The decades-long battle over nearly 9,500 acres in Oklahoma is coming to a head in Washington, D.C.
Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) secured a farm bill provision that would block transfer of the land, which currently hosts a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) research facility and sits atop sizable oil and gas reserves, “except as otherwise specifically authorized by law.”
The USDA facility that occupies part of Fort Reno is the Oklahoma and Central Plains Agricultural Research Center, previously Grazinglands Research Laboratory, which Lucas has called “one of the crown jewels of our nation’s agricultural research facilities.”
The provision could clear the runway to expand agricultural and climate research by removing the need to extend a transfer moratorium in future farm bills. But it has also raised alarm within the USDA and among leaders of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, which have vigorously pursued their contested claim to the lands dating back more than 150 years.
A USDA spokesperson told The Hill that Lucas’s provision is a “move that defies decades of effort by Tribes and hundreds of years of Tribal history.”