Landboard and Livestock

 The Idaho Board of Land Commissioners recently met. The duty of the Land Board members, who include the Governor and the other 4 highest elected officials in Idaho, is to oversee the Department of Lands and management of all the state endowment lands. The highest percentage of the endowments go to public schools, the Board tries to get the best long-term deals that they can to go to these endowments and that’s a good thing.

 Here’s where it gets dicey for livestock producers who rely heavily on public lands for grazing rights and who are willing, able and do pay for those rights. There are revisions that are being made into the leasing process for rangelands for among other reasons, increasing revenue to the endowments. Farm Bureau Rangeland Specialist Wally Butler says that livestock groups are very pleased with the majority of the revisions but one change is troubling: “The one major exception industry has taken to what they’re doing is to put conservation groups which is a misnomer because the problems they’ve had aren’t the conservationists, it’s the environmental groups that want to remove livestock from the land, it’s given them equal footing as far as bidding on these leases.”

 So livestock producers could be:  “Pushed into paying a premium for the right to have that lease for ten years.”