A Salida rancher asks if it’s time to rethink permanent conservation easements. “Perpetuity is not working.” ...Middle East

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Art Hutchinson and his daughter Abby had a plan to counter the soaring costs of running their 800 acres of quiet green pastures between bustling Salida and Poncha Springs. 

Why not host a two-night bluegrass concert with camping? The organizer promised cash for every ticket and an army of volunteers to prep the ranch and clean it up after the event.

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The Campout for the Cause gathering would be bigger than the weddings, educational events, hay rides and pumpkin patches the Hutchinsons regularly host to augment dwindling revenue from raising cattle. An annual camping festival could generate revenue to maybe cover expenses for half a year. 

So after 18 months of negotiating with the founder of Campout and securing Chaffee County approvals, the Hutchinsons agreed to what could have led to a multiyear deal that would be financially similar to the conservation easements the Hutchinson family reached for the property more than a decade ago.

“This would have really helped us maintain and supplement the income we have. We really needed this,” Art Hutchinson said. “This is not a trophy ranch for an owner who just wants to play. We have been good stewards of this land for more than 150 years. It’s not like we were trying to build Bandimere Speedway out here.”

After the organizer sold about 1,500 tickets for the event, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, which holds conservation easements on portions of the Hutchinson Ranch, denied the Campout for the Cause festival. It was the biggest event the conservation group had ever reviewed, and the trust’s board found the event too big and the impacts too intense for the oldest family-owned ranch in the Upper Arkansas River Valley. 

The Lakewood-based land trust has since 1995 worked with more than 400 Colorado families like the Hutchinsons, negotiating easements that prevent permanent development and protect the agricultural heritage on more than 800,000 acres across the state.

“That legacy is very important to me and the family. We have 150 years of producing responsible cattle and taking care of a community. That has all changed. There are not many farms in this nation that last past four generations,” 73-year-old Hutchinson said. “There’s a reason for that. I’m not saying we are going to go bankrupt, but the way we are going is no longer sustainable and it’s keeping us up at night. The money is running out. Something has got to change. 

Art Hutchinson (first picture) is hoping the rules governing conservation easements will change to allow ranchers some flexibility when it comes to expanding operations on land governed by such pacts. The open air barn (second picture) at the Hutchinson Ranch near Salida hosts events likes weddings, bar mitzvahs and funerals. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“We are getting boxed in by development on both sides. Costs are going up and our ability to even drive across the street has changed. Land values have soared. Everything costs us so much more,” he said. “We need to take a solid look at these older easements and see how they can be adjusted to address these changes.”

Federal lawmakers from North Dakota and Wyoming in April proposed legislation that would prohibit federal land managers from inking easements longer than 30 years. The legislation would reform conservation easements by allowing landowners to renegotiate terms and possibly buy back easements at market value. 

“Easements shouldn’t last multiple generations,” U.S. Rep. Julie Fedorak, a Republican from North Dakota who introduced the Landowner Easement Right Act, said in a statement announcing her bill. “This bill restores balance, gives landowners flexibility, and allows them the freedom to reassess, renegotiate, and reclaim control over their property. Conservation should be a partnership, not a one-sided permanent restriction.”   

An aerial view of Hutchinson Ranch. (Mike Sweeney, The Colorado Sun)

“What is not in alignment are the values needed to keep this ranch going” 

The Colorado conservation easement tax credit program launched in 2000, offering landowners $100,000 per easement. The program was capped at $22 million in 2011, $34 million in 2013 and has remained capped at $45 million since 2014. The tax credit limit per easement has grown from $260,000 in 2003 to $1.5 million. Funding for easements comes from Great Outdoors Colorado, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, local and municipal open-space taxes, nonprofit conservation groups and federal programs. 

A 2017 study of Colorado’s conservation easement tax credit program by Colorado State University showed Colorado taxpayers realizing $4 to $12 in public benefit from protected private land for $1 invested in conservation easements. The study defined those benefits as protecting water, wildlife and clean air while improving the financial viability of local food production. 

Hutchinson is a fifth-generation Colorado rancher. Now, his daughter Abby runs cattle on the acreage homesteaded by Joseph Hutchinson in the 1860s. They welcome wedding and graduation parties. They host a few anglers and hunters. A few thousand local schoolkids visit the property’s renovated homestead every year. 

Hutchinson’s dad was a veterinarian. Hutchinson spent more than 30 years with the National Park Service, including serving as superintendent of Great Sand Dunes National Park down the road from his ranch. You have to have a day job to make ends meet as a not-corporate cattle rancher, he said. And you have to seek revenue everywhere. Including giving away development rights. 

The Hutchinson family in 2010 negotiated an easement protecting 180 acres with the Land Trust of the Upper Arkansas. The cattlemen’s land trust, working with the Trust for Public Land and funding from Great Outdoors Colorado, Chaffee County, Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Natural Resources Conservation Service protected 470 acres of the 800-acre Hutchinson Ranch in two easements purchased in 2011 and 2013. The easements helped the ranching operation stay with the Hutchinson family who created the ranch in the years after the Civil War. 

“To have provided Abby Hutchinson with an opportunity to carry on the family’s rich ranching heritage in the Upper Arkansas Valley is very gratifying,” Chris West, the cattlemen’s trust director, said in 2013.

