{"id":42263,"date":"2022-02-11T00:09:01","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T07:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/a-record-number-of-coloradans-pursue-conservation-easements-as-land-water-prices-increase\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:06:26","slug":"a-record-number-of-coloradans-pursue-conservation-easements-as-land-water-prices-increase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/a-record-number-of-coloradans-pursue-conservation-easements-as-land-water-prices-increase\/","title":{"rendered":"A record number of Coloradans pursue conservation easements as land, water prices increase"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Warner spends a morning checking on his cattle and on the men who are working his family ranch near Fort Lupton, Colorado. \"The cows are kind of like children-they run and play and have foot races. I just like to be around them.\" ((Kathryn Scott\/Special to The Colorado Sun)
Bob Warner spends a morning checking on his cattle and on the men who are working his family ranch near Fort Lupton, Colorado. \"The cows are kind of like children-they run and play and have foot races. I just like to be around them.\" ((Kathryn Scott\/Special to The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Tony Caligiuri was ready for it to fall apart.<\/p>\n

Instead, the pandemic gave conservation in Colorado a boost. Soaring land values, spiking prices for water, legislation boosting incentives for landowners who protect their land and growing pressure to develop open land has fueled a record year for conservation easements in Colorado.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were bracing ourselves for the whole business to collapse, but it\u2019s done the exact opposite,\u201d said Caligiuri, the head of Colorado Open Lands, which has protected 637,000 acres in 668 easements since 1981.<\/p>\n

The past year has been the busiest ever for the nonprofit Colorado Open Lands. And the coming year looks even busier.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe incentives have never been better and we have never seen this much demand in 40 years,\u201d said Caligiuri, whose group has merged with five other land trusts in the past five years. \u201cIt\u2019s just been exponential growth. We have a waiting list of 100 projects. Demand is growing faster than we can keep up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only a few years ago, Colorado Open Lands was handling about six easements a year. Now they are doing 25 deals with landowners who are earning more to forever protect their land from development.<\/p>\n

Last year, Colorado Open Lands launched a campaign to raise $3 million to support landowners pursuing easements. The trust has recently hired five new employees for both conservation work and stewarding land that is set aside for conservation.<\/p>\n

\u2018This place needs to stay in agriculture\u2019<\/div>\n

Bob Warner\u2019s parents started farming and ranching near Fort Lupton more than a century ago. He was born on the farm 85 years ago. The Colorado State University graduate and Air Force pilot who flew for Continental Airlines for 38 years grows hay, alfalfa and corn on about 1,500 acres. He raises cattle there, too. From his home he can see the farmhouse where he was born and the one-room schoolhouse where he learned to read and write.<\/p>\n

\"Bob
Bob Warner\u2019s ranch foreman Patrick Hladky, coaxes calves across the road to where they will pasture with their mothers. (Kathryn Scott\/Special to The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Now he\u2019s locking up his land in a conservation easement that will keep his family\u2019s fields forever filled with cattle, grasses and corn. He spent 46 years serving on boards for three conservation districts that overlap his property, including the Platte Valley Conservation District, the West Adams Conservation District and the Southeast Weld Conservation District.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve spent a lot of years working to keep land in conservation and in agriculture in perpetuity,\u201d he said. \u201cI guess now it\u2019s my turn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner, who is working with both the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Colorado Open Lands to protect his family\u2019s property from development, said he\u2019s practiced conservation on his land \u201cfor all my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s planted thousands of trees to protect his fields from wind. His father, J.C. Warner, participated in the federal government\u2019s Soil Bank Program in the 1950s and 1960s, which saw farmers fallow acreage in exchange for rental payments from the government as a way to protect soil and better control the flow of crops to market.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis place needs to stay in agriculture,\u201d said Warner, who sees grazing as a way to help land managers better control grasses on open plains. \u201cWe can\u2019t have these places developed. We can\u2019t turn everything into homes. We need land to remain as farms and ranches as a way to manage our land.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Cows
Cows and their calves walk through a snowy pasture on Bob Warner\u2019s ranch near Fort Lupton. Warner is placing his family spread under a conservation easement. (Kathryn Scott\/Special to The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Last year, Colorado lawmakers passed House Bill 1233, which removes bureaucratic barriers in the conservation easement process and increases the tax credit a landowner can claim when they place their land in an easement. The law allows landowners to obtain tax credits up to 90% of value of the conservation easement on their property, up from 50%.<\/p>\n

