John and Jennifer Hanson

Operate Logging Camp Ranch, a beef cattle, bison, and quarter horse ranch with a ranch recreation operation along the Little Missouri River near Bowman, ND

Prairie Public
Tell me the name of your ranch and what you do here John.

John
Well this is "The Logging Camp Ranch," and we operate a livestock enterprise with beef cattle, bison, and quarter horses, and then we also have a ranch recreation enterprise that we have operated here since 1985.

Prairie Public
What is this ranch recreation?

John
It was started with an interest that I always had in managing the pine trees—harvesting some or trying to create some value from them. And we wound up purchasing the old Harry Jeffrey’s sawmill in Spearfish, South Dakota. Kevin Fuger and I and my brother, Ted Hanson, went down there over the Labor Day weekend in the fall of 1983 and extracted the sawmill from Harry Jeffrey’s setup, loaded it on a flatbed, hauled it back to North Dakota, and that fall began to set it up here. And it was quite an adventure to learn how to run that saw, but eventually we figured it out. And there was a great, great North Dakotan named Joe Thompson from Washburn, North Dakota. He was a World War II veteran, community-minded person, a guy that built Fort Mandan largely out of his own pocket, a man who bought and donated a major steam engine to the Steam Threshers Reunion, a great community man who had quite a large acreage along the Missouri River west of Washburn, and he had always had a sawmill. And Joe and us we became friends, and so then he came down here one day finally and got us over the top on how to manage this 54-inch circle saw. So we started sawing boards and selling firewood and fence posts. One dream I had always had as a youth was to build a log cabin, and so as straight pieces of wood came through the saw, we would cut them flat on two sides and throw them in the log cabin pile. And our intent was to create a place in the wintertime where we could stay warm, a place to store all our tools, keep things dry, get organized and all that kind of thing. Well, before we had the roof finished, people were inquiring about renting it. And at that time the assistant tourism director was Terry Harzinsky who is the long-time CVD director in Bismarck-Mandan. And he and his associate came out here at our invitation to see whether or not recreation was a possibility in western North Dakota and would people be interested in coming here. They said immediately yes, please seriously and positively consider the startup of a guest ranch sort of operation. I don’t really remember how the conversation went, but we decided to do it at any rate and then move the cabin that we had built at the sawmill to the site that we now occupy, and that was in the fall of 1984. And then in 1985 in the spring, some friends of ours built a second cabin. And then in 1986, we built a third one and then gradually have just kept trying to fill in the blanks as best we can with the resources that we have at hand and eventually now created an enterprise that is by no means an empire, but we have 44 beds in four separate buildings. And having been doing this since 1984 have enjoyed a long list of people who’ve come here who now are our friends, and we learn from them. We’ve prospered to some extent from them being here, and the list of interests is A through Z. We haven’t had a funeral here yet, but I have no doubt that at some time we’ll even have that. We’ve had weddings and family reunions and educational processes and hunting and musical events and great things that have to do with virtually all of human interest. I think the primary human interest here would be biology—the birds and the animals and the sky and the plants, the grasses, and the river and all of the biology things. I think that’s where people’s primary interest is.

Prairie Public
How is it to keep all this up Jennifer and to do this in addition to everything else you have to do on a working ranch?

Jennifer
Well it’s gotten a little bit easier with our kids getting older. They can take on more responsibility, but our labor pool is either far away or very few, and so you just have to get a lot out of the day, plan your day well.

Prairie Public
And you substitute teach as well.

Jennifer
That’s correct, and I also help with junior high volleyball which is quite time-consuming, and, of course, having that switched to fall that hurt a little bit with activities at the cabins. We’re busy in both places at the same time.

Prairie Pubilc
You guys do all the work? You physically change the bedding and all the things that go into it—clean it?

Jennifer
Uh-huh, yeah we do. We have a daughter that’s 16 and a daughter that’s 11. And I guess if we all get at it, it’s not so hard. And they bring their own bedding some of the time, and we don’t do all of the cooking all of the time. People want to do that themselves, and they can so it works out okay. I think the biggest piece of advice when we started this adventure was start small, think big, and stay solvent, and you know that’s good for any small business starting.

John
It came from Marketplace. It was an old Marketplace theme.

Jennifer
It was very good, even family-wise. I knew this would have an impact on our family, and we were a little bit skeptical, but it’s really turned out well. Our kids and ourselves really have had a chance to meet many different people from different parts of the world, and I think it’s just enhanced their person, their character.

