As many of us return to work after the holidays, I have great hopes for the coming year. Those of us in agriculture are optimistic, but we are also cautious, as we know times can change easily and quickly.
For years, it seems like we have been fighting the same old issues, and we have, especially on public lands.
As time goes by, I find there are more people wanting to use a larger part of public lands, water, wildlife and places to recreate. I understand we all share in the multiple uses of these public lands, but there are also private lands and their respective rights intermingled within public lands, such as water rights and grazing permits which are legal entities.
The public needs to understand ranchers pay for their livestock to graze public lands, whereas sportsmen and recreationists use the lands for free. So, as a Bureau of Land Management or a U.S. Forest Service permittee, I have some chips on the table. It is a legal asset. If I sell my grazing permit, I have to pay taxes on it, just like selling land.
Now some recreationists are wanting to cross private lands to reach federal lands for free. A lot of landowners are okay with this, as long as they get permission to cross, but lately a few hunters have been crossing without permission and showing no respect for private lands. Some feel riding an ATV or side-by-side gives them the right to go anywhere they want.
Whether I cross someone’s backyard in town or a hunter crosses my private land at the ranch, it is a violation of the same trespassing laws. The only difference is my backyard is bigger.
As a rancher, I’m concerned about the government using large blocks of public lands for wind or solar power as this will hurt recreation and ranching and, at some point, the feeder lines into the energy fields will cross private lands using eminent domain.
Ranchers and farmers across Wyoming should be concerned about the industry wanting the state’s water with disregard for agriculture’s water rights. There is currently a legal case in the upper Platte River Valley that could result in the state’s water being turned into a commodity like it is in Colorado.
Agriculture should be concerned over the Tribes gaining control of federal grazing permits to run bison. They need to see first if it works on a large scale on reservations and what management will be needed first.
Agriculture needs to keep battling the misguided national dietary guidelines developed by vegans and extreme animal activists. We don’t want to eat beans three times a day.
These concerns should be everyone’s concerns. The big issue is not protecting ag, but it is protecting food security. Protecting ag is how America can always have food.
America has the greatest and safest food supply in the world. To accomplish this, farmers and ranchers need land to grow crops and raise livestock on. We lose thousands of acres every year for multiple reasons, including foreign countries buying farm lands.
We need to be more careful of our ag lands.
Dennis Sun is the publisher of the Wyoming Livestock Roundup, a weekly agriculture newspaper available online and in print.
