As a child, Lytle Denny learned where blue grouse, ruffed grouse, sharp-tailed grouse and greater sage grouse lived. A member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, he scouted the high-desert landscape during family hunting trips on the tribes’ ancestral homelands in southeastern Idaho. His dad preferred hunting deer and elk, but Denny developed an affinity for grouse.

The family hunted together as a group. Denny moved quietly through the silver-green sagebrush, hoping to hear the sudden heavy wingbeats of a startled bird. His family watched, waiting for a flush, not just of grouse but of mammals, too. “So it worked together,” he said. “We’d get birds and big game.”

As Denny got older, though, he saw fewer sage grouse. These distinctive, chicken-sized birds with their thick white chest feathers and brown, sunbeam-shaped tail feathers are culturally significant to the Shoshone-Bannock people, a rich source of song, dance, stories and nourishment. Denny noticed that other animals, including ground squirrels and mule deer, were declining as well. More farms were replacing the sagebrush that covered the foothills near the reservation. More cattle grazed the area, too. As their numbers increased, so did drought and wildfires.

By his late teens, Denny knew he wanted to pursue a career in fish and wildlife biology. He learned about the conflicts between sage grouse and cattle. The birds return faithfully to their open mating grounds, or leks, every spring to perform one of North America’s most striking mating displays: Males gulp a gallon of air and strut, strumming their stiffened chest feathers with their wings to create two loud swishes, then inflating and contracting the two yellow air sacs on their chests with a couple of inimitable popping sounds. But livestock grazing disturbed this yearly ritual; in some areas, Denny saw ranchers drive out onto open leks in their ATVs and throw salt licks out for cows. Sharp-tailed grouse continued to perform their mating dances in the area, but sage grouse left. “I started asking questions like, ‘Why are we letting this happen?’” Denny said. “I didn’t have any stake in livestock. I had value in the land, in plants and animals.”

Sage grouse have become a rare and special sight. Denny doesn’t hunt them anymore. Whenever he sees one, he’ll stop and watch.

Today, at 46, Denny is the deputy executive director of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Natural Resources Division. Both the Shoshone-Bannock and the Burns Paiute Tribe of southeastern Oregon are confronting cattle grazing’s impact on native plants and animals, including sage grouse, in the high-desert sagebrush steppe that covers much of the West. This vast landscape is the ancestral territory of the Shoshone-Bannock, a confederation of the Eastern and Western bands of the Northern Shoshone and the Bannock tribes, or Northern Paiute.

Since 1965, sage grouse populations in the West have declined by 80%, with birds in the Great Basin — which spans Nevada and parts of Idaho, Oregon and Utah — experiencing the most dramatic declines. The birds, considered a keystone species that indicate the overall health of their ecosystem, have been the subject of litigation and land-use battles for decades, and advocates have attempted, unsuccessfully, to place them on the federal endangered species list numerous times. It’s estimated that there may have been 16 million sage grouse living in 13 states and three Canadian provinces before non-Native settlers arrived in the mid-1800s. Now, about 350,000 remain, according to an estimate by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Half of the species’ original habitat is gone, replaced by farms, cow pastures, invasive grasses, mines and oil and gas fields.

The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the majority of sage grouse habitat, blames the decline on habitat loss and degradation from drought, wildfire and invasive grasses. But federal officials often fail to mention livestock grazing — the most widespread commercial land use in the West by acreage — as an underlying factor. Ranching interests, largely concentrated among corporations like multinational conglomerate J.R. Simplot Co., which also grows potatoes for McDonald’s, have a powerful hold on federal land-management policy — even though cattle that graze on public land account for less than 2% of the nation’s beef supply. Nearly all the remaining sage grouse habitat is open to grazing.

Some tribal members and scientists, including Denny, as well as non-Native advocacy organizations like the Western Watersheds Project, have urged a reckoning with extensive public-lands grazing, which they say threatens not just sage grouse, but the entire sagebrush steppe ecosystem and the many other significant species it supports, including sagebrush, mule deer and jackrabbits. Settler-colonial notions of the West may have framed the sagebrush steppe as cattle country, but “cows are an invasive species,” said Diane Teeman, a Burns Paiute tribal elder and former manager of the tribe’s Culture and Heritage Department. Grazing, Teeman said, is causing “permanent damage to a lot of things here.”

“Cows are an invasive species.”

The threat grazing poses to sage grouse has become even more dire under the current Trump administration. Last July, the administration rescinded a BLM policy that required prioritizing environmental reviews of grazing in areas critical for at-risk species like sage grouse, and in October, the U.S. departments of the Interior and Agriculture released a plan that called for expanding the number of acres open to grazing on BLM and Forest Service lands. In December, the BLM finalized new sage grouse management plans for several Western states, including Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming, that ease restrictions on oil, gas and mining and lift a previous requirement that ranchers in Idaho, California and Nevada keep grasses at least 7 inches tall to protect grouse nests from predators.

Both the Burns Paiute and Shoshone-Bannock tribes, meanwhile, are modeling ways to reduce grazing on the landscape. The Burns Paiute Tribe has significantly cut the number of cows that are allowed to graze on tribal lands, while the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes plan to reevaluate herd size on reservation lands. The results are promising, revealing how restricting cattle could benefit native wildlife, including sage grouse. But applying such efforts to public lands would require undoing generations of deeply ingrained beliefs about grazing’s place in the West. Cows are woven into the very fabric of Western colonial identity, Denny said. To tug at the threads in any way “is to go straight against settler-colonial values.”

“That’s the real battle,” he said, “whose values are getting precedence over whose.” 

THE SAGEBRUSH STEPPE is not a showy place with towering trees like the Pacific Northwest’s coastal forests. The landscape is often seen from behind the wheel on a two-lane highway, a pastel-green filler passing alongside blurred white road lines and fence posts. Juniper trees grow sparsely; mule deer rest in their shade. Sagebrush itself — a branching, fragrant shrub with narrow lobed leaves — rarely exceeds five feet in height. The ecosystem’s diversity flourishes closer to the ground, where the understory is colored by the blossoms of yellow hawksbeard and purple sagebrush mariposa lilies, interspersed with the black, green, gold and white flecks of biological soil crusts.

These miniscule crusts, made up of lichens, mosses, green algae and cyanobacteria, are key to the ecosystem’s health.The crustfunctions like organic armor, retaining moisture, cycling nutrients and preventing non-native plant invasions. When the crusts break apart, other plant communities fall apart. “I used the word ‘fragile’ talking about our soils,” Teeman said. “There is a delicate balance.”  

In a healthy high-desert landscape, soil crusts cover the ground in clumps. Sagebrush grows scattered and bunchgrasses fill the space between. Sage grouse rest under the modest canopy and lay speckled eggs in ground nests surrounded by tall grasses that protect the brood against predators like ravens and coyotes. Insects crawl on the abundant wildflowers, and both feed sage grouse and their chicks.

