The Strategy
Working Farmland Protection is our conservation easement program for active agricultural land — a deliberately different tool than land acquisition. Where our preserve program buys land outright for habitat and public access, this program pays landowners to permanently retire development rights on farms and ranches that continue to be privately owned and actively farmed. The family keeps farming; the land can never be subdivided or developed regardless of who owns it in the future.
We launched the program in 2018 in direct response to valley-floor rezoning pressure that was pricing multi-generation farm families out of their own land — easement payments give families liquidity to invest in the farm operation or plan succession without selling to a developer. Every easement we hold also includes negotiated habitat requirements specific to that property: Willow Bend Farm’s easement requires 2.1 miles of native pollinator hedgerow along field edges; Cattail Slough Farm’s protects the winter flood-up practice that turns harvested rice fields into waterfowl habitat each year.
We currently hold easements on 350 acres of working farmland across two properties, with three additional family-farm conversations in early-stage discussion. This program is genuinely permanent — an easement runs with the land title in perpetuity, surviving any future sale — which makes the negotiation slower than an acquisition but the protection just as durable.
