For 50 years, this rancher followed labor law. As big ag lobbies for amnesty, he is about to lose his legal crew.
Nevada rancher Hank Vogler says bureaucrats have made the H-2A farmworker program a "living hell."
Hank Vogler has spent much of his 76 years in sheep camp. He built his livestock empire over decades of hot days in the Nevada sun and cold nights under a high desert moon. The Need More Sheep Company runs 14,000 sheep and 1,000 cattle in Spring Valley north of Las Vegas. That could all change if the Department of Labor (DOL) suspends his access to H-2A workers on what Vogler says are spurious accusations.
“They’ll take away my life’s work,” the rancher says. “They will not relent. I’m not using illegal workers like some in agriculture, I’m using the H-2A program, and the government is making it a living hell.”
As the Trump administration ramps up deportation efforts, Vogler says he is looking at the loss of his business for hiring foreign workers the right way for almost 50 years.
“I’ve been in the H-2A program since 1977. The regulations keep getting tougher and tougher. It’s like Chinese water torture—drip, drip, drip. Those bureaucrats just sit around making more rules and regulations, their job is to make it onerous. It will be the end of people in agriculture. We need an H-2A program run by people who understand what the hell is going on.”
The last sheep man in Nevada
There aren’t many sheepmen left in the American West. A convention of Nevada sheepherders could meet in a phone booth, Vogler quips. Most hire South American shepherds through the H-2A visa program. It’s a tough job; in 54 years, Vogler has managed to get just about four Americans on his crew. Vogler can’t relate to the lack of interest. He doesn’t think there could be a better life than his own; the grit, grime, and starry nights in high desert camp, watching sheep.
This is all he’s ever wanted to do. Born Henry Conrad Vogler IV, he set out to be like his grandfather, the Oregon ranching legend everyone called Hank. He became Little Hank. But he built his place from scratch; he didn’t inherit a dime.
“It only takes about 50 years to be an overnight success, didn’t you know that?”
A cowboy with a college education from the University of Nevada, Reno, it was Basque immigrants out in sheep camp who gave him his “doctorate in shepherding.” Above no job, Vogler worked in slaughterhouses, dairies, grocery stores, welding, sheering sheep, building barns, shoeing horses. The only job that didn’t work out was for an insurance company that loaned to agriculture. An agriculture degree plus an agriculture background made him a rare commodity; the company courted him fresh out of college. But he couldn’t turn a farmer down for a loan and would have shortly “broke the bank.”
“I knew what it was like to be in agriculture. It’s always down to the last dollar.”
Before long he managed to buy a couple cows, seven sheep. That was the beginning of his herd.
“As a card-carrying cowboy, I didn’t know anything about sheep. But you can own 10,000 cows and nobody will call you a cowboy. Own one sheep and everybody will call you a sheepherder. They’ll stop by and tell you sheep jokes.”
Vogler has a quick wit, a wealth of knowledge and life experience. He is multi-lingual—as he puts it, he can get his face slapped in six or seven languages (Spanish, French, Basque, German, Shoshone Indian, Mandarin Chinese, and “a little bit of English, but it has a bunkhouse flavor”).
At six feet tall, broad-shouldered, weather-worn and wise, he outgrew the “Little” moniker long ago. Now he’s just Hank, one of the last sheep men in Nevada. To the guys on his outfit, he’s patron. The way Vogler describes it, they’re a tight-knit bunch. He’s godfather to three children born to the crew, one is named for him. To this day, he works shoulder-to-shoulder with his men. There’s not a job on the place he won’t do himself.
“Now I have government people who have no affinity or empathy for what I do, who want to put me out of business. It’s all been hard work, and they’re taking it from me by a thousand paper cuts.”
Las Vegas water wars
Vogler believes his longstanding conflict with the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) is behind this latest threat to his operation. He thinks SNWA wants his land for a multi-billion dollar pipeline project to truck water from Spring Valley into Las Vegas. He points out the golf courses and hotel water features of Sin City.
“Southern Nevada Water Authority bought all the ranches from my house south, and now they realize I’m the canary in the coal mine,” he says. “I’m one of the last ranches in Spring Valley. They’re the big dog, and they’ve got the political capital. If they ever build that pipeline, my springs and my water sources will go dry. I own water rights, and they need them. I would be first in line.”
