LIVINGSTON — When Robert Anderson looks out across the ranch his great uncle purchased in the Trail Creek drainage about 100 years ago, he sees an intact piece of agricultural land that has survived generations of familial and economic pressures. If the ranch has resisted residential encroachm ent for this long, “it needs to continue forever,” he said of the decision he and his wife, Valerie, made this May to put their 884-acre property into a conservation easement that will preserve it as open, working land.  The money for the easement was made possible by the Northern Yellowstone Open Lands initiative, a project launched by Gallatin Valley Land Trust in 2022 to conserve agricultural land and wildlife migration corridors at the landscape scale. Robert was the first landowner in Park County to secure some of the initial $7.8 million grant the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded to the land trust to support the initiative.  In the waning days of the Biden administration, the land trust received another, more substantial round of funding — $25 million —  to build on the program’s initial success. But this summer, the federal government informed GVLT that the funding had been rescinded. The Trump administration’s USDA insists that the program included “burdensome climate guardrails.” But in Park County, where nearly 40,000 acres of once open land have been lost to low-density development since 2000, residents lament the weakening of a new program to protect “old Montana” that was just starting to gain momentum. “That’s unfortunate that $25 million got nixed,” Robert said in a recent interview with Montana Free Press. “There’s been a lot of interest [for additional easements].”  Paradise Valley ranches are seen on Aug. 7, 2025. Robert, 70, said he knows other ranchers in Park County in their 70s and 80s who would consider participating in the conservation program if the $25 million hadn’t been eliminated. Some of these landowners are preparing to hand off the family ranch to the next generation, he said, while others don’t have someone lined up to assume operations. What they have in common is a desire to keep the land they’ve spent a lifetime stewarding intact, Robert said.  With a conservation easement on a property, “you can’t sell it and subdivide it and get the big bucks,” Robert said, adding that for him, heritage is more important than money. The concerns that Robert holds about the loss of working lands and open space are widely shared, both locally and statewide. According to property tax data analyzed by Headwaters Economics, a nonpartisan research group, 37,600 acres of land in Park County were converted to housing between 2000 and 2021. Statewide, that figure is approximately 1 million acres, roughly equivalent to Glacier National Park’s acreage. Montanans are wary of the change. A 2024 poll of 500 Montana voters commissioned by the University of Montana’s Crown of the Continent program found that 59% of respondents reported development sprawling into open and working lands as being an “extremely” or “very” serious problem. That represents a 7 percentage-point increase from 2022. In a questionnaire disseminated by the Park County Community Foundation, 62% of respondents reported concerns about the amount of agricultural land being subdivided in Park County, a 4 percentage-point increase from 2022. Ninety-five percent of respondents said it’s important to preserve natural resources such as water for future generations. Satellite imagery recorded in 1998 and August, 2025, demonstrates open space loss near Pray, Montana, as previously undeveloped parcels of land are converted into ranchettes. Credit: Google Earth Robert’s grandfather’s brother, Sidney Nesbit, acquired the Trail Creek property about 100 years ago. In 1961, Robert’s father died, leaving his mother a widow with four young kids to care for when she was just 34 years old. Still, she held on to the ranch. In 1980, Robert bought it from her for $250,000. Since then, he’s generally followed her lead, growing hay on some of it and leasing the rest to a nearby ranch that grazes cattle on it. Although Robert has made few changes to the ranch, he now estimates its value at $10 million, an eye-watering sum for someone who spent much of his adult life building houses, driving semi-trucks and working in slaughterhouses.  Situated on either side of an old stagecoach route between Bozeman and Yellowstone National Park, the ranch’s location and topography help explain its rise in value. Trail Creek flows through the Andersons’ land, which includes views of 10,000-foot peaks in the Absaroka Range that define Paradise Valley’s eastern edge. Bozeman, a “Zoomtown” that hosts the state’s busiest airport, is a 45-minute drive away.  The Anderson property’s gentle slope along an otherwise wrinkled and rolling drainage makes it a particularly appealing spot for a residential development, Valerie said during a recent conversation at her and Robert’s 1,400-square-foot home, which is decorated with an assortment of cuckoo clocks and long-lived but still-vibrant houseplants. “If this turned into a subdivision, there would be 100 homes on it in a heartbeat, because it’s flat,” she said. Development at that scale would have implications for wildlife habitat and groundwater, Valerie said, adding that she and Robert are committed to keeping the property in agricultural production “so at least part of it stays like what I grew up with — old Montana.” Conservation easements are held in perpetuity — forever — and that’s something that gives many landowners and policymakers pause, as evidenced by Montana lawmakers’ proposals to restrict or prohibit perpetual easements in 2023 and again in 2025. But Robert said he’s made peace with the permanence feature, in part because it’s protective of agricultural uses. “Cows still walk on four feet, right? They still eat grass, no matter what happens in the technology industry. If we start living on the moon, you aren’t going to take any cows with you,” he said. “This is cattle country.” From Gallatin Valley Land Trust’s headquarters in Bozeman, Chet Work told MTFP that losing the $25 million was particularly disappointing because it would have enabled his organization to continue reaching a broader cross-section of landowners. With the funding, the organization had hoped to conserve 20,000 acres of land in Park County. Most of the conservation easements GVLT works on are donated, explained Work, who has served as the organization’s executive director since 2020. For those arrangements, the land trust works with wealthy property owners who offset sizable tax bills by putting land into a conservation easement. But for families like the Andersons, who garner much of their income from agriculture, the land trust can pay them using federal money from frameworks like the Regional Conservation Partnership Program. Even then, the purchase price is significantly lower than fair market value. Erica Lighthiser and Max Hjortsberg, co-directors of Park County Environmental Council, discussed that dynamic in a recent phone call with MTFP. Max Hjortsberg and Erica Lighthiser, Managing Directors for Park