Public Grazing on Bureau of Land Management Land :: Agriculture Farming Environment Essays Papers

Public Grazing on Bureau of Land Management Land The Bureau of land Management is an agency of the department of the Interior. It manages 264 million acres in the western lands and over 700 acres of mineral estate nationwide. The purposes of these lands are mineral development, recreation, timber, and grazing. The on that we are going to talk about is grazing on the BLM lands and how they are improving them. In the 1930's, overgrazing was damaging the Western rangelands to a dust bowl. In Wyoming during 1909 the sheep numbers reached six million. Most of these sheep operations were nomadic, with that meant that some of these operations were keeping their sheep on public land all year round. The range land became deteriorated bye this way of grazing. By the 1920's and 1930's the ranchers and the conservationists wanted something to be done before the land got any worse. Congress knew that they had to do something before they lost their country's biggest asset. The Taylor Grazing Act (TGA) of 1934 was passed. What the TGA did was regulated grazing on public lands through using permits. With regulation of public lands they could control numbers of occupancy and uses on the land. It also could preserve the land from destruction, with that it could improve the land and develop it better. In 1964 Public Land Law Review Commission was established to make recommendations on how to manage the lan d. Congress responded to that by passing the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976, which keeps the lands in Federal ownership. The Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 was another act that improved rangelands. It realized that public rangelands were producing less than their potential. This act helps maintain and improve the conditions of the rangelands so that they become productive and usable to their highest potential again. The Executive Order 12548 of 1986, signed by President Reagan, stated that there would be annual fees for domesticated livestock grazing on public rangelands. Just in Oregon and Washington the federal government will receive over $1.8 million annually for grazing about 250,000 animals on BLM land. The BLM has improved the rangeland in Oregon by one hundred percent. With the Oregon Trail having immigrants and their cattle coming through, it destroyed the land with no grass left to graze. The BLM scattered cattle throughout the land and the grazing has improved, so has the water development.