Mill Creek Parcel to be Protected

The Bulletin covers the protection of Coffer Ranch by the Deschutes Land Trust.

A 500-acre parcel of wetlands, wildlife habitat, rocky outcroppings and farmland along Mill Creek will be permanently protected from development under a conservation easement between the Deschutes Land Trust and a Crook County landowner.

“This property, it just has a really outstanding mix of habitats,” said Brad Nye, conservation director of the Deschutes Land Trust. “It’s got the stream riparian area, it’s got these wetlands and these tremendous cliffs.”

The conservation easement is designed to ensure that the property isn’t carved into pieces and developed in the future, said Jim Bauersfeld, who owns the property. He and his neighbors have been working with state agencies and others for years to help bring back natural vegetation to the banks of Mill Creek. 

“This conservation easement, I hope, is the next phase of conserving the viability of the stream, rather than seeing the land subdivided in the future,” Bauersfeld said. “The fish and the wildlife will always have a home, and that’s the most critical thing from my standpoint.”

The land trust purchased the Coffer Ranch conservation easement for $650,000, with funds from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the James H. Stanard Foundation. Bauersfeld also donated $25,000 to the land trust to help manage the easement, Nye said. 

As part of the conservation easement, Nye said, the property will not be subdivided even under future owners, and the only houses on the parcel will be a main house and a residence for farm workers.  The easement also sets up a buffer area along the creek, and puts wetland areas, cliffs and some upland wildlife habitat off-limits for farming or grazing. The best agricultural areas will still be dedicated for farmland and grazing on the ranch.

“The main challenge has been really having a working agricultural landscape, and habitat protection, existing on the same piece,” Nye said.

He noted that one of the easement’s funders, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, is focused on preserving stream values, while the Natural Resources Conservation Service has a program designed to protect working farms on high-value soils.

The $650,000 price tag for the easement covers about a quarter of what the property would be worth subdivided, Bauersfeld said, but landowners have to weigh that against the value of stream health and habitat preservation. “There’s a tremendous value in knowing you have native trout in the stream and you have wildlife,” he said, noting that a herd of elk was in one of his fields Tuesday morning. “You can’t put a dollar value on that.”

Bauersfeld owned a different parcel along Mill Creek in the 1990s, and started planting trees and improving the streamside habitat on his own, noted Brett Hodgson, a fish biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And after floods in 1996 and 1997 caused serious erosion on other properties — but left Bauersfeld’s restored banks relatively unharmed — other landowners became interested in improving their sections of Mill Creek as well.

“Jim was the springboard behind the whole restoration effort,” Hodgson said. “It was his stewardship ethics, and buying that ranch in the early ’90s that really set the stage.”

Over the past decade or so, landowners, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and other organizations have made significant improvements to the creek’s habitat, he said — and a conservation easement is one way to help preserve that effort.  “Now you need to protect that investment with a long-term conservation strategy,” Hodgson said.