But over generations, extensive cattle grazing has transformed this vast landscape. Herds compacted the fragile soils, making the ground hard and dry. The land can no longer hold as much water, exacerbating drought and fueling the wildfire cycle. “You walk across a grazed area, and it’s like walking on a parking lot,” said Boone Kauffman, an Oregon State University ecologist. In an ungrazed area, he said, it’s like “walking on a marshmallow.”

Cattle also spread invasive cheatgrass, which chokes out native grasses and turns entire hillsides maroon in the spring. Sage grouse and most other wildlife avoid areas heavily infested with cheatgrass, which began to spread across the West in the late 1800s, in part due to livestock: Seeds stick to the animals’ hooves and hides, and when those hooves break the soil crusts in areas that are also overgrazed and depleted of native grasses, it can create openings for them to germinate.

Cows devour bunchgrasses, exposing sage grouse nests to predators. They congregate near water, trampling streambanks and chomping on wildflowers, willows and aspens. These riparian areas normally serve as critical oases in the desert, providing food and shade and supporting the region’s  plant and animal life. “Every riparian area in the West has been hammered,” said Roger Rosentreter, a retired BLM Idaho state botanist.

Water troughs built for cows create hazards where sage grouse and other birds can drown. Barbed-wire fences injure grouse by snagging their wings and sometimes severing their heads, and insecticides aimed at protecting plants for cattle kill the grasshoppers and crickets that are critical food for grouse chicks.

“Those cumulative effects of grazing,” Rosentreter said, “are sealing the coffin on so many of our native wildlife.”

Ranching’s dominion over the West began in the mid-1800s, when cattle barons — aided by the federal government’s westward-expansion policies and the forcible removal of the region’s Indigenous peoples — built vast ranching empires on tribal lands. Hundreds of thousands of cows grazed on the tall bunchgrasses of the sagebrush steppe, which the newcomers and government dubbed “the range,” a term that later morphed into “rangeland” and is now widely used to describe the sagebrush steppe. Rangeland scientists like Karen Launchbaugh, a professor at the University of Idaho, consider it an ecological term, not a commodity term. But other scholars say it is by nature colonial.“Rangelands are inescapably implicated in the conquest and settlement of North America,” wrote Nathan Sayre, a geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2023 book about rangeland history.

Rangeland science developed hand-in-hand with the livestock industry. By the early 1900s, livestock herds had decimated native vegetation in the West, and ranchers needed help. Only 16% of public rangeland was in good condition, according to a 1934 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. USDA scientists began studying non-native grasses and forage crops that could grow in the high desert, and universities across the West developed range-management programs to help the livestock industry survive. The research, supported by the federal government, informed many of the laws and policies that still govern the Western rangelands.

A major component of the government’s early range-management programs involved seeding the depleted lands with non-native crested wheatgrass, which ranchers favored for its agreeable taste to livestock and ability to withstand heavy grazing. The federal government also killed sagebrush on several million acres in Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, California, Utah and Wyoming, spraying the shrubs with herbicide and then seeding the ground with crested wheatgrass and turning the silver-green landscape gold. As a result, grazing capacity skyrocketed across the region — by 800% in Elko, Nevada, alone, according to a 1954 USDA report.

While rangeland science has shifted in recent years to become more attuned to ecological needs, the work remains rooted in livestock economics. Oregon State University’s rangeland science extension center in Burns, for example, “helps maintain a robust and sustainable cattle industry in Oregon,” according to its university web page. Both Rosentreter and Kauffman said that it’s difficult to find funding for studies that investigate grazing’s ecological impacts. In 2022, after Kauffman published two studies that found that grazing degraded public land, local cattle industry leaders called for his removal from Oregon State University, he said. “There’s a real pressure, and probably unprecedented pressure at the moment, on state and federally funded scientists to not go against the cattle industry.”

The livestock industry has also funded rangeland science.A June 2025 report by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Idaho’s Rangeland Center found that livestock grazing on federal land in Idaho did not negatively impact sage grouse nesting success. Among the report’s biggest funders were two ranching advocacy groups, the Public Lands Council and Idaho Cattle Association, which provided in-kind donations of trucks, ATVs, camper trailers, laptops and other equipment, according to an email from Courtney Conway, a USGS wildlife biologist and a co-author of the report.

In March 2024, well before the report was published, the Public Lands Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association released a statement urging the BLM to incorporate its findings in its sage grouse management plans, which the agency did, in plans finalized in December. In an emailed statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires wrote that the agency “does not rely solely on any single publication” for habitat management decisions, though he declined to say whether or not pressure from industry groups factored into the BLM’s inclusion of the report.

In an interview on the rural community network RFD-TV, Kaitlynn Glover, an executive director of government affairs for both industry groups, said that the report confirms what ranchers have known for generations: Grazing has made landscapes healthier and sustained sage grouse populations. “But we needed the science to prove it,” she said.

TODAY, MORE THAN 200 MILLION acres — 85% — of Western public lands are grazed by livestock, mainly beef cows. Livestock industry leaders have long argued that ranchers are key to sage grouse conservation, since cows need open land to forage, just like sage grouse do. Prominent Oregon rancher Tom Sharp coined a popular tagline, “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” and some scientists agree. “Generally, we think of livestock grazing as being very compatible with sage grouse conservation,” said Skyler Vold, sage grouse biologist at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Some rangeland scientists and the BLM say that modern grazing practices have improved to the point that they no longer degrade the landscape. “Well-managed livestock grazing is not considered a threat to greater sage-grouse habitat or survival,” Hires, the BLM’s press secretary, wrote in an emailed statement.

But the definition of “well-managed” grazing depends on who you ask. “There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit that focuses on grazing’s ecological impact on public lands.

Land managers and scientists classify grazing levels as light, moderate or heavy, depending on the amount of vegetation that livestock eat each year on a BLM grazing allotment. But this is hard to measure at large scales; some federal allotments can span 250,000 acres or more. To measure plant consumption, the BLM typically conducts “ocular assessments,” Molvar said — basically, eyeballing the landscape. “In science, we call that a wild guess.” (The BLM wrote that the agency “employs multiple data collection and assessment methods” to measure livestock plant consumption. The method used depends on several factors, including “the resources available to collect the information.”)

“There is so little well-managed livestock grazing in the American West, I don’t even know why we’re talking about it.”

