March 7, 2022
The Honorable Debra Haaland
Secretary
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240
RE: Docket No. DOI-2021-0016; Request for Information To Inform Interagency Efforts To Develop the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas
Dear Secretary Haaland and members of the interagency task force:
The undersigned agriculture organizations represent livestock producers across the United States whose operations include production on and stewardship of vast private, state, and federal lands. The Public Lands Council (PLC), the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), and the American Sheep Industry Association (ASI) (collectively the “livestock associations”) appreciate the opportunity to provide perspective on the administration’s request for information on the development of an “Atlas” of conservation that will be used to inform and catalog the America the Beautiful goals to conserve 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030. As individuals whose livelihoods, cultures, values, and enterprises are intimately intertwined with the health and sustainability of natural resources, the livestock associations and our members are uniquely qualified to discuss conservation goals.
PLC is the sole national association whose singular focus is to represent the interests of approximately 22,000 cattle and sheep producers who hold federal grazing permits throughout the West, NCBA is the nation’s oldest and largest trade association representing cattle producers, and ASI is the national organization representing the interests of more than 100,000 sheep producers located throughout the United States since 1865. These organizations and our members are actively engaged in the management of lands and waters that are central to the administration’s current focus on a long-term conservation campaign.
Background
When the Administration made the goal to conserve 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030 public as part of Executive Order 140081, the livestock associations made a series of recommendations that we believe must be incorporated into the administration’s implementation strategy.
These recommendations, in short, were the following:
1. Distinguish “conservation” from “preservation”, and “conserve” from “protect.”
2. Define what “counts”: is this federal land? State land? Would multiple use be allowed to be considered “conserved?”
3. Define scope:
- 30 % per state?
- 30 % across the lower 48 states?
- How would water be quantified and cataloged as a “percentage?”
4. Recognize existing conservation, including the routine stewardship of farmers and ranchers.
Now, more than one year on from the initial debut of the conservation goal, many of the questions posed above, and many of the recommendations, go unanswered. Neither the administration’s first report2, in which the “30 by 30” goal was transformed into the campaign to “Conserve and Restore America the Beautiful”, or the subsequent annual report, shed much light on the administration’s progress to define or differentiate terms, whether progress has been made toward recognizing that conservation happens differently across the nation’s lands and waters.
We were pleased to see, however, recognition from the administration about the need to “Incentivize and Reward the Voluntary Conservation Efforts of Fishers, Ranchers, Farmers, and Forest Owners” as part of the larger conservation goal (emphasis added). As a baseline, farmers and ranchers have often stewarded and conserved landscapes for decades, some for generations, and have done so with great success. Ranchers’ and farmers’ viability depends on their ability to match the needs of their operations with the health of the landscape and watersheds, building on the biodiversity and ecological potential for future generations. The administration’s initial recognition that these practices are important must now translate to an understanding that this national conservation effort will fail without the voluntary and robust engagement of landowners and managers of all types. The administration must recognize and “count” the contributions of farmers and ranchers on private land, state land, and federal land.
This conservation effort is not happening in a vacuum; during the comment period for the Atlas, the livestock associations and our members have commented on regulatory revisions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Clean Water Act (CWA), Clean Air Act (CAA), Endangered Species Act (ESA), and various rulemakings under each of these larger authorities. Each of these rulemakings will result in changes to the regulatory burdens on livestock producers and land stewards, many of whom take specific action to comply with all of these federal laws – and more – during routine livestock operations.
As the administration purportedly seeks to “incentivize and reward” the contributions of farmers, ranchers, and others, there must be a focus that those incentives and rewards should not be the carrot that disguises the stick of an untenable regulatory framework that makes compliance impossible or impracticable. If the administration regulates farms and ranches out of business, those lands and the contiguous wildlife habitat in cultivated and protected ecosystems that they provide will be subdivided, developed, and impossible to “conserve.” The administration must avoid taking steps that directly threaten the sustainability of farms and ranches nationwide, as these landscapes are the last protection against commercial development and permanent habitat loss, in addition to being an irreplaceable part of domestic food security.
General Recommendations
The livestock associations offer a few general comments regarding the Atlas and the administration’s ecological goals:
Now, more than ever, the administration must clearly distinguish between “preservation” and “conservation” as part of this effort. While some federal statutes provide for preservation of certain assets, ecosystems are not “assets” nor are they static entities. Ecosystems, and the biodiversity this administration has prioritized, can only be created, maintained, and restored through active management and careful cultivation over time. The administration should prioritize stewardship and conservation, rather than preservation for all ecosystems and resources considered as part of this proposal.
