardt acting or did he get— He's permanent. So he did get permanent. He got confirmed, yeah. What about the acting director of the BLM?

That's a whole separate story. Let's hold off on that one. The WPP. Yeah. So we'll hold off on that one because there's still more to talk about here with the access stuff. Yeah. But another thing we were doing the project with Onyx, what we realized is that the agencies often have no idea where they have legal accesses. So they may have, it may be an access easement that was granted 40 years ago, that's in the basement of some BLM or Forest Service office someplace in a cardboard file box.

And what Eric and the company found was that there was a huge need to get that information digitized and out in the public sphere, because this makes it very hard for you or me or anybody to know really where legal access routes are now. So we have a bill that's being dropped in Congress soon that would give the agencies the money to go in and expedite digitization of all these access areas. And that's something I testified in Congress on last year about the need to do this because what the agencies told us was that if we're left to ourselves under current timeframe, it'll probably take us 20 years to get this stuff all digitized. Trevor Burrus Yeah.

Trevor Burrus And that's just ridiculous. Trevor Burrus How often do you testify in front of Congress? Trevor Burrus So TRCP in 2019 testified five times. I personally did three, I think. Trevor Burrus Is it fun? I mean, if you sort of know your stuff. And for us, it's not bad. I mean, they're no hostile.

They don't like bust your balls real bad. No. Like I just did right in December, I did a CWD on the Senate side. I talked about that with the Senate Environment Committee. And it was super positive. I mean, they had good questions. They had done their homework. Everyone from Barrasso from Wyoming to Gillibrand from New York. They don't roll their eyes and go, oh, God, it's the guy who likes to be outside and animals and stuff.

No, no. Again, this is in the weird way. This is one of those few issues that actually brings folks together in Congress. And I'm not just saying CWD. I'm saying that conservation, hunting and fishing broadly. And I remember right after the election, when Trump got elected, you know, Martin Heinrich came and talked to our policy council, which is the sort of collection of all the NGOs that are part of the partnership. And he said, almost nothing is going to happen in Congress these next four years that's positive other than what's in your space. So he says,

you guys have an unbelievable opportunity. Don't waste it. And, you know, I think we've taken, you know, his advice on that one and we've been pretty aggressive in asking for things and honestly been getting most of what we've been asking for.

That's great. Yeah. So I know on the access thing, I think that's been, you know, pretty much, you know, a good story.

Because no matter what side of the aisle you're on, you want to win. And if everything else is such a pain in the neck and not likely to get a win. Well, and plus you just want to show you to win. And if everything else is such a pain in the neck and not likely to get a win.

Well, and plus you just want to show you can govern and do something that's important for your constituents. And it doesn't matter whether you're a Sierra Club member or a Safari Club member. I mean, these are things that folks can agree on. In our notes here, we have VPA HIP and 3373. Yeah. So 3373 is that tech order I just mentioned from Dave Bernhardt. VPA HIP is going back to the farm bills. We got a program in the 2008 farm bill. At that time, it was known as Open Fields, but the technical name was the Voluntary Public Access Habitat Incentives Program.

So this was a program that we just got expanded to $50 million annually, which are competitive grants to states to negotiate walk-in easements, essentially, with private landowners. Oh, okay. So you have a lot of – So it's actual money they can use. Right. Can they roll it into their existing programs? You bet. Absolutely. Okay, good.

Yeah. So they don't need to start some whole new damn thing. No. Part of the cool thing about the VPA HIP program is that you have states like Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania that have created walk-in programs because all of a sudden now there's a source of federal funding. Oh, really? And they can supplement it with their own ways if possible. Right, exactly. And this has really started back in – I think Kansas was the first state that really did this aggressively back when Steve Williams, who then became Fish and Wildlife Service Director under George W. Bush, but now runs Wildlife Management Institute. When he was Fish and Game Director in Kansas, they created this walk-in program basically to get people out there pheasant hunting and up on bird hunting.

And it became so popular, counties were giving the states grants to create walk-in programs in those areas. Real quick, what Whit's talking about is, depending where you are, your state has one or needs one, is programs where landowners are compensated to get financial compensation to allow people public access to hunt and fish on their lands. And these programs tend to, are oftentimes hunting programs funded through hunting or access programs funded through hunting and fishing. Like we have the beast thing in Montana right now in Montana. It's certain corners of license revenue fund the public access program.

So it's not like you're going, you know, it's an internal thing. It's not like you're going out and taxing everyone on the landscape to allow hunting. It's something that hunters, anglers are doing kind of for themselves through their agencies, through their state agencies or with federal help. And the cool thing about the VPA HIP program is it is also tied to conservation. So you don't have the risk of some dude getting paid to open up his row crops to hunting and fishing where there's no wildlife. So to the extent that that land is already entered into other conservation programs, CRP, CSP, conservation easements, whatever it might be, they score higher. Oh, really? So the quality of the habitat. The quality of the habitat is going to be much better in these types of programs.

The other thing that's good about this is it takes liability away from the private landowner. So if Cal trips and breaks his leg in a ditch, he's not going to sue the landowner. The state assumes that liability. So they will defend that right. I'll help you out, Cal. Not financially, but I mean. Just like a shoulder to limp out of the field on? Loading your crutch. But the reason a county would support this program, right, is I can't tell you how many counties, little townships we go through where it's very obvious the only money that's coming in is from recreation, whether that is hunting, fishing, floating. It's the local motel. It's the local motel. It's the local diner. Gas station.

All these folks are benefiting from this. And that's why you fly into Sioux Falls in November and the big banner you see as you leave the airport is welcome hunters. Yeah. Because it's such an economic driver. At the gas station too. Yeah.

Yeah, you roll into a gas station. The big orange bush sign. Yep, exactly. That's good. You roll into a gas station with the meat eater crew, they're going to get hurt on snacks, I've noticed. Phil, play the noise. How do you describe that noise?

I have it labeled as a swish in my library. No, no, I like it. Yeah, the swish. Okay, CWD, thumbs up? I mean, it's thumbs down. Thumbs down. Thumbs down. It's thumbs down in two ways. it's thumbs down. Thumbs down. Thumbs down. It's thumbs down in two ways.

It's thumbs down, I'm guessing. The primary way it's thumbs down is it's spreading. Yes. More counties all the time. I mean, there's more testing, revealing, more spread. Yes. How else is it thumbs down? The unwillingness of most politicians to accept this is a real issue and deal with it.

Why are they not scared shitless about what this would mean for ag? They ought to be. Everybody's talking about like guys like me are like, well, what if? How horrible would it be? What if a human got CWD? But why is the livestock industry not considering what's going to happen if CWD spreads into sheep or cattle? It would be like an ag apocalypse. Well, let's take it a step further.

Let's say Norway is already banning the import of agricultural products from CWD positive areas because it's trying to control CWD outbreak in reindeer in Norway. So how long is it until the EU bans agricultural imports from CWD positive areas? And as 26 states right now have it, that's a lot of CWD positive areas in ag country. And they just aren't paying, they're not paying attention. So, I mean, listen, I mean, it's improving. They were, we did, I think, three hearings this year in the House on CWD. So we're definitely making some progress in the sense of getting people to be aware of this.

Mark Veazey, who's a congressman from Texas around that Fort Worth area, who's going to get our big award this spring. He went to the floor during the appropriations. Don't just say our big award. TRCP honors one Democrat, one Republican, somebody from the private sector every year. It's a big fundraiser in April. Steve got the private sector award a few years ago. This year, the congressional honorees are Mark Veazey from Texas and Garrett Graves, Republican from Louisiana. But Mark Veazey went to the floor during the Ag Appropriations Bill and offered a amendment to add $15 million to go to state fishing game agencies to help

with surveillance and testing, which is the first thing you need to do to get on top of CWD. And that was unanimously adopted. Trevor Burrus Okay. Jason Kuznicki So that comes over to the Senate, which is great. And then the Senate Ag Appropriations Committee cuts that down to 5 million, of which half went to state agriculture departments for the captive service industry.

