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.
At the time the law was passed, the nation’s population was growing pretty fast and per capita meat consumption was also growing so people thought that the fees calculated by the formula would increase over time. Instead, population growth slowed and due to health concerns per capita meat consumption declined, so the fees dropped. Ironically, the more vegetarians the nation has, the more we subsidize grazing.
In most recent years, the fees have been the minimum allowed by the formula, $1.35 per animal unit month (AUM). An AUM is the amount of forage a 1,000-pound animal would eat in a month. That’s about five sheep or one cow and a calf. So a rancher can let his or her livestock graze on public lands for four months for about $1 for a sheep or $5 for a cow and a calf. Meanwhile, the agencies spend close to $10 per AUM of taxpayer money to support such grazing. Grazing fees on state lands in the West tend to be two to four times as much as on federal lands.
Only a small share of the nation’s cattle and sheep ever graze on public lands. More than 30 million cattle and 5 million sheep live in the U.S., and less than 3 percent of food for the cattle and about 5.5 percent of food for sheep comes from federal lands. Public land grazing is one of the most inefficient ways of feeding livestock, and it mainly continues to happen because of nostalgia.
The rancher standoffs that took place in 2014 and 2016 generated a lot of bad publicity for public land grazing. But this has all been forgotten since the Yellowstone television series has re-romanticized ranching. Most of the series deals with fights over the land between ranchers, Native Americans, and developers, but none of those fights are real. The real battles, which are over the ranchers’ use of public lands, are hardly mentioned in the series.
Environmental battles over national forest and BLM timber sales led to an 80 percent reduction in those sales since 1990. Wood products from federal land timber was both used by and employed a lot more people than public land grazing, yet grazing has been reduced by only about a third. Environmental activists tell me that getting further reductions is impossible because ranchers have convinced Congress that we need to preserve this historic lifestyle.
At the same time ranch after ranch is being taken over by wealthy people whose ties to the land are negligible. These hobby ranchers profit from grazing their livestock on public lands at your expense. This isn’t preserving a lifestyle; it is welfare for the rich.
While grazing impacts wildlife, the big environmental problems are with salmon and other fish. Cattle and sheep trample stream beds, rendering them worthless as fish habitat. I see lots of money being spent on salmon restoration, including removing dams, reducing water to irrigators, and reducing commercial and sports fishing seasons. Yet no one is fencing off stream bottoms from livestock or otherwise protecting salmon from grazing.
Ending livestock grazing on public lands will increase the cost of your next hamburger by less than a penny, but will allow for much more abundant salmon and other fish. Unless grazing fees are increased to cover all of the costs of grazing, including both taxpayer and environmental costs, then private livestock should be taken off public lands.
Why Buffalo farts didn’t cause global warming but cow farts do? Maybe Buffalo’s don’t fart?
Is there a Buffalo proctologist in the house?
Ranching in USA, competes heavily against Big Wig, Brazil. If beef prices fluctuate, They can bulldoze and burn another million acres of rainforest. I’m not vegan, but beef production in 3rd world; is Worlds most environmental ticking timebomb. Regenerative agriculture in Pasture/grassland is difficult because drought consecutively affecting how well cattle can graze. Faced with prospect rationing, they graze to the bare soil and leave nothing. Being federal land, Tragedy Commons frequent. Also since wildfires occur, they’re likely to justify total grazing anyway, as devoids what can burn….
Which is why I said a long time ago, Build desalination plants, Build nuclear plants to run em. Then coastal states like California, Oregon, Washington can sell water as credit to dry states. 2nd option Arizona/Nevada build seawater pump/pipelines via Baja/Gulf California in exchange free water (40%) to Mexico, since their drinking water is….. Shit. They’ll upkeep infrastructure in exchange US provide trade new water supply.
Second, is decades “Varmint” removal have mitigated important aspect grazing/grassland ecosystem. Worms, Gophers, prairie dogs, etc are natures Diggers. By digging holes and extensive tunnels they redistribute soil by bringing minerals to surface and organic material to depths in essence they mix the soil up so it doesn’t layer or turn to hard pan. These organisms cant dig well thru hardpan or silt. Drought extensive grazing turns soil exactly into that. Herbivore dung and organic material are brought down, more so when it DOES rains the channels they dig serve to funnel water to percolate into the soil replenishing the groundwater and water table grasslands depend on to survive dry summers.
