Biden administration accused of taking agricultural land out of production

 Fox News:

The state of Montana filed a legal motion against the Biden administration over its decision to permit a billionaire-backed organization to lease large swaths of public property for non-agriculture uses.

In a motion for summary judgment filed with the Department of Interior's Office of Hearings and Appeals late last week, Montana alleged a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rule issued in 2022 unlawfully prioritizes non-production "conservation herds" over livestock production and the state's rural ranching communities. In July 2022, BLM granted a request to the American Prairie Reserve (APR) to graze bison across leased federal lands.

"The BLM’s final decision granting a general use permit to graze bison is a direct attack on rural communities — attacks that have become a hallmark of the Biden Administration," Knudsen told Fox News Digital in a statement. "The BLM has bent over backward to circumvent the law and approve APR’s plan to turn hundreds of thousands of acres of productive ranch land into a nature preserve for the wealthy."

"From shutting out Montana ranchers during the comment period, proposing to copy and paste directly from APR’s website, and ignoring federal law and its own regulations, it’s clear Biden’s BLM intended to rubber stamp this proposal from the start — no matter the impact on and opposition from local communities," he continued.
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BLM's decision granted APR the ability to graze bison across 63,500 acres of federal lands that the group has leased over the past several years. The group first made the request in 2017 and revised its request in 2019.

Overall, APR has completed a total of 37 transactions to create a "habitat base" of 460,800 acres in Montana, of which 124,098 acres it privately owns and 336,702 acres it leases from the state and mainly federal government. The transactions are part of the group's overarching goal of creating a 3.2 million-acre ecosystem connecting private and leased lands to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in northern Montana.
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This looks like a direct attack on the livelihood of ranchers who were leasing the land. 

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