BY JOSEPH GUINTO
PUBLISHED MAY 2007

To date, the best hope for the turtle and others were protections granted them under the Endangered Species Act, a 1973 law that promises to safeguard nearly 1,300 birds, amphibians, mammals, fish, and plants.

For all its good intentions, the ESA has been surrounded by controversy for the restrictions that were imposed on landowners whose properties are home to the endangered. “Private property owners … have been victims of the restrictions mandated by the original law,” says Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska).

Still, there is little political will in Washington for rewriting the act itself. Now lawmakers are hoping tax incentives will help make it obsolete. This year, bipartisan groups in the House and Senate have proposed legislation that would give tax credits to landowners if they spend their own money to protect and recover endangered and threatened species that live on or migrate through their property. The bills would also give landowners a tax break if they agree not to sell or develop land where endangered species live.

As of press time, no floor action was scheduled on either the House or Senate bills. But with Congress in a “green” mood, Capitol Hill watchers consider the chances good for action on the tax breaks. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) may be the key. He’s chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees tax-break legislation. “It’s pretty hard to jam something down somebody’s throat,” Baucus says of the ESA. “The more we move toward encouraging people to take actions on their own, the more we’re going to achieve the results we’re looking for.”

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SO YOU THINK YOU LIKE HORSES? Like to putter around the barn morning, noon, and night? Then make your way to this 10,000-acre ranch in the heart of Santa Barbara County, which has been owned by the Jackson family since 1943. There’s plenty to do at the Alisal—two golf courses and an extensive tennis program come to mind—but in my book it’s the string of 100 horses and the almost unlimited acreage for riding that set this place apart.

“Next to children, horses are the best cure for disposable income”.

Trail-tested wranglers can answer all your questions, teach you how to sort cattle, and lead you through the Santa Ynez Valley. But when it comes to the big-picture ideas, what should you take away from your experience at Alisal?

Gary Vorhes has a suggestion or two. The former editor of Western Horseman, Vorhes has had a career that’s been all about horses, on the job and at his own horse farm. “Next to children, horses are the best cure for disposable income,” Vorhes says between laughs. He offers two key suggestions.
The first is to go into the horse business with a clear, concise marketing plan. “Where are you going to be five or six years from now when you have some foals?” he asks. “That’s where bloodlines come in. A lot of people don’t care about the individual horse. It’s the pedigree they’re dragging behind them that counts. It doesn’t matter if it’s racing, cutting, or rodeo, the most successful horsemen and women are the ones who are able to sell weanlings or ones before they even hit the ground because they have established a reputation. The marketing is done for them.”

Vorhes’ second piece of advice? “Buy the right piece of land. Pick a strategic spot. You’ll be raising horses in a gold mine. It changes the whole ball game,” he says.

One last observation: “Every foal that hits the ground is a miracle, and when it’s your foal it’s THE miracle.”
—Eric O’Keefe

“The one thing we always do is plant things we can use”.

Herb Farm
Fredericksburg Herb Farm
Fredericksburg Texas
Rate: $145 to $185
800-259-4372
www.fredericjsburgherbfarm.com

WE REALLY STUDY WHAT WE’RE doing. We have a story to tell, and we tell it in everything we do,” says Bill Varney, who owns and runs the renowned herb farm with his wife, Sylvia.

The Varneys fast-forwarded their own story in 1991 when they cashed in the house they called home and bought four acres in Fredericksburg, a gem of a town in the Texas Hill Country. Included on the land were a limestone farmhouse that dated back to 1882, a two-bedroom cottage, a small wooden barn, and a couple of sheds. It’s worth noting that the property itself had been abandoned sometime in the 1970s. Wild turkeys and a host of snakes had established themselves as the lords of the realm.

Not that any dilapidation is visible today. Instead visitors stroll through acres of expansive gardens. They peruse wonderfully scented rooms, buy exquisitely packaged personal care products, dine on herb-crusted delicacies, and indulge in aromatherapy treatments. “It got to the point that business at the day spa picked up so much that we moved out of our house and it became the spa,” Varney says.

