Livestock Grazing on Public Lands

“Home on the range

Where the deer and the antelope play

Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day”

That old song was is one of the many things you would think of when you look at the prairies and mountains of the western states, especially in Colorado.  It is also one of the songs you always hear when people think about ranchers and cowboys.  As a rancher’s son, I’ve always been proud of my heritage.  So much so that I always wear a straw cowboy hat around every day and everywhere (to the point that my friends and family can spot me a mile away because of it).  I remember, while growing up, that city folk were envious of my upbringing in a ranch environment, thanks to famous western movies (from the old classics with Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and John Wayne in True Grit, to the recent ones with Robert Duvall in Broken Trail and Harrison Ford in Cowboys vs. Aliens).  The folks in the city are envious of us being ‘free’ in the wide open spaces of the countryside and being away from the noise and pollution of the cities. I could not blame them, I love and enjoy the emptiness, peace, and silence of the countryside and raising cattle to help feed the world (whether it’s for people in Japan or even in our local area).  With all this in mind, I can only just feel more proud of my heritance. 

But, there many things going against ranchers today.  Very few people in their twenties or younger are interested in ranches or anything agriculturally related. Agriculture has become industrialized, and public lands have been developing into urban areas.  Since much land has been converted to urbanized land or national park land, livestock grazing on public lands has become a debated topic. While city folk see the land as being theirs, the ranchers still need access to properly graze their cattle. Due to the high cost of land nowadays, the relative “cheapness” of grazing on public lands, and not wanting to over graze their own private lands, sheep and cattle ranchers find the idea of grazing their livestock on public lands to be a grand deal.  But, with the desire of supporting the protection of the flora and fauna, preserving the view of “unspoiled” wilderness, and the worry of livestock harming the environment, conservation groups from the cities and younger generations work tirelessly and endlessly on the prevention of livestock grazing on public lands.  And this is when ranchers and city people get into conflict with each other over the appropriate allocation and use of public lands, so much so that the debates they get into would instantly become heated or bloody.  Further, almost a century after the Range Wars (a term used for a conflict between cattle men and sheep men during the days of the Wild West) has ended, a whole new form of Range wars have started up and opened up today (a sort of Range Wars II or RWII).

In response to this sort of conflict, the prices of the permits that the BLM society sell, which allows ranchers to legally graze their livestock on public lands, have increased every year (Winter and Whittaker, 1981) and, if the ranchers couldn’t be able to afford that permit, hey had to sell off their ranch so that they wouldn’t overgraze their pastures to the point where they become useless.  Some of these ranchers had to work for other ranches while others had to quit ranching all together.  To the conservation groups opposed to livestock grazing on public lands, this would seem like a great victory.  But I wonder, is removing the livestock off of public lands really a good movement for preserving the land?  Or is this movement a good thing to do entirely?  Along with being a rancher’s kid, I am also a supporter of conservation of wildlife and wilderness.  True ranchers preserve the land so that the land can preserve us in return, by supporting our livestock and livelihood.

The first question that has to be answered is that does livestock grazing really damage the environment?  A good number of ranchers would say that no, their livestock do not really damage the land any more than elk would damage the land.  The conservation groups and researchers would say that yes, livestock grazing causes immense and even permanent damage to public lands and habitats of endangered species (Donahue, 1999).  It appears that both sides have very different and very opposing viewpoints on this situation.  But as Colorado State University professor, Bernard Rollin, has said often, the best place to be in situations like this is the “middle ground between two extremes” (Rollin, 1992).  And I would have to say that I completely agree with his remark.

One of the first things that should be analyzed is whether the effects livestock grazing on the public lands are negative, positive, or somewhere in between.  One common claim is that livestock grazing has a disastrous effects on riparian areas (the edges of water sources) because livestock feast on the plants at those areas and cause soil erosion (Armour, Duff, and Elmore, 1991).  After doing some research on this topic, I have found some evidence to this claim.  It has been shown that, in uncontrolled conditions, livestock will tend to stay and graze at riparian areas for an extended period of time (Armour, Duff, and Elmore, 1994).  Additionally, I have seen this first hand in my father’s old ranch; cattle do not like to stray too far from a good water hole.  Why is it that livestock like to stay at those riparian areas?  It appears that, along with the good source of water, the riparian plants are rich in sodium and sodium is highly prized by large herbivores.  In natural situations, this sort of thing is prevented by the occurrence of predators, who are often hunting near and around these areas, making the riparian areas less visited by the local wildlife and decreasing the chances of those areas being destroyed (Beschta, 2010).

While livestock do negatively impact riparian zones, it can be prevented. The most effective ways to prevent the degradation of riparian habitat is to either fence off the riparian areas with barbed or electric wire fences (Platts, William, and Wagstaff, 1984), train your livestock to keep away from those areas, or just set up a water trough and salt licks at a distance away from those areas (Elmore, 1992).  By doing the latter, spreading out the resources prevents the livestock from concentrating on just one location, preventing overgrazing and soil erosion.

