A new investigation by ProPublica and High Country News reveals how wealthy ranchers and corporations are profiting from federal subsidies for fees they pay to graze cattle on public land. The three-part investigation used data from the Bureau of Land Management to analyze grazing fees and identify the largest ranchers on public lands. ProPublica investigative reporter Mark Olalde joins us to discuss the findings.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to grazing on public lands in the West. This was the focus of a recent three-part investigation by journalists at ProPublica and High Country News. They found that most grazing permits are now renewed without any review, even when there’s evidence of damage to public land, that wealthy ranchers are most likely to benefit from generous public subsidies and that political clout can help ranchers dodge oversight. Mark Olalde is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Mark Olalde: Thanks so much for having me.
Miller: Your first installment in the series focused on the lack of environmental oversight for federal grazing allotments. For a number of decades, there was a congressionally established standard that there had to be a review of the land connected to grazing permits every 10 years. What was the idea behind this requirement?
Olalde: The idea stems from the history of grazing and the history of agriculture in the country in general, where overgrazing and a lack of environmental stewardship were rampant, and so dating all the way back to the Dust Bowl and those sorts of massive kind of nation shifting events. The idea was, when we give a permit for a rancher to graze their livestock in public lands for a decade, we need to review that. We need to review the practices, we need to review how it’s impacting the ground, we need to review the environmental implications and change the rules of the permit if needed before granting a new one. But we’ve seen that sort of policy in recent years just take a complete 180.
Miller: Right. What happened in 2014 and why?
Olalde: The BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service – which are the two largest federal land management agencies – for years they’ve had understaffing issues, things that in this current Trump administration have only gotten much worse, of course. They had trouble with enough staff to do the studies they needed to do, to do the reviews they needed to do, and there grew these massive permitting backlogs to the point where Congress decided, let’s give them a temporary reprieve and say if you don’t have the ability to complete all the mandated reviews and paperwork and everything else, let’s keep this moving and let’s keep these permits going on the same terms as they’ve been approved before, until we get a chance to do the review.
Now in 2014, Republicans, with pushing from the livestock lobby, got this into a must-pass National Defense Authorization Act and and got, of course at that point, bipartisan support to make this exemption a law, and from before it was a law to after it was a law, we saw the use of this exemption absolutely skyrocket to the point where now ¾ of the acreage that the BLM reapproves for grazing happens without the mandated reviews.
Miller: What did you hear from current and former BLM rangeland managers or BLM employees about permanent reviews that are happening? Because one of the things that stands out in your reporting, it’s not just that in the majority of cases there are no reviews, but there are issues, serious ones even, with the reviews that are happening. What did you hear?
Olalde: We heard from a number of current and former BLM employees, everyone from the folks who do this work, literally boots on the ground, to some of the former highest ranking staff of the BLM, talking about the political pressures of this review process. At times it was trying to do reviews in such a way where you would just avoid scrutiny from stockmen’s associations on one side and conservation groups on the other side who were very litigation-happy. What that ended up leading to was ignoring reviews on the more harmed, the more degraded land that really needed the reviews and really needed the permits and the processes of grazing changed to better protect the environment and really focusing on the areas that weren’t controversial, that were maybe fine with with the current level of grazing. We ultimately took what we heard from these folks doing this and looked at the stats, did a full numerical analysis of it, and effectively we think proved that areas that are known to be worse environmental impacts are more often to be ignored by the reviews and just given that exemption to keep grazing at current levels.
Miller: It’s a true perversion of the entire purpose of the system. As you were noting, there were these reviews specifically because there had been abuses of the land in the past and so that the system of inspections was created to address that or prevent that. And now the places that are most likely to have the problems are also the places, broadly, that are most likely to not be reviewed.
Olalde: Absolutely, and we heard from a number of BLM folks who do this every day, a very professional staff, that they feel pressure. They feel the politics, they can feel the eyes in the back of their neck, and they sometimes pull punches. In other cases we heard allegations from these folks that there was tinkering from managers where they would, they being the staff, the experts would try to say in a review, hey, there’s threatened and endangered species in this allotment, where there’s grazing happening. We need to take extra precautions to protect them under the Endangered Species Act, and that information might not end up in the final documents that come from this. So there was a real chilling effect of the pressure that could be put on the rank and file staff members, who are just trying to enforce regulations.
Miller: You even showed, and this was in a separate article by one of your colleagues, that in the seemingly relatively rare cases where rangeland managers do find problems and point them out and bring them to the attention of permit holders, that sometimes those ranchers have ways to wiggle out. Can you describe the political maneuvering that you uncovered?
Olalde: We looked at a number of cases where there would be some low level dispute. We’re not talking geopolitical issues here, we’re talking a fence line dispute, we’re talking too much grazing in this one area and someone is faced with a fine. We’re talking about that sort of thing that is important to the individual rancher but really shouldn’t rise to the level, I think most reasonable people would say, of national intervention. But we saw many cases where there would be an attempt by the BLM or the Forest Service to enforce regulations, and a sitting U.S. senator or representative or someone at that level would immediately get a call or an email or a letter from these folks, and it wouldn’t be ignored. It would be a case where a powerful senator would deputize their staff to get involved at, like I said, what seems like a pretty low level issue.
