The Trump regime recently made sweeping changes to the way livestock grazing is regulated on public lands. Their changes would cause damage to public lands, public watersheds, and to wildlife. They would worsen fire danger and increase subsidies to ranchers while damaging recreation experiences for millions of Americans.
In July Trump’s Department of Agriculture issued new directives to the US Forest Service and the BLM regarding management of cattle grazing on lands owned by Americans. They couched the changes as “fortifying the American beef industry.” They decried the shrinkage of beef production in the US and the diminishing number of public land ranchers and cattle on our public land. In their publications and pronouncements, they made no mention of the damage livestock exact on our land. Their focus is on boosting the cattle industry.
Here we have a significant disconnect. Ranchers and the Trump agencies are looking at the cattle business while many other people are looking at the public lands themselves, and the damage cattle cause versus the benefit the public gets to sacrificing watersheds and biology to a small industry.
Grazing on public lands is the single most destructive human activity we carry out on those lands, including oil and gas drilling. Our public lands in the arid West have been overgrazed since the late 1800s, with only marginal improvement from the days when no government agencies existed to constrain ranching in the pioneering days. Many people within the federal agencies and nonprofit organizations have struggled for years to reverse the devastation caused by cattle grazing in the deserts especially. Trump’s agency heads are reversing years of progress on this front.
Why does this matter?
Public land grazing has two major impacts that affect people directly. First cattle and sheep destroy native plants which a wide range of wildlife from insects to birds, to deer depend on for food. When large areas of plant life are decimated by cattle, it devastates the diversity of wildlife including pollinating insects that humans rely on to service our food crops. The plants are eaten by the livestock before they can flower and reproduce. If their leaves are eaten down to the ground, the plant cannot feed itself and it dies. Cattle trample plants with their thousand-pound weight. While many species of grass can survive repeated grazing, grasses too eventually die when they cannot reproduce or feed themselves with sunlight after repeated “cropping.”
Second, livestock ruin creeks and streams. In the Southwest, streams are linear oasis where trees like cottonwood and willow shade a wide variety of plants and shrubs critical to the survival of birds and other wildlife. Cattle like wet places so they stay in stream corridors until they have devastated the vegetation and trampled stream banks. The streams dry up and the water supply for humans and wildlife disappears. This is an acute problem with the Southwest facing a critical water shortage in our major river basins as the big rivers like the Colorado and the Rio Grande come from thousands of small streams.
When cattle trample streambanks, they are flattening them out, making the stream shallow. Fish die in shallow streams and the water evaporates, drying out the stream. Thousands of miles of streams in the West have been destroyed in this way, eliminating fisheries and cutting off the stream from supplying water to the larger river it used to flow into. Wildlife from birds, to fish, to various mammals die in the absence of riparian areas. In the Southwest most of the species on the endangered species list are there because cattle have destroyed riparian (stream) corridors where the habitat was for those lost species.
Third, cattle trample the landscape, turning soil that should absorb rain into hardpack where rainwater rushes off, eroding the landscape and degrading groundwater and surface water alike. Desert soils often have lichen and fungus growing on them. Cattle trample these biocrusts which take decades to develop and even longer to recover. Without the biocrusts and with soils compacted, vast areas of the West are enduring sheet erosion where rain runs off the land quickly and forms gullies, washing away topsoil and leaving subsoils that are much less useful for plants. This is the process of desertification.
At the same time, when soils stop being porous, the rain mostly stops infiltrating to tree roots and water tables below ground. Then springs dry up, devastating a whole range of wildlife. Water tables drop and trees die.
Why?
The ranching industry is powerful politically and they have thwarted efforts by many to reduce cattle on Forest Service or BLM lands over many decades. Their economic footprint in the West is very small and their contribution to the nation’s meat supply amounts to less than 2% of our national beef supply. Yet over decades ranchers have come to largely control federal multiple use agency’s livestock programs, and they have pulled Congress to their side, for no rational reason. They create a mystique and it persists over time.
