Defenders of Wildlife Blog

Tim Male, VP of Conservation Science & Policy

Black-tailed deer graze on a South Dakota prairie (c) Moriah Brocar

I watched Little House on the Prairie as a boy … I might have had a crush on Laura Ingalls.  It was a story of one family on the frontier and their efforts to break the prairie and make a successful life for themselves as farmers in Minnesota.  The fictional characters succeeded … and their non-fictional counterparts in the real American Midwest did too.  Unfortunately, they succeeded a little too well from an environmental perspective.

America’s tallgrass and mixed grass prairies are mostly gone today.  States like Arkansas have less than one percent left.  States like North Dakota have lost 80 percent of their prairie.  Gone are bison and pronghorn antelope from prairies, but the loss of these landscapes has also imperiled many less obvious species that make prairies special – endangered orchids, fritillary butterflies, grasshopper sparrows.

The loss of America’s prairies continues as agricultural technology creates new techniques to plow and irrigate the hilly, rocky or poorer soils or more disaster-prone areas that until recently supported remaining grasslands.  And in the prairie pothole region of North and South Dakota, it’s not just grassland but also wetlands that are being lost.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that up to 1.4 million isolated wetlands in these prairies are at risk of being drained.  Populations of many kinds of ducks will be hit hardest by some of these losses, since this region is the ‘duck factory’ of America.

High crop prices are fueling part of this cycle of destruction, and corn ethanol subsidies help drive those prices.  Adding to the problem are the extremely generous subsidies that the federal government provides to even America’s richest corporate agribusiness to help them buy crop insurance.  Think of your car insurance and imagine that Congress paid Geico to sell you a car insurance policy. They paid 60 percent of your out-of-pocket cost to buy the insurance, and then gave more money (called a subsidy) to Geico in case you had a lot of accidents and they started losing money.  That is how our crop insurance system works, and when subsidies are that generous, economists agree that it starts producing strange outcomes.   For example, since taxpayers are covering more than half the cost of insurance, we take away the risk from plowing up those grasslands and wetlands.  Farmers have no reason not to plow up wetlands or prairie because even if a crop fails to make it to harvest, insurance and taxpayers cover the losses.  The farmer wins either way – the only loser is the prairie and the species that rely on it.

Prairie dogs are another species that make their home in these grasslands.

Last week, two Members of Congress — Reps. Tim Walz (D-Minnesota.) and Kristi Noem (R-South Dakota) — reintroduced legislation to help stop some of the pressure that taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies put on prairie and wetlands.  The Protect our Prairies Act would pull back almost $200 million in insurance subsidies by dramatically lowering the amount the government provides on any acres of native grassland that have been recently plowed. This doesn’t mean that farmers can’t keep farming, just that they won’t have as much of an incentive to plow up prairies to do it.  It’s a great idea that has Defenders’ enthusiastic support and should be passed by Congress.

We are working on additional, bold ways to rein in billions in spending on the other corporate insurance subsidies that drive environmental destruction. For example, we agree with proposals that would prevent millionaires from getting as much subsidy as other farmers.  More importantly, we are working hard to ensure that Congress passes accountability provisions that require farmers have to abide by modest conservation requirements, in exchange for a generous subsidy provided by taxpayers. This is called ‘conservation compliance’ and was successfully included in the Senate-passed Farm Bill in 2012, partly because of our efforts. There are smart ways to maintain a taxpayer-supported safety net for America’s family farmers without doing as much harm to our environment.

A herder and guard dogs protect a flock of sheep in Big Wood River Valley, where coexistence measures are proving effective.

Wildlife and agriculture don’t always mix, but with a little extra effort conflict can be prevented. Progressive farmers and ranchers are coming up with ways to encourage wildlife-friendly agriculture—strategies for safeguarding livestock without resorting to lethal control.

In the scenic Pioneer Mountain region of central Idaho sits a grass-fed lamb operation known as Lava Lake Lamb. The owners, Kathleen and Brian Bean, devote themselves to ranching sustainably, while also improving and restoring the native habitat surrounding their property. Their animals roam freely over one million acres of rangeland, but also under the watchful eye of trained shepherds. After all, there are predators such as wolves out there, and the Bean’s need to protect their livestock. But for these ranchers, wolves are a natural part of the landscape and the Beans seek to coexist peacefully with them.

With help from the Defenders Wolf Coexistence Partnership program, Lava Lake Lamb has employed several practical measures to minimize sheep-wolf conflicts. Many wolves bear radio collars from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, so Lava’s herders carry telemetry devices to detect approaching wolves and move the lambs when necessary. Herders also carry shotguns loaded with rubber bullets to scare off, rather than harm wolves. At night, herders set up temporary electrified fencing tied with red cloth strips (known as turbofladry) to protect the herd in wolf areas. And, they increased their number of guard dogs.

A federal wildlife agent demonstrates how to set up fladry to protect a flock of sheep from wolves.

These simple non-lethal deterrents have proven extremely effective for reducing livestock losses to wolves for Lava Lake. In 2008 they partnered with Defenders to form the groundbreaking Big Wood River Valley Wolf Project, bringing other sheep producers on board with these measures in collaboration with land managers. In 2010, despite more than 10,000 sheep grazing in the project area, only one sheep was killed by wolves and no wolves were killed by agency managers.

It is our hope that this project continues and that other ranchers will see the effectiveness of these measures and choose to implement them as well. Wildlife and agriculture need not be mutually exclusive, and with ranchers such as Lava Lake leading the way, it can be done in ways that both can benefit.

Learn more about Defenders work on reducing conflict between ranchers and wolves and other conservation solutions.