Cojo-Jalama Ranch’s Canadian Connection
North of the Border Bait-and-Switch Has Enviros Worried about S.B. Property
The distance between Point Conception and Eastern Canada may have just gotten a little closer. While armchair environmentalists throughout the South Coast continue to speculate about what exactly the new owners of Cojo-Jalama Ranch, commonly known as Bixby Ranch, have in store for the historic and sprawling 25,000-acre agricultural compound, word is making its way from Canada about a highly controversial mega-quarry project being proposed on an equally stunning expanse of beloved farmland north of Toronto.
What does one have to do with the other, you ask? Well, the folks looking to build the quarry, Highland Companies, and Coastal Management Resources (CMR), the people who have owned Bixby since 2007, are subsidiaries of the same Boston-based $23-billion hedge fund, the Baupost Group. Interesting but not necessarily damning in and of itself, the trouble about the commonality, according to Gaviota Coast Conservancy head Mike Lunsford, who has been following the story of Highland’s proposed Melancthon Quarry since last summer, is in the details. “I think the deceptive practices demonstrated [in Canada] show that Baupost is all about profit and doesn’t really care about community. [Based on what we have seen already with Coastal Management], I fear that that culture has been brought here.”
At first blush, the connection seems to be little more than a passing formality. After all, Baupost is a massive hedge fund, the 11th largest in the world, and it throws its money around in all variety of ventures. Then, of course, there is the fact that the high-quality limestone that Highland hopes to harvest in Canada likely doesn’t exist around these parts. However, once you start talking to people who stand to be most immediately impacted by Melancthon’s mega-quarry — most of whom are small- to medium-scale lifelong potato farmers — and get the background on what has happened in the time since Baupost first came to their neck of the woods five years ago and this past spring when Highland announced its plans to tear up some 2,300 acres of prime ag land and build the largest quarry in Canadian history, you begin to get an idea about what has Lunsford worried.
