At the 2023 Cattle Industry Convention, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays caught up with NCBA’s Associate Director for Governmental Affairs, Sigrid Johannes, about the proposed rule by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFW) that designates the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species.
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“On the regulatory side, we did secure a delay to that effective date, so it was scheduled to take effect in late January- we have now succeeded in getting that pushed back to late March- March 27,” Johannes said. “But between now and then we still have a ton of question marks for what people want to do if they want to get enrolled in this system that Fish and Wildlife has set up to review and approve grazing plans.”
Johannes said they still have not been given a good list of those third parties that will be reviewing and signing off on grazing plans.
“One thing that is pretty troubling is that NRCS is still not on that list,” Johannes said. “The day that this final rule came out, we had folks calling us from those states and were on the phone with Fish and Wildlife and with NRCS asking, ‘what can we do to get everybody to the table and make sure NRCS is included in this,’ because that would take the guesswork out of this for a lot of our producers.”
The voluntary efforts that producers have undertaken in these Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances, Johannes said, throughout the Northern DPS (Distinct Population Segment) and in the Southern DPS is the reason that the lesser prairie chicken is still thriving.
“Ninety-six percent of the LPC’s range falls on private lands,” Johannes said. “You quite literally cannot make this work and protect the species if you are not going to have the buy-in of private land owners and ranchers,” Johannes said.
Johannes said the lesser prairie chicken is sensitive to moisture levels, and being in a drought has been hard on the bird species, but the landowners are not the root of the problem.
“While we are working on this on the regulatory side, we also go to court,” Johannes said. “That is an important function that NCBA plays. We have the resources thankfully to be able to take some of these questions to task in the court system when we are left with no other recourse and that is what we have chosen to do here and we are moving forward with litigation in the western district of Texas, in federal court there. We went ahead and filed our notice of intent, which starts a 60 day clock, and then at that point you file your real complaint.”
NCBA will be filing their complaint in that lawsuit after the 60 days, Johannes said, in late March. NCBA has a few key partners in the case worth noting, Johannes said, including the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, Texas Cattle Feeders Association, Kansas Livestock Association, Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and New Mexico Cattle Growers.
“I think it is just a perfect example of why this network, this national presence, matters so much,” Johannes said. “When these big issues come up, not every individual state can go to court. Not every individual state has the bandwidth or the resources to fight every fight that is hitting the cattle industry, but NCBA takes vey seriously these opportunities to shoot down some of these precedent setting decisions- these bad decisions- and that is why we sort of mobilized quicky to file there and we appreciate the support of our partners.”
