Sidebar by Ed Quillen
Land Use – June 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine – 5ERN4Q62K64Q
Why all the interest in Conservation Easements? One reason is that we’re undergoing an economic and cultural shift.
The economic part of the transformation starts with classical economic geography and something called “central-place theory,” which is a branch of “location theory,” which tries to explain why activities occur where they do.
That can get rather complex, but when it comes to the major agricultural activity in the mountains — livestock — there’s a reasonably simple explanation.
Start with a fair-sized city. It needs to draw 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 Thünen posed these questions in an 1826 book, The Isolated State.
Von Thünen 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 — that’s what you see around here, unless you’re near Cañon City or in the irrigated part of the San Luis Valley. 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 cowboys to prod them along.
This is strictly an economic analysis, based on the productive value of the land, and it ignores modern developments in 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 classical economics, which values land only by what it can produce. As one-time Ridgway rancher Peter Decker explained 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 brook 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.”
LIFE MIGHT BE SIMPLER here if nobody had found other economic uses for rangeland. But now that it’s possible to get 300 TV channels via the same dish that provides a high-speed Internet connection, and even rural areas enjoy overnight delivery to and from the rest of the world, etc. — people don’t have to live in cities to get the goods and services and communications that used to be available only in cities.
Add to that some cultural influences that promote privacy and a wholesome rural life “close to nature,” along with a lot of economic growth that enables some people to buy their “dream houses,” and you get 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 (only on cheap land can range livestock be raised profitably) and Conservation Easements appear to be one way to minimize the disruption and dislocation this produces.
–E.Q.
