If the goal is keeping land in conservation, keeping farmers on it may be the most effective tool available.
That's the argument from Kat Dwyer, writing for the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a Bozeman-based free-market environmental policy organization. Dwyer contends that conservation strategies that fail to support the economic viability of working farms and ranches often accelerate the very land fragmentation they aim to prevent.
When farm families can't make the numbers work, the land tends to sell — and it rarely sells to another farmer.
PERC's core argument is that more innovative approaches to conservation finance, including voluntary easements, market-based incentive programs, and tools that generate revenue for landowners without forcing them out of production agriculture, improve the odds that family farms stay intact across generations.
The piece does not detail specific policy proposals beyond that framework, and the406.news has not reviewed any underlying study or report connected to the column. The argument is presented as an opinion and analysis piece by the author.
PERC has long advanced the position that property rights and market mechanisms outperform regulatory approaches to environmental conservation — a view that tends to resonate with Montana's agricultural community, which controls millions of acres of private land that serves as de facto wildlife habitat and open space.
The broader tension the piece points to is real: conservation funding often flows toward fee-simple land acquisition or restrictive easements that can reduce a farm's operational flexibility, while the farmers themselves are left managing land under tighter constraints with no guaranteed income improvement. Finding structures where conservation value translates to farm revenue — rather than just restrictions — is an active area of policy work in Montana and nationally.