The family in 2015 donated the renovated original homestead, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, to the town of Poncha Springs. The nonprofit Guidestone Colorado operates the Hutchinson Homestead and Learning Center as a venue that offers agricultural education events for as many as 3,000 local students a year.

This year, the Hutchinsons let go of the family’s century-old grazing lease on Forest Service land up nearby Marshall Pass, saying it was too much work to run about 30 head of cattle alongside motorized recreation up there. 

“Look, I understand the conservation values we need for keeping the ranch beautiful and viable. We are not naive about taking care of the land,” Hutchinson said. “Our values are in alignment with Colorado Cattlemen’s, but what is not in alignment are the values needed to keep this ranch going.” 

“Intensity beyond what we or other land trusts … have seen”

Erik Glenn is the head of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust. He’s been part of the organization since 2008 and his family homesteaded a ranch in the Upper Arkansas River Valley shortly after the Hutchinsons, in the late 1800s. His uncle still works the property. 

The cattlemen’s trust often gets applications for events but “the scale and intensity of the Hutchinson event was beyond what we or other land trusts in the state have seen,” Glenn said. 

A majority of the land trust’s board are ranchers who are running cattle operations and the board determined Campout for the Cause “was not compatible with the easement terms,” Glenn said. 

When the Hutchinson family scripted the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust easements for their property in 2011 and 2013, state law allowed them to claim tax credits of 50% of the value of the land up to $750,000, “which is nothing,” Glenn said. 

Times have changed, Glenn said, both with those payments and the pressures on families working to produce food in Colorado’s mountain valleys. And he wishes the state would help more.

Our values are in alignment with Colorado Cattlemen’s, but what is not in alignment are the values needed to keep this ranch going.

— Art Hutchinson

Last year Colorado lawmakers raised the annual cap on tax credits available to donors of conservation easements to $50 million, up from $45 million, which was in response to the Colorado Division of Conservation often hitting the $45 million cap and creating a waiting list for easement applicants. 

The land trust community was pushing lawmakers to raise the cap by $30 million to better help ranchers and farmers, Glenn said. Instead they got a $5 million boost.

The new legislation allows donors to claim 80% of the market value of the donated acres, down from 90% of market value set in 2021 legislation. Senate Bill 126 last year also increased the annual tax credits that can be returned to easement donors to $200,000 a year, up from $50,000 a year.  

The 30-year-old cattlemen’s land trust has seen about 40% of its ranchers with conservation easements sell their land. Of course, the easements remain. But many of the buyers — especially in the boom after the pandemic — are owners who do not necessarily need income from the property to pay the bills. 

“Our neighbors’ properties are trophy homes,” Hutchinson said. “That could be where we are headed.”

The challenge of perpetuity 

The deal with the Hutchinsons made a lot of sense, said Scotty Stoughton, who founded Campout for the Cause in 2009 as a grassroots festival that supports a variety of charitable groups. He and his team at Bonfire Entertainment spent more than 18 months working with the Hutchinsons. He planned to give the family $25 for every ticket he sold. He promised to replace an aging well and mobilize his Campout volunteers at the ranch for the summer. 

There were no plans for any fires, fire rings or permanent structures on the property. Parking was going to be on the edge of the ranch’s irrigated pastures. The plan called for a mobile stage and lots of tents. 

“We all thought this was a great idea to work with the ranch and direct money to them and build something up that would be a sustainable community gathering,” Stoughton said. “I never had any indication that the decision was not up to them. I’m pretty sure they didn’t know it was not up to them.”

Stoughton has pivoted to a new iteration of the September event, calling it Smalltown for the Cause. He moved the music to Riverside Park in Salida and set up camping a few miles downstream. It’s not the original plan for a contained camping festival, but his loyal attendees appear ready for the shift. 

“We really saw this as an ideal way to rethink how we can progress and support local farmers and ranchers,” he said. 

In 2022, Chaffee County approved first-ever regulations that allow private landowners to open parcels for commercial camping. The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust helped the county craft the regulations, which allow up to five campsites on 100 acres or 10 sites on parcels larger than 100 acres.  

Land trusts across the state are working with landowners to accommodate new revenue channels. Weddings are wildly popular. So are carbon-sequestering projects that pay farmers and ranchers to leave native grasses untilled in exchange for payment. 

The cattlemen’s land trust five years ago launched its “Additive Conservation Program” for owners who already have easements. That program delivers support for owners who improve river and wildlife habitat, grasslands or water infrastructure. 

That’s another way for ranchers to earn money. 

“An easement is a one-time cash infusion, but we have got to find a way to go back in and help the third and fourth generation of owners,” said Glenn, noting that new generations of ranchers can often be at odds with older generations as they develop easements. 

The cattlemen’s land trust has not rejected many requests from its easement donors, Glenn said, saying the group also works with landowners to anticipate future revenue opportunities. 

“So you build these terms at the time you are negotiating the deal and you try to build in flexibility to adjust to a changing environment over time, which we know will happen,” Glenn said. “But that’s hard to track and foresee what will happen in 15 to 20 years and even harder when you have to think about 50 to 100 years.”

A key phrase in every conservation easement is “into perpetuity,” meaning that the protections last forever. Is a 30-year easement the answer? It could be, Glenn said. 

“I do not object to new ways to look at doing this,” he said. “These are challenges seen across the West.”

Hutchinson agrees. 

“I can see the handwriting on the wall,” he said. “Perpetuity is not working with the way this state has changed.”

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