Wild animals intermingle with domesticated animals more than you would think. In the American West, cows frequently share grazing land with one animal: elk. However, ranchers often hesitate to let elk graze the same land as their herds. Now, an innovative new agriculture trust is opening up grazing land and easing ranchers’ worries through the power of voluntary incentives. 

Dave Gottenborg is a Park County, Colorado, rancher who is passionate about helping wildlife. He brokered a first-of-its-kind agreement with the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a win for migrating elk and Gottenborg’s wallet. He’ll allow elk to migrate through the grazing lands he leases, and PERC will cover most of the associated costs. 

Gottenborg already loses money helping elk year-round. Every winter, he pulls down barbed wire fencing so that migrating elk can come onto his property without getting hurt. In the summers, he fixes fences that the elk destroyed while his cattle graze the land the elk have trampled. This situation benefits the elk, but Gottenborg takes a hit when, in his words, “500 elk show up and eat 20 pounds of forage per day, per elk.” 

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Grazing elk can eat up a lot of available food that might have otherwise gone to cattle. They may carry a bacterial disease called brucellosis that they can pass on to cows. If cows test positive for the disease, ranchers must initiate a lengthy quarantine and testing protocol, which takes time and money, adding extra motivation to keep the two species apart in the first place. 

But elk need access to grazing land, even if it’s land occupied by herds of cattle. To ease the financial pressure on Gottenborg and demonstrate to other ranchers that incentives can work, PERC has committed to paying more than two-thirds of Gottenborg’s grazing land lease rate. They have agreed to do so for five years, as long as the land outlined in the agreement remains available to grazing elk. 

“We agreed to keep the payment less than 100% so it would still be more profitable for third-party landowners to keep agricultural grazing usage,” Gottenborg explained. The concern is that people who lease land to ranchers may stop leasing and simply collect money to host the elk if given the option. If that were to happen, Gottenborg says that would hurt area ranchers. “Devastate us, really.”

The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust helped broker the deal and will monitor elk herds on Gottenborg’s property. They will serve as an outside organization holding Gottenborg accountable and keeping an eye on things using trail cameras, drones, and in-person visits. Gottenborg will not be laying out salt or minerals for elk, but his pasture leases will be open to allow migrating animals to stop and eat for as long as they want. 

Gottenborg’s agreement with PERC is an excellent example of private actors at work to solve a wildlife management problem using ingenuity and incentives. Hopefully, we will see many more of these agreements pop up wherever needed. 

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.