A little background about grazing management on Forest Service land: The basic unit of livestock management is a grazing allotment (the Ashely NF in northern Utah, just as an example, has approximately one million acres of the 1.3 million acre forest divided into 80 different grazing allotments). The use of a national forest grazing allotment by a rancher, like all commercial activities on national forest land, requires a permit.
Congress, in its wisdom, has passed a series of legislative riders, most recently in 2005, which waive NEPA’s requirement to complete the detailed environmental analysis for grazing permits that the Forest Service performs for other commercial permits and other major management activities (like timber sales). Instead, grazing allotments are “categorically excluded” from NEPA, provided that the allotment “meets or is satisfactorily moving toward” the objectives of the Forest Plan that governs management of that national forest. In other words, each grazing permit can be renewed without analysis of environmental impacts if the Forest Service judges the allotment comports with the Forest Plan, or is heading in the right direction.
I have investigated 14 different grazing allotments in the Rocky Mountains so far. I pack along an NRCS range health assessment sheet to each one and look at each of NRCS’s 17 range health indicators to gauge site stability, hydrologic function and biotic integrity.
This is a random but not necessarily a scientific survey—I’ve probably passed by a thousand allotments and have selected only a few of them, mostly based on convenience to my line of travel. And I’m only looking a small portion of what are usually large allotments.
Almost every Forest Service employee I’ve talked to has told me that grazing allotments in the Rockies are well managed. I would say this is generally true, based on my unscientific survey. 12 of the 14 allotments had only “none to slight” or “slight to moderate” deviation from the expected conditions, according to the NRCS survey protocol. Most range specialists would consider them to be in decent shape, and they are probably meeting or trending towards the Forest Plan requirements.
The other two allotments I looked at were in deplorable condition, similar to the allotment in the Raggeds Wilderness I described in the last post. In these two allotments, forage utilization in the areas I walked far exceeded the Forest Plans’ 50% utilization requirement. The allotments were completely overun with invasive species and the streams I looked at were badly eroded, head cut, and trampled. In general, I would characterize these allotments as disaster areas.
The basic problem with national forest grazing management is that there’s a huge difference in the condition of different allotments, the differences are mostly due to the standard of care employed by different ranchers, and there doesn’t appear to be good—or at least not consistently applied—tools to distinguish between good cattle management and bad management. One district ranger put it to me this way:
“There are a lot of challenges there [with the grazing program]. I think that there are some permittees who are very conscientious and others that don’t spend much time with their herd. Some are very good at following the annual plans and others are not. Simple things can make a big difference, like where put you salt blocks. Some do a very good job of that. Some don’t. Some do a good job maintaining water developments and fences and there are those who could do a better job.”
Forest Service managers can take action against permit holders who aren’t following the rules, and they could find that a particular allotment isn’t meeting or trending towards meeting the Forest Plan when it comes time to renew a permit. Having or not having a federal lands grazing permit, though, is often the difference between barely making it in the cattle business and going under. Going under is bad news for the rancher, but also bad news for the national forest, because unprofitable ranches are often subdivided, with open space adjacent to national forest land lost forever and all the problems that subdivisions bring in terms of increased recreation pressure, habitat fragmentation, fire risk, etc. “The worst ranch is better than the best subdivision” is a frequent refrain among Forest Service managers.
Grazing management on national forest land can be problematic because at the end of the day Congress has made it an arbitrary judgment call for managers. Judgment calls come out differently depending on the circumstances.
“That’s a hard call,” the District Ranger quoted above told me about the decision to cancel a permit or reduce the herd a rancher is allowed on an allotment. “You cut a guy’s throat. They’re hard calls politically and they’re hard calls personally.”
Here’s my solution: First, Congress should waive grazing fees. The current fee structure is a joke. The Forest Service currently charges ranchers $1.13 to graze a cow and a calf on for a month—it probably costs more to pay someone to process the paperwork for the fee than the grazing brings in. The Forest Service should establish objective environmental standards that ensure ecological integrity for each allotment. Conditions should be monitored. If conditions are being met than permits should be renewed. If they aren’t being met, permitee should be required to pay for necessary restoration, exclosures, developments, etc (an “upward trend” is one thing, paying until the standard is actually met will make for a meaningful trend). If restoration is impossible with cattle remaining on the allotment, or if the permittee can’t afford restoration treatments, the permit should be canceled. Second, the Forest Service needs to go into the conservation easement business in a big way, providing funds to neighboring ranchlands to maintain open space when grazing can’t pay. This investment save money in the long run—as discussed in previous posts, subdivisions cost the Forest Service an arm and a leg when it comes to fire protection work, recreation management, and infrastructure maintenance.
These are imperfect suggestions that won’t make everyone (anyone?) happy. I welcome better suggestions.
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