Prairie Public
And has it been a grand adventure?

John
Oh yes ma’am. Oh yes. And it’s because people are really wonderful. And if you can look to their wonderful sides, there are just so many interesting examples of success and failure, and people are always anxious to share all that stuff—excitement and boredom and all of the things that they have experienced in their own life. It all comes tumbling out inevitably.

I think there are times when we would look to directly guard our privacy

Jennifer
But I have enjoyed people coming. I think what we try to do is personalize. I mean I feel like when people come here, we really do share our lifestyle, and we share the country that we live on just as if I’m going some place brand new. I think you get a better taste of it if you know personally someone to show you around, to really let them share with you the things that we have out here 'cause for a lot of people it’s really different. Just like if I would go to New York, some place that would be really different. I think when there’s people involved and we’re personable, it just is a better experience.

Prairie Public
Discuss the issues of landowner versus hunter. Hunters knocking down fences and wandering around on your property?

John
Well we have an almost 100% track record of really respectful, careful, responsible guests. Occasionally there would be someone who maybe accidentally makes a mistake, occasionally a purposeful one, but it’s a rare situation. Most times when people have come a long ways to go hunting or horseback riding or for whatever purpose they’ve come to a new place, they’re most generally on their best behavior. And it’s because if it’s a nice place and a nice experience for them, the last thing they want to do is jeopardize the quality of their stay or the chance that they would be able to come back. I think sometimes you’d more expect unacceptable behavior to come from people who are more familiar with their surroundings, more local people or that they just take things for granted. They’re not malicious or intent on doing bad things. They just take some of their privileges for granted. I think that’s some of the issue about hunting in North Dakota that I think people have taken for granted for so long their access to quality hunting, pretty much anytime they wanted, anywhere they wanted that now to confront a new reality which is tied to a declining prosperity level in traditional agriculture, the more where agriculture used to find prosperity many times especially the younger generation or farmer and rancher can’t find that prosperity, and so if they have property or access to property that has high recreational value, if they’re got entrepreneurial interests and are innovative and willing to try new things, it's logical that they’re gonna take an interest in developing a recreational land use.

In a case where a landowner or operator has access to high quality recreational land and they have a financial need to fulfill, it’s only logical that they would take advantage of those high values. In North Dakota because we have preserved our rural values so well—some might say that’s a negative—that because we haven’t been growing in population, because we haven’t urbanized, that we haven’t encountered the same development pressures as Cook County in Illinois or Lancaster County in Pennsylvania or Fairfax County in Virginia-- because we haven’t experienced those same kinds of development in population growth issues, that in those areas their natural resource values are going down. And because we’re depopulating, our natural resource values are going up. And so the recreational values of waterfowl hunting, upland game bird hunting, big game hunting, bird watching, biking, hiking, all of the recreational interests A through Z have very high value in places like North Dakota. For instance, a wild ringneck is worth more on the hoof to a farmer or rancher than is a feeder pig. Or in a profit sense more than a slaughter lamb, and so it’s only natural that people would see right away that they should be managing their land in a more diversified way which may include hunting for non residents and residents.

If a farmer or rancher has access to high quality recreational land and they have a financial need and they are innovative and entrepreneurial, it’s only logical that they will move the management of their property in a recreational direction.

Prairie Public
Is it frustrating that we can’t make a living out here agriculturally? Some friends west of Bismarck saw a couple of ducks flying, and one guy said to his neighbor, "Who would have thought 20 years ago that we would have said there goes our future." What are your thoughts on that?

John
Well we’ve always said that if feeder cattle were $3.00 a pound and wheat $10.00 a bushel, there would be no such thing as an agriculturally based recreational industry in the state. The recreational industry in a rural sense is growing is because there is very small potential for profit in conventional agricultural production. And 20 years ago people would have sold land that they would have thought was worthless because it had a slough on it or big canyons and draws, and it was low value agricultural land only to find out two decades later that that turned out to be the most valuable asset they had. And the thing about the future as it passes by is that you’ve gotta be willing to grab onto it. I think that’s an issue too in conventional agriculture is that at a time when it most needs to change, it either has the inability or the unwillingness to do it. And that’s an unfortunate coincidence—it’s a cultural crossroads. And I don’t think that we’re doing a good enough job of understanding how to make the changes in a timely fashion. Because to make changes on the land, things take time. It’s not like building a new house or buying a new car or changing schools or colleges or changing majors in a college. Things that are land-based and animal-based, it takes a long time. For instance, in our quarter horse operation, it will take a long time for us to create the kind of horse that we have in mind as our goal. It could take 20 years. It could take ten years of a different management regime on pasture rotations to start seeing a trend of grassland recovery. It could take ten years. These things don’t happen quickly. And so the same is true with a recreational enterprise is that it would be unfair to expect that just because you’re in the recreation business, that you’re gonna instantly have 500 customers in a year’s time. You must build a reputation. You must learn about marketing. You must learn about customer relationships. You must learn about a whole host of things. And so it’s important to be timely about the decision to diversify and not to put it off too long.

