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Current Situation Tour Prairie Dog Impacts News & Resources

Seeking Your Data On Our Public Lands

If you have photos or data to share related ecosystem health on a favorite Open Space trail or field, we’d love to hear from you.

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WHO + WHAT

We are citizens of Boulder County—including OSMP tenants, farmers, ranchers, neighbors, and advocates of soil health, local food systems, and Boulder’s climate commitments—who believe that regenerative agricultural practices, local food & feed production, and the preservation of healthy prairie ecosystems are all critically important to our community. We recognize that protecting Boulder’s remaining irrigable agricultural lands from prairie dog overpopulation and devastation is vital to our efforts to create a thriving local food system, establish food security, and sequester carbon in our Open Space lands.

We support the many existing planning documents governing our publicly-owned lands, which already preserve thousands of acres for prairie dog habitat, and which also mandate prairie dog removal from irrigated agricultural land. The uncontrolled exponential growth of prairie dogs on City of Boulder agricultural lands—and the resulting degradation, desertification, erosion, and abandonment of over 1,000 food-producing acres of City land—distresses us deeply. We call on the City of Boulder to follow their well-researched plans and to quickly remove prairie dogs from our publicly owned, irrigable agricultural parcels. Agriculture and prairie dogs can both thrive on Boulder’s public lands, but in appropriate, separate locations.

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