If Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election the management of livestock grazing on Western public lands will continue to further the interests of ranchers over those of the general public.
That’s a big deal, because grazing is the most pervasive commercial use of the Western public lands administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service. According to the BLM, they manage about 155 million acres for grazing, including 11.5 million acres in Arizona, while the Forest Service reported it manages about 102 million acres for grazing. That’s a total of about 257 million acres, which means that mitigating the environmental damage caused by livestock grazing on Western public lands is an important issue.
How would Trump’s mismanagement of public land grazing hurt the public interest? Examples are provided by some grazing management proposals issued in Arizona by the BLM and Forest when he was in office:
- In September 2017 the Tonto National Forest’s Globe Ranger District announced a proposed management plan for its Hicks-Pikes Peak grazing allotment. It included the initiation of cattle grazing on pastures, comprised mostly of Sonoran Desert, along the southern bank of the Salt River. Portions of these pastures are within the Salt River Canyon Wilderness and hadn’t been grazed since 1999 in order to protect riparian habitat used by endangered species. The new grazing was to be facilitated by the construction of an expensive 5.98 mile long fence built close along the river.
- In June 2018 the BLM Safford Field Office issued a grazing permit for the long-vacant Badger Den grazing allotment, located in desert along the San Simon River, a watershed that’s infamous for erosion caused by livestock grazing. The allotment hadn’t been grazed since 1993 after the previous permit was cancelled due to permittee noncompliance. The BLM issued the new permit using a unique categorical exclusion memo, claiming they were just transferring the permit that had been cancelled more than 25 years before to a new permittee. The new permit had the same limited terms and conditions as the old canceled grazing permit. The new permittee was Levi Klump, son of the previous noncompliant permittee Luther “Wally” Klump. (Wally Klump was released from jail in 2004 after spending more than a year there because he refused to remove his cattle illegally grazing on local BLM land.) The new Badger Den permit was issued despite the fact that an environmental assessment (EA) and land health evaluation (LHE) had never been completed for the allotment.
- In June 2018 the BLM Gila District Office released a draft resource management plan (RMP) for the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (SPRNCA) that proposed to increase the acres grazed in the RNCA by 375%. It also proposed to allow grazing to continue on a 2.5 mile stretch of the Babocomari River within the RNCA. This was despite the fact the 1988 law that created RNCA stated the BLM could only allow those multiple uses that “will further the primary purposes for which the conservation area is established.”
- In January 2020 the BLM’s national office issued a Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to revise the agency’s grazing management regulations. Their proposals included eliminating public decision notices and protest periods.
- In September 2020 the BLM Lower Sonoran Field Office released its RMP amendment decision to allow livestock grazing to continue in the northern portion of the Sonoran Desert National Monument. The decision was the result of a 2016 federal court order which found that the BLM’s 2012 grazing compatibility analysis for the monument’s RMP/EIS was inadequate in regards to the 2001 presidential proclamation that created the monument, which stated that grazing would only be allowed to continue in that area to the extent that it was determined to be “compatible with the paramount purpose of protecting the objects identified in this proclamation.”
There were probably more stinkers in Arizona, and certainly throughout the West, but these are enough to show the kinds of grazing projects that were proposed during the Trump administration.
Project Updates
There’s more to be learned about public land grazing management by reviewing what happened with the projects listed above after Trump left office:
- Hicks-Pikes Peak Allotment – On September 7, 2022, the Globe District Ranger issued a draft decision notice to implement a new allotment management plan (AMP) for the Hicks-Pikes Peak Allotment. It included the authorization of grazing in the long-vacant pastures along the south bank of the Salt River, and the construction of the long fence along the river. The decision notice sneakily omitted this major fact, and referred readers to the project’s EA to obtain details about the decision. On October 31, 2022, the Tonto National Forest Deputy Supervisor issued a letter wherein he announced his intention to extend the time to review the several objections received in response to the Hicks-Pikes Peak decision due to the “many contentions” included in the objections. On January 6, 2023, the Tonto National Forest withdrew its decision for the Hicks-Pikes Peak grazing allotment in response to the substantive issues raised in the objections it had received.
