Taylor Grazing Act (U.S. 1934)

The taylor grazing act of 1934 authorized the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to establish and regulate grazing districts on vacant, unappropriated, and unreserved public domain lands deemed “chiefly valuable for grazing,” to issue grazing permits for up to 10 years, and to collect grazing fees. Federal regulation of grazing first began on Forest Reserves in the early 1900s, but it took many years for legislation regulating grazing on the remaining public domain lands to pass. Although cattle ranchers were generally in favor of legislation that would bring order and stability to what was essentially an unregulated grazing commons, sheepherders, settlers, and farmers opposed it. In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior battled over which one of them would administer the public rangelands. Legislation was also delayed because the future status of these lands was unclear. On the one hand, since the passage of the first Land Ordinances in the 1780s, Congress had adopted a policy of transferring the public domain lands to private ownership. On the other hand, President Herbert Hoover offered to give the public rangelands back to the states in 1929, but the states declined. Finally, in 1934, the Depression, coupled with an extended drought throughout the West, provided the necessary impetus for the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act.

The purpose of the Taylor Grazing Act was to “stop injury to the public grazing lands…to provide [Page 1708]for their orderly use, improvement and development … [and] to stabilize the livestock industry dependent on the public range.” The Act directed the Secretary to cooperate with “local associations of stockmen” in the administration of grazing districts, a feature that its sponsor, Congressman Edward Thomas Taylor from Colorado, referred to as “democracy on the range” or “home rule on the range.” It also gave “preference” in issuing permits to local residents. A crucial clause, “pending its final disposal,” indicated that Congress was still trying to decide what to do with the remaining public domain and that these arrangements might be temporary.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes established a Grazing Division (which became the Grazing Service in 1939, and the Bureau of Land Management [BLM] in 1946) to guide these procedures and appointed Farrington Carpenter, a Colorado cattleman and attorney, as its first director. The Secretary delegated authority to set up boundaries for grazing allotments, decide who would receive permits, and determine initial stocking rates to grazing advisory boards composed of local ranchers. State advisory boards and the National Advisory Board Council took on more general policy issues.

This structure kept bureaucracy to a minimum and reduced the potential conflict involved in implementing the new program by taking historic use patterns into account, providing relatively secure tenure, and giving local grazing interests real decision-making authority. It has been heavily criticized for effectively instituting private grazing rights on public lands, allowing the BLM to be “captured” by local interests, and allowing range degradation to continue. Although the management structure set up by the Taylor Grazing Act has been significantly altered by subsequent legislation, it should be noted that, in its initial form, it bore a remarkable resemblance to collaborative and communitybased approaches to resource management now being promoted throughout the world and embraced by federal and state agencies in the United States.

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