Determining Market Areas for Livestock Grazing

Differentials between rancher costs of operating on private and public range were studied in an attempt to define market areas for livestock grazing in western United States. The problem of defining market areas is basically a problem of grouping differentials between rancher costs of grazing on private leased range and National Forests that are reasonably homogeneous and statistically testing differences among means of the different groups. Several methods were used to group forests with reasonably uniform differentials into market areas for cattle. A grouping of forests which have the same ave rage grazing fee does not, however, yield market areas which are statistically different from each other