Cattle ranchers in southwestern Alberta are fighting to hang on to their land and keep it from becoming covered over with homes and shopping centres.

The ranchers are asking the federal government to lower their taxes.

Land owners along the Rocky Mountains' eastern slopes are being offered millions of dollars by developers planning subdivisions near Calgary. It is often less expensive for families to buy a home in one of these brand new neighbourhoods than to buy an older home closer to downtown.

Creeping development is pushing up prices and there's increasing pressure on ranchers to sell.

Ranchers say the federal government should help keep their grazing land from the bulldozers. By paying lower taxes, ranchers say they would be able to keep their land instead of selling it.

The building trend has already eaten up much of the mountain slopes in the Western United States.

Ben Alexander speaks for a Montana conservation organization that works with ranchers. He says in the last five years alone, 16 million acres of prime agricultural land have been devoured by urban development. That's twice the rate of a decade ago.

In the past , environmentalists and ranchers argued with each other over the best way to treat the land. But Alexander says that now they have been forced to team up to fight the land developers.

"The divide between environmentalists and ranchers is in many ways dissolving around private land issues, as people increasingly realize the choice is cows or condos -- and they'd rather see cows."

"We appreciate the beauty, but we may end up sort of loving this landscape to death."

1. Whom are the ranchers asking to lower their taxes?