Conservation Easements on the Mannix Ranch
By Logan Mannix
Although careful management of our livestock and grazing is probably the most important thing we can do to steward our resources, there are other important tools out there for land owners, and one of the ones we have used is conservation easements. Most of our deeded acres are now protected under some form of conservation easement. And because we recently had a meeting with some of our partners on these easements it seemed a good time to share a little about them. What are are they, how do they work, what are their limitations, and how have we used them on the Mannix Ranch?
What are conservation easements?
Many of you are probably familiar with easements, but basically they are a way for separate entities to purchase and control certain rights on a piece of land that the owner would otherwise control, such as the right to access, sub-divide, develop, or mine the land. With conservation easements a group interested in conserving resources, such as open space or wildlife habitat, pays a landowner in order to ensure that development of some sort won’t happen on that land. Meanwhile, the landowner gets a paycheck while still keeping ownership of the land and most aspects of its management, such as the ability to continue farming or ranching.
For conservation groups, it is a more cost effective way to protect acres, allowing them to prevent subdivision or development in perpetuity while not having to come up with enough money to buy the land outright, or inherit the expense of taking over management of those lands. It also leaves those lands in the tax base, and supports communities by allowing those lands to continue producing jobs and resources. It also allows them to become managing partners on landscapes, such as our own ranch, that landowners would otherwise not allow them to have a say in.
For landowners, it gives them a tool to capitalize on some of the intrinsic value of their land, such as open space, wildlife habitat, beautiful views, and clean water, without selling and developing it. One of the biggest challenges for ranchers today, especially ranchers in beautiful landscapes such as western Montana, is that the value of land is no longer tied in any way to agricultural production. Instead, it is driven by what we call the “blue sky” value of the land. Selling the land will nearly always be the most profitable thing to do with land, and subdividing and selling smaller sections to multiple buyers will almost always be the way to get the most money from the sale. It is virtually impossible to buy land and then pay for it by ranching. In fact, it is hardly possible to pay the estate taxes if the value of the land exceeded the estate tax exemption.
Conservation Easements on the Mannix Ranch
Most of the land in this photo, from the irrigated meadows you can see in the valley, to the mountain where the picture was taken, is protected by a conservation easement, and will never be developed.
We have sold several different easements, which are now held by either the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service or the State Fish and Game. These easements cover nearly all of our land with the exception of a few building envelopes, were most of our ranch shops, barns, and homes are. Most of the money for purchasing these easements from us came from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is funded by money from offshore oil and gas leases.
Most of the easements limit building, development, and subdivision, with limits on the number of times ownership of the land can be split, and restrictions that limit future homesites. But each easement is unique, with additional protections that were a result of negotiation between us and different buyers with different priorities. For example, one of our earlier easements, sold to the State Fish and Game, went further to protect wildlife habitat and public access. Among other things the easement limits the amount of sagebrush we can control through burning, spraying, or other methods because the sagebrush is seen as an important winter feed source for elk and habitat for birds and other wildlife, and also requires some public hunting access, which we currently meet by including this land in the block management program. It also has language that could limit the number of animals we were allowed to graze, but only goes into affect if the agency detects overgrazing or damage to the resource. Another easement has language that does not allow any timber harvest “without permission” from representatives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. The major focus of our most recent easement was on the preservation of open space as a migration corridor between the Yellowstone and Glacier Ecosystems.
How have we used the easements?
In every case so far, we have used the easements to expand our ranching operation. For example, when our neighbors who owned and managed the small Cochran Ranch were wanting to retire from ranching, and saw that they didn’t have children interested in carrying on, they approached us about purchasing it, hoping to see it stay in ranching and stay with someone local. It was a great fit for us, but we couldn’t afford to purchase the land outright. By selling easements on the land, we were able to reduce the price to us, and make the purchase work. We did this again when another neighboring ranch, which had been purchased and sold several times over the last 20 years, again came up for sale. To afford the purchase of part of the Wineglass ranch, we sold easements both on the Wineglass ranch itself and on some of our own deeded acres, in addition to taking out a loan. Thanks to the purchases we’ve been able to expand the ranch, bring more family back, and keep more land in agricultural production without it being sold and subdivided. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be here on the ranch, and writing this post, without them.
The Wineglass ranch, purchased with the help of easements sold both on the wineglass and on our own deeded acres in 2013, was immediately adjacent to the original Mannix homestead. My brother Jordan and cousins Neil and Bryan now live the main ranch home. My wife and I live in a log cabin on the same property. Byran and his fiance Kate will soon be moving into a home on the Cochran ranch, purchased earlier with another easement.
In many ways, these conservation easements fit very well with out values and goals. We don’t want to see our land subdivided, and would like to see it stay in agriculture, even if at some point we no longer own the land. So selling an easement can seem like a no-brainer. However, easements are still not something to enter into lightly.
I talked to my dad, David, before writing this post, because he has worked extensively on the easements on this ranch, and also serves on a working group at the Blackfoot Challenge that is working to adapt and improve easements and easement language. One thing he stressed was that, “selling an easement is very much taking on a management partner.” Because we have sold easements, decisions that would normally be ours, such as thinning timber encroachment, logging a unit, conducting a prescribed burn, or farming ground, now require us to communicate with and sometimes get permission from easement owners. This can both be a challenge at times and a benefit. We have not always agreed with easement managers on what was best for the resource and can’t always do what we would like. On the other hand, we have learned from agency scientists who now have a role in managing the land, and have likely improved our management as a result. Dad said that, “It puts a premium on the importance of your relationships with these partners, and developing trust between them.”
