News

Efforts to reform federal grazing regs underway

The director of the Public Lands Council says efforts to reform federal grazing regulations are underway.  

Speaking to Brownfield at the Cattle Industry Convention in New Orleans, Ethan Lane says Clinton-era rules to move cattle off public lands have been harmful to ranchers.

“The regulatory reform that we saw during that Administration, which was called Range Reform ’94, absolutely derailed and substantially changed how grazing was implemented in the West. And we’ve seen it sort of struggle ever since.”

He tells Brownfield rolling back a lot of that range reform would provide stability to cattlemen and women.

“That’s going to mean looking at some of the things that when these regulations were written decades ago have changed, right? We didn’t have the recreational footprint 40 years ago on federal lands that we do now. You maybe had a few hunters on the grazing allotment, couple hikers, something like that. You now have this explosion in public use.”

Under current law, Lane says the rancher is solely responsible for any degradation of those lands.

“And quite often what we see is it’s not (the rancher) doing that. It’s the 4-wheeler that cut three new trails through the forest, or lit a match or shot up a sign or whatever.”

Lane says stakeholders are discussing the best ways to reform grazing regs and he believes the Trump Administration and federal lawmakers are open to their ideas.