For them to do testing? Who knows? Maybe do testing? I don't know. I mean, we have no control over that money. Maybe to try to breed yet a bigger buck? Well, who knows what it's going to be. Maybe it's going to be used for good things, but given our skepticism of USDA and how they've dealt with CWD,

yeah, we have very little hope that's going to be used as well. They seem like the one. If you told me, let's say there's two boxes. skepticism of USDA and how they've dealt with CWD. Yeah, we have very little hope. They seem like the one. If you told me, let's say there's two boxes. Let's say I'm on a game show and there's two boxes and behind each box is like, behind one box is a car, brand new truck. And one box says CWD spreads to livestock. And one box says CWD spreads to humans humans and if i got the answer right i'd get

the truck you tracking me yeah i would absolutely be the livestock one yeah no it's much more they got four legs right yeah they're eating the same grass you know all the rest man you think that i don't know why like so see that's one of the things that messes me about cwd is i look and i'm like what am I missing? I'm scared shitless, but if those people aren't scared, maybe I'm wrong. Well, I mean, listen, there is a cottage industry out there of folks who are just saying this is a hoax, not to be believed, and nothing wrong. I don't understand that part, though. I get it.

I try not to be like group think dude on this stuff. How is it a hoax what like when a deer dies is laying there dead and it's got the symptomology like where's the hoax always been around never jumped to humans nothing to worry about did not come out of the captive service industry oh yeah the captive deer farms have nothing to do with this spread you know it's interesting they're right I hope they're right. Yeah, I agree with you. That's what I tell everybody. I'm like, man, yeah, I hope I'm wrong on a lot of things every day. But the disease transmission stuff, your research, it's funded by the USDA. Like, it all comes down, like, Iowa, Ohio, all these ag schools, the USDA is paying for a lot of that research.

And yeah, it's bizarre to me. Okay. I'm trying to, what's the late, okay, Texas, how long, when did Texas first get CWD? I don't know. It was a while ago, but it's done a much better job than other states of controlling it. Texas, there was a recent case, I think in December. But I'm saying, I'm trying to better understand, and I got a pretty good understanding. Like a CWD denier used to be someone who didn't think it was a thing. Yes. Now a CWD denier is someone, like this kind of stuff changes. Like being a Republican, I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, being a Republican used to be you were like free trade.

Now it doesn't. A CWD denier used to be that you didn't think it was a thing. Now it's morphed into it's a thing, but it doesn't matter. It's like what it means to deny it has moved. Yep. So the current thing, are there people who are saying that a new state to get CWD. So are they saying that if you went to Texas 20 years ago and did all the monitoring, you would have found it?

Like it's always been there? Like what exactly? I don't want to try to get inside these guys' heads, but I think that's probably going to say it. Yeah, it's been around. You could have gone out, and if you did all this testing they were now doing. Nobody was looking for it then. these guys heads um but i think that's probably gonna say it yeah it's been around that you could have you could have gone out and if you did all this testing they were now doing nobody was looking for it then yeah like what you know that's the thing i think about you hear like like montana

had its first case a year or two ago and then all of a sudden you look like then there's like 20 some cases but i'm like yeah well all of a sudden they're monitoring every deer that comes out of certain areas. So you see a big increase. And then now you at least have a baseline. But if you go from zero testing to testing, that launch is going to give you an increase. What matters is after five years of testing, what happens? Exactly. You talk to the beautiful and lovely Doug Duren, who's really out there in his area trying to be impactful about this. And he's able to point to what is test.

Okay, we're doing exhaustive testing. So we have multiple exhaustive testings to look at to see increase. But I just don't understand arguing that it was always there because I'm like, where? Right. No, I agree. If it was always there, it wouldn't be everywhere. Yeah. So it's pretty clear. And you can look at the maps that show the sort of spread. There's something like it spreads like how shit spreads.

Yes. Well, it spreads faster than shit spreads because you can throw a captive deer in the back of a truck and zip it across the country on a Greyhound bus. And it's all of a sudden mixing with other deer and getting dropped off here and getting one picked up there. So, yeah. But I was saying when you have a new infection, you find a new infection, it spreads like in a way you would imagine it would spread. Yes. Like it's a circle that grows and grows and grows and grows.

Exactly. And you may pop up other places, which, you know, you scratch your head about, but that's the truck. And it's, listen, it's not just captive guys. It could be me throwing a truck, a deer in the back of my pickup and driving a few states and addressing it and dumping it there. Well, if you listen to the guys that are really, I don't want to use the word,

the people who are sounding the greatest alarm, why is it not that you move to hay bale? Yep. Yeah, because the prions are in the hay bale. They're in the dirt. They're in the hay. They're in anything they touch. You can't kill them.

Why is it not moving to hay bale? I mean, you're exactly right. The frustrating part is – Or an apple. I heard that recently. Members of Congress have staff, and they ought to be better informed on this. I mean, I had a member say to me, well, at the end of the day, we're just going to have to cook our meat longer.

Yeah, that's hilarious. I remember a guy saying it's going to be 1,700 degrees. It's going to be pretty well done. I think we should be throwing... If you're a denier, whatever the hell that means these days, God bless you. I feel like if you're a denier,

you should be saying, I feel like we should throw a lot of money at it so I can be proven right. Right. Dude, when I have an argument with someone, I would spend money to prove I'm right. So prove you're right. I think we should be throwing a lot of money at it because this is like a humongous deal. And it's not a hunting deal, as you already said, right? No, it is, but it's like that's my avenue into it.

Oh, absolutely. But if you care about, even if you care about the livestock industry, and I do, deal as you already said right it is but it's like that's my avenue into it but i would absolutely but if you care about even if you care about uh the livestock industry and i do i'm like you know uh how's it go save a cow stop a condo what's that bumper sticker yeah like cows not condos whatever yeah yeah dude yeah so anyway that's been that's been really frustrating because we thought we had that 15 million then the senate cut it down to $2.5 million. And you divide $2.5 million up between 50 states. You know, that's just meaningless practically. Isn't it hilarious to think about when you talk about these amounts of money than to think about like the wealth held by a person?

Oh, yeah. You know, we're always talking about like Pittman Roberts and money. That Jeff Bezos could give that amount of money every year and not notice it. Oh, yeah. That's hilarious, man. I was working with those guys in Sacramento, and the one guy turned to me, and he's like, yeah, you know, this issue, it's just not, you know, there's not enough private money to fix this. And I was like, didn't you say the dude who owns this ranch

owns three sports franchises? I think he just doesn't want to pay for it all. Yeah. So what we got to do is we got to get Congress to really step up in this issue. Now they did kick forward, you know, 1.72 million, they're going to USGS for additional research into CWD. And that's good. There's also a National Academy of Science study that's going to be going in to look at transmission vectors, look at the USDA herd certification program, which is a joke, and other things. So there's going to be some positive stuff that comes out of this year. But just given the threat and how fast this thing is spreading, the notion that we're going to kick out $2.5 million to state fish and wildlife agencies

and expect that to make a difference is just incredibly frustrating no it is you know yeah and when you wake up in a few years and you're watching news footage of people uh using heavy equipment to dig massive trenches that are burning millions of sheep and cattle like you did from ireland when mad cow and scrapey yeah then you'd be like, don't. PR modernization. This is, I'm a little, like Cal, I'm a little, I like if I'm a little skeptical. Yeah, so I mean. Thumbs up, thumbs down. You love it.

Oh, thumbs up. You love it. Cal, he's like thumbs even. No, I mean, listen, I mean, I originally had the same reaction you guys did. No, no, no, no, no. I'm just skeptical. Not skeptical, I'm curious. So let me give a little background here so folks know what we're talking about.

So Pittman-Robertson program is the excise tax that hunters pay on guns, ammo, archery equipment. That basically funds – goes out to the states and funds conservation. There's an equivalent on the fish side, which was the Dingle-Johnson program. Great name. Then got changed to Walletboro. Great name for something. Dingle-Johnson. Dingle-Johnson. Names. Then got changed to Wallet Bro. Great name for something. Dingle Johnson. Dingle Johnson. Names.