Bronson Mac, a spokesperson for SNWA, denies this.
“While we have had disagreements with Mr. Vogler in the past, we are not aware of any labor disputes or challenges that he’s having with staffing,” Mac says.
Precipitating incident
It all started when a sheepdog got out. One of the ranch’s Peruvian workers tracked the dog to a nearby ranch. The worker asked the rancher for a glass of water. According to Vogler, this neighbor did not speak Spanish, and called another neighbor named Bernard Peterson. Peterson manages a ranch for the SNWA.
Vogler then got a call from the sheriff.
“But the sheriff knew my operation,” Vogler says. “Thank God.”
He recalls the sheriff telling him that Peterson had called both the sheriff’s office and the local ambulance service, claiming that Vogler’s men were living in squalor, starving, and abused. Vogler says Peterson also contacted DOL and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Inspection from DOL
On December 23, 2023, a DOL representative called Vogler up. They’d be paying the ranch a visit. Vogler suggested they wait until spring. He was bewildered when the rep asked if the weather was different out at his ranch than in sunny Las Vegas.
“I said, well ma’am there is a little bit of difference,” Vogler says, still incredulous. There was so much snow on the ground Vogler had to break open the road every morning with a Caterpillar, followed by a truck bringing groceries out to sheep camp. “I said, it’s an open-air Cat, you can ride with me, but you should wear a heavy coat.”
Vogler now kicks himself for the courtesy. He was written up as uncooperative for his suggestion. That was strike one. The reps came when the weather was better.
After hours of inspecting his ranch and visiting every remote sheep camp, Vogler says he felt good. His place had been visited before in 2015 and passed with flying colors; not a single fine.
He was shocked when the agents read him a list of infractions. Vogler lists them off: At a camp 180 miles out, some rice that couldn’t fit in the designated sealed container was left in the bottom of a bag—a food safety violation, according to the agents. At another camp, a pail of water on a fence left for the horses was declared “stagnant” and therefore a danger. At the bunkhouse, the men’s beds were “five inches too close to the floor.” The pegs were there, Vogler says, but the workers took them off.
“Patron, I can’t put my boots on while sitting on the bed,’ they tell me. That’s how practical that rule is.”
DOL also claimed one of his workers, “Sebastian,” who left mid-contract and returned to Peru, was not properly documented. Sebastian shares a name with his son, who still works at the ranch. The DOL received all of the appropriate paperwork, Vogler says, but got father and son mixed up.
DOL sent an official letter notifying Vogler he owed $42,662.20 in fines and would lose access to the H-2A worker program for three years. Vogler was blindsided. He says suspending his visa program will be the end of his ranch. If he loses his crew, he’ll lose everything.
“If the remedy is to take away my men for three years, that’s the end of me.”
His daughter is set to take over the ranch one of these days, though not if the United States government has their way, Vogler says.
“Fortunately they haven’t come out and shot any of my grandkids yet. I think that’s real big of them. But they’ve taken away their future, and my daughter’s future.”
The DOL did not return a request for comment.
“It’s bullsh*t.”
Luis Rivas Reyes came from Chile in 1993 to work in the U.S. as an H-2A worker. He has been part of the Vogler outfit for 20 years. It’s by far the best company he’s ever worked for, Reyes says.
“It’s perfect here. I don’t know who the people are who said anything bad about the boss. At other ranches, the food is not very good. Here, the food is perfect. We have everything we need. I don’t know what happened. It’s bullshit.
He says Vogler buys anything his men require whenever Reyes asks him to, and he never docks pay for broken equipment.
“He only buys a new one and says nothing,” Reyes says.
He confirms Vogler’s story about Sebastian, the Peruvian worker who broke contract and left the ranch for Peru. He says the beds and food at the bunkhouse and sheep camps are “perfect.”
“Anything I need, my boss buys for me. Hank works hard, all the time he is working with me. He does the same job as me.”
Another sheep rancher confirmed this impression of the Need More Sheep Company. He requested anonymity, concerned about putting a bullseye on his own operation.