Which is what kind of led to, like I said, that chilling effect, and we ultimately saw that this sort of impact, it wasn’t just this esoteric thing, it ended up having real world impacts. After wildfires, for instance, the BLM tries to keep livestock off the land for roughly two years, which many folks say might not even be enough to let the ground recover. But every time they found themselves in a negotiation with the rancher with that kind of political threat behind it, that hey, you need to let us back in the land, this is our livelihood, that sort of thing. That’s the kind of an example of how you would have these real environmental implications of this political pressure.
Miller: To gauge the effects of those real world environmental impacts, you and your team went to federal grazing allotments in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and Nevada. Can you describe the scene in a place in Las Cienegas National Conservation Area outside of Tucson?
Olalde: This is one of the worst areas we saw and I want to give the caveat that many ranchers care about the environment and know that this is a family business that will go on for generations and so are cognizant about harming the environment will harm their kids and grandkids, should they go into the same business. But in some areas, especially in more arid areas, and a lot of this grazing happens in deserts where you’re kind of questioning, well, can an area that doesn’t have a ton of precipitation, handle these 1,000 pound animals and their needs for food and water? So we went to a number of national conservation areas, national forests, national riparian areas in Arizona.
This particular one by Tucson was this beautiful riparian area, meaning it’s cottonwoods by a stream that’s going through a desert, and this is the one place because there’s water where you have all sorts of biodiversity. We went to a particular stream in this area that supported five different threatened or endangered species. It was, I think, trashed is probably the right way to put it. There was a cow corpse in the water, bones, cow feces everywhere, embankments had been chewed up and trampled, so there was silt going into the water which knocks out fish nurseries. Really not what this place could be because it really just couldn’t sustain these very, very large animals.
Miller: I want to turn to the economics of this. You say that a grazing system that was established to prevent abuse of public lands has turned into a massive subsidy program. What do you mean by that?
Olalde: I mean that a lot of the largest ranchers are multi-billionaires who probably don’t need you and I as taxpayers to be subsidizing them. They get access to far below market rate for their forage. They get access to direct subsidies. We toured some grazing allotments in Nevada that belonged to Nevada Gold Mines, which is a joint venture between the world’s two largest gold mining companies, and you may ask, why is this giant gold mining company grazing on several million acres?
Well, they’re able to use that to get mitigation credits which allow them to kind of offset the impacts of their mining and therefore expand their mines, which is where they truly make a lot of money. So there’s a lot of ways that there’s money in this system that ends up with billionaires, with mining companies, with public utilities, with large corporations that have very little to do with the actual product, the actual beef that is being sold.
Miller: You found that roughly ⅔ of grazing on Bureau of Land Management land is controlled by just 10% of ranchers, something that you point out actually is not new, that an analysis 25, 26 years ago found about the same proportion. So large corporations and wealthy families are most likely to benefit from these federal subsidies. But you also heard from people that it is the smaller operators who’d be most likely to go out of business if the system, if these subsidies, went away. What’s that argument?
Olalde: To put it in context, to graze on public lands, the fees you pay are for the forage, and so you pay $1.35 for what is called an animal unit month. It’s just a way of calculating what a cow and or calf typically eats in a month. It’s $1.35 on federal land. In comparison, the average market rate in Oregon, for instance, according to USDA research, is $19.50. So across the industry, we found that federal public lands ranching saved ranchers $284 million last year alone in below market rate forage.
For these larger companies, they don’t really need that. It’s just kind of extra money in their pocket. For smaller ranchers, the access to that far below market rate forage is one of the things that keeps their costs low enough where they’re able to keep operating. So that mixed with things like direct subsidies for below market rate insurance premiums or direct payments for drought or wildfire relief or anything like that gets it to the point where they can make a profit.
But this is not a large industry and these smaller operators don’t have massive herds. They have to tie up their available money in the herd until they can sell, and so they’re not getting super wealthy. The typical type of rancher by number of ranchers is small, is operating on these thin margins, and we interviewed a number of them. We went out on their land with them. Many of them said, listen, if we don’t have access to these sorts of things, we might just not be able to make it anymore, we have to pack up and that’s the end of our operation.
Miller: How much is publicly known now about the Trump administration’s plans to change the way grazing is managed on public lands?
Olalde: That has really changed in the past few weeks. Just in October, the USDA released a 13-page “plan to fortify the American beef industry.” It’s kind of this white paper setting out some of their priorities. Prior to that we had found out that they began rewriting the regulations that govern ranching on federal public lands, they began writing that much earlier this year, and sent a draft of proposed revisions to the Department of the Interior in May, which was not publicly known, which did not have have public input, and that would be the first update since the 1990s to these vitally important rules and regulations.
We do know from this October white paper that the USDA is looking to increase a number of existing subsidies for drought and wildfire relief, for livestock killed by predators, for government-backed insurance, all these different things, but that has kind of only come out recently after we know they began already making a lot of these decisions behind closed doors.
Miller: Mark, thanks very much.
Olalde: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Mark Olalde is a reporter for ProPublica. You can read this three-part series. There’s a link on our website.
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