Beware - The Land Grab is coming to a Ranch near you

The 10 most feared words in the Sierra Foothills should be… “We’re from the Federal Government and we’re here to help”. I’m talking about the horror show that is coming to a ranch or farm near you called the California Foothills Legacy Area Plan and is brought to you by the US Fish & Wildlife Service. You know these folks and their sister agency, the EPA, from their land owner friendly Environmental Species Act.

Consider a few examples of these agencies behavior. Taung Ming-Lin is a farm owner in Kern County. When his property was threatened by fire he used a tractor to create a fire break to save his house. The FWS rained hell on this guy accusing him of disturbing the habitat of the Tipton kangaroo rat, an endangered species. Federal agents confiscated his tractor, arrested him and charged him with destroying the rats’ habitat.

But wait there’s more ! - 1,600 acres of a farm in Woodland, California was designated a "study area" for the Stephen’s kangaroo rat, without the farmer’s knowledge, and his farming rights were suspended. In Bruneau Valley, Idaho, 59 farms and ranches were nearly cut off from their water rights to avoid lowering the water level where the Bruneau hot springs snail is found. In Maryland, a wealthy landowner was fined $1 million for developing wetlands, even though the director of the project had obtained 38 permits from Federal regulatory agencies.

So when they come a calling in our backyard with a new scheme to get ranchers and farmers to sell a portion of their property rights to them under the guise of a “Conservation Easement” you might feel like wincing. The reality is that the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service have been infiltrated with hard core leftists at the uppermost levels and their policy edicts and programs are far from friendly to private property owners.

Here is their master plan. The FWS presented a map of the central valley and Sierra foothills that designated 18 million acres as a study area for “habitat preservation”. The plan area infects 36 of California’s 58 counties, and the first phase of the plan was to focus on 3.4 million acres that they would look to gain control of by offering unwitting landowners a devils deal. They would purchase the soul of the land, in the form of a conservation easement that runs for time and all eternity – in exchange for a onetime cash payout.

If you ask who designed the map that targets 18 million acres of private ranchland and its accompanying Faustian bargain, you would eventually find the names of two liberal environmental groups, The Nature Conservancy, and the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition. Neither is known to be on the side of private property rights. To cover their leftist roots, they added a few good guys as minority members who have little or no influence on policy, such as the California Farm Bureau Federation and the California Cattlemen’s Association, (the CCA) who publicly opposed the plan once it was revealed. Kind of a Pelosi-ish Obamacare sleight of hand – you had to pass the act before you could see what’s in it.

The plan requires the USFWS to hold the conservation easements and as a federal agency with almost unlimited police powers to protect any perceived hazard to species they deem endangered, easement controlled ranchland could easily be put off limits to grazing or mechanized agriculture.

To be fair, there are some landowners who may see this as their only option, but the concept of conservation easements is not always in conflict with ranching. The CCA founded a rangeland trust to do a similar type easement purchase, but the CCA’s motives are to encourage inter-generational ranching. The FWS interests are to control vast amounts of the California foothills with environmental fancies elevated far above the property owner’s rights or their ranching businesses needs. Once you take the federal money from the FWS under this plan you have likely signed away your property development rights forever. You also now have placed your land in the hands of regulators who view severe restrictions on land use their birthright.

California has had a trustworthy plan in place to conserve agricultural land in the form of the Williamson Act, which places ag land in a 10 year rolling trust with the State and County, restricting it’s usage to Ag purposes in exchange for reduced property taxes. You can opt in or out of the plan with the 10 year contract, and the end result is that Ag land is preserved for Ag. The problem with that act is - the spend-ocrats in Sacramento have essentially defunded the Williamson grants to California Counties so this program seems to be on deaths door.

Beware the Federal Governments greedy hand when it is outstretched to you for a conservation easement. They are not here to help; they are here to take control of your land for a few pieces of silver.