Rock-Bottom Price for Public Lands Grazing Reinforces private Industry Influence

The Department of the Interior recently announced the 2024 public lands grazing Animal Unit Month (AUM) price at a paltry $1.35. 

The fee was mandated in the 1980s as a means to steward healthy public landscapes without disrupting an extractive industry. Yet, over time, it has become clear that the scales have tipped heavily in favor of preventing harm to private interests and commercial industry with minimal regard for the true costs borne by taxpayers and the environment.

To put the 2024 AUM fee into perspective, let's examine the inflation-adjusted value of the grazing fee.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to command the buying power of $1.35 in January 1986, a person would need $3.80 in January of this year (2024).

The Animal Unit Month 

AUM pricing — AUM standing for Animal Unit Month — was developed to determine the cost for private interests to graze livestock on federally owned lands. 

AUM and its associated fee were established in the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 (PRIA) and by a 1986 executive order issued by President Reagan. 

The catalyst for the Public Rangelands Improvement Act and the development AUM fees was that vast landscapes across public lands were in “unsatisfactory condition”. 

The Act concluded that the lands in question would remain in the same unsatisfactory condition and further decline unless management of them changed. So in an attempt to prevent further degradation of public land, and “to prevent economic disruption and harm to the western livestock industry,” AUM fees were enacted.

How AUM works

The fee is based on grazing of a specified number of animals for one month. One AUM is usually the cost of a cow/calf pair — a full-grown grazing animal and her suckling offspring. When a federal agency such as the Bureau of Land Management permits livestock to graze within an allotment (designated acreage of public land), AUM is set as the max number of animals allowed to forage, and thereby the total fee to be paid.

The formula is supposed to be based on three factors, simplified in a 2019 report written by the Office of Government Accountability: 

1) the lease rates for grazing on private lands
2) beef cattle prices
3) the cost of livestock production

Revenue collected from the AUM fee is meant to be divided between the federal agency collecting the fee, the Treasury, and the states where the grazing allotment is permitted. A portion of that money goes back into a range betterment fund, which pays for projects like fence construction, riparian area repair, and range rehabilitation. 

While public lands ranchers often take on the labor associated with such range improvements, and wildlife and recreators may benefit, the AUM fees commercial ranchers pay are essentially returned to them for management of the land that their livestock forages.

Year over year, the cost of running the public lands ranching program far outweighs the revenue generated.

In Fiscal Year 2017 for example, the BLM collected $18.3 million in grazing fees. But the same year, $79 million was appropriated to the agency for rangeland management.

According to the Office for Government Accountability, “of that amount, $32.4 million was used for administration of livestock grazing, according to the agency. The remainder was used for other range activities, including weed management, habitat improvement, and water development.”

The accounting of cost ouweighting revenue was similar for the United States Forest Service in 2017. 

Contradictory Language. Contradictory Agency Action.

PRIA mandated that as a means to preserve rangelands for multiple uses, the conditions of shared landscapes would be regularly addressed “and corrected by an intensive public rangelands maintenance, management, and improvement program”. 

PRIA requires the following:

• That the Secretary of the Interior (BLM) and the Secretary of Agriculture (Forest Service) to develop and maintain an inventory of rangeland conditions

• Address failing landscape health by removing and/or reducing livestock grazing in those areas, and that

• Those appointed government officials shall make these conditions available to the public. 

More than 45 years later, that hasn’t exactly happened.

Rangelands have not been consistently assessed for landscape health, and landscapes that have been assessed are largely failing due to persistent livestock grazing — grazing which has not been halted.

Livestock grazing on public lands is linked to a plethora of issues at the intersection of social and environmental impacts.

A white paper titled "The social cost of Animal Unit Months on public lands: A case study of Oregon" provides a comprehensive analysis of the social costs associated with Animal Unit Months (AUMs) on public lands. The researchers determined these costs by employing a rigorous methodology that integrated various socio-economic factors, including impacts on local communities, public health, and cultural resources. The study quantified the tangible and intangible social costs incurred by communities due to livestock grazing activities on public lands in Oregon. These costs encompassed a range of factors such as reduced property values, negative health outcomes, and diminished quality of life, highlighting the multifaceted impact of AUMs beyond mere economic considerations.

“On public lands one cow-calf pair grazing for one month (an “animal unit month” or “AUM”) produces 875 kg CO2e through enteric fermentation and manure deposition with a social carbon cost of nearly $36 per AUM.”

The study determined that the social costs of carbon are approximately 26 times greater than annual grazing fees collected by managing federal agencies. These emissions and social costs do not include the likely greater ecosystems costs from grazing impacts and associated livestock management activities that reduce biodiversity, carbon stocks and rates of carbon sequestration.”

When juxtaposed against decades of inflation and the true ecological and social costs of livestock grazing on public lands, $1.35 per AUM serves as a stark reminder of the overwhelming influence the ranching industry holds over policy decisions that continue to erode fast-disappearing landscapes.