And that's the excise taxi. Pittman Robertson passed, I think, in 1936 or 37. Dingle Johnson passed in 1950, I think. And so... Which kicks off more money, the fishing one or the fishing tackle one or the hunting equipment one? I think they're more or less

even. Okay. There are a lot more fishermen, but the hunters buy a lot more, especially ammo. Yeah. But the fishermen, man, when they buy boat gas. They buy boat gas, it goes into there. Yeah. You go to the marina and buy gas, that's hit by an excise tax. Exactly. Yeah. So, but in the fish side, they can use a, states can use a small percentage of that for marketing, essentially to, for the R3, as we call it, you know, to recruit, retain, reactivate anglers. So that's why you see things like the Take Me Fishing program. They've done a similar one reaching out Hispanic community, the Vamos a Pescar program.

My Spanish is terrible. I apologize. But those have really changed the decline in fishing numbers. How's your Spanish, Phil? Phil gives two thumbs down in Spanish. I took two years of French. So yeah, three thumbs down if I could. So anyway, so that Take Me Fishing campaign has really reversed the decline in fishing numbers, and it's going back up at a pretty aggressive rate. And it's reaching a lot of communities, like Hispanic community, that typically get left in the cracks by our hunting and fishing community.

But because in the 1930s, nobody could envision the need to advertise and recruit hunters because everybody was hunting at that point, either because it was during the depression, they needed food, or post-World War I, going into World War II, you had a large- Trevor Burrus Yeah, you had to say, you had, I don't know, like a quarter as many Americans, but the same number of hunters. Jason Kuznicki Yeah, exactly. And so there was no idea that don't know, like a quarter as many Americans, but the same number of hunters. Yeah, exactly. And so there was no idea that we actually would need to use some of this money for the marketing. But, you know, that's changed. And the fish and wildlife surveys in the last, you know, two surveys over a five-year period, honey went from, you know, 13.5 million people to 11.5.

I mean, and so, you know, the long-term impacts, implications of that on, you know, conservation funding are huge. So what we wanted to do is just— And shit like fighting the animal rights movement. Absolutely. Yeah. So what we want to make sure is that we give the states the same ability on the hunting side as they have on the fishing side to use a small amount of those funds for marketing. Now, I had groups like, you know, Wildlife Society and Wildlife Federation argue that money is dedicated for habitat, you know, and things like that. Yeah, pulls it a little off.

It pulls it away. Pulls it off mission. And I would say we are in the death spiral. So, you know, if you want more money for habitat and good stuff coming out of PR, you better get more hunters into the game. And it's not going to happen anywhere again. That's the argument that swayed me because they were also trying to make it that you could use PR money to create public shooting ranges. You can already do that. Oh, you could.

No, that was like, but that was like recent. I don't think so. No. I think you've always been. Listen, man, this might be the first time in your life that I've ever known more than you. This might be the first time I've ever known more than you about something, but I think that it was like PR money couldn't go to public shooting ranges until something happened like some point in time in the last handful of years.

Well, we'll figure that out. You could be right about that. I thought I know this. Dude, I would pay money to know that I'm right, like I mentioned earlier. But here's the thing. Here's what I remember about the debate. The debate was, one, that everyone went out and shot old washing machines up out in the woods and it was trying to like get that centralized shooting so that everybody didn't have their own patch of their own gravel pit where they went and yep through through cans and bottles and appliances out and blew holes in it so you're

trying to reduce that and the other thing was that it would if people have more places to shoot and feel more comfortable shooting they're buying more sporting equipment they're buying more ammunition and more money and so it was like viewed as as an investment in the PR fund because most of the PR money doesn't come from hunters. No. Most of the PR money comes from shooters. If an old granny in New Jersey has a pocket pistol, she probably paid into PR. No, exactly. She might be an anti-hunter.

Yeah, and if you're a decent hunter, you maybe do one box of ammo a year. That's what friends of mine at the NSSF, they were laughing about. One of these guys is like, I hunt all the time. I got a gun that I got from my dad. I buy a box of shells every few years. I'm not the guy kicking into this fund. Right. The guy kicking into this fund is shooting his.223 down at the range.

Yep. Now, granted, there's a lot of crossover there. Yeah. But it's just a funny point. And it's like hunters are the ones that are always like PR, PR, Pivot Robertson You know A little bit blind to like where the bulk of that money is coming from

But I just think we need to do something out there To engage and attract people Because the demographics hunting Are not great either I mean it's an old white And getting older and at some point they're going to drop off that cliff No because Phil's starting to hunt How old are you Phil? 29 old, white, and getting older and at some point they're going to drop off that cliff. No, because Phil's starting to hunt.

How old are you, Phil? 29. Now look at that. 29. That'll knock the average down. Oh yeah, we're all set now. I'll get on an ASAP. But, you know, and we actually are seeing some good growth. I mean, obviously women are coming into hunting, you know, in a way they haven't in the past, which is great. I mean, I think you guys have been instrumental in sort of getting that food

side of people coming into hunting because they want to have, you know, harvest their own locally sourced, high protein, non-GMO meat. You know, so I think those areas are seeing growth, which is why you combine things like CWD, which is scary. It may push people away from hunting. Oh, it absolutely will.

And the fact that we haven't been able to advertise hunting. You know, those are, you know, that's the death spiral. So you love it. I love it. Two thumbs. Two thumbs. Up. Not even kind of tipped to the side., you know, that's the death spiral. So you love it. I love it. Two thumbs. Two thumbs. Up.

Up. Not even kind of tipped to the side. No, no, it's good. And again, you can't use, no state is going to, they can't, but no state would take all that money and just, you know, do advertising campaigns because that's not what they do. Yeah, I got you. So it's just, you know, that didn't happen on the, you know, the fishing side. So, you know, the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation was funded through the Dingell Johnson funds, the Walletboro funds.

And, you know, they get maybe like $7 million a year to run these big national campaigns on, you know, take me fishing. And it's worked. And we've showed this worked. Okay, Phil, play the sound. If you want a primer on big grain migrations, you should go listen. Scroll back down through the episodes. Here's a good research question for someone sitting here. No, I remember the name of it.

Scroll back down and listen to a podcast episode that we did called Landscape of Fear. And it's a primer on big grain migrations. So pause the episode right now before Witt starts talking. Listen to Landscape of Fear. And then in a couple hours

we'll see you as you come back to hear whether wit has thumbs up or thumbs down 2019 big game migrations meaning uh basically what that comes down to is meaning the viability and productiveness of lands that are used by migrating big game. They're used by big game. How are we doing? We know a lot more about it. Yeah. And that's been the key. Because of what you learn when you listen to landscape.

Fear is like how we're starting to learn about how animals use the landscape. Yep. Because of emerging technologies. Exactly. And this is something that has really, I think, Wyoming to a large degree sort of pioneered this, you know, with a lot, you know, beginning with Path of the Pronghorn, but then a lot of stuff that Hall Sawyer and, you know, guys like that have done in terms of- Matt Kaufman.

Matt Kaufman in terms of the mule deer migrations. And not only did they, you know, get good data, they got such cool video footage. And it really captured the imagination and National Geographic picked it up and pushed it out. And so all of a sudden it became sexy. And then Dave Bernhardt, his predecessor, Ryan Zinke, did a secretary order, I think 3372, something like that, 3362, that basically told the federal agencies within the Department of the Interior to work together to identify these migration corridors and to take the conservation actions necessary to protect them. technologies around GPS and things, identifying little things that could be patches of ground 75 yards wide along the edge of a lake that literally hundreds of animals pass through. And the ability to be so targeted about like this little thing really matters. Yep.

