Paying ranchers to host elk?

Like plenty of other Wyoming stockgrowers, Luke Lancaster is an outdoorsman who appreciates seeing wildlife on his Star Valley ranch.

There've been exceptions. A hefty herbivore that runs in big herds, elk, are notoriously hard to live with for cattle ranchers whose bottom line depends on the volume of grass growing on their rangeland and having enough hay stacked up to get through the winter. On top of that, the native ungulates can transmit the disease brucellosis to cattle, and vice versa.

So, until recently, elk were more of a headache for the fourth-generation cattleman who runs Lincoln County's Spring Creek Ranch. His reaction upon seeing them: "Oh, shit."

"This winter was the first time I'd seen them where I was like, 'Oh, that's cool,'" Lancaster told WyoFile.

What changed?

Ahead of this winter, Lancaster struck a voluntary, incentive-based deal with a conservation group, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, to allow elk on his property southwest of Afton. Paying landowners to benefit wildlife isn't new: Providing habitat is a big part of the very concept of conservation easements. Take, for example, compensation programs for California rice farmers to keep fields flooded for waterfowl.

But there's a novelty and timeliness to what the Bozeman-based nonprofit has dubbed "elk-occupancy agreements." As the chronic wasting disease epidemic ramps up in a corner of Wyoming where it's expected to have especially devastating effects, pressure is building for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to abandon a vector for infection, the century-old system of feeding elk.

"The real goal is to facilitate closing feedgrounds and to create a model to show ranchers who have properties: Here's an option where you can get paid," said Steve Sharkey, director of the Knoblach Family Foundation, which funded the Spring Creek Ranch elk-occupancy agreement.

The situation in southwestern Star Valley is in a way a trial run at the broader initiative. Over the next three or so years, Game and Fish will be reviewing all of its 21 feedgrounds and exploring opportunities to change or even do away with them.

There was never a permanent feedground on or immediately adjacent to Lancaster's Spring Creek Ranch, but it was an on-again, off-again feeding site in emergencies. The last time Game and Fish threw hay there, during the cold, long winter of 2022-'23, some 250 elk were holed up on the property.

Even when the feeding stopped last winter, he said, they had to "fight" 50 to 100 head of wapiti that returned to his land. A lot of that fight was left to Game and Fish, whose staff go to great lengths - even using drones - to haze and even kill elk deemed a nuisance.

Wyoming Game and Fish personnel weren't available for an interview on Friday, but the state agency's staff has been critical to making the Lincoln County deal happen. A warden, James Hobbs, put Lancaster in touch with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. The agency's Jackson Region wildlife management coordinator, Cheyenne Stewart, also played a big role.

"I was skeptical, but Cheyenne talked me into it," said Sharkey, the funder.

How it works

Going into the winter of 2024-'25, Lancaster was already thinking of trucking his 250 cow-calf pairs to Utah pastureland to spend the winter. "[I]t looked a lot better than having them here in this -40 degree hellhole," he said.

The deal cut with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition reimbursed him for about half of the transport costs, a roughly $10,000 savings. On top of that, the organization vowed to chip in on the cost of feeding his herd over the winter.

"It costs about $56,000 to winter the cows," Lancaster said, "and it cut our feeding bill in half."

The agreement also covered some modifications to Spring Creek Ranch, both its infrastructure and management.

There was also a cost-share around retrofitting about a mile of fencing with "let down" features - a modification used for terrestrial wildlife and also avian species like sage grouse.

"It can be removed and put down during the winter months, so elk can move through," said Teddy Collins, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition staffer who worked most closely with Lancaster. "And then the fence can be put back up during the summer months to keep cattle down in the irrigated pastures."

The final component of the deal is being called a "standing forage incentive." Essentially, Collins said, Lancaster is being compensated to not graze cattle on high ground that Game and Fish has identified as "crucial winter range" on the ranch during any part of the year. Elk, in turn, have that vegetation to browse and graze on during the winter.

Collectively, it's a good chunk of change for Lancaster, who has a keen interest in keeping his ranch going in an agricultural community that's losing its longtime identity to real estate development. Star Valley "has a clock," said Lancaster, but on his own land he wants to slow down the hands.

"Every field's getting developed, it's kind of turning into Jackson," he said. "This has helped us financially to be able to grow the herd to a [size] where we can actually live off of it and support the ranch. Hopefully, my kids will want to take over, and continue on with them."

Scaling up?

Spring Creek Ranch's elk-occupancy agreement isn't the first of its kind. In northwestern Wyoming, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and LegacyWorksGroup first put the concept into action back in 2018.

The first couple of agreements were struck with some of Jackson Hole's few remaining ranchers. Sharkey has been involved since the early days. He learned of the concept while out hunting with now-colleague Steve Kallin, who was then managing the National Elk Refuge, which had been trying, with difficulties, to scale back its feeding program.

"It was kind of like a short-term easement," Sharkey recalled. "They were just being basically paid to allow elk presence in the spring."

The first deals were with a ranch in Spring Gulch, which is a valley adjacent to the federal refuge where elk consistently have been considered too numerous. Another was with a small ranch on the Snake River's west bank that's also struggled with elk. Unrelated to feedgrounds, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Property and Environment Research Center have also brokered elk-occupancy agreements in Montana's Paradise Valley.

But to date, it's still a pretty niche endeavor in terms of the broader landscape and elk management in the feedground region.

"It's a nothingburger, at this point," Sharkey said.

Although the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is famously public land-dominated, there's still a lot of private ground - many millions of acres - that elk herds rely on to survive, especially in the winter. There's even been research quantifying how much unprotected private land each of the Yellowstone region's 26 elk herds depend on to survive. (The Afton elk herd, which dwells on Lancaster's Spring Creek Ranch, is actually one of the least private land-reliant herds.)

"There's definitely a scalability challenge," said Arthur Middleton, a University of California-Berkeley ecology professor. "If it's going to be a broader-scale solution, it needs a lot more resources." (Disclosure: Middleton is married to WyoFile board member Anna Sale.)

That could come from philanthropy, which is how it's working so far. Alternatively, state and federal agencies could take a wildlife management tool that began as a niche, donor-funded program and scale and fund it themselves, Middleton said.

There's a blueprint for that in the Yellowstone region.

"In the early days of wolf recovery, there was a time when [livestock damage] compensation was novel - an innovation that Defenders of Wildlife was doing with private money," Middleton said. "Now we think of it as standard practice."

Sharkey's brain is in the same place.

"If this could be scaled up, we would hope that Game and Fish would take it over," he said. "Instead of buying hay to feed elk, they could reallocate those dollars to paying ranchers to allow those elk onto their properties."

If Wyoming hypothetically diverted all of its elk-feeding funds, it'd be a good chunk of change. Game and Fish's elk feeding program had a $3.1 million budget as of 2022, according to its feedgrounds management plan.

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