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A new report from ProPublica sheds light on the use of public land for private profit. It is long-standing public policy to allow cattle to graze on public land. The original idea was to help small ranchers eke out an existence under difficult conditions. That's not how it works in practice, though, and Donald Trump and his team want to make it worse.
For example, ProPublica found that rancher Stan Kroenke has a permit to graze his cattle on public land. For this, he pays about 15% of the grazing fees he would have to pay a private landowner in the area. He can also get cheap crop insurance, disaster insurance, funding for fences, and compensation for livestock lost to predators, and other benefits that actual private ranchers don't get. He doesn't really need this help since he is worth $20 billion and owns parts of multiple sports teams. This is not an isolated case. About 10% of the ranchers with federal grazing permits control over half of all federal grazing land. The 10% own two-thirds of the livestock eating for free on public lands. Before Kroenke bought the ranch, it was owned by a series of hobby ranchers who used it for multimillion-dollar tax deductions.
In June, J.D. Vance flew to Butte, MT, and then was taken by an SUV motorcade to a sprawling cattle operation outside of Yellowstone National Park. There he met the owner of the Beaverhead Ranch, a man you may have heard of: Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch bought the ranch from billionaire Koch brother Charles Koch for $200 million. There, Murdoch grazes cattle on 340,000 acres of land, two-thirds of which is public. Murdoch paid the government $25,000 last year to graze his cattle on the public land. That is 95% below market rates. There are more examples.
So a handful of wealthy ranchers are raising a lot of beef on Uncle Sam's dime. At least that increases the nation's meat supply, right? Yes. Although there is plenty of private land they could use for grazing, they would have to pay market rates. However, because grazing fees are so low, they have too many head of cattle on the land, which is leading to erosion and degradation of the land. Overgrazing is part of what caused the great dust bowls of the 1930s, when large pieces of land in the Great Plains became useless and ranchers there were forced to move.
In addition, there are mining companies that hold grazing permits for land around their open-pit mines. This allows them to participate in programs that give them credits they can sell to offset their environmental impacts. It is very complicated, but the mining companies understand the rules and how to profit from them. Copper-mining companies like Freeport-McMoRan, Hudbay Minerals and Rio Tinto all run big cattle operations in Arizona, and not because they want to sell beef to McDonald's.
Is Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum aware of how public land is being used? Absolutely. He is a huge fan of it and wants to open up much more federal land for private exploitation. He said: "That's the balance sheet of America. If we were a company, they would look at us and say, 'Wow, you are really restricting your balance sheet.'" So he sees public land not as something to be preserved for future generations of Americans; he sees it as a balance sheet that is not being exploited enough.
The above is only a small summary of what ProPublica found during its investigation. In reality, it is much worse. (V)