Get the Scoop on Freeloading Cattle Ranchers in Book on Welfare Ranching

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. Ed. George Weurthner and Molli Matteson. Island Press, 2002.

In the early 1970s, I attended a summer camp near the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area of New Mexico. For six weeks, we lived out of tents on campgrounds set in the national parks. We traveled in vans and hiked, stocking up in small towns across the four states. In a letter I sent my younger brother, I once mischievously enclosed a piece torn off a fibrous, gray object I saw everywhere. Naturally, I did not explain that he would be touching a cow pie.

I recalled this incident when reading Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. I had never before wondered why I assumed that cow pies (droppings) were native to the New Mexico environment. Nor had I wondered why the desert seemed so sun-baked. Or why few places on public land below the ponderosas really seemed wild.

Now I understand, and it almost breaks my heart. The modest but rich ecosystems of the arid West had been degraded by cows grazing through them like wide-open feedlots. In return, less than 3 percent of American beef is produced from federal public lands.

Welfare Ranching is a coffee-table book with essays, but the photographs are all you need. One two-page spread shows cow-grazed barren land on one side of a fence; on the other side, waving golden grass stretches out toward the horizon. Another before-and-after photograph shows a fence dividing a verdant, high-banked stream from the muddy, trampled pools left behind by cows.

Such riparian zones - habitat for fish, shady trees and migratory birds - bear the brunt of ecosystem damage in the West because cows congregate near water. Page after page tells the same story.

Livestock graze more than 260 million acres of federal lands in the West, an area the size of Texas and California combined. In the west, they graze 90 percent of all Bureau of Land Management lands and 69 percent of U.S. Forest Service lands, in addition to national wildlife refuges and national parks. Few ranchers benefit. As of 2002, only about 6 percent of all livestock producers west of the Mississippi River ran stock on public lands.

The ecosystems of National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands are public assets that are literally given away to the rich. According to a special report by the San Jose Mercury News in 2002, the largest 10 percent of permit holders control 49 percent of the livestock on all public land, and 69 percent on BLM land. In contrast, the smallest 50 percent of permittees run just 3 percent of the livestock that graze in the National Forests and 7 percent on BLM lands.

The public massively subsidizes this system. Federal grazing fees are only $21.48 per year for a cow/calf pair. On BLM lands, about half that amount is returned to the BLM for 'improvements' like fences and predator eradication, neither of which would be necessary in the absence of livestock. In contrast, the annual cost of grazing that cow/calf pair in the West in 2004 was $147.84 on private lands and $171.60 on state lands.

A 2002 report, 'Assessing the Full Cost of the Federal Grazing Program,' prepared for the Center for Biological Diversity, estimated the full cost of the federal grazing program at about $500 million each year and the total annual public costs (including resource damage) at close to $1 billion.

Some of the big public lands 'ranchers' are actually wealthy individuals and large corporations like the Hilton Family Trust and Metropolitan Life Co.

Why an insurance company? The federal government allows ranchers to take out loans based on the collateral of their grazing permits. For this reason, banks and insurers lobby in Washington to keep the current permit system.

Some environmentalists suggest that public-lands grazing permits have merit because they subsidize western ranchers who can thereby preserve nearby private lands as open space and habitat instead of selling to housing developers. But sprawl is not inevitable - Western communities can commit to zoning and planning more effectively.

The Sierra Club has supported federal legislation that would allow the federal government to buy out ranchers' permits that allow grazing on public lands. The bill was reintroduced in 2005 by Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva of Arizona (see box).

Leafing through Welfare Ranching unlocked memories of the ubiquitous fences in the Four Corners; barbed wire or white slats along country roads, tent-poled aspen logs in the national forest; the 'cattle guard' bars set into the roadway; the rarity of native animals larger than lizards. The Four Corners 30 years ago was mysteriously tame: spectacular but not wild; outdoors but not quite integrated as an ecosystem. Now I understand how much it had been molded to suit the cow and the rancher. And that is the story of the federal lands of the West. This is a powerful book.

To learn more about Welfare Ranching, visit www.publiclandsranching.org or www.sierraclub.org/grazing/resources/.

A copy of Welfare Ranching is available at the Chapter Library for checkout to members. The Chapter Library is located at 3250 Wilshire Blvd. #1106 in Los Angeles.

Take Action!

Tell your representative in Congress to sponsor or endorse HR 3166 (the Multi-Use Conflict Resolution Act of 2005), which would provide compensation to livestock operators who voluntarily relinquish a grazing permit or lease on federal lands. Tell them grazing is an inappropriate use of public lands. In the Angeles Chapter region, only Rep. Napolitano has signed on as a cosponsor.