A4s—Lancaster Farming, Friday, July 3,1981
WASHINGTON. D.C. ~ The
nationwide federally sponsored
Adopt-A-Horse Program, which
finds homes for excess wild horses
and burros removed from western
public rangelands, will undergo a
major change this fall to make the
operation more self-sustaining,
Robert Burford, Director of the
Interior Department’s Bureau of
Lackawanna agent
receives dairy awards
SCRANTON - Thomas B.
Jurchak, Lackawanna County
Extension director, recently won
two awards for his work with dairy
farmers.
He received the fourth annual
“Service to Dairying” Award from
the American Dairy Association
and Dairy Council for editing the
“Milk Marketing Newsletter.”
Jurchak also was named
“Agricultural Man of the Year” by
Eastern Milk Producers for his
outstanding contributions to
agribusiness and dedication to
dairy farmers.
He uses a variety of teaching
methods to make the milk
marketing subject interesting and
informative. Workshops involve
participants in a learning situation
by actually solving marketing
problems.
Farmers attending workshops in
Lackawanna County bring
requests from Extension agents in
adjacent counties to conduct
sessions in their counties. As a
result, 53 meetings have been
conducted in 10 Pennsylvania
counties in the past three years.
PENNSYIVANIA AGRICULTURE
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Adopt-A-Horse has new
1-and Management, announced
recently.
Burford said that starting Oc
tober 1, BLM will charge a fixed
fee of $2OO for a wild horse and $75
for a burro, with the money to be
applied toward the actual cost of
removing and placing animals
with adopters. Transportation
Jurchak is author of the “Milk
Marketing Newsletter” that is
distributed to 26,000 dairymen in
six northeastern Pennsylvania
counties. New York, and New
England. His newsletter, The Milk
Check, is a regular feature in
Lancaster Fanning.
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Thomas B. Jurchak
Insecticide
costs, if any, will be additional.
"Increasing adoption tees for
wild horses and burros is long
overdue,” Burford said. "This
year, BLM will spend $4.4 million
subsidizing the Adopt-A-Horse
Program. In a tune of fiscal
austerity, we consider this an
inappropriate use of federal
•funds.”
He added that the Office of
Management and Budget and the
House Committee on Interior and
Insular Affairs in the past have
urged BLM to make the adoption
program more self-supporting.
“While the fixed basic fee system
is not the total solution, it is a step
toward getting the program closer
to paying for itself,” Burford said.
The new fees charged by BLM
will also apply to excess horses and
burros gathered from public lands
administered by the Agriculture
Department’s Forest Service and
placed through BlM’s Adopt-A-
Horse Program. In isolated cases,
where the Forest Service removes
small numbers of animals for
adoption locally, the fee will reflect
the actual costs of capturing and
placing the animals in adoption.
Fees paid by adopters today
range from $0 to $25 for a horse or
burro picked up at a BLM corral in
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fee program
the West to $145 for a horse tran
sported from Nevada to Tennessee
tor pickup at BlM’s wild horse and
bun-o adoption center in Cross
Plains, one of four such centers
across the country. The U.S.
Government absorbs about $3OO of
the cost of capturing and placing
each animal with an adopter.
The practice of removing wild
horses and burros from the public
lands and placing them in the
custody of qualified individuals
began after passage of the Wild
Free-Roaming Horse and Burro
Act of 1971. Protected under the
Act on lands administered by the
Bureau of Land Management and
the Forest Service, horse and
burro populations increased and
removals of excess animals
became necessary.
BIM placed the first wild horses
in 1973 when 23 excess horses were
removed from the Pryor Mountain
Wild Horse Range in Montana. The
next year, BLM began an adoption
program in Oregon, followed by
Nevada in 1975. The adoption
program was launched nationwide
in spring 1976. To date, more than
29,000 wild horses and burros have
been placed with adopters in 48
states. Applications requesting
more than 35,000 animals are
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currently on file with BLM.
When announcing the new fee
policy, Burford said, "further
changes in the management of
wild horses and burros are
inevitable. Even though BLM has
spent more than $27 million for
their management since 1971, we
have been unable to keep pace with
their population growth. Range
conditions in many herd areas
worsen year by year. ’ ’
Burford said, “If horses and
burros are allowed to destroy the
range, they destroy it for all. The
wild horse and burro herds suffer.
Livestock suffers, as do bighorn
sheep, antelope and the many
other forms of wildlife that inhabit
the public rangelands.”
An estimated 70,000 wild horses
and burros roam the public
rangelands in Arizona, California,
Colorado, Idaho, Montana,
Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon,
Utah, and Wyoming. Fifty-eight
percent of the animals are on
public lands in Nevada.
According to BLM projections,
44,000 of the current estimated
population of 70,000 wild horses
and burros must be removed from
the public rangelands before an
effective management level is
reached.
HOIST