Grazing Policies Often a Sore Point

His ranch has been part of the San Luis Valley for 120 years, and Jim Coleman acknowledges his grandfather and great-grandfather before him “grubbed this land out pretty bad” by overgrazing.

The sixth generation to run his family’s spread, Coleman now rotates his 1,300 cows regularly among his private land and the five pastures he leases in the nearby Rio Grande National Forest, to allow the grasslands to replenish.

“If you don’t have the grass, you can’t have the cattle,” Coleman says. But he also concedes many ranchers still abuse the land, both their own and federal acreage.

As ranchers across the West cope with wrenching change including unprecedented population growth, development and hard economic times, few disputes have caused as much commotion as those over federal grazing policies.

From Montana to New Mexico, ranchers like Coleman rely heavily on more than 300,000 acres of federal forest and grasslands to feed their cattle. Once ranchers were left to themselves to determine how those lands would be managed. But now a growing number of people--from environmentalists to federal officials in Washington--argue the public’s lands belong to all and should be protected.

Coleman says he has no problem with that--as long as those at the table are willing to listen. “We’ve got to educate them,” he says.

But other ranchers grumble and complain about a new war on the West.

Environmentalists say they are just happy to be at the table for a change and encouraged that at least some ranchers are listening.

“We’re now trying to find a way to get along instead of trying to beat on each other,” says Cathy Carlson of the National Wildlife Federation in Boulder.

Carlson and Coleman are both part of a regional advisory council developing new grazing standards for Colorado--part of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s effort to bring long-range improvements to federal grazing lands.

The council--one of three in the state--includes three ranchers, three environmentalists, three local government officials and representatives from the recreation industry. That such councils even exist is testimony to the rapidly changing West, say public lands experts.

But the wrangling over federal grazing is unlikely to end anytime soon. Many ranchers still chafe at non-ranchers telling them how to manage their cows.

“The feeling that people are trying to dictate to them--that’s what riles ranchers,” says Ken Spann, who leases U.S. Forest Service land for his nearly 1,000 steers in the Gunnison Valley about 70 miles north of Coleman’s spread.

Like Coleman, Spann has won praise from environmentalists for adopting new herd-management techniques that better protect grazing land. He rotates his cows among pastures and shows a visitor a stream bed lush with plants, even though his cows had used it earlier in the summer.

Carlson has praise for ranchers like Coleman and Spann. But when many ranchers are asked to cut livestock numbers, change management practices or take additional and more costly steps to protect riverbanks, they often just tune out, she says.

“I think ranchers all believe they’re good stewards. But I think half of them don’t get it,” says Carlson. “When you look at a gravel bank with a tiny little creek running down the middle of it, they don’t understand that in a healthy riparian area there should be willows growing and green grass on its banks.”