Category Archives: Grazing

Cliven Bundy Opens the Anarchy Door

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The BLM has got its tit in a wringer. From an environmental standpoint the BLM is a classic captured agency run locally both by and for ranchers. The agency has long overlooked grazing permit infractions of all sorts. Often outside nongovernmental organizations have to sue to win enforcement of  standing laws and regulations.  The BLM’s action of enforcement has been so lax that when they do try to enforce a decades old egregious and blatant defiance of U.S. law and multiple court orders, like the unanswered defiance by Cliven Bundy, they are unable to do so.  Which opens more than one door in a good news – bad news sort of way.

That bad news is that the government is inviting anarchy.  If one guy, like Cliven Bundy with his delusions of grandeur, can defy the government by going loud with right wing media and inviting a bunch of gun toting friends to gather around, why can’t everyone start making up their own laws?  Already Utah San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman  is rallying a group to flout federal law and ride their ATV’s into a closed canyon next month.  Presumably they will take notes from Bundy and bring their guns.  Mike Noel, a Utah legislator, did the same in Paria Canyon in 2012 with no repercussions. Yet when environmental activist Tim DeChristopher practiced civil disobedience by waving a bid paddle at what turned out to be an energy auction held illegally by the BLM, he was promptly sentenced to two years in federal prison.  Utah’s federal judge Dee Benson did not allow DeChristopher’s motives to be discussed in court, only whether or not he technically broke the law.  “Equal Justice Under Law” is engraved on the front of the U.S. Supreme Court building.  When special interest groups like livestock and energy producers or rural county commissioners on ATVs can crony up with the federal courts and agencies to manage legal outcomes, we are knocking on the door of fascism.

The good news for the BLM’s tit is that Cliven Bundy appears to be a lunatic to the vast majority of rational Americans.  All the media attention on public land grazing abuse will shine some light on BLM practices and might encourage the agency to toe the line and regularly enforce existing regulations.  This attention can open the door to a little public awareness to the otherwise boring issue of public land management, particularly the damage done by livestock grazing and the irony that this grazing would largely come to and end if it were not subsidized and/or if ranchers were permitted to sell and thereby retire their permits.

It will be up to non-governmental organizations and writers alike to go through the good news door.  I’ll see what we can do at Torrey House Press with some appropriate Green Shorts.

Sage Grouse ESA Listing?

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Last Friday morning a half a dozen cars full of environmentalists, mostly, are parked on the side of a rural road waiting for dawn.  It is surprising cold, a bit below 20 degrees, and most of us are a bit under-dressed.  As suggested, we stayed in the cars, and again as suggested by the folks parked next to us, quieted down.  As the first morning twilight came on we could begin to see and hear the sage grouse males, big as turkeys, some now even out in the road, doing their spring mating ritual thing.  Fantastic.

Kirsten and I were there with the staff of Wild Utah Project to see our first sage grouse lek.  We were there with folks from the Salt Lake Hogle Zoo and were hosted by a couple of guys from the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS).  I was a little surprised these guys were there with us, particularly when they started talking about grazing as “a tool.”  You can guess you are in a bit of idealogical trouble when someone starts to tell you this arid environment is better off with domestic cows.  The NRCS is part of the U.S. Dept of Agriculture is providing millions of dollars in incentives to get ranchers to take care of the land they use.  Ranchers and the ag people are running a bit scared because of the threat of sage grouse being listed next year as an endangered species.  Given that there is said to have been over 15 million birds in the sage brush oceans of the West when Europeans arrived with their cows, and now are less than 300,000, the listing is a good bet.

My question, that chilly morning, was if we enviros should be helping the ag folks try to fend off the listing, like by putting flags on barbed wire fences to keep the birds from strangling in the wire.  Much of ranching is in tough times economically.  A lot of ranchers would be happy and willing to take a buy out for their grazing permits, if it were legal.  If buyouts could be arranged on consecutive grazing allotments, the ranchers could be capitalilzed, cows would be kept out of the leks, and those fences instead of being flagged, could come down.  Listing of the sage grouse is likely the only tool that could herd the ranchers, politically, into benefiting from buyouts.  From a long term economic trend standpoint, it is clear the ranchers ought to take the buyouts now before they are forced out later when their permits get denied.

