Nearly 2,500 acres of a historic cattle ranch in southern Arizona will be set aside for conservation as part of a new partnership between a prominent ranching family and a Tucson-based conservation group.

Arizona Land and Water Trust partnered with the Brophy family, owners of the Babacomari Ranch, a nearly 28,000-acre property in the Sonoita region of Santa Cruz County and the largest contiguous private land parcel in Arizona.

A total of 2,488 acres of the ranch will be conserved in perpetuity as part of the deal, making it one of the largest conservation easements the trust holds. The nonprofit works with dozens of ranchers in Santa Cruz and Cochise Counties.

A conservation easement allows ranchers to sell or donate the development rights on their land to protect it permanently from future nonagricultural development, while still using the property for certain agreed-upon light agriculture. The Arizona Land and Water Trust monitors the land annually and ensures no development takes place.

“It’s a great project because there’s the wildlife habitat there, we’re sustaining ranchlands and native grasslands, there is the Babacomari River that feeds the San Pedro, which of course is one of the most iconic rivers in the country,” said Liz Petterson, the trust's executive director. “All of the things our trust deems special about Arizona is encapsulated in this transaction.”

READ MORE: Ocelot population discovered south of Arizona border

Maintaining ties to the land

Several years ago, 60-plus Brophy family members had to reach an agreement: Sell the ranch that had been their heritage since 1935 or commit to finding another way to sustain their livelihood.

"We basically put an ultimatum on the table, either we're going to continue our stewardship 100% committed or we're gonna sell and find somebody else that will," said Ben Brophy, partial owner of the ranch.

"We asked everybody, are you in or are you out?," he said. "What do you value? They said we value our heritage, we value having identity and connection to this place, a place that actually ties us together as 60 family members. If that goes away then probably a lot of the relationships go away as well."

They decided a conservation easement was a way to achieve that objective.

In this case, the trust applied for and received grants from the Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to purchase the land in agreement with the Brophys.

"We consider ourselves problem solvers and also facilitators of conservation land transactions," Petterson said in a phone interview. "Our role is to find the conservation dollars that are out there, federal, state, local or foundation dollars. In some cases, with the money through the sale of the conservation easement, they are able to pay off the mortgage on the ranch or update infrastructure. Ranchers are often land-rich and cash-poor, so conservation issues are a way to support them."

For the Brophys, the easement provided much-needed liquid assets for the family, while also supporting their goal of maintaining the landscape.

"Family businesses are businesses. We're not all just do-gooders, we have to pay a lot of bills every year to operate a large cattle ranch," said Brophy.

The family worked with a Phoenix-based community planner, Swaback Partners, which helped them adopt a theme of "achieving environmental excellence," Brophy said.

"That's really what we're trying to achieve, learning and striving to learn and understand the impacts of climate change on plant communities and that kind of stuff," Brophy said. "We focused on that rather than the short term financial issues."

The property encompasses rare wetlands, or ciénegas, and miles of cottonwood-lined riparian areas along the Babacomari River, an important tributary of the San Pedro River.

The ranch is a migratory corridor for wildlife traveling between the Mustang and Huachuca Mountains and beyond. The surrounding landscape is also a proposed critical habitat for the jaguar and potential habitat for pronghorn antelope, Chiricahua leopard frog and other sensitive species.

Sustaining a legacy in conservation

To date, the trust holds more than 16,600 acres of conservation easements throughout southern Arizona and has protected more than 53,500 acres since 1978 with landowner partners, according to a press release about the deal.

Unlike many conservation organizations, the Arizona Land and Water Trust is a nonadvocacy group, meaning it doesn’t speak out against large development projects or voice an opinion on hot-button environmental issues, Petterson said.

“We don’t lay in front of bulldozers or anything,” Petterson said. “There are special places within working landscapes and we feel the agriculture world is important because of food security issues and it’s a big part of our heritage.

"We live in Arizona because of the heritage that is here, the sweeping iconic landscapes and our connection to the history of this place," Petterson said. "So we like to think of our work as sustaining the legacy of these families as well.”

The Brophy family first acquired the Babacomari Ranch in 1935, when Frank Cullen Brophy became only the third owner of the historic property since the King of Spain 400 years earlier.

The ranch had long suffered from overgrazing and unmanaged livestock, so Frank Cullen Brophy started what he called "conservation warfare" to restore the land and help it hold water again. In the 1950s, he once again started cattle grazing.

That mindset has continued through generations of the Brophy family.

"My dad believed something similar," Brophy said. "He always said this land has been here for thousands of years and it will be here for thousands of years more and we have this very minute timespan that we are charged with being responsible for it.

"We look at it that way rather than from an ownership perspective," Brophy said. "Because if you look at it from an ownership perspective you lose sight of your role in the longer term. I think it's actually a more widely shared philosophy (among ranchers) than people understand."

Working with the Arizona Land and Water Trust, the Nature Conservancy, government agencies and other nonprofit conservation groups, the Brophy family has now placed around 5,700 acres under conservation easement in perpetuity and is pursuing easements on the remaining acreage.

"If we didn't do this, if we just said we're committed, we're gonna be great stewards, we're gonna keep the land open, the next generation can easily change their mind," Brophy said. "Sometimes business is tough and agriculture is tough, so when somebody's financially strained in an industry, it's hard to be so altruistic. Selling these easements facilitates liquid assets as well as permanent land conservation."

READ MORE: Border wall construction threatens river, desert habitat

Erin Stone covers the environment for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Send her story tips and ideas at erin.stone@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on Twitter @Erstone7.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.