Weld ranchers find grazing on federal land challenging but necessary

Weld County ranchers like Leonard Ball and Robert Hill have had federal grazing permits in their families for 75 years or more and while working with the agency that oversees that land isn’t easy, they say it’s a necessity when it comes to their operations. The relationship between grazing permit holders and the federal government was thrust into the national spotlight in April when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who refuses to recognize federal authority on state land and who stopped paying grazing fees 20 years ago, stood with an armed militia to thwart a Bureau of Land Management roundup of his cattle, which were on government permit land after his permit had been revoked. The BLM says Bundy owes $1 million in grazing fees and penalties for trespassing, according to Associated Press reports. Terry Fankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, called Bundy “an outlier,” saying that he’s not representative of how most ranchers feel, and he’s certainly not an example of how most ranchers would conduct themselves. Still, Fankhauser said many ranchers view their federal permits as a necessary burden: they struggle to work under tight federal restrictions, but they’d have a difficult time operating without them. “It’s a cumbersome process,” Fankhauser said. “That being said, (federal grasslands) are integrally valuable to these ranching operations. You have to have access to those federal lands to stay in business.” In Weld, the U.S. Forest Service doles out permits for just more than 190,000 acres of grazing land in the Pawnee National Grasslands on which ranchers graze roughly 8,000 cattle each year. Most of the roughly 100 permit holders are members of one of two grazing associations, the Crow Valley Livestock Cooperative or the Pawnee Livestock Cooperative Association, which each have permits for roughly half of that acreage. Other federal agencies have little land within the county’s borders. The Bureau of Land Management, for example, manages about 78 acres. Per federal statute, the going rate for grazing on federal lands is $1.35 per Animal Unit Month, or AUM. The permit holder pays the fee for the amount of forage each cow or each cow-calf pair would consume each month. On federal land, the permit holder is also responsible for any improvements on the land, including fences, windmills, and water systems. The permit holder foots the bill for those improvements but does not technically own them. Hill, one of five board directors for the Pawnee cooperative, said his association pays the $1.35 per AUM and pays for all improvements. The organization disseminates the permits to its 43 members, who each pay $7 per AUM. Members are required to help with some maintenance, like mending fences or repairing shallow pipelines, but the organization still pays for materials and bigger repairs. “A private individual wouldn’t be able to do that all on his own much of the time,” Hill said...more