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‘30 x 30’ – Producers urged to get educated, get involved

Byfield will be giving ranchers, landowners, and county government officials strategies for fighting the 30 x 30 plan during a presentation at the Valentine High School Auditorium on Tuesday, March 9, at 6 p.m. Central (5 p.m. Mountain). All members of the public are invited to attend.

VALENTINE, Neb.

The Biden Administration’s “30 x30” plan is gaining attention, and at least one well-known property rights advocate questions whether our President has the authority to carry it out.

Just a few days into office, President Joe Biden released a flurry of executive orders, among them being Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” (86 Fed. Reg. 7,619), which he signed on Jan. 27. Contained in that order is the “30 x 30” program, an aggressive effort, heralded by environmental and climate change activists, to put 30 percent of the land and water in the United States under permanent protection by 2030.



Property rights advocate Margaret Byfield is the executive director of American Stewards of Liberty and daughter of “Sagebrush Rebel” Wayne Hage, the man behind the first federal lands grazing case filed in the United States Court of Federal Claims. Her organization’s website is https://americanstewards.us, and offers an email newsletter with the latest developments and information on the 30 x 30 plan.

Byfield said that a Biden Executive Order on climate change that includes the 30 x 30 agenda, is scant on details on how the administration intends to accomplish that 30 percent goal, however, on the same day that the order was signed, the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI), which oversees huge swaths of government-owned land, released a fact sheet with a little bit more information [https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/fact-sheet-president-biden-take-action-uphold-commitment-restore-balance-public-lands]. However, the DOI release lacks citations.



For example, there is no constitutional or statutory authority cited for the President, the Department of the Interior, or the Department of Agriculture, to set aside and permanently preserve 30 percent of all land and water in the U.S. and no such authority is referenced in the Executive Order.

The authority is not cited because the federal government doesn’t appear to have it.

Also missing are citations to the science reasoning behind putting 30 percent of that land into preservation, or how specifically that could be the “cure” to the climate change question. According the Center for American Progress, the think tank the Biden Administration seems to have relied upon for information, 12 percent of the US’s land and 23 percent of its ocean is currently protected.

But what 30 percent of the land will states and private landowners be forced to hand over? In Nebraska, where 97 percent of the state is privately-owned property, that number is especially alarming.

State response

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts joined 16 other state governors, including Govs. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Greg Gianforte of Montana, and Brad Little of Idaho in a Feb. 22 letter to Biden warning against the potential federal overreach.

“Nebraska’s farmers and ranchers are our state’s original conservationists,” Ricketts said in a news release. “They work day in and day out to cultivate the land and manage water they’ve known for generations in a way that helps grow our state.

“With a new administration taking office, Nebraskans should be on the lookout in their communities for attempts by federal agencies and their partners to regulate land and water use,” he said. “We are already seeing big changes in how the federal government is approaching energy, climate, and conservation issues.”

Some support

While many agricultural organizations have not shown support for Biden’s plan, the National Farmers Union is hopeful it will make the world a better place.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) said in a statement that it welcomed the effort, particularly provisions that will support climate-smart agricultural practices that sequester carbon in the soil and include farmers and other stakeholders in decision making. NFU President Rob Larew issued the following statement in support of the administration’s actions:

“Climate change is an immense, complex crisis with far-reaching consequences. To be successful in our fight against it, we must approach it immediately and from every angle possible – just as President Biden’s economy-wide climate plan intends to do. National Farmers Union is especially encouraged by the administration’s focus on climate-smart agriculture, whose capacity for mitigation and adaptation has been largely overlooked until recently.

“We are also pleased that President Biden has instructed the USDA to solicit input from farmers and other stakeholders as they develop and carry out climate programs; though lawmakers and administration officials are generally well-intentioned, they may not always recognize policies’ unintended consequences. By offering farmers a seat at the table, they can ensure that programs are feasible and beneficial for all parties involved.

“In the coming months, National Farmers Union will hold the administration to this promise and work with them to flesh out policies that provide farmers with the support they need to implement solutions and build resilience,” said the National Farmers Union in a press statement.

The C word

Byfield doesn’t necessarily believe that conservation is a bad word. Existing Federal conservation incentive programs like CRP and CSP allow for private landowners to leverage federal funds to better manage the resources while still maintaining control of their land.

“You give (the government) a lease, and you take a risk by having a federal agency as a partner,” Byfield said. “But you’re still in control, and you ultimately maintain control and ownership of that property. But under a conservation easement, you forfeit your control for perpetuity.”

