Land trust seeks $25M to preserve farmland

Land trust seeks $25M to preserve farmland: POST works with local agriculture workers in new conservation initiative
February 04, 2016, 05:00 AM By Samantha Weigel Daily Journal
Courtesy of POST An aerial view of the POST-preserved Cowell-Purissima property on the coastside that supports a recreational trail and local family farm. Seeking to preserve the San Mateo County coast’s rich agricultural history, the Peninsula Open Space Trust is embarking on a multi-million dollar effort to preserve dwindling farmland in perpetuity.  Officials with the nonprofit POST, local farmers and Supervisor Don Horsley will gather Thursday, Feb. 4, to announce the Farmland Futures Initiative. POST seeks to raise $25 million to triple the amount of farmland it has acquired and permanently protected for agriculture along the coast. This 10-year initiative is already gaining traction having secured more than $7.5 million from donors to date, according to POST. Through this initiative, POST wants to increase the number of farms protected on the coast from 11 to 33, and grow the total amount of preserved agricultural land from 750 acres to 2,250 acres, according to POST. “Protecting local working land matters to our environment, our farmers and our community,” POST President Walter Moore said in a press release. “Farms are vital to the health of our local ecosystems, waterways and the region’s overall food system, growing the farm-fresh foods that we as a society value and cherish. Our Farmland Futures Initiative aims to protect San Mateo County’s valuable remaining farmland as farms before they are lost for good.” With new developments booming throughout the region, the nine-county Bay Area has lost nearly 200,000 acres of agricultural land since the 1980s with San Mateo County losing 35 percent of its farmland either due to development or no longer being in production, according to POST. Farmland is a critical component of the overall conservation mosaic and it’s important to act now before more is lost, said Marti Tedesco, POST’s senior director of marketing and communications. “We have this great opportunity. We still have farmland that we can protect, which not a lot of places do. We have POST, which can help step in and protect and we also have a lot of interest from farmers coming out of U.C. Santa Cruz and U.C. Davis and we have this great market for locally grown food along the Peninsula. So it’s a perfect storm of opportunity for us to make this happen now,” Tedesco said. But outside of the land acquisitions and conservation easements POST seeks to gain over the next decade, officials are hopeful this program will allow farmers to either stay in business or provide opportunities for younger generations to pick up the trade. POST will work to either lease the land to farmers at an affordable rate or sell it to agricultural businesses for row crops such as fruit and vegetables, but primarily non-grazing purposes, Tedesco said. “We’ve done a lot of work on farms over the last 10 years and we’ve come to really appreciate that they’re such an important piece of the main conservation picture. And they’re still really dramatically threatened both by potential development and the fact that land is so expensive here. Farmers can’t afford to farm. And yet we have such amazing soil and there’s demand,” Tedesco said. In POST’s nearly 40-year history of purchasing land, it typically transitions it to another public agency. However, through this new initiative, Tedesco said farmers are the best people to work with as they are experienced and have a genuine interest in keeping these habitats thriving. This model has already successfully supported several farmers on the coast in recent years, including David Lea with Cabrillo Farms and Ryan Casey with Blue House Farms. As a fourth generation farmer, Lea’s family has had nearly a dozen landlords. Since POST stepped in and purchased the farm and surrounding acreage that was sought for redevelopment, the Lea family now owns their land for the first time in nearly 100 years, Tedesco said. Casey, who first became interested in agriculture while studying at University of California at Santa Cruz, is an excellent example of how POST is enabling a younger generation of farmers to get started. Casey, an organic farmer whose operation includes nearly 50 different crops, recently took over a 74-acre farm in San Gregorio that POST purchased. “POST has been great to work with,” said Casey, 39. “I think farming inherently is a difficult business to do regardless of whether you’re starting or where you’re at. I think POST has been significant in that they have give me access to a farming region that is historically difficult to get into. … There aren’t a whole lot of younger generation farmers that are taking it on out there, so the coastside is really in need of new growers to take on acreage as older farmers are retiring and moving on.” Supervisor Don Horsley said some of these farm families that previously rented faced regular uncertainty as to whether their livelihoods would be uprooted in place of redevelopments like a golf course or housing. Now, POST is helping keep farmers working and preserving land in perpetuity. “The lands on the coastside are really influenced by Silicon Valley properties and as we know, prices have really accelerated in the last few years and the same thing is happening on the coastside. So for a family farm, it’s increasingly difficult to hang on to land and probably even enticing to sell it for development purposes,” Horsley said. “That’s what this Farmland Futures Initiative is all about. If a farm family is older and going to divest themselves from their land, is there a young person willing to come in and take it over? The only way they’re going to be able to do that is for an organization like POST to come in.” Visit openspacetrust.org for more information about the POST. samantha@smdailyjournal.com (650) 344-5200 ext. 106