Farm lease from National park

How would You like to farm for the National park
service?
The last Superintendent did away with the volunteers
that did the farming there.
The new supt. is trying to clean up the mess the last one made.
Farm lease proposal.

Strangest lease deal I ever saw is the lease of the farmland and facilities at McNeil Island, Washington. Its a prison, and they used to have a prison farm. They quit that some years back, and now lease out the land (several hundred acres) and the farm buildings plus a couple of residences for you/ your workers. They've got the capacity worked out to so many cows and calves (seems like 150 pairs?) plus put up as much hay as you want. With that many cattle, you hay the good fields and graze the rest, and its supposed to be self sustaining.

The kicker is that is only accessible by ferry boat- and not a very big ferry at that. So its kind of tricky getting cattle on and off the island. Once you get your cow herd there, you leave them and just haul off the calves to sell every year.

Another interesting feature is that much of the ground is steep enough that your round bales tend to roll down to the bottom and take out the fence, if there is one, or go into Puget Sound. Oh, and the fence- you have to maintain the fences.

Looked like a pretty good setup for someone that's kind of a recluse, and wouldn't mind just staying there and running the ranch. Family guy, well, not so much. I went and looked at it with a guy who was trying to get financing to swing it, when I was with Farm Credit. He ended up taking himself out of the running because of his family situation (wife wouldn't move up there, and implied that there wasn't much point in her staying around if he was going to- he was a bright lad, and got the message).

Sounds to me like the friend or relative of a politician wants to live there. No doubt the proposals will be given a fair review and one or two will be selected based on "merit".

You should try farming 2 thousand acres of federal wild life property.. Changes all time. Some tree huggers out in Washington state went to court and got it where we cannot use roundup on crops here even though we had a 5 year agreement. Been doing it for 25 years and just about ready to give it up. Gets harder ever year .