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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.

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