Grazing & Ranching

The National Forest System is not only forests. It includes 193 million acres of land managed under a multiple-use mandate — and within that mandate, grazing has operated on national forest lands for over a century. The USFS administers thousands of livestock grazing permits across national forests and national grasslands, including in and adjacent to Inventoried Roadless Areas. Unlike timber harvest, grazing does not require road construction to occur. It is already happening.

What road construction changes is the intensity, infrastructure, and manageability of that grazing.

Range improvements — stock ponds, water developments, salt licks, corrals, and the fencing systems that control where livestock go — require construction access. Pipelines that deliver water to new grazing allotments need corridors. The management capacity to monitor, move, and support livestock across remote terrain expands dramatically when roads exist. Rescinding the Roadless Rule does not create grazing where none existed, but it enables the infrastructure buildout that intensifies grazing pressure in terrain that has historically been too remote for intensive management.

The ecological consequences of intensive grazing in previously lightly grazed roadless terrain are well documented. Livestock compact soils, reducing infiltration and increasing the runoff that roads themselves generate — the two effects compound each other. Streambanks are trampled, accelerating bank erosion and delivering sediment loads that rival road-generated inputs. Riparian vegetation — the willows, alders, and sedges that stabilize streambanks, shade water, and provide critical habitat for neotropical migrants and aquatic species — is preferentially consumed. Where riparian vegetation goes, the stream often follows: channels widen, incise, and warm.

On grassland roadless areas in particular — and the USFS manages twenty National Grasslands totaling nearly four million acres — the threat is not to forest structure but to native prairie. Native grassland communities are among the most imperiled ecosystems in North America. They evolved with periodic drought, fire, and the grazing of native ungulates. They did not evolve with yearround, high-density cattle grazing. The difference matters. Native bunchgrasses, forbs, and the insects, birds, and small mammals that depend on them give way to introduced annual grasses and weedy species under intensive grazing pressure — a transformation that, once accomplished, is extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

The official definition of 2.3 Terrestrial Animal Farming, Ranching & Herding covers "domestic or semidomesticated animals allowed to roam in semi-natural areas (ranching) or the wild and supported by natural habitats (herding)." The IUCN classification's own introduction notes pointedly that "even seemingly well-managed grazing regimes can be a threat to some elements of biodiversity in the system."

In the roadless areas covered by this application: 307 species carry documented grazing-related threats across 1,899 areas — including 84 critically imperiled (G1/T1) species and 134 federally listed species. For these organisms, the intensification of grazing pressure that road construction enables is not a marginal change. It is an infrastructure-driven transformation of the ecological conditions they depend on.