In addition to their ever-expanding product line, the Varneys have coauthored two books (Along the Garden Path and Herbs: Growing & Using the Plants of Romance) and host an annual spring herb festival.

“The one thing we always do is plant things we can use. There’s nothing ornamental about our gardens. Even the pine cones and the seed pods get used as decorations,” Varney says.

Clearly this couple knows their business, which is why anyone remotely interested in growing herbs, cultivating flowers, or maybe even setting up an online company that specializes in these products should make reservations at the herb farm’s bed and breakfast.

What’s to lose? Varney says, “three or four days at an amazing relaxing place that integrates herbs into cuisine, aromatherapy, well-being, and personal care.”

—Eric O’Keefe

Vineyard
Youngberg Hill Vineyards & Inn
McMinnville, Oregon
Rate: $250 to $550
888-657-8668
www.youngberhill.com

YOU LOVE THE TASTE, THE AROMA, the sound of a cork popping. You’ve studied the various grapes, and you’ve perfected your ordering technique. You might even say wine is your passion.

With “do what you love” as your mantra, maybe you’ve decided you could have a vineyard or winery of your very own. But before you sign that check, schedule a trip to Youngberg Hill Vineyards & Inn in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. For the past two years this bed and breakfast, located on 50 acres outside McMinnville, has been offering half-day and full-day packages that allow guests to spend time in Youngberg Hill’s working vineyard and winery.

The folks at Youngberg Hill tailor the packages to fit each guest’s goals. Want to experience harvest? Depending on the time of year and the weather, they can make it happen. Want to see how the winery works? They can show you. You’ll get one-on-one time with a winemaker, a vineyard manager, or the owner—maybe even all three.

Other than fostering an appreciation for the land and the creation of fine Pinot Noir, no two vineyard packages are the same. “It’s not a cookie-cutter experience,” says Youngberg Hill owner Nicolette Bailey.

Before purchasing the vineyard, Bailey was doing wine distribution in Chicago, so she’s familiar with the city folks who come to the vineyard not knowing what to expect. She used to be one of them. “The process is eye-opening for people,” she says. “I’ve had people who didn’t understand that growing  grapes is farming.” Walking the vines, tending grapes, getting muddy—it’s all part of the deal.

Besides being nationally renowned for its Pinother Noir, the Willamette Valley is also close to Portland and spans more than 5,000 square miles, making it an ideal venue for getting into the grape game. And Youngberg Hill, with its organic and sustainable farming practices, is dedicated to keeping the area in top shape.

“It’s not just about growing grapes,” Bailey says. “It’s about doing things right for the environment.” And in case you were wondering, she couldn’t be more pleased that she pursued a passion. “There were a lot of Green Acres moments, but I’ve never regretted it.”
—Rhonda ReinhartGuest Ranch
The Home Ranch
Clark, Colorado
Rate:$5,075 per week (double occupany)
970-879-1780
www.homeranch.com

WANT TO WITNESS FIRSTHAND how to run a great guest ranch? This is the place to go. Thirty years ago, Steve and Ann Stranahan fell in love with an amazing piece of property in Northern Colorado: two large aspen-covered meadows bordering the Routt National Forest less than 20 miles from the popular ski town of Steamboat Springs. They closed on the property the following year (1978) and welcomed guests to The Home Ranch in 1980.

Fly-fishing, hiking, horseback riding—the list of outdoor activities in the Colorado Rockies is endless, but the kicker is that The Home Ranch is also a member property of Relais & Chateaux. Head chef Clyde Nelson has been featured in Gourmet, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine.

So what does it take to run a ship this size? Johnny Fisher, general manager of The Home Ranch, says a love for working with the land, the livestock, and the people is imperative to running a successful guest ranch. “For people who are tired of working with people, running a guest ranch is not for you. Every year I go to these conventions, and there is always someone who stands up and says, ‘I swear, kids these days …’ And I just think to myself, it’s time for him to retire.”