The Atlas, and underlying conservation goals, should focus on building on current success on existing landscapes, before seeking to create new designations or ownership patterns. While the livestock associations recommend consideration of varied landscape ownerships and management (private, state, and federal), the administration must recognize that a significant portion of the national land mass is already owned or managed by the federal government. Nearly 30 percent is under the federal estate3, many of those acres in need of fuels reduction, post-fire remediation, native grass restoration, habitat improvements, and more. The livestock associations have consistently advocated that the administration should first seek to improve the ecological baseline of these landscapes prior to adding to the federal estate. That recommendation extends to private and state lands, where the administration may seek to expand the conservation footprint without actually achieving or incentivizing any additional conservation practices.
The administration must not seek to create new regulatory authorities in order to achieve current objectives. This recommendation is twofold: 1) the administration must not seek to create new regulatory authority to achieve conservation objectives, particularly those that would allow the agencies greater latitude to infringe on private property rights, because 2) the administration will not be successful in regulating additional landscapes into conservation. The administration does not have the budget nor the personnel to actively conserve lands under the federal purview, and they lack the authority to require conservation practices be implemented on private lands. Durable conservation across landscapes, particularly those with a checkerboard ownership pattern, will only come through cooperative programming.
The administration should use this conservation goal as a way to address landscape level threats, particularly those that exist nearly solely in the purview of federal agencies.
In the West, federal agencies manage more than 640 million acres, on which they are the ultimate authority regarding management decisions. Many of these acres have been historically mismanaged, which has resulted in a variety of scenarios that threaten the ability of the administration to recognize their own lands as “conserved” as part of this initiative.
The administration should seize the opportunity to revitalize efforts that address invasive species encroachment, build on partnerships that allow federal agencies and ranchers to manage landscapes collectively, and make significant investments in managing threats to biodiversity across landscapes. As a stated goal of the Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful is to engage in active restoration, the Atlas should include all of the federal lands classified in need of immediate proactive treatment or restorative action. The agency must take swift action to implement fuels treatments across millions of acres of national forest to reduce timber density and understory fuels that contribute to catastrophic wildfires. These actions must expand outside of the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI); threats to human health are greatest in the WUI but threats to biodiversity occur well beyond the boundary of human interaction. Further, the Atlas should provide the necessary impetus for land management agencies to implement post-fire remediation on millions of acres to prevent further degradation while the agencies seek to retroactively address inadequate analysis under the NEPA.
Additionally, the agency must continue investments to reduce the on-range population of horses and burros, according to the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) strategic plan for 2022. These animals are under the sole and direct purview of the federal government, yet the agencies have failed to implement the necessary management of these animals that now threaten biodiversity and ecosystems across the West4. These two scenarios are replicated across Western water systems, where crumbling infrastructure threatens the ability of entire regions to effectively manage water resources during drought conditions. Federal investment in assets where federal agencies are the sole caretaker must increase, and agencies should leverage investment and partnerships where these assets are shared. Farmers and ranchers have shared rangelands and forest allotments, wildlife habitat and water resources with neighbors and federal agencies for generation, and the agencies must rely on that existing expertise.
Science and Data
As a baseline, the administration must commit to incorporating the knowledge of farmers and ranchers into land management decisions and conservation strategies. Federal agencies have existing agreements that allow for cooperative monitoring and data collection; efforts in these spaces should be redoubled, and additional investments should be made in ensuring voluntary efforts can be incorporated into federal decision-making.
The livestock associations recognize the challenges facing the interagency task force related to conforming the variety of federal data sets across agencies, and the varied categorizations of land statuses. In the Department of the Interior’s early categorization of the “30 by 30” conservation goal, the Department referenced the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Protected Areas Database (PAD-US) data sets as a baseline for consideration of lands under the Department’s purview5, outlining that “only 12% of lands par permanently protected”.
The livestock associations urge against using this platform and land identifications as a model for the Atlas. The PAD-US Gap Analysis Project (GAP) does not accurately reflect conservation status across varied ownerships, as the database relies on land designations as a means to ascribe a preservation “status.” GAP Statuses 1 and 2 consider only those areas that are “preserved;”6 while these two categories were combined to arrive at the twelve percent figure used by the Department, they are far from an accurate representation of landscape conservation. Failure to include lands where conservation practices, like grazing, are implemented alongside other multiple uses (as is the case in some GAP 3 lands and in different scenarios across GAP 4) on both public and private land would ensure the Atlas would be limited to an accounting tool. In stark contrast to the limited utility of the PAD-US dataset, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conducts immense annual surveys and collects millions of data points about practice-based land health assessments that prioritize recognition of conservation and persistence of working lands to ensure conservation outcomes.
