Beartooth Capital Partners | Investing in ranches, conserving land.

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About Beartooth Capital Partners

Beartooth acquires under-valued agricultural land and converts it into high-end recreational ranch properties via entitlement, habitat restoration and protection, and ecologically-appropriate limited development.

Beartooth also assesses the full array of non-development values embedded in each property, including agricultural, natural resource, conservation and ecosystem service values. Wherever possible, Beartooth enhances and captures these values through conservation easement sales and donations, innovative transactions like carbon sequestration projects, and by developing conservation enterprises such as ecologically-sound agriculture and timber operations, mitigation banks, and more.

Beartooth’s business model deliberately focuses on the integrated goal of conserving important land and generating competitive financial returns. We work in partnership with conservation organizations to find, restore, protect and plan for the future use of our properties. This partnership provides Beartooth with deal flow, restoration assistance, easement partners and conservation science, while enabling conservation organizations to accomplish more than they otherwise could.

We also work in partnership with ranchers, bringing a healthy respect for their expertise, goals and wishes to our work with them whether we're purchasing their ranch, helping them profit from carbon sequestration projects, or partnering with them to create and realize financial value from their property and its unique conservation assets. We believe our conservation mission is a near and long term competitive advantage. Far from sacrificing financial returns to accomplish conservation goals, integrating conservation at the core of our business allows us to reduce investment risk and generate competitive investment returns.

Entitlement involves securing approval from city, county or state government to alter a property’s zoning (e.g. changing approved uses from agricultural to residential) or to subdivide or otherwise change the number or arrangement of saleable parcels.

Ecosystem service values are the benefits received from ecosystems. These benefits come in the form of goods and services, many of which we enjoy free of charge, such as the services wetlands provide by filtering water, recharging aquifers, slowing and absorbing flood waters, and providing opportunities to bird-watch, fish and hunt. Ecologically-important ranches provide a wealth of these benefits to an area, whether by serving as migration corridors, homes or forage for wildlife, beautiful open vistas for passersby, or the preservation of culturally-important agriculture or heritage. Although markets do not exist for many of these benefits today, Beartooth enhances and then captures many of these values via innovative transactions.

Mitigation. Federal and state environmental regulations often require landowners to mitigate the impacts they have on endangered species or important habitat like wetlands when they develop land. A developer who impacts a wetland can meet his or her mitigation requirement in a number of ways: by creating or restoring the required amount of wetland on site, by doing so off site, or by buying a credit from someone who has already created wetlands in a mitigation bank and has been approved to sell the resulting credits. Mitigation banks have emerged as a leading way for landowners and developers to meet their mitigation requirements, and they can be profitable enterprises for the bankers, providing an alternative way for landowners to get paid for providing ecosystem services.

In partnership with the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), Beartooth Capital has pioneered a new tool that rewards ranchers for implementing sustainable grazing management practices that enhance range productivity and carbon sequestration rates. Beartooth is working to expand the Rangeland Carbon Sequestration Program and to catalyze its widespread use as an incentive to improve range health across the West. To that end, Beartooth works with ranchers to qualify for the program, implement required practices, verify the credits created and manage credit sales on the exchange, thus providing all the services ranchers need to profit by improving the health of their land. For more information on the program, please contact us at info@beartoothcap.com or 406-551-4769.

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