Prairie Public
You guys went to marketplace and other places to learn all about all these things?

Jennifer
Yeah, we started probably with Marketplace, and North Dakota Tourism really helped in the beginning. They helped us get some people out here that gave us some coverage. You know the country is a draw in itself, and it’s just to let people know that it’s here. And then we started getting into the hunting. So then we started to go to sport shows, and we’ve gone to a couple of horse shows—Minnesota Horse Expo—to incorporate the riding vacations and also people bringing their own horses out here to ride which they really enjoy, and then to sell our own quarter horses as well.

Prairie Public
It sounds as if you’re always thinking about what’s the next thing going to be. I mean just like a regular business would have to operate. Are we on the cutting edge of what people want.

John
And as the industry grows, it’s even more important to be innovative because you know if you were to keep the same products recreationally speaking, you would be in always a more competitive environment because there are more and more people offering riding, hunting, bird watching, rural things, and so yes you always have to be offering a new kind of product or some new. One of my interests, which if I’m allowed to promote it a little bit is that I’ve always had the really romantic view of the wintertime nighttime horse-drawn sleigh ride on the Little Missouri River so I have this vision of a group of eight or ten people per weekend—one group so it would be a private group, and that they would reserve the cabins for Friday night and Saturday night, and that each night we would go with buffalo robes taken from these bison here—tanned—and hot bricks or rocks in a horse-drawn sleigh ride and go down the river for an hour and maybe light a fire and sit around the fire and have somebody there to sing or something and have some refreshments—hot cocoa or some other refreshment, and then to get into the sleigh and come back on a cold, moonlit, starlight, badlands night. And so that’s a product that I’m hoping to introduce at some point in time, and I just get a tingly feeling about doing those kinds of things. I don’t think anybody else is thinking about doing that on the Little Missouri River right now. And so it would be an example of a new recreational experience.

Prairie Public
A lot of people still think, "Why can’t I make it in traditional agriculture? What’s wrong? Am I doing something wrong?"

Jennifer
I think so many things have shaped agriculture. I think for awhile it was banks because in order to make things look good you had to have things look good on paper so you needed all of this equipment. You needed all of this land, and now all of a sudden to make it in farming, you make it by your margins. You only get so many bushels, so much money profit per bushel so then you have to have so many more bushels to make it, you’re overproducing, but then now you’ve got companies like Monsanto and genetically modified wheat so you’re looking at that. I’m looking at anti trust laws and how come they’re not helping us with packers now being able to own cattle so they don’t have to buy ours at the price that we can make a profit. We import now because it’s cheaper for the companies in America to make money if they buy cheaper food from somewhere else. And then you start looking at the corporate farming. I think that’s the worst thing we could do because I think if you get people on the land that need to take care of the land to make it in farming, you’re gonna have your land cared for. Corporations have to make money. They’re gonna do it however they need to do it, and if it means abusing the land, they’ll probably do it. We started with bonanza farming which fell by the wayside too. I’m hoping that maybe we’re in a cycle, and it’s gonna get back to the small farmer. Maybe that is truly in the past. I don’t know. I wish it could be that way.

John
If I do this, then I can’t take good care of the beef cattle or if I do that, then I can’t take good care of the horses, or if I do this I can’t. There was excellent quote that I learned as a result of the work that we did with the grasslands stewardship initiative. "To keep your traditional value, you must change your traditional practice or to preserve a traditional value, you must change a traditional practice." To take that little bit of wisdom and put it into reality, people need to understand that there has to be some change. To protect part of the whole, you must give up some of it. Somewhere something has to change. In fact there was a depopulation conference in Dickinson last fall—you might remember that. There was a two-part, one in Bismarck and one in Dickinson. And one of the main speakers talked about the importance of change, that you can’t have opportunity without change. So the longer you stay with status quo, the longer you go without opportunity. And again if you’re innovative and entrepreneurial, you have to create an opportunity. To get the opportunity, you must have a change, and to preserve a traditional value, you must change the traditional practice.

