Proposed Federal Policy Change Could Prohibit Livestock Grazing on Wildlife Refuges

May 29, 2024

By John Hooks

The federal government is in the process of updating its policies regarding management of the National Wildlife Refuge System. Montana ranchers are worried the new rule could prohibit cattle grazing on refuge lands.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service closed public comment on the proposed policy changes earlier this month. With new guidance on everything from mosquito control to land acquisition, the Service says the update will provide needed clarity and consistency to management decisions that have been complicated by climate change and biodiversity loss.

But one proposed change– which would see the service prohibit agricultural uses on refuge lands, except when management goals could not be reached naturally– has the Montana ranching industry worried.

Lesley Robinson is a Vice President of the Montana Stockgrowers Association and a rancher near Dobson. Her family has grazing permits on more than forty thousand acres of the Charles Russell Refuge. She says grazing helps meet refuge management goals and a prohibition would be a significant hit to ranching outfits.

“That would have a huge economic impact for us and everyone else who grazes on wildlife refuges,” Robinson said. “We come from rural areas, and just changes like that could have a big impact on the whole community.”

Presently, ranchers can apply for special-use permits to graze livestock on refuge lands. Those permits are then approved or denied on a case-by-case basis. The proposed update would create a “default position” of prohibiting grazing.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.