USDA’s beef industry plan sells out US public lands

A grazing cow in the US -- public domain image

By Adam Bronstein, Oregon Capital Chronicle

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new Beef Industry Plan arrived in October wrapped in flowery language of industry revitalization and rejuvenation. 

At the core of the plan — a joint venture between USDA and the Department of the Interior — is a pledge to “streamline and expand grazing on federal lands.” 

Translation: fewer environmental safeguards, more cows. 

The Public Lands Council, lobbying arm of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, wasted no time taking credit, calling the policy “the direct result” of its collaboration with both agencies. The cattle industry isn’t responding to this plan, it’s dictating it. And the Trump administration is shoving it down everyone’s throats.

To justify expansion, USDA states that 10% of the nation’s 29,000 federal grazing allotments (around 24 million acres) are “vacant.” Their message is clear: Millions of acres are going to waste and should be “put back to work.” Many of these vacant allotments can be found in northeastern Oregon. 

But that’s not what “vacant” means on the ground. Many of these allotments were closed to grazing to protect bighorn sheep in places like Hells Canyon or to reduce conflicts with wolves and grizzly bears around Yellowstone National Park. Others were rested after decades of livestock abuse so native vegetation and fragile soils could recover. Some lie within national monuments, national recreation areas, wilderness areas, and critical habitat for endangered species. 

These allotments might be vacant of livestock, but they are not vacant of wildlife and the ecosystems on which they depend. 

Indeed, these areas are some of the most valuable wildlife habitats, precisely because there are no cattle and sheep to compete with wildlife and put strain on native vegetation. These “vacant” landscapes have rebounded — streambanks are healing, native grasses are returning, and wildlife is recovering.

These are the places where many people I know love to hunt and fish expressly because livestock are not there destroying the habitat. Fish and animal populations are doing well in these places. “Vacant” allotments are among the few living case studies of what the arid West looks like without cattle.

Reopening these areas would erase decades of ecological progress. But USDA’s redefinition of “vacant” sweeps aside law and science alike, treating any land not currently grazed as if it were underutilized and out of production. It sounds innocuous, but the meaning is profound: every acre ever grazed must remain open to livestock, forever. 

Buried deep in the fine print is a commitment to “ensure no net loss of Animal Unit Months nationwide.” Even if a site was retired for environmental recovery or resource concerns, the agency would have to compensate by opening new territory somewhere else. This “no-net-loss” rule would convert every fire, drought closure, or wildlife conflict into an excuse to push cattle into rewilded ground. It’s a bureaucratic sleight of hand that manufactures the appearance of balance while steadily expanding the damaging footprint of an already subsidized industry.

And subsidized it is. Ranchers on federal land still pay just $1.35 per cow-calf pair per month, as cheap as it was during the Reagan administration and covering only a fraction of the government’s oversight costs. On top of that sits the Livestock Forage Disaster Program, conceived as short-term drought relief but now functioning as an annual entitlement. In 2023 alone, it paid out a billion dollars, averaging $58 per head per month, forty times the federal grazing fee. The result is a perverse incentive: ranchers who graze through droughts keep their payments, while those who rest land risk losing their permits for “non-use.” The worse the land fares, the more the subsidies flow.

USDA frames these policies as rural revitalization. In reality, they entrench a system where ecological destruction is rewarded and financial risk is shifted to the public. Public-land ranching provides barely 1.6% of the forage used for U.S. beef and contributes just one-tenth of 1% of regional employment in western states like Oregon while perpetually degrading millions of acres of the state.

Public lands ranchers are not the backbone of America’s beef supply; they are the beneficiaries of a deeply entrenched subsidy system whose costs are borne by the land, the taxpayer, and the wildlife that once thrived there.

The Beef Industry Plan doesn’t strengthen the West — it destroys our fragile ecosystems and puts wildlife at risk while degrading recreational experiences like hunting and fishing. It recasts ecological recovery as waste, privatizes public resources, and treats every ungrazed acre as a missed opportunity to squeeze and extract. 

Adam Bronstein is the Oregon director for Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting and restoring wildlife and watersheds throughout the American West. He is an avid hunter and angler, and advocates for democratic and ecologically sound management of native fish and wildlife.

This work was shared via a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.