In 2015, ranchers paid the federal government $1.69 per animal unit
month (AUM) to allow their livestock to graze on federal land. As of
March, that amount has risen to $2.11, a 25 percent increase. Utah Rep.
Rob Bishop has called the fee hike “outlandish,” and most of the
approximately 22,000 public-land ranchers are likely to agree.
But critics are quick to point out that a $2.11 AUM
fee pales in comparison to private grazing leases, which are often
nearly 10 times that amount. Travis Bruner, the executive director of
the Western Watersheds Project, told High Country News that “taxpayers
are getting a raw deal regarding grazing” and that the current system
constitutes nothing more than “a narrow welfare program for the benefit
of Western livestock operations.”
That position presupposes that the government is
somehow doing the ranchers a favor by allowing them on public lands at
all. There is a growing body of evidence, however, that there is a
genuine environmental benefit to well-managed grazing. In 2015, the Utah
Legislature recognized that well-managed public land can naturally
sequester carbon emissions and passed HCR 8 in an effort to achieve that
goal. Grazing is a critical component of that process, as it regularly
turns the soil and makes it more fertile than land that is left
untouched and untended. Of course, overgrazing can become a problem, but
the idea that the government would be better off without any private
animals grazing on public land is belied by the facts.
The Center for American Progress, a nonprofit think
tank headquartered in Washington, outlines another compelling reason to
encourage grazing on federal land. In a recent report titled “The
Disappearing West,” the group found that from 2001 to 2011, 4,300 square
miles of open Western land were lost to development. “Every 2.5
minutes, the American West loses a football field's worth of natural
area to human development,” its website states.
The group's answer to this problem is to preserve
that land by purchasing it for private environmental groups. Yet the
more cost-effective solution is to encourage and even expand grazing on
public lands.
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