Cowpie National Monument

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Beautiful, fragile, poorly managed.

Grand Staircase Escalanate National Monument, Burr Trail (GSENM), May 20, 2013 

It doesn’t make sense to subsidize environmental degradation on public lands.  Kirsten and I went out for a couple of nights camping to the Deer Creek campground off the Burr Trail in the GSENM.  After a hike down Deer Creek for less than a mile we turned around, sad and disgusted, and came back a day early.

The campground is an oasis in the high desert red rock country.  Deer Creek runs off of Boulder Mountain toward the Escalante River and on to Lake Powell.  Along its banks are cottonwood trees, coyote willow, aspen and spring wildflowers.  That is, if the delicate area is protected from cows.  The campground is cattle guarded for the most part and was a delight.  Out of the gate, across the road and down the stream was another matter.

Leaving camp we came across the first ominous signs.  Inside the campground the spring grasses were knee high and robust.

Cattle guard and fence at campground. Cows hang out at viewer’s right.

On the other side of the fence the grass was already overgrazed and gone.  Ranchers and their apologists such as the responsible BLM agents call this a “sacrifice zone” saying that cattle will congregate along fences making things worse there than  in general elsewhere.  But in general cows are to be kept out of riparian zones.  In fact, that is where they primarily hang out.  We crossed the road and signed in at the trail head register.  Behind the first row of willows it smelled and looked like we had walked into a stock yard.  The trampled stream was at our feet and the cows were there strip mining away.

It costs a rancher $1.35 per month for a permit to graze a cow and her calf on public land.  It is the same price they paid in 1962 and 1/10 to 1/20 the going market rate and less than it costs for you to feed your gerbil.  It costs the taxpayer more to manage the ranching/permittees than the ranchers make doing it.  It’s the reason for the pejorative “welfare rancher.”  These folks couldn’t afford to keep doing it with out subsidy.

The grass, wildflowers and willows should be hip high in this riparian area.

In addition to paying for gates and fences, the taxpayer also pays to exterminate wildlife that might threaten the cows like wolves and coyotes and even beaver (beaver are virtually outlawed by the county commissioners in Garfield County where much of the Monument is).

Cow burnt.

It is wolves and other predators that keep ungulates on the move in riparian areas allowing the supporting undergrowth like the grasses, wildflowers, and the cottonwoods, aspen and willows to prosper.  That bugs ranchers so even federal agencies like the so called “Wildlife Resources” spend millions making creeksides like this one a virtual private ranch where, as if they are the only concern, there is no need to monitor and manage the cows.  A half a dozen of the hooved locusts were munching nearby.

The ranchers answer that this is their way of life.  But who gets that?  Torrey House Press is losing money, and it is my way of life, but I am not asking for subsidies.  I have to make it work or get out of the business.  The commissioners ask who I am going to put out of a job.  Great rhetoric but the wrong question.  I am not qualified to say who should have a job and who shouldn’t and the government certainly isn’t.  Ask the Soviet Union about that practice.  The market could be allowed to work it out and there are market solutions.  The conservation community is standing by ready to buyout grazing permits but only if the permits can be retired.  By current law permit retirement on BLM land literally requires an act of congress.

Cows made sense for a little while in the arid Intermountain West and the Colorado Plateau but with the advent of the railroad and easy transportation, such things as grazing need to be done on private land where it rains.  There is plenty of it east of the 100th meridian.  It is nuts to keep hammering our public treasures this way.