It allows you to be, it allows you to be really precise, you know? So we were arguing with the department of the interior early on this, you know, this administration and are, you know, are encouraging them to do this. You know, the points are pretty simple. I mean, it's, you want interagency. So you want to talk about, you know, sort of breaking down the silos between the different agencies, the state, federal, private collaboration. It's, you know, highly charismatic megafauna. It is relatively small areas of actual conservation because, you know, yeah, you're

going to need to protect some broader areas, but otherwise it's just a pinch point here or there. And I said, you can use a bunch of other people's money. You know, for example, in the transportation bill, the highway bill, we just got $250 million in the Senate version for an experimental program over five years for highway crossings, for big game migrations, and for aquatic connectivity. Are you aware that those are controversial? Well, I know they are in places like Island Park, Idaho. In general, no, they're not that controversial. Let me tell you where it is. It's step one in the massive government takeover to run people out of their homes.

It's like, you know, this country really went downhill when they made an overpass, so many animals didn't get killed on the highway. That's when I knew America had, I'd had enough of this country. I want my right to hit a deer if I can. Anyway, no, I mean, most of the time it's not controversial. And I think that, you know,

so the way it happened under this administration is they put out an order in all Western states and focused on three species, mule deer, elk, and pronghorn told the States to nominate three to five core migration corridors. And, you know, then the department of the interior would basically commit resources to helping protect those. There's a rumor. I don't mean to keep interrupting you about this. A lot of Dukes I'm doing it, but there's a rumor that they're't mean to keep interrupting you about this. Well, I do because I'm doing it. But there's a rumor that they're using it to move the deer away from public hunting areas. I hadn't heard that one.

It's Enviro's channeling the deer and helping them pick routes where they won't be subject to getting shot at. It, it was hard training those initial gear with the collars to go those different routes they'd never been before. But after they got through that hurdle, then yeah. No, I mean, that's just that crazy talk. This is something that makes sense for everybody. And I think that we've seen the highway bill is going to contain this program. We've seen states, Wyoming has sort of been the lead on this, but they're even, Mark Gordon is doing an executive order right now that is laying out how to formalize this process moving forward as they designate new ones.

Those big lefties over in Wyoming. Yeah. Polis administration in Colorado pushed through an executive order on migration corridors. So you're seeing it have ripple effects in a variety of different states in the West. Well, that mega one on the 101, right? Yeah, the wildlife crossing over the 101 freeway in California. Yep. Outside of LA there.

Has anything been used in it? Wait, it's not going to be complete sometime this year, I think, is what they're saying. But that's going to be the most expensive overpass in the United States. I know one legitimate one. We heard from one guy. I never fact-checked him on this, but an angry listener wrote in and was talking about all this money they spent building one. Maybe it was in Washington State. Somewhere they spent a bunch of money building one, and then it just didn't work.

I mean, that was— He said like a coyote went over that thing once. I don't know if it's true. I never fact-checked him on it. You've got to give these things time. And Ed Arnett did a pretty good video that's on our website. That's where he talks about this. You've got to give them a little bit of time to work.

Second, you have to have fencing that goes along with them because you have to funnel the animals toward this. Yeah, because you're getting them to do something they don't normally do. Right. But I think certainly in Wyoming, the evidence is overwhelming along with other places that once they figure this out, they use them like crazy. And not just one species but a host of different species. Small mammals, birds prefer to fly over them. They've got reptile crossings in New Jersey. So it makes sense on a number of different levels.

I remember when I was a kid, snapper turtles would always get hit real bad when you drive north of Muskegon Marsh. And they put up this really low fence, like a knee-high fence, that channeled snapper turtles into the right thing. I remember people being mad about it. Just kind of like this, like, Ah, those idiots! And I remember thinking, like, what exactly is the problem?

Right. But it just insulted people that someone would spend effort to have lots of snapper turtles every June when they're going to lay eggs, not get killed. They wanted to see them get killed. Well, if you hit a snapping turtle in the middle of the night, it keeps you awake. Yeah, and they're like insulted by it. I remember people in my own family were like eye-rolly about the fact that you would try to keep all your snapping turtles from getting crushed on the highway when they come up the lay. It's this giant marsh, and it's like really, for them, it looks like suitable nesting habitats.

They need to get out and dig a hole in the sand. And you build this big artificial thing, and every turtle in the area tries to climb up there and get smacked by a thing. And people are like, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Well, anyway, I think overall, though, the migration corridor stuff has been you know really a positive thing i think it's spreading and it's got good momentum and the exception of a few weird places it's not controversial something again that i think everyone can agree on i sure think so hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Fisheries. I'd say mixed bag, sort of sideways. Sideways thumbs? Sideways thumbs.

Tell me more. So a lot of the fisheries. What are the big issues with fisheries? Fisheries is a broad term. There's fresh water, there's salt water. So a lot of the focus we've been doing is on the saltwater side, marine fisheries. Now, we did get a bill passed in, you know, late last year, the year before, called the Modern Fish Act, which for the first time recognizes that recreational fish should be managed differently than commercial fish. Commercial fish, you know, are really managed for maximum sustained yield.

So you're going to need instantaneous data. You're pushing that species right to the edge. And you have to have really good data for that. And you can do that with commercial fishing because you have a limited number of ports and you can actually count the fish. Wreck fishing, you can't do that. I mean, you have people spread out everywhere, over a million little docks and marinas. And there has always been – you can't manage them the same way. So instead of trying to push that commercial management paradigm down on the wreck fishing, which is what NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service, has always done, and to the point

where we're getting a ton of controversy and things like Red Snapper in the Gulf, where the lack of certainty on numbers were causing the agencies to shut down the fishery in nine days and seven days and three days. So if you and I were planning a trip down there, we'd have no idea. We booked our hotel room, we booked our guide, whether the season would actually be open or not. It's just not the way to manage recreational fishing. So Modern Fish Act passed, and it did a few different things. I mean, the main one said to the National Marine Fisheries Service, you have the ability to try these different things that may work better

for recreational fishermen. Let's use the waterfowl model. Yeah, so go out and you do surveys in the Arctic of what the breeding populations are going to be. You look at how many ducks get shot and then you set a season.

You know, when it opens, you know what the bag limit's going to be. The end of that season, you reevaluate. Now, you have to be pretty conservative for that to work because you can't be way off or else you just crush a species. So honestly, it's better for conservation anyway, if you were to apply that model for wreck fishing, which is the same way with the model we do on freshwater fisheries, you know, be it largemouth bass or trout or anything else. I mean, there's a bag limit. You know what it is, you know, when the season starts,. You know when it ends. And we just haven't been doing that recreational side.

So now that's going to get changed. And a lot of these were hot button fisheries. And the hot button fisheries are the ones where you have mixed stocks. So part of it's commercial, part of it's recreational. Red snapper being a classic case. The all recreational stocks, things like redfish, bonefish, tarpon, those are all well managed because they're managed with that same sort of precautionary principle that we manage waterfowl with. And so we finally got that changed. Now the agencies in the process are going through a bunch of rulemaking

to determine how it might use that. And there are different ways you could do it. You could do a tag system. You could do these bag limits. You could do fathom limits where outside for ground fish, under a certain level is wreck fishing, outside of it's commercial fishing. Yeah. Like in Washington, there's a lot of things like you can fish at different times of year within certain depths. Yeah. So you deal with a lot of the

bycatch issues with things like that. So it's just being a little bit more creative, but the agency, because that wasn't the way it was used to doing things on commercial side, was always very reluctant to do that. Now it has a green light to do it. The other thing that the agency was very reluctant to do was to use different data collection techniques. So it would do telephone surveys and mail surveys asking you how many fish you caught last summer, which needless to say were not- Highly accurate. Highly accurate, not instantaneous by any means. You'd be like, shit.

