Around 25 years ago, Edith Wearmouth jotted down several goals for the Wineglass Ranch, a six-generation, family-run ranch she operated, onto a brown piece of paper, and among the goals were how to keep the lands healthy. Last week, the Government of Alberta announced that Wearmouth will be able to do just that through the Alberta Land Trust Grant Program, an easement fund and contract, which will render the ranch lands off-limits to commercial and residential developers. “There is always pressure to see the land converted to housing development. I get quite a few requests to sell off a little portion or to subdivide,” Wearmouth said. “We get about five requests per week for access – people who want to do various things on the ranch. A lot of times we try and let them.” The grant program, which the government approved over $7 million for, will provide funding to various conservation groups in the province who will then pursue their own projects. The Southern Alberta Land Trust Society (SALTS) is one of the conservation groups that will be undertaking five projects with $2.6 million of the grant money, including the Wineglass Ranch. The ranch, which started 133 years ago, is located just south of Cochrane and is home to 300 Angus cross cow-calf pairs. It also sits on 1,247 acres of natural land – including the Jumpingpound Creek – which more than 20 different mammal and fish species inhabit. “We thought, we want to keep this. We want to provide good healthy water as it goes through our ranch,” Wearmouth said, who added the ranch has won several awards in the past for its efforts to maintain their land’s ecological integrity. Justin Thompson, executive director of SALTS, said it’s an example of how private land conservation benefits everyone. “The Wineglass ranch is unique and valuable for a number of reasons. Jumpingpound Creek flows right through the ranch. That feeds into the Bow River which of course, the water in the Bow River being clean is important for a bunch of folks,” Thompson said. “We’ve seen a huge increase in population and that means we’re converting more and more of the agricultural land into roads and houses and nonagricultural land uses. When land is fragmented with roads and houses, it doesn’t necessarily provide those same ecological values or services like helping to keep our water clean and providing habitat for wildlife ... it’s really important that we work with landowners like the Wineglass Ranch.” The easement is in perpetuity, a decision which Wearmouth said she and her son (who has taken over operations of the ranch) thought long and hard about. “It was a very hard decision. I’ve got a lot of mixed reactions to the decision,” Wearmouth said. “This land has a lot of stories to tell and it’s not finished telling them yet.” “We are just finding out now about some of the Native people who lived here before our family lived here. A lot of this land was under the ocean – we are finding out about some of those crustaceans and different animals and plants that lived here even before that.”
