WildEarth Guardians

Monday, March 30, 2009
Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement becomes Law

Tool could Alleviate Grazing Conflicts in the Gila
Contact: WildEarth Guardians

SANTA FE, N.M. - President Obama signed the “Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009” today, which includes an increasingly popular model for resolving grazing conflicts with other public values on public lands. Two sections of the act allow ranchers to permanently retire their grazing permits on select public lands in Oregon and Idaho. Private interests would pay the ranchers to relinquish their permits.

“Voluntary grazing permit retirement is an ecologically imperative, economically rational, and politically pragmatic way to address grazing conflicts on public lands,” said Mark Salvo, WildEarth Guardians’ grazing program specialist. “We invite public lands ranchers in the Southwest to consider retiring their grazing permits where conflicts have rendered their operations untenable.”

The new law authorizes grazing permit retirement on over two million acres in and near Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument and six new wilderness areas in Idaho’s Owyhee Canyonlands. Livestock grazing conflicts with other uses of these public lands, and ranchers have found it increasingly difficult to raise livestock there.

“There are many places in New Mexico where voluntary grazing permit retirement would benefit ranchers and public lands, including the Gila Bioregion,” said Bryan Bird, WildEarth Guardians’ Wild Places program director and coauthor of a new conservation strategy for the Greater Gila Bioregion. Grazing conflicts have jeopardized Mexican wolf reintroduction in the Gila recovery area for a decade.

Grazing permit retirement is a voluntary, non-regulatory, market-based solution to public lands grazing conflicts that is swiftly gaining acceptance among the environmental community, public lands ranchers and decision makers in Washington, D.C.

Federal grazing permit retirement is mutually beneficial to ranchers, taxpayers and the environment:

Ranchers can retire their permits and use their permit compensation to pay off the bank, restructure their operations on private lands, start a new business or retire.

Retiring grazing permits and closing the associated grazing allotments will reduce impacts on sensitive lands, water resources and wildlife, and the accompanying political and legal strife over grazing conflicts.

Retiring permits will reduce the cost of federal public lands management.

Congress will likely be presented with additional opportunities to enact grazing permit retirement legislation in the future. A recent survey of public land ranchers in Nevada indicates that as many as half are interested in retiring their permits for compensation.