Talking to a bunch of fishermen. Let me tell you about this one in particular. Take your arm off. So the states got so frustrated with this, a bunch of the states period their own basically, you know, iPhone-based systems where you're basically doing instantaneous reporting. You don't have to tell where your honey hole is, but you tell, you know, how many fish you caught, what general size. And, you know, so all of a sudden you have, you know, this instantaneous data on the rec side, which the agencies had never had before. And so part of what the Modern Fish Act did was, again, give the National Marine Fisheries Service

the green light to use these alternative data mechanisms, you know, to manage the fisheries. And LA Creole is the one in Louisiana. There's a separate one in Florida. There's a separate one in Texas. But they just make a ton more sense in this modern age than a telephone survey months after the fact. Trevor Burrus Yeah. I mean, the telephone surveys in Montana, I wholly buy into the system. I do.

But every year I'm like, yeah, you got a buck well what region um and what you know you know my uh you know my uh aunt's place you know uh yo cal did you know this that um in south like at our fish shack and in southeast alaska no there's just like an order that came down no non-plagic rockfish whatsoever oh so no no yellow eyes no quillbacks no way god those things are tasty i saw the yellow i mean obviously yellow is gonna make more no non-play i think it's to protect the yellow eye but no non-plagics that's amazing which has major implications for us fishing because you're gonna be no matter what you're doing you're pulling up a lot of rockfish you're gonna be like sending a lot of rockfish

down to the bottom with release devices yeah and no more targeting yellow eyes i just bought a new damn rod for jigging yellow and talk about an easy getting a kid fishing fish. Yeah, but I've been putting a lot of energy into pioneering some new greenling and flounder spots. So I was going to, you know, Brody Henderson right now is tying me some flounder flies. Nice. We'll make do. We're still going to, we'll still, we'll still put some food on the plate. Oh, okay. Okay.

So just got sent this last night at Texas parks and wildlife. Apparently just, um, tried a case convicted guy got fined $26,000 for being 16 or 17 red snapper over the limit. No. From last year. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's as far as I got into it.

So that's what I needed to do. There goes that new truck. Man. So obviously, Red Snapper's a pretty hot button. Yeah, and it has been for a while. And I think a lot of the controversy on Red Snapper has calmed down since the Modern Fish Act passed and basically the feds turned over management

to the states. And the states are doing a good job. Tell about the Manhattan deal. So Manhattan is, uh, Manhattan is the, basically the base of the food chain on the East coast. And it's also in the Gulf. It's a little fish. It's called bunker. It's called pokey. Oh, okay. And a super oily, you don't want to eat it, but everything else wants to eat it. And the bait fish of choice, right? Fish of choice. And not just for, you know, striped bass and weak fish and bluefish, but for whales, for eagles, for osprey, you name it. That's one of the areas where I have least experience hanging around. The Atlantic.

All right, we can change that. That part of it. That chunk of the Atlantic. So in the old days, back in the early 1900s, you know, basically reduction industries up and down the East Coast. And the reduction industries would go out in a purse saying- What do they call it? Reduction. So they would catch these, you know, the menhaden, bring them back, grind them up, reduce them to fish food, to pellets, to fish oil, to fertilizer, to a variety of other things.

So you go down to the drugstore and buy your old man, your... Yeah, you're eating probably Menhaden. Your fish oil pills. Yes, yes, which are useless, but it's fine. Yeah, so over time, because... That doesn't keep you alive forever? No. So you tell me that the supplementary drug industry has lied to me?

I actually have no idea. I'm way outside my comfort zone on that one. We call that big vita. Big vita has lied to me? So back in the turn of the century, you had these reduction fisheries up and down the East Coast and to this point where they almost wiped out menhaden and basically almost wiped out everything that eats them.

Because big schooling fish, you can just get on them and clobber them. Right. I mean, the way it's done today, and today. So basically state by state started banning this type of fishing. Only one state still allows it in the Atlantic. That's Virginia. And it has one plant owned by a company called Omega Seafood, which was recently purchased by Cook, which is the, you know, they have big aquaculture.

Not Matt Cook. Salmon farming. No, different Cook. With an E. They have salmon farming operations on the Atlantic, up in Canada and Maine. They had them out in Puget Sound. They got kicked out of Washington State because they're such bad actors. Tons of clean water act violations.

Tons of escapements for Atlantic salmon into steelhead habitat. So not a great company. But anyway, they own Omega. So one plant still owns it. You can imagine when that guy gets sitting around and complaining. Big cigar in his mouth. Oh, yeah. I'd love to owns it. You can imagine when that guy gets sitting around and complaining, big cigar in his mouth. Oh, yeah. I'd love to hear it.

So anyway, so this one plant catches 80 plus percent of all the commercial menhaden on the Atlantic. And it has big boats, has spotter planes. But they're only fishing Virginia waters. No, no. They can fish in, you know, so federal waters. Oh, so they go outside 70 miles. Three miles. Three miles.

Three miles. That three to 200, that's the federal waters. So they can do out there. And then they also have been fishing in the Chesapeake Bay. It's three to 200. Mm-hmm. Oh, where'd I get 70 miles from something? I don't know.

Is it based off the bank? Like with the drop off maybe? I don't know. This was all done back in the, you know, when Magnuson Act came into, you know, early in the 1970s. So you go off Virginia three miles. You can catch Mid-Hayden and Federal Waters. Yeah.

Oh, then you just go off anyone's coast. Right. Gotcha. Yeah. So that's where, you know, it was front page of the New York Times this past year because, you know, the big bunker schools were up there off of Long Island and whales and all the whale watching boats were out there, you know, watching this spectacle of nature. And here comes Omega with the spotter planes and it's little, you know, watching this spectacle of nature. And here comes Omega with the spotter planes and its little, you know, big factory ships

and this, you know, this purse saying boats and comes out circling around them, scooping them up while the whales are out there hitting them. And while the recreational anglers are on the spite, straight bass are blitzing them. Everybody's all pissed. Everyone's pissed. Yeah. And here it goes, gets brought back. So ground up in a fish food to be sent to Canada to feed aquaculture salmon, another totally unsustainable industry.

That's what you're using it for? Oh, yeah. And to get shipped back into the U.S. So you can buy salmon that has an ingredients list on it. Yeah. Yeah. When you buy salmon and you see that it's got ingredients, because normally you don't need to label stuff, but since they dyed it red. And it has all sorts of antibiotics.

Should say salmon. Yep. Salmon with an asterisk. So anyway, so Omega, what we've been trying to do is change the way menhaden are managed to go from single species management, which is basically how many fish can you kill before you crash the stock to ecosystem management. Meaning what does the ecosystem need? And then based on that, how many can you take out without messing things up? And that's probably going to happen this coming year.

And it's been a pretty nasty fight all along. Meantime, this past year, Omega decided it didn't like the federal limits, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission limits on Manhattan. And so it just decided to give a big middle finger to the agency and went in and blew through its cap for the Chesapeake Bay. And so it just decided to give a big middle finger to the agency and went in and blew through its cap for the Chesapeake Bay.

And so caught millions of extra pounds of fish. With what repercussions? So they were, I think, expecting, and who knows what was inside their head, that they could go to Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, and get him to waive any sort of penalties. Now, we as the wreck fishing community, as well as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, and every single state on the Atlantic, including Virginia, because the recent governor does not like that fishery, voted to basically fine Virginia and Omega out of compliance and penalize them. So that fishery- So Virginia wanted itself fined.

Yes, absolutely. And so that, you know, Wilbur Ross, to his credit, you know, ruled in favor of the commission and shut down that fishery. Now, that doesn't really mean anything because the fishery shut down in the winter anyway. This just happened in December. But what it means is that now the state has to come into compliance and there's going to be a penalty for all those fish extra that it caught out of the Chesapeake Bay is going to get reduced that from its overall quota. Now, listen, I think they ought to be kicked out of the Chesapeake Bay altogether. I'd love to see

this type of fishing end. If bait fishermen want to do Menhaden, that's great. I mean, we've so wiped out herring fisheries. A lot of lobstermen in Maine and other places are looking for other bait. Menhaden is the logic one for that. All four are using that. That's awesome. Asian cart going up to Maine for for other bait. Manhattan is the logic one for that. All four are using that. That's awesome. Asian cart going up to Maine for lobster bait. So you're saying like small scale stuff like that, but you're saying like the industrial harvest. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean these big reduction

fisheries, which where you grind them up and turn them into oil and pellets. It just doesn't make any sense. Now, and the crazy thing on this too is that, you know, Omega decided during this process to add political weight to its cause to get itself certified on the Marine Stewardship Council as sustainable, which doesn't make any sense for a host of reasons. We fought that. You know, they got it on the Atlantic and they got it in the Gulf. And there's not even a catch limit in place in the Gulf.

