BLM Grazing Overhaul Would Give Ranchers More Grass and Perks, But Could Force Elk Off Public Range

Though it doesn’t mention the bison-centric conservation group by name, the Bureau of Land Management’s proposed changes to government grazing rules can be read as a response to American Prairie’s novel use of public rangelands.

The newly proposed grazing rules were published last month in the Federal Register, the first step toward eventual adoption. They are out for public comment through July 13. The revisions are being hailed by most ranching groups for injecting welcome flexibility as the cattle industry goes through a generational change. Meanwhile, conservation groups say the proposed grazing rules could degrade rangeland and riparian habitats, and shift wildlife like elk to private lands.

The rules, which are the first wholesale updating of federal grazing regulations in 35 years, have been in gestation for months, but they have taken on renewed relevance since the Department of the Interior used a new interpretation of grazing rules to revoke permits held by American Prairie, the Montana conservation group that is replacing cattle with domesticated bison on their private land and associated public-land allotments.

Last month the Interior kicked American Prairie off about 64,000 acres of federal land in northeast Montana where it has been growing a herd now numbering about 1,000 bison. The agency claimed that the landmark Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which has guided public-land grazing on millions of acres of mainly Western rangeland since the Great Depression, applies only to “production-oriented” livestock. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who intervened in the American Prairie case, claims that “non-production” livestock aren’t an approved use of BLM’s lands and therefore don’t qualify for government grazing rights.

Related: BLM Says American Prairie’s Bison Can No Longer Graze on Public Lands

Burgum’s ruling, which is being appealed by American Prairie and several other conservation groups, follows the BLM’s official rescission of the Public Land Rule in May. That was a controversial Biden-era directive that elevated conservation as an appropriate use of BLM lands, on equal footing with established uses such as grazing, mining, and oil-and-gas extraction. But President Trump’s Interior views conservation as an illegitimate “non-use,” just as it has defined “non-production” livestock as out of alignment with the BLM’s multiple-use mandate.

Indeed, the proposed grazing rules emphasize the availability of America’s public rangelands to support private livestock operations.

The proposed changes to federal grazing rules would allow BLM lease-holders to graze their cattle longer on public rangeland and to adjust stocking rates to exploit available forage. “Non-production livestock” such as conservation herds of bison would be banned from BLM allotments. Cattle grazing could be intensified to thin forage on fire-prone rangeland. In a news release, Interior officials say the grazing rule would “give ranchers more flexibility, improve the health of rangelands, and support rural communities across the West.”

The grazing rule revision has been a priority of Interior secretary Doug Burgum and several of his deputies, including controversial “cowboy lawyer” Karen Budd-Falen, who worked with several Montana grazing organizations to craft the legal argument that ultimately resulted in the revocation of the American Prairie grazing permits. According to media reports, both Budd-Falen and Wyoming range consultant Brenda Younkin contributed to the proposed grazing rules now out for public review.

Western politicians have also gotten involved in the issue. According to the Arizona Free News, the delegation of Republican congressmen from Arizona petitioned the Department of the Interior to issue the rules.

“Under the previous administration, cattle ranchers were forced to reduce their herd counts because of federal mandates and orders cutting public grazing land use,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) said in a press release. “This administration knows how critical it is to protect our great ranchers and allow these families to provide abundant food to the American people.” 

Federal Grazing Fees Remain Well Below Market Rate

Significantly, the draft regulations don’t propose wholesale adjustments to the federal grazing fee that has been established this year at $1.69 per animal unit month (AUM), the term for one cow and her calf, one horse, or five sheep and goats to graze for a month. The federal grazing fee, which applies to both BLM and U.S. Forest Service livestock allotments, is based on a 1966 base value of $1.23 per AUM. A 1986 executive order signed by Ronald Reagan established that the federal grazing fee cannot fall below $1.35 per AUM, and any increase or decrease cannot exceed 25 percent of the previous year’s rate.

Average market-based private-land grazing rates are hard to define on an equal basis, partly because BLM lands don’t have the same forage value as adjacent private lands. But in the 17 Western states last year, private AUM rates averaged $23.70, with lease rates ranging from $47 (Nebraska) to $29 (Montana) to $10.50 (Oklahoma).

Meanwhile, critics of low public-land grazing fees note that America’s beef cow isn’t the same as it was 90 years ago, when the Taylor Grazing Act was enacted.

Genetic selection for larger-framed cattle has pushed the average live weight of range-raised beef cattle from about 1,000 pounds in the 1930s to about 1,400 pounds today, with equally hefty calves. Feedlot Magazine has estimated the mature American cow has increased in body weight by an annual average of 7.7 pounds.

Heavier cows and their calves consume more forage than lighter cows. Maybe the AUM calculus should also change, say critics of public-land grazing, which they consider to be a government-sponsored subsidy to private livestock producers.

What’s Included in the Proposed Grazing Rules

The BLM administers about 18,000 grazing permits on 155 million acres, mainly across the West. The Forest Service administers another 5,500 grazing permits on 77 million acres of federal forestland. In all, private stockgrowers lease about 250 million acres of public rangeland, the grazing rights for which are issued for 10-year cycles. Some of this grazing land, about 2 million acres, has been “retired” over the years, with cattle leases suspended while land managers prioritized other uses, such as wildlife use and range restoration. In most cases, these leases were bought out by conservation groups to ensure that leasees were compensated for the loss of their historic use of public lands.

