Dozens of pickups in the parking lot were the first clue that some serious ranch business was going down inside.

Inside a hearing room in Bismarck on Tuesday, about 160 ranchers and state officials were dead serious that the U.S. Forest Service's plan to halt lease transfers of federal grazing permits was both heavy-handed and likely to cause irreversible damage to grasslands ranches.

The Forest Service manages more than 1 million acres of national grasslands and announced July 19 it would end lease transfers in North Dakota, one of the few places in the country where someone other than the owner of a headquarters ranch can lease the ranch and the federal grazing permit that goes along with it.

The agency said a review of the leases found they weren't changing or meeting the goal of helping young ranchers build up equity so they could buy the ranch headquarters and effectively repopulate the fairly empty Badlands.

A regional officer with the Forest Service immediately took the microphone to announce that the agency has backed off that decision and removed the language from its handbook changes.

That admission wasn't good enough for Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., or Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., who told the agency to back off all changes in the lengthy grasslands' administration handbook and give them further study.

Dorgan called the hearing as a ranking member of the Senate Interior Appropriations subcommittee.

He wasn't satisfied with the agency's reversal and drilled a state, regional and federal Forest Service panel on how the decision to end the lease transfers could have been dropped on the ranchers without their consultation.

Dorgan was even more incensed when state grasslands supervisor Dave Pieper and regional forester Gail Kimbell said the decision was made without their knowledge.

Kimbell said the change wasn't proposed by any agency head in the room and termed it an "inadvertent edit" of the handbook.

"Who's responsible?" Dorgan demanded.

After some quiet at the panel table, federal rangelands supervisor Janette Kaiser took the microphone.

"It was the chief of the Forest Service," she said

Kaiser said the policy change on lease transfers was intended as an interim directive, a "test drive"for 18 months that lets a change get tried out before it's fully implemented.

Pomeroy said test driving policy with a "see how it goes"approach was bad government and he called the agency heavy- and ham-handed for dropping it like a bombshell on the ranchers and their grazing associations.

There are 618 federal grazing permits on the North Dakota national grasslands. Of those, 220 - or 35 percent - are leased by someone other than the ranch owner to whose ranch they're assigned. The Forest Service planned to end transfers of federal grazing permits when the ranch lease expired, or seven years, whichever came first.

Tony Huseth is one of those "someone others," a young rancher raising cattle on someone else's lease on the Sheyenne National Grasslands. There are 73 ranch operations using federal grazing permits, and 50 of them are leased out.

He said his dad's operation is too small for the two of them, and the ranch he's leasing with the federal permit is letting him raise 125 head and build equity without "sticking my neck out so far." He said he's been leasing for seven years.

The Forest Service said it has shelved plans to immediately end the lease transfers but maintained a proposal to review them after seven years.

If that's the case, Huseth said, his career could already be halfway over.

Pieper said he hopes the discussion leads to ways the Forest Service can use existing tools to help end the longterm lease transfers so that people don't end up leasing for generations, unable to ever buy the ranch from an owner who's often retired, or saving it for his own children.

He said since 1987, the Forest Service has seen only one ranch owner sell to the person leasing his ranch and federal grazing permit.

Pomeroy said the increasing property values and out-of-state ownership in the Badlands are accelerating the loss of the ranching tradition in any case.

"It is a difficult issue,"he said.