I mean, it's totally the Wild West down there. And, you know,, it's totally the wild West down there. And, you know, so it's just crazy. So anyway, but what it has done is galvanized the fish community, the recreational fish community behind this cause. We won on the compliance fight in the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay. You know, we're going to win, I think, on ecological management, changing the framework, and then we need to go down to the Gulf and put hard catch limits in place down there. Okay. Phil?

Pebble Mine. Man, Pebble Mine's been going a lot a long time, man. Two thumbs down. Two thumbs down. Two thumbs down. So we thought this thing was pretty much dead, and we're putting nails in the coffin a few years ago. Yeah.

It's been hard to track. It's been hard to follow. Yeah. Issue fatigue. Well, there It's been hard to follow. Yeah. So. Issue fatigue. Well, there's some of that too. Yeah. But it's a, things, this is one thing where, you know, see, see change from the last three years.

So the Obama administration, I think to their credit, you know, basically put up some very hard sideboards on any mine that could be developed in that area. Can you give people a night, just real quick, bring people up to speed. Like when people say pedal mine, what are they talking about? that could be developed in that area. Can you give people, just real quick, bring people up to speed. When people say pedal mine, what are they talking about? They're talking about one of the world's largest open pit mines at the headwaters in a gold and copper mine, headwaters of the two most productive sockeye of salmon rivers in North America,

the Cuyahoga and the Neushegak. Okay. In the world? In the world. So basically it's the backbone of a half billion dollar a year commercial fishery. Which it creates a surface lake of highly, it would create a surface lake of highly contaminated water. That would have to be maintained in perpetuity. In an active fault zone.

Behind, you know, an empowerment structure. Right. That this water would never be cleaned. And you would need to keep it in place because should it – And not only that, because of what would eventually be the size of the CMI, and you're going to have to put in not only roads and harbors, but utilities, basically a power plant. And you're going to open up an entire area to other impacts. And this is like from moose hunters, salmon fishermen, bear hunters. Everybody hates this.

Except a couple of people. Except for some Canadian speculators who want to – basically this Northern Dynasty, which is the company that's pushing this, wants essentially to make a bunch of money on this thing, sell it off to somebody else and get out of the business. So anyway, it was on life support. Then the story has it, and I have no idea if this is true. President stops on his way back from North Korea, stops to refuel in Anchorage. Laskin governor, who likes the mine, likes any sort of development project, spends time with him on Air Force One. Trump goes back to D.C., tells EPA to make this thing happen and the Corps of Engineers.

And all of a sudden, the Corps of Engineers, which takes six years for a restoration project to do the permitting in a place like Florida or Louisiana, has never moved faster on any project ever. And we're going to basically be moving, careening toward approving the permit on this, you know, in right about now. Now they've kicked it back a few months because everybody, including the state of Alaska, including Lisa Murkowski, including Department of the Interior, have said, whoa, your analysis is woefully inadequate. You're not looking at all these potential impacts. So, but we still think the Corps of Engineers is going to issue a permit,

which means litigation is going to begin. But what it also means is that, you know, the mining company, Northern Dynasty, may get an infusion of cash because the stock price is bound to go up at that point. And it makes this thing far more viable than it's been any time in the past 15 years. Yeah. I don't want to tell you about this crazy bet I have about Pebble Mine. I'm not going to tell you about it. Okay. With my sister-in-law.

It's a brutal thing. You're talking about a landscape where you couldn't maintain a kiddie pool out there from overflowing or rupturing for any amount of time. I mean, the groundwater is on the surface, and the surface water comes down in frickin' deluge buckets constantly. It's just a recipe for disaster. And you're in an active fault zone. I mean, you have volcanoes erupting within 75 miles. And listen, there are a lot of places in Alaska

that make total sense for mining. There are a lot of really good mines in Alaska. This is not about being anti-mining. This is about the worst place you could ever pick to put a mine is, you know, top of Bristol Bay. What I'm curious to see, I don't say this lightly and I wouldn't say about a lot of things, but I'm curious to see what role that civil disobedience would come into play were they to actually go in and break ground to start extracting resources it's become such a line in the sand issue for such a broad array of individuals from the native community native alaskans sportsmen commercial environmentalists, commercial fishermen. I wonder if it would be that there would be,

I just feel like if not, like this would be the kind of thing that would inspire civil disobedience. It's so hard though, because it's like, look at where it is. You know, like the winter population of King Salmon, Alaska is like very, very few. Yeah.

The summer population in anything that would probably be hard to make a human chain out of that too no i know but it's like if if if we can't protect i think people look at as a line in the sand issue because if you can't protect bristol bay if it's not worth protecting bristol bay i think people would be like, so that means nothing is. That wasn't good enough? Yeah. That would mean to a lot of people like, okay, we're done. Yep.

Because nothing's sacred. Yep. Anyway, this is going to, you know, I don't think they're going to be breaking ground anytime soon. This is going to be extensively litigated if the permit is issued. So, you know, part of us, you know, running out the clock and hope you get a more friendly administration and that we'll actually do something good for Bristol-Benn. Or that the current administration will change tack on it. Yeah, I mean, which is entirely possible.

Yeah. Yeah. He listens to public opinion on a lot of issues. Just got to hit him on the Twitter feed. 2020 Outlook. Thumbs in, thumbs out, up, down. You know, I think we're going to get some stuff done. Really?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to... Did you play, Phil, you got the noise in there? You know the noise? Yeah, sort of, yeah. Obviously... That's all we need right now. You have two things that are going to make progress on anything difficult. Impeachment and the election.

Progress on anything? Anything. Do you wish the impeachment hadn't happened just because it makes everything so hard to do? progress on anything difficult impeachment and the election progress on anything anything do you wish the impeachment hadn't happened just because it makes everything so hard to do or is that not something you're comfortable getting into i'm not going to get into that one okay so i just think that it is what it is now the way it happened i gotta deal with it yeah we gotta deal with it now the way the rules are set up they're gonna yeah basically the impeachment sounds like they're gonna convene at one o'clock every day so which means we have some period in the morning to get a little bit of business done but basically it's it's uh you know it's a different distraction so I know that what's been I'll just tell you Whit this isn't Whit

talking it's me talking what's been frustrating about this thing is going through with something won't happen. It's not going to happen. That's all. It feels to me like, let's say I was going to, I'm like, I'm going to dig a hole. And Cal's like, no matter how much you dig,

I will fill that hole back in. And I can guarantee you that I will fill the hole back in. But I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to dig it anyway. And then spend a bunch of money doing it. Go on. Yep. So again, you could be right, but it is what it is and we're going to work around it. So I am right. Yeah. So anyway, in an election year, you know, there you, you really have until say the May to get stuff done. And then everything gets too tied up with politics. And then you have another window after the election until the new Congress. And some radical stuff can happen during that window.

Big time. So first of all, you're trying to clear the deck of a lot of easy stuff right now in the next month or two. And I think that – I'm sorry, real quick. How much time, okay. The, the impeachment is going on now, or, you know, the Senate trial is going on now. Not yet, but it will start soon time soon. So how much, so forget that part of it. How much time of activity do we have before the election cycle just throws everything into chaos?

End of May. End of chaos? End of May. End of May. End of May. And then everybody's just thinking about that. Yeah. I mean, you may some, you know, a few things, odds and ends get done, but basically it's just, you know, everybody's out campaigning. It's too political.

