Mormon Ranch Hailed As Model
For Forest Service By GAO

SALT LAKE CITY —(AP)— If the Forest Service needs a model for self-sufficiency that excels at protecting land and wildlife, it should study a Mormon church-run ranch, congressional researchers say.

The U.S. General Accounting Office says the 201,000-acre Deseret Land and Livestock Ranch in northeastern Utah's Rich County has thrived by implementing innovative grazing, hunting and management plans.

If copied, the GAO asserts, the Forest Service could enhance both its revenue and the quality of its own land protection policies.

The agency's comments are part of a report for House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, who maintains that subsidies for the Forest Service are out of control.

Along with studying operations at the church's ranch, the GAO looked at selected state park systems, Indian tribal lands, areas owned by environmental groups and even a private forest owned by International Paper.

The GAO noted that Deseret, like the Forest Service, was heavily subsidized in recent years. But unlike the Forest Service, the ranch has become self-sufficient even as it made improvements in land use, the agency stated.

A previous owner of the ranch was losing $500,000 a year on it as late as 1978, the GAO said.

When the ranch was sold in 1983 to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, managers defined its mission as "to maximize profit while improving the resources" and to be "part of the community and an ensign of the church."

The ranch established five-year plans, set annual goals and devised clear accountability objectives. It also gives employees bonuses of up to 10 percent of their annual salary if they achieve profit and-or production goals, the GAO noted.

Now, "The ranch's annual revenue covers both operating and capital costs, including $280,000 a year paid to the church to repay land-acquisition costs," the agency reported.

Generating revenue and reducing costs are not mission priorities for the Forest Service, the GAO charged.

One way the LDS ranch turned things around was by managing "big game and other wildlife as a profitable resource rather than as a cost of doing business," the GAO said.

That includes charging high access fees for some types of hunting on its land — up to $8500 per hunter for guided bull elk expeditions. Some other hunting is still allowed free of charge.

The report said revenue generated by the ranch's wildlife programs was $342,000 in 1997.

Meantime, the Forest Service historically has left all hunting programs on its lands to the states and receives little or no money from them, the GAO said.

The GAO also praised the ranch's policy of limiting the time cattle are allowed to graze an area and moving them among fenced pastures instead of allowing them to graze on open rangeland.

That approach allows long periods of rest and recovery for plants, which in turn has improved the quality of rangeland while the ranch increased the number of mother cows by 85 percent since 1983. The number of weaned calves increased by 103 percent, the GAO noted.