Abstract
Cattle ranching is one of the traditional uses of public lands recognized under various federal laws and has occurred on those lands well before the existence of those laws. The federal government is the largest landowner in the 11 western states with about 42% of the total land base, which varies from 22% in Washington to 86% in Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) manage most of the federal lands where grazing occurs. Local communities have been established and evolved throughout the rural parts of the western United States with varying degrees of dependency on a ranching industry that has incorporated public land forage as an important part of seasonal forage supply. The questions we address here are who the public land ranchers are, what might be their motivations for owning the ranch, and how that information can be used in policy formulation and analysis.
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