Ranchers Want to Preserve Agricultural Facilities at New Mexico State U.

Ranchers are asking New Mexico State University to retain its livestock facilities on the campus, along with the agricultural education that goes with them.

“When I went to school there, we’d go into the classroom, start on a lecture, and we’d walk literally a few hundred feet out and get hands-on experience,” Ty Bays, a Grant County rancher and New Mexico State graduate, told the Associated Press. “You don’t see that at every university and in fact, it’s disappearing at a lot of our land-grant universities.”

Officials at the instituion say the campus master plan calls for preserving the livestock facilities. But the article notes that the university was criticized when it leased land to the city of Las Cruces to build a convention center. That land, critics said, should have been used for agricultural research.