So everything gets put on hold until after the election, in which case when you come back and a buttload of stuff gets done between, you know, that first week in November and the new Congress gets sworn in. Whether it's an outgoing administration or an empowered administration that doesn't need to worry about re-election. Yeah. I mean, you have the dynamic of what happens with the Senate, what happens with the House, what happens with the president. But at a minimum, it's a place where you can get a bunch of stuff done. Yeah. And because you have retiring members, and there are a lot of them on, you know, on both sides, you know, who are going to say, you know, that, all right, this is a chance.

I don't actually have to be political. I can do what's right for a change because I don't run for re-election. And, you know, get stuff done there. So anyway, I think there are some opportunities. I mean, I think there is a, you know, sort of a broad wildlife bill, you know, that we've been, you know, putting through that has, through that has a bunch of non-controversial stuff. NAWCA reauthorization. Tell me what that is.

North American Wetlands Conservation Act, which funds wetland restoration and protection around the country. It's funded about $50 million. That gets reauthorized. They're creating a CWD task force. There is the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation reauthorization, the authorization of a national fish habitat bill, which is essentially the fish equivalent of the North American Wetlands Conservation Act. All this stuff is non-controversial

and has been passed by committees or by houses or one body or the other. This is all going to get bundled and it's doing right now. We expect actually to pass the Senate last night. It didn't probably pass today and go over to the house. So this becomes a bunch of good stuff, which is not controversial and everybody can agree on. We can get that done quick. So I think that's good. Besides – oh, go ahead. I mentioned the fact that Murkowski wants to do an energy bill as soon as basically impeachment wraps up before things get too political. That may be another opportunity for a bunch of public lands provisions. So I think there will be some things like that to get done.

But a lot of the focus is going to be on the election and what happens after the election. And honestly, what TRCP will do is we will start developing – we'll do scenario planning. If Trump loses, if Trump wins, if the Senate flips, the Senate doesn't flip. All these different scenarios and that sort of, you know. How are you going to keep conservation at the front of it? And then what do we need to do and what are the priorities and how do we present them? I mean, climate is going to be a big issue because, you know, even, you know, the deniers are recognizing that they can't, you know, not deal with this for very much longer.

Yeah, I would imagine. I mean, everyone does. I mean, if the administration, I mean, never mind, like, what will happen in the House and Senate. If the administration switches, there's going to be a ton of, I'm guessing, a ton of climate activity. I think even if it doesn't switch, there's going to be a bunch.

If you look at the polling, you know, you look at Republicans under the age of 30, climate is number one or one of the top issues. So, you know, the party has to deal with that younger folks who recognize this is an issue and need to deal with it in some fashion. So I think you're, now, you're not going to see a Green New Deal, maybe, but you're going to see, particularly on the land side.

Oh, I think the Green. I mean, again, what you're going to see, though, I think is things that folks, again, generally agree on. Yeah, you've got to reduce some emissions, but you also have to do an investment on the land. Sequestration, you know, adaptation, resilience. And those are things that our community loves, that are great for fish and wildlife, and that I think Democrats and Republicans can agree on. So you could see some sort of climate package with that sort of focus moving forward.

So I think there are going to be some opportunities moving forward, but a lot of it is what we do this year is positioning ourselves for 2021 and beyond you know what's interesting is uh in a coming up pretty soon through my kids schools there's this night where they can go do it's like this technology night my wife understands better than i do but anyway she was prevent she was presenting that with them the menu of things because you go down and you pick like four seminars your kids pick four seminars they want to go to and our um seven-year-old nine-year-old were picking which seminars they wanted to go to this night you roll through them and the seminars were like the year in the life of a grizzly sturgeon migrations um a thing about developing computer apps.

It's like half wildlife stuff and half non-wildlife stuff. And one of the things was this sort of like climate change primer. My daughter very readily picked that one along with the other ones she wanted to do. And my boy, without too much persuasionasion added the climate one in with one about native american games and uh sturgeon i really wanted him to go into uh waterfowl migration but he didn't do that one you can only win so much but it's uh it was a thing that they're aware of right this morning we woke up to check muskrat traps in the dark, and it was warm out. And my son goes, is this because of all the garbage?

And I'm like, well, you're confusing two issues, but let's talk about that. And quick question, are the kids referring to these as seminars? It's got to be like a presentation. I haven't heard them use the word seminar. It was more presented to them like, you're going to this. We signed you up for this thing. You need to pick which ones sound good. And so we read over dinner.

I don't know. There's a dozen things to choose from, whatever. She read through all the descriptions and then put their initials by the ones. And they had too many, so they had to narrow it down. Got it. I think Sturgeon Migrations was top. I told them, you got to go down there and then come tell me what you learned. Yeah, I like it. I like it. I think Sturgeon Migrations was top. I told them, you got to go down there and then come tell me what you learned. Yeah, I like it.

I like it. I'm just going to be real confused if I show up at the house and your kids are like, so Cal, went and saw a seminar the other day. I'm like, really? I don't know if they'll frame it that way. I'll be curious to see how they tell you about it. They will tell you about it. I don't know what they'll use. I don't think they'll use seminar.

That's awesome. Probably like a thing maybe. We were at a thing. Yeah. Went to a show. You know what's funny today? We're out in the dark. Checking muskrat traps.

It's dark and we're in this spot where there's that flex pipe. It's like eight inch flex pipe plastic. And it's coming out of, there's a chunk where it's coming out of the ground. And snakes across the ground. And it goes in under the ice on a pond someone's doing like some kind of drainage project and we're hanging around there near there in the dark and then later my four-year-old is talking about what's up with the big animal with the big tail? And I'm like, you mean a muskrat? Because he has a big, long tail.

And I'm like, the muskrat? No. Uh-uh. You know, the one that can't move? Can we bring that home? And so I get confused. We're about 100 yards away. And I give him the flashlight. I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Let's go back and take a look. And we go back, and he shines a light at that black flex pipe, 12 feet of black flex pipe running between the dirt and the ice. And he's like, that thing, that's what, what's, you know, what animal has that tail? Big one. I'm like, that would be, I would not be standing here were that an animal's tail. That's chunk flex pipe. He thought it had got frozen in so hard that it was just stuck yeah what's your state of uh waterfowl right now getting real interested in waterfowl again and it seems like there's the data between migratory waterfowl against like our songbird data right now is oddly in opposition.

How so? Where it's like, well, we've lost billions of songbirds in the United States, but waterfowl seems to really be kicking ass. With the exception of like pintails seem to be taking a hurt. Geese in the Atlantic fly right now are actually down. It was one bird limit in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting.

So, no, I think that, you know, the answer is that, you know, we pay a lot more attention to waterfowl because we have dedicated hunters. We have dedicated funding for it. It's a priority, whereas songbirds, it's not. And which is really, there's another bill in Congress called the Restore America's Wildlife Act that would put some dedicated funding toward these non-game species, which the states have responsibility for managing, but really have no dedicated resources to manage. So, no, I agree with you is that I think the situation probably on a bunch of the songbirds is even worse than we think because our data is pretty poor. Real quick. Is it quick? Is it possible to explain like why from a conservation standpoint?

What's up with ethanol? Like I get it, but I get it a little bit. But tell me, why is ethanol part of – why does it matter from what we're looking at? So ethanol has sort of a long and checkered sort of environmental history. It was originally created both to supplement markets for farmers, but also when during the oil crisis as a domestically produced transportation fuel. Yeah, you better explain like from the high, high level what we're talking about. Yeah, so this is basically you take corn

and you can do it with other cellulosic plants and you convert it into a fuel. And it's the same way you'd make alcohol. In fact, with ethanol, you got to put a denaturant in it to keep you from drinking it.

So it's, you know, same as grain alcohol, you know, and it, you know, runs pretty well in cars and, you know, it's been used for years going back to Henry Ford as a transportation fuel.

