The Antiplanner is hardly a radical environmentalist, but I’ve lost patience with one environmentally destructive activity: livestock grazing on public lands. Taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars a year to subsidize this grazing, while the ranchers who have permits to do it have successfully lobbied Congress to keep they fees they pay almost zero while their cattle and sheep trample fish habitat and compete with wildlife for forage.
Cattle on BLM land in eastern Oregon. BLM photo by Gary Shine.
Livestock grazing was once a profit center for the Forest Service; in 1920, the agency actually made a profit and most of its income came from ranchers, not timber buyers. But in 1978, ranchers persuaded Congress to impose a fee formula on the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that supposedly calculated fair market value by starting with the value of livestock and subtracting all of the costs of production. What was left over was supposed to be the fee. Continue reading