Exclosures – August 2012

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First cup

Kirsten and I went up to the Fish Lake National Forest and camped on Thousand Lake Mountain in southern Utah for a couple of nights this last Thursday through Saturday August 16-18.  This area is just north of Torrey and we like to get up there in the summer just to get out and to do a little volunteer assessment of the management practices on these public lands.

We came away glad to have been out but distressed at how the land is being over used particularly for grazing and logging.  Working with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust we have become aware of how the open spaces of the public lands in the West are in a state of what Mary calls normalized degradation.  I’m afraid she is right.  The national forest above the Wasatch Front is managed for people.  These dry desert mountains in southern Utah have a multiple use directive, but the use in fact is dominated by ranching.  The contrasts are distinct.  Wildflowers are hip deep all summer in the Wasatch.  The southern meadows are grazed every year down to a 4″ stubble height.  That’s the goal, it is usually worse.  Riparian areas in particular take a beating.  Because of pressure by environmentalists some small areas called “exclosures”  have been set aside and somewhat protected from grazing.  The ecological difference in these exclosures is tremendous.  The cowboys obviously still let the cows into these protected spaces but not enough to erase the evidence of what these mountain meadows could be without public land grazing.

I have blogged about it more here and elsewhere, but the reasoning behind public land grazing defies common sense.  It is not economic.  The ranchers/livestock permittees depend heavily on subsidies for water, gates, fences, rangeland “treatments” and pasture control.  Most of them make very little money all the same.  Public land grazing is probably the number one source of public land degradation and yet the public subsidizes it.  It is a story of a very narrow special interest taking advantage of the public’s clueless largesse.  It has long been a problem and one that seems to be intractable.  At $1.35 per AUM (Animal Unit Month – one cow and calf for a month of grazing) ranchers pay the same fee to graze as they did in 1966.  Who gets such treatment today?  One way out, the best one I can see, is to give ranchers a right they do not now have and allow them to accept grazing retirement buyouts.   -Mark Bailey

Cows somehow fenced IN the Elk Horn campground. Did they pay the fee?
Exclosure at Elk Horn campground.
Spring protected from grazing near Elk Horn campground.
Logger party. (notice cows at top)
Logged hillside on east slope of Thousand Lake Mountain. It’s hard to imagine showing less land ethic or a more utter disregard for the land than the Old West extractors do.
Inside and out
Thousand Lake Mountain exclosure
Protected from grazing – north slope of Thousand Lake Mountain
Exclosure on road to Elk Grove campground on Thousand Lake Mountain
Over grazing leads to erosion. The road to Fish Lake.
We haven’t seen the upper Fremont run dry before.
K inside exclosure.
Ungrazed willow and waist high grass — inside exclosure.
Inside U.M. Creek exclosure. Lovely.
Inside the exclosure. Notice the healthy stream banks. Trout love this coverage, stream stays deeper, cooler, narrower without cows in it.
Outside the exclosure. Notice the incised stream banks.
Exclosure fence
Exclosure U.M. Creek
Exclosure around U.M Creek in Water Flat. One of the best places in the forest to see what the forest could be without cows. Cows do get in here, maybe as they are moved between pastures. It could be even healthier.
Look close inside and see the cow pie. There is no reason for cows to ever be in this exclosure on U.M. Creek. K says if there is a gate in the fence that’s all you need to know.
Over-grazed willow
We saw a couple of muskrat in here late last fall. Now a stockyard — but cows are supposed to be kept out of riparian areas. If there is a cowboy up there, as required, he was nowhere to be seen.
More public ranch
A large seep meadow, mostly dry now and before the cows arrive for the year. The spring here is not grazing protected. Is grazing drying it up?
Utilization cage. Cows haven’t been in this pasture yet this season.
Upper end of Right Fork U.M. Creek exclosure
Lower end of Right Fork U.M. Creek exclosure
Water Flat, U.M. Creek exclosure
Cathedral Valley on way down off of Thousand Lake Mountain. Not sure if cows get in here but glad they aren’t here now.
Then this guy bellows into camp.
Good to be out.
Glad this big boy was on the other side of the road.

