Milton Ranch Management
By David Jaynes (retired from Bureau of Land Management)
Introduction
I started work at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Elko, Nevada as a range conservationist in 1977 and moved to the Billings, Montana office in 1984. I worked with the Miltons from 1986 to 2003, when I transferred to the Miles City BLM office.
The Milton Ranch is intermingled private and public land administered by the BLM. To understand the BLM’s role in management on the Milton Ranch a little background information is required.
Background of federal involvement
The land which would become the Milton Ranch was part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The U.S. General Land Office (GLO) was created in 1812 to administer the disposal of the public domain lands of the United States, previously administered by the Treasury Department. The Department of Interior (DOI) was created in 1849 and the GLO became an agency under that department.
By the 1930’s the public domain administered by the GLO consisted of lands not part of the forest reserve, a national park or military reserve, nor homesteaded or sold. Grazing on these lands in the west was first-come first-served (tragedy of the commons). With the economic depression and the land resource destruction during the Dust Bowl as a result of improper farming methods there was also recognition of the damage to the public domain from unregulated livestock grazing.
The Taylor Grazing Act was passed in 1934 which established the Division of Grazing to regulate grazing on public lands. The Division of Grazing, which became the Grazing Service in 1939, held meetings with local stockmen to establish appropriate livestock numbers, assign areas of use and charge a grazing fee. Some areas, in particular in Montana, had already started the process of establishing limits on livestock numbers and areas of use through the cooperative creation of grazing districts administered by the stockmen. These became a model for future grazing management on BLM land.
The Bankhead-Jones Act was passed in 1937, authorizing long-term loans for tenant farmers. For the area that became the Milton Ranch it also authorized purchase of damaged private land by the federal government, to ensure land conservation and utilization (LU) -- “to control soil erosion, preserve natural resources and protect fish and wildlife,” and as the story goes, enable destitute farmers to start over in California. Most of the federal land on the Milton Ranch is called LU land acquired by the federal government in the 1930’s, identified by the color pink on BLM maps instead of the yellow for public land that never left federal ownership. The land was administered by the Soil Conservation Service (established in 1935) until the late 1950’s, when it was transferred to BLM.
In 1946 the GLO and Grazing Service were merged into the Bureau of Land Management under the Department of Interior with the mission of managing these federal lands until final disposition.
In 1969 the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed which required the determination of the impacts of all federal actions before implementation of the action. For BLM this meant conducting an environmental assessment for building a fence or drilling a well or a full-blown Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for land use plans or for projects proposed by other agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers.
Livestock grazing was considered a major federal action. It was determined in the early 1970’s that BLM would analyze the impacts of grazing with a programmatic (EIS) and would prepare one planning document to cover the impacts of grazing on all public lands administered by BLM. In the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., v. Morton (Secretary of Interior) lawsuit, a 1974 court decision determined that this approach was inadequate. More site-specific analysis in the form of an EIS to determine the impacts of livestock grazing would be required for at least each of the 52 districts on approximately 150 million acres of BLM administered land.
In 1976, the year before I started working for BLM, Congress passed the Federal Land Management and Policy Act (FLPMA) which was a major change in the mission of BLM. The general points of the law are that the public lands will be retained in federal ownership (disposal is no longer the primary mission). “They will be inventoried and managed for multiple use and sustained yield to protect the quality of the environmental, ecological and water resources and provide food and habitat for wildlife, fish and domestic livestock”.
FLPMA addresses essentially every land management authority granted to BLM, from establishing grazing advisory boards consisting of livestock operators to rights-of-ways, mineral revenues, land sales and wild horses and includes the repeal of the Homestead Act. However, for discussing management on the Milton Ranch I will focus on several sections of the law that directly affect grazing management.
Specific requirements: Section 201 of FLPMA- Inventory and Identification – “maintain on a continuing basis an inventory of all public lands and their resource and other values”. “This Inventory shall be kept current so as to reflect changing conditions and to identify new and emerging resource and other values”. Section 202- Land use planning - “with public involvement and consistent with the terms and conditions of this Act, develop, maintain, and, when appropriate, revise land use plans which provide by tracts or areas for the use of the public lands”. The first land use plan covering the Milton Ranch was the Billings Resource Management Plan (1984). (The new revised final EIS is proposed for completion in 2014).
Inventories that would lead to gathering data for the land use plans that would be developed were undertaken. In my case, that meant range inventory of the 4 million-plus public land acre Wells Resource Area in Elko County, Nevada in 1978.
Also in that year the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 (PRIA) was passed to improve range conditions on the public rangelands and was specific on requiring rangeland monitoring.