Flexibility is also a key ingredient to a well-run ranch. Fisher says rearranging the staff schedule is usually his first challenge in the morning. “You have to be able to juggle people around and pull up loose ends. Some days I will do shoeing because my wrangler is injured or wash dishes because my dishwasher is sick.”

After managing The Home Ranch for four years, Fisher has learned to wear many hats, and he says he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’ll tell you this much, it’s never the same old, same old around here—this place keeps me on my toes. But the best part about working here is that I never have to spend a minute in rush-hour traffic.”
—Amy Hallford

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BY ERIC O’KEEFE
PUBLISHED MAY 2007

No matter where you turn, stunning vistas encircle the property. Just a few feet from the back porch, the mile-high mesa’s rocky ridge drops down hundreds of feet into Chalk Draw, an enormous chasm that forms the watershed for tens of thousands of acres of surrounding ranchland. To the south, Elephant Mountain basks in the afternoon sun and the Rosillos Mountains loom in the distance at the edge of Big Bend National Park. Cathedral Mountain crowns the western horizon.

Given the setting, it’s hard to believe Morrison came across this stretch of high desert in the first place. Remote is an understatement. Think uncharted territory, terra incognita, Area 51.
“I found out about the Big Bend through my father,” Morrison says.  “He was a poet, one of the pioneers of poetry therapy, as well as a teacher and a professor. A group of his friends had driven out to attend the cowboy poetry festival in Alpine [the nearest town]. They came back to Austin and told him how beautiful it was out here. Mild winters. Cool summers. Mountainous terrain. I always knew I wanted to see it for myself and kept talking about it, so my wife brought me here for my 50th birthday. We stayed at Cibolo Creek Ranch and made it our base for exploring the area. My very first trip and I knew I wanted to buy out here. I had the land bug,” he says.

Over the next 18 months, Morrison returned to the Big Bend on several occasions. He scouted in several properties, looked at listings large and small, and ended up making several offers. Although nothing came close to going under contract, he didn’t lose heart. Finally, his real estate agent brought up a long shot: the agent’s own deer lease.
 
The Double M sits four miles off the nearest paved road. ”It was part of a 7,000-acre ranch that he had been hunting on for years. The rancher who owned the property had divided it up and was selling it as seven parcels. Normally, ranchers only sell to ranchers, so when he told me about it, I jumped on a Southwest flight, flew out from Dallas, and we had a look at all seven. When I saw this place, there was not a doubt in my mind. I told him I’d take it. When the rancher found out I wanted to buy the Draw Pasture, she said, “That one is the farthest from the road, the most out of the way, and the most difficult to get to.” And I said, “That’s exactly why I want it.”

In short order, Morrison became the proud proprietor of the Double M Ranch. The name honors the memory of his father, Morris Morrison. The rugged tract with an incredible expanse of views was full of possibilities, but it had no electricity, no running water, not even cell phone reception.

Morrison’s first consideration was water. “No water, no life,” he says. Good rains are a scarce commodity in West Texas. Annual rainfall in the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert averages a little more than 12 inches, and lately there have been a few years when half that amount was registered. Rainwater catches or tanks were not a viable option on the Double M, so Morrison contacted Walter Skinner, a longtime local whose drilling and well service company enjoys a good reputation. Skinner says mountaintop wells can require drilling 500 feet deep, which at $13 a foot can quickly add up. That’s especially the case when you have to pay for a dry hole or two. Skinner got skunked twice before he hit pay dirt: 10 gallons a minute.

Water secured, Morrison turned to electricity. The site he chose for his homestead was 4.5 miles from the nearest power lines. According to figures provided by the local electric co-op, the base fee just to wire that span was $10 a foot, a staggering $237,600. And that’s not including any engineering fees or the cost of the dozens of phone poles required. Fortunately for Morrison, a friend recommended he get in touch with Meridian Energy Systems in Austin. Morrison not only contacted Andrew McCalla at Meridian but invited him out to his new property.
 
