Enviros upset following release of range management plan for Idaho, northern Nevada

A new federal land management plan for southwest Idaho and northern Nevada created after the settlement of a lawsuit aimed at reducing cattle grazing has been released — and it allows an increase. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management last week approved its Resource Management Plan for the Jarbidge Field Office. The settlement agreement with conservationists was reached in 2005. "This demonstrates that the BLM cannot be trusted to put the priority of wildlife and multiple use over cowboys," said Todd Tucci, an attorney for Advocates for the West representing Western Watersheds Project. "Cowboys are running the show." The conservation group will consider another lawsuit, Tucci said. "We can't let an increase in cattle go unchallenged," he said. The previous plan allowed up to 260,000 animal unit months, which increased to 326,000 under the new plan. In the 76-page plan, the BLM cited the 2005 federal lawsuit settlement agreement with Western Watersheds Project as one of the reasons for creating the new plan for the 1.4 million acres of public lands in the Jarbidge Field Office. Heidi Whitlach, project manager for the Rangeland Management Plan, said the wildfires in the area and other parts of the state often pulled workers off the project and accounted for the length of time needed to complete the plan. Rehabilitation efforts in the burned areas, she said, resulted in the planting of grasses to prevent non-desirable invasive species, particularly cheatgrass, from returning. She said the initial years of the new Range Management Plan call for increased grazing and more cattle because of the additional forage with the planted grasses. Over the years, she said, the number of animal unit months will be reduced to 279,000 as more native plants and shrubs return...more

"We can't let an increase in cattle go unchallenged," he said. 

That's been the case across the west for years. Reductions go unchallenged all the time, but every proposed increase is challenged, and it's had an impact on the agencies. 

In NM we had a situation in the Las Cruces District of the BLM where a new owner took over an allotment in a WSA. The allotment had been hit pretty hard but the new owner installed some range improvements and implemented some grazing strategies that brought the allotment back. Based on the improvement in the overall condition of the allotment, the rancher filed for a temporary increase in numbers. The NM BLM state office said no. The rancher appealed and it went to an IBLA judge for a hearing and the rancher won. Why? Because during the course of the hearing an employee of the NM Dept. of Ag found a memo from the Las Cruces BLM office to the State office recommending and justifying the increase. The memo had mysteriously disappeared from the Allotment File, but was found in the Wilderness file. What quickly became clear to the IBLA and everyone else was the State Office had made a decision based on politics, no increases in WSAs, rather than on the data collected on site. 

The article above says cattle numbers should go up or down based on the forage available. But no matter what the science says the enviros are insisting on no increase. No sir, can't let that happen on 1.4 million acres.