At the first National Forest site we visited in California’s remote Modoc Plateau, nearly every plant had been chewed on by cattle. The botanists, there to track down and collect seeds from rare plants, pointed out the soil erosion from stomping hooves. The cow pies were everywhere, unavoidable on the steep roadside slope, and they crunched or squished under our boots. The seeds we had come to collect, from a delphinium only known to exist in a handful of places in the state (though more common elsewhere), were mostly gone before the botanists could preserve them—disappeared in the digestive tracts of hungry ungulates. These plants, which just a few weeks ago had been flush with purple flowers, and which the botanists had thought would now be covered in seed pods, were instead largely gnawed to stubby stalks. At the base of the hill along the river below, we could see the offending cattle. And even before we saw them, we could hear their lowing.
The cows are innocent enough, of course. But they’re unknowingly at the center of an ongoing battle between ranchers, conservationists, and the federal government. The conflict, which spans more than a century, is set to get even more heated this year, with the forthcoming release of new Bureau of Land Management rules on cattle grazing and a recent legal challenge filed by environmental groups. The outcome could permanently alter the western U.S.’s public lands.
At the field site, the botanists collected what they could of the remaining seed pods in small yellow envelopes. Christa Horn, the trip coordinator and a plant conservation researcher at the San Diego Zoo, pulled up the state records for the delphinium at our location on her field tablet. Cattle damage had been noted at this site all the way back in 2010. This time, before we moved on to the next place, Horn submitted a note to the purple plant’s digital file. She indicated that cattle damage wasn’t just present at the site but that it posed a real threat to the flower’s survival there.
It’s a pattern that would repeat over the five days in August 2022 that I spent with the researchers: cows where we weren’t expecting them to be, trampled soil, poop piles, and plants cut down before their seeds could mature into the next generation. Every place we visited was on public, ostensibly protected land—National Forest or Bureau of Land Management territory. And at nearly every site, we encountered cattle.
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Horn and her colleagues took it in stride. They were careful not to make any sweeping declarations about how the health of the overall plant populations were or weren’t being affected by the presence of cattle. Cows have been grazed on these lands for more than a century, and at least the plants they were out to collect have survived in that time (albeit in small pockets), pointed out Tobin Weatherson, another San Diego Zoo plant conservationist. The plants are persisting, but the damage in front of us was hard to ignore.
It’s indisputable that cattle shape the landscape of the American West, yet whether or not they should be allowed to is a perennially touchy issue. As Horn put it, “people like things the way they’ve always been,” or at least the way they think they’ve always been.
Cattle aren’t native to the U.S. Though bison used to roam in many areas of the country, domestic cows are a different animal, with their own specific quirks, dietary preferences, and movements. For instance, they are thirstier than bison and so spend much more time disturbing the riparian areas along streams and rivers, which also happen to be home to unique and often already imperiled communities of other animals and plants. For plant conservationists like Horn and Weatherson, the cattle are just one facet of a slew of human impacts piled onto the ecosystem. While for ranchers, the cattle represent an entire way of life and a right to the land and its resources. Yet even for the ranchers, the current system is broken.
Cattle grazing is the single largest commercial use of public lands in the western U.S.—more than mining, forestry, or other types of agriculture. About 85% of public lands, or some 250 million acres in the West, are grazed by livestock (mostly cattle), and most of that land is managed by the Forest Service or the BLM. Such grazing has been officially sanctioned since the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. Prior to that, grazing was entirely unregulated. Without management, grazing became overgrazing, and grassland became wasteland, especially amid the widespread southwestern drought of the 1930s. Overgrazing was one of the primary contributing factors of the Dust Bowl, and the Dust Bowl spurred the Taylor Act. The federal government realized some management was necessary to prevent systemic agricultural collapse from repeating itself.
Since 1934, some aspects of the grazing program have been updated, but the changes haven’t kept up with our scientific understanding of land management, ecological health, or climate. And the consequences are being felt by people, not just plants. Ranchers are struggling to keep cattle alive in a shifting ecosystem. Invasive species have become fire-starting nuisances spread, in part, by cattle. An overabundance of cows may be exacerbating water shortages and California’s persistent drought. And public lands are far from the pristine wildernesses recreators seek out. In its current form, the grazing program isn’t working, and it’s not sustainable—not for ecologists, conservationists, federal workers, ranchers, or even the cows.
Now, these cumulative and long-simmering tensions over whether and how to graze cattle on public lands are coming to a head. For the first time in decades, the Bureau of Land Management is set to present new rules on livestock management. The federal agency is planning to release a draft for the updated guide early in 2023. Stakeholders remain skeptical the update will address the multitude of difficulties with the current public grazing program, but any changes would signal a big shift from the stagnation of past years. Additionally, the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation advocacy group, is suing the BLM over the destruction the organization says cattle grazing causes to plants and the landscape, according to a 60-day notice of intent filed in early January. What has long been a taboo issue, too thorny to navigate for federal regulators, is set to be a conversation that defines the next few months.
So what are the problems, and what needs to change? For starters, the current cattle program is deeply under-resourced, said Chandra Rosenthal in a video interview with Gizmodo. Rosenthal is the head of the Rocky Mountain office of the nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which provides legal and other support for current and former public employees. The BLM is supposed to track the health of every parcel of rangeland it allots to ranchers, Rosenthal said. Yet through PEER’s own analysis (developed by a former BLM subcontractor), the nonprofit found that the Bureau hasn’t recorded any monitoring data on about 28% of that land. And of the land it had assessed, the BLM noted about half failed to meet its own Land Health Standards, according to PEER’s 2020 review. In 72% of those failures, covering about 40 million acres of land, the BLM indicated livestock overgrazing was a central factor. “We think that the program is really understaffed,” said Rosenthal, who said she and PEER have spoken with numerous past and present workers at the Bureau concerned that the land they oversee is in worse condition than it was when they began their jobs. “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction in those positions,” she added.
PEER opted to create its rangeland health map because the data from the BLM wasn’t centralized or analyzed within the agency itself, Rosenthal said. “Different field offices have different standards for the way they do things,” she added. So, in order to better understand the scope of the problem for federal employees, PEER had to put together its own database. But there were still gaps. “We’ve totally tried to figure out the total number of cattle,” Rosenthal said—but PEER couldn’t. Parts of the data were incomplete, outdated, or unreliable. “It’s crazy,” she added. As a result, it’s difficult to know if there are more or fewer heads of cattle on the landscape now versus a decade ago. The BLM does publish annual land use reports, which track the number of authorizations issued and the amount of grazing material authorized to be eaten, but not the number of animals. Researcher estimates put the number somewhere around 1.5 million cattle on BLM land, not including the rangelands managed by the Forest Service.
Chris Christofferson, the forest supervisor for Modoc National Forest, told Gizmodo in a phone call that the U.S. Forest Service also doesn’t have a single number on the livestock grazing its land. In California, he believes the numbers of cows on the landscape are declining, in accordance with drought restrictions, but he couldn’t point me to public numbers demonstrating that. Christofferson’s account echoed Rosenthal’s perspective, that the public grazing program doesn’t have the funding or staffing it needs, and that in recent years and federal administrations the problem has worsened.
In Modoc, where those rare purple delphiniums had been gnawed to nothing, Christoffersan said that once, there were eight staff solely responsible for monitoring grazing; then, about 10 years ago, it was cut to four people. Then it went from four to just three staff, meant to be manag Source: Gizmodo