An Arizona rancher told President Trump on Friday that Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs would have taken his land away and given it to a foreign renewable energy company if the Trump administration had not intervened.
Casey Murph, a fifth-generation Arizona rancher who leases land from the state for his H-Y Cattle Company in Navajo County, said that Hobbs wants to take away his land for a Danish energy company, Ørsted, to develop.
According to American Stewarts of Liberty, Murph’s family has used the roughly 4,000 acres of land in Northern Arizona since the 1870s, decades before Arizona even became a state in 1912.
In 2022, Murph began receiving notices from the state that foreign developers wanted his land for a renewable-energy project. In 2025, Hobbs signed an executive order granting large-scale energy infrastructure manufacturers priority access to state lands and easing restrictions on the so-called green energy projects.
“Her task force created a map of all the state lands throughout the state and color-coded those lands according to solar favorability,” Murph previously said, noting that his land was designated as less suitable for agriculture than renewable energy.
During an executive order signing ceremony on Friday, Murph revealed to the President that Hobbs wants to kick him off his family’s land of over a century to build a solar energy plant.
“It’s been in my family for over 100 years. Katie Hobbs has offered those lands up to solar development companies,” Murph said.
“If it had not been for your Secretary of Agriculture, I would already be gone, sir. She’s managed to hold him off, not permanently, but if it hadn’t been for her, I would not be a rancher anymore.”
WATCH:
Trump signed an executive order titled “Supporting America’s Ranchers” on Friday to remove the gray wolf and the Mexican wolf from the protected species list.
The President said that the order “authorizing ranchers to protect rural communities and cattle herds from predatory Mexican greywolves, which are costing them tens of millions of dollars and endangering not only herds but people.”
“You can shoot them as of today,” pending a determination by the Secretary of the Interior to delist or downlist the wolves under the Endangered Species Act, Trump told the ranchers.
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