Working for Montana

For over 100 years, the Barthelmess family ranch has contributed to Montana’s agricultural economy while stewarding healthy rangelands and wildlife habitat. To ensure the ranch remains in working hands for generations to come, the family chose to partner with The Nature Conservancy to place a conservation easement on their 8,100-acre ranch, ensuring this working landscape continues producing food, supporting the people and businesses of Malta, and conserving grasslands.

The Leep family has been farming in the Gallatin Valley since the late 19th century. Through generations, they have navigated economic pressures to grow their historic farm into a thriving 5,500-acre operation. They used multiple conservation easements across 1,600 acres of their property to expand their land ownership and preserve a family farming tradition critical to Montana’s agricultural economy and food supply.

Building on 175 years of forest stewardship, Stimson Lumber Company has exercised its private property rights to permanently protect nearly 130,000 acres of Montana’s working forests. These voluntary conservation easements will help reduce wildfire risk, sustain local logging jobs, conserve wildlife habitat, and support public access to Montana’s outdoors for generations to come.

As Montana’s most prominent conservationists, hunters have often been the first to recognize the inherent relationship between the species they pursue and the land that underpins that relationship. Healthy wildlife populations depend on healthy, intact habitat to thrive. Elk, mule deer, pronghorn, waterfowl and other wildlife do not recognize property lines. Their survival, and the hunting opportunities they provide, depends on connected landscapes that provide food, water, cover and places to raise young.

The Montana Army National Guard, much like other industries across the state, requires wide open spaces to operate and train. Land trusts, like Montana’s own Prickly Pear Land Trust (PPLT), specialize in maintaining such open spaces and have partnered with the Department of War to strategically deploy conservation easements to secure military installments like Helena’s Fort Harrison.

Across Montana, voters express their support for open space and community recreation. In Missoula and Ravalli Counties, a series of voter-approved Open Space and Lands Bonds have conserved thousands of acres of open space, agricultural lands, wildlife habitat, and community parklands through investments in conservation easements and open lands that protect the area’s open spaces.

As agreed in the Good Neighbor Agreement signed in 2000, Stillwater Mining Company donated conservation easements on six properties totaling more than 4,000 acres across Sweet Grass and Stillwater Counties. These easements were granted to The Montana Land Reliance to ensure the long-term protection of important open space, agricultural lands, wildlife habitat, scenic viewsheds, and the rural and agricultural character of the region.