“In Texas, they don’t get a lot more remote than Chet’s,” McCalla says. “I saw the building site and said, ‘I understand why we’re talking.’ Electrical distribution is well established in Texas. That’s one of the reasons line extensions can get so expensive. At Chet’s, soil conditions and rugged terrain make it even more cost prohibitive. The good news is he had a ton of solar access, a large solar window.

“What we did first was build a load profile to figure out what his lifestyle would be electrically. In the case of this structure, how often it’s going to be used. It’s good to design a system that can accommodate for some variation. Most people just want the lights to come on and the beer to stay cold. We have to accommodate a variety of uses: Chet by himself for a weekend, Chet and Patty for a week, a three-month non-stop stay. And as system designers, we seek to lower costs and limit maintenance. It’s a vacation spot. Tinkering with your utilities is not how you want to spend your vacation.”

After meeting with McCalla and getting his bid, the decision was straightforward for Morrison. “My choices were either to pay $250,000 to the electric co-op and get an electricity bill every month or invest a fraction of that in my own solar system and never get another bill. I decided I was going to be the power company,” he says.

With the well in, it was time to build a house. Morrison initially turned to a well-known architect to build a home that blended in with the topography. “The design he came up with was absolutely fabulous. The only problem was when I forwarded the plans to contractors, none of them would return my calls. They were completely intimidated by the design and would say, ‘What it costs, it costs.’ That was a red flag. There’s every reason to believe that instead of building it for $100 to $200 a square foot, it would have ended up costing $1,000 a foot by the time they were finished with it.
 
Chet and Patty Morrison selected many of the furnishings in Dallas then trucked them out.
“So I paid for the plans, and then I went to see Richard Allen at Allen Realty in Alpine. He sells prefabricated homes that are built on site from Styrofoam, concrete, and steel. They’re a type of smart home, and they cost a fraction of what a custom home would have cost. If you can believe this, the two of us sat down and designed the house in 30 minutes. It wasn’t a cookie-cutter deal, either. I chose French doors, added windows, and rearranged the bedrooms. What I ended up with was a very nice 1,500-square-foot house with three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen/dining room, and a living room. It’s a very tight house, incredibly energy efficient: Styrofoam covered with fiberglass batting, covered in concrete, totally tight.”

Morrison admits he was skeptical about the type of phone service he’d be getting out in the middle of nowhere. “When they told me that they were going to install a radio telephone, I envisioned myself going ‘Roger Wilco’ and clicking my handheld. Turns out it’s just like any other phone I’ve used,” he says. Thanks to the extensive fiber-optic network that crisscrosses the area, Morrison says the service he gets from the locally owned communications company is better than what he gets in Dallas. “For decades, remote ranches have relied on Big Bend Telephone Company. The company started out with two-way radios and later went to those party-line phones. Now they rely on the point-to-point microwave system that I use,” he says.

Morrison’s signal goes straight to a commercial antenna. Rusty Moore at Big Bend Telephone says they’ll soon be upgrading the Double M to satellite phones with high-speed Internet connections. “Here I am in the middle of nowhere, and I have the most sophisticated communications in the world outside my door,” Morrison says. Basic service? A whopping $18 a month. Total cost to install, including inverters and battery plant? $395.

One final note: Morrison’s hunch about ranchers selling only to ranchers proved correct. Of the seven parcels that initially came on the market, he bought the only individual tract. The other six were snapped up by a neighboring landowner, a man whose family has ranched in the Big Bend since the late 1800s.

“It turned out perfectly for me. Not only do I have just one neighbor to deal with, but he’s the best possible neighbor imaginable. I can’t tell you what a difference he has made,” Morrison says. “Things couldn’t have worked out better.”

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Tom Brokaw has had a front-row seat at some of the most momentous events in recent history, yet to hear him tell it, what happened on an isolated river bank on his Montana ranch a couple of years ago could well be just as unforgettable.

For decades, millions of Americans tuned in to Tom Brokaw when they wanted answers. So much so that when the NBC anchorman stepped down in 2004, the Peacock Network wisely offered him a 10-year contract extension to produce documentaries and sit in on major events. In an age of media midgets, this is one guy who didn’t need to be on the market.

But Brokaw is also a gifted storyteller, a fact well known to anyone who has read The Greatest Generation or his autobiography, A Long Way From Home. This facility quickly becomes evident one afternoon at his NBC office overlooking Rockefeller Center. The conversation had shifted from dates and places to the Tom Brokaw America doesn’t see on TV, the man who emerges when he arrives in Montana and sets foot on his ranch. Brokaw starts off by describing how much he loves to go out by himself. “I think the wilderness is at best a solitary experience,” he says, then quickly cuts to the chase: “I’ll tell you one quick story. This is, for me, the apotheosis of the Montana experience.

“Two years ago in the early spring, I was out by myself on our property. And I was on a ridge overlooking a bend in the river, and a herd of mother elk came out with their newborn calves. The calves couldn’t have been more than three weeks old. River’s running very high. They took a long look at me. I’m 150 yards away. I stood stock still. The mothers led the calves into the high river. Most of them made it. They had to kind of crash their way through the hawthorn bushes on the other side. One did not. It got swept downstream. Made its way onto an eddy, got back on the sandbar, tried a second time, missed a second time, missed a third time. Now it’s pretty tired. Goes up and stands on the sandbar, and it just looks painfully at its mother across the way. Honest to God, this cow elk looked at that calf and nodded, waded back into the river, nuzzled the calf, led it upstream to a safer part of the river and across the river where the rest of the herd of mothers and their offspring were waiting, and then they disappeared over the hill.

“I challenge you to duplicate that anywhere else in American life. It was just the most rewarding kind of experience. It’s truly spiritual in its own way, and I keep that memory with me with a lot of others,” he says.

Brokaw’s enthusiasm for this other life of his masks a key fact: Montana wasn’t even on his radar screen until he was almost 50. Although he grew up next door in South Dakota—his family had homesteaded in the Dakota Territory in the late 1800s—his career as a journalist took him every place but the American West. He started at KMTV in Omaha, anchored the late evening news on WSB-TV in Atlanta, and then joined KNBC-TV in Los Angeles. He got tapped for the big leagues in 1966 when NBC News hired him, and with the exception of a stint as the network’s White House correspondent in the 1970s he’s been working in New York City, anchoring the Today show from 1976 to 1981 and the Nightly News from 1982 to 2004.

So how did he first make his way to Montana? On assignment of course. “I was drawn to Montana originally because I went out there to shoot a documentary, and also I was invited to the Montana Bar Association to give a speech,” he says. “The fee that I came up with was they had to drop me at a trail head and pick me up five days later. My wife and I were pretty avid backpackers at the time. And we’d not been in Montana before that. We were thunderstruck frankly by the amount of space that was there—not just the national parks, which we were familiar with, but the wilderness areas and other places.”

What got him back a second time? Another assignment.

“I shot a documentary in a small town called Absarokee down in Stillwater County about the disappearing family ranch … and it became more of an organic relationship at that point,” he says.

Point of fact: When anyone with substantial media experience describes a relationship as “organic,” a major acquisition is imminent. In Tom and Meredith Brokaw’s case, it was time to buy a ranch.

“I didn’t know what that meant frankly. It was kind of a romantic idea that I had of buying a piece of ground. I was really looking for 100 acres and a river, and that’s the hardest single thing to find. And I kept at it, kept at it, kept at it. My wife never believed it would come to fruition. And it did. And it was a life-changing experience or the whole family,” he says.

Oddly enough, the property they now own didn’t fare that well in the initial judging. “The first time I looked at the ranch that we now own, it didn’t take. And I’ve often wondered why. I was at the end of a long day. I was tired. We’d been fishing, pretty hot,” he says.

The second go, however, was a charm. “I went back and rode the property with the then owner and saw all the dimensions of it and fell in love with it,” he says. The next step was to convince his wife.