The livestock associations have members who also engage in management of federal landscapes as part of federal grazing permits and cooperative agreements. The administration, as part of this Atlas exercise, must also recognize their own position that grazing is conservation7 (emphasis added). Grazing allotments under the purview of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the BLM are subject to a variety of assessments including those related to land health standards and planning and should continue to be recognized as an activity that both promote near-term conservation and protects long-term conservation outcomes.
Conservation as a Continuum
Detailed above, conservation activities occur on a wide variety of landscapes through a variety of means. The livestock associations encourage the interagency task force to develop an Atlas that is more of a menu of conservation that continues to evolve, rather than a rigid limitation on creative conservation partnerships. To achieve a menu of practices and stewardship norms that can be considered conservation, here too it is key for the administration to differentiate between conservation and preservation. If the Atlas is to truly reflect the “meaningful conservation work already underway in America,” it must follow the lead of the land and water stewards across the country that adapt management to the local ecosystem.
The livestock associations recommend the Atlas build a foundational expectation that a land ownership or designation alone is not necessarily sufficient to mean that the land is conserved (i.e., federal ownership itself doesn’t eliminate the need to take action to reduce fuel risks, improve native grass biodiversity, use targeted grazing to achieve conservation goals). Especially here, the concept of “preserving” landscapes is inappropriate because it is impossible to do within the current confines of federal law. While the administration may take steps to designate a national monument, for example, the designation itself will not guarantee conservation or ecological outcomes. Those outcomes are guided through the stewardship and management of that area over time, not ownership status.
The Atlas should also recognize that uses of landscapes will vary across ownership and management profiles. The livestock associations represent producers whose operations are limited to their private lands, affording them the opportunity to solely determine management outcomes, as well as producers who manage both private and public lands. Public lands ranchers – those whose operations include federal grazing permits and management of federal lands in coordination with federal agencies – undertake management in the framework of the “multiple use mandate,” as directed by statute.
The discussion above related to land health standards and ecological assessments that are livestock producers are expected to uphold are standards singular to livestock operations; where livestock grazing occurs in the same footprint as hiking, biking, hunting, fishing, motorized vehicle use, and more, the livestock grazing use is the use that shoulders the entirety of impact of all of those uses. The Atlas must account for the conservation contributions of livestock grazing while also recognizing that these benefits may be dampened or moderated by other uses that affect the land in different ways. The administration has prioritized access to nature as part of this conservation initiative, so must also account for the need to maintain multiple use in a way that the effort to quantify conservation efforts does not inadvertently – or intentionally – marginalize the grazing community and their conservation benefits.
Investment in Stewardship, Not Designation
The livestock associations generally believe that the call for input asks the wrong question when posing the question “what stewardship actions should be considered, in addition to permanent protections, to capture a more complete picture of conservation and restoration in America?” The question frames preservation through permanent protections as a conservation baseline, rather than asking which stewardship actions should be prioritized to capture a complete picture.
Conservation and restoration come in many forms and are tailored to the ecosystem in a targeted way. Federal programs that recognize the voluntary conservation contributions on private land are prime examples of conservation strategies that allow for tailored implementation.
Currently, American farmers and ranchers have enrolled over 150 million acres of in voluntary USDA conservation programs. At a baseline, the Atlas should account for acres enrolled in existing USDA voluntary conservation programs on private land. To increase enrollment in existing USDA conservation programs, the agencies should strive to ensure that these programs (along with technical assistance) are accessible to all producers. The livestock associations support updates to the Conservation Practice Standards that will increase conservation program access. Voluntary conservation practices supported by research and implemented by producers with technical assistance are the key to increasing efficiency and resilience. The use of cover crops by farmers across the nation is perhaps the best example. While cover crops have been a key tool in the agricultural producer’s toolbox since the mid-20th century, the producer community knew little about which cover crops were best suited for their climate and soil type. Often, the most suitable cover crop can differ between regions, states, counties, or even fields on a single farm. Years of dedicated research by USDA and land grant universities continue to develop the cover crop knowledge base. Now, farmers can utilize USDA and land-grant university resources to determine the cover crops that best suit their individual operation.
