Written by Aaron Weiss on Tuesday, January 26th, 2016

One of the complaints coming from Ammon Bundy and his band of militant extremists in Oregon is that the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service are unfair to ranchers who graze their cattle on national public lands.

Bundy has been promoting a handful of ranchers who said they’ll no longer pay taxpayers for the right to graze their cattle. Ammon Bundy would like the media and the public to believe that all ranchers are like his father, Cliven, and are so frustrated with the federal government that they refuse to pay grazing fees as a form of protest. Cliven Bundy still has not paid more than $1 million in grazing fees.

But new data show this just isn’t the case. Here’s the reality: most public lands ranchers are paying grazing fees on public lands and are responsible business owners.

E&E News ran the numbers this week: Out of 16,000 ranchers who run livestock on public lands, only 285 of them have bills that are past due. That’s a delinquency rate of less than two percent. By contrast, around eight percent of Americans are more than 90 days late making their credit card payments. And the ranchers who are late aren’t racking up big tabs on principle—they owe a grand total of $172,000, or about $600 each.

It’s no wonder that ranching organizations like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association aren’t siding with the Bundys; their members get a bargain from the American public. They pay $1.69 per cow-calf pair for every month they graze on BLM or Forest Service land. According to the number crunchers at FiveThirtyEight, that’s a 93 percent discount compared to what they’d pay on private land.

If states owned the land, as Bundy’s friends at the American Lands Council and in Congress advocate for, ranchers would have pay five to twelve times more to graze their cattle.

The bottom line is that Ammon Bundy does not speak for American ranchers. What’s more, his decision to steal a wildlife refuge from the American people to make a point about grazing cattle could cost ranchers handsomely.

Photo: Hereford cattle on the range by USDA ARS, public domain