Grazing Permit Loophole Harming the American West? Part Three

This article by Mark Olalde, ProPublica; Lucas Waldron, ProPublica; and Jimmy Tobias, High Country News; appeared on Colorado Newsline on December 6, 2025. This story was originally published by ProPublica and co-published with High Country News. We are sharing it in three installments.

Read Part One

Federal staff have pointed to myriad reasons why the environment is suffering under current grazing policies.

For example, after a wildfire, the BLM aims to keep livestock off the land for two years to allow the ecosystem to recover. But ranchers often negotiate an earlier return to the public pastures where their livestock graze, said Steve Ellis, who spent his career with the BLM and Forest Service, rising to high-level positions in both.

“There was always pressure to get back on,” Ellis said. “That’s not a new thing. It’s just part of working for the bureau.”

The government’s support for ranchers can add to the damage. Land management agencies sometimes seed invasive grasses, which can benefit livestock, although those plants can drive out species that are native to the local ecosystem. And state and federal agencies kill predators such as wolves and cougars — also integral to a healthy balance of species — to protect ranchers’ economic interests.

Some staff members also question the agency’s oversight.

BLM employees said that in some permit reviews and land health assessments, rank-and-file staff noted the presence of threatened and endangered species, which would have triggered tighter environmental controls, only for agency managers to delete that information from their reports.

One current BLM staffer called the reviews “rubber stamping” and said higher-ranking staff who controlled the text of reports “wouldn’t let me stick anything into the official documentation that acknowledged things were in poor shape.”

Another complicating factor, according to BLM staff, is that ranchers are often invited to participate in fieldwork to gauge whether they are overgrazing. The results, employees said, were watered-down reviews and assessments.

The industry, though, is critical of the assessment process for other reasons. Erin Spaur, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, said it’s an inflexible “one-size-fits-all approach” that doesn’t sufficiently account for differences in ecosystems.

“There are huge cultural problems within the agency,” said Dennis Willis, who spent more than three decades with the BLM, including managing rangeland, adding that “there’s a real fear of dealing with grazing problems.”

Some ranchers acknowledge the environmental impacts of their industry. But they say that more flexibility — not stricter oversight — would make them better stewards of the land.

Chris Jasmine, manager of biodiversity and rangelands for Nevada Gold Mines, contends that ranching can be done without denuding the West. A sixth-generation Nevadan, he oversees the mining company’s ranching operations, which run about 5,000 head of cattle.

On a sunny July day near Carlin, Nevada, Jasmine walked through chest-high vegetation to show off the recovery of Maggie Creek, a tributary to the Humboldt River that flows through a checkerboard of public and private lands. Photographs from the 1980s show barren ground around the shallow creek. When ranchers changed how they rotated their herds in the 1990s to give the streambed more rest, the land bounced back, Jasmine said, as a chorus of chirping birds punctuated his story. He credited a BLM biologist with initiating many of the projects that helped revive Maggie Creek.

“It’s a renewable resource. That grass that they’re eating right now will come back next year and the year after that if managed properly,” he said. “It’s about not eating the same plants in the same place year after year after year.”

Jasmine touted the company’s goal of protecting locally important species, its sage grouse restoration projects and its partnership with the BLM, which targeted grazing to remove unwanted vegetation and create a firebreak.

But Nevada Gold Mines — a joint venture between two companies with a combined value of around $150 billion — operates in a different economic reality than most ranchers and can afford to keep cattle off the land long enough for it to recover.

Smaller ranchers face slim profit margins, making it attractive to heavily graze federal lands, where the cost is much lower than on state or private land.

For years, some politicians and environmental groups have proposed protecting degraded or sensitive habitats by paying ranchers to retire their permits, making the areas off limits to grazing and preserving the land as wildlife habitat. Ranchers have occasionally taken these offers. But the industry as a whole is hesitant to surrender grazing permits.

In October, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat, introduced a bill to further voluntary retirement, calling it “a pragmatic solution that supports local economies, protects biodiversity, and saves taxpayer dollars by reducing the cost of administering grazing programs.”

Louis Wertz, a spokesperson for the Western Landowners Alliance, said that the conservation-minded ranchers who make up his group want to both stay in business and “live in a place that is vibrant, full of life, provides clean water, has clean air.” But when it comes to food production, he added, “the expectations we have of both being environmentally harmless and healthy and cheap are untenable. Over the last 150 years in the United States, we have chosen cheapness at the expense of environmental quality.”

Like Jasmine, Wertz said that understaffing at the BLM and Forest Service deprives ranchers of an opportunity to change how they manage their herds, even when they want to.

“It is important that there be accountability for producers on the landscape,” Wertz said, but there should also be “flexibility so producers can be economically successful and so they can do what is right for the landscape.”