You even have race car drivers use it or methanol in some of their cars today. But the issue became when Congress basically created an ethanol mandate. And under the Renewable Fuel Standard, which expires in, I think, 2021 or 2022, essentially 10% of the nation's gasoline fleet has to be ethanol. Now, the goal had been originally that that transition from corn ethanol to cellulosic ethanol over time, switchgrass, kudzu, and who knows what the hell you'd make it out of. But something other than corn. Fragrant mighties? Sure.

Do it for it. I mean, it all depends on the starch content, I guess, of where the plant is. Steve Kendra, he's listening in. But the problem is that that transition has never happened. It stayed with corn ethanol. And when you had that time of like go-go corn prices, when we lost 6 million acres of pasture and grassland to row crops, it was that ethanol mandate that was largely driving that.

Okay. So a lot of pheasant hunters, duck hunters can't stand ethanol because they see it, the mandate as creating basically an artificial incentive to convert habitat for, you know, corn. And, you know, a lot of the, you know, urban, you know, folks that don't like high food prices see it as, you know, an abomination too because it's food that's now going to a fuel in basically a subsidized way. So, you know, I felt a lot more strongly about it, you know, when, you know, prices were high and we're seeing all this conversion. It's hard to, you know, again, right now, nothing's going to happen before the renewable fuel standard comes back up for Congress and Congress decides what to do with it. But when you go back to the dismal state of the farm economy right now, I just think that even groups that don't like the ethanol mandate

are backing off a little bit right now because- It's just on hold. Yeah, because you just don't want to do anything else to make life even worse in ag country. When you see a gas station with giant signs talking about ethanol-free, are they performance? Yeah, so that's an issue. That's not them being pro or against or whatever.

No, it's farming. A lot of the old equipment, especially things like chainsaws, snowmobiles, couldn't handle ethanol. So when it was first moved into the gas stream at 10% blends, there were a lot of problems with some of those small engines in particular. I could never tell if they were being political or they were just talking about how you could get good boat gas there. that 10% blends, there were a lot of problems with some of those small engines in particular. Now, all those engines- I can never tell if they're being political or they're just talking about how you could get good boat gas there.

So all basically, today, all essentially modern engines can deal with 10% ethanol. The problem is that the ethanol industry, which is pretty greedy, has been trying to get the blender percentage kicked up to 15%, and EPA has approved that. Now, at 15% ethanol, you could have a very modern outboard engine on your twin 250s on your big boat going out offshore. What about my 60-40 Honda jet? It'll screw that up too. The 15% ethanol. Now, in theory, it ought to be labeled, and especially marinas won't be selling it, but a lot of guys will fill up the gas can and take it out to their boat and pour it in. And it does really bad things to engines. And again, it's just another sort of artificial subsidy

that we really shouldn't be doing. National Marine Manufacturers Association, American Sport Fishing Association have lobbied vigorously. Oh, really? Against increasing that ethanol percentage in gasoline because of what it does to marine engines. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah. that's interesting thank you good that

answer some of my own questions but it's been approved anyway avoid e15 on anything in your outboard engines there had ours our small engine expert with Fossberg and I've just tapped the extent of my knowledge of small engines all right man any final things any conclud. Any final things? Any concluders? Any final things we didn't get to? No. I mean, you were influential in making our list. Yeah.

No, I think, first of all, I appreciate you guys actually paying attention to this stuff and caring about it. Because, again, most people would rather talk about deer stand placement or hunting coos deer in Mexico or whatever it is, which is a lot more fun. But, yeah, this is the backbone of what we have in this country in terms of hunting and fishing. And if we don't pay attention to this, we're going to lose it. Well, thank you for paying attention to it. Well, thank you guys for paying attention. And thank you for coming on.

We seem to schedule it regularly, but it can't be like once a year. Maybe do a mid-year check-in. Sure. Six-month check-up. You know what? Every time my kids go to the dentist, I'm going to have you on. All my six-month stuff will just have, like, dentist, wit. I'll be associated with family pain.

That's good. Okay. Be good, like, election cycle, too. Be like, all right, here's our conservation-minded candidates. Yeah. You know what? Maybe they'll come on. You want to talk about getting people pissed is if you come on right before election time.

I think I'm going to avoid that one. I'll come in right after the election time. Come on. Hey, we're a 501c3. We don't pick sides. Oh, that's true. Yeah. No, that's true.

We don't pick sides. Yeah. As TRCP is a nonprofit organization, you guys don't play at that level. We don't have a C4. We don't have a PAC, so we just don't get engaged. Yeah. And you guys work both sides. We've got to work both sides.

What I like about TRCP is you're respectful of bipartisan process, and you strive to be just like as effective as is humanly possible. Well, I think that's a niche our community has always had. And I think that's when Jim Range created the organization back in 2002, that was his idea. And I think it stands true today that these are issues that ought to unite and not divide. And they shouldn't be political. Yeah. Plus you hate fishing and hunting. Yeah, well, then they're political

alright thanks again oh Cal did you have a concluder? what's your shirt say on it? I can't oh I got this for being in a ski race in Sun Valley you're commemorating the fact that Sun Valley was what formed in 1936? I just feel like

this is a comfortable sweatshirt. I feel like it was probably formed millions of years ago, Cal. Yeah. Yeah. Highly volcanic area. It's pretty young. Oh, 1936.

It was just flat until 1936 and it became a valley. That's a fun fact for you. Cal's shirt says Sun Valley, 1936. Oh, I think on the, on the, your selection of political candidates, i just like to tell people it's like you're gonna always gonna have to fight for something right so you have somebody who you

feel is going to give you an easy out on a topic you're still going to have to if you select that person to vote for and they make it in you're still going to have to, if you select that person to vote for and they make it in, you're still going to have to push them on the other things that you believe in. Oh, yeah. So this is just the way it works. One plus part of our job is to educate. I mean, you have less and less members of Congress coming from rural America. I mean, there are some much more suburban, urban focus now. And so if some member says, you know, we're just going to have to cook our meat more for CWD, that's not because they're a bad person. It's just because they don't understand the issue,

and it's up to us to educate them. But I think that people, when it comes to selecting candidates that you're going to vote for, I think a lot of people look like, I pick my person, and then I look to them to see what I think about anything. Right? So I just go with what they say. Another way of looking at it is you pick your person and you're, you're balancing out,

you're making a selection one between two things, you pick them. And then I'm going to pick them. And then I'm going to move them in my direction on all the things I don't agree with them on or work my hardest. And people get uncomfortable with that because they think that when you, that your selection of a candidate is basically, you're saying that's me rather than saying part of that's me, but I really need them to move my direction on a bunch of other stuff. And I'm going to do everything I can in my power

to make sure that the whole, that things move in my direction. I'm choosing you as the person that I want to then be heard from and get you to see my side. Right. You good? Phil's good. What's your shirt about, Phil? You got a wine shirt on? This is my friend's. My friend runs a winery in Kalispell. Tailing Loop Wines. Check it out

next time. Does he grow the grapes up there or he buys them from somewhere else? She brings them in from different parts of Washington and puts them in barrels in Kalispell. And you like that wine? Yeah. It's like a fly fishing term, right? Tailing Loop? Yep, yep. It's a fly fishing themed winery.

Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. And you love the wine? I like wine. You don't fish? I like her wine. No. She's got some great I like her wine. No.

She's got some great art on the labels, though. You're going to start fishing, too, now that you're going to start hunting? I don't know. I went fly fishing once with Cal, and it didn't go well. So I need to get better. You didn't enjoy yourself? I had a great time. Then it sounds like it went very well.

Your friends got a very inefficient winery because it's fly fishing themed. How much property do you own, Phil? Oh, I own like about 11,000 square feet. I don't think about it in acres. I was going to see if I could come out and trap your place for muskrats. No, sorry. You don't have like a pond or anything that's all getting messed up by muskrats.

No, no, no. Alright, thanks again, Whit. Thank you, guys. We'll go out. This is like the doctor. On your way out, I want you to schedule your next visit. Okay. Whit Fosberg, TRCP. Thanks for listening. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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