Grazing Away Wildfire Risk? Congress Considers Cattle for Wildfire Suppression

More than 1,000 cows and sheep died when the 2024 Remington Fire scorched almost 200,000 acres in south-central Montana. If proposed federal grazing policies become law, those livestock could be considered firefighters instead of fire victims.

Under federal proposals floated by both Congress and cabinet agencies this spring, livestock could become major players in wildfire suppression efforts by literally eating the fuel before it burns. However, current research indicates the results could vary widely depending on what landscape and climate are involved. And critics say the revised policies would spread invasive species, hurt endangered ones and do nothing to stop wildfires. 

Both Republicans and Democrats have pitched grazing-as-firefighting bills in the current congressional cycle, and the Trump administration has released new agency grazing policies listing fire suppression as a justification. But the debate rarely gets at a central question: Are firefighters asking for ranchers’ help to reduce grass fires, or are ranchers asking for more grass by claiming that grazing could be a wildfire suppression tool? At stake are millions of acres of public grassland and forest that currently have little or no livestock accessibility.

“From a livestock producer standpoint, we’ve been having these conversations for many years about bringing cattle grazing into the toolbox for fire mitigation and management,” said Raylee Honeycutt, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association. “It can reduce wildfire ignition and help with post-fire recovery. We think it’s a cost-effective, non-intrusive way to reduce wildfire risk.”

Expanded grazing has drawn heavy fire from conservation organizations.

“It is insane to think you can overgraze the land with cattle and think you can do anything beneficial for fire risk,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project, an environmental advocacy organization. “That has never occurred in the past, and I don’t know why you would expect that to happen in the future.”

Section 8418 of the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2026 would allow grazing on vacant allotments during wildfire and other displacements, develop a strategy for “targeted grazing to reduce hazardous fuels,” use grazing for post-fire recovery, and encourage federal land managers to make vacant grazing allotments available to ranchers as a wildfire mitigation tool. The 800-page bill passed the House of Representatives on April 30, and could clear the Senate by late May or early June.

The Public Lands Council, which promotes agricultural industry initiatives, makes its case in a new website: grazingpreventswildfires.org. It claims ranchers manage about 250 million acres of private and public land, “which are all at risk of wildfire.” Livestock grazing, PLC maintains, “reduces the risk of wildfire ignition by up to 50 percent.”

The website did not provide a source for that claim, and had some other contradictory information. One federal policy that PLC cited actually recommends prohibiting livestock grazing for two years after a wildfire to improve grassland recovery. PLC did not return a Mountain Journal request for comment on the website claims.

Molvar acknowledged some research showing grazing within a few hundred yards of homes and outbuildings can help protect those structures from wildfire. But he pointed to an extensive body of evidence of a “livestock-cheatgrass-fire cycle” driven by overgrazing on public lands.

Western Watersheds has also joined a chorus of criticism of BLM Associate Deputy Secretary Karen Budd-Fallen, who oversees the agency’s grazing programs and also has extensive family ranching and livestock interests. As a private attorney, Budd-Fallen represented the Montana Stockgrowers Association among others in challenging American Prairie’s federal grazing leases in north-central Montana for bison use. 

The nonprofit journalism outlet Public Domain has reported Budd-Fallen’s conflict-of-interest problems, including maintaining financial connections to her husband’s ranching and legally representing ranchers who would benefit from her grazing policy decisions. An Interior Department spokesperson told Public Domain that Budd-Fallen “followed all ethical guidelines and recused herself from all matters involving her former clients,” adding that the reporting was an “attempt to smear a successful woman.”

The Center for Biological Diversity has notified the U.S. Department of Agriculture that it plans to sue over President Donald Trump’s new grazing policies, which are separate from the congressional proposals. Andrea Zaccardi, CBD’s carnivore conservation program legal director, told Mountain Journal the administration’s orders to the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management would open up 24 million acres of public land to grazing where livestock had previously been disallowed. Much of that land is critical habitat for federally protected and endangered species like grizzly bears, bull trout and steelhead salmon.

“Ranchers say they need to graze on public lands or the nation’s beef supply will go down,” Zaccardi said. “But most beef is produced in factory farms like every other meat and dairy in the U.S. This is the Trump administration trying to throw the ag industry a bone, without looking at the impacts of public lands or wildlife.”

CBD’s notice of intent to sue gives the government 60 days to respond, which would expire on June 29. Zaccardi said the case follows similar arguments to the successful challenge of Custer Gallatin National Forest grazing permits in the Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone National Park, which the Forest Service lost last September.

Nevertheless, expanded grazing has strong backing from Rocky Mountain congress members. Days before Trump began his second term, Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso introduced the Wildfire Prevention Act. Its primary goals were to push increases in the acres mechanically thinned or prescribed burned on Forest Service and BLM land. It also called for a new strategy to “identify opportunities to use livestock grazing as a wildfire risk reduction tool on federal land.” Barrasso followed that up days later with the RANCH Act, (S.211) which would allow temporary use of vacant grazing allotments during disasters, while extending grazing permits and leases for up to 20 years. Many of his provisions were also copied into the Farm Bill.

“There’s broad agreement that the U.S. Forest Service and BLM have failed to manage our forests in a serious and credible way for many years,” Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris testified before Barrasso’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee last December. Norris said 63 million acres of public land were at “severe risk of catastrophic wildfire,” which grazing would help mitigate.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman and two other Republicans joined 197 Democrats on the losing side of the April 30 Farm Bill vote, which passed with 210 Republicans and 14 Democrats in favor. Hageman said the package had “so much bloat” from special interests that it would hurt ag producers’ ability to feed and fuel the nation. Nevertheless, the Farm Bill did include Hageman’s Grasslands Grazing Act, which would ensure ranchers with federal grazing agreements were treated the same as permittees on other federal lands.

2024’s Remington fire blackened about 196,000 acres in Montana’s Big Horn, Rosebud and Powder River counties. Governor Greg Gianforte said at the time that “over 95 percent of the total acres of all land burned within the described counties are used for agricultural production,” specifically grazing and hay, fencing, stock tanks and water supply lines. The fire also killed more than 1,000 domestic livestock.

A 2017 study published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters noted that the Great Plains was one of the most frequently burned biomes in North America before European settlement. Over the past century, “fire suppression efforts, development, fragmentation, and the conversion of open grasslands to agricultural fields has led to the almost complete eradication of large wildfires.”

However, the study also found the number of grasslands wildfires larger than 1,000 acres in the North American Great Plains have increased from about 33 a year between 1985 and 1994 to more than 117 a year between 2005 and 2014.

University of Montana fire ecologist Phil Higuera told Mountain Journal by email that, in general, grazing is a legitimate way to manage fuels and fire hazards in some ecosystems when carefully planned and monitored. But he cautioned that the practice depends greatly on where and how it is used. Much of the recent research, he said, tracks the use of goats grazing on California scrublands. Those conditions are very different from the grasslands of the Remington Fire in south-central Montana.

“Fuels reduction treatments, regardless of mechanism, exist along a spectrum [of effectiveness],” Higuera told Mountain Journal. “If you have widespread drought and a high wind event, that’s exactly when the role fuel modification plays becomes smaller and smaller. That’s when wildfire behaves more like a hurricane than something we can modify the behavior of. The fuels-reduction work you’ve done no longer matters.”