The state has just absorbed a new chunk of land for conservation in Southwest Florida. The acquisition comes years after the state turned down the land.
Peaceful Horse Ranch is a 4,400-acre parcel of land in DeSoto County. Both Horse Creek and the Peace River border parts of the property before heading into the Charlotte Harbor estuary.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection or DEP added it to a list of lands it wanted to acquire in 2010. A DEP document described its shoreline forests as “largely pristine.”
And in 2012, the Mosaic phosphate mining company donated the land for free to the DEP.
But, President and CEO of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida Robert Moher said the state declined to take it.
“The Peaceful Horse Ranch was originally going to be part of the state parks system, but then of course that option was turned down by the state,” he said.
This month, the Conservancy gave the land to the Florida Department of Agriculture instead.
The news comes two years after a settlement between Mosaic and environmental groups that said Mosaic would give the state Peaceful Horse Ranch in exchange for expanding its operations in Hardee County. Moher said the company also kicked in a $2 million fund to maintain the land.
“The idea was that this would help offset, mitigate for some of the impacts of the mine,” he said.
But, a 2013 Tampa Bay Times article says DEP turned down Peaceful Horse Ranch because it felt it did not feel meet the standards to become a state park.
DEP Secretary Herschel Vinyard also said the would-be park was too close to other parks that didn’t have many visitors.
“We don’t want to harm other parks,” Vinyard told the paper.
So, when state passed on the land, it fell to Moher and the conservancy to figure out what to with it.
They looked at federal options - even went back to DEP which declined again - and eventually found the Department of Agriculture.
The agency’s Florida Forest Service will now manage Peaceful Horse Ranch.
“It took a while to get this worked out but… the public and the state of Florida have 4,400 more acres in meaningful, permanent conservation,” he said.
Moher said there will be some public accessibility including limited hunting. The conservancy also put protections in place for the land including banning mining.
