To pull back the curtain on the federal public-lands grazing system, ProPublica and High Country News pored over government documents and data gleaned from more than 100 public records requests filed with the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and state agencies across the West. We interviewed ranchers, conservationists, researchers and federal rangeland managers. We also toured grazing allotments in Arizona, Colorado, Montana and Nevada.
To identify the largest public-lands ranchers — and the share of public-lands ranching controlled by the top 10% of permittees — we relied on BLM and Forest Service datasets, which included roughly 50,000 bills the agencies had sent to operators. We sued the BLM to obtain its data. Our analysis covered the most recent grazing fee year — effectively a fiscal year for cows — which ran from March 2024 through February 2025. To gauge the size of ranching operations, we used the number of animal unit months — a measure of livestock foraging — billed to each permittee. We researched connections among the largest operators, grouping related entities. For example, we counted subsidiaries as part of their parent companies.
To calculate how much ranchers save using federal allotments instead of grazing their herds on private property, we multiplied the annual open market grazing price in that state by the number of AUMs for which the permittee was billed, before subtracting what the federal government had billed the permittee for those AUMs. We ascertained each state’s average free market rate by using U.S. Department of Agriculture research for grazing fee year 2024, which the BLM publishes annually.
Our list of the largest ranchers on Forest Service land by acreage was compiled by the agency and provided to us in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. We contacted all of the ranchers named as the largest permittees to ask for comment on the accuracy of our findings, and several confirmed that the agency had provided the correct acreage.
Mark Martinez of S. Martinez Livestock, which holds large permits on Forest Service lands, noted that livestock don’t graze on the entire permitted acreage every year. This is because some of the land is in poor condition due to wildfire and some is avoided for environmental reasons, while animals also graze each pasture for only part of the year.
We consulted with various researchers as we compiled a list of subsidies the Agriculture Department pays to public lands ranchers. Our estimates were based on data from the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency and Risk Management Agency and included figures from the following: Livestock Forage Program; the Federal Crop Insurance Program’s Pasture, Rangeland, Forage category; Livestock Indemnity Program; Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish; the temporary Emergency Livestock Relief Program; Livestock Risk Protection policies specific to beef cattle; and the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program.
ProPublica AND High Country News RELIED on a variety of sources to calculate the Bureau of Land Management’s escalating use of legal exemptions to bypass environmental reviews of grazing permits, as well as related land-health assessments.
We used geospatial data compiled by the conservation group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to tell us the land-health status of BLM allotments. The organization obtained the data, which was last updated in December 2023, from the BLM via a public records request. To determine whether an allotment had been reauthorized for grazing via an environmental review or an exemption, we turned to data compiled by the environmental group Western Watersheds Project in its “Renew or Review” initiative. The organization pulled this data from the BLM’s Rangeland Administration System in September 2023. We then joined the datasets, limiting the analysis to allotments that appeared in both sources.
To calculate the percent of acreage authorized by the BLM via the exemption in 2013, we used a list of BLM permits provided by the Western Watersheds Project, excluding the less than 1% where the grazing allotments’ boundaries had changed in the decade following 2013. In both the 2013 and 2023 data, less than 1% of allotments also contained conflicting designations as to how they had been approved for grazing. In these cases, we did not count the allotment’s acreage toward either approval method, which potentially resulted in a slight undercount of total acreage approved by the exemption.
Western Watersheds Project data analysts described to us their methodology in studying the Forest Service’s use of the exemption in reauthorizing grazing. The group’s conclusions relied entirely on the Forest Service’s GIS grazing allotment data.
To better understand the regulatory environment that led to the outcomes these data findings revealed, we interviewed 10 current and former BLM employees, from upper management to staffers on the interdisciplinary teams that conduct land health assessments and permit reviews.
And to see the environmental impacts of grazing firsthand, we toured various BLM and Forest Service grazing allotments. Our reporters spent several days driving and hiking across allotments in central and southern Arizona, including those within Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, Agua Fria National Monument and Coronado National Forest.
The FREE RANGE stories are part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation. Additional financial support was provided by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
