Farm and Ranch Easement Council Rewrites Its Grant Scoring Under a New Working-Lands Law

The state council that pays Texas farmers and ranchers to keep their land out of subdivisions meets Oct. 13 to rewrite how it scores grant applications, and written comments on that vote have to reach Texas Parks and Wildlife by 9 a.m. the morning of the meeting.

The Texas Farm and Ranch Lands Conservation Program buys agricultural conservation easements. A landowner keeps the title and keeps farming, ranching or cutting timber, and sells the right to subdivide or develop. A land trust holds and enforces the restriction. Parks and Wildlife has run the program since 2016, and its project table lists 30 closed projects covering 32,541 acres at about $10.9 million in easement payments. That table carries no date and lists nothing from the past two years, so it is not a current total.

The Oct. 13 agenda puts a single action item before the 12-member council: changes to the scoring criteria for new grant applications. They follow a 2025 law that rewrote the program’s grant standards, requiring priority for land susceptible to development and fragmentation and a scoring process that weighs agricultural and timber productivity. It took effect Sept. 1, 2025. Paul L. Foster presides; the statute hands the chair to whoever leads the Parks and Wildlife Commission, and he does.

Staff have already told the council the law narrows the field. At the council’s October 2025 meeting, according to the posted transcript, a staff member said the Legislature amended the program’s statute to specify working agricultural lands, and the point surfaced while members argued over whether particular applicants qualified. The council awarded $1,749,872 to eight properties that day, chosen from 17 applications and covering about 20,233 acres. Texas A&M’s Natural Resources Institute reported in 2024 that roughly 60 percent of applications go unfunded.

Three briefings follow without a vote: the status of existing projects, the new law’s effect on the program, and land trends from the institute’s director. The council will also discuss adding another agriculture industry representative to the team that reviews applications. It meets once a year, and the next application cycle does not open until July 2027, so the criteria adopted Oct. 13 will sit unused for months before anyone is scored against them.

Meeting at a glance

Council members

• Paul L. Foster — chair; El Paso; Parks and Wildlife Commission chairman.
• Leslie L.W. Kinsel — Cotulla; attorney and rancher.
• Natalie Koehler Denbow — Clifton; attorney and rancher.
• Russell Boening — Floresville; Texas Farm Bureau president, dairy farmer.
• Andrew C. Polk — Lufkin; bank commercial lender and cattle partner.
• Lindsey Gohlke — Oglesby; bank lender.
• Romey Swanson — Austin; the council’s land trust representative.
• L’Oreal Stepney — Pflugerville; chairwoman, Texas Water Development Board.
• Kendria Ray — executive director, Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board.
• Sid Miller — De Leon; commissioner of agriculture.
• Roel Lopez — director, Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute.
• Kristy Oates — Texas state conservationist, federal natural resources agency; nonvoting.

Names and roles are from the council’s roster page, checked October 6, cross-checked against the governor’s appointment releases. Cities and occupations for the six appointed members come from those releases; Gohlke and Swanson were appointed January 21, 2026. Two mismatches are reported as found: the roster page gives Swanson’s employer as Audubon Texas while the newer appointment release names him executive director of the Devils River Conservancy, and the page places Lopez in San Antonio while his institute is based at College Station. Gilbert Riojas, appointed in January 2024 to a term running to 2029, is not on the current roster; the Dispatch found no notice of his departure and does not report one.