Contact: Liz Brimmer, 307.690.1910
Lara Ryan, 307.690.9266

Pinedale – The launch of the Wyoming Land Trust will help more ranching families statewide keep land within their families, and significantly strengthen Wyoming landowners’ ability to keep wildlife, scenic viewsheds and open spaceS available for generations to come.

After 10 years of working positively in one of the state’s most intensive energy development areas, the Green River Valley Land Trust will expand into a statewide trust called the Wyoming Land Trust. Please follow this video link for a launch description and key sound: www.youtube.com/grvlandtrust.

“Ever-increasing requests throughout Wyoming led us to take the important step to serve landowning families statewide,” said GRVLT and WLT Board Member Dave Bell. “Wyoming people want to build the Wyoming they want – to maintain the unique character that defines us and also grow our economy,” he said.

“The Wyoming Land Trust makes that balance a priority,” Bell said.

“We began in one of the core energy producing areas of our State, and worked hand-in-hand successfully with energy developers and ranchers to conserve and inspiring pieces of Wyoming,” Bell added. “We will help landowners throughout Wyoming to keep it in the family – literally.”

"Mark Twain said, 'In the West whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.' Land in Wyoming is a lot like water. Thankfully there are organizations such as the Wyoming Land Trust that help to bring people together by focusing on their shared values," U.S. Senator Mike Enzi said. "We can use the land and preserve it for the future. The Wyoming Land Trust is here to show us how."

The Wyoming Land Trust will facilitate conservation easement donations, purchase conservation easements, steward conservation easements, educate the public and work collaboratively with other land trusts. These services will help landowners conserve Wyoming’s natural and agricultural resources privately, voluntarily and without any additional government regulation.

The success of the Green River Valley Land Trust will be celebrated at a 10-year anniversary party on July 17th on the Brown family's conserved Green River Ranch near Daniel, Wyoming. Governor Dave Freudenthal will be the keynote speaker. Event details: www.grvlandtrust.org/gannett.html

In 10 years the Green River Valley Land Trust demonstrated “landownercenteredsolutions that protected and enhanced the area’s quality of life –economically, visually, culturally and sustainably,” said Larry Wolfe, a WLT Board member.

“All this with market-based secure solutions. A stronger combined future resulted for ranching families, wildlife and energy producers, who found they benefited from on the ground solutions,” Wolfe said.

Lara Ryan, GRVLT and now WLT executive director said, “Every day, all across Wyoming, people are looking for the best answers for the future so that we get it right. Integral to that is making sure future generations can see and enjoy the Wyoming that we all love so dearly today.”

“We can all come together to think about what the Wyoming we want looks like, and how conservation and energy mitigation can help,” said Ryan. “Ten years of working in Sublette County in varying economic climates, gives us a unique experience as a land trust. We want to help statewide with mitigation, conservation and keeping production agriculture active in Wyoming’s future.”

“Wyoming landowners are central to providing clean air and water, wildlife habitat, migration routes, agriculture heritage and scenic views -- can you imagine what would be lost without their presence? We need as a state to keep it in the family,” Ryan said.

WLT board members and Ryan emphasized that with more than 10 quadrillion BTUs of energy produced in Wyoming annually, there is plenty of work for all land trusts and partners in Wyoming.

“Wyoming is blessed and extremely fortunate to have a number of organizations that help landowners conserve the things they love about our state – the Wyoming Stockgrowers Agricultural Land Trust, the Jackson Hole Land Trust, the Conservation Fund, the Sheridan Community Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy, and great partners like the Natural Resource Conservation Service, Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Wyoming Conservation Districts, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation, Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited and more. These groups have made a real difference in Wyoming and should be celebrated and supported.”

"Our work gives landowners, especially agricultural landowners, choices. These choices are right for some and not for others. But they let landowners and their families plan for the future of their land together as best they can,” Ryan said.

“We are taking the opportunity we had in Sublette County and expanding it across Wyoming communities with a statewide board and an organization working throughout the state. There is a lot of great work being done throughout the state – we hope we can add positively to that mix.”

Ryan also noted that the WLT will continue to headquarter from Pinedale. “We know where our home is. Our Wyoming Land Trust headquarters will be where our landowner focus began.”

The Green River Valley Land Trust was the first accredited land trust in Wyoming, and that accreditation will carry over to the Wyoming Land Trust.

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Background:
Below is a background material on the Wyoming Land Trust and its mission.

Wyoming Land Trust Website: www.wyominglandtrust.org

Some friends of ours have a ranch that straddles a county road.  Unpaved, the road draws traffic mostly in fair weather.  In the spring, and after summer thunderstorms, they use their tractor to haul unknowing travelers out of the ditch and through the gumbo back to the pavement.  Locals use the main highway when things are wet.  But, dry weather incites a stream of outfits which kick up red dust formed in the Triassic era.  It sifts through the windows of the house, all over the saddles in the tack shed and powders the plants along the road. 

