< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Toward the end of last month, I kept getting messages from friends telling me I should drive over to Westcliffe on April 25 to observe a forum on conservation easements put on by a local property-rights group.
A conservation easement is an agreement not to develop land. The landowner, typically a rancher or farmer, sells or donates an easement to a non-profit group, generically known as a land trust.
Some land trusts are quite picky about how the landowner uses the property , while others, like the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust, just want the land kept in agricultural production and don't care much about how it is fenced, irrigated or grazed.
Since there are willing sellers and willing buyers, and
this is a market economy, I didn't see how this was a
property rights
issue, but it did make me wonder why
I've been hearing so much about conservation easements
lately.
By and large, ranches raise cattle, and the cattle go off to distant markets. So we could start there, in the eventual market, by envisioning a city which draws on its hinterland for food. Other things being equal (which of course they aren't), what sorts of agricultural activities will occur at various distances from the city?
An educated German farmer named Johann von Thnen posed
these questions in an 1826 book, The Isolated State,
which became the genesis of a variety of geography known as
central place theory.
Von Thnen considered two factors: How much are people in
the city willing to pay for various agricultural products,
and how much does it cost to ship them to market? With
increasing distance from the Town,
he wrote, the
land will progressively be given up to products cheap to
transport in relation to their value.
By his analysis, the area right outside town would hold intensive agriculture -- dairies, truck farms, orchards, and the like. These products are either heavy or perishable, so they can't stand high shipping costs. They're also fairly valuable, so they would drive out other agricultural uses.
Land would be cheaper in the next zone, devoted to crops that aren't as heavy (shipping costs are higher, after all), and not as perishable (it can take a while to get them to market). More specifically, that's where grains like wheat and corn would be grown.
Farthest out, on the cheapest land, would be range livestock like cattle and sheep. Livestock have relatively high value in relation to their bulk, and in days of yore, they could pretty much transport themselves to market with the assistance of a few drovers to prod them along.
This is strictly an economic analysis, based on the productive value of the land, and it ignores modern developments in refrigeration and transportation, but its point should be clear -- grazing is what happens on the cheapest land. Or, to put it another way, just about any other use of land pays better than grazing, assuming you can find one.
That's old-fashioned economics, which values land only
by what it can produce. One-time Ridgway rancher Peter
Decker, and former Colorado commissioner of agriculture,
explained this in his 1998 book, Old Fences, New
Neighbors
:
Well into the late 1970s, the value of a ranch was
determined by its water rights and hay-growing capacity....
Snow-capped mountains in the background and a babbling book
in the foreground did not increase a ranch's productive
value, nor did the cows concern themselves with the visual
amenities of a property, caring only that the grass and
water were plentiful.
But times have changed. Much of what people enjoy in life used to be available only in metropolitan areas. But now you can get hundreds of TV channels with a satellite dish. FedEx and UPS can delivery almost anything from anywhere to anywhere overnight. Living in a rural area used to mean enduring a degree of isolation that many people found intolerable, and that isn't the case now.
Combine those and related developments with cultural
influences that promote privacy and a wholesome rural
lifestyle that is close to nature.
Throw in some of
the money that was appearing in the 1990s.
The result is a demand for scenic rural property that has nothing to do with the productive capacity of the land.
Thus there's a high-dollar use for the land pushing against a low-dollar use, since only on cheap land can range livestock be raised profitably. This being America, it's easy to predict what's going to happen in that case.
But not until ranching was threatened by real-estate development did it dawn on many of us that it provided some pleasant by-products that had nothing to do with beef. It kept open spaces open, it provided views and wildlife habitat, and it more than paid its own way in regard to local taxes and services. Rural subdivisions, on the other hand, remove open space and habitat, and cost more in services than they pay in taxes.
Given all that, it's easy to see why there's so much interest in conservation easements. And in a century or so, maybe we'll know whether they work.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2002 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >