Western Colorado’s North Fork Valley is Colorado’s only rural winery region and has the state’s highest concentration of organic farms and ranches. It is an intimate mixture of private, small family farms–many certified by the USDA as organic–and public lands, including many managed by the BLM.
The BLM is an agency within the U.S. Dept. of Interior that manages most of the public’s minerals. BLM once wrote a land use plan for the area, twenty-five years ago. Now it seeks to use that plan–even though it never even considered oil and gas development in the North Fork to be much of a possibility–to open the area for drilling and fracking.
Finish the land use plan update and take these leases off the table