The BLM permits cows to eat 50% of native plants annually on the majority of federal allotments and 60% of non-native plants like crested wheatgrass. An oft-cited 1999 paper, which scientists like Rosentreter say is still relevant, concluded that a 50% utilization rate may classify as “moderate,” meaning it maintains landscape conditions, for areas that see more precipitation, like the Southern pine forests of Georgia. But in semi-arid ecosystems like the sagebrush steppe, this level of consumption degrades the land. The study defined moderate grazing in dry areas as being 35% to 45% of the vegetation. To improve rangeland conditions in these environments, cows would have to eat even less — 30% to 35% — of the vegetation, or about 40% less than the BLM currently permits. In the recent University of Idaho study that concluded that grazing did not harm sage grouse — the report ranching interests supported — cows ate on average just 22% of plants, a level that’s considered light grazing and is practiced by few ranchers on public land.

Congress made it easier to ignore grazing’s harm to public lands

Research from Oregon State University’s extension center in Burns has found that targeted grazing can reduce invasive grasses. This kind of grazing, however, requires ranchers to isolate cows in small fenced pastures and move them frequently, a practice common on private land but difficult to execute on large public allotments. “Sometimes the research is pointing to or identifying tools that are, under our current system, almost impossible to implement,” said Mark Salvo, program director for the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a conservation nonprofit.

For grazing to reduce invasive grasses, it has to be carefully managed, said Austin Smith, natural resources director and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs in central Oregon. The tribe leases some of its land to local ranchers in the John Day Valley, allowing cows to eat invasive grasses as they grow in the early spring. “But then you get them off the landscape and with enough time for these other plants to come in and grow,” he said. On BLM lands, he added, “they just hammer the heck out of it.”

Science has found that grazing can both harm and help sage grouse habitat, but “it’s a question of how it’s managed,” said Nada Wolff Culver, the BLM’s former principal deputy director during the Biden administration. But for decades, the BLM has lacked the staffing to adequately manage its grazing allotments. BLM data obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) showed that 56.7 million acres — about 37% — of federal grazing allotments failed to meet BLM land-health standards from 1997 through 2023, primarily because of livestock grazing. In a 2023 federal lawsuit against the BLM, PEER and the Western Watersheds Project alleged that the agency had not conducted environmental reviews for nearly two-thirds of its grazing permits.

“I think it’s a failed system,” said Teeman, the Burns Paiute tribal elder.

COLLIN WILLIAMS STEPPED OUT of his white truck in camouflage rubber boots, surprised by the dry ground. “It’s been just like mud-bogging up here every time because of all the snowmelt,” said Williams, a non-Native wildlife biologist who works for the Burns Paiute Tribe.

It was dawn in April on BLM land east of the small town of Burns, in southeastern Oregon. Water had been so abundant recently that in late March, snowmelt from the Strawberry Mountains inundated the tribe’s reservation north of Burns, flooding and damaging homes. But the above-average snowpack was welcome news for sage grouse. Good water years in the arid high desert bring more wildflowers and insects for grouse and their chicks to eat.

With a clipboard in hand, Williams and his colleague, Matthew Hanneman, the tribe’s wildlife program manager, who is also non-Native, walked quietly to a vantage point where they could tally sage grouse. The first hint of sunrise burned the horizon orange as Williams and Hanneman scanned the area’s several leks with binoculars. About 60 males were performing their signature mating dance. They appeared spherical from afar as they strutted in the near-freezing air, their white and brown feathers prominent against the beige bunchgrasses.

Biologists working for the Burns Paiute Tribe have counted sage grouse in the area since the early 2000s as part of a collaborative effort to track the populations with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The leks are roughly five miles away from a tribally owned property known as Jonesboro, a former ranch where some sage grouse spend their summer. In 2000, the tribe reacquired these 6,385 acres of unceded ancestral lands along with a 1,760-acre property called Logan Valley. Tribal officials have worked to restore both properties for wildlife such as grouse, mule deer and elk, giving tribal members access for hunting and gathering.

“We don’t just consider the management of things in terms of their value to us,” Teeman said, speaking of the Paiute approach to ecosystem stewardship. “The management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood,” she continued, “as opposed to how BLM or any of the other Western-oriented management systems work where everything is a resource.”

“…management is really about how to give everything its due rights and personhood.”

Before the tribe purchased the Jonesboro site, livestock had grazed it for decades. Weeds choked out native vegetation. Federal fire-suppression policies and overgrazing led to an expansion of juniper trees.

Since reacquiring the property, the tribe has worked to undo this colonial legacy in ways that could also be applied to federal lands.

In the early 2000s, the tribe removed some fencing at Jonesboro. Tribal staff, like Williams and Hanneman, have overseen projects to cut junipers to clear space for grouse, which avoid forested areas. They’ve planted sagebrush, yarrow, rabbitbrush and buckwheat. But weed removal has required the most intensive work: To remove cheatgrass and medusahead, the tribe mows, burns, sprays herbicide — and grazes.

The Jonesboro site came with 21,242 acres of BLM allotments as well as 4,154 acres of state grazing allotments overseen by the Oregon Department of State Lands. The tribe subleases these grazing permits to local ranchers for some income, but its priority is not beef production. “Our focus is definitely wildlife and wildlife conservation,” Williams said. Grazing is used to target weeds and clear thatch when native grasses are dormant, but the tribe allows just one-third of the cattle that it could graze under its BLM permit. Only so many acres are good for grazing, Williams said, typically places near streams or springs that are critical habitat for sage grouse and other wildlife. With fewer cows, the native animals have more plants to eat.

The tribe also gives the Jonesboro pastures regular rest from cattle. Cows spend 10 days grazing in small, 40- to 60-acre fenced pastures on tribal land and are then typically removed. On larger, 3,000- to 13,000-acre federal pastures subleased to local ranchers, the tribe requires ranchers remove the animals after one to two months.

These efforts are slowly transforming the property. Photographs taken by tribal biologists from 2007 until 2018 to track restoration progress show a greener landscape. Riparian vegetation is taking over an abandoned road; more bunchgrasses are growing.

In southeastern Idaho, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are also evaluating ways to reduce grazing’s impact. Led by Denny, the tribes’Natural Resources Division is studying 320,000 acres of rangeland on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to reassess the number of cows allowed. Much of the reservation is grazed by cattle, though only a third of the animals are owned by tribal members, some of whom grew up in ranching families. About 20,500 acres of the reservation’s rangelands are off-limits to grazing. The tribes also own another 33,000 acres of conservation land where grazing is prohibited, said Preston Buckskin, the tribes’ land-use director and a tribal member. They have also considered barring cattle from some sage grouse mating sites.

The West is losing 1.3 million acres of sagebrush steppe each year

Buckskin has struggled over the years to find a compromise between traditional tribal values that prioritize conservation and the business of ranching, which keeps some families afloat. Tribal cattlemen have influenced land-management decisions on the reservation for generations. The tribes’ Office of Public Affairs said in a written statement that, while it’s important to not minimize grazing’s impact on sage grouse habitat, “effective conservation outcomes depend on collaboration among producers, land managers, and tribes rather than placing responsibility on any single group.”