3rd , Air and water pollution from animal wastes…this seems like unusual seeing as at one point Buffalo roamed and their wastes weren’t “Pollution”
More like adpatation of gut microflora of buffalo and introduced to cows to make their digestion less stressful.
4th. Ranchers are not irresponsible to needs grassland be it private or federal. Speeding up recovery of grazed grassland thru re-introduction of mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen fixing bacteria. Overgrazing devastate soil microflora, it’s re-introduction, speeds it’s recovery.
5th Finally, Composting. Commercial composting is becoming a larger and larger in industry. Once trade of farmers markets, now become big business, but room for small ventures still proliferate. Because industrial laden fertilizer manufacturing involves enormous energy infrastructure, composting agriculture wastes, ironically from the very source they arrived re-introduces soil nutrients back to whence they came Thus in turn closing the food cycle. Farming cycle only takes nutrients from the soil then artificial fertilizers shipped considerable distance. Rather than landfill, organic waste can be steam retorted and dried to make suitable soil amendment. One-Third Nations Municipal waste destined for landfills is organic…..Not including paper. That’s 100 Million tons soil amendment. Since composting requires space and freight trains already cross US to deliver bulk agricultural goods, shipping organic refuse BACK to source to produce perfectly good organic fertilizer and give ranchers additional revenue in off season.
If you want to address expensive subsidies consider corn. The subsidies cause over production and waste of a much more valuable resource – water.
How much water is used to produce a gallon of ethanol vs a gallon of gasoline? 8 to 160 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol (produced from corn). Refining for gasoline is about 1.5 gallons per gallon of fuel. (E&P uses water but the water does not have to be potable nor suitable for irrigation). Not only is the corn production exacerbating water availability issues, the by-product of corn syrup is put into a very large percentage of food because it is there. That corn syrup is a problem for diabetics and for people that don’t want to become diabetics. It’s in virtually all packaged food in the U.S.
Corn as food is one of my favorites and corn is one of the most versatile and productive crops out there. But cut down on the corn subsidy.
The subsidy for public land livestock grazing might be disgraceful but it is insignificant both in $$ and in effect compared to what is going on with corn systemically. This isn’t an “anti-farmer” or even anti-subsidy rant. It’s a rant about the effect of misplaced subsidies.
High fructose corn syrup is Fructose. For those unfamiliar with chemistry it’s Sucrose and glucose molecule stuck together.
Yes I agree decrease in corn subsidy will remove some issue. More importantly separate fructose down to sucrose to make basic table sugar.
At the very least, programs that let private entities use public lands for profit should break even. A little ROI for the taxpayer would be nice.
i would resort here to true federalism and make this a state issue solely (along with many other things). you give the fed beast one power they wont stop with others, they simply cant stop themselves.
Another issue with these “ranches” is that they are often bought as investments and used as recreational properties. The low-cost grazing is only one dimension of state-subsidized rent-seeking that includes charging huge amounts to access landlocked parcels for hunting and recreation.
One example of this I encountered this summer on a trip to collect rocks. I was in Central Wyoming looking for rocks near Jeffrey City. This one location I wanted to go to is about 3 miles from the highway. I looked at a map and it said there was a road that passed through a ranch to go to the BLM lands.
I drive down the road, go by the ranch and cross the river. A guy chases me in a truck and yells at me that “there is no easement” and that I am trespassing. I apologize and turn around and leave.
Here is the back story. The Split Rock ranch is a game ranch that sold for 12.9 million in 2019.
https://www.livewaterproperties.com/properties/split-rock-ranch/
Rather than being owned by a family it appears to be owned by investors who run expensive (tens of thousands of dollars a week) game hunts on the property.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STGsd6JqYpk
https://www.qrsoutdoors.com/
As you can see from the real estate page their private holdings cut off access to public land. Also, the only way to access the public land, literally hundreds of thousands of acres, behind the mountains is to drive on dirt trails 20-25 miles.
Also, somewhat recently the mountains around the ranch were designated a “wilderness area” where motorized vehicles and even hobby rock collecting are banned. Of course, hunting is perfectly fine in this area.
https://www.blm.gov/Programs/National-Conservation-Lands/Wyoming/Split-Rock-WSA
What this amounts to is that the wealthy owners of this property have created their own private estate using public resources. They hide behind claiming that they have property rights that are questionable or that they are “protecting wilderness.” Apparently, this is a huge issue and many observers from a variety of perspectives see it.