DENVER – U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet pushed federal agriculture officials Thursday regarding concerns around conservation programs.

During the Senate Agriculture Committee, Bennet, D-Colorado, pointed to a new Agricultural Lands Easement program included in this year’s Farm Bill. The program provides grants to purchase conservation easements that permanently restrict development on important farm lands and ranches.

The goal of the voluntary program is to create agreements that will ensure that land stays in agriculture.

But Bennet said the mission of the program is being diluted by complicated legal interpretations and overall bureaucracy.

“We have heard very severe concerns from Coloradans about NRCS’s implementation of the new Agricultural Lands Easement program,” Bennet told Jason Weller, chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Farmers and ranchers in Colorado rightly believe that they had a huge hand in writing these provisions to begin with, because they did,” Bennet said.

He pointed to complications with right-of-way requests.

“The legal interpretation made no sense to anybody that had anything to do with drafting the legislation, including the Cattlemen’s Land Trust,” Bennet said.

Colorado has 29 land trusts that are members of the Land Trust Alliance, and they have protected more than 1.1 million acres using conservation easements alone, according to the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust.

Weller said he understood the concerns and would work with Bennet to ease some of the burdens.

“It’s very concerning to me that there’s a perception, or a real experience, about additional bureaucracy,” Weller said. “We need to reduce that or get it out of the way.”

He described land ownership in the West as a checkerboard.

“This is a problem that we need to fix,” Weller said.

pmarcus@durangoherald.com