As one potential compromise, the tribal land-use department is considering a program that would pay landowners to quit grazing. Non-Native conservation organizations like the Western Watersheds Projecthave pushed a similar approach on federal lands for years. Most recently, in October, Democratic Reps. Adam Smith, Jared Huffman and Eleanor Holmes Norton reintroduced legislation that would allow ranchers to relinquish their grazing privileges in exchange for buyouts by private individuals or groups.

Additionally, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes are working on a land-use plan that would reclassify some areas zoned as “rangelands” on the reservation as “wildlands” instead, ensuring that the land is valued for wildlife and tribal hunting. “Words shape expectations,” Denny said. “‘Rangeland’” implies that the land is for livestock. “It carries a meaning imposed by a different way of thinking,” he said. “I prefer the term ‘sagebrush steppe.’”  

IN THE EARLY 1990S, HART Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southern Oregon was severely overgrazed. When then-manager Barry Reiswig made the controversial decision to prohibit cattle on the property, he was characterized by some locals as the “epitome of evil,” according to Rewilding a Mountain, a 2019 documentary about the project. “We were under a lot of pressure to compromise, to kind of look the other way,” Reiswig said, speaking of grazing’s impact on the refuge, in the film.

But it didn’t take long for a landscape that had been grazed for 120 years to repair itself. In 12 years, aspen increased by 64% and wildflowers multiplied by 68%. In 23 years, bare soil decreased by 90%. Rushes and willows quadrupled, a 2015 study by Forest Service and Oregon State University researchers found.

Today, the refuge is one of the largest ungrazed areas in the Great Basin and one of the largest sage grouse breeding grounds in the West. Female grouse are commonly seen with chicks in tow, scurrying across gravel roads and foraging in wet meadows. “Simply removing cattle from areas may be all that is required to restore many degraded riparian areas in the American West,” the 2015 study concluded.

Grazing’s highly politicized nature makes it difficult for scientists and state and federal agency officials to even broach the subject, Denny said. “We’ve got to get uncomfortable talking about the truth.” Tribes, he said, can lead the conversation, as well as show the way. “We can use our homelands as, like, ‘This is the model for how you navigate this.’”

But progress ultimately relies on the federal government’s willingness to reform its policies, as a spring day on Burns Paiute land demonstrated.

Just north of the headwaters of the Malheur River, in a forest clearing below the snowy Strawberry Mountains, a few sage grouse have found an unexpected summer home in a portion of Logan Valley that once again belongs to the tribe. The birds’ preferred species of sage, mountain big sage, grows on a gentle slope that rises above a nearby creek. Last year, by mid-May, bluebells and yellow groundsels — wildflowers favored by grouse — were starting to bloom in the mountain meadow.

It’s a mystery where the grouse come from, Hanneman said. The open valley is surrounded by lodgepole and ponderosa pines. “It’s pretty dangerous for a sage grouse to be moving through a forest with Cooper’s hawks and goshawks and everything else.” The closest known lek is 10 miles away.

To understand the birds’ movements, the tribe received a grant from the Oregon Wildlife Foundation to purchase transmitters to place on grouse this summer. The data will help tribal biologists understand where the birds travel, informing efforts to conserve their migration corridor. Since cultural burning was prohibited by the federal government more than a century ago, trees have encroached on the area. The tribe has hand-cut 60 acres of pines to keep the sagebrush open for grouse and other wildlife. They also hope to return fire to the meadows.

Most of the 1,760-acre Logan Valley property has been ungrazed since the tribe reacquired it in 2000. Officials permit cattle only on a 300-acre meadow to control a non-native grass that settlers introduced as a source of hay and forage for cows.

Where horses roam, sage grouse struggle

But the tribe’s propertyborders federal land: It forms a “Y” shape, following creeks that merge to form the Malheur River, and the Forest Service, which owns the land in between the water, allows cows to graze from June to October.

Trespassing cattle have been an issue for years. The fencing is old, and cows get through. The tribe puts up a temporary fence at the end of May to keep the cattle off its land once the animals return to the neighboring federal property in June.

On a site visit in mid-May, Hanneman drove a dirt road that cuts through the property. He slowed down. “I did not know they put cattle out already,” he said. A dozen black cows stared at him.

It was two weeks early, and the temporary fence had yet to be erected. Despite the tribe’s best efforts, cows had gotten in.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The bird and the herd.”

The post What’s needed to protect sage grouse? Less grazing. appeared first on High Country News.

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. We will be taking the next edition off as we head into Christmas. Subscribe to stay in touch with us during the New Year.

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Compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, a greater share of the rural population lives in states with the most restrictive abortion legislation, according to my analysis of data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that focuses on reproductive rights. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, it became harder for women to access reproductive care, but the burden often disproportionately hurt rural women.

About 46% of nonmetropolitan, or rural, Americans live in states with either ‘most restrictive’ or ‘very restrictive’ abortion legislation, representing 21.3 million people. Approximately 35% of metro Americans live in these states, representing roughly 99.1 million people. 

State-level abortion legislation is complex; it’s rarely as simple as an outright ban or permit. Abortion policies can include stipulations like waiting periods, ultrasound requirements, gestational duration bans, insurance coverage bans, telehealth bans, and more. To deal with some of this complexity, the Guttmacher dataset groups states into one of seven categories that broadly captures the state’s access to abortion: 

• Most Restrictive
• Very Restrictive
• Restrictive
• Some restrictions/protections
• Protective
• Very Protective
• Most Protective

Click here for the interactive map.

Seventeen states make up the ‘Most Restrictive’ category, and 13 of those states have enacted full bans with few exceptions. Those states include Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. The rural population in those states equals about 15.8 million people. 

Rurality Exacerbates Access Challenges

In the Post-Roe landscape, pre-existing rural challenges are exacerbated by restrictive abortion legislation, a change that has led to increased maternal mortality, particularly for women of color. The new state of abortion in America means people often have to travel much further to get the care they need, often out of state.

An ABC special that featured women who had to travel for abortions highlighted the story of Idaho resident Jennifer Adkins, who was excited when she found out she was pregnant with her first baby. But a 12-week ultrasound showed that continuing her pregnancy would put her life in danger. With financial help from family and friends, Adkins had to travel to the nearest clinic in Oregon to receive the care she needed. 

My previous analysis of abortion data showed that rural travel to abortion clinics increased from 103 miles on average in 2021 to 159 miles on average after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But travel distance varies by state, with women in parts of rural South Texas having to travel up to almost 800 miles to receive care. 

