Protect The Harvest | FLASHBACK: HOW ONE GREEN GROUP IS BUYING UP GRAZING ALLOTMENTS TO KEEP CATTLE OFF THE RANGE

Hostile Takeover: How Grand Canyon Trust is Driving Real Ranchers Off the Range
By Marjorie Haun

from an article in Range Magazine from Spring 2020

Giving credit where credit is due, you have to hand it to the “lock-up-the-lands” environmentalists. They never seem to run out of creative ideas when it comes to fulfilling their mission to drive ranchers off federally-controlled lands in the west. Meet the Grand Canyon Trust (GCT), a multi-million-dollar, anti-grazing, anti-multiple use environmentalist organization operating in northern Arizona and southern Utah.

Despite the fact that GCT holds a base property called North Rim Ranch, their interest in grazing is not to promote healthy grazing practices on federally-controlled lands—something already practiced by a majority of actual ranchers with grazing permits—but to acquire, retire, and destroy the grazing capacity of allotments so they become entirely inaccessible to ranchers.

Grand Staircase-Escalante Allotments

Exploiting the onerous restrictions placed on grazing by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) following President Clinton’s unilateral creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSE) in the late 1990’s, GCT offered to buyout permits from aggrieved ranchers, some of whom took the bait. GCT took control of four sizeable allotments; Big Bowns Bench, Clark Bench, Willow Gulch,