This is a story about choices.
A flock of white-faced ibis, riding the winds north from their wintering grounds, fly over huge swaths of the West. What makes them pick a tiny patch of Oregon desert at the edge of a great yet shrinking saline lake to land, build nests, and raise their young?
A rancher, trying to carve out a future for his operation and the three young kids he hopes will inherit it one day, has two offers on the table. One from a solar company, one from a local land trust. What makes him choose the land trust?
Before we can begin to understand how each makes these decisions, we must first understand the truths at play.
For the ibis, the main truth is that the best breeding grounds come with just the right amount of water at just the right time.
This tiny patch of Oregon desert next to the brackish expanse of Goose Lake provides just about everything the ibis need to raise their young. For decades, ditches have pulled water from the nearby creek to spread it out over meadows. This is done to raise hay that get cattle through the region’s dry winters, but it mimics historical patterns of the lake raising and falling seasonally. Regardless of whether it’s irrigation or natural flooding keeping these wetlands intact, the ibis are finding plentiful food and nesting conditions in this meadow.
For the rancher, there are a lot of truths.
One is that no single ranch can be divided up fairly among children without someone going bankrupt. The only way to make sure their kids have the opportunity to make a living off the ranch is to expand now. The rancher reckons expansion will be all but impossible for family operations in ten years due to inflated agricultural land values, declining farm incomes, and low commodity prices driven by non-agricultural investment demand and asset scarcity. However, buying more agricultural land requires additional loans and input costs, as well as the time and energy of managing additional land.
Another truth is that in this economic landscape, it is increasingly common for ranchland to be bought by wealthy businesses outside the agriculture sector as financial assets. Even though many of these new owners hire ranch managers and keep the land in agriculture, the ranch-as-business-asset model increases the prices from machinery to supplies because businesses want to claim tax deductions at the end of the year. Family ranchers—especially the ones just starting out on their own or taking over from a previous generation—struggle. For these ranchers, expanding without outside income is a difficult proposition.
“If you’re a young person trying to start out or continue a family ranch, you can’t keep up with the larger corporations,” Chaylon Shuffield, the rancher, said. “They inflate the cost of equipment and supplies. You just can’t make it; there is not enough profit at the end of the day.”
“If you’re a young person trying to start out or continue a family ranch, you can’t keep up with the larger corporations.”
Chaylon Shuffield
Cattle graze on the Shuffield’s Goose Lake property outside of Lakeview, Oregon.
Shuffield would know. He and his wife are deep into the process of taking over his family’s ranch in another part of Lake County. In that process, they realized that if they wanted to afford their boys similar opportunities, they had better acquire more land and do it soon.
That’s where Goose Lake —and the ibis—comes into play. A few years ago, the Shuffields bought 3,600 acres on the edge of the lake to raise hay and graze their cattle. The family holds an off-season water right on the creek that runs through this parcel, which means they can divert as much water as they want in the winter and early spring, as long as they stop diverting when the ranchers with senior water rights are ready to irrigate come May and June.
It also means that when the ibis show up in May, the grass is green and the ground is wet. That’s why, in upcoming science from the Intermountain West Joint Venture on white-faced ibis breeding habitat, the Goose Lake area—and the greater Southern Oregon Northeastern California (SONEC) region—lights up like a beacon. Conditions here are usually just what migratory waterbirds like white-faced ibis need.
The Oregon Agricultural Trust (OAT) honed in on the Goose Lake area for much the same reason as the ibis: a tightly woven community of working ranches keeping the meadows wet and the landscape open. For the ibis, it’s about the wetland habitat created by irrigation. For OAT, it’s about preserving a way of life and the communities that depend on it.
“The best way to keep land protected is to keep it in agriculture,” said Phoebe Autry, OAT’s Land Program Associate Director.
Big Decisions Beyond Conservation
One way OAT protects farms and ranches is through working land easements. These are similar to traditional conservation easements, where the landowner transfers some development rights to the land trust in exchange for a tax credit or cash. However, OAT’s easements focus specifically on preserving a property’s agricultural uses (and the habitat that comes with them, as the ibis can attest). Autry is quick to stipulate that this might not be a tool that works for everyone, which she said she tries to make clear in conversations with landowners.
“It’s a big decision for a landowner to make; to permanently protect their land and think about what they want that land to look like for the next generation,” she said.
For those who aren’t ready for that kind of perpetuity but are still seeking partnership, OAT also offers succession planning support. This typically starts with OAT facilitating a discussion among family members about what land ownership will look like for the next and future generations, so that they can move forward with a goal in mind for writing a succession plan. Those conversations, Autry said, sometimes never happen otherwise.
“The best way to keep land protected is to keep it in agriculture.”
Phoebe Autry, Oregon Agricultural Trust
Both easements and succession planning, Autry said, can be helpful tools for ranching families like the Shuffields.
“If an easement is not a good fit for you but you want to successfully transfer it to your son or daughter or a non-familial person, I’d rather that be the scenario than nothing,” Autry said.
The Shuffields turned to OAT as they searched for a good way to help pay for the Goose Lake property they hope will enhance their operation. Shuffield said an easement aligned with their conservation and stewardship goals and will help relieve the financial pressure of absorbing the new acreage so his small family operation can continue to move forward.
“It allows a little bit of breathing room and allows the family operation to be more successful,” he said. “There’s so much risk in agriculture. If you have a bad crop year or lose 60 head of cattle to a fire, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. You could lose generations’ worth of work and time in one year.”
But an easement means an opportunity for resilience from one generation to the next. With the Shuffields facing a more stable future, that means that the ibis can continue to depend on the oasis of green in the desert, too. And it makes those choices a little easier, for both the ibis and the rancher.
Interested in learning more about forthcoming white-faced ibis science? Contact Erica Hansen, IWJV Water & Wetlands Program Coordinator.
The Picture Rock wildfire burns behind the Shuffield’s Summer Lake property; a resident ibis on the Goose Lake property.
