National Audubon Society Embrace of Ranching

The National Audubon Society has a program called “Conservation Ranching,” which promotes individual ranchers who practice what Audubon calls “bird-friendly” ranching.
One must assume that Audubon is garnering some big bucks from individual wealthy landowners by promoting ranching or is just brain-dead.

Livestock production is the most significant factor in Species Endangerment in the West.
While there are better and worse ways to raise livestock in the arid West, there is no good way to do the wrong thing. Ranching cattle in the West is the wrong animal in the wrong habitat. Aridity exacerbates the adverse effects of livestock production; hence, western ranching severely impacts biodiversity.

Ranching in the West has numerous ecological impacts that Audubon is willing to overlook.

First, Audubon suggests that most of the participating ranchers are raising grass-fed beef. Audubon suggests: “Using native grasses and other plants as forage increases the ability for pastures to sequester carbon, helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

Audubon’s willful blindness to livestock’s 14% to 18% contribution to global climate warming is inexcusable. Livestock methane emissions vastly exceed any carbon sequestered by grazing grasslands. If one is concerned about climate warming, one of the easiest ways to reduce one’s individual contribution is to forgo eating beef.

Furthermore, numerous studies show that grass-fed beef continuously emits methane because it takes much longer to reach slaughter weights, resulting in a more significant carbon footprint than even Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) raised beef. It’s important to note that CAFO beef has its own set of environmental impacts.

Both grass-fed and CAFO-raised animals are a significant driver of global climate warming.

Among the numerous other impacts of livestock production, especially from grass-fed beef, are pollution of waterways, soil compaction, destruction of biocrusts (by trampling), fences that fragment wildlife habitat, spread of weeds (like cheatgrass), soil erosion, the killing of predators, dewatering of rivers for irrigation, and destruction of native plant communities to create hay and alfalfa fields.

Not all beef operations have these impacts, but few don’t at least have some of these influences. For instance, throughout the West, the single biggest consumer of water from rivers is irrigated livestock forage production. Many rivers are completely dewatered by irrigation. And even those that don’t often are drained down to a trickle.

Dewatering reduces adjacent riparian vegetation, one of the West’s most important habitats for all bird species. Even the reduction of aquatic habitat negatively impacts many birds. Dewatering can reduce fish production, which in turn can negatively impact osprey and bald eagles. Other water-dependent birds, from great blue herons to dippers, suffer when irrigation removes water from rivers.

Even California, which grows about half of the food crops consumed in the United States and irrigated feed crops—including alfalfa, pasture, and corn silage—cover a quarter of acreage and 27% of farm water use.

Another impact mentioned is that the trampling of soil biocrust creates a grazing-induced shift from native bunchgrasses to cheatgrass, an annual that easily ignites and is responsible for the degradation of the sagebrush steppe across the West.

This loss, in turn, results in less habitat for sage grouse, sage sparrow, and numerous other sage-dependent species. To learn more about how livestock grazing promotes sagebrush losses, go here.

Fences exist across the West to manage livestock movement and grazing pressure. However, fences have numerous ecological impacts, including hindering the migration of large mammals, acting as “lookout” posts for avian predators like ravens, and even a source of mortality due to collisions. For example, up to 29% of sage grouse in one study died after colliding with fences.

Grazing also removes “hiding” cover for nesting grassland and shrubland bird species. One way that grazing increases the vulnerability of sage grouse to predation is by reducing dense vegetation that hides nests, chicks, and adults from predators.

Audubon’s program is motivated by the recognition that grassland bird populations have declined 50% in the past 50 years, and much of the habitat exists on private lands.
One might like to believe a Conservation Ranching program would help save grassland birds. One could also believe in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.

Without being too cynical, the number of ranchers in the West participating in Audubon’s program is just a drop in the bucket of all ranchers. It affects a small percentage of the private rangelands in the West.

Nationwide, Audubon claims they have enlisted 110 ranchers in their program. I repeat, 110 ranchers.

Even if these ranchers significantly improved the habitat for grassland birds, their contribution is insignificant in the big picture. It’s like suggesting a bucket of water dumped into a waterway suffering from drought would save the river.

Although Audubon does not identify who these ranchers are, my experience with such happy talk from so-called environmental groups is that selling ranching as a conservation strategy usually involves wealthy individuals who can afford to modify their ranching practices. Why is this important?

Because such models are never transferable to landscape scale influence, most ranchers either are uninterested in promoting biodiversity or, in many instances, cannot afford to implement changes that might help wildlife.

Worse for grassland birds, such alignments with the ranching community emasculate the Audubon Society when it comes to being a critic of public lands rangeland with significant of grassland bird habitat.

If Audubon spent nearly as much time advocating for the removal of livestock on public lands, which cover over 300 million acres of the West, the overall benefits for grassland and other birds would greatly outweigh any presumed “benefits” from its “conservation ranching” program.

Furthermore, for those members of the public who might be sympathetic to advocating for the preservation of grassland bird habitat on public lands, marketing material like “Conservation Ranching” promotes the notion that ranching is somehow compatible with preserving biodiversity.

Audubon is not the only so-called “conservation” group that has become an advocate for ranching in the West, and it includes the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Society, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Trout Unlimited, and others. None of these groups are willing to condemn livestock production and antagonize ranchers, particularly in the West, when there is abundant evidence that overall ecological and evolutionary function would be better served by removing livestock, particularly from public lands.

If Audubon were serious about preserving bird habitat, it would invest its resources in garnering support for the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act, which is one means of reducing livestock degradation of public lands and thus bird habitat.

At the same time, it would advocate for reducing consumer beef consumption, not promoting consumption like its “Conservation Ranching” program. The only conclusion I come to from reading Audubon’s position on livestock production is that it wants to advocate for “feel-good” programs with few substantial bird benefits.