Country Environmental Council, stand together for a portrait on Aug. 7, 2025, at Livingston Airport. Credit: Lauren Miller, Montana Free Press, CatchLight Local/Report for America “A lot of ranching families can’t really take advantage of the tax credits that a wealthier landowner could,” Lighthiser said. “[The North Yellowstone Open Lands program] seemed like a really neat solution to help some of these working ranches stay working ranches.” Hjortsberg said the North Yellowstone Open Lands initiative had just started gaining momentum, so the loss of funding was all the more disappointing. “That $25 million would have gone a long way with quite a few families in Park County to securing their land and their ranching legacy,” he said. Work isn’t throwing in the towel on the Park County initiative, though. He said he’s hopeful Congress will replenish funding for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, which was initially established in the 2014 Farm Bill and significantly expanded by the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Some of the funding loss was the prerogative of the Trump administration, which has made undoing many of the Biden administration’s environmental and climate policies a top priority. But Congress played a role in the funding reduction, too, according to Jeremy Lougee with the Land Trust Alliance, a national organization that provides training and advocacy for local land trusts. A section of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act the Republican-controlled Congress passed this summer clawed back unobligated funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivized renewable energy development and climate resilience initiatives with an assortment of grants, loans and tax credits. Regional Conservation Partnership Program funding was caught up in the funding rescission, Lougee said.  Work said his understanding is that funding for the program was tapped to fill a $1 billion budget hole. Gallatin Valley Land Trust will apply for Regional Conservation Partnership Program funding again, he said.  “We’ve always been an organization that has worked within the system. That system has changed, and so will we,” he said.  A USDA spokesperson wrote in an email to MTFP that money for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program was rescinded because it placed “burdensome climate guardrails on the funding.” Asked for information on working land and agricultural preservation initiatives generally, the spokesperson highlighted a sister program, the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, which seeks to limit  nonagricultural uses of working farms and ranches, and conserve and protect wetlands. That program is set to receive $625 million in fiscal year 2026, according to the spokesperson.  While GVLT also works with that program, it maintains that the Regional Conservation Partnership Program is a better fit because it allows for meaningful progress at the landscape — rather than individual property — scale.  U.S. Rep. Troy Downing, a Republican who represents the eastern half of the state, including Park County, did not return MTFP’s request for comment on funding for land conservation. Gabby Wiggins, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, wrote in an email to MTFP that Daines “supports the Regional Conservation Partnership Program’s efforts to protect Montana agricultural lands through conservation and responsible management through private ownership.” Montana’s senior senator is “in close contact with” U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and “other relevant members of the administration” regarding support for Montana’s farms and ranches, she added. Alan Redfield is a former state lawmaker and agriculture teacher who recently put a 1,570-acre ranch near Pray, Montana, into a conservation easement.  Credit: Amanda Eggert/MTFP Alan Redfield, who put 1,570 acres into an easement agreement about the same time the Andersons did, told MTFP from his cattle ranch along Paradise Valley’s Mill Creek drainage that he’d like to have an audience with the federal government’s top agricultural policymaker. “I’d like to talk to Brooke Rollins myself and say, ‘You know, we need to sit down. You need to have a group of farmers and ranchers from around the West talk about [what’s happening].’ A lot of people don’t understand it — they don’t understand how we’re getting developed.” A few beats later, Redfield, a former teacher who also served as a Republican state lawmaker, discussed legacy: his family’s, Montana’s, the country’s. He built the ranch’s barn and the shop he was sitting in with Douglas fir he harvested on the property’s forested slopes. An assortment of both modern and antique tools filled the shop: a chainsaw, a crosscut saw, the wooden sled Redfield’s father used to haul groceries back to the northeastern Montana ranch he grew up on. Redfield said owning the ranch along Mill Creek was his father-in-law’s dream, one that he and his wife, Laurie, feel lucky to carry on. If their 36-year-old daughters don’t have the ability or desire to run the place in the future, they can lease it to an aspiring rancher and help sustain the area’s agricultural heritage that way, he said. The conservation easement will help serve that end, he said. It’ll help ensure there’s land in Paradise Valley available to support future ranchers’ dreams. “We’ve got a crisis in the United States, and nobody’s addressing that crisis, about the next generation of agriculturists,” Redfield said. The Mill Creek area of Paradise Valley as viewed from the air on June 17, 2024. Credit: courtesy EcoFlight Although he no longer teaches agriculture at Park High, Redfield maintains an interest in rural youth. A few years ago he put together an ad-hoc welding class for local teenagers, he lets young people hunt on the ranch if they’re willing to lend a hand on it, and he partnered on horse purchases with a young man interested in becoming a farrier. “I was a teacher. I can’t quite give it up,” he offers, almost sheepishly. “It pays off down the road.” It’s fair to assume that conviction would have resonated with his father-in-law, James Warfield. In the 1970s, when the filming of Jeff Bridges’ Western comedy Rancho Deluxe brought national attention to Livingston, Warfield started fielding unsolicited offers for the property. Redfield recalls Warfield would be offered six digits for the ranch and would counter with “How about 12 digits?”  Before moving forward with the easement, Alan and Laurie secured the blessing of his daughters, who live in Livingston and Butte. With that approval, Alan’s 20-plus-year journey of contemplating an easement started drawing to a close. If the $25 million were restored, Redfield said he has no doubt other landowners would raise their hands for consideration — and they would probably pull the trigger on it much faster than he did. “I had all kinds of people calling me and asking me about it,” he said. “People would sign up for it within two weeks.” The post Paradise Valley open space initiative falters amid political priority reversal  appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less