Budget cuts are going to hit sacred cows across the nation, and in Idaho the cows came home early.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services agency took deep cuts this year, including $247,000 out of its $1.7 million Idaho budget. That cut prompted the agency to back off helicopter hunting of wolves for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game last summer to help elk herds.
That’s because the agency knows where its bread is buttered. It was established to control predators and other wildlife that caused problems for ranchers, not hunters. So the agency went back to killing wolves that were eating calves and sheep.
But with the cuts, they won’t be able to maintain that action to the degree sought by ranchers.
In the old days, the livestock industry would simply go to Congress and ask that its agency be protected from budget cuts.
And if that didn’t work the industry would turn to state legislatures who were dominated by agricultural interests.
But today, the livestock industry faces the same realities everyone else does. Even good programs with universal support are facing cuts. Programs that have critics, such as Wildlife Services, have even less chance of holding the line.
So the Idaho Cattle Association has set up a task force to explore other funding options. That has been interpreted by some as simply going to the state with their hands out.
But Cattle Association Executive Director Wyatt Prescott said it simply isn’t true. The task force is looking at how it can place assessments on various facets of the cattle industry to make up the federal budget cuts.
“We know the state doesn’t have the money to do that, so we’re just looking at ways the industry can fund it,” Prescott said.
They still would have to go to the Idaho Legislature, perhaps to get the assessments into law to ensure everyone is paid.
SHEEP STATION
Another place where budget realities may hit western ranchers is in a little-known tract of public land that stands in the middle of one of the most important wildlife corridors in the Northern Rockies.
The U.S. Sheep Experiment Station at Dubois has an annual budget of $2.25 million to conduct research on 28,000 acres of mountain meadows in the Centennial Mountains. The range marks the Idaho border with Montana and runs west from Sawtelle Peak and Henrys Lake.
I rode a horse through the station’s high mountain meadows in 1987 with the U.S. Forest Service as we checked out this remarkable range. It is closed to the public, but it abuts national forest and Bureau of Land Management lands.
With about 30 researchers and staff, the experiment station conducts mostly genetic research designed to make sheep more productive. Since sheep in the West are mostly grazed in mountain ranges like the Centennials, the Agricultural Research Service that runs the station argues it needs the mountain grazing to serve its research.
But a growing number of conservation groups consider that hogwash. The National Wildlife Federation has been working cooperatively with sheep ranchers for more than a decade in the surrounding national forests to retire the sheep grazing in grizzly bear habitat, with the support and backing of another federal agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
They want the upper elevation grazing areas retired for good so that grizzly bear, Canada lynx and other endangered species can pass through the bottleneck that the sheep station may present. They aren’t pushing to close the sheep station; they just want them to feed the sheep in feedlots where they won’t present a threat to bears and bighorn sheep.
The Sheep Station is in the middle of an environmental review in which for the first time since it opened in 1918, it must defend its mission against the environmental threat it presents. Some environmental groups want the station to close.
Representatives of the industry say its work is still important, not only to the industry but to a nation that needs cheap food. Its challenge is that in these times, even good defensible government programs are getting cut.
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
