Campaign to buy ranchers' grazing permits is the way to save public range

By Keith Raether
for Headwaters News

Allan Savory's leap of holistic faith in matters of range management and livestock grazing (Headwaters News: Perspective, March 13, 2002) belies an entire body of range science.

Some of his notions even border on an anti-Darwinian conception of the natural world. (Savory once wrote that "After years of working on several continents, I have been unable to find any clear evidence of competition in nature.") His is a quasi-religious world laced with proverbs and prophesies -- a world in which the messiah is Savory himself.

Savory is the founder of the Allan Savory Center for Holistic Management, which promotes, among other strategies, the Savory grazing method to federal agencies and an unsuspecting public.

Savory’s method is predicated on the notion that rangelands are in poor condition because they are undergrazed, not overgrazed. He blames the wholesale degradation of watersheds in the Rocky Mountain West on "biological decay" and "too few animals" on the watersheds that feed rivers.

In the world according to Savory, domestic livestock are a means to "land reclamation."

Savory ignores or rationalizes the denuded and eroding watersheds across much of the West, where vegetative cover and production are severely depleted by livestock grazing, and where sufficient forage does not exist to support the large herds that Savory’s grazing system depends on.

He also overlooks the role of livestock grazing in the replacement of native vegetation with weeds across millions of acres of the West.

When Savory argues that centuries of large-herd grazing in the West maintained healthy grasslands, he reinvents history. Until domestic livestock were introduced to the region some 150 years ago, the Great Basin and the desert Southwest were not heavily grazed for 5,000 to 10,000 years.

Savory also fails to mention that, prior to the introduction of livestock, 400,000 miles of barbed-wire fencing didn’t divide migratory corridors into so many prison yards. Before rangelands were fenced, wildlife herds were able to roam for hundreds of miles without competition for forage.

In a recent letter to the publication Rangelands, Savory wrote positively of the only scientific grazing research trial that he has conducted in 30 years of consultation with ranchers.

All three authors who published papers on the trial reported the opposite result. Savory’s method, the authors concluded, failed to improve ranch profits, failed to improve range conditions and failed to increase financial returns per head of cattle.

Other refutations abound. Experimental studies dating from 1984 by range and soil scientists conclude that Savory’s principles of range management reduce water infiltration into the soil; increase erosion; reduce forage production, soil organic matter and mineral cycling; and increase soil bulk density.

The late, eminent range ecologist Joy Belsky challenged Savory’s claims about livestock management widely and often. In a paper entitled "Allan Savory’s Holistic Management: Scientific Misinformation on Grazed Ecosystems," she cites a grazing study on a ranch in Zimbabwe where Savory’s recommendations were applied to improve range condition and increase livestock productivity.

Neither outcome occurred. Increased production only happened during periods of heavy rainfall. In periods of normal rainfall, stocking rates prescribed by Savory stifled production and severely damaged the range.

Contrary to Savory’s belief system, scientific studies show that bunchgrasses in arid environments such as the Rocky Mountain West are more likely to die if they are grazed. Contrary to Savory, "overrest" of grasslands does not cause deterioration.

As one of several examples, Belsky cites Dutchwoman Butte in central Arizona, a fertile, stable territory where grazing by livestock has never occurred.

"Published comparisons of grazed and ungrazed lands in the western United States have found that rested (protected) sites had larger and denser grasses, fewer weedy forbs and shrubs, higher biodiversity, higher productivity, less bare ground, and better water infiltration than nearby grazed areas," Belsky writes.

And yet, the U.S. Forest Service is currently collaborating with Savory to establish a "national learning site" in central Idaho to "heal the land." This leap of faith for Savory’s services will cost American taxpayers $1 million spread over four years.

Savory’s fee, albeit excessive, is a drop in the water trough compared with the annual cost of livestock grazing on public lands in the United States. Taxpayers pay upwards of $500 million annually in direct subsidies to support livestock grazing, the most pervasive and destructive use of federal lands in the West.

Livestock grazing threatens native species, reduces water quality, spreads noxious weeds, alters natural fire regimes and accelerates soil erosion, destroying streamside and upland ecosystems.

About 80 percent of all streams and riparian ecosystems in the arid West are severely degraded by livestock grazing. In its Global 2000 report, the Council on Environmental Quality noted that "improvident grazing ... has been the most potent desertification force, in terms of total acreage (351,562 square miles), within the United States."

The economic picture is no rosier for grazing permittees on public lands. A recent study cited in the Journal of Range Management concludes that ranching operations "had a return rate that ranged from negative to 1 or 2 percent. ..."

Federal grazing lands comprise more than 250 million acres in the U.S. Beef produced from these rangelands accounts for less than 3 percent of total production. As recently as 1999, public lands ranching accounted for a scant 0.04 percent of all income and 0.06 percent of all employment in the West.

These returns are especially alarming given the enormous federal subsidies allocated to keep public lands ranching on life support.

"On federal lands . . . a rancher can graze a cow and calf for a full month for the price of a can of dog food," Los Angeles Times columnist John Balzar noted in a recent editorial. "Despite these bargain rates, or maybe because of them, too much of their rangeland has been mistreated, overgrazed, beaten down and polluted. Reform of the vast grazing program is long overdue."

Enter the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign. Directed by Andy Kerr and backed by a steering committee that includes the American Lands Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Committee for Idaho’s High Desert, Forest Guardians, Oregon Natural Desert Association and Western Watersheds Project, the campaign has formulated an innovative compensation proposal that could save public lands ranchers from dire economic times, a losing occupation and a vanishing way of life.

The campaign proposes that Congress establish a buyout program to compensate grazing permittees who voluntarily relinquish their public lands leases. The plan is already endorsed by 85 conservation groups across the country.

"I’ve often thought the livestock industry would be better served without public-lands grazing," said an Idaho cattleman who gave up his federal permits several years ago. "Whenever you subsidize an industry, as in the case of livestock grazing on federal lands, you create inefficiency. You paint a false picture of demand for the product."

The campaign proposal would pay federal permittees nearly three times market rate to voluntarily relinquish their grazing permits. The average market value in the West of a federal animal unit month (AUM) is $50-$75. The new proposal would compensate permittees at a fixed price of $175 per AUM.

Under the plan, a permittee with 300 cow/calf pairs that graze public lands for five months of the year would receive upwards of $262,000.

The proposal would effectively retire a welfare state in the Rocky Mountain West. It would also stem decades of environmental destruction wrought by livestock grazing on public lands.

Under the proposal, compensating all federal grazing permittees at a rate of $175 per AUM would initially cost taxpayers about $3.3 billion. But the net savings of the program would be between $5.5 billion and $11 billion.

"Federal grazing permit buyouts are ecologically imperative, economically rational, fiscally prudent, socially compassionate and politically pragmatic," Kerr notes. "It’s a win-win-win for permittees, taxpayers and the environment."

In the plan, public lands ranchers win. Conservationists win. Above all, devastated rangelands return to health -- without the need of a messiah other than nature itself.

Keith Raether is director of media and public information for Western Watersheds Project, an Idaho-based conservation organization dedicated to protecting and restoring western watersheds. He is also public information coordinator for the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign.

Have an opinion? Join the discussion in this week's forum.

Or click here to view all our forums.