Another potential negative impact of grazing livestock on public lands is that the sheep and cattle overgraze the land and deplete the resources of local wildlife.  This is problematic when cattle stay in a particular area for too long and overgraze and trample the area (Fleischner, 1994).  But this problem is primarily the result of poor management and can be mitigated through rotational grazing.  When rotational grazing and proper management are done, it will not only maintain the land, but it will improve it (Holechek, 2006).  Proper grazing can help with flora diversity, by providing extra room for other species of plants, and even decrease the amount of dry grass, which would otherwise be fuel for wildfires (Zimmerman, 1984).  And, in regard to livestock grazing destroying food for wildlife, properly managed grazing can actually provide wildlife with more food than if there were no grazing from livestock at all.  One such way this works is that, in the Rockies, cattle would graze on the low-quality grass, which exposes the high-quality plants that deer and elk love (which are unpalatable to cattle) (Frisina, 1992).  This kind of behavior mimics the behavior of wildebeest, zebras, and gazelle in the African plains (Bell, 1971).  And in looking into the natural history of the Rockies in Colorado I have found that, in the past, there was a subspecies of bison called the ‘mountain bison’. The mountain bison, like the bison herds in Yellowstone, would graze in the mountains in the summer months and in the valleys and lowlands during the winter months before they were wiped out of Colorado around the turn of the century (Dary, 1989).  With this information, it doesn’t take too much of an imagination that the elk are doing the exact same thing they did with the cattle as they had done with the bison, letting them graze off the course grass to get to the good stuff.  Think of it like feeding your dog your vegetables so you can get to dessert faster.

So, it seems that while there is some evidence in support of the fears of livestock grazing on public lands, these problems can be avoided by simply a change of herd management by ranchers and education of the conservation groups.  So why is there so much hatred and conflict over this issue?  From the ranchers’ side, I know firsthand that ranchers want to be independent from the government and not be regulated by them.  When government officials or scientists tell them what to do or what they think they should do, ranchers feel defensive and retaliatory.  On the side of the conservation groups, I can see why they are against livestock grazing given that it corrupts the view of “unspoiled” wilderness and their goal of trying to restore  the wilderness to where it was before we came about.   Ranchers need to discipline their management strategies to maximize their profit. Conservation groups need to be that we can’t have the environment like it was before we were here, that world is gone forever.  And just because the animals are domesticated, it doesn’t mean that they are not still animals.  I would encourage them to see livestock grazing as an ecological opportunity, not a problem.  And I would also encourage ranchers that changing their management is not losing freedom problem, it’s just advice that needs to be taken.  We are all stuck on this planet together and whatever choices we make affect us now and later.  So, in conclusion, the answer is to make people a solution, not a problem.  And by doing this, we can still have a home on the range.

Reference List

• Armour, Carl, Don Duff, and Wayne Elmore. "The effects of livestock grazing on western riparian and stream ecosystem." Fisheries 19.9 (1994): 9-12.

• Armour, C. L., D. A. Duff, and W. Elmore. "The effects of livestock grazing on riparian and stream ecosystems." Fisheries 16.1 (1991): 7-11.

• Bell, Richard HV. "A grazing ecosystem in the Serengeti." Scientific American 225.1 (1971): 86-93.

• Beschta, Robert L., and William J. Ripple. "Recovering riparian plant communities with wolves in northern Yellowstone, USA." Restoration Ecology 18.3 (2010): 380-389.

• Dary, David. The buffalo book: the full saga of the American animal. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1989.

• Donahue, Debra L. The western range revisited: removing livestock from public lands to conserve native biodiversity. Vol. 5. University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

• Elmore, Wayne. "Riparian responses to grazing practices." Watershed management. Springer New York, 1992.

• Fleischner, Thomas L. "Ecological costs of livestock grazing in western North America." Conservation Biology 8.3 (1994): 629-644.

• Frisina, Michael R. "Elk habitat use within a rest-rotation grazing system." Rangelands Archives 14.2 (1992): 93-96.

• Holechek, Jerry L., et al. "Grazing Impacts on Rangeland Vegetation: What We Have Learned: Livestock Grazing at Light-to-Moderate Intensities Can Have Positive Impacts on Rangeland Vegetation in Arid-to-Semiarid Areas." Rangelands 28.1 (2006): 7-13.

• Platts, William S., and Fred J. Wagstaff. "Fencing to control livestock grazing on riparian habitats along streams: Is it a viable alternative?." North American Journal of Fisheries Management 4.3 (1984): 266-272.

• Rollin, Bernard E. Animal rights and human morality. Prometheus Books, 1992.

• Winter, John R., and James K. Whittaker. "The relationship between private ranchland prices and public-land grazing permits." Land Economics (1981): 414-421.

• Zimmerman, G. Thomas, and L. F. Neuenschwander. "Livestock grazing influences on community structure, fire intensity, and fire frequency within the Douglas-fir/ninebark habitat type." Journal of Range Management (1984): 104-110.