It’s unclear from the proposed grazing rules how those conservation buy-outs would be adjudicated, both monetarily and in terms of impact by refilling them with domestic livestock. This is according to the grazing rules and a related Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Forest Service and the BLM that aims to align grazing rules between the land-management agencies.  The rule would redefine these conservation grazing vacancies as “temporarily nonrenewable” and authorize the BLM to issue short-term leases when “forage is temporarily available for livestock grazing.” Many of these conservation leases have allowed wildlife such as elk, bighorn sheep, and other ungulates to expand their range by not having to compete for limited forage with livestock.

Rangeland Health Evaluations

The proposed rules would also expand the criteria that agencies use to evaluate rangeland health. The proposal would require the BLM to apply land-health standards to grazing allotments, mainly broadening the scope to entire watersheds rather than the landscape health of individual allotments. The broader definition of land health would include non-grazing impacts, allowing the BLM to use recreational and energy-development impacts in its periodic rangeland-health assessments. This is welcome relief for livestock producers, who sometimes were blamed for rangeland damage not caused by their cattle.

Flexible Grazing Dates

The draft regulations would also ditch the long-held “turn-in” dates that have determined when ranchers could start and end public-land grazing. Instead of rigid dates, the proposal would give permittees the ability to adjust their turn-in dates based on rangeland goals. The rule specifically would allow ranchers to start grazing 21 days before and remain on the range up to 21 days after their officially permitted dates. Taken together, those 42 additional days represent about 31 percent more grazing compared with traditional turn-in dates.

Redefining Key Terms

The rules would also redefine the BLM’s requirement of a “base property.” According to the Taylor Grazing Act, these private properties were intended to winter the same number of livestock that grazed the public range during the grass-growing months and were used to pre-qualify BLM leasees. Curiously, the proposed rule would expand the definition of a qualifying base property to one that has livestock handling facilities, not just forage or water capacity.

“The BLM is proposing to revise the definition of the term ‘base property’ to provide that land that contains livestock operation facilities capable of serving as a base of livestock operations can properly qualify as base property,” reads the federal rule proposal. “That would be in addition to the two existing criteria by which land or water may qualify as base property.”

The BLM further proposes to add the term “beginning rancher (mentee)” to the criteria of who may qualify as a beginning rancher. The revision is intended to encourage young ranchers who may not be the children of existing permittees to participate in public-land grazing.

Wildfire Risk and Grazing

In keeping with the “increased flexibility” for grazers, the rule would allow BLM resource managers to approve intensive grazing on rangeland that’s considered at high wildfire risk.

This “targeted grazing” would be used to create “strategic linear fuel breaks, reducing fine fuel height and fuel loading, and maintaining fine fuels reductions.” But critics maintain that the use of cattle for fire suppression is unproven, and could remove forage that wildlife require both in drought and severe winters.

Little Opportunity for Public Feedback or Environmental Review

The proposed rules would freeze out most public comment, which is a thumb to the eye of entrenched critics of the BLM’s livestock-first management across big swaths of the West. The rules would “limit the consultation, cooperation, and coordination process to just the affected permittee and the state or states that contain the allotment at issue.” The rule would further remove the requirement to consult with the public and even the BLM’s Resource Advisory Councils “during the planning of range developments and range improvement programs.”

Lastly, the rule would exempt the BLM from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) when it comes to large-scale grazing rules, though NEPA would be applied to allotment-scale changes to grazing systems.

Taken as a whole, the proposed grazing rules would confirm that ranchers, and public-land ranching, are not degrading Western rangeland, according to content distributed by the Public Lands Council, a group that represents cattle and sheep producers that collectively hold 22,000 federal grazing permits across the West.

“Ranchers are not the problem. They are the solution,” said Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs, as quoted by the Public Lands Council. “Yet outdated regulations and false claims continue to punish them.” Biggs and other Western congressmen cite bureaucratic red tape, in addition to the rising cost of supplies and the environmental pressure of drought for pressures on America’s livestock producers.

Potential Consequences for Wildlife

Authors of the BLM’s draft regulations declined opportunities to contribute their perspectives for this story, and the Interior directed Outdoor Life to press releases. But conservation groups have been eager to denounce the rules as a sort of give-away to public-land grazers.

“These [proposed] rules have the government’s response to American Prairie written all over them,” says Nick Gevock, a Montana hunter, former conservation director of Montana Wildlife Federation and Northern Rockies organizer for the Sierra Club. “They took many of the standards that they rolled out in the American Prairie decision and rolled them into nationwide grazing rules.”

The organizing principle of the new rules is to double down on cattle grazing at the expense of other BLM uses, Gevock says.

“This is coming at a time when state agencies and sportsmen are working actively to get elk back on public land,” he says. “But the BLM’s rules are going to have significant negative impacts on wildlife, and particularly on elk. The whole issue of restocking vacant allotments? Those vacant allotments, whether on Forest Service or BLM ground, are elk habitat, and they were retired for wildlife purposes, whether it was to expand the range of elk to get them off private lands or to expand bighorn sheep distribution into areas previously occupied by domestic sheep. The rules will serve to reduce wildlife distribution and to push them back into marginal habitats or onto private lands.”

Gevock notes that the rules have carved away opportunities for the public, including public-land hunters, to be notified about these changes or given the ability to provide comment to decision-makers. In other words, a provision prohibits commenting on individual grazing adjustments unless you’re an allotment holder.

“These rules take the public out of public lands,” he says. “In order to protest, you have to be a permit holder. They’re openly saying we want to sterilize the landscape of wildlife to make room for livestock but hunters don’t get a chance to comment about those changes on a community or a hunting-district scale.”

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The BLM will accept public comments on the proposed grazing reforms as a whole through July 13. The agency is also hosting a virtual information session tomorrow, June 10, from 5-7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Sign up for the virtual session at this Teams link.