BELGRADE (AP) -- The county's open lands program is getting high praise from a top U.S. Department of Agriculture official, who said it is an example of the kind of work the Bush administration is advocating.

Mark Rey, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, praised Gallatin County's conservation easement program, which has so far set aside about 25,000 acres of farmland to prevent it from being subdivided in the future.

Gallatin County voters have twice approved $10 million in bonds to buy conservation easements from willing sellers. The Natural Resources and Conservation Service has chipped in matching funds, as have other government and private entities. Private groups like the Trust for Public Land help iron out the details.

''The program has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," County Commissioner Bill Murdock said. ''If you don't want people to develop (their land), then pay them for it."

Rey, who spoke Friday at the site of one of the county's first open lands projects on the Skinner Ranch north of Belgrade, said the county's program can serve as a national model of public and private cooperation in preserving open space.

''It's a prototype," Rey said. ''I'd like to highlight it" in an upcoming seminar on cooperative conservation in St. Louis.

Development of private land is one of the nation's biggest challenges, and one that makes other conservation problems even harder to handle, said Rey, who also oversees the NRCS. In the 1990s, 3.2 million acres of private land were subdivided, and the pace is quickening this decade, he said. As a result, roughly 8.4 million new homes have been built in what officials call the high-risk ''wildland-urban interface."

That type of growth ''underscores and exacerbates" a number of problems, including the loss of wildlife habitat, disputes over water rights, degrading water quality, spreading weeds, decreasing recreational access and complicating firefighting.

''The worst-run ranch is better for the environment than the best-run subdivision," Rey said.

Rey touted federal programs, many of them offered by NRCS, that reward good ranch stewardship and encourage improvement of rangelands and water quality.

The programs are meant to ''reward the best and motivate the rest," he said. Funding for such conservation programs totaled about $1.9 billion in the 2002 federal farm bill.

Conservation easements, which ban most development but allow ag to continue, ''work in concert with private property rights, not in opposition," Rey said.

Information from: Bozeman Daily Chronicle, http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com