Several generations ago, the landowners granted the access easement to the county.  It changed the character of the place completely and with ever-increasing vehicle traffic and all that it brings, it just becomes more and more of a nuisance.  More trespass, cattle guards and fences to deal with.  Beer cans and trash.  And that dang dust!  They’ve lost a few good dogs, too. 

A few sections of land got sold along the way, as well.  Square houses in rainbow shades are scattered randomly across old pasture like so many dice out of a shake-a-day cup.  But, my friends nod to knowing it’s what the family thought was the right thing to do at the time.  Had to.

Landowners make decisions that affect their family’s future on a daily basis.  The ones that last the longest are the ones that convey rights to the land in perpetuity—access agreements, power line and pipeline rights of way, conservation easements and the sale of deeded ground.  Most final is the sale of the whole place—that is about as forever as it gets. 

The decision to do any of these things is never made lightly and the consequences are felt for generations.  My great—great grandfather’s sale of the family shipyard is something I mourned, even though I had never seen it or known him.  Ship models and photographs at Mystic Seaport Museum and a small collection of ships’ logs, cargo share certificates and other old paperwork in attic trunks provided a glimpse into a past that I might have inherited but didn’t.  My family, New Englanders for over a dozen generations, is no longer where we started. Interestingly, I somehow found myself working with traditional sailing vessels not unlike those built for J.D. Dewell’s Sutton Fleet with some sort of genetic allegiance for 20 years.  Then I moved west.

Here in Wyoming, I have had the good fortune to make many friends in the ranching business.  Some are lucky enough to be on the same place as their homesteader forbearers.  Others, many of them graduates of UW’s ag college, search for ways they, too, can get back to something their ancestors gave up. 

As Americans, we place great value on many of the rights we enjoy, especially those concerning private property.  In our ever—changing world, where the only constant is change, new threats to the home place continue to surface.  And so do new opportunities. 

The price of beef is down.  The value of wildlife is up.  And whoever would have imagined trophy ranchers and second homeowners would drive the real estate value of a working ranch out of the hands of anyone not lucky enough to inherit?  Or able to pay the taxes even if they did?

The opportunity to raise capital sometimes comes at the cost of severing all the rights to some - or all - of the family property.   Conservation easements can facilitate the transfer of just some of the rights to all, or a portion, of the property.  I think of it as having the choice to divide property along shallower, horizontal lines rather than an all-encompassing vertical split.  Is one better than another?  Only the landowner can make that decision: each family situation, each ranch—and the land ownership and patterns of use which surround it—are different. 

As each generation of our respective families has learned, things change.  New choices become available…or are necessary. 

Landowners throughout the country have increasing new opportunities to earn income for “ecosystem services” —the provision of shelter and forage for wildlife, watersheds allowing the unfettered return of water into the creeks and rivers they feed, and of course the wide-open spaces that define the west.  While ranchers and farmers have always provided these natural resources, the idea of the public supporting the agricultural operator’s effort and ability to do so is a recent phenomenon.

The sale of a conservation easement is a mechanism to provide such income through the use of funds dedicated for those purposes.  The donation of a conservation easement can help ranching families with the transfer of their land-rich, cash-poor wealth.  Many families choose to do a combination of both, which we refer to as a “bargain sale.” 

Our land trust is currently working with three families in two different parts of our state on such bargain sales.  They all descend from original Wyoming homesteaders, they all make their living through the production of cattle and hay, the sale of minerals they own, and the grant of access to sportsmen and energy companies.  They all are keenly committed to keeping their property in agriculture.  They cannot imagine it ever being used for anything else.  Two of the families want to reduce the estate tax burden for their children.  One of them has no heirs.

What will they do with the cash?  The family with young children is looking forward to paying down a bank note.  Coming from a large family themselves, they have worked hard and taken on substantial financial risk to strike out on their own.  Another family looks forward to maintaining their family’s ranching legacy—a legacy which dates back to territorial times—and adding some additional acreage between their place and a rapidly expanding sub—division along the forest boundary.

The third family has no heirs.  With very deep roots in and a keen understanding of their county’s history, along with an appreciation for all of the resources their place provides—excellent pasture and hay ground, natural gas, trout fishing, migration corridors, winter range and breeding grounds for many species—they are dedicated to keeping it intact and utilized in this way into the future.  They would very much like to see it passed along to a young working rancher in the future.  By removing the potential for development on their acreage in the most rapidly expanding county in the state, it brings that desire closer to reality by ensuring the land is valued only for agriculture once they are gone, and not at full market value for its appraised “highest and best use”.  The cash component enables the consideration of retirement.

As is the case with fellow agricultural land trusts, the Wyoming Stock Growers Land Trust cannot keep up with the current interest in and demand for purchased easements, even at a bargain sale.   An ever-increasing number of landowners believe a conservation easement is a tool they can use to the benefit of their family and their operation.  Are they for everyone?  No, but I can’t think of anything that is.  Thankfully, we have choices.

This column appears in the Fall 2009 edition of Cow Country: The official magazine of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.

Visit www.wsgalt.org for more information.