“I got two partners because my wife was so resistant to the idea,” Brokaw admits. “I didn’t want to step off the cliff on my own and paralyze me. So I had two partners at the time, and we bought it. And it took my wife six months to come out, and then she fell in love with it. And now we own it entirely.”

THE LAND ITSELF IS JUST OVER a mile high. Crow Indians once used it as a summer hunting ground. A Norwegian immigrant homesteaded the property in the early 1900s. In 1989, the New York broadcaster began journeying west with his family. At first it was for a week at a time. Then two. Last summer the Brokaws spent four months on their West Boulder Ranch.

Brokaw describes his experience as a landowner as an evolution. “We tried everything,” he says. “We took the fences down where we didn’t like them. We fenced off the riparian zone because we wanted to bring that back. The cattle were allowed to graze right down to the river. We had a leafy spurge problem that we didn’t know what that meant. Then we found ways of trying to deal with that. Putting sheep on and getting biologicals, and it got to be interesting. With every passing year we came to know more about what we were involved in and what was required. I’m to the point now where I think that we’ve been good stewards of the land. We’ve worked hard at it. Getting the leafy spurge down. Keeping the grasses down.

“We run bison on about half the ranch. On the other half, we lease to a local cowboy who … has a mother-calf operation. It’s good for that part of the land where he grazes his cows because it keeps the grass down. We had fires last year that, I think to a lot of outsiders, were pretty destructive. To us they were renewing. They burnt primarily our grassland, although some timber as well. But I’m relieved. Nobody got hurt. No structures were burned, and it’s going to be good for the ground.”

After almost two decades on his property, Brokaw is anything but a passive landowner. The pace of his voice quickens as he describes the challenges the land affords, the biological puzzles, and the sort of problem solving that has stimulated as well as preoccupied Montana landowners for generations.

At times there was a bit of a learning curve. “One of the big mistakes is that we tried to run cows for a while on our own and have a cow-calf operation. It was too high, too wet, too cold to calf. We were doing it, in part, for the managers that we had at the time—a couple that wanted to make some extra money and loved doing it. And it just wore them down and wore us out as well. So that was a mistake,” he says.

One of his prouder accomplishments is a project that was undertaken in conjunction with a neighbor to increase the upland bird population. “We put in two acres of milo down along the wetlands just so that they would have some feed. And we’ve allowed the grasses to grow higher in some of the ravines,” he says.

Such stewardship has paid big dividends. “We’re going to work harder at it now because we’ve learned that if you do just a few things the right way, the bird population goes way up. It’s Hungarian partridge and sharp-tailed grouse but also rough grouse and other things.”

“Tom is a student, an inquisitive fellow,” says renowned horseman Buck Brannaman, who takes my call at his Wyoming home. Brannaman knows the country in and around the West Boulder Ranch. He served as a technical adviser on the set of The Horse Whisperer, which was filmed not far from the property. Brannaman met Meredith Brokaw not long after the couple closed on the ranch in 1989. He was giving one of his many annual clinics, and she attended. She so enjoyed his approach to horsemanship that she invited him to conduct a private clinic at the family’s ranch. Brannaman has been a regular every summer since.

“It’s kind of a tradition,” Brannaman says. “The clinic is usually four days. Tom and Meredith keep it small. They always invite about 10 of their family and friends. It’s a family get-together for them—they’ve got a great family—and it’s become a real social thing for us. We do a little fly-fishing. We always have dinner on the Fourth of July at Mike Keaton’s place [the actor owns property nearby]. And then we go back to the Brokaws’. Every year Tom sets off fireworks on the bridge. I think he’s a pyromaniac at heart.”

Newcomers are always subject to scrutiny, especially in Montana, a state whose incomparable beauty has been attracting well-heeled buyers from both coasts for decades.

