5280 Denver's Mile High Magazine
The New Ruralism - Can eco ranchers-and their wealthy residents-save the Wild West? - by Bob Berwyn
September 2005
ON THE GENTLY tilted foothills of the Sangre de Cristo's east slope, Duckett and Lake creeks swirl and gurgle gently through the heart of the 2,593-acre Maytag Mountain Ranch, dipping through dense stands of aspen and cottonwood. Three young bucks-just starting to show velvety antlers-are hiding out in a rounded tuft of scrub oak, leafed out to a brilliant green. As far as the eye can see, there’s lush grass, threaded with huge skeins of blue wild iris, stretching up toward thick evergreen forests and the craggy crest of this wild central Colorado range.
"All I ever wanted to do was ranch," says owner Russ Maytag, surveying his spread from the ranch cookhouse. His wife, Jeannie, offers me lunch: slices of tender beef, hormone- and antibiotic-free, produced from their grass-fed herd, along with a skillet of fried potatoes and green beans, a succulent fruit salad, and lemonade.
With his strong, lanky cowboy frame and crinkly eyes, Russ looks likes he's been running a working ranch for more than 30 years. And when he starts to talk about sustainable agriculture, his steady, thoughtful gaze shows he’s spent a good amount of time pondering a crucial Colorado issue-how do you sustain the state’s vital ranching heritage while making it mesh with the economic realities of the 21st century?
"I bought the ranch in 1978, when I was 25," Russ says, explaining that his spread encompasses up to eight old homesteading sites, dating back to the late 1800s, when buffalo wandered the prairie. Some of the region’s earliest explorers, including Zebulon Pike, mapped the area and noted that winters were mild in the Wet Mountain Valley, with plenty of sunshine and abundant water from nearby snowcapped peaks providing an ideal agricultural setting.
Soon, the ranch will once again become home to multiple families, as the Maytags, partnering with developer Jeff Temple, implement what they believe is a visionary and unique plan for an "eco-ranch" with a residential component that is fully integrated with the agricultural operation. He thinks Maytag Ranch’s integrated ranching-residential model may provide an innovative solution, giving the ranching family some liquid cash value for their land while preserving the traditional agricultural operation in perpetuity.
The Maytags and Temple are convinced that the Maytag Mountain Ranch is a model for sustaining the agricultural heritage on the land, although the development has raised concern that it's simply another way to let wealthy absentee land buyers play Wild West cowboy while the land is exploited for its real estate value.
"Ranches like the Maytag are for sale because ranchers are struggling to make ends meet," says Ben Alexander, a socioeconomics program director with the Sonoran Institute, an Arizona-based group that advocates for the preservation of open space and agricultural land and communities. "Is the development done in such a way that it doesn’t compromise the agricultural characteristics and the biological values of the land?" Alexander asks. He says that to be realistic, any preservation model has to address the fundamental economic issue-that fact that ranching in the West is, and always has been, an economically marginal proposition.
"What breaks my heart is when the ranchers sell the land and then they're hired back as ranch managers," he says, describing a process he sees and the "re-feudalization of the American West."
"Does the Maytag concept have integrity? Did they do enough?" Alexander asks, explaining that in some cases similar developments have built-in financial mechanisms that help to ensure agricultural sustainability, including real estate transfer fees that are earmarked for conservation and ranching operations. According to Temple, a minimum $5,000 yearly assessment levied by the homeowners association is earmarked for conservation in addition to funds established for projects like restocking trout streams, improving irrigation efficiency, and trail stabilization.
Brian Riley, executive director of the San Isabel Land Protection Trust, a Westcliffe-based land conservation group, thinks the Maytag model is viable. "I like the fact that they’ve protected the agricultural land, the areas that have historically been irrigated," Riley says. "The homesites are on ground that’s not agriculturally productive. Personally I like the model."
"It seems to me, in the modern West, there are more and more folks with a lot of money who want to ride their horses and feel like they’re part of the ranching tradition without having to do all the hard work that goes along with it. And the pressure on agricultural land is growing," Riley says.
His main concern is that future decisions by property owners at the Maytag will not always meet the letter and intent of the original development plan, strictly outlined in the covenants and restrictions of the property deeds.
"At some point down the line, the homeowners' association could get together and change those restrictions," Riley says. "That's what homeowners' associations do. The normal Western mentality- 'It's mine. I want to be able to do anything I want on my land' -won't work in the Maytag model," Riley says. "You have to have the right buyer. Then it could turn into an incredible community of like-minded people."
On the other hand, he says, there could come a day when a property owner becomes unhappy with the deal and decides she wants changes. "You may have someone say, 'Show me my 100 acres,' and decide they want to fence off their own parcel, no longer buying into the communal aspect of the ranching operation," Riley says.
As a land trust director, Riley believes strongly in the value of conservation easements, legal mechanisms backed by the force of law that offer significant tax benefits to owners while protecting traditional agricultural uses as well as wildlife and open space. He cautions that he's not sure whether the Maytag scenario will truly protect the ranching operation in perpetuity.
