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The Yellowjacket grazing allotment sprawls across some 8,600 undulating acres of sandstone canyons, piñon and juniper forests and sagebrush-covered mesas near the Colorado-Utah border in Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. It is a place of subtle beauty, without the ostentatious allure or adrenaline-junkie draw of the red-rock, slot-canyon country farther west. The landscape here is also rich in cultural resources, with dozens of catalogued Puebloan sites, from massive “castles” and hilltop shrines to Hovenweep-style towers.
In 2005, after more than a century of cattle chomping the native grasses, trampling the fragile cryptobiotic crust, toppling ancient walls, and marring the rare riparian zones of the arid Yellowjacket region, the livestock operator gave up his Bureau of Land Management grazing lease. When a team of researchers from the Grand Canyon Trust and University of Colorado did a study here in 2016, they found the land beginning to slowly heal itself.
But now grazing, with all its impacts, may be returning, the Yellowjacket allotment appears on a recently released BLM map titled “Federal Grazing Lands Potentially Available,” along with a neighboring parcel. The map includes hundreds of currently livestock-free allotments on some 24 million acres across the Western U.S., including many that the leaseholders voluntarily retired — in exchange for cash — in order to benefit wildlife.
It’s one part of the Trump administration’s multi-agency effort to increase the number of cattle on public land by issuing new grazing rules, restocking vacant leases and allowing ranchers to monitor and police themselves. The aim, according to a typo-riddled U.S. Department of Agriculture white paper, is to “boost the supply of American born, raised, and harvested beef” by cutting “bureaucratic red tape.” The USDA and the Interior Department are working together with the goal of “maintaining grazing capacity wherever possible,” no matter how degraded the land might be.
Agency leaders like USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins have praised Trump for “putting America’s farmers and ranchers first.” Yet at the same time, Rollins and others are studiously ignoring Trump’s February executive order to quadruple beef imports from Argentina, as well as a May promise to bolster Brazilian and China beef imports in an effort to keep Big Macs affordable.
But of all the many beef-related contradictions, public-land grazing may be the most glaring. Livestock grazing occupies the largest area and has enjoyed the freest hand of the many extractive “uses” of America’s public lands, despite its widely acknowledged impacts on the land, water and even the climate. Grazing permits are good for 10 years but are typically renewed without review, making them essentially lifetime prospects. Ranchers can even use them as collateral against private loans. While grazing is typically banned in parks and monuments managed by the National Park Service, it has been allowed to continue virtually unfettered in those controlled by the BLM and Forest Service.
The debate — or lack thereof — over grazing fees provides a window into the BLM’s approach to grazing a whole, reminding Westerners why critics have long dubbed it the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining.” In 1978, Congress established a formula for setting grazing fees, but insisted that they would not be allowed to drop below $1.35 per animal unit month, or AUM. Grazing fees have barely budged in decades, reaching $1.69 in 2025. That means you can set a cow-calf pair loose to consume a half-ton of forage or more for less than the price of a good cup of coffee.
Nearly everyone agrees that the forage is worth far more than that, and the data makes it clear that fees would have to be substantially higher for the grazing program to pay for itself. Yet all efforts to increase the fee and bring it in line with market rates have consistently flopped.
A Clinton administration proposal to increase AUM rates sparked widespread outrage from ranchers and Western politicians and ultimately went nowhere. President Obama wanted to add an administrative charge to the regular fee, but it never happened. The Biden administration initially promised reform but later quietly smothered the attempt, meanwhile labelling active grazing lands as “conserved” land and formulating management plans that left livestock grazing essentially untouched on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. In fact, Bears Ears may have had more protection from livestock before it became a monument.
You can set a cow-calf pair loose to consume a half-ton of forage or more for less than the price of a good cup of coffee.
Past administrations had been so friendly to public-lands ranching that it was difficult to see how the Trump administration could be any more benevolent. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s public-lands focus mostly has been on fulfilling President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and appeasing drilling and mining interests by fast-tracking environmental reviews and leasing out land and drilling permits at a blistering rate.
Still, the administration has tried to endear itself to the livestock lobby with a host of policy changes in recent months. In February, the BLM entered a memorandum of understanding with the Public Lands Council, a lobbying group representing public-lands ranchers, to allow livestock operators to monitor their grazing allotments. The USDA and Interior Department then signed their own MOU aimed at bolstering the American beef industry, with an emphasis on public-lands grazing. That was followed by the BLM’s proposed new grazing regulations, which make it even easier for ranchers to renew permits while eliminating references to grazing as a “conservation use” and diminishing public input.
At the same time, the administration rescinded the Public Lands Rule, which ranchers irrationally feared would lead to the “eradication” of public lands grazing. The administration also moved to allow ranchers to once again use cyanide bombs to poison coyotes on public lands. And — at the urging of the Montana Stockgrowers Association — it revoked American Prairie’s grazing permits to run bison on BLM grazing allotments in Montana
It’s not clear any of this will help Western ranchers. The number of cattle on public lands has declined over the years, but it’s rarely due to BLM regulations. Nor is it clear that there will be significant demand from eligible livestock operators to lease out the vacant allotments the administration is currently peddling. Ranchers often choose to vacate or to not fully stock existing allotments because either they or the drought-stricken land simply cannot support that many cattle.
There are exceptions. Some 2 million acres of the “potentially available” allotments listed on the recently released map were vacated through a buyout, in which a conservation group pays a willing seller to vacate their federal lease to give the land a rest or to avoid further conflicts with wildlife or recreational users. In most cases, the rancher was not only ready to move on, but also unable to sell that allotment to another livestock operator, often because the land was so degraded by grazing and climate change. It’s truly a win-win situation, with one great big caveat: Federal law does not allow those vacated allotments to be permanently withdrawn from the system, a loophole that the administration is now attempting to exploit.
If the administration was really interested in helping these ranchers, it would support a “just transition” away from public-lands grazing, which is on the decline despite the government’s frantic efforts to prop it up. A just transition would include backing the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act, or other legislation like it, which would allow conservation groups to permanently buy out federal grazing allotments from willing ranchers and livestock operators. But these bills have faltered in the past because many Western politicians of both parties are wary even of appearing to take action that could lead to fewer cattle on the land.
Meanwhile, on the Yellowjacket allotment down in southwestern Colorado, the administration is looking to create the illusion of fostering a mythical ranching “heritage.” This may sound admirable, but if you peek behind the curtain, you’ll see the less-palatable truth: Reinforcing that illusion would require sacrificing a healing land, an irreplaceable cultural landscape and, ultimately, the region’s own rich and genuine American heritage.
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