NCBA: New ESA Rules Rollback Previous Improvements

With California Ag Today, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

Last week, the Biden administration released three final rules under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that rewrite and rollback what the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association says were improvements made under the Trump administration.

On Tuesday I spoke with Sigrid Johannes, Director for the Public Lands Council and NCBA Government Affairs…

“Part of the danger with these three new rules that have now been finalized is that there are some pretty major changes to things like the blanket 4(d) rule, things like the roll of economic impact in making habitat designation decisions, and the last piece that really jumped out to us when these were finalized was the changes to the standards around unoccupied critical habitat designations. And thats, I think, where we see the greatest area of concern for producers across the country.”

Not to sound too passive, but the next question may lead itself to that. Now what?

“We want to keep a very close eye and a very close track on what the actual implementation impacts of this are going to be for producers. We need farmers and ranchers to start to notice changes, who experience more oversight and essentially more enforcement of some of these items, we need to be able to track what the actual impact of these is having on folks as they start to roll out and get implemented.”

Again these are final rules. They will take effect May 6.