His holdings include food processing, fertilizer and other divisions making up the J.R. Simplot Co., a private company based in Boise. Government already imposes too much paperwork and too many regulations, Basabe said, and with Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and the Clinton administration, the bureaucracy has worsened. Cattle mill around a feedlot owned by Idaho billionarie J.R. Simplot, who has more cattle on BLM lands than anyone else. He holds grazing permits for at least 1.9 million acres, an area six times the size of Los Angeles. On this day there are 100,000 cows just outside Basabe's office on Simplot's Grand View feedlot, the largest west of the Mississippi.
Visitors can smell it three miles away.
In long rows of dirt pens and feeding troughs, the cows await shipment to slaughterhouses in Utah and Idaho. Some meat will be sent to Japan. Basabe says big operators should continue to pay the same grazing fee as small family ranchers. And Simplot cowboys patrol vast open areas. The information you receive online from Mercury Center is protected by the copyright laws of the United States.