Three Ways to Reform the Public Lands Grazing Program

By Greta Anderson, The Wildlife News

16 June 14

he dust has settled on the Cliven Bundy debacle and the media has moved onto the next spectacle. The Obama Administration should take this opportunity to do a little housekeeping on its privately-grazed public lands. The example of the Nevada scofflaw’s failure to pay his grazing fees and his refusal to adhere to environmental laws – as well as the Bureau of Land Management’s refusal to address the issue for twenty years– should serve as a wake-up call for a failing federal program that degrades the environment, costs the taxpayers a bundle, and enables a “tradition” that is no longer appropriate in the new West.

There are three steps that would provide vast public benefit:

1. Raise the grazing fee.

It should be abundantly clear that even if Mr. Bundy had paid up, he wouldn’t be paying enough for the privilege to graze on public lands. At $1.35 per month per cow/calf pair, this small fee pays for the livestock “unit” to eat about 1000 pounds of “forage,” also known as wildflowers, shrubs, grass, and wildlife habitat, drink about 30 gallons of water each day, and turn both into waste products that foul our creeks, our campgrounds, and our hiking trails. It’s a bargain for the rancher, but taxpayers subsidize the program upwards of $1.2 billion each decade.

The fee is low because it is calculated using a flawed formula. Efforts to revise the formula to ensure cost-recovery have been met with resistance from the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture. It is unclear why these agencies are comfortable operating at a substantial deficit for the grazing program while struggling to fund other essential federal programs, but it should stop. The President and the Secretaries should reform the fee program right away.

2. Allow for grazing retirement throughout the West.

When Clark County, Nevada sought to mitigate its impacts on desert tortoise habitat, buying conservation credit on the public lands around Gold Butte was one way of doing so. Clark County paid for the BLM grazing permits to be permanently retired, a win-win for the ranchers whose cows were increasingly in conflict with the native species. Mr. Bundy wasn’t entitled to avail himself of the payment since he wasn’t a legal permit holder in 1998, but had he been playing by the rules with the federal agency, there would have been no reason he couldn’t cash out on his cows.

Voluntary grazing retirement allows ranchers to get out of the business and the grazed lands a chance to recover and improve as habitat for imperiled species. Conservation groups and private foundations will pay the ranchers, but the federal government needs to allow it on all public lands. This can be accomplished through legislative action, a simple mandate to allow for permanent retirement of relinquished permits. There are ranchers itching to go in many places throughout the west, and the pen-stroke of Congress would solve their woes.

3. End the permit renewal riders

The federal agencies can’t keep up with processing grazing permits with complete environmental reviews and so Congress has been offering them a free pass to renew without review since 2004. This means thousands of permits are rubberstamped for ten-year terms without having their impacts even evaluated. Without any checks on the environmental impacts of livestock grazing, the damage to our natural and cultural resources is done long before the agencies notice. If the agencies had more money (see #1, above), perhaps they’d be able to keep up better with their workload. So Congress should stop giving them a way out and the American public should demand environmental accountability on our public lands. We simply cannot keep deferring appropriate management on public lands: these are the last strongholds of native species and functional ecosystems, and climate resilience depends on improving the ecological conditions across the west.

Now is the time to end the free rides, failed oversight, and fiscal nightmare of the public lands grazing program.