Section 2 – Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 – a) ”The Congress finds and declares that - (1) vast segments of the public rangelands are producing less than their potential for livestock, wildlife habitat, recreation, forage, and water and soil conservation benefits, and for that reason are in an unsatisfactory condition” Section 4. (a) “Following enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture shall update, develop (where necessary) and maintain on a continuing basis thereafter, an inventory of range conditions and record of trends of range conditions on the public rangelands”.
In the 1990’s resource advisory boards consisting of members from all aspects of land management including wildlife, environmental and elected officials replaced the livestock grazing advisory boards. These boards were asked to develop Standards and Guidelines for Rangeland Health to be used in determining rangeland conditions and trends as addressed in FLPMA and PRIA due to the impacts of grazing and other activities on public land such as off-highway-vehicles.
In March 2010, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) published its decision in response to the proposed listing of the Greater Sage-Grouse (GRSG) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The determination announced was that the ESA listing was “Warranted but Precluded” by higher priority species. Inadequacy of regulatory mechanisms was identified as one of the criteria in which the “Warranted” decision was based.
The USFWS identified the principal mechanism for the BLM to assure regulatory certainty is by adoption of conservation measures in RMPs. The USFWS will review its warranted-but-precluded decision at the end of 2015 and make a decision as to whether the GRSG warrants protection via the ESA.
The BLM, working jointly with the Forest Service, developed a series of Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) to incorporate GRSG conservation measures on the lands they manage. These Draft EISs were released to the public in 2013.
BLM land in Montana including the Milton Ranch has extensive areas of sagebrush, priority sage-grouse habitat. The proposed conservation measures to protect the sage-grouse habitat impose new restrictions on grazing, range improvement projects, mineral development and road use (Travel management).
Within this framework of laws which are translated into regulations and policies BLM is mandated to manage the federal lands on the Milton Ranch.
From Rest Rotation to Holistic Resource Management
August (Gus) Hormay developed the theory of rest rotation grazing while working for U.S. Forest Experiment Stations in the west for over thirty years from the 1930’s to 1966 when he transferred to the Bureau of Land Management. Gus taught and promoted this grazing method to BLM management and field personnel until his retirement in 1977.
Rest rotation grazing management was a systematic approach to grazing management accomplished by dividing a ranch or management unit into three or four pastures and resting (no grazing for a year) on one pasture while rotating (deferring) the season of use for each pasture through the three to four year cycle. For example each pasture might be grazed for a month to six weeks in the spring in year one, summer in year two, fall in year three and rested in year four. This scientifically based systematic approach became the standard for grazing management on BLM administered land through the 1960’s and 70’s and was a significant improvement over having spring pastures, summer pastures and winter pastures. It is still extensively used today.
The management methods and theories about evolution of plants exposed to grazing resulted in the high intensity, low frequency grazing methods called Holistic Resource Management (HRM) touted by Allen Savory. They seemed to be a radical violation of the overall basic principle of BLM grazing management “take half and leave half”. To many critics of BLM grazing management inside and outside BLM it seemed to promote the very result the Taylor Grazing Act was intended to reverse -- grazing an area until it was denuded of vegetation, because if you didn’t the next guy would.
After attending a Savory workshop in Billings in 1984, Bill and Dana became true believers and saw this method as a way to increase stocking numbers while improving range conditions. But creating innumerable small pastures and boundary fences so each pasture could be intensively grazed and making this fit the BLM billing system for grazing use was diametrically opposed to BLM management principles and administrative capabilities.
Experiments in grazing management are the realm of universities and experiment stations, not the BLM. The Miltons’ infectious enthusiasm for attempting to implement this method, along with their dedication to involving everyone in the process from state and federal government agencies to interested individuals, built the trust of the team members. They convinced Karl Hedrick, Range Conservationist in the Billings BLM Field Office, and a couple of years later me, to adjust the BLM grazing administrative system to accommodate the HRM grazing method and give it a try.
Everyone was (and still is) involved and looked forward to reviewing ranch operations to produce the best results for the land and the Milton family. There were annual monitoring and planning meetings, discussion of successes and failures in current management, field trips and always an exceptional lunch. Cohesion and trust between team members grew with the understanding that everyone’s mission was the same -- manage the land for the benefit of the vegetation, wildlife and watershed while providing a profitable and sustainable livestock operation.
The rest rotation grazing method is a “system” a rancher follows through annual cycles. The HRM method, as the name implies, incorporates all aspects of land management with a focus on planning, trying new management techniques which result in success or failure, and then re-planning. I was told on many occasions by people inside and outside BLM that some of the pastures looked scalped and why were we allowing this abuse to continue? I always explained this is an on-going experiment, adjustments are made regularly to correct mistakes as well as improve the chances for success, and everyone that might be impacted is involved in the process.
The experiment has been going on now for close to thirty years with great success and many lessons learned over an extended time-frame that will benefit grazing management for the future.