Prairie Public
Wow, that’s great. Who do you have here today? Who’s with you today?

John
Well they’re upland game bird hunters. One is from New York, one is from Massachusetts, and one is from Montana. The fella from New York is a retired real estate agent, owns a pro tennis club. And the fellow from Massachusetts has an invisible dog fencing business. And the fellow from Montana is a retired West Point officer and was in the Army Aviation. They’ve traveled all over the world hunting and fishing. Many years ago they hunted in northwestern North Dakota, and then now they found out about the hunting in southwestern North Dakota and called us about a month ago.

Prairie Public
It sounds like you get a lot of people like that who have been everywhere else. Is it a little intimidating because they might be measuring you up against an African safari or something?

Jennifer
I think they’re just looking for a different experience.

John
The same reason that people come to North Dakota is the same reason they will leave because they’re looking for new and different things to do.

Prairie Public
So there’s a constant need to bring in new people?

John
Yes, and new people will always come because they’ve hunted in Florida or fished in British Columbia or they’ve ridden a horse in Wyoming, and now they want to ride horse in North Dakota in the Little Missouri Badlands or they’ve been to the Sears Tower in Chicago and now they want to go to Venice and see the city by the sea. And having seen the city by the sea, they might go to Nepal and see a city in the mountains. So it’s not a negative for people to leave your business as a recreational operator. We always used to feel badly about that—well what did we do wrong? Well we did everything right. It’s just that they have interests that take them elsewhere in the world.

Prairie Public Tell me about the grasslands issue.

John
Well the U.S. Forest Service is by law mandated to every ten years update the management manual or the management plan for the national grasslands in the United States, of which I think there are five or six. In North Dakota it’s the Little Missouri Grasslands .and the controversy is reflective of the problems that are in conventional agriculture.

The frustrations that are accompanying the loss of prosperity, the loss of income are connected to the defensive attitudes that ranchers in the rural community have with regard to the prospect of the new management plan shrinking their income either by cuts in animal units or by other uses of the grasslands.

The perception is that less cattle or less agricultural interest results in higher values for other interests which is a misconception. That’s not entirely true. There are places and circumstances that occasionally happen where perhaps the grasslands are overgrazed a little bit. But in most cases the grasslands are very well taken care of. The U.S. Forest Service, for the most part, does an excellent job of overseeing the management and the ranchers as permitees the same way. The grazing associations have for decades been effective, fairly progressive, relevant political bodies.

But in the last ten years there’s been a wider chasm develop between the environmental and recreational interests versus the traditional livestock interest. We have been pretty active in trying to find a middle ground, hence the creation of the Glasslands Stewardship Initiative which has now become the Partners For Grasslands Stewardship, and it’s a collaborative effort that’s designed to bring the diverse interests involved with the Little Missouri National Grasslands together to talk about their values and what’s important to them and then to try to build a relationship that results in the ability to create a future that everybody can live with versus a future that everyone is threatened by. And we have made some good progress. In some areas we haven’t. There’s a long history of mistrust, questioned motives, and we need to work hard to reverse that. And it’s like managing the land, it takes some relationships in a human perspective that have gone bad. It takes a long time in many cases to rebuild those relationships, and that’s what we’re trying to do, and I’m personally convinced that we can accomplish much more with a community picnic than we can a meeting at the courthouse. I’m firmly convinced of that. When I grew up, there was a long tradition of people on the 4th of July or Labor Day gathering together on the Little Missouri River and having pot luck picnics and softball games and horseshoes, and people did a lot of things together. And because they did a lot of things together, they were more neighborly. They understood everybody’s interests so much more. But because agriculture has become such a difficult profession financially, people just don’t have, in their own view, time to be more of a community. And so that’s what we’re trying to do is to recreate a community in the Little Missouri National Grasslands. And if we can do that, then I believe that we can together create a future that’s good for all of us versus a future that’s good for one and a threat to the other or vice versa which is what’s happening now. If the livestock interest is perceived to have gotten a better deal in the management update, then the environmental interest is somewhat offended and vice versa. If the environmental interest gets a deal that is counter to the livestock interest, then the livestock interest is offended. And obviously you can’t manage a resource with that kind of disagreement. And so we’ve tried a collaborative effort. Now it’s three years old. Some people believe in collaborations and others don’t which then gets into the arena of more human things versus land things. There might be times when people are used to having control or the political edge. That’s what they don’t want to give up. It’s not what has to do with the resource. It’s more what has to do with someone no matter where their interest is a longstanding position of authority, and they just don’t want to change. They’re not comfortable changing which goes back to what we talked about earlier that at a time when we most need change, sometimes we’re the most unwilling or incapable of doing it.