- Badger Den Allotment – On December 4, 2019, the conservation group Western Watersheds Project (WWP) filed a legal complaint in federal court regarding the questionable legality of the allotment’s new grazing permit. The BLM responded on March 9, 2020, by cancelling the permit, before any cattle had been let loose on the allotment. The lawsuit was dropped in June after the BLM agreed to engage the required public planning process for a new grazing permit. In June 2021 the BLM issued an EA and LHE for the allotment with a proposed decision to issue a new grazing permit. WWP protested it, and the BLM subsequently issued a final EA and decision notice for the allotment on February 14, 2022. The new livestock management plan prohibited grazing in the allotment’s San Simon River pastures during the growing season to protect the river channel.
- San Pedro RNCA – On April 26, 2019, the BLM released their Proposed SPRNCA RMP/Final EIS. It did not include their original proposal to increase grazing on the RNCA, but proposed to allow existing grazing to continue on about 7,030 acres, including along the lower Babocomari River. When the BLM issued its final decision for the RMP on July 30, 2019, they used circular logic to resolve the protests of their proposal to allow livestock grazing to continue. They promised, however, to finally implement appropriate livestock management on the RNCA’s four grazing allotments using a process that, “will have a public involvement component.” On April 7, 2020, a coalition of environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit against the BLM’s decision to continue to permit livestock grazing in the RNCA. In spite of the pending lawsuit, on April 29, 2022, the BLM released a preliminary EA and final Land Health Evaluations for the RNCA’s grazing allotments. On August 2, 2022, the lawsuit was resolved with a settlement agreement that required the BLM to reconsider the impacts of livestock grazing in the San Pedro RNCA, and update their 2019 RMP if the review found that grazing should be ended. On December 21, 2022, the BLM issued a Finding Of No Significant Impact (FONSI) wherein they claimed the review of their decision to continue grazing in the 2019 RMP, as required by the legal settlement, had found no reason to make any changes. On that same day, the BLM released proposed decisions and a final environmental assessment (EA) to reauthorize grazing on the four allotments. On April 7, 2023, the BLM dismissed the protests they had received in response to their proposed decisions for the grazing allotments, and made the decisions final. They were subsequently appealed by conservationists to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Hearings and Appeals, which is infamously slow in making decisions.
- BLM Grazing Regulations – The BLM received over 1,500 unique public comments on their proposed grazing regulation changes by the deadline of March 6, 2020. The next step was to complete a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, but that didn’t happen before Trump left office in January 2021.
- Sonoran Desert National Monument – On June 29, 2021, environmental groups sued the BLM for its September 2020 decision to continue to allow livestock grazing in the Sonoran Desert National Monument. On August 9, 2023, a federal judge responded to the lawsuit by issuing another legal decision that the BLM’s grazing compatibility analysis was still inadequate and they needed to complete a better one. On October 4, 2024, the Arizona BLM issued a revised Draft Resource Management Plan Amendment/Environmental Assessment the Sonoran Desert National Monument. It still included the continuation of cattle grazing in the northern portion of the allotment, although it was limited to ephemeral grazing.
As you can see, even after the Trump administration was ousted by voters in 2020, local agency officials continued to sympathize with grazing permittees. Another example of this would be the Forest Service’s Southwestern Region office’s practice of redacting grazing permittee names from public grazing administration documents requested through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It took a FOIA appeal (#2024-FS-WO-00075-A) to the agency’s national office to end this secretive practice.
The problem is that most public land ranchers believe that livestock grazing is the most important use of Western public lands, and many public land managers agree with them. This is a perversion of the multiple use doctrine, which is legally defined as the, “harmonious and coordinated management of the various resources without permanent impairment of the productivity of the land and the quality of the environment with consideration being given to the relative values of the resources and not necessarily to the combination of uses that will give the greatest economic return or the greatest unit output.” In other words, livestock grazing isn’t required to be permitted on all public lands in the name of multiple use.
A Tyranny of the Minority
In 2017 it was reported there were about 17,800 BLM grazing permittees, and about 6,200 Forest Service permittees across the West. These relatively few people in a nation of more than 330 million have excessive influence over hundreds of millions of acres of public land, despite the marginal economic contributions of public land ranching, which are significantly offset by the growing amounts of government assistance received by grazing permittees. (There’s also the below market federal grazing fee of $1.35 per animal per month.)
It’s a sort of subsidized tyranny of the minority because few real conservation projects get approved by local public land managers without the assent of the local grazing permittees. And instead of focusing on common sense grazing reforms, such as no grazing in wilderness areas, hot deserts, or riparian areas, conservationists have to spend time fighting bad proposals. If Trump wins reelection, the situation will become worse, because it will embolden these lords of yesterday and their misguided sympathizers in the BLM and Forest Service.