Small tweaks in USDA programs support working lands and migrations in Wyoming
By Shaleas Harrison
It’s 8 am as the sunlight moves across the foothills of Carter Mountain, the longest mountain in the Absaroka range and east from Yellowstone National Park. Ronee Hogg loads Callie, her gray corgi, into her pick-up truck and we head down the road to inspect some newly built fences on a part of her ranch that is leased for wildlife habitat.
The lease spans miles of rolling hills, ravines, creeks, and native grasses. As we traverse the hillsides, pronghorn sprint to cross the road in front of our truck. We stop to check a wildlife-friendly fence—built with funds from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)—that has a smooth bottom wire for pronghorn to crawl under and a low wire at the top for elk and deer to easily jump. Nearby, small clumps of cows with nursing calves congregate on the green grass still remaining in July. Hogg makes sure that all the nursing cows have calves. Otherwise, she notes, “There’s a good chance that a grizzly got to them.”
Hogg and her two sons operate Hogg’s Black Diamond Cattle Company, which has been in the family for over a hundred years. Like many other properties in the region, the ranch supports more than just the Hoggs’s 250 Angus-cross cattle and small herd of Angus bulls. It also furnishes essential winter habitat for the thousands of deer, elk, and pronghorn that migrate between it and the high country of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem each year.
Hogg’s habitat lease is part of a new program, known as the Migratory Big Game Conservation Partnership, that the USDA launched to better support landowners like her who provide wildlife habitat for migrating big game. What’s unique about the initiative is that rather than creating novel programs, the USDA prioritized existing resources in key areas of big game habitat and tweaked the delivery of programs to work better for private landowners. These focused adjustments to USDA programs have amplified the impact of conservation investments and helped protect migrations on a landscape level.
This attention to wildlife habitat on private lands is driven, in part, by relatively recent advances in documenting wildlife migrations in the West. Over the past decade, GPS technology has helped biologists demonstrate that wildlife migrate across land ownership boundaries and that private lands indeed provide critical habitat to these herds.
It’s no accident that some of the best habitat today is private. It was settled because it holds the elements necessary for life in Wyoming’s harsh climate—water, wetlands, and high-quality vegetation on flat land. It also tends to be lower in elevation with a milder climate. That makes ranches like Hogg’s ideal places for big game in the fall and winter, where they can find optimal seasonal forage and refuge from deep winter snow.
But landowners like Hogg face many challenges keeping their properties intact and economically viable due to development pressures, market conditions, and family succession issues. Supporting wildlife can add to the strain, through damages to crops and fences, diminished grass and hay production, and loss of livestock to carnivores.
Across the country, an estimated 14 million acres of rangeland were lost to development between 1983 and 2017. Between 2017 and 2022, Wyoming lost just over 200,000 acres of farm and ranch land to other uses—some of which was once valuable habitat for wildlife. Without support, the working lands that account for 30% of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will continue to fragment and their important ecosystem services could disappear.
The Big Game Partnership, which began in 2022 when Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack signed a Memorandum of Understanding called the USDA-Wyoming Big Game Conservation Partnership, aims to address this issue. It reorients conservation dollars and incentives to these places, regarding the producer and their working lands as essential to conserving wildlife and migrations.
In the years before the big game partnership’s rollout, USDA leaders did their homework. First, they identified four priority areas that were productive landscapes valuable for wildlife and littered with private working ranches and farms rearing cattle, bison, sheep, and commodity crops. Hogg’s ranch is in the Absaroka Front; the other three areas are the high desert sagebrush steppe of the southern Wind River Range, the tribal lands of Wind River Country to the north of the range, and the grasslands surrounding the Medicine Bow National Forest.
Then, USDA representatives made strategic visits to Wyoming to meet with leaders and landowners to better understand the challenges that producers face to stay operational. “Landowners consistently asked for the ability to enroll in multiple USDA programs and to be paid fairly for feeding wildlife,” says Laura Bell, a facilitator for the East Yellowstone Collaborative. Bell helped convene landowners and agencies in the years leading up to the big game partnership, along with several other organizations including Western Landowners Alliance. (Disclosure: The author is employed by Western Landowners Alliance.)
The USDA heeded landowners’ input. Within the big game priority areas, the USDA increased payment rates for an existing habitat lease program, allowed producers to sign up for multiple conservation-oriented programs on the same land, and released more money for conservation easements. Now, families like the Hoggs, and the wildlife they support, are reaping the benefits.
A habitat lease is an agreement between the landowner and a federal, state, or private entity that provides payment for maintaining wildlife habitat. Within the USDA’s existing programs, the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program, or Grassland CRP, functions most like a habitat lease. But enrollment in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem had been virtually non-existent. To conserve migratory big game habitat, it needed some improvements to make it work better for landowners.
