Okay. Lets get a couple things straightened out. We are talking about grazing land. The cattle eat the grass, deposit fertilizer, and move on. In farming, you plant, tend, and harvest your crop. Most grazing land is too rocky, poor, or at an inappropriate angle for farming. Most leased state and federal grazing land is land which was too poor for someone to make the homestead work. Not prime agricultural land. Most jurisdictions are such that no seeding, fertilizing, or irrigation may be done on state or federal land. However, it is sufficient to graze a limited number of cattle, for a limited time, which requires that a lot of it be used, in rotation, to graze any substantial herd.
Cattle Ranching 101.
You must build the herd to levels where calves will provide, at marketable maturity, sufficient income to keep the operation economical. The pleasantly low meat prices which Americans enjoy are the result of tremendous pastureage in the US. Unfortunately, west of the Mississippi River, a great deal of the land is owned by the government--about one half. In some states, more--in Nevada, over 90% of the land is federally owned. This placed the cattle ranchers and the government in a sort of partnership. The government gained revenue from the land by leasing the land as pasture, and in many areas, still does. The rancher gained pasture land, through leasing, which allowed him to increase the size of his herd and keep his operation economically profitable.
The Government, MOST IMPORTANTLY, gained lower food prices on the open market, something which has been essential to keeping the masses happy since the days of Imperial Rome, (bread and circuses). Spin off revenue comes to the Government in the form of fuel, excise, sales, and other taxes which are levied on the incredible number of consumable and durable goods which a ranching operation utilizes.
Falsely terming the leasing of sparse pasture as "subsidizing" ranchers is an error which the environmental groups have willingly perpetrated and perpetuated. The Environmental groups have a multifaceted agenda which includes promoting the following agenda items:
"Rewilding America", the alleged return of the vast majority of the land area to it's "pristine" state. Ridiculous, simply because there were people here thousands of years before European colonization, and the "rewilding" agenda includes closing these areas to people. People have been part of the ecosystem for a long time.
In addition, this portion of the agenda includes the reintroduction of dangerous predators, including, but not limited to the grizzly bear and cougar.
Another portion of the agenda is the removal of meat from people's diet, the PETA/HSUS portion, and one way to achieve this includes attacking ranching so the price of meat goes up.
Other venues of attack include the abuse/use of the Endangered Species Act (as in the Klamath Basin), and use/abuse of any and every other stumbling block which can be trotted out or written into official policy.
This environmental group assault reaches even into firefighting, where in a fire a few years back which burned a swath of prairie some 30 miles by 12 miles,(Eastern Montana and North Dakota) the local BLM rangers would not let private landowners whose land was in an area of intermixed BLM and private ownership travel by road to their ranches to repel or fight the fire. Fortunately, the ranchers knew other routes to their property, beside the ones the BLM had blocked, or they might have had a couple of job openings.
In a nutshell, leasing rangeland with no intention of doing anything but preventing ranchers from utilizing the grass on it as feed, is just another phase of this multifaceted assault.
As for a multibillion dollar industry, yes it is. But like the Great Wall of China, that which you percieve to be megalithic is, in actuality composed of small blocks. Each one of those blocks is a family-owned ranch or farm. Is that farmer/rancher a millionaire? Perhaps, if you add up the value of all the land (much passed down through generations) and equipment, livestock, etc. Cash flow, however, is another item, as that wealth is tied up in the means of production. The whole Ag industry megalith as a structure is too large to attack, so the attack is localized, one or two bricks at a time.
The eventual result will be, if this continues unchecked, that megacorporations like Monsanto, Conagra, or Cargill will control food production in the US, after they buy the little operations up at auction. Hormel, Tyson and Armour already control a substantial portion of the meat market.
Eventually you will pay more, a lot more, for food.
In my industry, the oil industry, we are not subsidized, it is actually the reverse. Huge sums of government money are spent each year to keep prices down. Ceaser lived in a fairly temperate climate and energy costs were not a concern.
Add up the cost of the Gulf War, which was about maintaining low fuel prices (by keeping Saddam from siezing Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil fields). Democracy schmemocracy. Kuwait was and is an Emirate.
One last thing, although there were political/religious factors involved in the Irish Potato Famine, there was a blight which destroyed the potato crops. The British figured it was more expedient to let a bunch of 'Mick mackeral-smackers' starve.
If this also has the effect of knocking down another subsidy, I'm also all for it. No matter how much you whitewash it, providing land for under market value to ranchers is a subsidy. However, the ranchers should be compensated for any property improvements if they lose the lease.
Aside from all of that, just reading the article tells me these people aren't worried about facts and free market, only their own interest. For example:
Many ranchers say the new rules are akin to turning owner-occupied homes into rental units with high turnover - the short-term tenants won't be good stewards of the land.
The only reason the environuts want the land is to take care of it.
"These plants have evolved over the last 100,000 or 200,000 years with grazing," Chilton said. "We have all kinds of evidence that horses, camel, bison, mammoth and other grazing animals have been on the land for eons."
And the wild animals ate and moved on, letting things grow again. Don't tell me that none of the ranchers ever overgrazed their plots.
called the ruling "a risky new precedent" that could "seriously harm the income generated from trust lands for the schools of this state."
The only way the environuts will get the land is to outbid the ranchers. Logically, this equals more money for the schools.
With these ranchers spouting lies this much, I don't much trust anything they say about how devastating the effects will be. I trust more the PERC mentioned in the article, since they think more like I (and I'm pretty sure you) do: let money instead of regulation do the talking to save the environment.