In rural Louisiana, where all the bordering states have also issued abortion bans, the distance to a clinic has increased by almost 400 miles since Roe was overturned. The average rural Louisianan is about 492 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic. The data for that analysis came from the Myers Abortion Facility Database.

In 2024, approximately 12,000 Texans traveled to New Mexico to receive an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute data. Nearly 7,000 Texans traveled to Kansas, and another 4,000 traveled to Colorado. Texas enacted a near total ban on abortions in July of 2022.
In Idaho, which enacted an abortion ban in August of 2022, 440 people travel to Washington and 140 travel to Oregon for abortions in 2024. (Visit the Guttmacher’s interactive map of abortion travel by state to explore the topic in more detail.)

Abortion and Rural Voters: More Complex Than You Might Think

Every time I write something about how rural people suffer from GOP policies, I get comments and emails from readers saying some version of, “They voted for this.” I take issue with this response for many reasons. It’s unkind, and it erases the thousands of rural voters who don’t support these policies. While some people are going to say you get what you deserve, here’s another way to look at it.

In a previous analysis of voting data from the nine states that had abortion on a ballot measure in 2024, I found that support for Trump didn’t always line up with support for abortion restriction. In 2024, approximately 73% of rural voters supported Trump, but only 61% voted to restrict abortion access. 

While 61% is still a majority vote, the 12-point gap between support for Trump and support for abortion restriction demonstrates that abortion access is a complicated issue for many Americans across the geographic spectrum. This data shows a rural voting base that is willing to split with the broader Republican platform on key issues. 

“All voters are complex,” said Nicholas Jacobs, rural sociologist. “People voted for [Trump], even if they wanted more access to reproductive care or were disappointed that a national standard was lifted by the courts.” 

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The post The Stats on Abortion Access in Rural America appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Every spring, investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where Warren Buffett holds court. Insiders call it Woodstock for Capitalists, and CNBC covers it with the fervor of Fox Sports on Super Bowl Sunday. 

Last year’s meeting held particular weight. Investors were watching closely to see if Buffett, the company’s 93-year-old CEO, would name Greg Abel, Berkshire’s vice chairman, as his successor, and how the company would weather the billions in wildfire lawsuits threatening its energy utilities. Buffett dodged the succession question, but the meeting revealed something just as consequential: the company’s strategy to avoid wildfire liability. 

Two months earlier, the Utah legislature had passed a law allowing utilities to charge their own customers to build a fund for future fire damages. The state also has a 2020 law on the books that capped the amount fire victims could sue utilities for damages. Combined, the two laws mean that if homes in Utah burn down due to a power company’s faulty electrical line, the financial damages residents can seek are limited — and they may already have been paying into the fund that covers them. For utilities, the result is reduced costs.

At the shareholder meeting, Abel singled out Utah as “the gold standard” of utility protection — a model he urged other states to adopt. “As we go forward,” he told the crowd, “we need both legislative and regulatory reform.”

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, or BHE, Buffett’s $100 billion energy arm, operates a vast power grid that stretches across the West. BHE subsidiaries such as Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp are responsible for maintaining more than 17,000 miles of transmission lines that serve roughly 10 million customers across 10 states. In recent years, BHE has been slapped with lawsuits in Oregon worth nearly $10 billion for fires caused by its faulty equipment. For BHE, the Utah laws were a significant win, shielding the company from that kind of liability in at least one state. Across the West, BHE-owned utilities and their lobbyists are now trying to replicate that success, securing laws that both cap wildfire damages and shift costs onto customers. 

“It’s infuriating to me that they are creating these situations,” said Stephanie Chase, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute and a former consumer advocate in the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “They’re not doing a good job at maintaining their power lines. Then when they start fires, they don’t want to pay for them.”

BHE’s infrastructure is aging, and maintaining it is expensive. Climate-proofing measures, like running power lines underground, can easily cost more than $1 million per mile, according to the Institute for Energy Research, and would put the cost of sending all BHE-owned equipment into the ground at well over $17 billion. Other resilience measures, such as trimming branches that grow over power lines and inspecting equipment in rural areas, are also expensive. 

“Vegetation management is not one of the things that they receive a return on investment,” said Chase. State regulatory agencies typically set utility prices using a formula known as the rate base, which excludes routine maintenance like vegetation. By contrast, utilities earn a return when investing in new infrastructure, Chase added. “Utility companies have a much bigger incentive because they’re receiving a return on equity on any funds that they put into capital expenditures: building a new plant, building construction, building new lines,” she said. BHE did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Earlier this summer, the Wyoming legislature passed a law that limits damages that can be awarded to victims of a utility-caused fire, so long as the company followed its own wildfire plan. In July, Idaho also enacted a similar law, shielding utilities from negligence if they prove they adhered to their wildfire plan. According to state regulatory filings, at least one representative for Rocky Mountain Power and other utilities operating in the state lobbied lawmakers in March and April to get the law passed.

One state senator who voted against Idaho’s law, Bruce Skaug, told Grist that it leaves little regard for residents who may have legitimate grievances. “We don’t want to bankrupt utilities,” Skaug said. “At the same time, if they burn down your house, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the claim through a jury trial.” Yet, the law could do just that, he said. Skaug hopes to tweak the law to better protect residents during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

PacifiCorp is also running the same playbook in Washington. The company has petitioned state regulators to start tracking the cost of insurance increases and wildfire liability, which Chase calls a “stepping stone to getting those costs included in customer rates.” From there, utilities could begin to press regulators or legislators for permission to pass those costs on to customers.

In Utah, Rocky Mountain Power’s lobbyists benefited from a friendly legislature. Carl Albrecht, a co-sponsor of the two bills, spent decades working for utilities — including 23 years as CEO of a small electric cooperative — and takes several thousand dollars in political contributions from the energy utility industry and Berkshire Hathaway each year, according to campaign finance disclosures. Perhaps most crucially, Utah hasn’t had any major wildfires in recent memory. 

That’s not the case in Oregon. In September 2020, fires enveloped hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, burning down 4,000 homes — including a state senator’s — and killing 11 people. In the aftermath, PacifiCorp became the state’s arch-villain — and a chance at the perks it won in other states vanished.

Soon the public learned that at least some of the half-dozen fires burning across Oregon that Labor Day stemmed from downed power lines owned by PacifiCorp. A subsequent investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an agency that oversees energy markets and transmission,  found that the distance between vegetation and power lines did not meet safety standards and that some of these violations were so severe that “at least 45 percent of PacifiCorp’s BES lines” should not have had any power running through them at all. 

Public outcry turned into class action lawsuits against PacifiCorp, which turned into a costly lesson for BHE. Since 2020, juries have awarded more than $300 million to several dozen plaintiffs. Yet the fate of thousands of other claimants remains unresolved as the lawsuits drag out in court. In the end, the company may be on the hook for around $8 billion more in potential damages. 

