The Public Grazing Conundrum
By Daryl L. Hunter, Unfiltered 10-01-06
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The face of the west is changing, what was once a frontier populated with hard scrabble farmers, loggers, miners, cowboys, and ranchers has been infiltrated and is getting gentrified by interlopers from the cities that have a new plan for their adopted home, part of this plan is to end the grazing of our public multipurpose lands.
Cattle grazing on our public lands has not always been an issue. Until recently cattle grazing was a natural part of the culture of the West. Cowboys, Indians, tumbleweeds and cows were the first thing to come to mind when thinking of the west. For the last couple of decades this perception has been muddied, a battle has been raging between cattle ranchers and environmentalists. The battle is rife with mistrust and misunderstanding by all.
Jon Marvel’s Western Watersheds Project (WWP) is the driving force to form the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign (NPLGC). The NPLGC is pushing Congress to authorize the voluntary buyout and permanent retirement of federal grazing permits. The WWP and the NPLGC believe a payment of $175 per animal unit month (AUM); will reduce the contentious and adversarial conflicts concerning grazing interests and environmentalists on federal land.
The buyouts are voluntary, but the buyout amount being almost triple the average value per AUM of federal grazing permits in today's market provides a powerful bribe for ranchers to succumb to the temptation. A rancher with 300 cows that graze on public lands for five months of the year, will net the rancher a $262,500 settlement. Some say that this expenditure is sound because WWP’s asserts $500 million annually is spent to administer public grazing will have a payback period of about six years after retirement of all grazing permits. The land area involved in 11 western states is about 270 million acres.
The General Accounting Office of the US government report concludes that federal agencies spent at least $144.3 million in direct and indirect expenditures to support grazing activities on federal lands in fiscal year 2004. A far cry from the WWP and NPLGC’s asserted figure. According the GAO grazing fees generated about $21 million in fiscal year 2004 less than one-sixth of the expenditures to manage grazing.
The WWP and NPLGC theorize permanent elimination of federal administrative costs of public grazing land will produce savings after the initial six-year payback. While the financial benefits of such a program are easily asserted, the environmental value of the plan seems to them even greater. By ending the negative impacts of livestock grazing will result in a rapid recovery of degraded riparian areas and all wildlife species dependent on them.
The WWP and NPLGC plan will change the face of public lands in the West. It will also greatly change the face of the private lands as well. Where there is great change there is also great opportunities for the law of unforeseen consequences
One unforeseen opportunity/ consequences that will result is millions of acres of previously useful hay production land of our western valleys that produced hay for the cattle that were grazed in the nearby public lands will have to find another use. These farms and ranches freshly freed from the bovine production industry will naturally evolve into something else, it isn’t too hard to guess that the highest and most profitable use of land is to subdivide it for profit creating millions of buying possibilities for America’s new insatiable appetite for rural living, and technology’s facilitation for them to be able to do so. Public land ranching maintains open space. 107 million acres of private ranch land are tied into public land grazing. Without access to public land forage, these ranches would be forced to sell out.
According to Rangelands Journal, 11,300 acres of farm and ranch land are lost to development each day. The greatest threat to biodiversity of plants and wildlife is fragmentation of habitat and public land ranching protects millions of acres of open habitat for rangeland species.
The influx of millions of gentleman farmers/ranchers will decimate wildlife much more than the evil cattleman did, every farmette will have a dog to see to it that no pesky grouse or other varmint is trespassing on the property. What the dog misses will be picked off by a 14 year-old with a 22. The exponential population growth will be matched with an equal increased visitation to all the beautiful public places. And the NPLGC and the WWP thought that a cow was destructive force in nature.
Daryl L. Hunter publishes the Jackson Hole region's Upper Valley Free Press
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Comments
leave the environmental consequentialism to the experts, it suits them better.
don't pretend to care about the environment, the disengenuousness of the article is obvious.
public lands belong to us all. when your cows degrade the riperian areas so critical to natural habitat, deface God's creation, and require tax-payers to pony up susbsidies to keep you folk competitive, that's not a respectful stewardship of public land. if i borrowed your car, i wouldn't give it back to you full of cigarette burns, a gouge in the paint job and an empty tank. that's disrespectful. you're borrowing a common trust, and not leaving it the way that you found it.
if you didn't have disdain for WWP they wouldn't be doing their job.
goodluck otherwise though...
