In the mid-to-late 1800s, well-financed livestock operations drove tens of thousands of cattle onto the “public domain” — i.e., onto the lands stolen from Indigenous people in the Interior West, where the grass grew as high as a pony’s belly and appeared to be free for the taking. The livestock industry, along with mining, soon dominated the region’s colonial-settler culture, economy and politics.
By the end of the century, however, the big cattle drives were becoming a thing of the past. In the ensuing decades, ranches gave way to energy fields and suburban sprawl, and the industry’s economic power faded. And yet, the West is still Cattle Country: The cowboy myth endures, fueling tourism. Ranching wields an outsized influence over state and federal politics. And the cattle themselves are still here, millions of them, squeezed into massive feedlots, scattered across public lands and pumping out milk in industrial-scale dairies.
More of the region’s irrigation water and farmland goes to alfalfa and other livestock feed than to any other crop. Cows are walking, cud-chewing methane dispensers, creating massive “hotspots” of greenhouse gas above overcrowded feedlots. And they continue to roam the West’s public lands, decimating grasslands, facilitating the spread of noxious weeds, destroying cryptobiotic crusts, trampling riparian areas and fouling desert streams.
In 1965, Arizona researchers found that cattle grazing in the Sonoran Desert had caused a “shift in the regional vegetation of an order so striking that it might be better associated with the oscillations of Pleistocene time than with the ‘stable’ present.” The landscape has been so altered by livestock that we can barely imagine what it looked like before the herds arrived. Forget the Anthropocene; the West is still stuck in the Beefocene.
34
The GWP drops to about this amount once in the atmosphere over a 100-year interval, after methane slowly breaks down into carbon dioxide and water.
86
Global warming potential (GWP) of methane over a 20-year interval, meaning it is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the near term.
A single cow-calf pair emits 233 pounds of methane annually.
31.3 million acres
Minimum amount of land in the Western U.S. dominated by cheatgrass, a noxious, fire-prone weed spread by grazing, as of 2000.
123.5 million
Tons of carbon lost to the atmosphere as of 2000 due to the conversion of native rangelands to cheatgrass in the Wyoming big sagebrush biome.
$1.35
Grazing fee per AUM on BLM land in 2024 and the previous several years, meaning that’s how much it costs a rancher to keep one cow and calf on public land for a month, during which they’ll consume 600-to-1,000 pounds of forage. This is the minimum amount Congress allows the BLM to charge.
$8-$12
Administrative cost per AUM to manage livestock on public lands.
$5.498 million
Amount that industry, including livestock lobbying groups, donated to Frank Mitloehner, a UC Davis animal science professor who downplays cattle’s contribution to climate change.
$36
Social cost of greenhouse gas —the estimated cost of damage done to the climate — for one AUM on Western public lands.
$105.9 million
Amount budgeted to the Interior Department for rangeland management in 2020, meaning taxpayers are subsidizing grazing operations to the tune of $90 million per year.
650,000-2 million
Gallons of water needed annually to irrigate an acre of alfalfa, depending on location and climate.
$2.5 billion
Total amount of federal conservation, disaster, commodity and crop insurance subsidies paid to ranchers and farmers in the 11 Western states between 1995 and 2020.
SOURCES: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Environmental Working Group, Environmental Protection Agency; “Water Scarcity and Fish Imperilment Driven by Beef Production,” by Brian Richter, et al.; “The animal agriculture industry, US universities, and the obstruction of climate understanding and policy,” by Viveca Morris and Jennifer Jacquet; “Livestock Use on Public Lands in the Western USA Exacerbates Climate Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation,” by J. Boone Kauffman, et al.
Data visualization by Jennifer Di-Majo/High Country News
This article appeared in the May 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Cattle country.”