But the lawsuits may not bring much relief to the victims. 

“Warren Buffett is not just going to dump billions in to settle,” said Bob Jenks, executive director of Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. More likely than meeting the claimants’ demands, Jenks predicted that “the company will go into bankruptcy.” 

Despite its pariah status in Oregon, PacifiCorp has been trying to secure the same protections that it has in Utah. Earlier this year, when state representatives introduced utility-friendly bills in the Oregon legislature, they were dead on arrival. “I didn’t expect the degree of anger at PacifiCorp that’s out there,” Jenks said. “I understand. Your house burns down, and PacifiCorp is playing hardball and doing everything they can to prevent liability.” 

The notion of offering some financial support to utilities in the form of ratepayer funds isn’t inherently problematic, experts acknowledge. For example, utilities in California rely on wildfire funds to pay for damages caused by their fires. As in Utah and other states, ratepayers contribute to the pot. But unlike other states, a government entity called the California Earthquake Authority — and not the utilities — oversees the distribution of that fund when it’s needed. After a tree felled a PG&E power line in 2021 and sent the Dixie Fire burning across Northern California, the fund has provided $445 million in support to the utility.  As a result of the program, utilities like PG&E can avoid bankruptcy, but aren’t allowed to pass on the costs directly to their own customers.

So far, catastrophic fires haven’t hit states where PacifiCorp has won liability caps since they’ve taken effect. But with the track record of BHE subsidiaries and rising temperatures drying out Western forests, experts believe that it’s only a matter of time. 

“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who pays for wildfire damage? In the West, utilities are shifting the risk to customers on Sep 19, 2025.

Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. 

Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.

A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them. 

This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state. 

Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics. 

Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish. 

As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies. 

Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears. 

Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock. 

Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy. 

Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return. 

And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West. 

Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system. 

Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production. 

The grocery giants

The illusion of competition

Farmers markets — a bright spot in the grocery landscape

Get big or get out: Consolidation in agricultural production

The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.

Visit a dairy farm anywhere in the country and odds are decent you’ll overhear conversations in Spanish.

Like other farmers in the United States, dairy farmers rely on immigrant laborers from Mexico or Central America, many of them without authorization to work here. Immigrant labor is vital in getting milk to market, whether it’s moving cows through milking machines, taking care of chores that milking robots still can’t do or trucking milk across the country.

That’s especially the case on larger dairies with hundreds or thousands of cows. According to Farm Action, only 2.5% of dairies (comprising a few hundred dairies with more than 2,500 cows) produce nearly 45% of American raw milk.

“We’re at a point today where, if you go on large dairy farms—and when I say large, I mean anything that’s, let’s say 500 cows and higher—[there’s a] very strong likelihood that most of the milkers are Hispanic, and probably some of the shop or outside crew,” says Richard Stup, director of agricultural workforce development at Cornell University. In the Northeast and Midwest, he estimates immigrants make up about 50-60% of dairy workers, while in the Southwest and West it is close to 80%.

Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, estimates that about 90% of workers on Idaho dairy farms come from other countries.

That has left many farmers deeply uneasy at the aggressive stance on immigration taken by the Trump administration, which has made immigration enforcement central to its message and policy.

There are signs Trump may be ramping up raids on dairy workers. In late March, ICE reportedly picked up four adults and three children at a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, New York. The agency said at the time that it had also begun conducting “enhanced targeted operations in parts of New York,” picking up any unauthorized workers they find along the way. On April 21, ICE conducted what Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based advocacy group, called the largest single immigration enforcement action against farmworkers in Vermont in recent history when it detained eight workers at a dairy farm in Berkshire.

Why the issue is so acute for dairies

Nationally, estimates vary on how many workers on dairy farms lack authorization to work in the country—although they likely have papers, genuine or not, to present to their employers—but there’s broad agreement that it’s a significant amount.

“That number is all over the place, and no one really knows,” says Stup, adding that it also varies quite a bit from farm to farm. Some farmers are very assertive about making sure authorization paperwork is genuine, while others don’t look too closely. A decade-old study from Texas A&M, still cited by some industry groups, found that immigrants make up 51% of all dairy workers, while dairies that employ immigrant labor produce 79% of the U.S. milk supply.

Why not hire locals to work on dairy farms? Farmers would love to, but as in other industries, they say the labor pool simply isn’t there.

That’s not because of low wages, says Jaime Castaneda, executive vice president of policy development and strategy for the National Milk Producers Federation. In fact, dairy is very competitive with other agricultural sectors and may even offer benefits, he says. But the work, while rewarding, is demanding and often starts in the wee hours of the morning, and locals who do sign up for it don’t last.

“We’re very lucky to have these foreign workers that, actually, not only they are willing to work with animals, but they are very good at it,” he says.

Numbers back up Castaneda’s assertions. A 2013 study done by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Center for Global Development, a bipartisan coalition supporting immigration reform, analyzed data from The North Carolina Growers Association. The association pools resources to bring in labor via the H-2A visa system, which allows migrants to come in temporarily for seasonal work. To be part of the H-2A system requires that employers demonstrate an effort to recruit domestic workers first, so the study analyzed how successful the growers association had been at recruiting a domestic workforce.

It has gone very poorly.

In 2011, for example, the association offered around 6,500 jobs. They got only 268 domestic applicants and hired 245 of those. But only 163 actually arrived for their first day, and more than half had quit after a month. The number who stuck it out for the entire season? Seven.

Naerebout reported hearing similar, and even starker numbers out West. “It’s a job that the domestic workforce hasn’t sought out for decades.”

“It’s so hard,” Wisconsin dairy farmer Tina Hinchley says of her occupation. “It’s a grueling, grueling lifestyle.”

Farm labor faces a devastating blend of forces, according to Brian Reisinger, who grew up on a small Wisconsin dairy farm and later researched the history of farm economics for his book, Land Rich and Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.

Reisinger says that many young people would love to stay and work on the farm, but the economic outlook is bleak, and they don’t see much of a future in it. “I see kids like … my eldest nephew, who would rather be doing nothing [other] than being on a tractor working with his grandpa. But the problem is that kids in 4H and FFA [Future Farmers of America], they don’t have any guidance counselors telling them to go into farming.”

The fact is there are not enough workers in the rural labor market, as the Baby Boom generation retires and fewer young people come behind to take their place.

“There’s not a lot of retired farmers that are willing to come and help on the farms anymore,” Hinchley says. “We have two older men that help us, but they’re in their 70s; they’re aging out.”

On her family’s farm in Dane County, Wisconsin, they only have one migrant worker to help out as they milk about 240 cows and give farm tours to educate people about the dairy industry. Many other farms rely on migrants to fill roles that used to be filled by high school and college students in the neighborhood, she says.

