Ranchers tackle development

SALMON, Idaho – It’s not hard to get a bird’s-eye view of the Salmon River valley. Surrounded by steep mountains, even a short hike can put things in perspective for miles. An expanse of irrigated pastures and crops along the Salmon and Lemhi rivers adds a vibrant green to the landscape.

But the tractors crawling through those fields are not all tilling crops – several are clearing ground and excavating large rectangles.

Stacks of two-by-fours and trusses lie in neat rows, with the symmetry of haystacks. New homes are growing up and down the highways and in the tucked-away drainages of the foothills.

While Salmon’s population has remained at just more than 3,000 people, 2005 has been a record-breaking year for construction starts in Lemhi County.

Ranchers like Joe Tonsmeier feel a sense of loss when they see the survey crews pacing neighboring land. Even at his secluded Hayden Creek ranch, some 20 miles east of Salmon, people knock on his door, asking him to break off just a small chunk of his property. The amount of money the would-be subdividers offer is staggering, Tonsmeier said, and it’s all too tempting for someone struggling to make a living from the land.

So Tonsmeier and other Lemhi County ranchers and residents have formed what they see as the best chance to save the valley’s open space and agrarian lifestyle, the Lemhi Regional Land Trust. The group is raising money to give ranchers an alternative to selling their land piecemeal to developers. Tonsmeier hopes to show agricultural landowners how a conservation easement can offer ranchers capital, or significant tax advantages, without breaking up the ranch.

“When I talk about conservation easements, I see cautiousness in most people,” Tonsmeier said. “They think an easement will limit their operation or force them to offer access to their land. The truth is they’ll be able to ranch the land, and they don’t have to let anyone on their property if they don’t want to.”

He hopes large landowners will be attracted by the message. And when they are, he hopes he can find the funds to bankroll the trust.

“There are no big bucks here,” Tonsmeier said.

Unlike land trusts in the Wood River and Teton valleys, the Lemhi Regional does not have millionaire neighbors to canvass. This is the land of bake sales and quilt raffles.

Guy Bonnivier, a veteran of the land trust movement, said the Lemhi group’s humble beginnings and working-class objectives might make them appealing to charitable foundations.

Bonnivier, of Richfield, likened the Lemhi ranchers to a group he worked with on the Arizona-New Mexico border faced with some of the same pressure Tonsmeier’s fellow board members are feeling.

“They call themselves ‘the radical center,’ ” Bonnivier said of the southwestern group. “They are very, very rural ranchers who got ahead of the curve, and in the process, have received national and even worldwide attention for their approach.”

He hopes the Lemhi Regional Land Trust can follow a model like the Malpais Borderlands ranchers, keeping their focus tight.

As the Nature Conservancy’s first employee in Idaho, Bonnivier said he’s seen firsthand the consequences of a land trust getting too big to be truly community-based. “I used to be the only employee,” he said. “I knew all the neighbors. Then we kind of grew out of control.”

Bonnivier counseled the Lemhi Regional to “keep your grass roots.”

For now that won’t be much of a problem. The group is “starting from scratch,” said Tonsmeier, who came up with the idea after realizing that national organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Land Trust Alliance would only do a few projects in the Lemhi region.

The idea of any outside funding coming into the valley to ward off future development makes some residents bristle. Cindy Snook, a local real estate agent, said the origin of that money is important to her. She is wary of artificially limiting growth in the valley, a move she said could mean a “death sentence” for the area’s struggling small businesses.

Rachel Nafus, a real estate broker in Salmon, is working with an out-of-state developer on a high-end project about 10 miles east of town. The Estates at River Run has been platted on about 130 acres of the former Stephenson Ranch on the Lemhi River.

Nafus said the subdivided part of the ranch was marginal agricultural land. “If it’s not productive agriculturally, what better use for it than this?” she said. “As ag land, it’s not generating much for the county in tax dollars, but if you put 15 $500,000 homes there, that means a lot to this community.”

Tonsmeier does not aim at stopping all subdivisions. But part of the valley’s attraction to newcomers and longtime residents is its open space, he said. Large tracts of land also provide habitat for deer, elk, antelope, moose and smaller animals, he said.

If the land trust can do something to keep ranchers on their land, Tonsmeier’s mission will have been accomplished. And make no mistake – he is on a mission. That’s the only explanation for why Tonsmeier continued to push for the land trust formation in between chemotherapy treatments and a stem cell transplant designed to send a creeping cancer called multiple myeloma into remission. Any extra energy is diverted to preserving the landscape he first laid eyes on three decades ago.

“I just don’t want to see this valley get all screwed up,” he said, with just a trace of the Alabama twang he grew up with. “We’re just a bunch of local guys squeezing this work in between whatever else we’re doing because we believe in preserving the aspects of what we’ve got here.

“Without conservation easements, I don’t see anything but subdivisions in our future.”