6/7/99
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
Is Livestock Grazing on Federal Lands Crucial
to the Economies of the Inland West?
There is no more enduring symbol of the inland west than the cowboy and the cattle ranch. That is one of the reasons that efforts at reforming the way livestock uses public lands has not made much progress. Many argue that the current level of livestock grazing on federal lands is doing serious damage to the environmental integrity of those arid landscapes and the quality of their water and streams. But any change in the access that livestock have to public lands is treated as an attack on the West because it threatens the region’s ranches, the way of life built around ranching, and the local economies built around that ranching.
One can get at the relative economic importance of livestock grazing on federal lands by answering several questions.
1st What part of the local economy relies directly on agriculture for income and jobs?
2nd What part of local agricultural activity is cattle raising?
3rd What part of the feed the cattle need comes from federal lands? And
4th What part of the value created in cattle raising should be assigned to feed alone?
Answering each of these questions will result in a fraction or percentage. When those four fractions are multiplied together, we get the fraction of the local economy that is directly tied to cattle grazing on public lands. The fact that we have to multiply four fractions together should suggest at the start that the answer may be a very small number: a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction!
The West is largely an urban society with very diversified economies. Over the last five years, agriculture has been the direct source of about one percent of total income. If we exclude the larger cities and focus only on the nonmetropolitan areas of the West, agriculture is still the direct source of only about 3 percent of total income. That is also true in Montana.
Cattle raising is only one type of agricultural activity. In Montana only about44 percent of all agricultural value is associated with cattle. For the eleven Western states as a whole, only about 20 percent of agricultural output is associated with cattle raising. In states like California and Washington, where most "livestock" are chickens and pigs, only about ten percent of agriculture is cattle raising.
Federal lands do not provide all or most of the feed needed to support the West’s cattle herds. In Montana, California, and Washington less than ten percent of total cattle feed comes from grazing on federal lands. For the eleven Western states, federal lands provide about 19 percent of the feed needed by the cattle herds.
Finally, it takes more than feed to raise cattle. It also takes careful management and labor effort, capital, equipment, fuel, and land. All of these other productive inputs help create beef values and have to be paid for out of the gross sales value. There is no easy way to estimate that value except to look at the price paid for feed compared to the gross value of the beef produced. Over the last 30 years feed costs have made up about 25 percent of total livestock sales. Some part of private grazing and pasture land values has to be worked into this too, however.
When all these fractions are multiplied together to determine the direct economic contribution made by cattle grazing on federal lands, the results are astoundingly small: For the eleven Western states it averages out to be about five hundredths of one percent of employment and income. For Montana, it is one to two tenths of one percent.
At the rate at which the Western states’ economies have been growing during the 1990s, this amount of new income is created every eight days. Put slightly differently, the direct economic cost to the West if grazing on federal lands were to completely end would be a pause in economic growth that lasted eight days.
If we focus not on whole states but on individual counties, for most counties the results still indicate that federal grazing makes only a modest direct economic contribution. For instance, if one looks at all of the 102 counties in the seven state interior Columbia River Basin, in 97 of those 102 counties federal grazing contributes less than one percent of local income. If one looks even closer at a five county area in southwest New Mexico centered on Catron County which has led an important part of the Sagebrush Rebellion because of federal grazing policies, federal grazing is responsible for less than one-half of one percent of local income.
None of this is to say that cattle ranching or grazing on public lands is unimportant. In a diversified economy it is usually the case that no one economic activity makes up a significant proportion of the total economy. The point of going through this exercise is quite different. The primary economic cost of trying to protect the integrity of the federal lands that make up such an important part of the West’s landscape is reduced cattle grazing. The economic question we face is would the improved quality of that landscape and its streams and wetlands be worth that cost? Knowing that the cost would be quite low in economic terms, gives us some idea of the economic rationality of proceeding to better protect those lands. Knowing that the cost is low and the environmental values to be gained high tells us in what direction we ought to proceed. It does not tell us how to proceed nor how to act to minimize the cost to individuals and communities who may be harmed. Those are also important questions that need to be answered.