Voluntary Federal Grazing Permit Retirements Are A Solution

The federal government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually in a misguided and often futile attempt to try and maintain ranching on Western public lands that aren’t suited for livestock grazing, including hot deserts, wilderness areas, and sensitive wildlife habitats.

Despite these growing subsidies, a lot of federal grazing permittees still don’t make much from their operations, and thousands lose money. This is especially true for those trying to operate in arid regions, which are becoming increasingly hot and dry due to climate change – as evidenced by the ongoing megadrought in the Southwest. In fact, research has shown that public lands grazing is exacerbating climate change. In other words, public land ranchers are engaged in an activity that’s increasing the frequency and severity of the droughts they are suffering.

In many of these situations, the taxpayers money would be better spent by paying public land ranchers to voluntarily relinquish their grazing permits so their grazing allotments can be retired. In addition to financially assisting beleaguered ranchers, it would help improve the health of the land, as commercial livestock grazing is inherently destructive to the West’s arid ecosystems. (Livestock management is, after all, primarily about mitigating ecological damage.)

Furthermore, the retirement of grazing permits could help relieve the administrative burden from the grossly understaffed local offices of the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which together have to administer about 24,000 grazing allotments, on about about 257 million acres of public land across the West. A 2024 report produced by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) assessed BLM rangeland health and showed some of the results of this understaffing. More than 56 million acres (an area larger than Idaho) failed BLM Rangeland Health Standards. And livestock was identified as the major cause of degradation for at least 37 million acres (an area bigger than Florida), making overgrazing the biggest cause of landscape health failure across the West.

Voluntary Retirement

Public land managers are legally required, of course, to determine if livestock grazing is a suitable use of the lands under their jurisdictions, and authorize it only where it’s appropriate. But the unfortunate reality is that grazing suitability determinations typically just depend upon whether or not any local ranchers want to graze the area.

The process of voluntary grazing permit retirement could be a sort of market mechanism for suitability determinations. Those ranchers with permits for unprofitable or marginal grazing allotments would be the most likely to take advantage of it. This would include many arid allotments. And ranchers with permits for allotments that have more value to the public for other uses, such as wilderness or wildlife habitat, would have a new financial option.

Public Land Grazing Permits Aren’t Property Rights

The biggest complication involved in creating a voluntary grazing permit retirement program is that federal grazing permits have no legal value because they aren’t private property rights. They do have a market value, however, because the local real estate value of a public land ranch’s private base property is typically inflated by the traditional presumption that a new owner would be the first in line for the nearby grazing allotment’s permit.

But according to the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Fuller (1973), the federal government is prohibited from paying for retiring grazing permits, because they aren’t private property rights, compensable as per the 5th Amendment. They are just revisable and revocable licenses to authorize the commercial use of public lands. Their decision cited the seminal Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which states that “its provisions shall not create any right, title, or estate in or to” public lands.

This is a very good thing, so any legislation that Congress might pass to authorize government payments for the market value of voluntary grazing permit retirements would need to explicitly maintain this legal provision in order to prevent any defacto creation of private property rights on public lands. And it’s doubtful that would happen in today’s reactionary political environment.

Public Land Grazing Permit Retirement Fund

The solution for providing compensation to ranchers that voluntarily surrender their federal grazing permits could be to create a dedicated fund managed by a private non-profit corporation. Its website could be used to collect financial contributions online, and the site could be regularly updated to feature specific local situations that are in need of funding.

However, even if that happened, federal grazing regulations would still have to be revised to ensure that permits which are voluntarily surrendered don’t get reissued. Under the current rules, when a rancher surrenders a grazing permit, they notify the agency of their “preference” for who should be the allotment’s succeeding permittee. This is typically the person who bought the ranch from them. But if the surrendering permittee’s preference is for the grazing permit to be retired, the agency is usually required to classify the allotment as still open for grazing – just temporarily vacant.

The regulatory changes necessary to allow voluntary permit retirements would have to be implemented through federal legislation. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Congress has passed numerous bills in the last several decades that authorized various grazing permit retirements for specific situations. It’s proven to be a good strategy, so in November 2023 U.S Representatives Jared Huffman (D-CA) and Adam Smith (D-WA) introduced the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act (HR 6314) to allow permit retirements on all Western public lands. (They both won reelection in November 2024.) It didn’t include any federal funding to encourage ranchers to surrender their permits, but would have relied upon conservation organizations to provide the financial incentives. The bill did not receive a hearing in the House Committee on Natural Resources, despite being a common sense solution and having the support of numerous conservation organizations.

The establishment of a private public land grazing permit retirement fund could encourage the passage of federal legislation to implement changes to public land grazing regulations that would enable ranchers to voluntarily retire their grazing permits.