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Grazing lands across the Globe provide essential habitat for sensitive species. Balancing habitat conservation with the infrastructure needs of a growing population is a central challenge facing planners, conservationists, agriculturalists, and policy makers. Differing paradigms among and within conservation/regulatory entities often results in divergent management strategies on mitigation parcels nested within agricultural landscapes. We are investigating the ecological and economic impacts of alternative conservation strategies for a 2,000 acre wetland mitigation for highway construction on grazing lands in northern California. Ecosystems services addressed in the mitigation strategy include clean water, habitat for sensitive plants and fisheries, and native plant diversity. There are two extreme conservation paradigms evident in the Little Lake Valley Mitigation Plan. The �Tradeoff Paradigm� assumes in-place agricultural activities pose an immediate risk to conservation objectives, and agricultural production must be eliminated or species will be lost. The �Synergy Paradigm� assumes that, given the desired ecological attributes already exist on site in the presence of long-term agricultural management, agricultural production and mitigation can be compatible in new conservation grazing strategies. Potentially, the conservation benefits are dependent upon the agricultural activities. The tradeoff and synergy paradigms have been applied to approximately 500 and 1500 acres, respectively in the Little Lake Valley Mitigation Plan. Compared to pre-mitigation grazing management for optimum agricultural production, we are assessing the ecological and economic impacts of 1) complete removal of grazing (tradeoff paradigm); and 2) grazing management focused on conservation objectives (synergy paradigm). We will present preliminary ecological and economic results from this assessment.