For this part, Russ Maytag believes the legal mechanisms built into the Maytag development plan will do even more than a conservation easement to protect the agricultural heritage in perpetuity. He's concerned that even with a conservation easement, future owners could decide to remove the cattle from the land. He says the scenario he's developed with Temple offers stronger guarantees.
Here's how it works: The ranch is selling 24 home sites, each 100 acres, with most of that land legally dedicated to common open space to be used for grazing, fishing, and a 10-mile trail system. Property owners can only fence off a small section of their lots, in areas carefully defined by the development plan.
Homebuyers become part owners of the Maytag cattle herd, and profits for beef sales go back into the homeowners' fund, Maytag explains. And the operation also yields a quarter of beef for every property owners. The offering symbolizes another of the Maytag’s primary goals: for people to experience a close connection with their food, to understand where it comes from and how it grows.
"The community herd creates buy-in. I hope that by creating that ownership, you create community," Russ says. To be truly sustainable, the land has to be productive, he says, emphasizing his quest to combine the ranching operation with the residential element.
After clearing the dishes, the Maytags take me on a walk through their natural permaculture garden, where plants and honeybees work in symbiosis. Grape vines sprout next to dozens of bushy fruit trees, and a few fat strawberries are showing their first blush of pink. The idea is to group plants together that benefit from each other, Jeannie says. In some areas, fragrant medicinal herbs help provide a natural barrier to insect pests, while other vegetables grow close to a heat-retaining rock wall.
Jeannie settles in for a bout of weeding near the cookhouse pond, while Russ and Temple take me for a drive around the property. A yellow warbler, bright as a star, swoops over the waving grass and lands on his perch, twittering lustily. Red-winged blackbirds flit around the willows, wing patches glimmering like rubies. Down in a draw, Temple points out an abandoned cherry orchard from an early homestead, where bears now feast on the fruit.
A dragonfly whirs above a small pool in the creek, where the Maytags have placed a series of logs to create natural drop structures that help aerate the water and create pools of brook trout habitat. They’ve improved miles of stream, stabilizing banks and improving the flow, efforts that have garnered them an award nomination from the local Trout Unlimited chapter-not to mention praise from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a tough-to-please federal agency that regulates wetlands and aquatic impacts.
"We worked closely with the Corps on this plan," says Temple. "They called it a poster child for small stream restoration," he adds, pleased as an angle with the bolstering of a fine brook trout fishery.
The Wet Mountain has been identified by the Sonoran Institute as a focal point for open space and agricultural preservation, Temple says. "There's still time here," he says, alluding to the ever-increasing development pressure and explaining that at least one adjacent ranch has already succumbed to the 35-acre use-by-right ranchette subdivision scenario, branded by many critics as the death knell of Western ranching.
With their highly developed land stewardship ethic, it's not surprising the Maytags manage their grazing in the most ecologically beneficial manner. "We manage for ecology and the growth of the grass. It mimics the way the wild buffalo herds grazed hundreds of years ago," Russ explains. "They would graze an area intensively and then move on, and they might not come back to that same spot for a year." Essentially, Russ lets his herds of cattle graze the same way, in a small area for a short period of time, with seasonal adjustment to account for different rates of plant growth at different times of year.
He also manages the herd to be more in tune with natural rhythms. Calving at the Maytag comes later than at many other ranches-about the same time the elk are calving. Russ says that avoids the stress of early calving during blizzards and also means the young are born when the lushest, greenest grass is available for nursing cows.
Along with fishing and cowpoking, Maytag also encompasses and equestrian component, with a communal stable and the opportunity to learn and practice horsemanship at any level, from grooming and bridling to joining in with ranch staff on cattle rides. "We don't cowboy them and spur them," Jeannie says, opening the door to the spotless tack room lined with glowing custom saddles and cowboy boots. Property owners can take advantage of the well-trained horses, or they can bring up to two of their own to the ranch, with miles and miles of trails to enjoy, including access to the adjacent National Forest lands.
There are similar operations around Colorado, but none, says Temple and Russ, come as close to achieving full harmony between residential and agricultural uses as the Maytag. Temple previously helped develop the Storm Mountain Ranch, near Steamboat, and Russ and Jeannie also were involved in setting up the agricultural and equestrian ends of that operation, which scored a Colorado "Smart Growth" award for agricultural heritage and open-space preservation in 1998.
Learning from what's already out there, and building on their own experience and wisdom, the Maytags hope to prove that ranching and residential uses can coexist in modern Colorado, without one displacing the other.
Seven of the 24 homesites have already been sold, and the team expects to be busy with prospective buyers now that the infrastructure is in place and word-of-mouth is starting to get around. The infrastructure includes the cookhouse and a pair of fully furnished guest cabins, where families can stay while they are scoping out potential homesites and later building their houses.
"They didn’t have to do it this way," says Temple. "They had many offers to buy, but they wanted to do something different-to be a model."
