I met with someone on a recent trip to talk about investing in land, thinking that our conversation might lead to new ideas that could help us in our search to mitigate the debt on the Paintrock Canyon Ranch, with the long term goal of putting together a number of ranches across the West. Instead, it led me back to the same conversation I have always had when talking about financial expectations around investing in land.

My quest to find an economic solution to creating a healthy ranching landscape has been frustrating over the years, because no matter who I am in discussions with, ranchland is always placed on the same shelf as any other investment that must provide a competitive return, the same as a shoe factory, or a coconut farm in Acapulco.

I have been managing land professionally for almost 50 years. We work with a great number of people—conservation organizations, government agencies, and private landowners, all with different perspectives. Except for some of the private owners, hardly anyone places real value on managing the land. Management is always spoken highly of in our meetings—it gets great lip service—but never more than that; there is rarely any concrete reward for creative, successful management. It's always about making a buck. I have worked for ranch owners with high financial expectations from their ranches, and I've directly felt the pressure and seen the harm it does to the land and to the people managing the business, who simply cannot squeeze the land hard enough to respond to owners’ expectations.

As I grow older, I have become increasingly part of the land that I live on. And, at an emotional level, it has become hard for me to put a price on it. Its value is way beyond any human monetary measurement. So I ask myself: How can land be reduced to a dollar amount when it is the source of life on earth? Isn’t it too valuable to be quantified simply by a number of dollars?

Perhaps the question should be: Is the conventional private land management model the correct model? Should land be portioned out in ownership shares, off limits to all others who cannot contribute financially? This is an especially relevant question when ranches today cost more than what an agricultural enterprise can service, leaving ownership to only wealthy organizations and individuals.

Financial companies are investing billions of dollars to acquire agricultural land. This speculative trend—which views land as a financial investment rather than as an ecological community, as someone’s home, as the source of our food, water, and clean air—adversely affects the ability of a fourth-generation ranching family like ours to operate. As the price of agricultural land continues to rise, it is increasingly difficult to compete with these large institutional investors.

This financial investment model does not recognize non-monetary values like clean air and clean water that land can produce. It does not truly value management expertise that strives to vitalize the health of the natural systems and resources.

In 1999, when I was writing the proposal for leasing the Chico Basin Ranch, I envisioned creating a large group of people living on Colorado’s Front Range who would come to feel like the Chico Basin Ranch belonged to them as a place where they could explore the outdoors with their families and friends, a place to go get out of the city, a place that produced products that they needed and would support because they believed in the work and mission of our what we were trying to do.

My dream was somewhat ethereal, but ambitious. I saw the lands around the nearby cities providing homegrown meat, water that you could drink off the ground surface, and air to breath and clean your lungs—an Eden, if you will, where you could take your family to hike, fish, explore, play with your kids and friends.

This picture of future possibilities has lived ever since beneath the surface, morphing day by day. It has led to a different perspective of looking at the land we manage multi-dimensionally, as a place to share and learn from. We implemented an open gate policy on the Chico Basin Ranch, which welcomes anyone wanting to visit the ranch to hike, ride horses, bird watch, participate in music and art exhibit events, field days and workshops. A ranch leadership training program was founded and has created a new generation of ranch managers. And ultimately it has led to creating special experiences that invite people from way beyond the Colorado Front Range to visit “their” ranches as guests to enjoy–a dream come true for many people.

Today, the play has taken us full circle. Our community of people has come to consider Ranchlands as their place. Not through investing capital in land, but through investing time and money in our management model, which produces avenues for people to become involved with our ranches, such as guest experiences, beef, leather products, hunting, fishing, workshops, concerts, and art exhibits. And ultimately, what I feel is the most important part—people joining Ranchlands Collective because of a desire to become part of a vision that strives to give back to the higher good, of managing for the land.

Can this be an alternative to portioning land out in ownership shares? Can this be a conduit for financing Ranchlands in light of the fact that agricultural enterprises simply cannot generate conventional financial expectations? If so, this model can be an important alternative for raising the bar on creating healthier ecosystems and building connected and inspired communities of people of which land is the common denominator.

I want to find a way to acquire land, hold it, and make it better. And through this, enjoy it—not necessarily through what it can return financially, but by knowing we are making it better. By enhancing our lives physically through what we can experience being in the place that we have invested in. By learning how to fish in a way that honors the fish and the water and all the time that has passed as the creek runs endlessly between its banks, carving canyons through mountains and plains. By riding a horse across the land and enjoying the ride, because it puts me as close as I can feel to being a part of its sweep, where I can feel it move and breathe. I want to find a way to experience land in a way that makes me feel that I belong to it, instead of it belonging to me. These ranches can belong to all of us—the Ranchlands community that wants to challenge the conventional financial approach with an alternative that we can actually touch with our hands.

We are in the process of creating a new membership level to the Ranchlands Collective that will offer equity shares that provide you deeper access to Ranchlands. This would be an opportunity to help pay for the Paintrock Canyon Ranch and create a foundation of future ranches that make up Ranchlands, giving us the ability to develop and scale the business management model that you have become a part of by being a member of the Collective. We are in the formative stages of thinking about the structure of this membership tier and would love to hear your thoughts on how an opportunity like this would meet your personal goals. What ideas or interests do you have that we can incorporate as we develop this new concept?

We’ve been thinking about what kinds of experiences could be meaningful enough to you, on the land we would purchase and manage, to make you feel justified in spending hard-earned money. We wonder how strong an incentive being part of a mission for the higher good of the land we own might represent. We wonder if there would still be an incentive to invest in land if the only financial return would go to the next generation, when shares are sold at an appreciated value.

These are the ticklish questions, because even though we are trying to figure out an unconventional solution, there has to be a financial reward. And, we realize that the incentive cannot simply be to be part of a mission for the higher good, even though to me that might be sufficient.

We greatly appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

So I leave you with all this mumble jumble, a quagmire of what dreams are made of, esoteric, just short from the edge of comprehension. It's very early, still dark outside, so perhaps I should wait till it gets light to re-read what I have written. I have my fire going with winter having made its way to Wyoming in full force, laying down 8 inches of snow with single digit temps. We’ll see what the new day brings.

Duke Phillips
December 2023