John
This view is why we picked this sight. This was the first cabin we built up here. That’s the second one over there.This one was 1984, that one 1985, and the other one 1986, and then the big building 1996. The Prairie Learning Center kids were here just recently. It’s pretty cozy. I got a woodburning stove. People like to come here and just chill out. It sleeps six. It’s really cozy. Every so often in the wintertime I’ll come up here and spend one night up here.

All the wood in this cabin came from the ranch, and it was to be the first modern day log cabin that was built from these pines. And we pretty much proved that the wood could be used for good use. Up until the time we did that everybody assumed that these trees were worthless. I just couldn’t see how a pine tree could be worthless having seen it put to such good use in so many other places. Why wasn’t it so here? And it was only because people just had never done it.

In the case of this sawmill, it was learning how to work that blade. It was such a big, powerful machine that I didn’t know anything about, and yet we learned how to work it and make it do what it was designed to do. And then when we could work the blade, then we could create building materials, and as soon as we had building materials, then all these other things began to open up. And, of course, then when people wanted to rent this building, in a minute or two I realized there was the land use, that it was—'cause the ranch is a beautiful ranch. It’s one of the most beautiful landforms in the State of North Dakota, and how in a conventional way could you never extract a prosperity from that. I mean beef cattle buyers and wheat buyers don’t have any bias on how beautiful the ground the animals were grown on. But having cabins and services, that was how we could prosper from what the country looks like and smells like and sounds like and all that stuff.

Prairie Public
And that was liberating for you?

John
It was. It changed my life, and it was because then I realized that I could just darn well do anything I set my mind to. So we’ve tried to duplicate the experience with my son, but it’s hard to duplicate. It’s like asking for flowers you know.

Prairie Public
Like asking for flowers, no. Tell me what you mean by that?

John
Well if you have to ask for flowers, the act in and of itself, the generosity or the sensitivity or the love of the act is gone.

Prairie Public
But he’s gonna have to find his own liberation.

John
I think so. And I always do my best with adventure with the children and broadening their horizons as much as I can, hoping that they will be liberated more quickly than I.

Prairie Public
Did you learn a lot just putting this first cabin together?

John
Oh yes ma’am. If you could see the cabins we’ve built now compared to this one, this one is quite a plain Jane, but it’s still quaint, and it’s still my favorite. Periodically, at least once a year during the winter, I’ll come up here and stay one night here. The kids like to stay in the cabin. It’s kind of a little adventure like you take a trip and never leave the farm.

Prairie Public
How would you compare this as a profit-making thing compared to raising cattle? Talk about the difference on what amount of work goes into doing this versus trying to feed the cattle and what money can be made.

John
Well I’ll give you an example. The first ringneck combo that we sold, there was a group of ten hunters, and I charged $1000. And in one week’s time I spent probably eight hours taking care of selling the trip, and then once the people got here getting them oriented to the habitat and checking in with them periodically through the week. But we netted pretty close to $8000 for that eight hours work so we got paid statistically a $1000 an hour for that work. And we figured that the profit on a beef cow is about $160/head so that would be approximately the profit on 60 beef cows for the entire year. And the hours involved in an entire year to take care of 60 head of beef cows, oh man I think the pay is—I think people pretty commonly say that farmers and ranchers work for minimum wage. So the contrast is significant that in eight hours time we duplicated the profit on a hundred head of beef cattle.

Prairie Public
So your inheritance, your parents legacy is not so much a cattle ranch but this beautiful spot that they happened to pick?