The livestock associations urge USDA to bolster programs that keep land in production, rather than promoting programs that allow land to lay fallow. These “working lands” programs, including USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) cost-share programs, allow producers to manage their land efficiently while simultaneously contributing to our nation’s food supply. Land in production, whether it be crop fields or pastures with grazing cattle, provides a greater carbon sink than a fallow landscape. Ruminant grazing increases the land’s ability to sequester carbon, by deepening root structures and encouraging photosynthesis. USDA-NRCS not only provides cost-share funding through its EQIP and CSP programs, but also technical assistance to farmers and ranchers who wish to implement conservation practices. The benefit of Conservation Technical Assistance (CTA) is its personalized approach: local NRCS employees work with agricultural producers to implement a suite of conservation practices best suited to fit the individual needs of each operation. Many of the solutions supported by NRCS’ Conservation Technical Assistance are the product of land grant university research and extension. Voluntary conservation practices, supported by research and implemented by producers with technical assistance, are the key to increasing efficiency and resilience.
As the agencies works collaboratively with producers to help reduce agriculture’s environmental impact, the livestock associations urge the agencies not to utilize subjective measurements, such as potential climate impact, to determine conservation program eligibility. By limiting access to conservation programs, USDA would not reduce agriculture’s environmental impact, but instead refuse assistance to producers who, by USDA’s own determination, need it most.
In addition to existing USDA conservation programs, the agencies must include acres enrolled in state and local conservation programs. Programs administered by state departments of environmental protection, state departments of agriculture, land grant universities, and local soil and water conservation districts are just a few examples of mandatory and voluntary programs that provide significant conservation value across the landscape. State and local programs are carefully tailored to the needs of individual communities, ensuring that environmental benefit is maximized. Further, land grant universities across the country are continuously developing new practices and tools for America’s agricultural producers. Acreage associated with this research accounts serve as valuable “land labs,” and are often the first to see the environmental benefit of new practices.
As the administration works to incorporate these programs unique to private lands, it is imperative that inclusion of these lands (existing enrolled acres) and the associated programs and practices must not face any regulatory penalty or repercussion should a future private business decision change the engagement in a federal program. The Atlas must be flexible enough to recognize the valuable contribution of practices implemented as part of these programs, while also recognizing that the specific acres on which those practices may change over time.
Inclusions and Outcomes
The livestock associations urge the Atlas to be flexible enough to recognize that conservation appearance and methods will vary based on ecosystem need; conserved lands that prioritize wildlife habitat continuity in Florida may look like habitat protected by livestock grazing on private lands on either side of a highway with a culvert under busy traffic, while in Nevada it may look like project to remove pinyon juniper to encourage revitalization of a sagebrush stand or use of targeted grazing to convert a cheatgrass monoculture into a thriving native grassland.
The Atlas must include a wide variety of landscapes, but conservation and restorative efforts should be focused on the practices that will move these landscapes toward a higher level of resiliency, rather than an artificial standard or “attribute.” The livestock associations urge the administration to avoid creating list of attributes to be crossed off to achieve a one-time “conserved” designation, rather than doing the hard work of creating land management strategies that make lands more resilient in the face of drought and other stressors. The administration must favor careful planning and ongoing investment rather than a one-time mathematical exercise.
Future Engagement
The livestock associations appreciate the opportunity to have an ongoing conversation with the Departments and components of the interagency working group, however the public engagement on the Atlas marginalized a wide variety of stakeholders. The administration relied on three public “engagement” sessions at the beginning of the year. These sessions were rife with technological glitches and did not afford participants the opportunity to have meaningful engagement. For many of our members who are caretaking many of the rural resources central to this discussion, the online video format and administration of the comment sessions left them without any further indication of the administration’s intentions or motivations as part of this conservation campaign. Further, while individual departments and program leads have had ongoing conversations with stakeholder groups who are already actively engaged in land management, the task force has so far failed to create any such opportunities. The livestock associations offer our assistance in helping the task force to create meaningful engagement opportunities and stand ready to serve as a facilitator for future discussions.
Conclusion
The livestock associations appreciate the BLM and USFS’s recognition that grazing is conservation and urge the Atlas to clearly include grazed lands – both federal and private – as conserved. At its core, livestock grazing often represents the last bastion of protection for the American landscape, the acres most often considered as our national gems. These lands are those cultivated by the farmer, ranchers, fishers, and forest owners. These individuals, and the ongoing investments they make as part of their larger management strategies, must be encouraged to lead this effort.
The livestock associations appreciate the opportunity to comment and look forward to continuing to lead conservation efforts as part of our long history of commitment to healthy, resilient, productive landscapes.
Sincerely,
Public Lands Council
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association
American Sheep Industry Association