Even so, with persistent litigation, organizations like Western Watersheds Project, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Wildearth Guardians have managed to cut cattle numbers down in many places and eliminate grazing by buying out grazing leases or through other legal means. But buying out leases so they can be rested permanently requires having a legal structure in place that often requires federal legislation. The ranching industry has blocked buy-out legislation, depriving ranchers of the choice to stop using allotments when they wish.
National Parks are closed to grazing in most cases but some national monuments, especially those managed by the BLM or Forest Service allow grazing, even in desert areas where very little vegetation grows. Congress told the National Park Service to allow grazing in some NPS areas like the Mojave National Preserve in southern California where a desert landscape entirely unsuited to cattle has been overgrazed. Weed grasses move into the overgrazed areas and these weed grasses carry wildlfire where fire was unknown before overgrazing. At Mojave NP fires have killed most of the native vegetation over wide areas including Joshua trees, a threatened species.
While commercial grazing in the Mojave Desert is particularly outrageous, grazing happens over vast areas where the land is not adapted to grazing and where grazing compromises almost all other human uses of the land. In most of the West, no animal like cattle have grazed these areas since the last ice age.
Trump
The Trump regime focused on cattle grazing through the reactionaries on the Interior and Agriculture Department staffs.
Trump’s crew did a few things with their new regulations, (which can be reversed by a future president). First, they said they wanted to increase the number of cows on public lands, reversing decades of work by agency people and grazing activists to cut the number of cows down so that streams, forests and open grasslands can somewhat recover from a century of overgrazing.
Next, they said they want to restock cattle on grazing allotments where no cattle are now. Most of these allotments have been closed because they are so badly degraded from overgrazing, or they have had their leases bought out so they can recover, or they are not suitable for grazing because they are too steep, rocky, dry, or otherwise unable to produce forage. In many cases, local land trusts or other private donors raised money to buy out the grazing allotments and return them to wildlife use. Trump’s folks don’t care; they simply want cattle on all grazing allotments regardless.
The Trump folks may be unaware that grazing on federal lands requires a plethora of subsidies to make it worthwhile for the ranchers. Granted most public land pastures are of very low quality but even so, the federal government charges a small fraction of what private leases would cost. The agencies lose money administering grazing allotments and the public pays the ranchers to graze through our tax dollars and through the tremendous loss of ecosystem services that the land used to provide before it was decimated by grazing.
The federal government charges $1.35 per cow/calf per month for grazing on Forest Service or BLM lands. This amount doesn’t cover the cost of issuing or maintaining the leases by these agencies, so it is a subsidized rate. By contrast an organization of state land commissioners sets a rate for state lands leased to ranchers that is $6.56 per cow/calf pair. State lands must make money for the school systems in their states so that is a realistic fee for cattle grazing. The federal government should charge at least this amount.
But the Trump people are not focused on the land. The are focused on the “American Beef Industry” and they decry the loss of ranches and the rapidly dropping number of cattle in the US. They seek to build demand for beef in the US and eliminate barriers to ranchers using public lands for their businesses. They want grazing to be a “central” part of the management of national forests and BLM lands nationwide.
They say they will eliminate regulations and streamline grazing practices on public lands. Note that the Trump people have also said that logging will now be the central focus on national forest management even after they fired 6000 employees at the US Forest Service. So, we can expect that range management personnel at these agencies may also face the pink slip.
Trump’s folks also want to elevate the voices of ranchers in public land management. Ranchers have dominated public land agencies for more than a century with their advisory boards which have tremendous power over local land management decisions.
They also want to increase predator control through the wildlife killing agencies at USDA (AHPHIS) and focus on wolves and compensating ranchers for cattle killed by predators when they place their cattle in the wilds.
And it goes on and on. Trump’s folks focus on business and the ranchers who give campaign contributions and the public largely focuses on the great damage the cattle exact on fisheries, landscapes, watersheds and wildlife.
I remember a friend telling me he went to the San Pedro Parks Wilderness Area on the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico and he and his son had trouble finding a place to pitch their tents because there were so many cowpies covering the overgrazed land. Wilderness is overgrazed when Americans expect it to be a place of refuge for wildlife and plants and the public.
The Trump regulations will probably face litigation from conservationists.