To start, the USDA established a minimum rental rate of $13/acre to more fairly reflect the cost of habitat to landowners. Previously, rates in Wyoming were often as low as $1/acre. The USDA then offered an additional $5/acre payment incentive for counties within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The initiative also made it easier for people like Hogg to enroll by ranking priority area applications higher, which helped them enter the nationally competitive program.
Since she enrolled in the Grassland CRP, Hogg has received two annual payments in exchange for maintaining forage for wildlife and not developing the land or turning it into row crops. She follows a conservation management plan developed with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which stipulates grazing regimes that benefit wildlife. Her lease will run for 15 years.
“We use our habitat lease payment for buying hay,” she says, referring to the payment she receives from the USDA. “We don’t have much hay ground, so we need to buy around 200 tons a year to feed the cattle in the winter. The cost of hay ranges from about $145-285 per ton, so the extra income helps with these types of operating costs.”
Hogg is also able to enroll in NRCS’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) while receiving Grassland CRP payments. EQIP helps landowners cover the cost of conservation practices or expensive infrastructure like wildlife-friendly fences, water developments, weed control, or habitat restoration. For example, replacing an old fence with a wildlife-friendly fence can cost more than $3.80 a square foot, or $95,000 for twenty-five miles of fencing. EQIP helps offset these costs and encourages landowners to integrate conservation measures they may otherwise be unable to afford. Hogg used EQIP to help pay for the wildlife-friendly fences we spent the morning inspecting.
When I ask Hogg about conservation easements—the third prong of the Big Game Partnership—she says she is considering it. A conservation easement is the sale by a property owner of his or her development rights, usually accompanied by other promises which maintain the property’s conservation values. Most working farms and ranches are able to continue their current land use practices after the sale of a conservation easement, so selling a conservation easement can prevent fragmentation of agricultural lands and be a valuable tool for intergenerational succession planning. Although Hogg’s ranch does not have a conservation easement, other ranches in the region do. In the first year of the Big Game Partnership, the USDA dedicated over 10 million dollars in Wyoming for its Agricultural Conservation Easement Program.
Embedded video: Wildlife friendly fences—like those Hogg was able to install with EQIP funding—have a bottom wire high enough for animals to crawl under and a top wire low enough for animals to jump over. (Tanner Warder/Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit)
Beyond the USDA tools, Wyoming Game and Fish has a dedicated Big Game Coordinator to help agencies, NGOs, and other partner groups work together to help landowners access the programs. The USDA also granted the University of Wyoming nearly a million dollars to provide technical and scientific support to the NRCS, Game and Fish, and other partners. With those funds, the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources is evaluating the initiative’s implementation, and Jerod Merkel’s lab is creating science-driven mapping tools to direct conservation practices like wildlife-friendly fences and invasive annual grass treatments.
Regardless of these small but innovative changes, the initiative is not for everyone. For some landowners, the payments for the Grassland CRP are still not enough to justify complying with the management plan. Other landowners don’t have the time to apply and jump through the hurdles required to access the programs, which can take three to five years, for example, for an agricultural conservation easement. These challenges, and many more, may limit the federal government’s capacity to conserve private land on a landscape level. But the USDA has taken a first step and initial results indicate widespread success.
In 2023, the Grassland CRP enrolled 61,149 acres in designated Big Game Priority Areas—a 264 percent increase from the previous two program enrollment periods in 2021 and 2022. With the additional funding for agricultural conservation easements, land trusts supported landowners in forever conserving over 11,830 acres of working lands and big game habitat across the state. The initiative in Wyoming proved so successful in its first year, the USDA expanded it to Idaho and Montana in November 2023. Now, producers in those three states can also benefit from the package of opportunities available through the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program.
Preliminary research indicates that the Big Game Partnership has plenty more room to grow. A recent survey of nearly 800 Wyoming landowners, many of whom live within big game habitat, revealed that 85% of survey participants were unaware of the programs and benefits offered through the Big Game Partnership. Despite this lack of awareness, 55% said they might participate in the initiative if they were eligible. “This shows tremendous need and potential for partners and agencies to get the word out,” says Hilary Byerly Flint, a Senior Research Scientist at the Haub School who is leading a multi-year project to track how landowners are responding to these large-scale public investments in conservation. “The goal of our research is to better understand landowner experiences so that programs can meet landowner needs and achieve conservation goals at the same time,” she says.
Never before has there been such a galvanized approach to supporting working lands and migrations within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, especially one that involved landowners so closely in the development. Bell, of the East Yellowstone Collaborative, says, “We commend the USDA for listening to the landowners. This improved approach to working land conservation has increased partnerships and trust with the very people who steward the land. This little bit goes a long way.”
Shaleas Harrison is the Wyoming Resource Coordinator for the Western Landowners Alliance, which advances the policies and practices that sustain working lands, connected landscapes, and native species.
Header image: Through the USDA Migratory Big Game Initiative, Hogg leases part of her ranch for habitat through the Grassland Conservation Reserve Program and is also able to enroll in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to help fund things like wildlife-friendly fencing. (Shaleas Harrison)