The rancher describes Vogler as brilliant, well-spoken, and ethical. Some of his own H-2A workers work on Vogler’s outfit during the slow season. If there was an issue with treatment of workers, the rancher claims, he would have heard about it. Instead, he says his men come back with nothing but compliments on the conditions and management of the Vogler ranch.
“This is way overboard and I’ll back Hank up all the way to the Supreme Court,” the rancher says. “It’s harassment, un-American, and damn near communist. They’re forcing Hank to spend money on an attorney to defend himself, and he is in the right. That’s the terrible injustice of it all, but that’s what these groups do. They come after you and you have to defend yourself. It’s wrong, it’s total bullshit, and they’re doing this to the ranching community everywhere, especially in Nevada.”
Punished for hiring legal workers?
Vogler felt the DOL inspectors were out to get him from the moment they set foot on his ranch.
“They have it in mind that my men are being abused. They get them by themselves and want them to talk trash. One guy threw his arms up and yelled at the inspector and walked off. I asked him what happened. He said, ‘I told her I didn’t have to talk to her. My daughter just graduated from college and she’s got it made for life in Peru because I work on this outfit. I get paid well and I get fed well and I got a place to sleep. You want me to talk trash on that man? You can go to hell.’”
Vogler has hired a “baseball team of lawyers” to defend himself.
An administrative law judge in Los Angeles has ordered Vogler to contact all of his men who are considered “remote” every day to check up on them. Vogler says Judge Andrew Katz classifies “remote” as “one mile from a sheriff’s department, one mile from a hospital, or one mile from an electrical service.” Charging cell phones by solar panels in camp is also not acceptable.
This definition of “remote” by Judge Katz would encompass the vast majority of the American West.
“There’s a couple camps where we have to use mules to get in and out,” Vogler says, “Now we have to pack a 12-volt battery with us and the men have to go every couple days to charge their cell phones?”
Coming up in this business, Vogler is used to rough conditions and sparse comforts. His camps are luxury accommodations by comparison. His men are tough, self-reliant, professional herdsmen. The high-touch check-ins seem absurd to him, even disrespectful.
“All these guys have an iPhone, electricity, lights. Sixteen men all within spitting distance of each other. I have to call every one of them constantly? It’s extortion.”
There’s a brotherhood Vogler feels with his crew, stark against his scorn for bureaucrats in air-conditioned offices in cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Out here in Spring Valley, there are no weekends or holidays.
“You gotta take care of the animals on Christmas same as any other day, and I’m there with my men,” he says. “If you want to be successful, if you don’t take care of your people and don’t make them feel like the most important cog in the wheel, you’re an idiot.”
Life of a sheepherder
Vogler doesn’t mince words. When he believes someone is wrong, he tells them so, to their face. He likes to quote Winston Churchill: “Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.”
Not everyone who knows the legendary rancher would say he is diplomatic. Vogler is described by some as a lightning rod. Many are grateful for his willingness to fight it out with all-powerful entities others are frightened to cross.
Not one accuses him of being an unfair boss, afraid of hard work, or a man who took any shortcuts to his success.
“This was the American way I learned. You weren’t jealous of people who became successful, you were admiring of them. Now it’s like, if you’re successful, you must have done something wrong.”
He feels targeted for more than his success. His dogged love for a vanishing way of life makes him an outsider. He describes himself as a Bedouin. There aren’t many men or women left who have spent decades of their lives in a bunkhouse, moving animals across the arid rangeland of the West.
“My grandpa always used to say, nobody will ever get it until someone starves to death,” he says.
Being a sheepman is lonely. It’s unappreciated, grueling, and seems to attract the ire of the worst actors in government. Hank Vogler wouldn’t trade it.
“You roll out a bedroll at dark in a band of sheep, and the lambs come rolling and jumping and bucking and their mommies are all blatting trying to get them tucked into bed, and if that’s not Mozart I don’t know what is. It’s like a symphony to me. You can’t help it. You just thank God He made you to do what you’re doing.”
SNWA has been trying to drink Spring Valley dry for decades. We moved to Vegas in ‘97 and there seemed to be a story in the Journal about Spring valley quite often. Government needs to keep its hands off cattle and sheep people who feed us and keep us healthy. May God help this rancher beat back the ignorant city judges etc.
This is gorgeous writing, vivid and grounded. Such a pleasure to read.