However, under 30 x 30, the mentality seems to be more that private landowners don’t know how and aren’t responsible enough to manage and steward their own land.

“They’re operating under the assumption that the administrative state or federal land managers can make better decisions about the quality of the land and how it should be managed than private landowners,” she said. “From my experience, that just doesn’t bear out as true.”

Private landowners are invested – personally and professionally – oftentimes across multiple generations, Byfield said.

“A federal bureaucrat in Washington D.C. can’t match that institutional knowledge and love for the land,” she said. “But the progressive mindset is that you can’t trust an individual to make their own decisions – they are the only ones who are qualified to make your decisions for you – including what you can and can’t do with your land.”

Where did it come from?

Byfield said she believes much of the Interior Department’s 30 x 30 factsheet was pulled straight from a report released by John Podesta’s D.C. think tank, The Center for American Progress (CAP) [https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2019/08/06/473242/much-nature-america-keep/].

Byfield said CAP figured that 12 percent of the land in the U.S. is “currently protected in its natural state,” which includes wilderness areas, National Parks, wildlife refuges, and private land conservation easements.

As it stands, the DOI has 90 days from the date of the executive order to deliver a report to the White House on how it intends to carry out 30 x 30. That report is expected sometime in April.

Another Biden administration action seems directly related: the removal of the consent of States and local governments for land acquisitions. On February 11, Scott de la Vega, Biden’s Acting Secretary of the Interior revoked an order from Trump-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt concerning the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which gave local government a seat at the table specifically by giving governors and local officials veto power over pending acquisition deals.

On a weekly – and almost daily – basis, there are new updates and actions being taken. House Democrats are expected to circulate a letter promoting votes on 30 x 30 related regulations and bills that would grant the authorization for the federal government to start snatching land.

“Right now they’re doing it by fiat because they lack the authority,” Byfield said. “They’ve got their people in place. They have a President that’s going to let them push this as far as they want, so this is really their moment.”

A hard PIL to swallow

“Payments in Lieu of Taxes” (PIL) are Federal payments to local governments that help offset losses in property taxes due to the existence of nontaxable Federal lands within their boundaries. For Nebraska’s 520,851 acres of Federal land, the Federal government paid about $1.3 million to the state.

However, because of the wildly differing valuation variances, the scenarios for how those payments are calculated, and which types of federal land acquisitions wind up exempt from PIL, the 30 x 30 plan’s potential to shift real estate from private to government ownership could hobble the budget for local governments, exacerbating the property tax burden for ranchers during a time when they’re struggling to be profitable.

By cutting the state and local governments out of the decision making process, the Biden Administration ignores many of the existing federal laws that govern land acquisition and protection.

How can I address this?

Byfield will be giving ranchers, landowners, and county government officials strategies for fighting the 30 x 30 plan during a presentation at the Valentine High School Auditorium on Tuesday, March 9, at 6 p.m. Central (5 p.m. Mountain). All members of the public are invited to attend.

It’s just one of the many presentations she’s been putting on to educate and mobilize landowners and county government officials to fight back against Federal overreach.

“We’ve got to get out in front of this,” Byfield said in a phone interview on March 3. “We’ve got to get people aware that this is coming down so they can make good decisions about their own property.”

All politics are local, and the first place to start is to reach out to your county government and make locally-elected officials aware of the 30 x 30 agenda.

“We’ve developed a resolution that can be passed by a local government,” she said. “It’s a good place to start, and it’s a good tool to educate not only the leaders, but the community.”

Byfield said those resolutions should then be forwarded to Washington D.C. to help senators and congressional members show their colleagues that they have grassroots support for private property rights and local control of land and resources.

“It helps them stand up to other members of congress and say, ‘The people don’t want this,’” Byfield said.

And that’s an uphill battle in itself, she said. The League of Conservation Voters has gotten individual elected officials across the nation to sign on to a letter in support of the 30 x 30 plan. On paper, it seems like there are a lot of local officials backing it, but in reality, those individuals could easily be the minority member of a board where the majority supports private property rights and would oppose a Federal overreach.

“Those officials are outliers, but the League has been pounding house members with that letter claiming that they’ve got the endorsement of local officials,” she said. “We think it’s a lot more powerful to have the local government consensus saying ‘That’s not going to happen in our county.’”

A sample resolution is available as a Word document through the American Stewards of Liberty website [https://americanstewards.us], and county boards can download it and easily modify it to fit the needs of their county, along with the “Guide to Fighting 30 x 30.”

Individuals can also contact their representatives up the chain from the State House to the Federal Government and make them aware of 30 x 30, and share their personal opposition or support for the movement.


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