This same pundit said, "I have a problem with those who feel they have the right to dictate how another uses his own property, and then forces him to pay for the effects." Does that mean that, since my grazing allotment is public property, I don't have any right to dictate, even though the fine print of my permit agreement actually says that I have an obligation to do so, that the public has to walk or ride horses and can't run their jeeps and motorcycles through my forests, across my pastures, cutting ruts, tearing out the native grasses that I just got done replanting, ruining the drip tanks that I just put in for the wildlife, and chasing my cattle? Now, because I needed to rework some old fences to improve my pasture control and let some of those native grass replantings get a good start, I did get a grant from the NRCS. Does that mean that I am forcing the actual owners of the property, the public, to pay for the effects of my ranching and that I don't have a right to do that?
Then this pundit says, "if the cost is too high, then the project can't be that worthwhile," which seems to be exactly what the WWP and NPLGC keep saying about all public lands grazing.
Yet, I AM "growing food for the masses;" so, I'm getting confused and depresssed trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do with all of this wisdom that's being so freely handed out. I guess I need to fall back on what I know myself. As a diehard conservationist and a public lands rancher, I know that these issues of public lands grazing, endangered species, land conservation, and population growth are all tied in a thorny knot of intertwined goals, compromises, natural factors, socioeconomic factors, and counterintuitive effects, all surrounded by an incredible amount of talk coming from people who have more wind than intellect or knowledge. None of this "wisdom by strong assertion" is really helping the debate.
This Daryl Hunter makes some good points. There are a lot of ranches out there where the base property is only a tiny fraction of the size of the associated public lands and, in these cases, it can be debated whether keeping development off the base property is truly a good trade for possibly lifting the impacts on the public portion; however, if these buyouts were to be successful to the extreme, the final disappearance of the true American West truly would be hastened and even the most ranting of urban armchair environmentalists would eventually regret it. Well, maybe I'm wrong there because a lot of these urban "experts" hardly ever come out to see what is really out here and then often don't know what they are looking at. At the same time, Daryl and the rest of us need to take a good hard objective look at our practices and the practices of the most obnoxious of our neighbors and be realistic about "sticking together" with that jerk down the road that insists on being a loudmouthed poster child for bad stewardship.
On the other hand, Marvel and the boys can use their "edge of the spectrum" antics as a lever as they choose; but, they also need to realize that they better have their political ducks in a row if their utopian buyout scheme ever came close to succeeding. Based on the record of the past six years, they could get the ranchers off and then discover that the ranchers were what stood in the way, not of public land conservation, but public land sale.
Again, its a complicated knot of strategies and tactics, and issues and those of us with any sense at all need to be careful what we wish for...
University of Wyoming law professor Debra Donahue makes the case for shutting down grazing on public lands in her book, "The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity."
She concluded that where mean annual precipitation is 12 inches or less, livestock should be removed from large tracts of federal lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Pro-grazing advocates counter that holistic grazing can benefit grasslands, that grasslands were grazed by bison and that in lieu of ranchers, you've got condos instead.
There's a great deal of debate as to whether holistic grazing actually works, or how well it works.
The bison/cattle argument tends to fall apart when you realize that bison were migratory and didn't hang-out around water sources. Cattle don't behave like bison, and therefore, their environmental impact is hugely different -- generally worse.
As for cows vs. condos, there's quite a bit of truth here. When ranchers sell out, developers move in, as CSU's Rick Knight points out, to the detriment of open space and wildlife.
There are model ranching operations that efficiently convert grass into protein, without creating a cow-burned environment, but fostering a sensitive balance between wildlife and the enviroment, versus staying in business.
Aside from politics and culture, there are simple answers, but we don't live in a world where politics and culture can be ignored -- witness Sam Western's “Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming’s Search for Its Soul.”
Have you thought about doing an article on just what back country hikers and backpackers do to improve the areas they use for free? It might be a real eyeopener.
Ranchers do have a wide range of education and experience, and the outcome (the health of their range land) reflects that. Ranchers are very sensitive to weed infestations and work hard to keep them under control, with varying success.
Back country hikers and backpackers do have impacts on wildlife, according to CSU's Knight -- wildlife experience stress even if they hear or see people. There are hiking clubs that contribute labor and money toward trail maintenance and improvement efforts. Increasingly, there is no such thing as "free" use of public lands, given the growing number of user fees.
I realize that user fees are increasing in some places, but they don't seem to be all that universal are they? There aren't often even trailhead parking permits are there? I don't object to hikers, I object to having so much land set aside for their exclusive use.
Another story I wish you or another outdoor writer would do is on the amount of wildlife that survives on ranches in the winter. Do we really want to end that to keep from stepping in a cow pie?
I am a photographer turned writer; I have stepped in that cowpie in the wilderness and cussed the rancher. I live in a mountain valley where the ranches are rapidly disappearing; the west will not be the west without the ranches and the cowboy. The ranches were here long before me. I love untouched wilderness but I also love the western heritage.
