USFS grazing management ignores livestock water contamination

This spring, CSERC, Sierra Forest Legacy, the Western Watersheds Project, and other supportive conservation groups formally appealed the BEH grazing plan by filing a legal “objection.” We provided detailed comments along with years of photographs showing examples of livestock damage. Yet instead of asking for an end to grazing, CSERC and the coalition only requested a major reduction in the area open to cattle in one allotment and smaller reductions in grazing areas in the other two allotments. We also pressed for protective fences to be put up and maintained around all of the meadows and special aquatic features that the Forest Service identified to be in an unhealthy or degraded condition.

In July the Forest Service responded to our “objection” to the new grazing plan by holding a field meeting at two meadows. Rather than put forward any solution, Forest staff pressed us to accept their plan to keep grazing numbers the same. Grazing permittees who attended the session insisted that all the meadows are in acceptable condition. They even suggested that since amphibians are still surviving in grazed areas, it must be because the cattle impacts are beneficial.

When CSERC staff offered to share photos of degraded meadows and damaged riparian areas that suffer from livestock effects year after year, no permittees wanted to look. Only a single USFS official showed any interest. Yet local Forest Service officials pressed CSERC and other objectors to allow the status quo to continue.

The decade-long planning process for the three grazing allotments is especially important to the environment because CSERC biologists have documented significant numbers of water quality violations in streams within the grazing allotments where cows are present for prolonged periods. The water sampling results reported by an independent testing laboratory show water pollution at levels that pose health risks to recreational visitors to the forest.

Despite peer-reviewed science studies proving that cows pollute streams, the Forest Service continues to dismiss water contamination as inconsequential. At the recent field session, one Forest official told CSERC staff that water contamination didn’t matter unless the Forest felt that a high number of recreational visitors might actually consume the polluted water. And in response to CSERC staff’s carefully measured evidence of more than a decade of livestock damage to wet meadows, riparian areas, seeps, and springs, the Forest staff only promised to do “new” monitoring and then try various adaptive management actions. Sadly, the Forest staff doesn’t even consistently do the mandated livestock monitoring that is already required in the allotments.

All of the above is compounded by the fact that taxpayers lose hundreds of thousands of dollars each year due to cattle grazing in the local national forest by paying more for the Forest to manage livestock than the meager amount taken in as fees paid by grazing permittees.