An Analysis of Public Range Lands Grazing Fee and Factors Contributing to Fee Differences
Thesis/Dissertation Embargo Procedures
The data on which this analysis is based were obtained from the Bureau of Land Management (8LM), U.S. Department of Interior. They were taken from the listing of leases found in the Westwide appraisal study and represent those leases classified as "sub leases", where federal permittees leased their federal grazing allotment to another party. The data cover fourteen western states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The number of observations included in the analysis varied by state as shown in Figure 1. Several states had a minimal number of sub leases included in the data. More specifically, Texas had only one lease included and North Dakota and Washington had only four and eight leases included, respectively. For much of the analysis that follows, it is not possible to suggest that the results are statistically significant due to the small sample size of many sections of the data. Obviously, this same criticism applies to any other analyses of this same data set. For some states and certain parts of the analysis, the results are statistically significant. For instance, data sets from Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana were large enough to justify confidence in the results in a statistical sense, although such confidence intervals are not included as part of the analysis.