“Frankly, there is always going to be a certain element among the locals that are not going to understand Tom,” Brannaman says. “He’s too famous. He couldn’t possibly be like-minded. But I couldn’t disagree more. Tom is very astute. Very open-minded. Ask him about his ranch 10 years from now, and I promise you what he’ll tell you will be different then from what he’ll tell you today. Each piece of property is different. Tom knows that. He knows that you have to learn your ranch. That’s kind of the fun stuff.”

WHEN IT COMES TO FITTING IN, BROKAW knows his place, and he knows it for the right reasons. Despite his high-profile status and worldly mien, he’s small-town born and bred. He knows better than to put on airs. Red Brokaw saw to that. In A Long Way From Home, Brokaw shows no shame in listing the lessons he learned from his hardworking father and the bruising his ego took when he needed to be put in his place. It’s given him an equanimity that serves him well as a newcomer.

“When I first moved there, I was stopped on the streets of Livingston and Big Timber by every other cowboy saying, ‘I used to hunt on your property. Can I do it again?’ And I said, ‘You know, I’m just going to have to say no to everyone until we sort this out.’ And then we hired an outfitter who had rights on there. And he came and said, ‘I’d like to put some hunters in.’ So we did a trade with him. I don’t think we ever got our end of the trade. That’s fine. And I said, ‘Sure, come on with your hunters.’ And then our manager hunts. And then we generally allow the guy who does our waste management stuff. He comes and picks up the trash once a week. And I think the UPS driver this year got to shoot a cow.

“As I often say to my friends, and I’ve got a lot of friends who lived in Montana all their lives, I say, ‘You know, when I first started coming to this area, I don’t remember the local ranchers standing out in the highway saying, ‘Come hunt on my land,’ or ‘Please come fish in my section of the stream. I’d love to have you over here.’ It didn’t happen that way” he says.

Brokaw recognizes the responsibilities that come with owning land. “For the most part, most people are buying that land because of its beauty, and it speaks to them in a way. And they want to preserve those great natural qualities. And certainly that’s our intention.”

Phrases like “getting biologicals” and “good for the ground” are the type of talk one typically doesn’t hear emanating from a corner office at Rockefeller Center. Maybe at Val’s Deli in Wilsall, Montana. Then again, this is Tom Brokaw speaking. Not the Tom Brokaw with 10 Emmys lining his office walls, but the one whose bison herd will put on more pounds because of the richer soil. The man has found a way to balance two wildly divergent lifestyles, and he’s done so in a manner that not only is rewarding for him and his family but also is a challenge.

“It’s a constant state of discovery I’d say about my two lives,” he says. “This is part of my life, and that’s part of my life. I get up every morning in New York City thinking something exciting is going to happen in this city today. This is just the nature of the city. I get up every morning in Montana saying, ‘I’m going to see something today I haven’t seen before.’”

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Act now or forever lose your easement. A tax break for conservation-related land donations-known as conservation easements-is about to expire. That is unless Congress does something about it.

The tax break, signed into law by President Bush in August 2006, vastly expanded the deductions landowners could get in exchange for donating their lands to trusts and surrendering the right to develop those lands. But unless the tax break is extended, it will only apply to lands donated in 2006 or 2007

Some landowner lobby groups are pushing hard for an extension, as are members of Congress, who note that the temporary tax deductions passed in 2006 added to the increasing popularity of conservation easements. The Land Trust Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based interest group, reports that even before the new tax breaks went into effect, the total acreage of conservation easements under control of land trusts had skyrocketed. Acreage under easement increased 148 percent from 2000 to 2005, reaching 6.2 million acres at last count.

For landowners of moderate income, whom the 2006 bill was intended to help, a lot is at stake if the tax break is not extended. The government offers this example: Under the current law, if a rancher earning $50,000 a year on a ranch appraised at $2 million donated half his property to a conservation easement, he would be able to receive $800,000 in tax deductions over a maximum of 16 years. Once the law expires, the maximum tax break on the same donation would fall to $90,000 over a maximum of six years.

Numbers like that have inspired influential Democrats and Republicans in Congress to sponsor bills that would permanently extend the 2006 tax break.

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