In the ever-evolving landscape of agriculture and public lands management, Kaitlynn Glover is another voice carrying weight and expertise on behalf of the livestock industry and preservation of originally intended uses of our public lands. 

As the Executive Director of the Public Lands Council and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s Natural Resources division, Glover has been a steadfast advocate for sustainable land use and the interests of America’s ranchers since joining the organizations in 2020. 

Her journey to this pivotal role is marked by a deep-rooted passion for agriculture and a robust career that spans continents and disciplines. Before stepping into her current position, Glover served as a policy advisor to Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), where she honed her expertise in navigating the complex intersection of policy, land management, and agricultural production. Her work in the Senate provided her with a front-row seat to the legislative processes that shape the nation’s natural resource policies, equipping her with the insights needed to drive impactful change. 

Glover’s expertise extends beyond the halls of Capitol Hill. Her international experience includes several years with Teagasc, Ireland’s agriculture semi-state authority, where she immersed herself in innovative agricultural practices and research. During this time, she earned a Master’s of Agriscience in Innovation Support from University College Dublin, further solidifying her commitment to advancing agricultural sustainability and resilience. 

Hailing from Wyoming, Glover’s connection to the land runs deep. Raised in a state where wide-open spaces and rugged landscapes define daily life, she developed a profound appreciation for the delicate balance between grazing, recreation, and conservation on public lands. Her diverse background in agriculture policy and hands-on production, combined with her strong ties to ranchers, recreationalists, and other stewards of public lands, positions her uniquely to lead with vision and pragmatism. In her current role, Glover continues to champion policies that support the livelihoods of cattlemen and women while ensuring the long-term health of America’s public lands.

 

Arizona Agriculture: How does your experience in the U.S. Senate and with Teagasc in Ireland inform your approach to managing and advocating for public lands grazing?

Glover: There are so many different ways to end up with a policy career in Washington, D.C. While I was working in Ireland, I was concurrently conducting social research on “knowledge transfer” – how people learn the things, the most efficient pathways to convey information, what people do with information once they have it, and whether certain information pathways are more likely to result in acting on that information. This process sounds complicated when we try to distill it into its individual parts, but it’s a process we all go through in seconds every time we have a conversation. Whether we’re trying to convince mom and dad to let us have an ice cream, urge a farmer to adopt an emerging technology, or secure a vote in Congress, knowing which buttons to push to get the desired outcome is part of our daily lives. My work with pig farmers while at Teagasc taught me how to develop strategies that would work for specific groups – groups that may not seem similar on the surface but had key attributes in common – and how to most successfully clinch their participation in a project. That experience translated directly to my work in the Senate where I was constantly developing partnerships to resolve legislative and policy conflicts. I’ve learned whether you’re a farm advisor, policy analyst, or lobbyist, the biggest skill you need to have is to understand what people care about and how to give them the information they need to be motivated to act, and succeed, in that space. 

 

Arizona Agriculture: What are the key challenges facing the public lands grazing community today, and how is the council addressing them?

Glover: Public lands grazing is such a unique subset of the behemoth that is American agriculture. Everyone loves thinking about a guy in a cowboy hat trailing cows across a vast landscape. They love thinking about the open, wild, free American West. The public also love the idea that these lands are theirs and that they have ownership in the last wild parts of this great nation. 

Often, those two strongly held values simply don’t square with one another. Many public lands in the West weren’t created intentionally, they were just the lands left unsettled because they were too harsh or too far from water, but over time, they have become public treasures. Public lands grazing permittees are ranchers who settled places nearby and have taken care of these landscapes for generations, far before the advent of fat bikes or long-distance trail running. 

These lands are intended to serve the public, and public lands ranchers take care of them accordingly, but the public understanding about what it takes to manage these landscapes to ensure they remain healthy, open, and available for all uses hasn’t always kept pace with the demand for access and use. We face an ever-evolving educational challenge to answer questions about why cattle and sheep are crucial to Western land management in order to ensure policies around public land management are durable. 

Arizona Agriculture: How does the council balance the needs of the livestock industry with the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity on public lands?

Glover: Grazing and conservation are synonymous terms. By definition, public lands are managed for “multiple use and sustained yield,” so livestock grazing is managed with the intent to achieve specific outcomes this year with an eye toward long-term sustainability and predictability for the years to come. Often, public perception and political development attempt to pit livestock grazing’s use of forage against some standard of conservation objectives, when that perspective is based in a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to manage an ecosystem for long-term productivity. The Public Lands Council supports ongoing research in riparian management, targeted grazing, watershed management for forage objectives, as well as our engagement on policy that recognizes the need for long-term, science-based monitoring of these vast landscapes.  

Arizona Agriculture: What are your thoughts on the Bureau of Land Management’s recent conservation rule, and how do you see it impacting the livestock industry on public lands?

Glover: The Biden Administration proposed the “Conservation and Landscape Health” rule, which by any standard sounded like an ambitious undertaking that would guarantee land and wildlife health. PLC led a coalition of public lands interests in suing the BLM to overturn the rule and have worked with the Trump Administration to rescind the rule as soon as possible. In truth, the rule overstepped BLM’s legal authority to manage public lands by adding a new “use” of the landscape and elevating this use above all other uses of the land. 