That value is based on the development potential of a property, so landowners can get a big tax break.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis makes the playing field much more level in terms of producers and farmers thinking about selling their property but not selling to a developer,\u201d said Carmen Farmer, a project manager with Colorado Open Lands. \u201cThey can get close to the whole value of their property and remain on their property and keep it protected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Farmer is quick to point out that the benefits of conservation easements reach beyond the farmers, ranchers and longtime owners of wide-open spaces.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrivate land conservation is a public benefit,\u201d she said, pointing to the protections of wildlife habitat, views and agriculture that supports rural economies.<\/p>\n

Last year Colorado lawmakers rejected a proposal to set aside $149 million to pay reparations to landowners whose eligibility for the pre-2013 tax breaks was denied by the state Department of Revenue. Many families and farmers said they had followed the rules when placing their land under conservation easements, but investigations more than a decade ago found some valuations were inflated or even fraudulent.<\/p>\n

Agricultural families in Colorado have been feeling increased pressure in recent years as the state\u2019s population grows and communities seek more space to grow.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom decreasing prices and increasing regulatory pressures, figuring out how to make a living while keeping land open for wildlife and continuing the legacy of ag in Colorado can feel impossible,\u201d said Colorado Sen. Kerry Donovan, an Eagle County rancher and Democrat who sponsored last year\u2019s legislation that increased the incentives for landowners who protect their land. \u201cConservation easements are a tool for Colorado to protect what defines this state: the hardworking Western spirit tied to the rivers and the mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donovan has spent several years working with agricultural communities to find ways to protect their heritage. She said the legislation last year was a culmination of years of work trying to build up conservation easements to create financial stability for the state\u2019s ranchers and farmers. The work is not over, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cColorado will have to continue to find ways to support ag if decades from now we still want mountain valleys and wide-open plains to be free of vacation home development,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The increased incentive for landowners has pushed many of them into action, said Rob Bleiberg, the director of the Colorado West Land Trust, which holds about 500 conservation easements protecting 126,000 acres in Delta, Gunnison, Mesa, Montrose, Ouray and San Miguel counties. He\u2019s seeing about twice the number of landowners ready to protect their land.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe increased incentive is making these projects pencil out better for landowners,\u201d he said. \u201cIt takes a project that was maybe not viable and made them a win-win for the landowner and the people of Colorado, who value wildlife habitat, open vistas and open space conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the incentives that are driving interest in easements. Land prices, along with all real estate prices in Colorado, are exploding. Same for the prices Front Range municipalities will pay for water that comes with large properties. Some farmers have water rights that are more valuable than their land, Caligiuri said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWater rights are definitely driving values right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"Cattle
Cattle line up near a red barn on Bob Warner\u2019s historic ranch near Fort Lupton. The retired airline pilot was born on the ranch 85 years ago and wants it to be preserved in perpetuity. (Kathryn Scott\/Special to The Colorado Sun)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

In addition to farmers with water rights, more ranchers are coming around to easements as a way to stabilize their operations in a market where cattle prices plummeted during the pandemic after restaurants closed, Caligiuri said.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the land-rich, cash-poor farmers and ranchers who are pursuing conservation easements. New buyers are joining the easement movement as well. Buyers who line up conservation easements for new properties \u201care seeing their dollars go further,\u201d Caligiuri said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a lot of landowners are realizing this is the right window for a conservation easement,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to think of a better time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new law offers landowners securing tax credits worth 90% of the value of the conservation easement on their property<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42264,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-42263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"Website Administrator","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85278,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42263\/revisions\/85278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42263"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=42263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}