Idaho has seen some influx in population, but many of these are retirees from the West Coast, according to Naerebout. They’re definitely not seeking out jobs on dairy farms.

Robotic milking machines and other automation technology are appealing to an industry short on help. But, as of now, the technology has its limits, especially for larger operations, says David Anderson, a professor at Texas A&M who helped author the prominent 2015 study on the dairy labor force.

“That technology isn’t perfected yet,” Naerebout says in agreement. He knows of operations, tired of the ongoing maintenance costs and issues with reliability, that have actually fired their robots and replaced them with more reliable humans. “It’s a bit of a mixed bag, where you have some robotics, but you still have a significant reliance on human labor.”

When it comes to hiring authorized migrant labor, the H-2A visa doesn’t serve dairy farmers well. It’s short-term, which is fine for farmers who need people to pick their crops for a few weeks. But dairy farms run full-time, year-round.

Dairies also value experienced workers who stick around and learn the business intimately, which is not the H-2A scenario.

“What we were able to document is that the higher your rate of labor turnover, the worse outcomes you had for overall herd health,” Anderson says. “Your milk production per cow was lower … there’s a value to having employees who have been there a long time.”

Workforce issues are only one headache keeping dairy farmers up at night, including the fact that most farmers are struggling to stay afloat financially. 

Milk markets, as they are set up, are notoriously inflexible.

“No farmer controls what they sell their product for,” Naerebout says. “We’re price takers, and so it’s not like we can just say, OK, we’re going to increase our hourly wage by five bucks an hour, and then we’re going to increase what we sell our milk for to compensate ourselves for that increased labor cost. That’s not how our markets work.”

What to do about it

Even though the political pot is red hot and boiling over, the dairy industry has a strong incentive to seek immigration reform as farmers of various political stripes can find agreement on some policies.

The Idaho Dairy Association wants to see expanded legal pathways for existing immigrant workers and their families, and then some kind of multiple-year visa, Naerebout says. They also want to see the conversation go beyond the “Enforcement only” approach that seems to predominate now.

“What we need is stable workers, and what we would like to see is that they have the opportunity to stay for the entire year,” with the option to return after that, says Castaneda at the National Milk Producers Federation. Congress has shown no eagerness for reform for a long time, he says, so modest reforms like this might be the best way to start.

Pennsylvania farmer Rob Barley, whose family runs multiple operations, including a large dairy with more than 1,000 cows, is among those calling for common sense reform. He thinks that viewing the issue as a choice between two extremes—either those who want to keep everyone out or those who want to let everyone in—has caused problems. He wants a strong border, but also a system that allows people to come in who can be a productive part of society.

“There should be a way to do this that is reasonable,” he says.

Farmers don’t always see eye to eye politically. Hinchley, who serves as vice president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union, agrees that a long-term visa is needed. She’s also a passionate immigrant advocate who denounces the Trump administration’s approach.

“We need to welcome these people. They’re the ones that are saving our industry,” she says, noting that Wisconsin couldn’t call itself “America’s Dairyland” without immigrant workers. They not only work in milking parlors, but cheese factories: “They’re everywhere,” she says. “They’re driven financially. There’s a motive that they want to better their life.”

She finds it difficult to understand dairy farmers who support Trump’s policies and sympathizes with the fear immigrants feel as they wait to see if their lives will be upended. “I don’t know what we’d do without them, and I think they need to be respected.” 

Reisinger blames Congress for failing to do its job, saying it’s not farmers who have put us in this position. “The only reason we’re stuck … is because Congress hasn’t rolled up its sleeves and actually addressed the issue for decades.”

Intermittent efforts to do that haven’t gone far. A 2024 effort by a bipartisan group of senators tanked in spectacular fashion, getting no help from then-candidate Donald Trump, who savaged the bill.

The reality on the ground

A number of sources who spoke for this story chose their words carefully when speaking about immigration policy, rarely mentioning the current president by name. Quite a few others who were reached out to did not respond to requests for comment.

Now that Trump is back in power, and promising to deport both unauthorized and, in some cases, legal immigrants, farmers have been wondering what’s ahead for them. Meanwhile, what the administration frames as a focus on crime is laying the groundwork for larger scale deportation efforts. In April, the Supreme Court sided with Trump in allowing the administration to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to continue deporting individuals, as long as detainees are given due process. The law had been invoked only three times in U.S. history, during wartime, and is now at the center of a April 20 emergency injunction by the Supreme Court to temporarily block the deportation of 137 migrants the administration claims are part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Despite the legal firestorm currently happening over immigration, farmers and industry insiders described a mostly quiet dairy farm scene on the enforcement front.

Barley, who also serves as the chairman of the Pennsylvania Milk Board, says he had not heard of enforcement actions taking place, although there is talk going around and a sense of heightened concern among employees.

“There’s definitely an uneasiness and anxiousness amongst the workforce on what might happen in the future,” Naerebout says.

He tells Barn Raiser in an email that Idaho agriculture has not seen any worksite raids under the new administration, although there has been some targeted enforcement directed at criminals. People picked up in those operations who don’t have a criminal record have then been released, he says.

“There’s been quiet conversations on the side between industry people and the administration, and [telling] them, ‘Look, you can’t. If you do this enforcement widespread and start picking up half the workforce, it’s going to put people out of business and really hurt the industry,’ ” Stup says.

Rumors have been flying on social media. Stup says one of these was sparked by a state vehicle spotted on a farm that had nothing to do with ICE. But, as he has talked with dairy farmers around New York and colleagues in other states, a picture has emerged of ICE making some farm visits. “In those farm visits, they have been quite consistent, though, that they are looking for individuals with some kind of a criminal background,” he says.

That doesn’t mean the situation will stay that way. “It could be a new memo tomorrow, and that could all change on a dime,” Stup says.

It’s commonly pointed out that ICE doesn’t have the staffing, as of now, to actually carry out mass deportations as described by Trump during his campaign. Still, targeted enforcement could cause a lot of pain. If the administration were to go after blue states like New York, and concentrate in a dairy-heavy county, that could result in disastrous consequences locally, Stup says, with cows not being fed or people trying to sell off herds. The more remote and rural the area, the worse this impact could be, with farmers not having many neighbors to turn to for emergency help to get them through.

Among the traits of the Trump administration so far, predictability isn’t one. But even if he follows the trend of the past 30 years and lets things go along largely as usual, farmers will continue to be caught in the middle on immigration for some time to come.

The post Trump Deportations Have Dairy Farmers on Edge appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Both the Wyoming and Idaho Freedom Caucuses joined the D.C.-based national network of far-right political blocs two years ago, but they’ve since traveled two very different roads.

