You Cant Cram a Square Peg in a Round Hole

A commentary on the inappropriateness of livestock grazing in the desert. (Photos included.)

Did you know the federal agencies in charge of our public lands permit livestock grazing in the desert?

In Arizona, for instance, where the predominant ecosystem is hot desert, more than 87 percent of the 14.2 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are grazed by livestock while the Forest Service permits grazing on more than 67 percent of the 11.2 million acres they manage. (Arizona's Tonto, Prescott and Coronado National Forests include millions of acres of hot desert.)

Do you wonder how so much public land can be grazed when so many places have been designated as wilderness regions, areas of critical environmental concern and scenic river corridors?

The problem is, these special designations do not prohibit continued livestock grazing. But just because it isn't prohibited doesn't mean it's an appropriate use. Cattle are attracted to the desert's scarce perennial streams and springs where they find the water and shade they need to survive. The natural tendency of these large ungulates to congregate in these riparian areas, unfortunately, results in the degradation of these precious and unique resources.

Riparian habitat severely degraded by livestock,
Agua Fria River, Box Bar grazing allotment, Arizona BLM, July 1997.

Arizona's perennial riparian areas, for example, comprise only 0.4 percent of the state's total land area but they are the state's most important wildlife habitat. It's been estimated that over 60 percent of the region's vertebrates rely on them for survival. And riparian areas and the health of the land, of course, are important for other reasons such as healthy watersheds and human recreation. The problem is, these and other benefits are being lost because many of our publicly owned desert riparian areas are little more than cattle wallows.

On a positive note, it's been proven that desert riparian areas are resilient. If cattle are restricted from them they can eventually recover when you are working with nature and not against her. But most ranchers resist this measure because they realize that, if they lose access to riparian areas, the size of their herds will have to be reduced, perhaps to the point where it becomes unprofitable to continue operating. This is especially true of desert ranches, many of which are already marginal operations.

Some federal officials, like any good bureaucrats, are trying to find a way out of this dilemma by spending more tax dollars. They claim the implementation of more intensive livestock management will allow riparian areas to be rehabilitated without reducing cattle numbers.

It usually involves building miles of annoying fence to keep the cows out of riparian bottomlands and the construction of replacement water sources on the uplands so the animals can be rotated among several different upland pastures.

This approach has a multitude of problems. To begin with, it's usually difficult to fence off a bottomland in rough country. And even if you can do it, every time a flood comes down a canyon a section of fence is taken out and the cows quickly find their way through the opening.

Then there's the problem of making adequate water available for the cattle on the uplands. When it's possible, it may involve noisy gasoline powered water pumps along the stream and ugly pipelines across the landscape. Or it could mean converting natural springs and the small riparian areas around them in to cattle troughs or muddy tanks.

Furthermore, these upland stock ponds often support populations of introduced fish and frogs that can get washed down in to streams during floods, where they can devastate native populations. Also, redistributing a cattle herd on the uplands can allow them to degrade areas that have historically received little grazing pressure due to a lack of water.

Grazed BLM land on the left side of the fence, desert wildflowers on the right.

Desert upland ecosystems are more fragile and take longer to recover from overgrazing than riparian areas because they are more arid. In addition, grazing steep uplands increases soil erosion which can lead to more frequent and violent flood events and speeds up the siltation of expensive downstream water reservoirs.

Furthermore, federal land managers usually don't know the number of cattle the uplands will be able to support so they allow the rancher to maintain the same size herd until range monitoring indicates a change needs to be made. This means the land is damaged by the time the agency acts, if they ever do. The monitoring rarely gets done and it's even rarer when a herd is reduced due to the results of monitoring.

And officials do little to insure that ranchers comply with these intensive livestock management systems. Sometimes the cattle don't get moved to the next pasture in a timely manner. Or maybe the fence around a riparian exclosure doesn't get repaired for a long time. At any rate, agency officials seldom know if the cows are where they are supposed to be, or aren't supposed to be. Even when they happen to discover the management system isn't being followed, they won't take punitive action unless they are able to document the rancher has repeatedly and intentionally violated the plan.

The intricacies of these intensive livestock management systems makes it difficult, obviously, to implement them. As a result, federal officials respond to unforseen complications by characterizing the management systems as frameworks which are "flexible." This flexibility always seems to work in favor of the ranchers. For example, when the inevitable periods of serious drought occur, the agencies allow cattle to enter riparian areas instead of ordering the herds rounded up and removed.

All of this is bad enough but it's made even worse by the fact that these systems are inordinately expensive. The cost of fence is about $3,000 to $5,000 per mile and water "improvements" frequently cost more. Then there's the expense of maintaining the fences and watering devices, not to mention the manpower and planning expenses incurred by the agencies. With ranchers currently paying less than $2 per head per month to graze their animals, it's easy to see the public usually picks up the tab for these projects.

For example, Arizona's Tonto National Forest recently proposed an intensive livestock management system for the 79,000 acre Dos S unit of the Sunflower grazing allotment. The Forest Service wants to protect the unit's important desert riparian resources along Sycamore Creek, a tributary of the Verde River, by building 20 miles of fence and other livestock management devices in order to exclude cattle from the creek for at least 10 years.

While this should allow the creek to recover from years of degradation from overgrazing, it will also increase grazing impacts on the area's desert uplands and take at least six years and cost the taxpayers about $261,000 to implement. The grazing permittee is currently paying only about $891 per month in fees to graze his 450 cows on the unit.

I think most healthy people would consider this a poor investment. The Dos S unit is just one unit of one allotment and there are about 100 grazing allotments on the Tonto, most still lacking livestock management plans that adequately protect riparian areas. There are more than 1,000 grazing allotments in Arizona. It would take an enormous public expenditure to significantly improve livestock management in Arizona, let alone the rest of the desert West.

In 1991, Congress's General Accounting Office (GAO) completed a report (RCED-92-12) that analyzed the BLM's permitting of livestock grazing in the desert. The GAO concluded that, "the lands we visited provided enough evidence of the high environmental risk and low economic benefit associated with livestock grazing in America's hot deserts for us to conclude that the program ascurrently conducted merits reconsideration."

In other words: Cows don't belong in the desert.

It looks like here's another grazing myth exposed for what it really is! As you may suspect, the multiple use doctrine under which our public lands are managed requires the agencies to determine the suitability of land uses, including grazing, and allow only those that are in the interests of the general public. But these regulations, like federal environmental regulations, are usually ignored when it comes to livestock grazing.

Conservationists have recently started trying to get federal land managers to follow the law and make grazing suitability determinations but there's been little success. Grazing activists have also been pressuring the Clinton administration to include explicit instructions in the forthcoming public rangeland regulatory reforms for federal officials to comply with their legal obligation to complete grazing suitability determinations. But Interior Secretary Babbitt has so far refused to add this component to the reform package he's pushing.

A campaign needs to be organized to litigate and, if necessary, legislate the equitable phase out of livestock grazing in areas, like our deserts, where properly managing cattle is prohibitively costly to the U.S. taxpayer.

END

Previously published in the Canyon Echo and Arizona Wildlife News.