Federal Grazing Fees

Grazing permittees/lessees pay a small fee to graze federal public lands. In 2008, the grazing fee on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and most Forest Service lands is $1.35 per animal unit month (AUM; a measure of the amount of forage necessary to sustain a cow and calf for one month).

Grazing fees paid by ranchers are insufficient to cover the direct and indirect costs of livestock grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands. The Governement Accountability Office (2005) determined that public lands grazing on BLM and Forest System lands cost taxpayers at least $132.5 million in FY 2004 (BLM $58.3 million, Forest Service $74.2 million), while the agencies only recovered a combined $17.5 million in grazing fees (of which $8.8 million was deposited into "range betterment" funds used to support continued grazing, and only $3.7 million was deposited in the Treasury).

If grazing fees were to pay for livestock grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands, the BLM would need to charge $7.64 per AUM and the Forest Service would have to charge $12.26 per AUM (GAO 2005).

Federal Grazing Fee Rulemaking Petition

In November 2005, the Sagebrush Sea Campaign joined the Center for Biological Diversity and partner organizations on a petition to the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Agriculture to promulgate new rules to increase the grazing fee on BLM and Forest Service lands to cover the costs of their grazing programs. The current fee fails to recover even 15 percent of the known direct and indirect costs of administering grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands, which include vegetation, upland and riparian restoration; range “improvements”; resource monitoring; and salaries and overhead expenses for range management personnel. The low fee also does not repay the ecological costs of public lands grazing: impaired watersheds and water quality; increased flammability of forests; proliferation of invasive species; degraded wildlife habitat; and species imperilment. The ecological costs alone expose the exorbitantly high costs of renting public lands forage that supplies only two percent of the total feed consumed by beef cattle in the 48 contiguous states.