John
Yes, my great grandfather William who as it turned out was an entrepreneur and an innovator in his own right. He had oh about 15 head of bison and some elk and some deer, and he went around to county fairs and Midwest public events in Iowa and Illinois and charged a fee for people for come in and see his menagerie of great beasts that people normally had never had the opportunity to see. He was a free thinker, even back then, and his father before him the same way. His father before him walked to the gold fields in California from their family holdings in Iowa and made a lot of money as a merchant in California. Didn’t walk back, but he walked out there. Then he returned again in the 1860s, before the end of the Civil War, and tried to make some more money but wasn’t able to do it.

Prairie Public
Is it hard to do things differently when everybody around you is not?

John
Yes it is. Opposition to Measure Number Three is justified in the sense that Measure Number Three doesn’t include enough things in a policy perspective about how to keep young people in the State of North Dakota. And I think one of the things they’re really missing is there should be an innovation curriculum, K through 12, there should be an innovation curriculum in every higher ed institution in the state. The University of Mary is the only one that has it at the Schaefer Center. And I think over time, if people know about innovation on a much more, sophisticated level - if they know more about innovation and the challenges that innovation iinvolves, they’re gonna be a lot more likely to treat the innovator with respect and with some decorum, some basic decency. When innovators go to the café or the bar, they may not be welcome in those circles anymore. In many communities diversity is not welcome.

In Grant County year ago the county commission voted to accept a grant to study, just the grant, to study the likelihood that there might be a way to have a nuclear waste site in Grant County. All they did was vote to accept the study money, and three of those county commissioners eventually wound up out of office, run out of town. Ray Miller was a long-time Grant County Commissioner, raised his family there, great dairyman, right along the highway there west of Flasher. Ray Miller was voted out of office. Another man named Sprecker was voted out of office. A third one was so vilified, he was subjected to a recount and a recall. I often thought afterwards, imagine all the other young thinkers that were thinking about things differently in Grant County, their mother saying now you be quiet. You remember what happened to Ray Miller. You remember what happened to those county commissioners. Don’t you dare bring embarrassment and shame down upon this family. So take your idea child, please, and sit down and be quiet about it. Go to Minneapolis or go to Des Moines or go to Kansas City, and it’s okay there, but don’t tell anybody where you’re from or who your family is. I remember once I suggested to my mother that I thought that if I had a horse-drawn wagon and Amway products and pulled a wagon around Bismarck, Mandan, or Fargo or Minneapolis that I could attract enough attention to the product that I could sell a bunch of product, and I was just musing with her about that, and oh she said well that might be the case, but don’t tell anybody whose kid you are. So my point is that if people knew more as a community of a state or any other political subdivision--state, county, local whatever, civic, municipality, whatever--that if there was more understanding about innovation as a total subject, then innovators would feel more comfortable. There are some times that I know people, especially in the Badlands, if you’ve got a different idea about things, be prepared for people to criticize it before they stop to think about it long enough to maybe embrace it. Another case is the wildlife management issues in the state. We recommended that a wildlife extension service be formed so that on a county by county basis there is a wildlife professional working with the people, managing the people for the wildlife versus managing the wildlife for the people, and we reasoned that if you had that county by county presence that was people oriented, that eventually a lot of these controversies would go away. Oh my goodness you’d have thought that I had suggested to the Game and Fish that their whole method of dealing with wildlife resources and just associated issues that by virtue of suggesting this human resources division, that it meant that it was a referendum against all the rest of the things that they were doing. Dean Hildenbrand, I made the suggestion at a judiciary B meeting, and oh my gosh, he was so defensive, brought the human resource person they have hired in Minot down and introduced him to the committee and to the crowd there that this is what we’re doing, and Mr. Hanson makes a good recommendation. But we said Dean, having four resource people in the state is the equivalent of having one combine to cut the crop in Cass County. There’s so much more to do.

Prairie Public
How do people feel around here about ranchers selling their land in attractive little parcels for people to come and have for hunting.

