by Owen Hablutzel.
For many livestock ranching operations—especially in the U.S.—it is common that some sizable portion of the resource base available includes allotments or permits for grazing on areas of public land. Here at Landscape Function Management (LFM), working with Perennial Pastures Ranch as well as in many other grazier operations—we find this management element of public lands grazing to be a significant factor worth management attention. While the agencies involved in public lands grazing access are varied—including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), State Lands, U.S. Military land and so on—the value of the additional feed resource to ranching operations is usually high.
Continued access to these valuable grazing areas is never permanently assured however, given the ever-shifting landscape of government policy, political influences, agency decisions that trade-off between conflicting uses, public perceptions, as well as legal, funding and other challenges. All of these factors, and more, can influence what it is possible to do, and not do, from one year to the next on public lands.
While many of those variables are not within our ability to strongly influence there remain a set of reliable strategies that ranchers who are public land permittees can apply to better maintain access to this valuable resource over time, have permits reliably renewed, and even potentially gain access to more areas where the opportunity arises.
At Landscape Function Management a major focus is to reduce exposure of client ranch operations to risk, in order to ensure profitability and to build the resilience necessary for successful regenerative ranching. This certainly includes reducing the risk of losing access to any public land allotments that may be part of your grazeable resource. We find--when it comes to keeping or growing public lands grazing access--attention to four key areas can be the difference between continued success or abrupt failure:
- Relationships,
- On-the-Ground Data,
- Supportive Resources
- Active-Learning Networks
Let’s look a moment at each of these four with some thoughts and recommendations for how you can bolster these to lower your risks and review positive steps and actions you can take to help assure continued success in your specific situation.
Relationships
For regenerative graziers who are able to apply the tool of grazing to improve landscape function, biodiversity and ecosystem health on their public land allotments there could be a temptation to assume that both the public and the managing land agency partners should simply be grateful for the beneficial service you are providing, and that gratitude should be sufficient to ensure continued access. However reasonable this logic may be, it would be a mistake to rest on this rather than taking pro-active steps to ensure access remains unimpeded and your relations with the managing agency are strong.
Relationships, naturally, are first of all about people. Every office of every land managing governmental agency is staffed with different people and has a somewhat different way-of-doing-business, a specific ‘office-culture.’ Recognizing this reality and getting a feel for how to best work with that particular group can go a long way. Even within the same office your experience in working with different individuals employed there can vary quite widely as well.
Building a good working relationship with both the agency and the person(s) you deal most frequently with is key. Relationship here means somewhat regular interactions, with specific people, through time. It means being in touch not only when you have something to ask for but also just checking-in, asking what needs on the allotment the agency might have, sharing ideas and relevant things you have learned, observations about the land and other resources there. Essentially every last one of these agencies have been engaged in a general reduction of staff levels for at least a couple of decades now, so additional eyes-and-ears on the ground, or help with small tasks on the land can be a true godsend for these over-scheduled and understaffed offices.
Remember, no matter the agency, the actual process of renewing your grazing permit could be fairly easy or quite difficult. It will depend on many circumstances both internal and external to that agency. Different people within the agency may have different ideas about the status of your renewal. There may be various lawsuits in play that could affect it, or other regulation changes since the last renewal, including shifts in status of different endangered species or cultural landscapes since you last renewed. Whether it is a combination of these or many other potential competing factors, having strong, consistent and cooperative relationships with more individuals who are involved in the renewal process offers great advantage.
On-the-Ground-DATA
Here at Landscape Function Management doing the soil surface monitoring for feedback to guide our management is a true cornerstone practice. When it comes to grazing permit allotments this practice has benefits well beyond the expected feedback about how our grazing and recovery periods are impacting the landscape function trend. In the context of public lands allotment continuance having this kind of ground-sourced data can make all the difference.
Given the permanent state of understaffing at public lands offices time is usually a resource in exceedingly short supply for the staff. Any actual data from the land can be of great value to them as well as you. Gathering this kind of data is also an additional avenue that builds and cements relationship, so it is a good idea for any permittee to make the effort to obtain on-the-ground data in a regular and timely way.
Real data showing a positive soil health trend, or that our grazing has improved the land condition and landscape function are a critical bulwark against potential lawsuit challenges on public lands--from cattle-adversarial groups, for example--and can help counteract common negative assumptions from the public like ‘must be cows that grazed out the riparian area’ (when in fact all was well when your animals left the area, but that large herd of elk came through just the week after). Even just a photo showing the land and resource condition when your animals moved out can be a data point of true value and will always beat no data at all.
Supportive Resources
Resources for support may come in many sizes and flavors. Today, moreso than ever before, there exist a multitude of NGOs (non-governmental organizations), environmental and ranching groups who strongly recognize the immense value of working-lands, the benefits of well-managed grazing, along with the need to implement more regenerative approaches to agriculture and land management more broadly. Even the land management agencies themselves in the U.S. today have unprecedented billions (with a ‘B’!) of dollars coursing through them that are dedicated--in name at a bare minimum—specifically to supporting “regenerative agriculture.”
As a rancher and permittee you may find some organization would like to do a project on the public land of your allotment. This is an opportunity to get involved! Collaborate! Be sure to tell your story in the process and have your perspective included. If groups would like to contribute time, money, energy, interest and attention to those lands then you, your animals and the agency involved will tend to benefit. The more you can participate in the project the more you can assure this positive outcome.
Even quite small projects can lead to large benefits. Attention frequently brings further interest and more partners to any collaborative effort. What might begin with a local boy-scout troupe earning merit badges through controlling noxious weeds on a certain acreage of the allotment could soon enough result in Trout Unlimited (or some similar NGO that works with ranchers on public lands) bankrolling several new wells for livestock water, and include 5 miles of new water pipeline, along with an extensive run of new fencing to help keep the animals out of a riparian restoration project that benefits the resource. You just never know, but you won’t find out if you don’t take the opportunity to jump in and be involved.
The chain of benefits of such projects tends to grow and be amplified further through time. The relationships and supportive resources that you you develop on one project can serve you well for others down the line. Today, more than ever there are peer-to-peer networks, grazing associations, collaboratives, agencies, consultancies, NGOs, pilot-projects, and a wide-variety of funding sources for all things regenerative. Get out there and get involved. Remember, access to these funding sources tend to be all the more available for those willing to collaborate outside and across different networks for a given project or goal. Partner up!
Active-Learning Networks
As Landscape Function Managers we are always actively attempting to learn more about our management impacts on the land, gathering data to interpret and developing new knowledge—actionable intelligence—about our land, animals, soils, etc. Through focus, attention, safe-to-fail (S2F) trails and the like we treat the production of new land-specific knowledge as though it was simply another valuable crop or product we commit to produce each year—the returns it provides justify the work it takes.
With respect to our public land allotments this is no different. Anything we learn there becomes even more productive when it is shared with our partnered agencies, with other permittees in the area, and with other collaborative partners and interested groups. Not only is this effective for ongoing relationship building but the exchange of information and learning, back and forth, between public and private, agencies and permittees, continues to grow the overall conduit of knowledge useful for ongoing management. This situation sets the stage for new critical insights to emerge, specific for our region and areas of interest, building on the growing base of shared knowledge.
So, when something works well in your relationship with your public land agency be sure to tell the story to others. Get the data that makes the story stick! Be open to supportive collaborators who may be willing to fund more of the same, or better. And share what you learn with each turn of the learning cycle as widely as you can.
You’ll see soon enough, word gets around.
