The rancher is not all that smart. He watched as over 50 other farmers left, for various reasons. Yet he chose to stop paying his fees because of some ancestral nonsense. He should have kept paying the fees, and sued in parallel to get any land ownership dispute settled. Moreover, these guys typically pay a miniscule amount to graze livestock on federal land. I do not have much sympathy here. I also think we do not have all the facts.
Went back and reread the article, while biased it does point out a few interesting points. The family had been leasing from the BLM long before he ever stopped his lease payments. Hard to prove you own the land when you have over 50 years of lease payments proving you don’t. While I think shutting it down for grazing over a tortoise is a pretty weak excuse it is what it is. When you crawl in bed with the Fed’s your gonna get screwed. The fact that he stopped his payments 5 years before they shut it down doesn’t help his argument.
We have a rather large ranch for this area and lease out about 80% of it to cattle operation. We control the lease amount and how many head are run per section, a violation of either of those or a non lease payment gets you shut down immediately. He would have been in violation of our rules and he and his cattle would have been removed.
YOUr miniscule amount is up to a million dollars accd.to the link.
The rancher in the article is NOT the one I was referring to.
Watch "Enemies of the State" on Youtube for the Fox News special on Wayne Hage, Catherine Englebrecht, an oil producer, and Gibson. Very well done, makes you grit your teeth and say "Hell yeah, bring it on."