Expanding efforts to keep ‘cows over condos’ are protecting land across the West

Across the West, a growing number of ranchers and farmers are seeking such “conservation easements” to stave off the big-box stores, self-storage complexes and residential construction consuming millions of acres of fertile open space. From Montana’s sagebrush steppe to New Mexico’s Central Flyway, the interest is so strong that state agencies and nonprofits are juggling lengthy waiting lists of applications. A Wyoming land trust funded in part by state appropriations typically has as many as 24 projects vying for review. “There is huge demand,” said Jordan Vana, managing director of Montana Land Reliance. The organization, working with land trusts and government agencies in the state, closed deals in fiscal 2019 that preserved 71,000 acres — more than the other 49 states combined. This push for “cows over condos,” as some call it, comes as the Trump administration increasingly greenlights industrial uses on public lands across the West. It has transcended political, geographic and economic lines, creating unlikely partnerships between conservative farmers and ranchers and liberal conservationists. Their shared goal is to safeguard areas that connect fragmented ecosystems, shelter endangered species, preserve soil that acts as a carbon sink and lock up water rights coveted by thirsty cities. Conservation easements have been around for decades, encouraged by federal and state tax benefits. (California and New York were the first states to pass legislation.) Interest jumped sharply as development claimed at least 31 million acres of prime agricultural land between 1992 and 2012, according to a 2018 report from the American Farmland Trust. Nationwide, an estimated 40 million acres of natural habitat now fall under easements. A quarter of that is along the Eastern Seaboard. Funding remains a major hurdle, however. After land trusts lobbied for additional support, Congress almost doubled money available to protect agricultural land in the 2018 farm bill to $450 million a year. Even so, the U.S. Agriculture Department can fund only 30 percent of the applications it receives annually for its easements program, said program manager Jerome Faulkner. In New Mexico, retired school administrator Johnny Pack joined three neighbors to place an easement on 600 acres that includes riparian wetlands a few miles north of Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The deal took a decade as the parties applied and reapplied for federal funding for wetland preservation from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It finally concluded in 2016. “I didn’t know if it was going to work until the very end,” said Pack, who owns just over half of the total acreage. Between tax breaks and funding raised by the land trusts that now hold the easement, he realized as much per acre — about $1,300 — as he expects he would have gotten from an outright sale...MORE