After a successful August primary, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus is poised to take control of the state House in November. Meanwhile, its Idaho counterpart has splintered, leaving original members fighting with a new collection of lawmakers being recruited by the State Freedom Caucus Network.

The Gem State schism has grown so petty that the two factions are squabbling over who owns the rights to the Idaho Freedom Caucus logo.

“If all this sounds improbable, well, it isn’t,” Randy Stapilus, who covers Idaho politics, wrote in an Idaho State Journal op-ed. “Given the nature of what underlies these groups, it’s probably better seen as inevitable. The other states with Freedom Caucuses are on notice.”

Still, of the dozen network members, the Idaho Freedom Caucus is the only one that has thus far imploded. Is it an outlier, or a warning sign to extremists who have banded together to take over their respective statehouses?

The answer will help determine if Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus can successfully make the transition from a group of obstructionists to a functional governing body that’s able to pass its own agenda. 

A loose-knit Wyoming Freedom Caucus formed in 2016 with roughly a half-dozen members, modeled after the GOP’s U.S. House Freedom Caucus that started a year earlier. There was little movement in its ranks until about 20 Republican incumbents and candidates met in Story in September 2020 to vent their frustration over their inability to ban abortion and eliminate gun regulations. They shared fundamental beliefs in smaller government, minimal taxes and a bare-bones state budget.

In 2021, the Freedom Caucus had about 18 members who could reliably be counted on to vote as a bloc. After the 2022 election, the caucus grew to about 26.

It was six votes short of the majority at the time, but its new-found strength was a wake-up call to “traditional” conservatives who formed the Wyoming Caucus in response. 

Then a dramatic shift in legislative power occurred this year. Thanks to the requirement that bills must have two-thirds support to be introduced in the budget session, on opening day the Freedom Caucus killed 13 committee-passed measures that would have normally sailed through the process. 

The war between the two groups began in earnest, and the battleground was the Republican primary election in August. The Freedom Caucus had a net gain of three House seats and is strongly positioned to obtain a clear majority in November. 

The Freedom Caucuses in Wyoming and Idaho joined the State Freedom Caucus Network in 2022. Leaders made separate trips to D.C. to learn more about the network’s tactics, which emphasized an us-versus-them divide between members of the populist state caucuses flying under its banner and the demonized “RINOs” — Republicans in name only.

The Wyoming group hasn’t accomplished everything on the national network’s long list of priorities, including a ban on teaching “critical race theory.” But far-right lawmakers successfully sponsored abortion bans currently on hold pending court action, as well as anti-transgender bills and the diversion of state public-school funds to private and religious schools.

By contrast, the short history of the Idaho Freedom Caucus reads like the playbook for a team bent on self-destruction. The Idaho caucus is much smaller than Wyoming’s, which allows anyone to join. According to Stapilus, the 12 Freedom Caucus members in Idaho had to be vetted and invited, but they couldn’t agree on their mission, and several didn’t like their organization’s subservient relationship with the network. 

A secretly taped recording of a fractious meeting was leaked to the public last May. Squaring off were the Idaho state director for the State Freedom Caucus Network and a caucus co-chair who backed moderate positions of the speaker of the House. Both sides were angry and couldn’t wait to break away from each other. 

In a newsletter earlier this month, the Idaho Freedom Caucus outlined its beef with the national network and the director, who was described as “more in line with the [network] than Caucus members, making the ongoing situation untenable.” The caucus claimed the network ordered it “to be dissolved and re-formed on the conditions that it alter its self-governing structure, rewrite its bylaws, and adhere to a rigid D.C.-driven agenda.”

Sounds like a whole lot of freedom going on, doesn’t it?

The national caucus network cut off financial and administrative support, and the former director was tasked with forming a competing state Freedom Caucus, according to the Idaho Freedom Caucus newsletter. 

But Stapilus wrote that the feisty original group, now down to seven members after resignations and primary losses, isn’t going away. The caucus declared it will “follow its own path,” and hired a former state senator as the new director.

Like Wyoming, Idaho’s far-right made significant gains by defeating more moderate opponents in the GOP primary. But it’s uncertain whether those wins will translate into a chance to control the Idaho House, or if the feud will continue to sap the group’s power.

Wyoming’s Freedom Caucus, to my knowledge, hasn’t been handicapped by such disputes. The members’ common bond seems to be the need to control the House, support senators who align with Freedom Caucus positions and elect more of their own to state offices, including the governorship. Chuck Gray, a member of the caucus when he was in the House, was elected secretary of state in 2022.

I don’t see a backlash here against the network’s leadership, largely because its campaign strategy has helped elect new Freedom Caucus members. The bare-knuckled tactics the network encourages, including mailers that opponents charge lied about their voting records, were key to several victories. 

“I took 22 hit pieces in the mail and 10 text messages against me, and that negativity works,” Rep. Dan Zwonitzer of Cheyenne, a Wyoming Caucus member who lost his bid for an 11th term, told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. He added it’s “the new normal, and that’s what bothers me.”

There have always been negative campaigns, but the 2024 Republican primary sunk to a new low in many districts. As its members try to build coalitions to help them govern, the Freedom Caucus should remember how the ex-Idaho director framed its work before the rebellion: “We can save the nation one state at a time, and the State Freedom Caucus has the formula.”

National groups have resources to help, but sometimes the reward isn’t worth the pain of complying to unbending rules, especially ones at odds with legislators’ views of their own state’s priorities.

I wonder why more Republicans aren’t worried about the clash between those who want to rigidly adhere to the extreme-right platform of the Wyoming Republican Party and the traditional conservative wing. It’s the perfect recipe to tear a political party apart.

An example of what can happen when a state caucus refuses to follow an unwanted national “formula” is only one state to our west. The Wyoming Freedom Caucus should take that lesson to heart, especially since it’s following orders from the same master that led to the implosion in Idaho.

The post Can Wyoming’s populist Freedom Caucus learn from the Idaho FC’s implosion? appeared first on WyoFile .

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”The aquifer in Idaho’s Teton Valley has been diminishing for years. One local group is hoping to change its trajectory.” title=”The aquifer in Idaho’s Teton Valley has been diminishing for years. One local group is hoping to change its trajectory.” />In Teton Valley,
Idaho, where water is as precious as its native trout, irrigators and
environmental groups have teamed up to recharge the area’s diminishing aquifer.
In the process, they want to do something novel: find someone to pay farmers for
the effort.

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Advocates express relief but push for greater oversight of facilities statewide By Wilson Criscione /…

The post Idaho youth treatment home exposed in InvestigateWest investigation closes down first appeared on InvestigateWest.

The post Idaho youth treatment home exposed in InvestigateWest investigation closes down appeared first on InvestigateWest.