Farmers enter conservation easements to protect their land for the future

John Boyer repurchased 131 acres of his childhood farm in rural East Jordan, Michigan, and entered it into a conservation easement with the Little Traverse Conservancy, hoping to prevent future development from destroying family land, reports Vivian La for Grist. The future rights of his property will belong to the conservancy.

Rising land values, climate change and a non-farming younger generation is changing farmland around the country, forcing farmers to make tough decisions about what to do with their land. Some are consider whether they should protect it. 

Between 2017 and 2022 farmland in Michigan, “where the majority of operations were family-owned, decreased nearly 470,000 acres … ” In that same timeframe, non-traditional farm ownership increased, with the state seeing an additional 22,000 acres of easement-protected land.

Easements allow farmers to own property, sell it to others down the line or transfer it generationally. The conservancy behind an easement acquires land and protects it, holding rights in case of future development. Farmers still own their land, but the conservancy protects it.

“An easement can be a hard decision for farmers because land is typically their greatest asset, something that can pay for retirement or a college fund,” said Joe Graham, chief financial and operating officer for the Little Traverse Conservancy. “We’re offering them another alternative. We’re offering a way to capture some of the equity and the value they have in that land without having to sell it and see it leave their ownership.”

Pressure to preserve farmland could be especially strong in Northern Michigan, La writes. “Farmers there are already confronting the effects of climate change, including more extreme precipitation, crop disease, and temperature swings, but some local farmers said those impacts are relatively easier to deal with than elsewhere in the country.”

Wendell Berry, champion of natural places and agrarian life, has died at 92

Wendell Berry, Kentucky poet, novelist, essayist and farmer, died at his home in Henry County on
Monday, Aug. 31. He was a naturalist, staunchly advocating for and supporting returning land to its natural state, and encouraged an off-grid lifestyle that would do as little harm to the natural world as possible. He was also a fierce advocate for rural places. 

"Mr. Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction and argument that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness and distant government," reports Robert D. McFadden for The New York Times.

McFadden continues: "He never became a household name but, as his oeuvre grew over a half-century, advocates of agrarian and ecological causes embraced his work as an eloquent, if sometimes didactic, expression of their own hopes. Some critics likened his landed exhortations to those of Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson."

He studied English at the University of Kentucky, writing at Stanford and taught at New York University for two years before being called back to his Henry County, Ky., homeplace, "an old two-room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal... where his ancestors had lived since 1803," McFadden writes. 

"Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 ...," McFadden writes. "The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky," Berry said during the interview. "I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”

Opinion: Virtual cattle fencing offers a multiple-benefit solution for ranchers and helps migrating wildlife

Ranchers can easily move herd grazing lands with an app. 
(NoFence photo)

Western ranches in the United States include thousands of miles of barbed wire fencing, which has both positive and negative effects. GPS fencing could help ranchers strike a healthier balance while cutting business costs, writes Bruce M. Beehler in his opinion for The Washington Post.

Rangeland fencing is "an important tool for managing herds, rotating grazing areas, protecting environmentally sensitive wetlands and stream corridors, and keeping cows off highways," Beehler points out. "But it’s also harmful to wildlife populations, including deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep and elk, as well as game birds such as the greater sage-grouse."

The idea behind GPS-based virtual fences is similar to "Invisible Fence," which uses buried wire to keep dogs in their yards. Similarly, virtual cattle fencing "uses GPS, cellular technology and a mapping app that allows ranchers to draw cow-proof fence lines on their computer or tablet," Beehler explains.

While the new system requires an initial investment in collars and cell service to install, Beehler believes it offers ranchers enough benefits to justify the initial price tag. For one, they won't have to repair nearly as much fencing, which is time-consuming and expensive for farmers and tax payers. 

For wildlife, removing barbed wire fencing from migration corridors will prevent animal suffering and death. Beehler adds, "One study in Montana found that, on average, one wild ungulate got tangled in fencing every 2.5 miles of fencing per year."

While the system is designed to keep herds within designated grazing lands, it offers a huge secondary benefit. Beehler writes, "With a glimpse at the mapping app, ranchers can see the exact location of every one of their cows in real time."

Virtual fencing collars could be replaced with ear tags.
(Photo by Chad Boyd via USDA)

Virtual fencing won't replace all physical fencing, "especially along highways and to keep bulls from wandering into a neighboring herd," Beehler explains. 

But for every mile of barbed wire that virtual fencing replaces "costs will decline. . . and as a result the annual cost of maintaining a herd will fall, increasing profit margins," Beehler adds.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers more insight on virtual fencing benefits for farmers, the environment and wildlife here.