Ranchers Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Ranchers are commercial range livestock producers. In addition to a market-orientation, ranchers have exclusive, divided access to land (whether privately owned or leased); in contrast, pastoralists-who may be subsistence and/or market producers-share access to land and regulate use through mechanisms other than private property and contract. Many ranchers are found in the western United States, in Australia and New Zealand (known there as graziers), in the Iberian peninsula and parts of South America (known as ganaderos in Spanish), and in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Ranchers in North America rose to prominence just as the earlier rural American ideal-the Jeffersonian farmer-was foundering on the arid and semiarid areas of the interior West. Periodic droughts and economic crises from the 1890s to the 1930s squeezed out thousands of small farmers, and ranchers who could afford to bought up their homesteads, consolidating sometimes very large holdings. The Cattle Boom-itself a victim of drought and depression-was interpreted as a Tragedy of the Commons that would require exclusive land tenure and fencing to control livestock numbers.

Progressive era reforms and agencies, notably the U.S. Forest Service, favored ranchers over pastoralists and subsistence producers, seeing efficiency in dealing with a smaller number of large operators who had the revenue streams to pay lease fees and the capital to make improvements such as fencing and artificial water sources. This was a racial preference as well, since many smaller and/or nomadic livestock producers were not Anglos. With the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, exclusive leasehold was extended to the unclaimed public domain (today’s Bureau of Land Management lands) and pastoralist livestock production disappeared from the United States. In the sparsely populated interior West, ranchers were a dominant political and economic force for most of the 20th century.

Ranchers’ power provoked a backlash beginning in the 1940s, when historian and journalist Bernard DeVoto published a series of articles in Harper’s excoriating ranchers for abusing public lands and for lobbying to devolve leased lands to the states, counties, or private ownership. Since roughly half of U.S. ranch lands are publicly owned (primarily by federal agencies), DeVoto’s accusations found a wide constituency, and the backlash intensified with the emergence of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Although the evidence of rangeland degradation is widespread and compelling, it is unclear where the blame should be laid: Conditions have generally stabilized or improved since the Cattle Boom, and the expectation that reducing or eliminating grazing will restore degraded rangelands rests on obsolete ecological theories. Indeed, such theories informed the policies and practices of federal agencies, which may therefore deserve as much (or as little) blame as the ranchers.

With the suburbanization of the interior West and the industrialization of livestock production on feedlots in recent decades, the basis of ranchers’ wealth and power has shifted from livestock to real estate. Ranchers who lease federal grazing lands own an estimated 107 million acres of private land in the West, and half depend on nonranch sources for more than half of their income. Some are independently wealthy-ranching has attracted affluent investors since the Cattle Boom-but many others are not, and as the market value of their land has come to exceed what livestock production can justify, their commitment to ranching as a “lifestyle” and heritage conflicts with economic imperatives. Recognizing the ecological importance of undeveloped private ranch lands, a growing number of environmental groups such as The Nature Conservancy have decided to work with ranchers to prevent land use change.

Bibliography:

J. Gentner and J.A. Tanaka, “Classifying Federal Public Land Grazing Permittees,” Journal of Range Management (v.55/1, 2002);
P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Harvard University Press, 1959);
T. Ingold, Hunters, Pastoralists and Ranchers: Reindeer Economies and Their Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 1980).