John
Well subdivisions all across the American West are controversial in that because the ag use has failed, they sell the land to the highest bidder, and oftentimes that’s a real estate interest. They either subdivide the land themselves into the 40-acre ranchettes or they sell to a developer who in turn is going to sell the land into 40-acre ranchettes—makes a huge amount of money. It’s environmental devastating. It changes the open space. Many people they have the dream and justifiably so havin’ their western horse ranch, and so they get a 40-acre piece of ground and innocently probably graze it out year after year after year. The environment is changed. It’s degraded, significantly degraded. So environmental that’s the controversy with subdivisions. Financially, the controversy with subdivisions to the local community is that for those farmers and ranchers who don’t have mortgages, who made their money in the 50s, 60, 70s era of agriculture, they see their future and their opportunity in the changing ownership of land. So they don’t like recreational values being attached per acre because they can’t afford that. So that’s why the opposition comes from that part of the interest that land like this will sell for $1000 an acre. Agriculturally it’s worth $150 or $200. And so that’s the story from an environmental point of view and from the local point of view amongst the people who have the money to buy land when it comes up for sale. Well that leaves out the mortgaged where a young person who got in the business at the wrong time—you know any of us that got started farming and ranching in the early 80s until the present, if you had to borrow money to buy the land, borrow money to buy cows, farm equipment, that sort of thing, the business model is going to fail. It’s failed already for lots and lots of people. And so it leaves them out. What about their opportunity? You know if they’re gonna sell their land, they should be able to sell it to the highest bidder.

Another one of those innovative ideas, and it’s been around a long time—is the conservation easement. And the conservation easement protects the open space and protects either the agricultural value or the environmental value…'cause the two are often the same, by paying what’s called the recreational differential. So if the land is worth $1000 an acre for recreation and $200 an acre for agriculture, the conservation easement has a value of $800 per acre, the difference between recreation and agriculture. And so then it allows the landowner to take advantage of the recreational value of the land without the subdivisions. Well, there’s lot of organizations all throughout the American West that don’t see conservation easements as good tools. There’s too much of the rights are given away, and there’s too many strings attached, and in some cases there are. But it still is a tool that where it’s been properly applied, has worked beautifully to preserve open space, to keep local and traditional landownership patterns so that people aren’t force to sell, and on and on and on.

Prairie Public
So they get that cash that they need to do what they do?

John
Yes, yes. They can pay their mortgage or they can y do whatever they have to do. Get rid of the bank loan without selling.

I’ve thought about this for years and years. I’ve had time to distill these thoughts into some kind of comprehensible dialog ‘cause it is so complicated. It’s such a tender equilibrium, and when anytime it’s upset a little bit…..

Prairie Public
What is this building called?

John
It’s called the Rangerosa which is another—see the old building was the Ponderosa, but the Ponderosa burned. We decided to rebuild on exactly the same site. So a group of bow hunters from Minneapolis-St. Paul associated with one of the finest archery professionals in the United States, a man named Carlson, they came here in the spring of 1997 with 14 men and got us back on our feet, got enough of this building rebuilt in a week’s time that Jennifer and I and the guy on the website, and one other paid employee spent the better part of the summer in 1997 rebuilding this building. Ranger is the name of the township. Ranger was a location name that had been moved around in the area twice before, and I thought well what about Rangerosa? And of course everybody said but you know we’ve never heard of that word, and I thought it was a perfect name it’s a piney, woodsy kind of a name. Almost no one understands.

It sleeps 25. We have this common kitchen area and meeting area. There’s a full loft with a bathroom and bedroom suite upstairs in the loft. And then I you want to follow me, there are four rooms back here. and, of course, the Little Missouri River heads at the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, and that’s why we have this picture here. It’s to make that connection. Two bathrooms used communally by the other four rooms which is if there is a weakness in our plan here, we need to have bathrooms in each individual room. But it’s so costly that we couldn’t afford to do it. But these rooms, this is how they’re designed. And we’re gradually going to replace the bunk beds made as they are with more rustic things, but we had to get back in business. We had North Dakota Youth Range Camp. Their family reunion’s coming, and we had to get up and running, and so we just did the things that went most quickly…

Prairie Public
You had the North Dakota Youth Range Camp here?

John
Yeah for the past 15 years, yeah the NDSU Youth Range Camp of about 35.

Prairie Public
And then the agronomy guys come out?

John
Yeah, , the extension guys, range science and RCS, they all cooperate on that—another educational thing. I also have strong feelings about education as part of the business plan, and I always reasoned that it was important because you know they were teaching in the temples 5000 years ago, and they’re gonna be teaching in whatever temples there are 5000 years from now. And so I reasoned that teaching and education is a time-honored thing to build a business around, and I am not wrong about that. We have photography workshops and we teach as much as we can.

Prairie Public
You’re thinking about ways to tap into things that happening already and why can’t they happen here?

John
Yes, exactly.

You can visit the Logging Camp Ranch website at
http://www.loggingcampranch.com/