Doing the math out loud, Jeff Lazslo counted the tens of thousands of dollars he would need to outfit his Montana cattle ranch with virtual fencing.

"I have to do the math while I answer that question," he said during a recent presentation on Zoom. "Collars are approximately $50 each. We run a herd of around four or 500 animals, so let's say ... 500 ... that, I think, is $25,000 if my math is correct. And we have three radio towers which cover the entire ranch, Lazslo said. "Those, I think, are about $12,000 each. So that's ... $61,000 to cover our needs," he told a group of folks in agriculture and a handful of members of the press.

It sounds pricy, but it's only slightly higher than he spends on conservation annually, averaged over the past two decades. The price of virtual fencing will likely pay for itself in about five years, he said, considering the price of mending and rebuilding a mile of fences on the large property is about $20,000 per year in labor and supplies. As a bonus, it helps wildlife co-existing with his land.

Lazslo owns Granger Ranches, located in Cameron, Montana. It's a historic, family-owned cattle operation in the Madison Valley, owned by his family since 1936. The ranch is recognized for extensive land stewardship, including restoring 17 miles of stream channels and 1,000 acres of wetlands, which he says has increased both the habitat for wildlife and his bottom line.

In the 1950s there was a major effort to dry up creeks and wetlands to expand usable agricultural acreage. But in 2005 Lazslo began a project to reverse that trend by restoring the wetlands and stream channels. At the same time he was forced to consider every project and how it affected profits.

As he moved from one project to the next he began seeing native species of wildlife returning to the ranch — more each year.

He said the cost of the conservation efforts over the past 20 years has been between $600,000 and $1 million. But he didn't go in blind as if he had money to spare.

"As landowners, we are in the middle of a complicated situation, which is we're trying to be agriculturally productive to the point that we're sustainable, that we're a viable business, and at the same time, in many cases, we're managing wildlife, which has a cost of its own," Lazslo said.

The family loves watching as wildlife has flocked back to the improved wetlands and waterway. They enrolled their ranch in conservation easements, to ensure the land will remain undeveloped in perpetuity. Conserving the land for future generations is "very, very important to us," he said.

"We manage it in a way that we place the land and all the species ... more on an equal, if not higher value than our ranching operation," he said proudly. "I don't know any land owners [or] ranchers who aren't concerned with the health of their lands and looking for ways to make it more productive, more resilient and also cognizant of the fact that our uses don't exist in a bubble."

He testified that while it's work, he doesn't find it to be a burden.

"I enjoy it, and when I see results [with wildlife], that tells me I'm on the right track. And when I see healthy livestock and a reasonably good bottom line, that tells me we're on the right track. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive," he said.

Lazslo is not alone in this change in attitudes about how to best manage private land that's also important habitat for wildlife. According to a recent survey across the West, private landowners often don't get the credit they deserve for supporting wildlife friendly farming and ranching.

The Western Landowners Alliance, an organization that advances policies and practices that sustain working lands, connected landscapes, and native species, sponsored a broad survey of landowners with 500 acres or more in the 11 western states, about 90% which were working agricultural lands and projected out to represent about 80.6 million acres across the West.

Ag lands are not only important to economic success, they also are home to more than 75% of the nation’s grasslands and wetlands, which offers habitat for two-thirds of the nation’s wildlife protected by the Endangered Species Act, said Chief Executive Officer of Western landowners Alliance Lesli Allison. She was also the lead author of the survey report.

"Why should this matter?," she asked. "From a conservation standpoint, you have to think about the fact that private lands occupy the majority of land in the lower 48 in the United States, and they support the majority of wildlife species."

They provide food, fiber, energy and livelihood for agricultural communities. But the WLA wanted to know just how much ag lands contribute to wildlife habitat. To do so, they partnered with 27 organizations to design their survey, coming up with 19 questions that asked about finances and money spent on conservation.

Clearly the majority are grazing livestock (74%), and then hunting is second (41%), followed by forest management (17%), crop production (11%), nonagricultural management (8%) and energy production (2%). About 87% said their land qualified as a farm based on U.S. Department of Agriculture definitions.

They also asked how long the family had been on the land. The top two responses were between 16 and 49 years (27%) and 100 to 149 years (21%). Only 2% have been on their land less than five years or more than 149 years.

They also spend a massive amount of money on conservation. In 2024, landowners in the West spent a combined $408 million on habitat conservation projects. That's more than was raised by taxes through the Pitmann-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Acts combined. It's also more than is offered by the USDA's massive Equip program and about five times more than the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

"Landowners are obviously making significant investments above and beyond normal operations to prioritize the health of natural ecosystems, which I think is a wonderful story," Allison said, adding "It's just a wonderful piece of good news in a bad news world."

At the same time, the wildlife they find important are costing them money and resources. However, among landowners who did incur losses, only 16% of them received any form of compensation, and of those who received compensation, it typically only covered about 20% of the losses or damages.

"Western landowners are at the tip of the spear on [these] issues," Lazslo said. "It's a management decision to balance costs against benefits. But a big reason why I do it and why don't others do it is because we think healthy lands are best for all aspects of what we do. Healthy lands are good for our cattle, and they're good for wildlife. And so it's sort of a no-brainer."

Not covered in the survey is the massive amount of taxes western landowners pay. Just for property taxes, western landowners pay about $9 billion per year. That money supports all of our community services throughout the states; schools, school buses, roads, emergency services, all that and more is coming out of the property tax base. Only then do the costs to produce products come into view.

"If you can't stay economically viable, you can't keep that land intact, and you can't afford to take care of it," Allison said. "But on the other hand, when you take care of your riparian area, it has benefits, not just for the public, but for the land and the future of the land itself. So it is really intermingled, and what we need is a better economic system that recognizes that and that supports people in caring for all of the values that land needs to provide for us."

For more information: westernlandowners.org/working-wild-challenge