My empathy lies with the historical western culture of my adopted home as long as that culture is a responsible steward of the land, I don't mind being more careful where I step.
Daryl L. Hunter
Range Magazine does a good job of presentling the truth, but more needs to be done. I wish I were a good writer and could do some of it.
if we put the money that is currently used by public lands agencies to clean up and develope (roads etc.) for the ranchers into fee purchases of the land, we'd have a lot of protected land. otherwise developement in the areas is inevitable and we can blame the market and overpopulation, not environmentalists, for that.
Can you name a single road developed for a rancher? I cannot. You guys are so concentrated on having it all for yourselves that you don't bother to look at facts. If the ranche's private land are sold to developers, who is going to feed the wildlife during the winter? The recreationalists? ROTFL!
When By-be, says: "we can blame the market and overpopulation, not environmentalists, for that." It is clear that when the environmentalists put western ranchers out of business that they will will not shoulder the responsibility for the aftermath of the dynamic that they were responsible for putting into play.
Enviros do not take any responsibility whatsoever for the damage they do. They know what they want and someone better make it happen for them. They do not care about the ecosystem, only their own egosystem.
Look at the wolf situation, "the elk are hiding, the drought killed them, the winter killed them, the bears are killing them", "the ranchers need to watch their sheep and cattle better", on and on. and on. But they take no responsiblity whatsoever. I've even seen some insist the wolves that killed the guy in Canada didn't really happen, "wolves don't do that", or else it was his fault, not the wolves.
The decimation of its open space had nothing to with ranching or not ranching. People sold off parcels one or or two at a time along all the county roads. Before long, most of the private land was blocked from view by houses, and at an amazingly low population density.
Who was to blame? No one, I guess. Just amazing lack of foresight and no land use ordinances.
The first internal sub-division seemed to be Star Valley Ranches. It was notable how it was not located in nearby Etna, which stagnated.
"It is clear that when the environmentalists put western ranchers out of business that they will will not shoulder the responsibility for the aftermath of the dynamic that they were responsible for putting into play."
It is clear that when negligent ranchers (not all are) degrade the land to the point that scientists, judges, and the rule of law demand that the grazing operation be shut down that they will not shoulder the responsibility for the aftermath of the dynamic that they were responsible for putting into play.
First, it was ski resorts that drew the growth, then fly-fishing rivers and now it is any pretty place. City people can now make money in the country; some can afford Jackson and some only Soda Springs. The fact is, if a ranch anywhere in the Rockies gets subdivided there are no shortage of buyers, and it is changing the nature of the mountains. Surfing on Ebay’s real estate offerings you never know where you might end up with the mountain valley nirvana of your dreams.
The beautiful Birch Creek Valley north of Mud Lake is wall-to-wall cattle ranches; if they lost their grazing allotments soon the valley would start to resemble Lemhi Valley just over the divide. The Birch Creek Valley hypothesis is just food for thought for what could happen to valleys throughout the west. Hailey, Hamilton, Driggs and Bozeman could become the Rocky Mountain Valley norm instead of the exception.
The anti-grazing folks have nature at heart and that is noble however, it is my belief that the law of unintended consequences will deliver undesirable results for the well meaning environmentalists whose bias cripples them with tunnel vision.
By-be - negligent ranchers that that abuse the public trust should be put off the land to be replaced with a rancher that has respect for the land.
A family in Arizona got a very nice settlement from the Center for Biodiversity for their public reviling of the ranch practices. the truth was they had a classically excellent ranching practice, and were able to prove it.
Thanks for your comments.
Yes I fear for these valleys too, but I don't think anything can be done unless there is a sea change in the way Westerners think about private property. Even that might not be enough with guys like Howie Rich from New York sponsoring initiatives to require a regulatory taking whenover people pass a an ordinance regarding land use.
I don't expect ranchers will, or that we should expect them to continue ranching when their land is worth 50,000 dollars an acre in an alternative use. Now if its a ranch on the Snake River Plain (not scenic), it will remain in agricultural use.
One alternative is the purchase of private land by the government. That's not popular in the current political regime, but it was 30-40 years ago, and I don't know why it couldn't be again when this era of big brother conservatism comes crashing down.
It is hard for me to understand the desire to get control of other folks land away from them. Is it jealousy that supposed hicks have so much more land than the "right" folks do?
Certainly the government has no business spending 50 grand per acre to take land from ranchers, so some other people with lots of free time have a place to play. If the rancher is forced to sell, then it should go to the highest bidder, and we all lose. We really need to support the rancher, and keep him there.