Christian Science Monitor
By Stephanie Castellano, Contributor
August 22, 2023 | GAINESVILLE, FLA.
Go to article on website www.csmonitor.com
Doyle Carlton’s Horse Creek Ranch, DeSoto County, Florida
Some days Wes Carlton wants to turn off his phone. The calls from developers wanting to buy pieces of his four large cattle ranches in central and south Florida roll in almost constantly.
“Imagine you have something your grandmother gave you,” he says, “something precious and dear to your heart, and people are calling you all the time asking, ‘Can I buy it? Can I buy it?’ It’s like, ‘Quit calling me.’”
A fourth-generation cattle rancher, Mr. Carlton is a firm advocate for the Florida beef industry. He and his family have won awards for good environmental stewardship of their land. He has no plans to sell it off. But he understands the pressure that virtually all Florida ranchers are under from developers and why many ranchers choose to sell.
Some days Wes Carlton wants to turn off his phone. The calls from developers wanting to buy pieces of his four large cattle ranches in central and south Florida roll in almost constantly.
“Imagine you have something your grandmother gave you,” he says, “something precious and dear to your heart, and people are calling you all the time asking, ‘Can I buy it? Can I buy it?’ It’s like, ‘Quit calling me.’”
A fourth-generation cattle rancher, Mr. Carlton is a firm advocate for the Florida beef industry. He and his family have won awards for good environmental stewardship of their land. He has no plans to sell it off. But he understands the pressure that virtually all Florida ranchers are under from developers and why many ranchers choose to sell.
Ranches are some of the last strongholds for nature and scientific discovery in the Sunshine State – but they’re disappearing fast at the hands of developers.
Land values have been rising for decades as more and more people move to the state. In 1960, Florida was home to fewer than 5 million residents. In 2022, Florida’s population was 22 million – and growing fast. More people in the United States moved to Floridathan to any other state in 2022. Demographers liken the growth to adding a city about the size of Orlando every year.
Florida’s wild landscapes are vanishing as developments spring up to accommodate these new residents. Vast expanses of prairie, forest, and wetlands have now been converted to large-scale housing developments or entirely new planned cities and towns. And ranchlands, which encompass large swaths of these natural habitats in the north and central part of the state, are being swallowed up as well.
But these lands are necessary to the state’s future viability, providing benefits that lawmakers now realize can’t be ignored: Ranchlands produce food and clean water for Floridians; they offer critical habitats for wildlife; they even serve as buffer zones for military bases. And they are necessary for the restoration of the Everglades, a project expected to cost more than $23 billion in government funds and upon which much of Florida’s future water supply depends.
In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved one of the Legislature’s largest-ever investments in land conservation. Nearly $1 billion has been earmarked to protect Florida’s natural and agricultural lands from development, including ranches, timberlands, and croplands. And in 2021, in a rare unanimous vote, Florida lawmakers passed the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, which set aside $400 million to preserve nearly 18 million acres of wildlife habitat, 7 million of which are working ranchlands and timberlands.
Julie Morris, a wildlife ecologist and director of the Florida Conservation Group, says she is “cautiously optimistic” that funding for land conservation will continue in the coming years. But she worries that in the race against development, conservation efforts will continue to lose ground.
“We have a very time-limited opportunity to protect these lands,” she says. “And the development pressure is very, very intense.”
“Myth-busters” on a cattle ranch
In Florida’s Kissimmee River Valley, where the headwaters of the Everglades begin their southward flow, a 10,500-acre working cattle ranch also serves as a living laboratory for scientists. The partnership between Buck Island Ranch and the Archbold Biological Station (which owns the ranch) represents a unique collaboration between ranchers and scientists, one that has yielded surprising discoveries about the environmental benefits of ranchlands.
“We are kind of like myth-busters,” says Elizabeth Boughton, senior research biologist and program director of agroecology at Archbold, a nonprofit that studies the ecology of working lands. “People have this preconceived notion that cows are bad, ranching is bad, agriculture is bad, but we’re looking at ways where we can minimize the tradeoffs and understand the benefits of ranching to nature, water, and carbon.”
Dr. Boughton and her colleagues have experimented with ranching practices that benefit both the cattle operation and the environment. For one research project, they tested growing and harvesting forage for cattle as a way of removing from pasture soils the nutrient pollution derived from past fertilizer use. Growing their own hay reduces ranchers’ reliance on imported feed and helps prevent excess nutrients from entering the watershed, where they feed the state’s smelly, toxic algae blooms.
The natural wetlands and flood plains comprised in ranchlands help capture and filter water as it moves through the landscape, which means better flood protection for urban communities and improved water quality – including drinking water from aquifers. The native vegetation does such a good job of filtering water and absorbing toxic fertilizer runoff, that regional water management authorities have experimented with programs that essentially pay ranchers to maintain their wetlands.
Julie Morris, a wildlife ecologist and director of the Florida Conservation Group, says she is “cautiously optimistic” that funding for land conservation will continue in the coming years. But she worries that in the race against development, conservation efforts will continue to lose ground.
“We have a very time-limited opportunity to protect these lands,” she says. “And the development pressure is very, very intense.”
How the state protects ranchlands
The threat to Florida’s rich biodiversity has helped scientists target high-risk areas for conservation – and helped lawmakers justify spending on it.
“Florida is number one in the nation for science-based land conservation,” says Ms. Morris, the wildlife ecologist. “We know where our important areas are.”
That includes privately owned lands. Without the cooperation of landowners, conservation efforts will not keep up with the pace of development in Florida, she says.
In recent years, conservation easements have emerged as the primary mechanism for protecting private lands from development in Florida. Conservation easements mean the government buys the rights to develop land from the landowner, but the landowner retains ownership. Landowners can continue to raise cattle or timber or crops, but they can’t turn the land into houses or roads, or sell to a developer who would. (Florida is unusual in that the largest easement holder in the state is its own government. In most other states, the largest easement holders tend to be the federal government or nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy.)
Conservation easements will become a lifeline for Florida agriculture in the years to come, predicts Tom Hoctor, director of the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning at the University of Florida. “I suspect there will be a day in Florida,” he says, “when all agricultural lands or the vast majority of agricultural lands, if they still exist, will be protected by some form of easement.”