This was a problem because when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), they were very specific about which uses were authorized, and how those uses needed to be balanced against one another. The law does not require BLM to ensure all uses can exist everywhere, but FLPMA is clear that no one use can take undue priority over any other. The Conservation Rule also gave BLM an “easy button” to bypass stakeholders like ranchers and rural communities, as well as the American public, in closing down access and use of lands. 

Arizona Agriculture: What encourages you about the future and how well do our ranchers manage public lands?

Glover: I have the best job in Washington. I get to come to work every day and repeat my mantra: Grazing is Good. I get to tell the stories about producers who have been on the landscape for 5 generations and those who just secured a permit for the first time. I am able to weave together the complexities of internation trade, tourism, recreation, and ecology to advocate for policy that will create a stronger future for Western communities who rely on public lands. While not every day is filled with policy victories, the resolve and persistence of the people I represent makes me so hopeful for the future. The best (and sometimes, worst) part of my job is that nothing is really ever done. Because I work with ecosystems, everything is cyclical which means that we’ve addressed this problem before and we can try a different, better way to solve it this time around. Learning from the past and making the future better is a privilege. 

Arizona Agriculture: How does the council support young or beginning ranchers in accessing public lands, and what programs or initiatives are in place for them?

Glover: Public Lands Grazing is always looking to the future. We work with states to integrate public lands briefing sessions in young producer sessions so the next generation can apply their knowledge close to home. PLC also hosts 6 interns and 2 scholarship recipients in our Washington, D.C. office every year. 

Interns participate in every part of the policy process for an entire semester, and our Legislative Conference scholarship recipients jump right into legislative and regulatory advocacy through intensive lobbying sessions during our spring conference. Each of our policy committees has a Past President as policy mentor for the Chair and Vice Chair to consult. Every year at our Annual Meeting, we invite a strong contingent of local students to participate in discussions about the future of public lands. As we look ahead, it’s not going to be only ranchers advocating for public lands grazing, it’s going to be the young fishermen, hunters, hikers, bikers, and folks from town who see the value of what we do and help us to step up to defend this way of life. 

Arizona Agriculture: Our ranchers feel that wildfire management of public lands has been poorly managed over the decades and part of the reason we have so many catastrophic fires. What is the council doing to address this and can we be hopeful that improvement is on the way?

Glover: Fire is a monumental challenge for public lands ranchers and the country as a whole. Over the last 30 years, “active management” of our Western landscapes has been eroded by well-meaning policies, litigation, and the desire to preserve special places. This desire is misplaced, because our Western forests and rangelands don’t exist in a terrarium – they need to be managed in order to remain healthy and special for the future. PLC engages in a wide variety of fire policy: we are working with the Forest Service and states to expand the use of targeted grazing in forest environments to address understory density that exacerbates dangerous crown fires; PLC secured draft Farm Bill language and 2 separate bills to increase the use of targeted grazing specifically in ecosystems that need fire breaks or immediate fine fuels removal; as part of the BLM’s grazing regulations revisions and the updates to the USFS rangeland handbooks and directives, PLC has advocated for expanded use of temporary non-renewable grazing permits specifically for fire reduction; PLC is also engaged in the discussions about budgetary allocations because while fire suppression gets most of the attention, there is a significant need to be able to thin trees, use prescribed fire, use targeted grazing, and do meaningful timely post-fire remediation. It’s a complex problem, and PLC is in the middle of it because our ranchers are on the front lines of all of these fires. 

Arizona Agriculture: What is the Council's vision for the future of public lands grazing in the context of evolving land use policies and the public’s impact on use? Again, are you hopeful?

Glover: I’m incredibly hopeful for the future. People want to know where their food comes from, and they want to feel secure that their wistful images of the West will be there when they come to visit. Each day, my team and I work to build durable policy to ensure that ranchers utilizing grazing permits can stay in business and be profitable, support policy that supports rural communities, and build advocates so that those who want the best for these areas can actually be part of policies that support the future. This isn’t without its challenges, but when I look at my members and our partners, their passion for the future makes me not just hopeful, but confident. 

Arizona Agriculture: Based on your experience, you get the multi-use feature of our public lands, and that all of it is doable. But what is often the biggest hindrance to the success of public lands use, and how do you and your leadership feel it can be resolved or fixed?

Glover: Often, policy and budgets are the biggest obstacle to meaningful public land management. Budgets for federal agencies are massive, but the budgets for federal land management programs are anemic. That’s not to say that throwing more money at a problem is going to resolve all the issues, but there are specific areas where a lack of funds and people to do the job are the only roadblocks. In other areas, every single piece of red tape is costly, both in time and finances. PLC is laser-focused on regulatory right-sizing: returning the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and more to their intended purpose so that speculative, expensive, lengthy analyses don’t get in the way of crucial work on the ground. This is the core of the work PLC does on a daily basis: how do we make sure the law, the people, and the money are aligned in a way that supports livestock grazing as a tool to manage hundreds of millions of acres across the West that are truly the heartbeat of this country. 

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the August issue of Arizona Agriculture.