Grazing Data Unlocks Public Land Stories

A cattle crossing on public lands in Wyoming. Federal grazing data covering thousands of permits can reveal newsworthy investigative findings. Photo: Bureau of Land Management Wyoming via Flickr Creative Commons (United States government work).

Reporter’s Toolbox: Grazing Data Unlocks Public Land Stories

By Joseph A. Davis

Just about anyone can access data on federal grazing permits. But as an environmental journalist, your job may be finding the favoritism behind them.

Almost all federal permits for grazing cattle, sheep and horses on the open range are administered by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management. It keeps records, even though it wants you to keep your nose out of “their” business. Don’t.

The database can be found at what it calls the Rangeland Administration System. The whole grazing system is pretty complicated. But BLM explains it here.

The data is online, searchable and downloadable in both flat file and geospatial forms. You can browse anonymously, but they try to make you sign in.

Grazing as journalistic gold

This stuff can be actual news. BLM this year revised its grazing regulations, making it illegal for environmentalists to lease land purely to conserve it. Ranchers liked that; conservationists didn’t. 

 

This year, BLM kicked bison off

some leases. Ranchers liked

that; conservationists didn’t.

 

This year, it also kicked bison off some leases. Ranchers liked that; conservationists didn’t. A judge stopped it, at least temporarily.

And the independent news desk Public Domain has been reporting that controversial Interior official Karen Budd-Falen has been skirting conflict of interest rules (her family holds interests in the grazing system).

How to use the data smartly

Toolbox thinks the BLM data probably has considerable integrity — if only because it gets a lot of it. But it’s hard to tell. We do expect this of government data these days.

The best use of this data is probably as a tool in investigations. You can start with a leaseholder name or ranching company — and then follow that leaseholder through other connections in various ways. 

What you are looking for, typically, is favoritism. You may remember that grazing rules and fees were at the heart of the armed Bundy standoff between armed ranchers and feds in 2014.

As always, groundtruth everything. Literally, go there. Interview everybody but the cattle.

[Editor’s Note: See more on grazing from tour coverage of the #SEJ2026 conference and from an earlier TipSheet, plus past coverage of public lands in an Issue Backgrounder on the tension with energy needs and a Feature on Native Americans’ push for policy changes.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 35. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.