Kevin Ertle, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is one of the managing partners on our easements. He has become a good friend, and is an asset both to our ranch and our valley.
What are the challenges and limitations of easements?
One of the challenges of easements is that the buyers of conservation easements often would like more strict, permanent language, and for understandable reasons. They want to make sure that their money is well spent, and that the ecological values they were intended to protect are in fact protected in perpetuity. There have certainly been examples of land owners that have found loopholes, sold conservation easements, and then still found ways to develop or profit from the land in a way that detracted from the original goals of the easement. However as land owners we are always hoping for flexibility in management, and that can create some tension in negotiating easement language.
Bee Hall, a form regional director for the Nature Conservancy, said that easements were, “a good land planning tool, but a poor land management tool.” Meaning that they are a good tool for deciding where we want to preserve open space, or where we want or don’t want houses or mining, but are not the best when they have strict language about how land should be managed, which must change and adapt.
One of the things that we’ve learned through generations of ranching is the importance of humility and always learning. Great grandpa won conservation awards for “habitat improvement“ for damming up a small creek on our property to create ponds. This was of course before we understood the negative impacts they can have, such as cutting off spawning habitat from the river. Great grandpa was certainly doing what he thought was best for the land at the time. Then, years later, when we were talking to Trout Unlimited about possibly connecting these ponds back to the mainstream Blackfoot River, the decision was made not to, because they were holding a genetically pure strain of cutthroat that they wanted to preserve, and occasionally shock, trap, and relocate fish from. Good management is a moving target, and a learning process. I’m sure that there are management practices that we are doing today, which we believe to be good, which we will later learn are detrimental, or at least not the best management possible. Or if not that, environmental conditions may change that will require different management. Any permanent language about management in an easement can make us uneasy.
For example, some of our easements limit “ag splits”, or how many times the land can be split into different ownerships. In theory this just ensures that the land won’t be subdivided, breaking up the habitat that the easement sought to protect. However, you could imagine a scenario where we wanted to do a small land trade with a neighboring ranch, each gaining a piece of land that worked better for their operation. Or maybe you could envision selling a small chunk of land that was within town limits and better for building homes on, while buying and protecting a neighboring piece of ground that was larger, more remote, and better wildlife habitat instead. All party’s could theoretically agree it would improve the easements goals, but it could be prevented from going forward because of strict language in the easement about the ag split.
When we sold one of our easements, we had hoped to leave out a piece of land that was right next to the town of Helmville, within boundaries that the county planning board had designated for small plots and homes. Because much of the county limits plots to150 acres ore more, finding housing is challenging for locals who would like to raise a family here. However, we were not able to leave this small plot of land out of the easement because of a previous bad experience the agency had with a land owner who used a neighboring strip of ground, held out of the easement, to effectively subdivide the land that was protected under the easement, undermining the goals of the easement in the first place.
Another specific example in our easements is regarding sagebrush management. As mentioned earlier the purchases of the easement were interested in wildlife habitat, and sagebrush was an important part of that, so it limited the number of acres of sagebrush we could “treat” in any given five year period. However we think that on much of that ground, the sagebrush is too dominant, and more controlled burning would increase forage, and lead to better habitat for birds, elk, and cattle. Part of the reason is we have likely suppressed fire for too long on the landscape. Now it would be one thing if we wanted to treat more sagebrush in order to get more grass for cattle, but biologists disagreed and felt the sagebrush was needed. But in this case we think the biologists on the ground agree that some increased burning would actually improve wildlife habitat too. In addition, the forest service is planning to conduct several controlled burns in the area over the next decade or so, and it would be effective and efficient to continue to work with them to burn some of our land with their burns. However, we may be prevented from doing so by the strict language about the “number of acres we can treat in any five year period”. That would be too bad.
In contrast, in another easement there is actually language that we can’t do ANY timber management without permission from the agency holding the easement. However, in effect, it has been more flexible and allowed more management, because we have good relationship with the agency scientists, and as long as all parties agree that the management is in the best interest of all, we can move forward. Going forward we think there is value in more flexible language like this.
One last thought - easements are a good tool, but shouldn’t be the end goal of conservation
Finally, while we think that easements are an important tool, we want to remind people that they are just one tool, and much more is needed. It seems that sometimes conservation easements are held up by conservation groups as the gold star, the be all end all of conservation efforts. Sometimes it feels like we want to put land in a wilderness area, or a conservation easement, and then celebrate as if our work is done, sort of like a “happily ever after” at the end of a story. We can now move on and “save” some other land somewhere else. And we want to caution against that.
If land is preserved in wilderness, or an easement that prevents any use for ranching, farming, timber, or other use, then it still doesn’t solve the problem of how we can produce food and materials sustainably for our population on the rest of the world’s acres. If anything, there is now more pressure on every acre left in production. And if we preserve open space and agricultural use in an easement, we need to acknowledge that there is still the never ending job of managing that land well. And managing that land well requires humility, collaboration, trust, and continuing efforts to learn, improve, and adapt management as our knowledge and the environment itself changes.
That being said, conservation easements, when well designed, are powerful tool for conservation and agriculture. We would encourage other producers to at least look into them, and hope that the public will continue to support funding for them.