A Park County rancher passionate about helping wildlife just signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with a conservation organization that will cover a significant portion of his cattle grazing fees in exchange for letting thousands of elk migrate through his property. And the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, which helped broker the deal, says other ranchers are already asking how they can get in on it.
Brendan Boeppel, conservation director at the land trust, said the organization has protected 800,000 acres of ranch land through conservation easements across Colorado since 1995, and that it’s exploring new ways ranchers can implement smart stewardship on their land without the “in perpetuity” condition of a traditional easement.
“Ranchers are conservationists in and of themselves,” he said, but easements don’t work well in every corner of Colorado. “We’re trying to create new tools for conservation.” Like the agreement Dave Gottenborg made with the land trust and a conservation nonprofit to let elk migrate through his 3,000-acre Eagle Rock Ranch in Park County.
Every winter Gottenborg lays down barbed-wire fencing on his ranch so migrating elk won’t get hung up in it. He assists them out of the fullness of his heart — and his bank account — because the elk trample ground his cattle graze on during the summer and inadvertently wreck fences he seems always to be fixing.
Now he’ll keep helping those elk while also saving a few bucks he normally pays other private landowners to let his cattle graze on their property.
Incentivizing conservation
The organization picking up the fees — the amount of which Gottenborg would not disclose — is the Property and Environment Research Center, which believes access across private land for wildlife like elk and grizzlies is key to their survival.
PERC started as a group of conservation-minded economists who during the height of the Cold War started asking if capitalist markets could produce bread and cars, why couldn’t they produce environmental quality?
They found their answer in incentive-based solutions to environmental problems like connecting willing buyers and sellers of water rights to resolve competing demands, and persuading policymakers to let Yellowstone National Park reduce its portion of a $22 billion deferred maintenance backlog across the National Park system by directing a portion of user fees to the problem, for instance.
PERC’s 2023 annual report, “Inspiring the Next Era of Conservation,” highlights several other public-private partnerships it has assisted and reports it has done on the efficacy of the Endangered Species Act. It has explored funding for the use of AI technology to count elk on a rancher’s property and determine the “rent” for them. And it’s behind The Root and Stem Act, which would authorize the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to use third-party funding on forest restoration and fire mitigation.
On March 26, Fox News featured PERC in a segment revealing its top 10 recommendations for the Department of the Interior “to cut so-called ‘green tape’ — as opposed to ‘red tape’ — which seeks to streamline the agency’s work.”
Among them are tripling the rate of endangered species recovery to 10% by recovering an additional 120 species, delisting grizzly bear populations in recognition of their recovery success, doubling national park fee revenues to improve stewardship by up-charging international visitors and creating co-management agreements of national monuments with tribes.
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4:00 AM MDT on Apr 3, 20255:02 PM MDT on Apr 2, 2025Not every conservation group agrees with all of PERC’s methods, however. The Center for Western Priorities criticized the organization’s view of market-based solutions as “the beginning, middle and end of conservation policy,” and The Wilderness Society said it has clashed with the organization over its “tendency to want to commoditize everything about public lands.”
Jack Wlezien, PERC’s vice president of marketing and communications, pushed back on the criticisms, citing examples of the organization’s longstanding leadership in researching and advocating for conservation leasing, and Gottenborg’s project, which “fits PERC’s ethos regarding markets and incentives as well,” he said.
Reducing rancher anxiety
Gottenborg said he has enjoyed working with PERC because they “think out of the box and they’re willing to be proactive.”
By paying his lease fees in advance and over a period of years, they’re helping to reduce the kind of frustration and anxiety he and other ranchers feel “when 500 elk show up and eat 20 pounds of forage per day, per elk,” he said.
And he said PERC is paying “more than two-thirds” of his lease rate for five years as long as the agreed-upon land remains available to foraging elk.
“We agreed to keep the payment less than 100% so it would still be more profitable for third-party landowners to keep agricultural grazing usage,” he wrote in a text. If PERC were to pay the full rate “a third-party private landowner might look at that and say, ‘Screw the cattle rancher! I don’t need cattle on my property! I’ll just lease for elk!’ And that would hurt me and all other cattle ranchers. Devastate us, really,” he added.
The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust will monitor Gottenborg’s grazing rotations via trail cameras, drones and in-person visits to make sure he’s “grazing consistent with the agreement and doing this kind of on-off approach to the pastures,” Boeppel said.
Dave Gottenborg and his wife, Jean, acquired Eagle Rock Ranch, in Jefferson, in 2012. Elk frequently migrate across the property in herds of hundreds. (Dave Gottenborg, Contributed)It’ll be business as usual for the elk, which Gottenborg said he gives no supplemental feed, “no ‘salting’ or other minerals” that would make them want to stay on his land. “The idea is to keep them moving, but, of course, they can stop if they want,” he said.
Boeppel says the public will benefit through hunting after the elk have migrated through Gottenborg’s ranch onto public land or when viewing them on Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s newest state wildlife area, the Collard Ranch, which is located in the Tarryall Valley near Eagle Rock Ranch.
Gottenborg’s one concern is pushback from hunters who think he’s going to start a private outfitter business “or perhaps try to create an elk refuge,” he said.
“No, No and NO,” he added. “I’m not a hunter although I’m not opposed to hunting. Hunters will likely say, ‘the elk belong to the people of Colorado and we should have the right to shoot them.’ Yes, they are right. But the rancher’s retort to what the hunter has to say is, ‘then why don’t you come around and feed them once in a while in the winter?’”
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