More public hurt from welfare ranching . . .

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What to do about the Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s imperial control over federal land-use policy in the West?

From an essay by Christopher Ketchum in The American Prospect comes some acute observations about the power abuse in the face of common sense and at the expense of the public and the land:

“It’s almost a matter of religiosity that the real costs of ranching are paid for by the public,” says Brian Ertz, media director with the Western Watersheds Project. “Democratic and Republican congresspersons alike make their way up through political environments of extreme livestock–culture-dominated political organizations. The statehouses are dominated by livestock interests, and that’s where the federal representatives cut their teeth.”

The Cattlemen spend $2 billion to $3 billion is spent each year in state, federal, and county subsidies to support the survival of ranching on more than 250 million acres of land managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.  With that money they have purchased their own predator extermination government agency, the federally funded wolf-killing unit, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) called Wildlife Services.  Between the loss of predators and the damage done by grazing, they are slowly turning the West to dust:

The loss of “apex consumers” from ecosystems, says the report, “may be humankind’s most pervasive influence on nature.”

Ranching, by contrast, is considered one of the top causes of desertification, deforestation, and species extinction in the American West. An estimated 80 percent of the streams and riparian ecosystems in the West have been damaged by livestock grazing.

Even under a Democrat President, the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, comes from a family of five generations of ranchers.  The public needs to put up a little more fuss about the management of their land by a destructive, subsidized, narrow special interest.  We hope to provide some leadership at THP.

 

Don’t photograph that cow!

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I’ve been reading quite a bit about the history and current practice of grazing on public lands.  My question has always been how so few people could have such huge political clout.  The answer is complex and fascinating.  Much of the answer revolves around the power of the cowboy myth in the mind of the American and particularly in the mind of the American congressperson.  I think I will blog a bit about some current examples of both regulatory and political capture and about the harm that public land grazing does.  Here’s a current example of where the reactionary Utah congress is working on a law to make it illegal to take a picture of a cow. (HB187)  >>>more

Golden Saddles

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Grazing in the Intermountain West does more environmental damage than any other single activity.  But ranchers have always had a choke hold on western legislators and most of the public land is grazed.  One force that could overcome the ranchers grip is the market.  Retirements of grazing permits (they are permits, not rights) are refered to sometimes as gold saddles.  There is currently such a proposal by a legislator whose name is Adam Smith. An almost-too-perfect name for a guy coming up with an “invisible hand” market based solution. With such poetic grace on its side, the grazing retirement option may be getting a little closer.  See Jodi Peterson’s article in High Country News.

What uses most of the land and water without showing up in production?

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70% of the land in Utah is public.  And 70% of that land is handed out for grazing.  Over 80% of the water used in Utah is for agriculture and most of that is to grow hay for livestock.  That is a lot of land and water.  Open this chart on the left of the State of Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert Economic Report’s figures on employment by industry as a percent of total employment: Dec. 2011.  Where’s agriculture?  The subsidized use of all that land and water isn’t producing much, particularly jobs.

Failure of Land Use Socialism

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There is nothing more harmful to the arid lands of the American West today than public land grazing.  It is ironic that the Cato Institute, the leading libertarian, conservative think tank calls the results of over a century of grazing on public lands, ” . . . a testimony to the failure of land-use socialism.”  Ouch.  70% of the over 300 million acres of public land in the West is grazed, producing less than 3% of the nation’s beef.  Agriculture is less than 1% of the western economies but uses nearly 80% of the water, much of that used to grow hay for to feed livestock.  Ranching is a tiny little special interest.  A rancher pays $1.35 per month to graze a cow and its calf.  How much do you suppose it costs to feed a gerbil for a month?  Yet the BLM, with $40 million of taxpayer stimulus money, wants to ignore the impact of grazing in their Rapid Ecoregional Assessments project to map ecological trends throughout the West.  See more here . . . >>