4.11.2. Federal Grazing Permits.In federal acquisitions involving ranch lands, appraisers must disregard any value added to those lands as a result of their actual or potential use in combination with adjacent federal lands under revocable grazing permits.1118 Federal grazing permits are chiefly administered by the Bureau of Land Management (U.S. Department of Interior) under the Taylor Grazing Act 1119 and the Forest Service (U.S. Department of Agriculture) under the Granger-Thye Act.1120 By law, these federal permits to use the public domain for grazing are revocable and create no property rights in the holder.1121 Thus, while grazing permits typically remain with a privately owned base property for many years, permits revert to the federal agency when the base property is sold and may or may not be granted to the new owner.1122 As a result, in federal acquisitions, privately owned lands cannot be aggregated with permitted public lands for valuation purposes, as “[t]o require the United States to pay for this . . . value would be to create private claims in the public domain.”1123 Appraisers must therefore disregard the use or potential use of the subject property in conjunction with federal grazing permit lands—even if “this element of value would be considered by a potential buyer in the open market”—because the government “need not compensate for value which it could remove by revocation of a permit for the use of lands that it owned outright.”1124 

Because Congress elected not to create compensable rights out of what are now licensees, landowners “have no compensable right in the land covered by their grazing permits or in the permits themselves.”1125 As a result, federal grazing permits cannot be considered in estimating market value.1126