Storm Over the Rockies

The West at war with itself

Karl Hess Jr. from the June 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Much the same is true for little creatures, like grasshoppers and Mormon crickets, whose populations wax and wane in response to natural cycles and events. Again, the USDA comes to the rescue of western stockmen by making you and me, not the rancher, pay the costs of spraying rangelands with pesticides. Again, the dollar value of the grass saved by spraying is only a fraction of the cost of the pesticide and its application. But, of course, pitting the formidable might of the federal state against a few thousand coyotes and millions of grasshoppers ranks right up there with taming the nation's great rivers: a noble and proper achievement for a government conceived in liberty. Government is stacking the deck, changing the calculus of costs and benefits to the distinct advantage of grazing and graziers in the public-land West.

Government also protects western stockmen from the nonliving elements of nature. The massive networks of dams on western rivers provide ranchers with predictable and cheap water, even in times of drought. But that is only a drop in the pork barrel. A more massive subsidy to both private- and public-land ranchers in the West is the USDA's emergency feed program--a subsidy that pays stockmen nationwide 50 percent of the cost of hay and grain to help keep their herds alive during the most catastrophic droughts.

Not surprisingly, the program has evolved--mostly under the Reagan and Bush administrations--into an entitlement program for dry years and wet. In New Mexico, for example, rainfall has been above average for five of the past six years, yet so has federal drought relief, averaging 15 percent of net ranching income. Nevada ranchers, the most vocal of sagebrush rebels and the most intent on kicking Uncle Sam out of the West, receive on average $18,000 per year for every man and woman in the program.

It's bad enough that emergency feed relief costs taxpayers $100 million to $500 million annually. It's even worse that emergency feed relief makes overgrazing on private and public lands both profitable and possible. Emergency feed payments sustain livestock numbers at 15 percent to 50 percent over the land's long-term capacity to grow grass. What this means is that ranchers run a grass deficit. Each year that they overstock and overgraze, their rangelands produce less grass, and with less grass their need for drought relief mounts. But as long as government payments for emergency feed grow as fast as the grass disappears, ranchers can stay in business, and even make a profit.

Most federal subsidy programs that apply to public-land ranchers are not founded on the pretense of natural catastrophe. For that reason, they are the most pernicious ones, the ones whose intent is to protect ranchers from their own bad judgments and from the glaring defects and perverse incentives of socialized grazing. For example, the federal government returns 50 percent of all grazing fee receipts to the ranching community to pay for purely private benefits such as fences and watering holes. Since the grazing programs of both the Forest Service and the BLM now operate at a deficit close to $200 million a year, these subsidies--amounting to almost $20 million a year--are paid for by taxpayer, not rancher, dollars. That they are needed at all, of course, speaks volumes on the foibles of socialized grazing: Lacking title to the lands they graze, public-land ranchers have no incentive to spend their own money on range management.

The mother of all public-land grazing subsidies is the special appropriations that Congress started handing out to public-land ranchers in the late 1940s as a way to placate western anger. A prime example is the Vale Rangeland Rehabilitation Program that took place from 1963 to 1985. Overgrazed for years and in extremely poor condition, public lands in the BLM's Vale District were scheduled for deep cuts in stocking. To avoid the cuts, ranchers, politicians, and the BLM persuaded Congress to pay for a massive range restoration program that would allow local stockmen to keep their herds and livelihoods intact. After spending $56 million (1992 dollars), or just over $300,000 per public-land rancher, the BLM declared the project a success. Was it?

Economically, the Vale project was a bust. The cost per acre to implement the program was $75--about $10 more than the market value of an ordinary acre of native rangeland. Further, the additional grass created by the program had a price tag four times its market value. Indeed, if the government had simply bought out every public-land grazing permit in the project at fair market value, it could have saved taxpayers about $10 million.

