When Nancy Stoverud wanted to fill her freezer with lamb this year, she turned to a local sheep rancher.

“They’re just all organic,” Stoverud said. “I know how she raises them and takes care of them, so it’s just amazing to me.”

Stoverud, whose family owned a jewelry store in Missoula for more than 60 years, said partly she likes to see her dollars support local businesses. But she also prefers her legs of lamb and osso bucco homegrown.

“I’d probably take every lamb she had if I could,” Stoverud said.

That ranch up on McCauley Butte belongs to Dorothy Northcutt, who has raised sheep on her 15 acres since around 1976. In the past, Northcutt has sold her sheep at a discount to 4-H children, and sent them to a feedlot in Corvallis.

“This year, I sold most of them to individuals,” she said. “Because they’re organic, I have a greater demand.”

Northcutt, though, is looking toward her own retirement and paying for the education of her grandkids. The land is her investment, and she said selling it as a sheep ranch will not bring nearly the same return as selling it for development.

“I know that the land has a certain value, and as long as I can, I would keep it as it is,” Northcutt said. “But when the time comes that these grandkids go off to college, or when I can no longer do it or need assistance, or assisted living, I know that my biggest asset and investment is this land.”

The call for local food is loud and growing. At the same time in Missoula, some of the land that produces those vegetables, that meat, is more valuable once it’s been developed. So making sure Stoverud can keep stocking her freezer with local meat and Northcutt can get a good price for her property is a challenge, but three community forces are at work on just that matter.

“The demand for local food is actually tremendous,” said Neva Hassanein, a food policy researcher and University of Montana associate professor of environmental studies. “It creates an opportunity that is going to be exciting to see how it unfolds.”

The move to protect rich soil in Missoula started bubbling when the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition piped up about the land’s disappearance bit by bit. State law says that development must mitigate the effect on agriculture.

“And for decades, local governments – not just here – have pretty much ignored that mandate,” said Hassanein, a coalition board member.

When developments were proposed, reviewers repeatedly noted the effects on agriculture as “incremental loss.” But the coalition, a leading force in protecting the best soils in Missoula, noted the resource is finite.

“You know what? Incremental losses build up,” Hassanein said.

So Community Food and Agriculture is taking an inventory of the most productive lands in Missoula County. Paul Hubbard, the coalition’s land use program coordinator, said it isn’t clear how much prime soil is left of the roughly

2 percent in the county because so much has already been developed and taken out of production. In any case, it’s the remaining large tracts that the coalition wants to preserve.

“How do we keep farm and ranchlands with the most productive potential intact?” Hubbard asked. “That’s really what it boils down to, because once those are gone, they’re really gone.”

On the local government front, Missoula’s Office of Planning and Grants is beginning work on a policy to protect agricultural land.

“There’s folks who want to eat all local, passionately. There are folks who frankly don’t care,” said OPG director Roger Millar. “There are folks who want to be prepared in case the cost of transportation goes up to the point where food becomes more expensive and local options become more attractive.”

So Millar said OPG is gathering information so interested parties can have an informed conversation. Many questions are on the table.

What incentives should be in play to keep land in production? How much land does Missoula need to protect based on the food the community consumes today? What about in the future? How much more local food does the community want to produce? What’s a good target?

Already, the OPG director said Missoula is using open space dollars to preserve farms all over the county. So far, that money has helped preserve nine farms or ranches that have at least some land in production. And to save more?

“What do we do with our regulations? What do we do with our public dollars?” Millar said.

On yet another front, the Missoula Organization of Realtors and Missoula Building Industry Association are studying the matter. Realtors spokeswoman Ruth Link said with policies in the works, those organizations wanted to be sure the discussions are based on facts.

“We just really felt it was important to base that policy on the most recent science possible in order to both preserve agricultural lands where we need them and protect the rights of private property owners,” Link said.

So the MOR, MBIA and some property owners pulled together to pay for a study. Elon Gilbert, who holds a Ph.D. in applied economics and agriculture from Stanford University as well as a political science degree from the same, is on the case. Link said he owns a ranch in Missoula County, so he knows the landscape here and also has a personal stake in the discussion.

The focus is on science, on the one hand, and the legal and policy work, on the other hand, she said. The study covers roughly 100 miles encompassing Missoula, and addresses myriad questions.

How much land does Missoula need to protect? How much will the community need in 20 years? What are the best policies for agriculture? For private property owners?

Link said the study should be complete by the end of the year and ready for public presentation in early 2010. The private property owners who helped fund it raised concerns similar to the ones Northcutt holds.

“They were concerned following the Chickasaw subdivision and some of the things they were seeing that some of their rights would be affected,” Link said. The soil was at the heart of the controversy over Chickasaw in Orchard Homes.

That’s the neighborhood where Kim Murchison and Josh Slotnick grow broccoli, fennel, arugula and other food on their Clark Fork Organics farm. They own three acres and rent 10, of which six are farmed.

Slotnick said the local supply seems to have reached the point where it’s meeting the demand, and there’s room for growth. With an estimated 2 percent of soil here considered prime, he said conservation shouldn’t be insurmountable.

“Setting a goal that we want to save as much of that as possible is not removing a huge amount of land from potential development. We’re not talking about every square inch by any means,” Slotnick said.

The American Farmland Trust has a “toolbox” of ways local governments already are saving such acreage. (See the fact sheet attached to this story online at Missoulian.com.) Bob Wagner, senior director for farmland protection programs, said among the tools are easements, used in Missoula, and also transfer of development rights, not currently in play here.

The latter allows farmers or ranchers to sell their right to develop – but not their land, which remains in production. Sometimes, public money buys those credits and banks them. Then, developers can purchase them to build more densely in other places. The program can be set up in many ways, but farmers and ranchers realize their equity.

“They actually are made whole,” Wagner said. “There is this sort of one-to-one relationship between what the land is worth for nonagricultural use and its agricultural value. So they continue to own the land, but they receive funds equal to the value of the land for its development potential.”

Community Food and Agriculture’s Hubbard said it generally has been easier to identify the land ripe for conservation. The challenge has been picking out the places where development goes instead. To work, he said such a program must be appealing to both parties.

“You really have to be serious about (creating incentives) and making sure it’s a win-win for both or it doesn’t get used,” Hubbard said.

Northcutt, the sheep rancher, suggests a conservation tax, and Wagner said that idea has been popular. There’s also agricultural zoning, “executive orders,” right-to-farm laws, and more.

Missoula itself already has taken steps to support local food by more widely allowing chickens, for instance. The PEAS farm – Program in Ecological Agriculture and Society – gave the Missoula Food Bank more than 20,000 pounds of produce in 2009. The PEAS farm is a program of Garden City Harvest and the UM environmental studies program. The school district leases the land to the city, which in turn rents it to the farm.

As the teams investigate the possibilities for the future and the efforts converge, the Missoula Organization of Realtors’ Link said the options must be ones that protect people such as Northcutt. The government has subsidized agriculture for a long time, and if agriculture is a goal in this community, she said those subsidies must be addressed.

Near a window overlooking woolly sheep grazing in a field, Northcutt said the gap is wide between what she or her grandchildren would earn if they sold the land to a developer and the amount they’d get if they kept the ranch intact.

“If we want to keep some land in agriculture, we need to pay,” Northcutt said. “We need to figure out how to pay the landowner.”

Reporter Keila Szpaller can be reached at 523-5262, keila.szpaller@missoulian.com or on MissoulaRedTape.com.