Ecologically, the Vale project fared even worse. By 1986, brush was reinvading, grass productivity was falling, streams were still mostly degraded, and wildlife was no better off than before. By 1994, the project had unraveled. Public-land ranchers in Vale's BLM district received emergency feed checks ranging from $35,000 to $50,000 apiece for the simple reason that there was no grass left. Millions had been spent to simply traverse a circle, to end up at the beginning. The public grazing system that had created the crisis in the first place was still intact and the chronic overgrazing of the past was uncured.

The West at War With Itself

With whom, then, is the West warring? Is the enemy really the federal government? Are sagebrush rebels prepared to risk the status quo by severing federal ties? Are they willing to dismantle the public institutions and subsidies that have made and continue to make cattle king on the western range? Are they willing to bring down the federal barricade that has protected much of the West from free-market forces--from consumer demands pressing for more recreation and wildlife and fewer cows and sheep? A look at the record suggests a disappointing no.

In the late 1940s, stockmen showed no qualms when they traded calls for privatization for calls for congressional appropriations--pure pork that grew over the years into hundreds of millions of dollars. By 1980, not much had changed, except that stockmen were no longer bothering with the charade of privatization. In fact, they fought privatization tooth and nail. They shot down President Reagan's modest attempt to sell the most marginal federal lands, a program called asset management. Nevada public-land ranchers, with the blessing of Interior Secretary Watt, joined hands with members of the Nevada chapter of the Sierra Club to kill the program. What stockmen wanted, and what they got, was not less government but the right dose of government to secure their public-land standing and to sustain a long tradition of federal largess and protection.

Today, Son-of-Sage moves along a similar path. True, calls for privatization can be heard, but most of the sagebrush agenda is aimed at making sure federal lands stay safe for ranchers and ranching. Privatization is simply too risky--and likely too costly given the political options. It's cheaper and more effective to have lobbyists fire away at federal proposals to increase grazing fees and regulations. It's safer for public-land ranchers to abstain from discouraging words that cast aspersions on the institutions and subsidies that define and sustain their world, and that return to some of them 10 times what they pay in grazing fees. Rather than gamble on freedom from government, sagebrush rebels instead grope for governmental solutions.

States' rights is the prime example. The chorus of the Sagebrush Rebellion is to give the federal lands to the western states, as if state socialism would be less malicious and more efficacious than the federal brand. To their credit, some sagebrush rebels argue that once in state hands public lands could be more readily privatized. It's an interesting idea, but it begs the question: If privatization is the goal, are we to assume that members of Congress who oppose it would be naive enough to vote for a program of state ownership that is nothing but a veiled attempt at full divestiture? Further, assuming that the western states would even accept the federal lands--something they have so far been less than enthusiastic about--would the sagebrush rebels really push privatization or would they simply settle for a new landlord closer to home and more susceptible to local control? Given the past, there is good reason to think that stockmen would indeed settle short of privatization, especially if they could get the kinds of political concessions from state government that they have not gotten from Uncle Sam.

Other pieces of the sagebrush agenda suggest that government in principle is not the West's main enemy. For example, an essential part of the rancher rebellion is the so-called county movement, a grassroots attempt to transfer control, if not ownership, of federal lands to rural western counties. Heavily influenced by Wayne Hage's book, Storm Over Rangelands, proponents argue that public-land ranchers have a lawful claim to some of the property rights that make up the federal West. They believe that a century of federally sponsored grazing has given stockmen a common law use-right to public lands. They stake their claim in the supposed inviolability of the "custom and culture" of livestock grazing, and they look to county government as the political muscle to enforce and safeguard it. Stripped of its exotic theories and fine legal points, what this idea amounts to is the sanction and protection of a traditional way of life by local government.

Public-land ranchers probably do have a claim to some of the rights on federal lands. After all, most of them bought their federal grazing permits and paid a price set by the market. However, the county movement is not really about a small stick in the bundle of federal property rights; it is about preserving a way of life that is now threatened by change. For example, ranchers in Bonner County, Idaho, persuaded a majority of county commissioners to pass a land-use plan that declared ranching and logging the county's custom and culture. A state district court nullified the law because the majority of citizens in Bonner County, who are neither ranchers nor loggers, were purposefully excluded from the planning process.